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guys in suits are standing around and i'm flipping the slides as the client reads my speech. i keep thinking, you know, while i'm flipping the slides and listening to how my words sound as the client reads them, i keep thinking about bongo at the fun hutt, how this means nothing to him. but his profession, what _he_ does, means a lot to me. it was last thursday night when i talked to bongo last, and he asked me about my job. i got all tongue-tied trying to explain to him what we did, and why we did it. i wound up out there at the satellite dish telling bongo all about this marketing initiative and all of the strategies and planning and media blitzes and everything. the more i said about one thing, the more i had to explain about another. my job suddenly seemed all convoluted and hopelessly byzantine and ... when

i finished my explanation, bongo poked a smoke into his mouth and said, "hmm, sounds like a lot of bullshit to me." i was thinking of this when my boss came up to me, grabbed the slide flipper out of my hand, and advanced the carousel. i had to stand there like, like ... i didn't know whether to sit down or try to take the flipper back or what, while my boss gave me a quick scowl and kept the thing moving, the client up there at the podium all tense, looking at us. it was okay though, i still did okay. and i got to ride the metroliner back by myself. i was so overwhelmed by the fact that i was on a train and alone and free and unsupervised that i went to the bar car and got two beers and a tuna sandwich on a kaiser roll, whatever a kaiser roll is. i had five different flavors of newspaper and i was in the smoking

car so i could smoke like a fiend and i watched delaware move past in the waning hours of the day, as they say. i think it was delaware. i was almost delirious. no, i _was_ delirious. i finished the beers and the sandwich and three of the papers and went back for more beers. i came back and smiled a lot even though there was nobody to know or care that i was smiling. i finished the papers and started on the amtrak magazine. back in the city, as i carried all my shit to a cab outside penn station, i was kinda drunk and i was thinking about all this crap i had to carry around. the cabby, wearing an enormous turban, was loading it into the trunk and i said to him in a lighthearted fashion, i said "look at all of this shit i have to carry around! i bet you, as a cabby, don't have to carry around this much kinda

shit!" he says nothing. going up the west side highway, i said to the cabby, i said "you know, time was all fellas like us would need was a loincloth and a spear and we'd be okay. he turns his head about 10 degrees in my direction but doesn't say anything. maybe he has more shit than i thought. maybe he _likes_ having lots of shit. maybe he doesn't have _any_ shit. i don't know. i worry that he thinks because i'm wearing a tie that i'm rich and he hates me. later i think that the man's actions were probably indicative of someone who doesn't speak english, and i feel better. saturday night at flipper's is popping! it's appliance night, which means that all of us urban dwellers who don't have things like dishwashers and microwave ovens and washing machines and blenders and that sort of thing get to use them

all we want. i was loading my underwear into the washing machine and blending a banana smoothie at the same time, eagerly anticipating both the drink and the fact that i'd get to load the glass into the dishwasher afterwards when bongo came up to me. flipper canned me said bongo. i laughed. flipper canned me he repeated. i looked over at flipper and he saw me and looked away. it's the economy said bongo. he says the recession ... so what does this mean? i say to bongo. i mean, what are you going to _starve_ or something? i laughed. it's not like he's going to starve or something, he's bongo. bongo says he occupies a highly specialized niche in society, a niche that has few opportunities, i try to keep thinking that it doesn't matter. that if it was like the pleistocene age, you could just _be_ , and go around

and eat tubers and kill mastodons or something. spears and jockstraps. it, i can't get used to the fact of money. i tell bongo that things have gotten too complicated. i tell him he shouldn't have to worry about where his next salem comes from. he laughs, i laugh. we both laugh. laff. laffing's fine, says bongo at the satellite dish. he's changed out of his sunoco outfit and now he's wearing a 1976 sear's leisure suit forest green with lime green piping with a clip-on tie and a huge belt buckle that says "bongo." bongo is really _into_ being bongo. bongo says he feels like he should be depressed that he hasn't created a huge furniture chain like his grandfather did. he doesn't, he can't take lessons from his ancestors because he doesn't know them. he knows what they did a little, but he sure doesn't know how

they did it. like me, bongo doesn't know his ethnic makeup or where his grandfather came from. bongo doesn't know why he has to be bongo. we're jelly fish says bongo, lighting a salem with his zippo (funnest lighter name) that has "bongo" engraved in it. i'm bongo, goddammit, he says to me down at the railroad tracks, the ones under the thing at riverside park, later on. bongo holds forth. bongo swims in the hudson river. i look at bongo like napoleon chagall looking at a yanomomi indian. i scribble notes on a napkin i will later discover are illegible. i hold my digital recorder up to his mouth and keep his words until i need the space for something at work and delete them. what is this bongo, this good bongo? i thought as i helped him up to his tribeca flat and put him to bed. i went home and i wanted a nightcap

so i went down to the bodega wearing a motorcycle helmet and funky shades because i wanted to be noticed. nobody blinked and i went home, anonymous as ever. i stopped going to flipper's. partly, i thought, because i wished to protest bongo's firing. i would go instead to the bar around the corner from my office, where everyone else hung out. i'd stand around and drink boring yuppie amstel lights and smoke non-fun marlboros and we'd all talk about work or sex or sports and all that. the only other diversion was a jukebox, and i noticed that the men and women in suits thought it somewhat daring to go and select five songs. like they were being really adventurous, imposing their choices on the crowd. the ones who considered themselves "fun" did this, and they, in turn, were considered "fun" by the others. well,

i can be adventurous and fun, too, and i went to the jukebox and flipped through the things and saw no abba, no they might be giants, no old banana splits theme, no partridge family all the stuff flipper has on his jukebox. a woman i knew from accounting came up and suggested eric clapton and r.e.m. and i looked at her, but i didn't see her; i looked right through her but not in the metaphorical sense. i mean, i didn't _see_ her, if you know what i mean. i could only see the door, excuse me, i said. i left the lights on on my snowmobile (there are no snowmobiles in the city, so i was being "fun," but she looked right through _me_ , ogling the credits i'd left on the jukebox.) i thought about hunting up bongo, but it was tex i really needed to see, so i made my way to flipper's. my cabbie was a sikh who nonetheless

let me smoke in the cab, and i hung my head out the window like a labrador retriever. hey! i said to the cabbie, poking my head back inside, i'm a labrador retriever! he inclined his head slightly and i thought i saw the slightest sliver of teeth through his dark lips. i couldn't wait to tell the kids at flipper's i made a sikh cabbie smile. at flipper's things were in full swing, and i hit the locker room to change into the tyvek jumpsuit that had become de rigeur at flipper's in my absence. yell to flipper for more ovaltine, more campbell's tomato soup and add milk instead of water so it'll be cream of tomato, would it be too much to ask to get some spaghettios mixed in there or will the shit explode? my cousin boffo once ate five cans of beefaroni on a dare, a week later he ate a whole sleeve of saltines

with no provocation, as eight o'clock nears, we all gather round for the weekly drawing to see who gets to smash an old tv set. gavin wins and we angle for position as he takes up a louisville slugger and has at it. we cheer every hit, every smash, and offer advice: "smash the tube ... mangle the antenna ... bust the dials!!" we yell, we hoot, we stamp. gavin has a special place in the bar because he works at mattel. it's good to see him win the drawing, we say afterwards. he really seemed to enjoy it, we say, i find tex out at the satellite dish, he's smoking a cheroot he says is the same kind clint eastwood smoked in a fistful of dollars, which we all take as gospel. where ya been, pardner? tex asks me, wrapping his big arm around me and squeezing me tight. his gun digs into my thigh, and i pretend not to

notice. i tell tex i've been drinking amstel lights over on the east side and he clucks his tongue. i tell tex i heard he had some trouble with his differential, and i listened intently as he went on a 15-minute discourse about something called spider gears and 80-weight oil. when he was finished, i asked him if he'd changed his air filter lately, but he didn't hear me, drifting off to do the nine o'clock toast. i smashed out my cigarette and followed him in. the candyland tables grew quiet, flipper switched off all the tvs and the hot dog machine, the lights grew dim as tex took the microphone and did his nightly toast, stolen from his days as an elk in carson city: friends, tex said, wherever you may roam, whatever your lot in life, you will never be forgotten here. be it dee-vorce, involuntary separation

from your present gig, or the woe-begotten circumstances bee-yond yer control that take you from our warm brother- and sister-hood, you weel always have a place here at flipper's fun hutt. and fer all you who may never ree-turn, ah lift mah glass and say: (and here everyone chimes in) to our absent cowpokes! and the light come up, the music starts and everyone cheers and looks happy for a minute afore they git back to their activities. i'm all choked up hearing this, and as i head to the bar to get a slush puppy to wash away the bitterness of the amstel light, an arm lands on my shoulder, and it's bongo dressed in his sunoco outfit! reel and jump, move about performing gesticulative non-sequiturs, yell to flipper for more quik. turn up the brady bunch, more mrs. paul's fishticks, s'il vous plait, more doritos,

more kraft mac & cheese, more park's sausages, yes, more. hey kid! bongo says to me, handing me a steak knife and hugging me around the shoulder like it was old times. he thanks me for getting him home that night and then, before we can talk, ol' tex wheels up and says to bongo: he tell you about his amstel light episode on the east side? and bongo just laughs. o, good bongo! he knows, and he knows that (and i found this out later) that i was one of the absent reasons flipper begged him back. and we laugh, bongo laughs, tex laffs, we all laff, laff, laff. and flippers, this night, is peeling out. collectively, the place is popping a wheelie. every appliance is on, every candyland board is full up with players, everyone has chocolate milk mustaches as tony danza shrieks at florence henderson from across the room. mtv

is here, as are the starburst and butterfinger reps, who are suspended from the ceiling by bungee cords. as they jerk and hover in their harnesses, handing out buttons, hats and samples of candy to the kids, i find suzie, who is vice president of corporate communications and investor relations at a company that makes asshole medicine. she's just come off a victorious round of monopoly, i know from talk, and she's got a treat in front of her. well suzie i say, putting on a bib and joining her over a flippers ante pasto of warm mac & cheese, skittles and funyons, how'd the game go? and she smiles a little and is nice to me for a while. she then tells me, politely, to go away. ### ### memorial day from his perch atop the mailbox, bledsoe could more or less see just about everything that was happening. it was

one of those holidays, he knew, where floats and bands gave way to barbecues and volleyball games. so it was like either labor day or memorial day or, perhaps, the fourth. but there were no fireworks, he noticed. the kid with the cotton candy all over his young mug squinted through the sunshine up at bledsoe and wondered aloud if there was extra room on the mailbox. bledsoe looked at his own clean jeans and tried to imagine what they would look like with pink crap allover them. bledsoe hoisted the boy up. "thanks mister," said the kid, now offering a grimy bag of peanuts bledsoe's way. "no thanks there, buster," said bledsoe. 'buster' where the hell did that come from? "you new in town?" asked the kid. "they call those 'sousaphones,'" said bledsoe, pointing at the marching band. "and they are named after

john philip sousa who, don't you know, was called 'the march king' and who invented those portable tubas for occasions such as these." a blank look greeted this statement of fact. "it's memorial day, who cares about tubas?" said the kid, squirming on the mailbox for a more comfortable position. "just don't eat wieners for god's sake," said bledsoe. "you never know what's in them things." "you mean hot dogs?" said the kid. "i _like_ hot dogs." bledsoe gave him a look and the kid slid off the mailbox saying, "you're weird, mister." bledsoe went and stood near his motorcycle watching the parade come to an end. a portly man with a bullhorn announced that the festivities would continue in kennedy park with a "full-on dixieland band ensemble" and that "food an' drink a-plenty" could be found there. the man was

wearing a shirt that said "i'm spending my children's inheritance." bledsoe glanced absently at his abdomen and figured he was hungry. over at the park, bledsoe was amazed to see an actual pig turning on a spit. next to this, a man stirred a huge pot of chili with an oar. the man had cut off the sleeves of his shirt with a butcher knife, bledsoe supposed, and he looked up at bledsoe and he said, "say pal, how about some fine texas chili?" bledsoe sort of looked behind him to see if there was anyone else that the man might be addressing and, finding no one, turned back and asked, "got meat in it, that chili?" "well hell! of course it's got meat in it!" said the sleeveless fellow. "wouldn't be much of a chili con carne without meat in it, would it?" "is that an oar you're using there?" asked bledsoe, changing

the subject. the man laughed. "yeah sure, an oar's the best damn stirrer for this kind of mess you've ever seen!" "i can imagine," said bledsoe. "but it's _clean_ , of course," said the chili dude. "cleanest damn oar you've ever seen!" "i see that," said bledsoe, admiring the oar's cleanliness. and then here's the kid again: "say mister," tugging at bledsoe's leather jacket. "lookee here!" and shoves the better part of a mustard besmeared hot dog into his face and mouth. "now look here ricky..." (here's the sleeveless guy)... "you don't want to be spoiling this man's appetite for chili!" "he don't like hot dogs!" shrieked ricky, then in one motion dropping to the ground and wiping his face on his left sock (a maneuver bledsoe had never before witnessed). seeing his wonderment, ricky supplied, "socks are

gross anyway." bledsoe noticed that a number of people were viewing this exchange, and then there was the sleeveless chili salesman proffering the steaming bowl. "buck and a-half," he said. bledsoe paid and wandered off. he set the chili down on some raffle table, bought the prize ticket, and started towards the watermelon stand. the raffle lady calls him back: "say," she said, "you forgot your chili, mister!" bledsoe sauntered back and picked up the bowl. "thank's ma'am, i must've lost my head." "say!" she said again as bledsoe left, "you didn't leave no address on your raffle ticket, mister!" but bledsoe called over his shoulder, "oh, i won't win anyway," and made it to the watermelon stand. "may i please have a slice of watermelon?" inquired bledsoe of the watermelon lady. she smiled and whipped a

melon up on the counter with a great thud. bledsoe watched with interest as the watermelon woman, brandishing an enormous knife (machete?), whacked the melon in half, then in quarters, and handed him the largest of the four pieces. "uh, ma'am, i only wanted a slice," said bledsoe. "oh, you run along," said the watermelon lady. "i've got more melons than you can shake a stick at!" and she did, too. so bledsoe walked off with his melon, feeling rather conspicuous with his unwieldy slab of fruit. he began to seek-out a spot where he might sit and consume his treat without interruption when here's the kid again, struggling under the weight of his own enormous slice: "say mister," sitting down next to, "i can spit watermelon seeds from here to timbuktoo!" bledsoe sat on the edge of a picnic bench and, breaking

off a piece of the melon, contemplated it saying: "where, do you suppose, is timbuktu?" "lookee!" supplied ricky, pursing his lips in grotesque fashion and launching a seed with a grand expulsion of breath and spit. bledsoe watched as the seed landed some four feet away and said, "my, nice launch! but timbuktu is in africa, you see, and i've the fear that you've fallen rather short of your goal." "whaddaya mean?! that seed took off like a rocket!" sustaining another "you're weird" from ricky, bledsoe sat alone and systematically ate the melon, now and then removing seeds from his mouth and depositing them sans flourish on the ground. he walked around with the rinds for some time before he found a suitable receptacle for them. bledsoe looked at the nearest star and figured it to be just after noon. he was

supposed to be somewhere that would necessitate his leaving within the hour, but the time and the place wandered away and he found himself over at the chili dude's counter again. "good, ain't it?" said the man without sleeves. "back for more, i reckon?" "is that a canoe oar?" asked bledsoe. the man looked at bledsoe curiously for a moment and then, without turning his head, shouted in bledsoe's face: "hey herb! what the hell kind of oar is this? canoe or something?" herb, busy carving junk off of the enormous pig nearby, looked up and said, "who wants to know?" "this young fellow here, he wants to know what kind of damn oar you've got me stirring this here chili with." now interested, the man called herb walked over and picked up the oar. he ran his hand up and down its length, he turned it over a few times

in his hands while extolling its virtues to bledsoe. "son," he said to bledsoe, "this here is the finest, _cleanest_ damn oar that money can buy. you can use it for your canoe, you can use it for your sailboat. you can paddle just about anything with it." "like maybe for a _dinghy_ ," said bledsoe, this being his attempt at displaying some sort of nautical knowledge. "hell yes!" says herb. "paddle your damn dinghy with it, that's the trick!" when bledsoe looked to the chili dude for support, the dude was offering yet another bowl of oar-stirred chili for bledsoe, saying quietly, "this one's on the house, seein's how you liked the first bowl so much." standing in the middle of a field with a bowl of chili he didn't want, bledsoe was... hey mister!" it's the kid again. "yes, ricky," says bledsoe. "hey!

how'd you know my name!" demanded ricky. "can't remember," said bledsoe, surreptitiously sliding the chili into a trash bin. the band, that dixieland band, had started playing. some folks had even started dancing. one rather rotund fellow, bledsoe couldn't help but notice, was prancing to the music whilst slamming a pork sandwich down his neck. wow, thought bledsoe. but ricky: "look mister, where are you from? i ain't never seen you around before." "well," began bledsoe... "well look, i need a partner for the sack race and my dad's busy with the horseshoe contest and..." "sack race?" said bledsoe. "i'd _kill_ to be in a sack race! what must we do?" "well..." said ricky, "i guess i ain't supposed to be going around with no strangers but..." "hey," said bledsoe, "i'm no stranger!" bledsoe, never renowned

for his aptitude at the sack race, did rather well with the young ricky. second place, a ribbon of sorts, and a virginia-smoked canned ham. "what's ham, anyway?" posed bledsoe to ricky. "heck, i dunno," said ricky. "it's just the name of the stuff. it's pigs, i think." bledsoe gave him a blank look: "pigs? pigs in a can? "yeah sure pigs in cans. fruit in cans, too. everything comes in cans nowadays." "how..." mused bledsoe, "how do they get big ol' pigs into l'il teeny cans like this?" "they cut 'em up!" snarled ricky, "they cut 'em up with giant chainsaws!" "yikes!" said bledsoe. "yikes!" said ricky. leaving bledsoe, ricky cruised over to the beer and pop tent. bledsoe looked up at the sun and figured four o'clock. he thought of his motorcycle. the dixieland band was winding down their set, the various

booths were being taken down, and the line at the porta-potty was long. bledsoe was about to get on his motorcycle and ride off when the sleeveless chili fellow approached him with the chili oar. "uh," said chili dude, "herb says you can have this here oar if you want it." "gee," said bledsoe. "really, for me?" chili dude became more relaxed. "hell, what the hell," he said. "it's just an old oar. we thought you might like it. i cleaned all the chili off of it." "well," said bledsoe, taking the oar, "i'm mighty obliged, i am. thank you very much." "don't mention it," said the chili guy. "this is a good thing," said bledsoe. and they sort of stood there for a second, bledsoe shuffling his boots in the dirt and looking around him and chili dude with his hands in his pockets, finally looking at bledsoe and

saying, "uh, say fella, you seem like a decent enough fella. how about coming up to my place. we're having a little party and everyone will be there." bledsoe said thanks but no thanks, carefully memorized the directions to the party anyway, and went into the biltmore diner. after having a cup of coffee, he rode his motorcycle up the road to chili dude's house. the kid met him at the door: "hey mister, where have you been? i'll whup your butt in chess, i got a table all set-up over here!"' it was like ricky was expecting him. ricky had a card table set up with a sign that said "chess korner" over it, the spelling of which bledsoe chided him about. bledsoe took ricky's queen but lost anyway. "next!" shrieked ricky, as the defeated bledsoe ambled over to the food table. there were people all around. talking

people. a hardware store owner, the county clerk, a guy who restored antique furniture and also repaired vacuums, a woman who sold real estate. a teenager who was in the army. a guy who plowed snow in the winter and mowed lawns in the summer and what did he do in the fall and spring bledsoe wanted to know? "rake leaves an' plant bulbs an' seed. i'll leave you to figure which one i do when." bledsoe discovered that the chili dude had a name. "i'm kurt," said the man. "i didn't think you were coming." "well..." began bledsoe. "say," said kurt, "where's the oar?" "in a safe place," said bledsoe. and it was, too. ### ### big iron it was my older brother tommy who informed me of the gun bequeathed me by my father. "i can't fucking believe you got the acp," he said, his voice a low snarl in lobby of the airport

in atlanta. "the big iron. shit." "what?" i said. he may as well have been speaking in serbo-croatian. i was used to communication problems with tommy, as well as with my father (whose funeral i was here to attend) and pretty much the rest of my immediate and extended family. to summarize: i'm a gay man living in san francisco; my entire family lives in rural georgia. to say i don't come back to visit very often would be an understatement; i seriously considered not coming at all. but that would be bad form, not to attend your own father's funeral. i did, however, ask anthony to stay behind. "but i should be there with you during this... difficult time," he'd said, albeit without much conviction. i can pass for pretty straight, but anthony would look like ru paul to my family. it didn't take much to convince

him that it'd be best for all concerned if he stayed in the city. but, of course, his willingness to go was noted, logged and appreciated. so it was just me, if not a stranger in a strange land then at least someone rather familiar with the land but one who sensed it as hostile territory. and it only took five minutes in the car with tommy after he picked me up at the airport to remind me, as if i didn't know, just what an alternate universe this was. tommy, cigarette dangling and big gulp at the ready, turned to me and said: no, wait, i'll spare you the awful comment about my gay partner masked as teasing, as well as the racist comments about the current inhabitant of the white house, the diatribe about the immigrants destroying our country and the extended encomium regarding our nephew argus, who had recently

enlisted in the marines. or the navy, i can't remember which. ("helluva fuckin' kid.") there was absolutely no topic i could think of that might be safe from setting tommy off on another rant about... something awful. even the cause of my visit my father's timely, logical and highly anticipated death of lung cancer after smoking pall malls like a burning haystack for 70 of his 85 years was no simple conversational turf. "so," i'd offered, with blatant hesitancy, "was it hard on dad, the last months?" i didn't really give a shit, but you have to say these things when relatives die. "fuck if i know," said tommy, already on his second cigarette since he'd picked me up (and if you think i was going to make any comment about his chain-smoking ways and our father's demise, you'd be wrong). "son of a bitch was in

some home where they looked after him past two years. i went once, but it was too fucking depressing for me. anyways, we were all just waiting for the son of a bitch to shit the bed so we can get on with our own lives. sick of hearing about the old man all the time, dyin' this and dyin' that, chemo this and nausea whatever hair loss shit so'sn you couldn't keep up with it all, that hospital talk. jeannie (our youngest sister) would go sit with him even though it probably made her gag (daddy was not a fan of women in general and barely tolerated his daughters; jeannie was the only one who would even talk to him) and she'd sent out some e-mail every once in a while, let us know what all's up. fucker shoulda died years ago can't believe he made it to 85, smoking like a goddamn freightliner the whole time." he

turned to me, gesturing with his smoldering cigarette: "an' don't you say shit to me about this, ok? i know, i know. don't think i don't hear it every fucking single goddamned day from janet (tommy's wife) and the girls. least i smoke filtered cigarettes like a white man, not those goddamned coffin nails the old man smoked three fucking packs a day of them anyways. here's our exit." the funeral was mercifully brief, sparsely attended and largely devoid of emotion. the real action was to be at the after-party at the big house. when we pulled up in front of my father's house, tommy turned to me as he killed the engine. "so, thearn, still gay, huh?" "yes tommy, still gay." tossing caution in tommy's capacious ashtray, i tried for levity. "always gay. gay forever. mmmm... i love the cock." he sighed and shook

his head. "man, i don't know how you go through life without no pussy never; just some asshole's asshole. blowin' each other an' shit..." i couldn't resist. "how much action do _you_ get nowadays tommy?" tommy was a good 300 pounds, and janet was, if the last christmas card photo was accurate, even bigger. i had no idea if a man and a woman that size could still copulate, but my guess was it wasn't going to be easy or a nightly occurrence. maybe a once-a-year kind of thing, using some kind of system of winches and pulleys. he laughed and punched me hard in the arm. "you got me dead to rights there, brother. shit, you probably get more pussy than i do, if you can call some guy's asshole pussy. you know what's even worse? i don't even care anymore. 'bout sex. i don't even bother jerking off hardly ever.

all these years back against the wall, dead fuckin' broke all the fuckin' time, that takes it's toll on a man. an' his dick, i guess. sex s'for younger guys mostly, i reckon. an' old horndogs like bill clinton. plus, course, i'm fatter'n fuckin' jabba the hutt." we sat in silence for a moment until he opened the door. "well shit, let's go see what the damage is." my father owned several hundred acres of land there in georgia. that may sound impressive, but it wasn't, really. it's not like the acres were worth much, filled as they were with scrub oak, snake-filled swamps and god knows what else. most everything was concentrated on the family compound five acres or so along a small lake where daddy's house formed the nucleus of a dozen or so different double-wide mobile homes occupied by tommy and my three

sisters plus various in-laws, boyfriends and girlfriends, cousins, nieces, nephews and assorted hangers-on. tommy, as the oldest, had his eye on the big house daddy had built back in the 1950s, and he'd already arranged to sell his own mobile home ("i ain't lettin' any of these other fuckers get it; i need the money.") our mother had died nearly 10 years earlier, and though daddy wasn't rich, he most certainly had more socked away than any of his kids. tommy worked in a machine shop and maybe pulled down 30 a year. jeannie was a nurse in a rest home and did ok, i guess. the rest of them in the compound had a checkered employment picture. i'd ask tommy about cousin billy's occupation or what jeannie's husband did and he'd shrug. "last i heard he was doing something part-time at the hospital or some shit. jeannie's

husband don't do fuck-all. ties ties all day, although i ain't never seen him fish. drinks pbr by the suitcase. but he don't whomp on jeannie leastways far's i know which is good. otherwise i'd have to shoot him." now, getting out of the car, i was about to go into the belly of the beast: my family, gathered together for the first time, tommy told me, in many years. despite their proximity to one another in the compound, he'd told me they rarely paid much attention to one another. "best that way," he said. "once in a while, someone'll ask me for help pullin' the engine out of a truck or something or to bail him outta jail on some dui or domestic. but mostly we keep to ourselves." eyeing the front of my father's house and hearing the noise from inside made by a large number of people quickly getting drunk,

i reckoned the odds of all this going well at roughly 10 billion to 1. i figured the best course of action for me would be to say as little as humanly possible while still being somewhat polite. that, it would turn out, was like saying you were going to lead a purple unicorn into a schoolyard and hope the kids wouldn't get too excited. gathered there in my father's house for the after-funeral party were a good 20 or 30 people, most of whom were relatives. (son of a bitch like our old man didn't keep many friends, tommy had reminded me.) only a handful had actually been at the funeral service. there was a keg in the living room sitting on ice inside an old utility sink that had been dragged in for the event. handles of cheap bourbon, vodka and rum were on the breakfront i remember watching my mother polish lovingly

as a kid. bags of chips littered the dining room table, and the kitchen counter overflowed with boxes of various snack foods of the frito-lay and li'l debbie variety. (poking through them as a means of delaying social interaction, i discovered many were already expired some by as much as three weeks. off my amazed face, tommy told me funeral parties were always a good place to get rid of shit like this "stuff you'd be too embarrassed to leave off at the food bank for the niggers. but the drunk relatives don't notice.") when anthony's mother died a few years back, i endured a similar circumstance at his family's home in south hadley, mass. sure, the food was a lot better, the people dressed nicer and the racial epithets were missing entirely. but the vibe was the same: here's the gay couple, just in from san

francisco, how very interesting! in south hadley, the torment was what anthony's family _didn't_ say. no one will ask a gay man how his relationship is with his partner the way you might a hetero couple. they certainly won't ask about whether we have any kids or about the schools in our area. mostly, they just want to know about our careers, and you can see them mentally calculating if whatever job you've told them about fits in with what they might imagine is a "queer" occupation. as a graphic designer, i got the knowing nod every time. at that point, the conversation would sag like an old couch, the relative and me desperate for salvation from another passerby or someone with a tray of appetizers. but in thomaston, georgie, the direction they all had apparently agreed upon before i arrived was to be as forward

as possible. and when i say "apparently agreed upon," i'm joking, because i know they didn't get together for some big family conference on how to deal with the thearn issue. it was more like a collective consciousness a school of fish that knew exactly when they were going to jog right. "shit!" said one teenaged nephew in a caterpillar cap after i'd identified myself: "you the fag, right? i ain't never seen a fag before." to highlight this, he screwed up his face and squinted his eyes at me, as if to discern the homo-erotic aura that must surely surround me. his mother fetched him a sharp smack on the back of the head, but she didn't extend any apologies or attempt to discipline him further. "he's just a little fuckin' hick," she told me as the teen slumped toward the chips table. "don't know no better;

ain't never been out of georgia." she offered a snaggle-toothed smile: "i'm trudy, one of your cousins somehow, i think, although i'm not quite sure how." she set down her overflowing plastic cup of beer and shook my hand like a man. sizing me up, i figured, to see if my fruity grip would cave underneath her country woman's strength. "sorry, i got beer all over my hand," she said as i reached for a napkin. "so, you're thearn?" "i am," i said. "named after your great uncle thearn." "so i've heard." "i reckon you don't get down here much at all nowadays, do you?" "not since i left when i was 17." "well," she said, matter-of-factly in a slightly raised voice, like she was making a comment about seasonal weather, "god hates gays, an' i s'pose the folks around here aren't too much different." there are times

in life when you're confronted by something you knew was out there, but were somewhat unprepared for when the real thing suddenly appeared before you. i remember a few years ago when anthony and i went to the zoo and i saw a lion up close for the first time (we didn't go for much zoos and museums and that kind of thing when i was a kid in georgia). sure, i'd seen lions on tv and in books, but seeing it there in the flesh was another matter entirely. i gawked at it for 20 minutes before anthony finally pulled me away to see the otters ("the gay guy's favorite zoo animal," he'd said "they self-fellate.") living among the gay and highly tolerant residents of the castro the past 20 years had inured me somewhat to the reality of people like trudy. sure, we knew she was out there, but more in abstract a quote in

a newsweek article, a wire photo of her holding an anti-gay marriage placard at some rally. like the lion in the zoo, i supposed she'd stay put and not ever bother me. but, of course, here i was, in her neck of the woods in her cage. after delivering her little bomb, she primly took a sip of her beer and looked at me expectantly with a crooked half smile. a couple of other relatives who'd overheard her were waiting as well, to see how i, the gay man and object of god's hate, would respond to this assertion of how things were seen in thomaston, georgia. i opened my mouth, but i had no idea what was going to come out. i thought about simply fleeing, but the house was so packed with people there was no chance i could move anywhere with the alacrity i'd really need. fortunately, tommy suddenly appeared, elbowing

his way through the crowd with two cups of beer expertly held aloft. "s'cuse me, comin' through. hey, thearn, follow me!" gladly, i did. tommy blazed a path through the crowd with ease, his 300-pound frame opening up a channel before him like a turbaned muslim passing through a baptist pot-luck. we passed through the kitchen and into the hallway between the garage and the house. tommy pushed the cup of beer into my hand. "figured an ass pirate wouldn't know how to work a keg, so i got you some," he said. "thanks," i said, taking a sip of the weak, fizzy beer. in all honesty, i can't be sure i'd ever had the opportunity to dispense a beer from a keg, but i wasn't going to tell tommy that. we were stopped in front of what we'd always known as dad's closet. tommy pulled the string on the light to reveal what

was to us a very familiar assortment of shit ranging from dog leashes and shelves full of canned nuts and bolts to hooks holding welding strikers and little packages of flints to go in the strikers. dad was a welder, and a tinkerer, and the closet was just the tip of his tool iceberg; out in the enormous barn that functioned as garage and workshop, there were many more tools and machines many of which, tommy told me, were so rusted and/or obsolete as to be nearly useless. "c'mon," tommy said, leading me to the back of the wide closet. i knew where he was headed: daddy's safe. it was an enormous victor dad had picked up for next to nothing before he'd even built the house; before any of us were born. one day when i was about 12, daddy had one of those moments where he seemed to remember he should pay some attention

to me, and he took me back here to tell me about it. "this here is a vintage 1882 safe made by victor safe & lock company. i bought it over in lincoln park from some nigger who had it in his backyard for years. paid him 50 bucks." the younger me asked why it was so inexpensive. at about 8 feet tall and 4 feet wide, the massive black safe was a substantial and impressive thing, and even though $50 to me at the time was a fortune, i knew the safe had to be worth more than that. "it was locked!" daddy laughed. "nigger didn't know how to open it, 'course. so i had whitney poulson come over with his crane truck and haul it over to my property, right here. an' i build the house _around_ it." he put his hand on my shoulder and looked at me. "thearn, ain't no one could ever get this safe outta this house, less'n

they knocked the house down first. it's _part_ of the place." "so how'd you get it open, daddy?" "i cut it," he said simply, describing a rectangle with his index finger just to the right of the combination dial. "right here. cut a hole with my torch, got in there and re-did the tumblers to a combination i could remember, then welded it back up, painted it over an' you'd never know it, would you?" back then, daddy had opened up the safe to show me what was inside. there wasn't much, really. some cash, a lot of papers, some old jewelry he said wasn't worth much, and a couple of guns. antiques, most of them, he said. when tommy spun the lock and opened the door of daddy's safe, it looked much the same inside. tommy grabbed a stack of cash, did a quick count and said "'bout five grand is all. divvy that up later." he

put it back, then reached in among the various handguns on the middle shelf and pulled out a wooden box. "here it is," he said. "the big iron." in the car, tommy had told me about it, this gun. i'd heard daddy speak of it before, but it never made much of an impression on me. what tommy told me was that it was our great-grandfather's service revolver from world war i. when tommy pulled it out of the box and held it up, he might just as well have pulled out a dinosaur egg or a dragon's scale for how alien this thing looked to me. i'd shot some .22 rifles as a kid, but dad and tommy never took me hunting since it'd been decided long ago i was "too delicate." this weapon looked too big for anyone to hold up and shoot straight. "that thing is fucking huge," i said. "ain't it?" said tommy with a grin. "this here

is the m1911 .45acp, which stands for automatic colt pistol. used by us troops from th'early 1900s all the way up until the '80s. this fucker'll knock down a horse at 50 yards, an' it killed a lotta krauts in its day. nips too, i reckon." he looked at me. "nice, isn't it?" "i suppose so, if you're into that sort of thing." he flipped it around and held it out to me, butt first. "well, it's yours now." "tommy..." "just take it, thearn! don't be a pussy. just hold it, fer chrissakes." i took it, held it for a moment and set it back in the box tommy was holding. "you can have it, tommy. i know you want it more than me." "you're damn straight i want it more than you. but i made one promise to daddy on his deathbed, just one. and do you know what that one promise was? it was to make sure you got this gun...

_and nobody else_." "what? why? why the hell would daddy want me to have this old, stupid gun?" tommy shrugged and closed the safe door. "i dunno. i asked him, fuckin' _begged_ him to explain why he wouldn't give his coolest gun to his one son who actually _likes_ guns, who actually shoots the fucking things all the time. he just got all yoda on me an' said: 'these are my wishes' or some shit." we stood there silently for a moment among the welding supplies, spools of wire and solder and work gloves. we could hear the party outside getting louder as more people pulled up. "maybe he thought it'd make me less gay," i said finally. tommy turned to me with an odd smile on this face. "maybe. would it?" i shook my head. "do you think putting mom's old apron on would make you a good cook? or make you grow a

pussy and become a woman?" "fuck no." "well..." i said. "i got it," tommy said. "i think i got it. leopard can't change his spots, right? so..." we were still standing in daddy's closet, tommy's tremendous girth leaving little room for personal space. we were sipping at our beers, neither of us too excited about going back out into the party. "so what?" i said. tommy surprised me by giving me a hug. "you're ok, thearn." "thanks, tommy. you too. for a fucking hick." suddenly, the grizzled face of uncle junior appeared in the doorway. "hey! tommy! what, you tellin' your fruit brother about how to work a pussy or something?" uncle junior threw his head back and laughed uproariously at his joke. "how to work a pussy. that's great. shit. have fun in there, boys." tommy and i watched him go and turned

back to each other. "i don't think i can go back in there, tommy." "yeah. i heard what trudy said, too, the fucking bitch. when's your flight?" "five-ish. but i can go now. got a book to read, keep me busy." he smiled. "ok, brother. let's go. we can sneak out the garage." he patted the box with the gun. "you obviously can't bring this on the plane. i'll ship it out to you. shit, even if you just get it mounted and hang it on the wall as a memory to the old man, i guess that'd be something." i thought of anthony's horror at such a decoration in our apartment and smiled. "yeah, it'd be something alright." back in town, i drove anthony crazy by being very spare with the details of the funeral. he wanted to hear about the dirt, the slurs, the looks and all that, but i only told him it was my fervent hope

never to return there again in my lifetime. in the back of my mind, i figured tommy would drop dead from sheer obesity long before i did, and at that time i'd be faced with whether to recant on the georgia no-fly zone policy. but i figured i had some time to think about it. as for anthony, i knew if i gave him some of the details the remark from evil cousin trudy, for example he'd never stop talking about it. for him, the remark would be automatically assigned to all my relatives to all residents of georgia and the south as well. if i did ever go down there again, he'd re-hash it _ad nauseum_ in preparation for my trip, perhaps even insisting on coming along as added protection against the ignorant southern hordes. yes, better for him not to know. as hurtful as it was for me, i at least understood the source

and context. after a few days, anthony stopped pestering me for details, and life and work resumed as usual. i couldn't bring myself to explain the big iron to anthony, and i was putting all my hope on tommy not sending me the damn thing. he'd either consider it too much hassle, or he'd take me at my word that i didn't want it and keep it for himself. a week passed and i actually had just about forgotten about the gun when anthony called me at work. "fedex came," he said. "that's nice. but, then, they so often do." anthony had a mail-order book business, and he knew the fedex guy by name. "there's a funny little box for you from georgia. a _heavy_ funny little box. is it something from your dad's estate or something?" i sighed and sat back in my chair as i anticipated his next question. "can i open it?" and

so i told him the whole story of tommy, our dad and the big iron. there was a silence on the other end of the phone as anthony took it all in, and i braced myself for the storm of issues and problems and suggestions he'd soon be blustering my way. "well," he said finally, "it seems pretty simple to me. just send it back." "anthony, did you not listen to a word i just told you? i can't send it back. it's this... _thing_. this deal with my dad and tommy and me, and he won't take it back. dying wish and all. whatever. listen, just leave it in the box until i get home, and we can talk about it then." to my vast annoyance, anthony effected his whiny child voice, dragging out his words, freighting each one with special significance to make sure i understood each one. "but thearn, i am now _dying_ to open this thing!

i've never seen a gun close up before, never held one." "anthony, no, seriously. just leave it. you'll shoot your eye out." the allusion to his favorite christmas film didn't mollify him or even elicit a titter. he immediately switched gears from plaintive to petulant. "fine," he said in his clipped tone. "you can play with your gun when you get home. so long as i get to hold it before you send it back." "yes, you can hold it," i said. "gotta run. love you." "love you too." when i arrived home, anthony was sitting at the kitchen table with two glasses of chablis, the fedex box and a pair of scissors. off his expectant look, i didn't bother to protest but simply sat down, took a sip of wine and slit open the box. there was a note from tommy, which i read aloud for anthony's amusement doing my best imitation

of tommy's drawl: thearn: here it is. couldn't send ammo so you'll have to get your own. the big iron takes regular 45 slugs. just ask the guy at the gun shop. take good care of it. it was good to see you. tommy. i chuckled holding the note, and anthony wanted to know what was funny. "just the fact that he assumes the first thing i'll want is ammunition so i can go shoot this thing." "well..." anthony said, eyeing the box. "aren't you going to take it out?" tommy had packed the gun unceremoniously in wadded-up newspaper. the gun itself was in a simple cloth bag, and i slid it out as anthony's jaw began to drop. "oh my god. look at that thing thearn! it's fucking _huge_!" "i know," i said, holding it up. "and heavy." anthony reached out both hands, palms up, and squeezed his eyes shut. "give it to me,

thearn. i want to feel its raw, manly power!" once in his hands, anthony opened his eyes and regarded the weapon as if he'd just come across some sort of alien creature. he shifted quickly to his analytical mode as he hefted and eyed the big iron. "it's very heavy. a concentrated heavy, really. it's both ugly and beautiful at the same time. a terrible contraption, but so precisely engineered. and it still works, right?" i nodded. "as far as i know." "and if it's almost a hundred years old, that'd make it an antique, maybe worth something." a beat: "we could use new countertops." "i'm not selling it, anthony. at least not yet." he placed it back in the box among the newspapers and crossed his arms. "well, i don't want it in the house." "fine. i'll put it out in the shed." "i don't want it on our property,

anywhere." "ok, anthony. how about i get a concealed weapons permit and i just carry it around with me?" anthony ignored this and began listing all the reasons for not having a gun in the house. he'd obviously been googling since the box arrived, and he cited statistics about gun deaths in america, the number of instances where homeowners with guns mostly used the guns on themselves in some way and, most importantly, what owning a gun would say about us. "when you tell people you have a gun in the house, they'll freak out. period." "we won't tell them." i knew this was ridiculous. anthony had probably already informed half our friends via e-mail that we had a gun in the house. but we left it at a compromise: i could keep the gun, sans ammo, for one week, after which time i would either need to sell it, send

it back to tommy or, worst-case scenario in the "highly unlikely crazy insane event" i decided to keep it "for whatever crazy fucking reason," i would find a storage place for it somewhere far from our home. "so you don't think we should mount it and hang it on the wall? that's what tommy thought i might do with it." "i'd rather put up a framed portrait of george w. bush." even out in the shed, the big iron exerted a weird power over me. i couldn't stop thinking about it. first, there was the whole gun thing. if you live in a world where guns just aren't part of your here-and-now, they seem like strange and exotic things scary manifestations of another world. a good part of that world, i truly believe, was the one where gay men were equated with child molesters. having a big gun in our shed was tantamount

to having a jacked-up pickup truck with a rebel flag painted on the side. trappings of the enemy what were thearn and anthony doing with this thing? but more than that, it was the whole reason for the gun's presence in my life. the extremely curious last request from my father that i should have this thing. what did it mean? did daddy, as i'd suggested to tommy, somehow believe my handling a gun would de-gay me? or was it simpler than that, just an old man's sentimental bequest of something he valued to someone he loved or at least should have loved? at work, the unanimous opinion of the few friends i told about the gun was that i should waste no time taking the opportunity to shoot it. one guy even knew of a shooting range over on dubuque where he'd shot pistols with his cop brother-in-law. "you can buy

bullets there, too, i think," he said. "they have a gun shop in the front." "i don't think so," i said, realizing i was lying. "it's really not my thing." although i was aware of the existence of gun shops and shooting ranges, they'd always faded into the landscape of the city like other locations i had no use for. a brassiere shop, for example, or the christian science reading room (what _are_ those places, anyway?). but hearing of the existence and rough location of an actual venue for shooting a place filled with, i imagined, stern, crew-cutted men who'd welcome me into their fraternity proved an irresistible temptation. the notion of joining the fact of owning a gun with the real possibility of shooting the thing became this delicious, decadent bit of naughtiness i knew i couldn't resist. in the afternoon,

i found the shooting range online and called to ask about when i could come and if there was anyone who could help me figure out the big iron. there was, the guy said, and as luck would have it they had some open range time that very afternoon. i called anthony and told him of my plan after dismissing the idea of not mentioning it. anthony is the kind of partner who pretty much needs to know everything i do and where i am at all times. taking an hour after work to shoot a gun without telling him would just about be grounds for divorce. as it turned out, anthony saw my decision as something close to that. "why? he said, exercising his annoying habit of attenuating that particular word when he knew he wasn't going to like the answer. "why would you... throw that in my face like this when you know i don't like

guns?" "i'm not throwing anything in your face, anthony," i said, my voice level and even (or so i imagined). "don't get pissy with me," he said. "i'm just asking." _you're never "just" anything_ , i thought to myself, but i didn't say it. instead, i offered this: "look, anthony, i don't understand the gun thing anymore than you do, but it was my father's dying wish that i have this stupid thing, and it just seems logical that i should try it out. i mean, if someone wills you a piano, you'd play it, wouldn't you?" "a piano never killed anyone," he said. "sure they do," i said, feeling the conversation taking that hard left into inane argument territory. "they're always falling on people in those old movies." i thought i'd have to endure more of this when i stopped home to get the big iron after work, but

amazingly anthony wasn't home. probably, he went to "that odious starbucks" around the block rather than endure another confrontation with his gun-toting husband. in anthony's bloated imagination, i probably now appeared in his mind like some sylvester stallone character, a machine gun in each hand, bandoliers full of bullets across my chest. to hell with it, to hell with him, i thought, going into the shed to retrieve the gun. i made it to the shooting range just a few minutes after "open range" time and sat outside in the car feeling, for some reason, like a man about to rob a bank or perhaps visit a prostitute. but people shoot guns all the time, all over the place, i told myself. it's a perfectly legal activity, perfectly safe in a controlled environment. there's no reason why a grown man, blah, blah, blah. inside,

the guy at the desk's gay-dar went off like an air-raid siren, the alarm manifesting itself in the dude's bushy monobrow which twitched and arched like a landed mackerel when i opened my mouth and said i needed help with a .45 pistol. "sure," he said. "first time?" "ever, for a handgun." i put the gun on the counter in its little sack and gave him the brief 411 on why i had it. "very cool," monobrow said, turning the big iron over in his hands. "don't see many of these anymore, but it's a damn good piece. even one this old, it'll shoot fine." he looked up at me. "man you need is jay." jay turned out to be roughly the exact opposite of the crew-cutted martinet/former drill sergeant guy i'd imagined. he had long hair tied back in a ponytail, a thin, pock-marked face and the posture of a whooping crane. as

he led me back to the range after monobrow supplied me with bullets, i noticed a bulletin board with a flyer for a women's shooting class to be taught by jay. ahhh, i thought. ok, whatever. turn the gay guy over to the women's instructor it probably made sense in some weird way to the guy at the desk. either way, jay turned out to be a supremely patient and kind instructor who didn't appear to mind walking me through the very basics. when it came time to step up to the shooting platform, i slapped in the clip the way he showed me and flicked off the safety. the target looked a million miles away, but jay walked me through the proper way to hold and sight the weapon and then said, simply: "ok, let 'er rip!" the first shot surprised me with its kick and power, but it was nothing short of intoxicating to have

that much power in one's hands. i fired the remaining six in quick succession, perhaps channeling the way i'd seen movie actors do it. when jay reeled in the target, every shot was in the 7, 8 or 9 area, with two in the bull's eye. jay whistled. "you do that again and i'm gonna call you a liar or the most natural marksman i've ever seen." i had nothing to say to this. i felt a swoon, as if i'd just been told i'd won the lottery or the nobel prize. my throat felt closed up and i couldn't speak. jay took the gun and slapped in another clip. "let's see that again." this time, i had one in the 8, two in the 9 and four bull's eyes. jay whistled again, and called over some guy named bob. "check it out, bob. this here's thearn, says he's never shot a pistol before and here he is, shooting like this first time

out." bob took the target and examined it closely, as if looking for evidence of cheating. i just stood there, surrounded by a weird glow of competence i'd never really experienced before. i was special. i had something special going on. "he's shooting an old m1911? what, your granddaddy leave it to you or something? "something like that," i said. "do it again," bob said. so i did, with similar results. by this time, a small crowd had gathered, and jay kept loading and handing me clips and i kept turning in the kind of results, bob told me, that usually took years to achieve. he said if i were in the navy, where he served, it'd earn me a marksmanship ribbon if i'd shot it with a beretta m9. after an hour of shooting, flushed with success and delighted with my new skill, i excused myself to take a leak.

standing there reading a flyer about all the upcoming classes and events at the range i might take, i thought of sharing all this with anthony and then felt the whole thing deflate like a failed souffle. all this i was experiencing would be meaningless to anthony; offensive, even. he would not share this triumph with me. it would only be this horrible thing thearn was doing in which he'd have no part. my shooting career, in short, was over pretty much as soon as it had begun at least if i wanted to stay with anthony, which i very much did. feeling oddly light on my feet, i went back into the range and found the guy who'd offered me $500 for the gun minutes earlier. among protests from jay and bob and the other guys who'd enjoyed watching me shoot, i told them i was going to be like muhammad ali and go out on

top. i thanked them, shook hands all around with my fleeting fraternity of shooters and went out to my car. back home, an icy anthony asked me how i enjoyed my "little escapade with weapons of mass destruction." "it's not for me," i said. "i sold it to some guy there for 500 bucks. not enough for new countertops, but a good bump for the vacation fund." i tried to act casual, picking up a magazine as if the matter were closed. but anthony came over and took my hands in his and looked me in the eye and said "thank you." "you're welcome." later, he asked me if i ever divined in my mind why my father had given it to me in the first place. "i don't know," i said. "maybe he did think it would make me less gay. maybe it was a genuine act of giving, of something he valued highly. and it might have been an attempt

to teach me something, or say something to me he could never say in life." "so, maybe you would learn something, from beyond the grave," anthony said, with a small laugh. "and did you?" "i did. i learned that if we're ever caught up in a firefight, i'd be a good guy to have around." "really?" "really. i'm like dirty harry with that motherfucker. and i guess one other thing." "which is?" "despite the history of that thing, at the end of the day it's just a piece of metal a weapon of destruction, as you say. when i saw what it was doing to us, what it _could_ do to us, well. it wasn't worth it." "thank you." "you're welcome." ### ### crouton: a love story the crouton appeared on ted's white ottoman, perfectly centered on the quarter-sized leather button that formed the nexus of stitching that held it

together. the ottoman was one of four pieces of furniture in the room, a one-bedroom place right above the bagel shop on main street, breckenridge. it was purchased for him by his mother, along with the matching recliner, just after his graduation from the university in boulder nearly a decade ago. "i think you're crazy to have all white in a mountain town," she'd told him. but she wrote the check all the same. "price they charge for furniture these days, it's criminal. are you sure it's that much?" a small glass-and-aluminum end table sat next to the chair, and a similar piece, slightly larger with one white-cushioned chair, served as his dining table. the 56-inch sony plasma hung on the wall, along with three framed exhibit prints from the denver art museum. ted noticed the crouton immediately upon entering

his apartment. everything else was exactly as he'd left it that morning before going to his office, a small graphic arts firm within walking distance of his home. a man with, say, several children could come home and not notice an errant crouton for weeks. but for ted, it was the same as if he'd come home and found the place ransacked, searched by thugs, infiltrated by zombies. he froze. it was easy enough to see that whoever had left the crouton was no longer present. the door to his bedroom was open, and there was no place to hide. except the closet. slowly, he removed his sno-mocs and jacket. the shoes went on one of three shelves dedicated to just that purpose; the jacket, a white marmot, went on its peg. he moved quickly to the bedroom closet and flung the door open. greeted only by his typical winter

wardrobe of turtlenecks and dark cords, he took a quick peek under the single bed, then went into the other room to contemplate the crouton. ted was not a crouton eater. he rarely ate salads, for starters, since the bag always went brown before he got around to making a second bowl. even then, purchasing an entire box of croutons to go with his infrequent salads would have represented something of an extravagance. a typical box of pepperidge farms croutons probably held several dozen croutons, and figuring only half a dozen or so, max, would go on a salad every few months, the box would go stale long before he could finish it. store-bought croutons were also, he suspected, pretty high in sodium. ted had mild hypertension, and he was cautious about his salt intake. a box of croutons was the kind of thing that

would sit in his cabinet for a very long time, plaguing him with a silent insistence that he come up with some way to use it. at one point he owned a box of rice-a-roni, pilaf flavor, which he'd bought on a whim. after noting that the sodium content per serving was over 1,000 milligrams, the box sat accusingly on his shelf for an entire ski season before he finally donated it during a christmas food drive. standing about three feet from the crouton-inhabited ottoman thinking these many thoughts about croutons, ted felt the old pre-lexapro ball of dread welling up in his chest. it had been a good two years since he'd felt it about the time that had elapsed since his doctor had prescribed the little pills that took the anxiety away and flattened him into a being who counted stairs and ceiling tiles and spent

an inordinate amount of time every sunday making his sock drawer just so. it was definitely a packaged crouton, not a restaurant-made product. it was nearly perfectly square, with tiny flecks of what was probably identified on the package as "seasoning." it might be "italian" style, he thought, or "garlic-herb" or even "caesar." there were no crumbs or other debris around the crouton, negating the notion that it could, somehow, have been tossed in an open window or even more unlikely shot out of an air vent. it looked as if it had been placed there with a pair of tongs by someone who'd taken great pains to position it symmetrically, at the precise center of the ottoman. in the middle of the button. in his apartment, where he lived alone and never entertained. even his mother hadn't been to visit since october.

she never drove up to the mountains when snow was a possibility. ted silently formed the word "why?" on his lips, then reached for his phone. he could call his mother, but the thought wearied him. her incredulity at the presence of the crouton would lead to a paranoid rant about the derelict ski bums who inhabited breckenridge, followed by a plea to move in with her or "find some friends, maybe a nice girl." she would quiz him again about his sexual orientation, suggesting it was ok with her if he were gay if it meant he'd have someone to talk to. she would roll the crouton into an indictment of his mental health, telling him he was going "stir crazy," getting cabin fever from the long winters. he could call the police, but even the cops in a small town don't have much patience for something as ridiculous as

this. it was even more inane than the time last summer when he heard or at least thought he heard his doorbell ring at 3 in the morning. when he looked through the peephole, he saw what looked like a guy wearing an astronaut's helmet, peering right back at him. the cop who showed up actually had a shotgun in hand, and he stalked around the building and up and down the hall before asking ted to close the door and look again through the peephole. the astronaut was still there, apparently some optical illusion caused by the glass of the peephole with the hall light. the cop was pretty nice. he didn't laugh but acted as if it happened all the time. ted could imagine getting the same guy to come investigate the case of the ottoman crouton. he'd get the reputation down at the police station as some crank loner,

cooking up bizarre stories to get attention. he slipped his phone back into his pocket. he squinted at the crouton and then walked into the kitchen. he opened every cabinet, every door and rummaged through the tiny closet pantry to see if somehow he had purchased a box of croutons, forgotten about it, and, while sleepwalking, perhaps, had placed one of the damn things on his ottoman. he took ambien, and he'd read stories about people doing weird things in the middle of the night under the influence of the drug. it was preposterous, though, to think that he could have driven to the store, purchased a box of croutons, removed one and placed it on the ottoman and then gotten rid of the rest. for he could find no box anywhere in the apartment. there was the cleaning woman who came in once a week. but she was

very good a woman who removed things like errant croutons; she didn't place them there. besides, it wasn't her day to come clean. ted pulled out his phone again to check the time. it was already a good 20 minutes past the time when he'd have begun his evening rituals of uncorking a bottle of wine and preparing dinner. "damn!" he said, slightly stamping one foot. as a dramatic gesture, it was weak. he thought about stamping again, much harder, but he now felt the moment had passed. and what about the people who lived below him? he walked back into the living room and glared at the crouton again. there it sat, unmoving, unthreatening except for the story the _mystery_ , he supposed behind its arrival in his apartment. ted started to reach for the crouton, with the idea that he would simply throw it down the

sink and grind it up in the food disposal. but his hand stopped about halfway, and he looked around. if he discounted the possibility that he had installed the crouton in his apartment on an ambien-crazed night mission, and that it hadn't somehow arrived by accident or been placed there by some insane prankster, then he had to accept its presence and the fact that he would likely never know the answer. its idealized location at the center of the ottoman suggested that whatever force had put it there understood ted's need for order. removing it could disrupt some new equilibrium that now existed in his space-time continuum. "that's the dumbest thing you've ever thought, ted," he said aloud. then he laughed an artificial laugh, crossed his arms and looked down at the crouton. it was time to make dinner. knowing

there was little chance he'd sleep with the alien presence in the adjoining room, ted finally took a pair of cooking tongs and removed the crouton from the ottoman around 11 p.m. for a moment, he stood in the middle of the room, holding the crouton in the tongs out in front of him like it was a chunk of nuclear waste. he considered saving the crouton as some kind of "evidence" (they could do dna testing on it, perhaps, and identify the crouton-placer that way), but ultimately he opted for the food disposal option, allowing the water to run for an extra minute after the grinding stopped to ensure it was washed away completely. and when he returned home from work the next day, the crouton was there again, in the exact same spot. ted froze, again, but his body's internal processes moved into high gear: the dormant

anxiety bomb inside his chest inflated to the size of a softball maybe even a basketball. he could feel various chemicals being released into his bloodstream: adrenaline, norepinephrine, god knew what else. perspiration spiked all around, with a concentration around the back of his neck and collar. his mouth went immediately dry, and the phenomenon he'd always thought of as "principal's office stomach" hit him with the force of a jackhammer. he felt his bowels twitch and hold, but his bladder let go completely. he stood there for several seconds before he even realized he'd completely wet himself. the pee was hot on his leg, and it was making an exit via his left pant leg onto his extremely clean white carpet. moving quickly, an adrenaline-fueled antelope before the lion, he made a quantum leap into the bathroom,

where he stripped off his pants and boxers in the shower, pulled his shirt over his head and turned on the water. normally, ted was the kind of guy who stood outside the shower, monkeying with the handle to get the water to the perfect temperature before stepping in. it always made him laugh how, in movies, people always got into the shower first and then turned the water on. that would never work in breckenridge, where the water entered the house at, it seemed, exactly 32 degrees fahrenheit. but that's exactly what he did in this case, and the resulting blast of frigid water caused him to jump backwards, slip, fall and crack his head on the tub. he was knocked unconscious, but only briefly. the water was jetting down his throat and up his nose, activating his gag reflex and reviving him, he later imagined,

just in time. he'd been out just long enough for the hot water to have reached the showerhead, so in addition to choking on the water, he was also being scalded. with a bizarre, inhuman croak he'd recall later with equal parts wonder and horror, ted pulled himself out of the tub and onto the bathroom floor, bringing the shower curtain with him. bleeding profusely from his head wound, scalded about the chest and face and still barely conscious, ted lay there for a moment wrapped in the wretched plastic shower curtain, highly cognizant of the fact that he was all alone. there was no one to call out to, no one to help, no one to give a damn that he'd just had all this shit happen to him. he had to digest all of what had just transpired and make it right all on his own, as he always had. the temptation was to lie

there on the floor for some time, but there were several factors convincing him that he needed to spring into action. these were: 1. the hot water in his apartment did not last very long, and if he wanted a warm shower to wash away the blood, urine and shower-curtain filth that now coated him, he'd need to act quickly. 2. his head was bleeding quite heavily, from somewhere around the back; his face and neck were on fire from the hot water. this was something that needed immediate attention possibly even a trip to the hospital and/or a burn center of some sort. 3. the crouton was still out there. ted didn't believe it was necessarily doing anything that required further action on his part, but it bore close watching. struggling to his feet and extricating himself from the shower curtain, ted first pushed

the shower handle to the middle. he was able to get the bloody curtain more or less in place and step under the stream of water. he watched in amazement as the water circling down the drain turned bright red, but after a moment it lightened up a bit, giving him hope that a band-aid would do the trick. where the hot water had scalded him still felt unpleasant, but he soon became reasonably sure that he hadn't been horribly disfigured and wouldn't need years of painful recovery. (as an avid watcher of medical shows on the discovery channel, ted was all too aware of what burn victims had to endure.) he skipped shampoo for fear that it would irritate his wound, but his faculties had returned well enough for him to clean and dry himself off properly and get into clean clothes. his head he wrapped in turban fashioned

from a large towel. ted knew how to wrap a turban because he'd had a sikh roommate in college at boulder, and he'd once had dalip show him how to do it. it always pleased ted to be able to deploy knowledge he'd acquired, especially when it was knowledge that initially appeared useless. even with the towel-turban, though, ted could tell his head wound was still bleeding and that he'd probably need stitches. that meant a drive to the clinic, which was no doubt full of skiers getting their torn acls and broken legs looked after. it was christmas week, after all, and ted could probably look forward to a long wait unless he could somehow contrive to start gushing blood onto the floor. the though of standing there bleeding in his makeshift turban surrounded by gaping iowa skiers made him chuckle in anticipation:

maybe a trip to the clinic would be more fun than he thought. laughing made the blood flow more freely, some of it oozing from beneath the towel and onto his neck. grabbing a box of kleenex off the night table, he stepped into the foyer and pulled his coat on while he stuffed some tissues up the back of the turban. as he zipped, he regarded the cursed crouton sitting there on the ottoman. it was oblivious to all the pain it had caused him, and it mocked him in the highly annoying way only non-sentient things can mock. fear of the crouton and what had caused it to be in his apartment had been replaced, at least temporarily, by anger. this little piece of dried bread and spices was really pissing him off. of course, it must be a different crouton, ted reasoned. but it looked identical: the little flecks of spice,

the near-perfect rectangular shape and the brittle, porous surface just waiting to play host to some sickly bottled salad dressing. "screw it," ted said, grabbing his keys. he turned once more to the crouton: "and screw you! bastard crouton!" a sudden whim found him crossing to the ottoman, picking up the crouton and crushing it in his hand. he let the crumbs fall onto the dark spot on the carpet where he'd pissed himself, and he laughed another fake laugh, a mad scientist's giggle that pleased him immensely. he strode out the door feeling the situation was well in hand. he'd deal with the carpet later. "what do you mean, a crouton?" "i mean a crouton, mom, a little piece of dried bread you put on a salad." there was a pause on the line as his mother digested this information. ted was back in his apartment,

sporting a row of six stitches in the back of his head and an ice pack on his upper chest where he'd taken the brunt of the hot water. the doctor told him his burns were relatively minor, but that he'd probably look and feel like someone with a bad sunburn for a couple of days. as for the skiers in the clinic, they'd barely noticed him, involved as they were in their own pain, their own forms to fill out and the unpleasant fact that their expensive ski vacation had been cut short by injury. by the time ted got out of there, it was after 8 o'clock, so he grabbed some dinner at the soup place and was eating it on the couch while talking to his mother. the crouton incident, as he was calling it now in his mind, had grown too big to keep to himself. the pain-killers the doctor had given him had deadened his senses

enough that he thought he could handle his mother's 20 questions. spooning cream of asparagus soup into his mouth, he countered her interrogation with what seemed to him job-like patience. "why?" "why what, mom?" "why did you put a crouton on your ottoman?" "i didn't put it there, mom. i told you, it just appeared. twice. i don't know who put it there. it could have been evil snowboarders, the mob, aliens, an intelligent gas from pluto. i don't know." "a what?! gas, your gas is leaking? get out of there now, ted. i mean it! call 911!" so much for trying a vonnegut allusion with his mother. after reassuring her his apartment was not going to erupt in a natural-gas explosion, he asked her to hold her questions until he'd recounted the entire series of events. there was another pause, longer this time very

unusual for his mother, who was seldom at a loss for words. finally, she spoke in a low, conspiratorial tone: "you have to get out of there, ted. that's it, that's all there is to it. come down to denver and move in with me. we'll find you a place, another job. there's lots of girls down here, ted, all hungry for a nice young man like you and..." "mom," he said, "i'm ok here, really. it's just a friggin' crouton, for god's sakes. and besides, i think i may have found somebody." ted was exaggerating, but there was a "somebody" of sorts. her name was elizaveta, and she was from kazakhstan. in addition to the area's sizable hispanic population, breckenridge also had a lot of immigrants from eastern europe. it wasn't unusual to find someone from georgia behind the deli counter at the grocery store, or polish guys

doing roofing or just-off-the-boat russians or czechs cleaning condos. one of ted's clients had a company that brought them over and found them service-industry jobs. it was bricklin who'd suggested a maid after ted mentioned he was spending his saturday morning cleaning his condo. "you're doing what? you're cleaning? why?" it was what ted always did on saturday in his ongoing quest to achieve spotlessness. it wasn't like he loved the process of cleaning so much, but he did like the feeling of being around clean. he didn't have that much else to do, anyway. unlike 99 percent of the town's population, ted did not ski or snowboard. he was drawn to the winter landscape of summit county simply because it was so very clean. nearly devoid of insects, covered in snow half the year or more and with crisp, high-altitude

air, it was almost perfect but for may's mud season and the diesel pickups many locals seemed to favor. "ted, you are _not_ cleaning your own place," bricklin said. "that's ridiculous. i'll send someone over, cost you 50 bucks a week, that's all." he hung up before ted could protest. but having someone come into his place and make it perfectly clean once a week? how bad could that be? elizaveta rang his doorbell on the very first day of september. she had a plastic carrier of cleaning supplies, and she wore faded jeans of some unknown european brand along with a stained jersey t-shirt and worn canvas shoes. she just smiled at him, and ted felt himself literally go weak in the knees something he'd never experienced before, so far as he could remember. she was, quite simply, the most beautiful woman he had

ever laid eyes on. her hair was raven black and tied up in a pony tail. she had deep brown eyes and the high cheekbones and pert nose he was used to seeing in vanity fair advertisements. she had a lovely mouth with thick lips and slightly crooked, white teeth, which she deployed in a smile that seemed to radiate a form of energy heretofore unknown to man. in fact, ted found he couldn't bear to look elizaveta directly in the face after their first meeting. despite the fact she was there to scrub his toilet and sink and vacuum his carpet, she was more goddess descending from olympus to ted. as a mere mortal, there was nothing he could offer her, nothing he could say, no level ground from which to approach her. she may as well have been one of the women in those magazine ads; the closest he could get to her was

to sniff the page. on that first day, he mumbled something about errands and left, returning hours later when elizaveta was gone, leaving only cleanliness and fresh smells in her wake. so it was just as well that he rarely saw her. she cleaned on thursdays while he was at work. he knew it was still her cleaning the place, though, because she would occasionally leave him terse notes in her scrawling, exotic hand: ted, need flour. -e that was one of her early notes, and it was set atop a fresh-baked banana bread. from the start, elizaveta was more than your average cleaning woman. she did things like clean the silverware separator and dust the top of the refrigerator (both things ted did, for sure, but he was under the impression he was largely alone in such endeavors). she even folded the end of the toilet