A Special Place In Hell

Yesterday I sat writing with a pen that looks like a needle -- you depress it and red ink comes out, the metaphorical blood on the page. I like my needle pen because it keeps me in mind of the task at hand, no less than mining a vein to get to something pure. The pen came as a bonus gift when I bought Carrie, one of my favorite horror movies of all time. I love the embryonic Sissy Spacek and her crazy mother with the huge crucifix in the trailer. It's the ideal revenge fantasy for people like me who were out of place, awkward teenage girls, hoping like crazy that things would change and when they didn't, taking matters into her own hands and destroying everything. It trumps the rash of stalker movies that came after, the ones where almost everyone was dead except a final girl, the one tomboyish character with a unisex name who lived to tell the tale, dazed by the horrors she'd seen, vowing never to go camping again. Come to think of that, I could relate to that scenario as well, even if the only horrors I'd seen while camping were rattlesnakes and Everclear poured into empty High Karate or Polo bottles for safe and undetected transport. You really haven't lived until someone says, The Everclear is in the High Karate, Southern Comfort in the Polo. There's a special place in hell where one is forced to drink liquor laced with the dregs of cheap cologne.

But some of the scariest movies ever are the ones where the danger comes from the inside -- ie, the babysitter movie where she's getting obscene, threatening phone calls and the police deliver the haunting line after tracing the line -- The phone call is coming from inside the house!. I am also partial to a good devil-child movie or a good possession movie. It's in these movies we see ourselves most clearly, the ways we wish harm on ourselves and others without thought and blame unseen forces. In our everyday existence, we live with our pettiness, our casual cruelty, and dubious motives as if we are safe, as if they don't exist. Of course, any horror fan knows that it's just a matter of time before things become uncovered and start to wreak havoc. Good thing I have my blood red pen to write it all down, keep a record of sadness and despair, evil and good, and failing anything that dramatic, the banality of my days, since there's a good chance that anything scary is coming from inside the house.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"He decided he'd told the artist enough of his business. Artists were all right in their place but he didn't like them poking their noses in the affairs of regular people." Flannery O'Connor, "Parker's Back"

Cocktail Hour

Drinking music suggestion: Live at Fillmore East Allman Brothers

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Monday!

Only You Can Stop This From Happening

Once upon a time I sat crying in a church doorway on a crowded city street. A group of Amish men passed by, a parade of Amish, and they snuck furtive glances at my semi-hysterical, sobbing self. Some were old, some in the prime of their lives, some young boys, and I comforted myself with the stories they might tell each other about why I had obviously broken down in a public place without the good sense to find a bathroom in which to cry. I thought of myself as a cautionary tale -- See what happens in a secular lifestyle! The big city will leave you cold and strung out like garbage on the side of the street! To my credit, I managed with heroic effort to pull myself together before I made more of a jerk out of myself in front of a myriad of people on bikes, trying to win some race. Not one of my finer stoic moments, that's for sure. I thought of all the self-help slogans I'd heard lately, but one in particular mocked me -- And you are somebody! Yes, I thought, somebody who is a real dumbass.

One of my favorite pulp novels details the adventures of a priest who does a street ministry for beautiful women junkies, having had his heartstrings tugged by one who got out of prison and begged for his help, only to overdose but had the presence of mind to leave a note safety-pinned to her bra that said, Only you, Father John, can stop this from happening to others. What's not to love -- heroin, New York City, Bellevue, a burned out priest on the edge of losing his faith, damsels in distress? What can I say? This formula works for me. While I read it, I thought about that day on the street. I wasn't trying to win a race, wasn't living all that plain and simple as the Amish pride themselves. I was living complicated and strung out, like so many people on the edges of something, trying like anything to regain my composure and failing, my faith, slipping in and out of the distance like a radio station I couldn't quite pick up for the time being even though I knew it was there and always would be, even if I couldn't hear it at that moment.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"Progress means eliminating one thing and accepting another." B. R. Sridhar

Cocktail Hour
Drinking movie suggestion: Conversations With Other Women

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Sunday!

Ill-Fated Lovers That Would Always End Up Together

One of the first stories I ever got published was about a heartbroken ballerina with an eating disorder of sorts who went on a mysterious date that didn't change her life. It was as good as it sounds, and I can see how my lack of knowledge of ballet (a childhood crush on Mikhail Barishinikov doesn't count for much) and my desire to thinly veil reality (I was heartbroken beyond belief) worked to create something that while stilted and artificial, still had some effectiveness. I had labored over that story, draft after draft, until I came up with some lines that shown through the pretentious set-up and inexperience. When I read it, I didn't cringe all the way through so I knew I had made some progress.

For a couple of years after my grandfather died, my mother's mother lived with my family. My mother and her mother did not get along so well, but my grandmother was partially deaf from being beaten by my grandfather and always medicated with a cocktail of booze and cigarettes, those terrific anecdotes to strong emotion, and she read Barbara Cartland romances by the grocery bag that my rich best friend schlepped over after she'd finished them. I can still see her, sitting in a haze of smoke and reading about those ill-fated lovers who would always end up together. She never read anything I wrote -- even at a young age, she found me a little depressing. But I daresay the ballerina story would have done something for her. After all, she made an appearance in it, near the end, where she's reading cards, regular playing ones, at the kitchen table, all those queens and kings telling her about the future. The cards were thin and worn, some of them almost see-through, and you could tell that she would never switch decks, that the magic was in those cards, the ones she'd been dealt and would deal to tell you what would happen next.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"How strange are the tricks of memory, which, often hazy as a dream about the most important events of a man's life, religiously preserve the merest trifles. " Richard Burton

Cocktail Hour
Drinking novel suggestion: Free Food For Millionaires Min Jin Lee

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Saturday! Rest in peace, Joel Siegel!

Potions Waiting To Be Concocted

The entire night during my last Day of the Dead party, I could smell burning hair, my own. I'd gotten too close to a Holy Death candle while waiting for people to show up and had to put myself out. A friend of mine and I decided to put this shindig on and everyone was late, think Martha Plimpton in 200 Cigarettes, and we decided that if nobody did show up, we'd have a lot of Doritos and guacamole on our hands, not to mention all the food for the dead people I'd made (the only time I cook -- flan for my mother, pistachio pudding for Hank, and circus peanuts for daddy), and many potions waiting to be concocted. By the time I started to think that maybe buying the tarantula pinata had been an unnecessary, frivolous expense, people began to flood in, more than I had expected and they all wanted their tarot cards read. Because I had on a dress that was more costume than outfit, people thought I could tell them their futures.

I don't have any gifts as a psychic or even a hostess, except that I can make a good drink, and I'm kind of an optimist at even the worst of times, maybe only the worst of times. With my burnt hair and dress designed like snakeskin, I laid out the cards many a time, gave the happiest reads I could, given whatever had been dealt. John Lee Hooker played on the stereo -- It serves you right to suffer, serves you right to be alone . . . The night wore on, the night to honor the dead. Their candles burned. Nobody touched their food. Nothing got disturbed or broken, not even the tarantula pinata waiting to spill its contents to someone willing to hit it hard enough, in just the right way.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
“When you are already in Detroit, you don't have to take a bus to get there.” Ram Dass

Cocktail Hour
Drinking short story collection suggestion: Sam the Cat Matthew Klam

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Friday!

A Walking Stick For Emphasis

Years ago, I taught a class where one of the students stayed perched on his chair for the entire period, like a bird ready to take flight. L (not his real initial) often wore a red cape to class and ate copious amounts of pixie sticks during my lectures, sometimes so fast he'd choke on the sugary powder and sputter like an engine in the water about to leave the harbor. I couldn't get mad despite the disruption -- a large part of my interest in the class rests on what L might do on any given day. Sometimes it got a little too interesting like when he started burning himself with cigarettes during break, prompting the other students to come in, yelling, L is burning himself with cigarettes. I walked out to see what I could do, but he'd already stopped and was prepared to resume his usual perched position. I saw the two angry marks on his arm, a testament to what I have no idea, and asked if I could do anything. Nope, he said, lining up his pixie sticks. I like to eat them in order, he said. All grape, all strawberry, and so on. I didn't know how he could stand the pain -- even I could smell the burning flesh from a distance.

Despite having a high capacity for drama and pain, L wasn't the greatest writer and opted to do a huge final presentation in hopes of raising his grade. He showed a video from PETA of a rabbit's vivisection which caused a student of mine who had recently lost his dog to a car accident to sob. The rest of the class tried not to heave as the minutes stretched out, one terrible thing after another happening to monkeys, bunnies, and other creatures. L had his cape on that day and had added a walking stick for emphasis, hitting the desk while defending animals. I didn't hear much of his speech given the general pandemonium in the classroom. But I kept my sights on his self-inflicted burn marks. They looked like eyes, the kind that belong on a doll that stares at you no matter where in the room you move.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"I don't think about art when I'm working. I try to think about life." Jean-Michel Basquiat

Cocktail Hour
Drinking music suggestion: The Chronic Dr. Dre

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Thursday! Thanks to my newest commenter on the kind words about the photographs! I'm not sure how it works -- I'm pretty new to photography, but I love it. Get a lot of inspiration from Dare Wright, the woman who wrote The Lonely Doll books.

More Blue Velvet Than Blue Violets

My parents were not prudes, but one of the most mortifying moments of my life came in the form of watching the movie Rush with them. Don't get me wrong -- it's a great movie. What's not to love about a movie where the badass Greg Allman plays a drug dealer in his evil scary way, hair down to his shoulders, mean as my Grandpa Charlie coming off a three day bender? Well, there was one particuarly inventive graphic sex scene between the main characters that seemed to last forever and my mother kept saying, What's he doing to her, Michelle? Despite having skin the color of cocaine, I seldom blush and those who have seen it have seen something akin to Haley's comet in frequency. But I blushed then and wished like hell they'd go back to a graphic drug scene or someone getting beaten to move us along. The other time that things really went to pot in this way was when they had accidentally rented Blue Velvet instead of Blue Violets, a sweet romantic comedy involving sailing. So important to read the box, yes?

My parents never discussed sex with me, thank the Lord, and my "sex talk" consisted of some vague ramblings about matters of reputation and once when I was going to the mall in Ft. Worth with a friend asking if I "had anything with me." Like what? My mother blushed at this point, said something about protection starting with a "c" and I realized she thought we might be having sex. My friend was gay, albeit closeted if dying a yellow streak in your jet black hair and listening to nothing but Berlin and Depeche Mode could be considered closeted, and even I knew that sex was as likely as a hot air balloon ride that afternoon. We were going to the mall where he'd buy my birthday present, a copy of Stephen King's Eyes Of A Dragon, with a brilliant cover the color of a green midori cocktail. I had to laugh at my mother's assumption about the afternoon. There would be other outings with other people that were a lot more Blue Velvet than Blue Violets, but for that afternoon, the scariest choice I had to make was what to order at the Catfish King. There were a lot of choices on the menu, but they all were made of the same thing, a food that could be served up more ways than I'd ever imagined.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"Sex is hardly ever just about sex." Shirley MacLaine

Cocktail Hour

Drinking movie suggestion: Chloe In The Afternoon

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Wednesday!

That's Really Funny

The semester after I broke up with a long-term love, I had the dismal task of teaching a class with seven (yes, seven) boys with the same name as my ex. It's a common name, a biblical one, and to have an entire team of people with variations on this theme was proof that God did have a sense of humor, that irony is not solely a literary convention, and perhaps the deepest most true thing I know about life -- you cannot get away from yourself, no matter what the hell you do, and you can't get away from your exes either. I'm still friends with this person after a fashion and when he delivered my birthday present, he had his mouth shot up with Novocaine from one of his near constant dental visits after many years of utter dental neglect and said, If you want to, you can punch me now because I won't feel it. I know you wanted to lots of times in the past, something both funny and sad and maybe a little bit true, because, let's face it, the only funny things are the sad true ones.


In retrospect, you can often say anything and everything about a situation once it's over which makes an ending both bitter and sweet. Years ago, I could laugh over damn near anything, often to the point where I felt sick to my stomach. Now I'm more the kind of person who recognizes humor, who says, That's really funny while nodding and trying to figure out what makes it funny. But it's futile in the end You can name things thinking that you own them, that you understand them, but in the end they own you and surround you, invisible staves that you don't know are there until you run into them and hurt yourself. And try and find it funny.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
“What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists?” he wondered. “In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.” Woody Allen

Cocktail Hour
Drinking essay suggestion: Mere Anarchy Woody Allen

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Tuesday!

The Roads Like Ice

There are dead fish flies hanging on my office window. They come every year for a few weeks, living for a day and breeding like mad before reaching the end of things. They don't bite you, but people hate them because of the smell their dead bodies make, the way they slicken the roads like ice. Having grown up in a place where the beasties are far less innocuous, I don't mind them so much. I can sit and watch them for many a minute, safe and protected behind glass as if seeing some spectacular movie play out. This fascination speaks to my high tolerance for repetition -- Fish Flies Are Out! Fish Flies Year One. Fish Flies Dance On Window.

When fish fly season comes every June, these insects cover the buildings, so much so that the houses appear to be moving. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before, beautiful and repulsive, otherworldly. One night during the worst of it a couple of years ago, I went out to eat at a place that was covered with the creatures. Sitting at a table with my friends, we watched them cover the window to the point that you couldn't see out. They looked like moving blankets and they looked like snow, never like themselves except when one was alone. You have to look closely not to be deceived! I took some leftover food home from that night, toting my take-out container through the assault of their bodies which seemed like an eerie kind of storm. When I went to the fridge the next day, one lone fish fly sat on top of the Styrofoam box, clinging from the night before. I wanted the food, but I couldn’t bring myself to eat it. I had to throw the entire thing away, the valuable sullied by a creature that had made a strange journey to a cold place where it would die but remain intact, as if nothing had ever happened.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"It is not enough to conquer; one must know how to seduce." Voltaire

Cocktail Hour

Drinking music suggestion: Tattoo You Rolling Stones

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Monday! Thanks to everyone for the incredibly kind and thoughtful comments on "Dead Girl, Live Boy." You guys (note the Detroit influence instead of the Texas y'all) are the very best!

Life Is Short -- Get A Divorce

Not so long ago, a lawyer in Chicago put up ads saying, Life Is Short -- Get A Divorce. The ads contained an attractive man and woman in various stages of undress and upset people so much that they had to be removed from billboards. People's objections went along the lines of the fact that the billboards trivialized marriage (hard to believe that a convention that can take place in Vegas performed by an Elvis impersonator could be trivialized!) and that they were signs of a society gone to pot, a society in which the old could be shed for the new without a second thought. I didn't get my divorce for any reasons having to do with boredom, and I suppose most people don't. Most people I know can only break up with someone by gnawing their own arm off, losing vital bits of their identity and soul. At the very least, they aren't swayed by a billboard. The fact that it threatens couples interest me far more than any kind of effect it might have on someone actually considering the act.

I don't know where all the zero body fat men in Calvin Klein underpants were after my divorce like on the billboard-- my first post-divorce date offer came from a man at work that people referred to as Shamu (after the killer whale) who said, I've got a buy one get one free coupon to the Golden Corral. Ever on a diet in those days, I did not eat at places that were named after animals troughs if I could help it. I had to decline. I had to sit at home and evaluate my options -- Lean Cuisine or Healthy Choice, movie or book, deal or no fricking deal. I did not imagine my life would become magically glamorous, and it didn't. But I did become a pariah to many a couple who feared contagion (a valid fear given that break-ups tend to beget break-ups) and became a friend to those who might be considering something else than the love that had turned to tedium in their own lives. I was no billboard and never will be, but when you're looking for a message, you'll take what you can get.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"One man's remorse is another's reminiscence." Gerald Bath

Cocktail Hour
Drinking music suggestion: The Black Rider Tom Waits

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Sunday!

Short Cuts

Regular post later today. Until then, Happy Sunday!

All Sales Final

Here's the last installment of the story!

I pick my way to the door, trying not to ruin my black high heels or slip on ice. On the porch there is a bouquet of red roses lay, their heads as dark as blood against the snow. I smile, thinking Mark is already turning out to be an ideal distraction from Kevin. I pick up the roses, Here she is, Miss America, and step over threshold like the bride of Satan, dressed all in black with blood red flowers, Josh following. By the time I look at the card, I stop smiling. The handwriting belongs to Kevin -- Saw these and thought of you -- and I think I might vomit. All that rich party food seems to be stuck in the back of my throat.

"Shouldn’t you get those in water before they die?" Josh asks.

I sit down at the kitchen table and start to break the necks of the roses one by one, tossing their heads in the garbage.
"I think they’ve been out in the cold too long already," I say, a few stray petals littering the floor as I continue to pull the bouquet apart.

Josh’s therapist has proclaimed our family toxic, a word that gets used so much that it has lost its power to shock. Language, like everything else, gets old, starts to mean something else, like a pair of sagging breasts that used to thrill. Today the therapist asks what my life would be like without any chemicals and I think I would feel like a chained dog, forced to circle the same territory until someone gets home and then it’s only a slightly bigger area to roam and perhaps you’re guarded with an electronic fence that’s shocked you so badly that you don’t even need a chain anymore. You become the chain. I shrug and say that I would feel pretty good, like the world was my oyster, only that I was never in an r month, thinking about the warnings against eating them raw during the summer. She wanted to say, cut the bullshit, Josette and I could have almost loved her if she had, but instead she said, Joking and sarcasm are defenses against strong emotion.

To which I say nothing, not wanting to get trapped by my own words. I think of an old ad from the seventies, a Kodak one aimed at housewives, trying to get them to understand the importance of their role in documenting family history -- when you are the camera and the camera is you. I do not know why this comes to mind, but it does, and I suspect that someone else would know and that’s the point of this uncomfortable office with its sagging chairs, the de riguer Kleenex box positioned on a table between me and Josh, the box decorated with a orange crocheted outfit, probably made by a grateful patient, accompanied with a note -- Thank you for healing me, now I am well enough to make crocheted gifts for friends and family, even samplers with helpful sayings. I look around the office, really look, and notice that everything in this place is disconnected and ugly and realize that’s because nobody knows the therapist, her job being a dumping ground, and these are all projections of what someone might like. She does that part of her job well, staying invisible. I scan her bookshelf -- all the classics, Man Against Himself, The Courage to Create, some truly awful Leo Buscaglia
books (perhaps a gift, I think, in a fit of generosity), Trauma and Recovery.

The first time our entire family went to therapy was the last year Josh was in college and almost didn’t finish because his mutilations had gotten out of control. College, our escape, turned out to be what Josh and I referred to as a big old less than, our term for something longed for and found terribly wanting. Father bitched about having to pay some Jewish crackpot to pick us apart even though the family therapist appeared thoroughly Protestant, dressing in outfits that would have been best described as a cross between David Koresh and Davy Jones. I thought of him, looking at us all with exhaustion when we wouldn’t talk, which was much of the time. Just like now. Even without the censure of our parents being in the room, Josh and I would make the worst interview, one that even Barbara Walters couldn’t revive. And I don’t like being called out on my behavior, given that Josh is the one that landed us here with his latest slashing. The truth about the Vicodan, the Fiorcett, the Tylenol Three, the Xanax, the Valium, the Darvocette, the Percodan, the Demerol is a simple one -- I hate to swallow almost anything, especially pills, because I have a terrible fear of choking and yet I swallow more shit than anyone I know. I fear things that have already happened and things that might happen and things that most certainly will happen. A few blocks from our place, a fundamentalist church puts up a sign with different sayings each week to scare people into their doors. From this week -- There Is No Stop, Drop, and Roll in Hell. Sitting here without anything to distract me from myself, I think don’t I know it.

I, like most people, do not take much pleasure in doing the right thing. I take pleasure in getting off the hook, the eleventh hour save, in mercy. After therapy, I drop Josh back at the apartment and head downtown for the voodoo store, Knight Light. I need to sort out the Mark/Kevin situation and this is as good a way as any. Knight Light, a small place, the size of someone’s living room, is crammed with hundreds of candles and ointments, holy water, roots, herbs -- John the Conqueror, Queen of the Meadow, Devil’s Shoestring, Grains of Paradise. One of my coworkers told me about this place a year ago and I come here once a month, oftener if I have serious problems like now since those fucking roses arrived on my doorstep. The first time I came in to the shop, I bought so many candles, Sunshine, the main candle dresser, asked if I was a church, mistaking me for someone buying for a representative for a cut-rate Catholic parish who couldn’t afford the upscale church-sanctioned supply shops, but the question itself made me smile, imagining my body as the stations of the cross, each consumed with a particular bit of suffering.

I make my way through the crack addicts that linger by the door, the living dead, modern day zombies that sometimes haunt my dreams. The snow from last night makes the city look cleaner and also sadder somehow. I shake the excess from my boots as I enter the store, the smells from the various oils rising from glass burners, each one with a different purpose, lemongrass for money, honeysuckle for protection. No matter how many times I have seen this place, I never get tired of it. A statue of Jesus, trapped in a dry-cleaning bag, retails for 49.99 and underneath the statue a sign reads, All Sales Final, a bargain price for the Almighty, to be sure.

"Beautiful Josette," Sunshine, the main candle dresser says, when I walk in and rushes over to give me a hug. "You looking good today. Lord, it’s good to see someone I like." I do not like touching anyone that I’m not having sex with and even then it’s iffy, but I try to let myself feel it, not rush away like I am wont to do.

I pick an empty box from the back and take off my coat.

"You need something special?" Sunshine asks.

"Man trouble. I just got a new one and the old one came back," I say, on my knees now so I can inspect the lower shelves.

"Ain’t that always the way. Honey came back even after I dropped him and his stuff off at the shelter, saying he couldn’t live without me." Honey, Sunshine’s long-time live-in boyfriend, from the pictures Sunshine has on her laptop, appears to be the whitest man in all of Detroit, and I cannot help but feel deep pity for him even though he’s a registered sex offender who keeps losing jobs when people find out about his past via the Internet where he is required to stay posted for years as such. Between his ill-fitting clothes, cross-eyes, and great financial and emotional dependence on Sunshine, Honey is always in his hour of need. Sunshine manages to keep the faith despite everything, which keeps me returning to this place. That and the stripped-down honesty of everything -- people spending what little extra money they have on various instruments of hope. And nothing is too strange to be addressed -- there are a row of penis-shaped candles that you rub with oil to get control of your lover or to obtain money. I have not resorted to this yet.

Knight Light, lodged between a liquor store and a human hair outlet, appears itself to be a dream, an oasis of fiction in an otherwise bleak landscape. Even Sunshine herself is a partial fiction -- after she was gang-raped by a group of men who debated for an hour if they would kill her or let her go -- she promised she wouldn’t report them and she did, causing her to have to change her name, and she chose Sunshine. I think of the Bible verse on the table where she pours oil on the candles -- The light shines in the darkness and the darkness knows it not.
"Which one do you want?" she asks.

"I don’t know," I say, scanning the shelves lined with saints, with requests for protection, for health, for love, for clarity. On the other side, there are candles for revenge -- destroy everything, doom, double reversible (to throw a hex back to a person who threw one on you). The rules of voodoo caution against too much of the bad, though -- for everything you do, it comes back to you threefold.

"The old one is married."

"You love him," she says. I hate how transparent I am.

I put some novena candles in my box, and Sunshine starts to dress them, carving deep into the top so that the oils can soak into the body completely. She sprinkles incense and glitter and confetti on them, prays over them. I read the prayer on the Lady of Lourdes candle -- Cast a merciful glance upon those who are suffering, their lips constantly pressed against life’s bitter cup. I could use a merciful glance -- I put that one in the box, thinking yeah, a merciful glance might be nice.

I get home and set the candles up in my bedroom and living room, thinking about what I want and if it matters in the long run. Josh seems to be taking a nap, so I turn on the television and look for distraction when Coley, strolls out of his bedroom.

"Back so soon," I say. "Did you leave something here? Your brain, perhaps?" Today she’s dressed in one of Josh’s button-up shirts he wears to work and nothing else.

"Josette, I was afraid I might not get to see you. I thought you might be at work, saving the world from venereal disease or not at work, spreading it," Coley says. Her eyes look so smudged with make-up that I wonder about the last time she’s washed her face.

I flip through the channels -- fake jewels can be purchased on one station, a pasta strainer on another, movies no one wanted to see when they were made, reruns of shows from the not-so-distant past. I want to call Kevin, but no good can come from it. Why do I want something so bad for me? My stash of pills calls to me, and I think it‘s an emergency (my mother used to say to me and Josh, don‘t do anything unless it‘s an emergency and even then, you want to think about it) and far better for me than getting back into the demands of an affair.

Coley returns to Josh’s bedroom after using the bathroom, and I take a Fiorcette and wash it down with a shot of vodka. I go into the bathroom to brush my teeth and notice Coley’s amethyst nose ring soaking in the lid of our rubbing alcohol. Nothing on me is pierced, not even my ears. What would it feel like to have something sharp go through your flesh so deeply that you could wear something in the hole for the rest of your life? I can hear Josh and Coley laughing in his bedroom, and I put my toothbrush back in its holder next to Josh’s.

Josh’s computer sits in the living room, and I turn it on. In the time it takes to boot, I think of the perfect message to send Kevin. I know this course of action will only lead to more misery, more pain, but I cannot stop myself. At least I’m not calling him. I send him one line -- What do you want from me? It’s an honest question. And for once, I wouldn’t mind getting an honest answer. I have an e-mail from Mark, asking me when I want to get together again. Somewhere between right now and never, so I call him and see if he’ll meet me here now. It doesn’t matter that Josh is home since he’s with Coley, and I can hear them having sex.

"Do you want to go out or stay where you are?" Mark asks.

The logical thing would be to leave Josh and Coley here alone, but there is nowhere I can think of that I want to be. I tell him to come over, and we’ll decide. But I already know the answer. I don’t want to leave. For Josh’s birthday parties, my parents always took us to the same place, Casa Bonita, a Mexican restaurant that attempted to be an upscale Chuck E. Cheese with lots of games for children. The food tasted awful, but that wasn’t the point. The place contained a waterfall and video games, skeet ball and air hockey. I never noticed any of that, though. In the back of the restaurant, I’d go to a room the size of a closet. It was the fake prison, with rubber bars on which I would climb. No matter where else I might go, I’d always end up there, seeing how far the rubber bars would stretch, and what I could do without leaving the room.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"If I had my life to live over again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner." Tallulah Bankhead

Cocktail Hour

Drinking music suggestion: Let's Groove Earth, Wind, and Fire

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Saturday!

This Could Be You

Here's part two! Thanks for reading!

Dead Girl, Live Boy

"Fuck, I forgot," Josh says, slamming his book bag on the kitchen table.

"Forgot what?"

"The headmaster’s dinner party."

I sit down at the table, a blue and white retro piece that looks like it came out of someone’s sweet grandmother’s kitchen. The tiny orange gourds I bought for Halloween have started to rot and cave in on themselves so I toss them in our trash. Josh pours a beer into a tiny juice glass and slugs it like a shot. I get a Sprite in an attempt to sober up from this afternoon.

"I don’t want to go," Josh says.

"So don’t."

"I have to. That little prick demands attendance."

"Say you’re sick," I say. "You look sick." Considering Josh took a razorblade and mutilated his face this summer, I’m guessing his absence might be one people would welcome.

"I don’t want to get lose my job. Why don’t you want to come with me?" Josh has finished his first beer and is onto the next, a local concoction called Third Coast.
"You can’t get fired," I say, seeing an entire night of polite social chitchat stretched before me. I think of the old joke -- what are the only two reasons you can get fired from a teaching job -- a dead girl or a live boy.

"Come on, Josette. I never ask you to do anything."

That’s not exactly true. I have to attend a therapy session once a month with Josh, that once being tomorrow. Josh goes to therapy every week, but the woman he sees after he ended up in the hospital for carving a smile underneath his mouth insists that I attend with him part of the time to address family dynamic issues. I cannot express how long fifty minutes can be under these circumstances.

Except in comparison to the headmaster’s party where time appears to have stopped altogether. Despite my afternoon reprieve from work at Planned Parenthood (the last girl I saw was pregnant despite her prescription for the pill which she thought you took each time you had sex), the drinking and fucking that replaced it, I feel entirely too exhausted for this affair, everyone dressed in what we used to refer to as Sunday best. They all seem to be discussing food allergies and nannies, the places they wished they could afford to send their children to school. I think about Mark the bartender, also a law student at University of Detroit Mercy (a third string program which almost lets me forgive the law thing) saying that ignorance of the law does not lessen the consequences for breaking it, meaning I knew this party would be a pain in the ass and even if I didn‘t, I’m stuck. At least nobody corners me and asks me about Josh’s face -- that’s one good thing about the constraints of politeness. Two months into teaching, he is like everyone else who has suffered in a visible way -- the badly burned, the scarred, those born with a port wine mark. People can adjust to anything.

I drink as much as I can without looking like an asshole, saying little, yes, I’m Josh’s sister, isn’t it cold for this early in the season, the food is just terrific. After a while, I’m left alone to sit and stare outside the big living room window, a floor to ceiling design when it starts to snow, big flakes so beautiful that they look fake. A bunny hops into the snowscape as if placed by central casting. People notice what’s happening and make their excuses to leave before the roads start getting bad, relieved as anything to be freed by the weather, and I try to remember whether seeing a lone rabbit is good luck or bad, if I am supposed to make a wish and blew it again by not thinking fast enough.

Settling into the passenger’s seat, riding through the snowstorm, I think how beautiful and peaceful everything is, even with the sirens from the city howling in the distance. Josh drives without expression, and I look at his face that is sporadically illuminated by streetlights and feel like I did when we were children, traveling in the back seat of my dad’s blue Cadillac after he’d made his money, like we were special and protected from the squalor and sadness of the world. We’d ride with him to pick Mother up from the hospital where she worked second shift on the oncology floor and sometimes we’d get to run around the lobby, buying Whachamacallit bars from the vending machine. There is nothing like a hospital at night to convince you that morning might be a terrible thing. The radio plays Miles Davis, something from his early days that sounds like it has always existed.

"Thanks for not making me suffer alone," Josh says as we pull into the driveway.

"Wouldn’t dream of it," I say. For me, there has never been a time when I haven’t been around Josh in some way except when I was married. It surprises people that I was anyone’s wife and even when I speak of it, I never feel it was quite real myself. I was deeply in love when I got married, just not, unfortunately, to my husband. We married at the courthouse, nobody we knew around, just a blank empty space where everyone we knew might have been had if circumstances were different. I told Josh, over the phone, like the coward I am. Josh hung up on me and sent me an e-mail the next day that had an attachment about a man who’d stabbed his girlfriend to death and buried her alive. She’d crawled out of her grave and arranged to break into a house and call 911 before passing out. She lived. This, Josh wrote, could be you. It was the most optimistic thing anyone had said to me in months.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"Beauty. The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband." Ambrose Bierce

Cocktail Hour

Drinking music suggestion: Stomp The Brothers Johnson

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Friday!

Late Into The Evening

Years ago, I attended a writing conference in west Texas, the kind of conference where everyone drinks all the time and "forgets" to wear their wedding rings. Many of the participants were a rough bunch, the kind of men who make jokes about Tailhook and didn't see anything wrong with Clayton Williams' suggestion that if a women was being raped that she should just "lie back and enjoy it." My friends and I were drinking margaritas late into the first evening in the big ballroom that had been decorated with chili pepper lights and sombreros. George Jones on the jukebox, singing "He Stopped Loving Her Today." Late into the evening, I declined the offer of another drink, a rare act of self-control. I was delivering a paper the next morning on some bullshit about workshop structure and needed what little wits about me that I could collect. One of my companions, a deeply alcoholic dude named Will said, How did you do that? I didn't have a clue what he was talking about until he said, Turn down a drink. Just stop. I could never do that.

I looked at him, saw that he was serious, and shrugged my shoulders. Mostly glib, a whole lot irritating, fairly handsome, Will exuded an ease that seemed completely natural, but in fact was almost always chemically enhanced. I didn't think of him as an alcoholic -- to me, alcoholics were people like my Grandpa Charlie who drove around tossing beer bottles out of his window and kicking anyone's ass who so much as looked at him. But at that moment, I could see into his soul a little bit, the loss of control that had begun to bleed into his life. I forget almost everything else about that conference, all the fake intimacies and promises to write about this or that subject, the drivel people talk about because there's no other common ground. But I remember the moment with Will; we did not speak of the subject ever again. Like a secret SOS, it drifted into the ether, never to be addressed, not really, but it was heard, and I suppose that's something.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love." Butch Hancock

Cocktail Hour
Drinking movie suggestion: Sorry, Haters

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Wednesday!

My Body, My Hello Kitty

In my long list of dubious honors that include many more participation ribbons than anything red, white, or blue (remember those godforsaken participation ribbons -- orange is the color of failure!), I would have to admit that I was an officer in a Hello Kitty club in the third grade. My friend K, a flaming queen by age five, had decided that we needed a devotion to our favorite new icon. We called ourselves Friends of Hello Kitty! and our main activity, besides gossiping, was working on sticker books. We'd hide out as far as the teachers would allow us to go, our doings as clandestine and serious as a Black Panther's meeting and dissect what made Hello Kitty so special. We'd been fans of Snoopy for as long as we could remember and had lusted after a Disco Snoopy which cost way too much in K's catalogue of doll clothes, and we'd dream about having the fifteen dollars needed to send away for the John Travolta Snoopy, the Snoopy we could make dance. But Hello Kitty was even cooler and more rare -- the most we could find were a couple of erasers at the local Hallmark where the old biddy who ran the place watched us with a death glare to make sure we didn't steal anything. Now Hello Kitty is everywhere, although I only have a few t-shirts with her on them as an ode to my former glory. We, I might point out, Friends of Hello Kitty!, were there from the beginning.

Various writers have pointed out that part of the genius of Hello Kitty is that she has no mouth and therefore cannot speak. There are those who would say that this makes her a perfect female in our patriarchal culture. The only form of expression she has is her outfits which take her various places -- the beach or school or Tokyo or Madrid. I'm a little less cynical on the nature of her popularity. She's beloved because you never know what she's feeling, no smile or frownie face or pout. She's the affable friend, the one who listens to your sorrows. She goes about her days with a certain kind of grace; she can be dressed for any occasion in a flash. Never tired or worried, she can provide comfort in any situation. She adorns women and children alike, dressed as we would like to be dressed, telling the world in an instant where we'd be if we could be anywhere but here.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"I dress for women and undress for men." Angie Dickinson

Cocktail Hour

Drinking novel suggestion: White Noise Don DeLillo

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Tuesday!

All The Things I'll Miss About Myself

I once knew a writer in one of the few writing groups I ever was a part of whose first drafts were all touched by God and needed no editing. Scarily brilliant, eerie, and perfect. This state of affairs seemed extremely unfair except that she had other problems that included but were not limited to a child she didn't like all that much, a third husband who hadn't turned out any better than the first two, and a deep aversion to regular hair washing. She spoke the truth all the time, whether it was a good idea or not, and once said about forgetting workshop, I got busy shovelling dog shit. What the fuck do you want from me? I can still see her, hand on hip, t-shirt that said Jenny Craig Is A Bitch. She had never had a weight problem so this seemed an odd choice for her venom, but there you have it. I couldn't help but like her, try as I might not to, try as she might to make me not. She made me laugh even when she made me cringe, having that peculiar instinct for the faultlines of people's egos and going for them with a vengeance. I knew I had made significant progress as a writer when she said, I was dreading reading your story and thought boring, fucking boring and then I was shocked as shit that it wasn't. It didn't seem like you at all. It was so good. Coming from her, it felt as if I'd won the Pulitzer.

When people ask me if writer's groups are a good idea, I come back to this experience which was a doozy. We'd often meet at her house as she was afraid to leave it and watch the roaches scurry on the floor. They were so bad that we'd have to appoint someone to keep watch over the snacks and make sure they didn't invade anything we'd brought as they were always dropping from the cabinets and whatnot. I suppose it goes without saying that she was not remotely together enough to make it to a store. I hate grocery stores. All those people and food. God! I was in my early twenties at this point, my workshop friend in her late thirties. You're going to love your thirties, Michelle. I make list of all the things I'll miss about myself when I die. I was dying to see her list, but she never gave up the goods. Some things are private, she'd say. Do you have a Tampax? I am so fucking miserable right now. You wouldn't believe, she'd start, and I'd wonder what the hell could be on the list that was more private than what she'd already revealed. What I did know that it was probably a first draft and more brilliant than anything I'd be writing.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"The supreme happiness in life is the conviction of being loved not for yourself, but in spite of yourself." Victor Hugo

Cocktail Hour

Drinking music suggestion: Tumble Home Amy Hempel

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Monday!

Behind This Earthly Veil

The last time I saw my dad, it was three weeks before he would die. Leaving my apartment to make the long drive back from Michigan to Texas, my neighbor had cornered him to look at her bloody eye. The inside of her cornea had filled up with blood like some godawful horror movie eye where she hit herself with a broomstick while dusting out her storage unit. "Do you think I'm in danger?" she asked him. "Should I go to the hospital?" People were forever asking my dad questions like this -- he had that stable, comforting look. The week before she'd shown him her gums. They were infected from the denture adhesive she'd used after her teeth fell out from a medication she'd been prescribed for another affliction. Dear Lord, the woman did not have good luck! My neighbor was my dad's age, in her fifties, but seemed as if she were of a different generation entirely, maybe more like Marie, the ninety-five year old above me who was routinely leaving her stove on and burning her clothes. I used to joke that her son had to escape from the nursing home he was in to come see her. Marie had style, though, and would yell, chic, chic out her window when she liked the outfits I wore to work.

In a few weeks, I'd scheduled to move out of that building that I referred to as The Misery for reasons that should now be all too obvious. My dad would be leaving as well, for whatever lies behind this earthly veil. He spent his last two weeks on a business trip which made me think of when I was a little girl. My parents wouldn't tell me when my dad was going to be away because I'd get too upset and stop eating entirely. And when he was away, I wouldn't eat, my own little hunger strike. He'd often bring back medically-themed gifts to assuage my sadness at his absence. The irony now being I imagine him away on a business trip all the time, not gone entirely, but out of range, as a comfort rather than a misery, perspective being everything and nothing all at the same time.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"Still I have not got used to it. /My mind can still form to that chair him/ whom no chair holds." Mary Karr

Cocktail Hour

Drinking documentary suggestion: Shot In The Dark

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Father's Day!

An Insult And Compliment

Recently, someone called me an eloquent self-absorbed whiner. Of course, I don't know who this person is because he or she didn't give an identity, the wonders of the anonymous comment function on my blog, something I am loathe to give up given that most anonymous comments are kind or interesting. I don't mind this one because although I have been called self-absorbed and most certainly consider myself a whiner at times (who can take any of her complaints seriously in a world where the dead and wounded are coming home from war at an astounding, horrible rate?), I have never been called eloquent. Charming, sometimes, funny, every now and again, but eloquent?! Never! It's not in my nature. I'm too clumsy and high-strung for anything resembling elegance or eloquence to come my way. I can barely dress myself without some huge mistake, can't speak without stumbling over my words, and would prefer to hide at home than face the slings and arrows of something as prosaic as grocery shopping. I consider some of this genetic -- take my dad, the nicest man in the world, but a little clumsy at times. Once he was driving along with my friend Hank and pointed out a big plane. Hank said that he couldn't see it. Hank, my dad said, slapping him on the back, you must be blind as a bat! Hank, I might point out, was legally blind and starting laughing hysterically. The only time Hank saw something in the car was when I nearly backed into someone. Even I saw that one, Michelle, he said. Not really shaken by much, he was the perfect passenger for someone with my truly vile driving skills.


Erica Jong writes that as people we get a thousand love letters or compliments and remember the few horrible notes from crazy people about how terrible we are. There's a lot of truth to this statement. In her book, Seducing the Demon, she talks about having a one night stand with Martha Stewart's husband and getting maligned for this act for years. During the one night stand, the husband talked incessantly about Martha and what she made him do, all the chores and the misery. This is what a lot of adultery is like I imagine, the kind of thing where the other person looms so large that he or she might as well be in the room. Erica did not have much fun during or after, when she was cast into the role of evil other woman. It's a role I'm sure she'd been cast in before with or without cause, an insult and compliment all rolled together. She got screwed twice, but in the end, she wrote about that awful night at the Frankfurt Book Fair and got the last say. Eloquence can give a person the final word, I think, even for the self-absorbed, maybe especially for us.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won't get much sleep." Woody Allen

Cocktail Hour
Drinking movie suggestion: How To Save Your Own Life Erica Jong

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Saturday!

Hi From Baby Grouchie!

Hi from Baby Grouchie and one of his many friends who resemble him! He's coming along with his great stories about his adventures and will be posting very soon, maybe on father's day since he doesn't have a father and well, that's a source of interest and material for him.

Our Unfinished Stories

Deep in the doldrums of summer, my friend Hank and I would often take refuge in the KFC buffet. There was almost never anybody at the buffet which explains why they stopped offering it, but back then we'd eat and discuss our unfinished stories. There's two schools of thought about this -- that writers should never talk about the work while the work is in process. To talk about it spoils it, releases the need to tell it. The other school of thought is that it's good to get feedback, no matter what. I'd like to add a third way of looking at things. Hank and I would talk about our plots and characters, and we'd offer each other such uniformly hideous suggestions about what to do next (stoned, no doubt, on the copious amount of grease in the food we'd just sucked down) that by the end of the meal, both of us would have been forced to think of something better for fear we might have to resort to the idea offered. Maybe you could make your character a clown school drop-out, one of us might say. You never read anything about clown school, not really. Or we'd resort to smart-ass mode -- How about a car chase? A lovable character named Gramps? We each had projects that were never going to work -- mine was a novel about a born-again evangelical bulimic whose life had taken a bad turn, his was Yellow Leg: The Incontinent Wolf, a long poem written in entirely in couplets about well, you can figure it out.

When we wore out our ideas for the imaginary world, we'd turn to the real one, which in its own way, was just as complicated as our stories. R never changes her clothes before our dates anymore. She just wears what she was wearing to softball practice. Do you think that's a bad sign or is she just comfortable with me now? Bad sign, I'd say, reading the remnants of my mashed potatoes as if they were tea leaves. Or maybe not, I'd backpedal, could be really good. Hank grinned before finishing off his coleslaw. You're right. Maybe I ought to take it as a compliment. Two weeks later she'd left him for someone she'd met at softball practice. You know even when you don't. That became a poem for him, "When Anne Stopped Changing," (I came up with the title on the next KFC visit) which contained the great line -- What, you never thought anything stupid? I've thought so many stupid things, but some of my favorites are ones where I was stuffing my face on my very favorite fast food, dreaming of fiction and life, the two things becoming one and the same by the time we dumped garbage off our trays and entered into the harsh sunlight once again.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not." Kurt Cobain


Cocktail Hour
Drinking short story suggestion: Welcome To The Arrow-Catcher Fair Lewis Nordan


Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Friday!

The Lost World

Haven't posted any poetry in some time, so here's the latest. A happy take on a happy subject -- my specialty, right?

The Lost World

I knew them too, the wife that remained loyal
to her husband, a pedophile mortician
who lived next door to us. He’s in prison
now, and she lives alone in the house, she says,
without irony, that love built. All those years
of dealing with dead bodies, violating live ones
and for what? Things are hard for her – not
a widow or divorced. She still visits him, although
it is a long trip, tough to make, even and especially
after all these years. I suppose, it is safe to say, that she, like
everyone else I know, imagined something a little different.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen. Die knowing something. You are not here long." Walker Evans

Cocktail Hour
Drinking memoir suggestion: The Father Of All Sorrows Tom Bissell

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Thursday!