U.M.Ph.! Prose #1
'lysergic new year' by mark hanser
On the train in a large city, you get used to being visually assessed. It's usually nothing personal, just an urban pastime because everything is so quick that to catch a stranger's story, or to make one up if the stranger is extremely interesting-looking, the storyteller has to look quickly and deep. The writer, whether on a train, in a car, plodding on concrete, or just vegging in a hospital waiting room, must capture a glimpse of the vibrancy, fascination, and quick pace of city dwellers -- in an urban multicultural phlash! -- before (s)he blinks.
Mignon Ariel King
Boston, Massachusetts
June 15, 2009
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In this issue:
Eric Beeny Matthew B. Dexter Timothy Gager Doug Holder
Cameron Mount Zvi A. Sesling James Wilk
[Note: Click on underlined names to link to author's websites.]
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GANG PREVENTION: CANCELED
By Eric Beeny
Watson and Bermuda got to the Histogram City Community Center, and there was a sign on the door that said:Gang Prevention: Canceled.
They stood there a moment.
They looked at the sign.
They read it once, knew by now what the sign said so they didn’t spend any more time reading it, and so they just stood there staring at it.
Watson and Bermuda looked at each other.
They turned around and walked back out into the parking lot.
A bunch of illiterate infants were playing basketball on a small court next to the Community Center.
The court was just blacktop with no boundaries painted on it.
The basketball hoop didn’t have a net.
It just hung there from the rusted aluminum backboard like a mechanical angel’s iron halo.
The bunch of illiterate infants played ball together, all pretty rough about it, slamming into and dropping each other like an anchor wearing mob-issued cement shoes.
They all just got up again, went right back to playing ball, hurting each other without ever really fighting big.
None of them had on decent clothes or sneakers, and they all made fun of each other for it.
Watson and Bermuda sat down on the rusted, warped metal bleachers off to the side of the court watching the bunch of illiterate infants play.
The sun was real big and hot.
“You think Lucas’s sick?” Watson said.
“I don’t know,” Bermuda said. “He’d call.”
“Would he? No one else showed up.”
“But he’s our counselor. He should call.”
Watson felt himself getting angry.
He made fists, like his hands were mouths grinding their teeth, and his blood got hot, felt like lava.
“No, he’d call,” Bermuda said.
“Then why didn’t he?”
Bermuda didn’t say anything.
“He’s fucking with us, that’s what. He thinks we’ll just be patient and depend on ourselves? Nah, fuck that.”
Bermuda felt like he was having a stroke, couldn’t focus on anything but, “He’d call.”
Watson got up off the bleachers, hopped down onto the blacktop.
He walked over to the illiterate infants playing basketball.
Bermuda watched Watson go without thinking about what he was doing, didn’t really notice the gun Watson pulled out and shot at three of them with.
He didn’t notice the other illiterate infants scattering away, leaping over the chain-link fences enclosing the court, fences with big gashes in them like runs in a stocking Watson once pulled down over his face to rob the Arabian store.
Bermuda didn’t even hear the loud pops the bullets made when compressed air coughed them up out of the gun.
Watson climbed up the bleachers and sat down beside Bermuda, who the whole time was trapping himself inside, getting angry about it.
His palms were slices of bleeding bread his fists bit into.
Bermuda snapped out of it and looked at Watson, thought he was maybe asking the illiterate infants if they’d seen Lucas.
“What’d they say?”
Watson didn’t answer, just sat there with the gun in his palm, squeezing the grip, cocking and uncocking the hammer.
“Let’s go,” Bermuda said. “I wanna go.”
They got up and went to their car, drove around looking for Lucas, and when they found him they weren’t sure what they were going to do.
Watson and Bermuda hadn’t yet learned self-control.
That was this week’s discussion.
There was [n]othing they could’ve done to stop themselves.
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The Pig in the Swine Flu Costume
By Matthew B. Dexter
It was the aftermath of the swine flu epidemic and the residual paranoia was pervasive and palpable. The children were in the hospital waiting room crawling all over the linoleum floor like cockroaches, wearing green surgical masks. The adults looked like doctors, wearing masks themselves; except most of them wore dirty pants and their hands were not smooth and artistic with long slender fingers like surgeons, but coarse and calloused like mechanics or construction workers. There eyes were huge, pupils bulging. One teenage girl sitting next to me noticed my face was unprotected. She asked me if I wasn’t afraid of the swine flu H1N1.
“No tienes miedo de la influenza porcina?”
I shook my head and smiled.
“Claro que no, señorita,” I said, meaning of course not.
She shook her head and shrugged her shoulders.
“Eres un gringo loco, no?” she asked.
I told her yes, I am a crazy American.
“Si señorita, estoy loquito.”
Every time anybody sneezes or coughs in Cabo San Lucas they receive an evil stare down from dozens of bulging eyes poking through disposable masks. Eyes and menacing stares look even more scary when they’re coming from somebody wearing a mask covering their face.
The nurse entered through the swinging door like a cowgirl entering a saloon.
“Mateo?” she asked.
I stood up and entered the hospital as the patients all did as much as possible to stare through my white skin and wonder whether I was fearless, courageous, or just plain stupid.
The nurse led me into an empty room and the doctor knocked on the door a few minutes later.
“Porque estas aqui?” he asked.
He was wearing a mask.
“Puedo hablar inglés?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Bueno…I am here because I can’t sleep through the night because six belligerent cows have decided to live in the desert right next to my house; one got trapped in a neighbor’s yard; stupidest of stupid animals; I feel like I’m livin’ on an effing farm…Mooooooeeeuuwwwww!!”
“I see,” he said.
“And what would you like me to do about this?”
“I would like some sleeping pills, prescription strength,” I told him.
“Don’t you fear the swine flu?”
“Not really. I mean a little I suppose, but no point living life in fear looking like a victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, right?”
He laughed and shook his head. I could see the lines on his face from the smile hidden beneath the mask of fear which has paralyzed my country.
“Maybe,” he said.
“I love Mexico,” I told him.
We shook hands in the hallway after he finished writing the prescription and just as I was walking out the door he asked me for some data.
“If you have a moment before you go,” he said, “would you please state your facts--I mean I agree with you--or at least your premise.”
“Annually, 'normal' influenza kills 30,000 people in the states; yet you don't see Americans wearing masks; but ignorant Mexicans and hypochondriac gringos are giving us all a bad name, and a negative image for our country; it's only a new strain and mass media hysteria; put your masks away you paranoid morons; or are you too stupid to realize influenza can enter through the porous fabric in small amounts?”
“Interesting…I just think it’s wise to take extra precautions until things die down.”
“Maybe,” I said, walking out the swinging door like a cowboy ready for a gunfight.
I grabbed the girl with the swine flu mask who was waiting in the same chair and took her into an empty triage room.
“You are crazy,” she said. “What’s your name?”
I didn’t think she could speak a word of English.
“My name is Don Mateo,” I said. “Listen, don’t worry, it’s ok, I have protection.”
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The Note
By Timothy Gager
Dear Jenny:
I know things have been rough for us the past year, but I’ve decided that in our best interest, I’m not going to try to save you anymore. I’m going to ask you a favor and for you to just do it without any questions. See you after work.
I love you,
Jim
Jim sat on the forklift and, for the first time in a long time, work passed by quickly. He put away thoughts of rushing home to see if she was all right. From now on, if she was, she was, and if she wasn’t, there was nothing he could do about it. All he wanted was for them to have a common ground. He could not fight a beast he didn’t know anything about and recently his entire life was taken up by worrying and fighting.
At break, he pulled some DOTS from out of the candy machine’s tray. Jenny told him that if he could imagine the best truffle, the best orgasm, the best breeze on a warm day, it could not even come close to what she'd experienced. Jim tapped the side of the box until the last pieces freed themselves into his hand. Then he took his pointer finger and pried the soft gluey adhesive remains from the outside walls of his teeth. A month ago, he performed the same act while driving and crashed the forklift, shaking himself up pretty good. Still, he refused to go to the ER at Brotman Medical Center in Culver City. What could they do besides give him some Percocet. Nothing.
It also had no appeal to Jim because Jenny had been at the same hospital twice that same week. To go back there after milling around those same floors for hours worrying about her would be like torture. Jim knew his was only an accident, but he was never quite sure about hers. She was falling into an abyss without hope and she blamed herself for everything. He said that he was giving up and felt he couldn’t go on trying to keep things right in their relationship, but he knew, yes, indeed, things were her fault and he no longer could prevent her from causing harm.
When Jim and Jenny were in the early stages of their relationship, it seemed that they had much more of an understanding. They went through things together, either at the same time, or one in support of the other. Things never got bad the way things were now.
“So is there a bottom?” he thought. Was it reached? The day he came home to find her unresponsive on the bed might have been close. He called 911 and drenched her face with water, and when she still could not be awakened, he slapped her harder than he wanted to. When she went back to the hospital later that week, he was treated by their stares as if he were the abuser, and later, the same suspicious looks were worn by the neighbors as she walked through the courtyard on the way back to their apartment. Screaming ambulances followed by black eyes will do that.
Jim tried to do what he could, but Jenny refused the treatment. He wanted it but she didn’t, so when it was offered he told the doctors, “We’ll just handle it on our own. I’ll do what I can.”
Jim snorted as turned the forklift sharply to the right. His shoulder was still not right. The next break, he would have to grab some Tylenol from the medicine tin in the break room. He shut his eyes, craving a short nap. When he first started, the warehouse didn’t have surveillance cameras. On days such as this, he could drive to a remote corner of the warehouse and sleep for the twenty minutes before his break. Today, there would be no such luck. He again resisted the urge to call Jenny. It had only been seven hours since he’d written that note and Jenny too would know why he was calling. Instead he picked up a pallet stacked with boxes and moved from one end of the warehouse to the other.
After break, Herbie rested his meaty hand on Jim’s shoulder, “Everything OK?” Jim winced. “Fine.”
“Pete had to leave. He has a family emergency. You mind pulling his weight?”
Jim rubbed his shoulder.
“Family emergency,” Herbie repeated. “One of his cats died.”
“Oh…OK. I’ll do what I can,” he responded. He reached and dialed Jenny’s number, but it just rang and rang.
When shift ended, Jim found himself driving home faster than usual. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. At the last red light, he stopped briefly and checked both ways before running through it. When he opened the door, he saw Jenny resting on the couch with a familiar syringe and a spoon on the coffee table. “Honey, wake up,” he said, slapping her face gently. “I want you to shoot me.”
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The Graveyard on Somerville Ave.
The stunted
bleached tablets
are like alien eruptions
as the tumbleweed
debris of Demoula's Market
skirts over the graves
like transient
wind-blown apparitions.
From a marker
1789
(on inspection, a life cut comically short)
one can feel
the looming
21st Century Towers
of Boston
casting a shadow
on this ancient
gated community of
the dead.
And pedestrians
pass
with flapping, studded tongues
and tunnel their
vision for the straight ahead
and never look back
at these Somerville
dead.
Furnished Room - Newbury St - Boston: 1978
A place I used to live when I first came to town.
_______________________________________
The raw, coiled
red glare
of the hot plate--
the urine stain
of a sink
and the waft
of Red Sauce
from Davio's below--
The head
a short, anxious scamper
down the hall,
the hacking cough
of the retired civil servant
through a thin wall.
And the spinster
who peers from
the crack in her door,
gathers her pennies
and courage
for her big trip
to the corner store,
And the decrepit
wooden ladder that
ascended to a tar roof
the sweet /sorrow scent of city, rain and sea...
and my youth...
--Doug Holder
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{Edited 2010}
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In the Interest of Saving Time Tonight, I
In the interest of saving time tonight, I traveled through some back alley street between Paterson’s River St and Madison Ave (lit only by neon and trafficked by two lovers fucking in the back of a rusting hulk, a table of three card monte players discussing the literary merits of Proust and Sartre and Plath, a few street-whores and houseless crackheads en route to their cornerstore dealers, johns and Planned Parenthood and the Eastside Park, where their lice-infested mildewy cardboard lies, heated by trashcan fires, free-basing, and rotgut, carrying pills and rubbers, carrying forgets and regrets in brown bags and blackened glass, with only fleas, rats, a rabid fox, two octopi in 50 gallon fish tanks, pigeons, and syph to keep them company, alone with fears of failure and death and disease) and arriving home early, I watched fat dicks wooing abused stars, surfed the sordid web for snuff films and Frank Herbert, read the dictionary and tore out all U words, while huffing paint and devouring Buddha, practicing the stigmata on my girlfriend, and engrossing myself in phallic Orlovsky, and promptly wasted away my ten extra minutes.
--Cameron Mount
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Gang War/Roxbury, MA
Watch the news, a black mother crying telling a white reporter
her son a good boy no way involved with drugs or guns. But the
boy is dead, cold as steak in refrigerator, not dead as a door nail
which never had life, except as a nail. The boy walking, thinks of
girls or basketball. His thoughts sparkle like stars on a dark night
a car moves slowly, silently like a clam being steamed its window
partially open like a thought to the next world, barrel of a pistol
protrudes like a clam neck about to excrete. The car passes the
boy three shots explode like bombs in Iraq, the car speeds off
like a NASCAR racer, fumes cover the dead body like a shroud,
blood stains the sidewalk while in houses nearby people turn TV
volume up, pull shades down. Mother cries for the reporter,
for the camera, for us as we sit on the couch waiting for relief.
--Zvi A. Sesling
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A Tooth
By James Wilk
A scalper sold me seats behind the dugout. Good seats. They'd better be, for sixty bucks a pop. I skimped on parking though, and pulled my Ford into the $15.00 lot a dozen blocks away. Connor and I made sure we had our sunscreen, tickets, mitts and Rockies caps, locked up the truck and walked.
I held his ungloved hand and steered him down the cracked and crumbling curb, down past the porn
shop advertising Live Nude Girls Behind Glass For Your Pleasure, down past Step 13— Your haven when the first twelve steps don't work.
The noon sun cast the shadow of his cap across his freckled cheeks and turned-up nose as I peered cautiously down alleys strewn with broken bottles, cigarette butts, cans, the smell of piss—detritus of a Denver Connor had never seen—down past the barred-up doors and windows of the liquor store
that also offered Easy Pay-Day Loans.
A raven-haired and grimy fellow, face and hands as tanned and creased as baseball mitts, picked hallucinated insects from his army jacket, groaning as he sat there at the bus stop, rocking back and forth.
“Dad?”
“Yes?”
“That guy must really have to pee.”
“Could be,” I chuckled, as we passed a red brick tavern with a spavined canvas awning where homeless men paced, smoking in the shade.
Then Connor reached for something in the gutter—someone’s front tooth, with bloody root and all, sallow and softly gleaming in the sand.
“Look, Dad! A tooth!”
“Don't touch it, Connor. NO!”
“How do you think it got there like that, Dad?”
A brawl at three a.m.? A drunken fall? A baseball bat? Perhaps he never flossed.
“I don't know, Connor. Let’s go to the game.”
Top of the fourth he tapped me on the shoulder. “Dad?”
“Yes?”
“I know what happened to that tooth.”
“What happened?”
“The tooth fairy must have dropped it.”
“You're right, Connor! I'll bet that’s just what happened,” I nodded, pondering his gap-toothed grin.
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U.M.Ph.! Prose #1. Copyright 2009. A pox on ye plagiarists! No part of this journal or site ramblings may be reproduced in any way, shape, or form. Writers have taken an oath on a stack of imaginary holy tomes that the work submitted is their original creation and that it has not been published elsewhere in the past six months nor will it be published elsewhere for the next six months (i. e. ultimately, it's exclusive here for a year). All letters of commendation or condemnation become the exclusive property of the fearless umphatic editor the minute you hit "Send." The sole rights to each work will revert to its author on December 21, 2009.
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