Winter in Massachusetts. On Saturdays, in my younger years, I normally went out with my friend Todd. He was into skiing and winter sports, snowmobiling, anything that involved “powder,” as it were.
It wasn’t my thing, winter activities, of any kind. Still, I liked the company, and riding around in his slick Infinity to look at new sleds and skis in those lodge stores, about two hours up north, if only to get out of the house during another miserable New England winter, was something I enjoyed.
Once, Todd and I smoked a joint on the way to get his car serviced, but before we toked up, we stopped at Dunkin Donuts for iced coffees. It was summer. I must have been about 21 years old.
I drank that iced coffee so fast, not realizing how much caffeine was in it — I wasn’t a regular coffee drinker at the time — and combined with the marijuana, it sent me into a full-blown, terrible panic attack, something I had never experienced before.
The next thing I knew, an ambulance had arrived and I was taken to the hospital.
The hospital bed was uncomfortable. I had a tube coming out of my arm, and my testicles were all sweaty. My father’s were too, I assumed. I would’ve bet anything on it. As much as I wanted to separate myself from my family — “I might be from them but not of them” — I couldn’t escape the sweaty balls commonality.
“Your father gets that, too,” my mother once said, unprompted, after she saw me with my hand down my pants.
My whole family was there — my parents, my brother and my sister, all huddled around me as I lay in the hospital bed with black char all over my lips.
When a drug overdose or a suspected drug overdose happens, they’ll give you this black char to drink. And you have to keep drinking it — and it’s completely repulsive — until all the drugs are out of your system. The black char slowly sucks the drugs out like it’s some medical vacuum cleaner.
Not only was I feeling awful and vulnerable, but I was also completely embarrassed. It was the first time I had seen all four family members at once appear deeply concerned for my wellbeing.
To add insult to injury, my brother’s friend Jim, a firefighter and EMT, was one of the people who happened to be working that day and brought me to the hospital.
Years later, I ran into Jim at a bar. We shared a drink and he told me the story of how he could hear my parents, before they came inside the hospital to see me, bickering outside, as he looked down on them from the open second-floor window.
“I knew it was them,” he said with a laugh.
“Sounds about right,” I told him, and took a sip of my beer.
This morning, I awoke to the crinkling sound of wrapping and saw a shadowy figure standing at the foot of my bed, eating a Kit Kat. When I inched closer, I immediately got a whiff of the halitosis and this meant only one thing.
It was fucking Terry. He’s back from the dead.
Apparently, he was so thrilled two people showed up at his memorial at the local dump — one a maintenance worker on lunch break — that he asked God if he could come back to life for a few days. And can you believe it, God obliged?
If you remember the last time I saw Terry alive, it was in our backyard. He was playing with an injured squirrel, making crow noises again , and in between singing Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie.”
To be honest, I wasn’t missing him all that much. A week before he died, he told me he’d eaten breakfast with an extraterrestrial he met in our backwoods near a muddy creek. Now that he’s back, I suppose I should want to make the best of it.
I’ve planned for an evening at The Improv. Since I’m the only one who can see Terry’s shadowy figure, things might get a bit awkward when I start talking to the empty seat next to me. I hope nobody smells the awful Yeezy cologne Terry told everyone Willow Smith gifted him last summer when he showed up at her new Chanel eyewear launch event at the Malibu Village Mall. Willow was overheard saying to her assistant, “Girl, who is this weirdo? Just give him the cologne to get him out of here.”
As if things couldn’t get more hokey, Terry has now requested we ride a tandem bicycle to The Improv, stopping first at a Chipotle to crush two chicken burritos with extra sides of guac, go halvesies on a cheese quesadilla, and order two Keto Salads Bowls to-go.
Say, do you remember the time he embarrassed us at the town’s public pool by whacking those two Goth kids with a pool noodle?
Their parents were horrified, but Terry kept at it, saying, “Billy Corgan from The Smashing Pumpkins is a recidivist who deserves to be back in jail for writing too many metaphorical lyrics!” We both know Terry was not a fan of literary devices such as metaphor, allegory, juxtaposition, and alliteration.
Terry! Get off me, you animal! I’m so sorry, Jasmine. Terry won’t stop dry-humping my leg and whispering in my ear, “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart.”
Anyway, I hope we can catch up now that the 2024 US presidential election is over. Terry has a crush on Tulsi Gabbard and thinks RFK Jr is making the greatest conspiracy theorist.
Sorry, Jasmine, I must go now. Terry just urinated on the kitchen floor for no conceivable reason.
It was 2010 and my wife and I were new to living in New York City. We were looking to buy a couch, but everything was so expensive.
Searching the Internet one day, I found a discount furniture store with some amazing prices located in Brooklyn. Bingo. This would be where we would set out to make our purchase. So we planned a trip there for the coming Saturday.
When we stepped off the train that Saturday afternoon and walked through the neighborhood of Brownsville, consistently named the murder capital of New York City–and where Mike Tyson grew up–we had the feeling that we weren’t in Kansas anymore.
Gangbangers hung out on stoops, police sirens blared in the distance, two cops stood on a nearby street corner outside of their cruiser, pedestrians jaywalked hurriedly, there was ubiquitous poverty, and the smell of “something really bad is going to go down” hung in the air.
I had never been so scared in my life. And just our luck, the furniture store was a half-mile walk from the train station.
As we strolled through the hood, I mumbled to my wife, who was whiter than a bar of Dove soap, to play it cool. “Let’s just start talking to each other like we don’t have a care in the world. Try not to stick out,” I said.
At that point, I think her soul left her body because she didn’t say anything.
I briefly thought of turning around and running full speed back to the train station, sans my wife. I figured she’d find a way out of there on her own somehow.
Can’t do that, I thought. You stupid fool. Just keep walking. Be brave. You’re supposed to be a man.
We both picked up the pace and started walking extremely fast. I thought of asking the nearby cop if he could drive us back to our apartment in Manhattan. No, that wouldn’t work.
We finally made it to the store. They had one couch on display. After walking around for a few minutes and collecting our thoughts, I finally said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Somehow, we made it back to the train station unscathed. And back to our apartment we went, where I immediately Googled the neighborhood and discovered that it was, in fact, the most murderous area in all of New York City.
The man was sitting in the corner of the kitchen on an antique mahogany chair, smoking a cigarette. He’d been thinking about his job, and the boss, Bill, who always said he was a hard worker, slow maybe, but good with a roller and even better at cutting under foundations and around windows with a small brush.
Shaped like a half-moon, the ceiling light glowed dimly in the late-afternoon sunlight that beamed through the kitchen. As he reached for the vintage black rotary phone mounted on the wall, the ashes from his cigarette fluttered in the air and onto the yellow linoleum beneath his feet.
He listened to the dial tone. “Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please hang up and try the call again,” eventually came on.
He hung up, picked up the phone again, and dialed the number. It rang and rang.
Finally, a voice on the other end said, “Hello.” “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand” by Primitive Radio Gods played in the background.
“Nicky? Where are you?”
“Home,” the boy said.
“Do me a favor please and go see what your father is doing.”
“He’s away on business, Uncle Rob.”
At the nearby stove, the man set down a small pot, halfway filled with water. Then he put on the burner. “He still selling fake promises? I’m supposta’ talk to your mom. Where is she?”
The boy said to wait and then when he returned, the man said, “I know, you got a girlfriend, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Bring her here so I can meet her.”
“I don’t have one.”
“Your brother — ” The man word’s suddenly softened. “What’s your brother, twenty-five now?”
“Chris? He’s twenty-two.”
“I remember how big he used to be. He still playing football?”
“He only played for a season. In high school.”
“One season? How come?”
“Dad made him stop. He was worried about Chris getting injured. You know how he is.”
“Uncle Rob, I hafta go. Sorry, I’m meeting my friend soon.”
“Did I tell you I ran into Tim Nelson the other day? He always said you reminded him of me. Remember when he came to your party with your fat Aunt Carol? And she fell in the pool.”
“She just missed a line drive to the face.”
“You hit it hard.”
“I was in the field.”
“I think you hit it.”
“That was our neighbor Dominic. The kid who used to wear orange sweatpants.”
“You know,” the man said, “those kids down at Hitchings Field got great swings, just like you. Why don’t you come by tomorrow— ”
“Don’t think I can,” Uncle Rob.
“Why not?”
“I’m supposed to do the lawn on Saturdays.”
“What do they have you doing the lawn for?”
“It’s part of my chores.”
“Get out of here with chores. You can take the bus to Chestnut Street.”
“I know where I can take it, Uncle Rob.”
The man held the phone away for a moment like it was contagious. “Nicky,” he said, pressing the receiver close to his lips now, “when I was on the high school varsity team, I played center field. I had a glove that could stick any ball in my direction. But my batting was another story. I used to take these big, giant swings but would never go yard. Always just grounded out or popped out, mostly. When I stopped trying to hit a home run, though, and just focused on putting a good swing on the ball, that’s when I started to hit bombs. Just a good swing — ”
The call got disconnected. The man called back and, with his free hand, wiped the sweat from his brow.
“Hello?” the boy repeated.
Adjusting the phone cord now, the man said, “Can you come after eleven tomorrow? We’ll go to Gino’s for lunch afterward.”
“I’ll ask my mother,” the boy said.
“Nicky, you know, you were always my favorite.”
“I know, Uncle Rob. Hope to see you tomorrow, OK?”
“Good,” the man said. “Good,” and they hung up.
Unfazed by the stench that treaded the stale air, the man walked into the bathroom. His mouth agape, he looked in the mirror.
The beard on his face had grown thicker, extending high up on his cheekbones. A broad, biblical-like stature, his physical presence dominated a contrasting life led of aimlessness and misgivings about women.
On his way over to the refrigerator, barefoot, he stepped on the cigarette that fell from his hand, like it was part of the floor.
In a sudden moment, he got down on his knees and, hand outstretched, started drumming his right palm off the floor, which mimicked the sound made when she hurried down the stairs and left him for good.
The following day, after taking the bus to the Chestnut Street stop, the boy walked three-quarters of a mile to Hitchings Field. He arrived a few minutes before one o’clock.
At the far end of the field, he took off his backpack and laid it carefully on the ground near a bench. Then he sat down and waited. Unlike a typical teenager, he always showed up early.
Outside, on the back porch, the boy’s uncle wondered about the new one. She used, too. And when turning tricks, she didn’t have to steal from him. He saw her no more than one sees a friend at the tail end of a friendship. The rolled-up brown paper bag had been perched on a shelf in the linen closet. Removing its contents, the man told himself that it would be his last.
His mouth, slightly drawn while securing the rubber band around his arm, accentuated the hint of purple in his lips; dark, impressionable lines overwhelmed the areas around his eyes.
In a few seconds, he would enter his element. Nothing could ever feel this good.
He injected the syringe into his arm. Sitting, with his back up against the porch railing, he began to nod out.
Within seconds, the man went unconscious for the final time, his body hitting the ground.
I’ve always had a knack for seeing things and going unnoticed. When I was seventeen, my boss at the executive park cafe where I worked asked me to surveil a man selling food out of his truck in the parking lot unlicensed. I went undetected during the entire surveillance. It was then I knew I had what it took to become an investigator.
Fast forward six years later and I’m sitting in my office as a staff supervisor at a small investigative firm.
The phone rang.
“Dave, you have a call on line one,” Barbara said in a hushed tone.
“Any idea if it’s a client?” I asked.
This time, “Neil McCauley” was on hold.
“Thanks, I’ll take it,” I said. Evidently, my friend’s voice eluded all recognition. Falling victim to the same fake names — DeNiro’s in the movie Heat being a favorite — made it difficult to take her seriously.
I picked up the phone saturated in frustration. “What`s up, Paul?”
“What`s the good word, David?”
“You do that every time,” I said, “and she still has no idea.”
“I know. What is wrong with those people over there? Are you working at a drive-thru?”
“The people in my office are — ”
“Davyyyy, Wasss-up bruthaaa!” Just then my boss, Don, shot into my office like a lunatic starving for more madness.
“Call ya back,” I said, hanging up on Paul.
“What’s up for the weekend?”
I turned unceremoniously in my black swivel chair. “Not much, really.”
“Listen, I need you to go ahead and do an employment verification on this woman.” He plunked down on my desk a thick manila folder that was held together by a giant red elastic, like what you’d find on the floor of a shipping and receiving warehouse. “Big domestic case. We gotta dot our i’s and cross our t’s on this one. CYA [Cover Your Ass]. Client says his ex-wife is going out drinking most nights and that she’s an unfit mother for their child.”
He removed his gray suit coat, a Jones New York job, and tossed it on a nearby box overflowing with VHS tapes. Propping his foot up on the metal fold-up chair, he tied and then retied his shoe. He looked like a stereotypical mobster from the fifties: clean-shaven, with short, perfectly-manicured dark sideburns, an obnoxiously square neckline. “We can’t screw this one up,” he said.
“Of course. Do we want Peters or Ricky to handle it?” I opened the file. A spelling error, relivant, glared back at me.
“Give it to Peters. Tell him it’s gotta be his best case.”
“We’ll see what else I can find on her.” I sounded out the subject’s last name: “I-z-z-u-p-i-e-t-r-o.”
“Get it done, Dave. Whatever you need to do. And tell Peters to put his other cases on hold for now. Tim Fredrickson from Liberty Mutual has been up my ass about his last few cases.” His cell phone started vibrating.
“I gotta take this,” he said, leaving me hanging, as usual.
On the long table along the far wall in my office stood six large black bins. Each contained numerous hanging green files. At first, I saw only his back to the door. Unable to make out anything more, I didn’t think much of it, but as I got closer, I could sense the agitation. He was fingering through one of the files, rather rapidly. Gimme a break, what did he want now?
“Sorry I’m late,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it, Dave. Good morning.”
I took off my coat. Glancing down at the newspaper spread out on my desk, my eye caught the headline:
Husband kills wife and then himself
My stomach immediately summoned up the sensation felt on a bumpy ride in my father’s old Dodge Granata. “Happened early last night,” Don said, approaching my desk with the file open across both palms, like it was a newborn baby.
I let out a deliberate cough. “I just talked to the client yesterday,” I said, and coughed again, though unintentionally this time. “Peters said he came up to his window.” I swallowed the phlegm in my throat to avoid embarrassment. “Told the guy to go away.”
“I knew something was off,” said Don, leaning against the doorway now, his mouth twisted.
“I don’t know what to say. I just talked to him yesterday.”
“It’s what I always say. We’ve got to be diligent about the information we provide.”
This one really hit me. How could this have happened, on a straightforward child custody case, no less?
But the truth was, the man who had ordered from our firm all those hours of surveillance on his ex-wife had the psychological profile of someone who could do real harm.
“The client is acting very erratic. He keeps calling me. There is something off about him, Dave. We’re gonna need to reevaluate things,” Don had said, putting the case on hold.
When Investigator Peters reported that the client showed up in his car to where he was conducting surveillance, got out, and rapped his knuckles on Peters’ window, it’d become apparent that the man had a serious obsession with his ex-wife.
Of course, Don did, in fact, reevaluate things in the end, deciding to call off the case completely.
The following day, the man would point a loaded gun at his wife and pull the trigger, killing her instantly, and then turn the gun on himself.
A young girl left behind, losing both her parents to murder-suicide.
The devastation, the tumult, the stress and uncertainty of having a severe chronic illness that’s rendered you bedridden for years. What does one do? I routinely seek out connection online, particularly social media, due to the isolation of being alone in a room all day, which at times is intolerable.
On this particular day, I was on Twitter, responding to the accounts I found most interesting and amusing. American literary icon Joyce Carol Oates was on my radar. She’s prolific on Twitter. At eighty-six, she’s as sharp as a tack and very, very opinionated.
A small blue, yellow, and white painting of the finish line at a race by an unknown artist hangs on the wall above my bed. My mother got it at a flea market and thought it seemed fitting because of my journey. But whether the finish line symbolizes recovery from chronic illness or the end of a life is not for me to say.
Three plants sit in my room to give it flair — a large Dracaena gifted to me by a rich American friend in Sweden, and the other two, a snake plant and a small succulent, from my mother, who seems to have a present or home-cooked meal for me every time she visits.
I’d clicked on Joyce’s post containing a link to her flash-fiction piece called “Hospice/Honeymoon.” Eloquently written and vivid prose, the hallmark of Ms. Oates’ writing, the fictional story is about the final days of her late husband Charles Gross, a psychologist and neuroscientist, and the topic of caregiving.
I, of course, could relate to the experience since my wife is my caregiver. So I replied to her post:
“Great piece, Joyce,” I said. “My wife has been my caretaker for nine years of chronic illness, seven of them bedridden. And it is no honeymoon for her, or for me.”
“Well, it is,” Joyce replied. “Just an unexpected kind of honeymoon. But it is for both, it is not solitary.”
Screenshotted photo by Author
For those unfamiliar with Ms. Oates, she is considered by some to be America’s greatest living writer, having penned the novel “Blonde,” a fictionalized biography of Marilyn Monroe, which was turned into the 2022 eponymous Hollywood movie. But more famously, perhaps, she is known for her 1966 short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
At first, I dismissed the comment, thinking nothing of it. But then I let it sink in and eventually found Joyce’s words to be oddly comforting, even life-affirming. I would most certainly not want to be doing this alone.
My wife had decided a long time ago that she would stick with me through this ordeal. And though many times she has wanted to quit, she has always hung in there, providing me with so many emotional benefits, as I fight for my survival on some days.
Community, connection, leaning on the shoulders of the people you love — this is how one endures great, prolonged suffering, suffering that often feels meaningless.
I thank Joyce Carol Oates for giving me her perspective. I thank her for being thoughtful enough to offer me a few kind words. It made that moment in my day less painful, less ordinary.
Over a decade ago, my wife and I lived in New York City for three years. From Manhattan to Brooklyn and then back to Manhattan, we lived in three different apartments during that time. Our last apartment, on East 93rd Street in the Carnegie Hill section of Manhattan, was just around the corner from the famous 92nd Street Y, also the former home to the great writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, where today famous authors, poets, and celebrities give engaging talks.
The apartment was located on the fourth floor of a co-op building once lived in by the Marx Brothers. It came equipped with marble countertops, cherry-wood cabinets, and a tin ceiling in the kitchen. There were ceiling fans throughout, a large yellow and white artificial fireplace backdropped by a deep red wall adorning the living room, crown moldings on the ceilings, and respectable hardwood flooring. It also had a very impressive bathroom: an NYC subway-tiled shower and bath with large sliding glass doors and a toilet the size of a throne with a big silver French handle on it.
Our landlord, a quirky, pseudo-intellectual retired UPS driver who loved to use big words and make obscure literature and film references, lived out of state in Florida but was previously a New Yorker for many years. Richard was the kind of guy who wore fluffy Christmas sweaters and, I’d surmised, had a copy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace sitting on his nightstand.
On day one of the lease for our new apartment, we found him inside camped out on the living room floor. A sleeping bag, a half-pot of cooked rice, and some empty water bottles were scattered throughout. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he perked right up upon sight of us. “David, it’s good to finally meet you,” he said, standing up. “And this must be Kathleen.”
My wife immediately turned red, something that happens when she’s embarrassed for everyone in the room, including herself.
“David, quick, let me show you something first,” Richard said, walking toward the fireplace. “This is the new play I wrote.” He grabbed a thick, handwritten packet of white paper from the mantle and opened it to the first page so I could see it.
“Wow,” I said, feigning interest. “That’s impressive.”
Afterwards, he told us he’d been wandering the city by day visiting museums. When asked if he’d be cleaning the place and making minor repairs before our move the next day, he said, “You know, I meant to spend the day cleaning yesterday, but I got bogged down with other stuff.” He assured us, however, that he’d be gone before the movers arrived—a welcome relief.
The first few months in the apartment were great. But then, things took a sudden turn. We started having issues with the heat; there was an exploding pipe; loose handles and knobs on cabinet doors, vanity doors, doors of all kinds; things just randomly falling off. A neighbor in the apartment next door beyond our shared wall did clumsy Tai-Chi sessions and organized furniture every night between three and five in the morning.
And then, there were the mice.
Because of the nature of our quirky interactions, the emails between Richard and me became more and more fanciful and ludicrous.
On the day after the exterminator came, I wrote him an email:
Hi Richard,
I don’t know what Kathleen responded but I wanted to let you know the outcome. Yes, the exterminator, a very large man who, if you ask me, seemed to be posing as an exterminator, came out yesterday.
He greeted me at the door by yelling, “Rent reduction, rent reduction!” and said the stairs were “too much.”I’m not sure what he did since it was such a quick visit, but that’s not the point. The guy was all about enthusiasm. “We’ll get the little fucker,” he kept saying.
As for our mouse friend, it seems he’s trying to save face. I told him he has no business up here. Of course, he didn’t listen at first, continued to peek out from behind our bookshelf as any mouse would (some taunting going on, too), even feigned like he was sniffing out one of the classics.
When he inadvertently brushed up against Kafka’s The Trail, however, that was it. His whole demeanor changed. I’m guessing he thought his prospects would be better elsewhere.
Also, I’m happy to report that we’re now the proud owners of six mouse trap bags.
-David”
I signed off my iPad feeling accomplished.
But the problems wouldn’t stop. Needless to say, we had had enough and wanted out.So one day, I got Richard on the phone and we came to an agreement: Kathleen and I would begin the process of subletting our apartment and breaking the lease.
But first, we would need the blessing of the head of the apartment building’s co-op board, a small, fiery Asian woman named Sherry. That’s just the way Richard wanted it.
He and I began emailing again, of course, about the situation, and about Sherry. And each email became more preposterous than the last.
Feeling silly and determined to get us out of the lease, I dug deep one afternoon. Richard, although a good, honest man, was a completely preposterous individual, so this would not have worked on any other person. But I came up with an email that would ultimately get the ball rolling:
Hi Richard,
If there was ever a time to remain steadfast to your position that the building heed your concerns, then certainly it is now. Sherry’s countenance — sufficiently peevish, no doubt — might well call to mind for you a character in the movie RAN, but one would be remiss in failing to understand her true nature.
A complimentary encounter such as, “Oh, hi, Sherry. By the way, the flowers out front look great. Are those new shoes you’re wearing?” which I, with your encouragement, would so graciously initiate, might not reveal much more than what we already know about her, I’m afraid.
Have there been misunderstandings? Certainly. Sherry and I have, by our own admission, been a complete nuisance to one another. Sure, righto, of course.
That said, Kathleen and I are responsible renters and always have been so. “You guys are always on time with the rent. Wow, you keep the place so clean. You’re so quiet and respectful of the other neighbors,” they invariably say. (Or maybe that’s us just saying it to ourselves.)
In any case, the decision to eschew a future sublet arrangement is yours, yes. However, I implore you to consider that in recognizing the co-op board’s fiduciary responsibility, the power might not lie solely with Sherry.
-David
After that, Richard fell in line quickly, as did Sherry and the others. And ultimately, we moved out for good.
Now I’m just wondering if I should send him another email, eleven years later, with wording even more ludicrous than the last.
