Friday, July 15, 2011

Step 1, check. Step 2-Uh oh...

I used to have a retail business and I wanted to promote it without paying for it. So I became a radio host, a TV personality, and a newspaper columnist selling rakes and hoes and bolts and dishing out advice. You don't have to have good answers, just answers.
This led to irritated newsroom editors and the occasional hate mail. You ain't the big time if you don't get hate mail.
Before all this I wrote a piece for a bike magazine and they paid me for it. I was in love with two vixens, writing and greed. I took greed and went into business long enough to meet my creditors and their hate mail.
911 reminded me we are mortal and why the hell am I doing this. I went back to the other vixen and wrote a book. Many times. Same book, just again and again. I learned the craft and get hate mail from my friends now.
That was step one and it was really hard. Now I am digging through the hard layers of rock and dry clay you would call selling the thing.
I am seeking agents through query letters and they are big recyclers. When I do snag one, they still have to sell it to a guy with enough greed to want to take a chance on me. Then that guy's got to sell it to you and you and you.
So it is, here where the men are handsome and the women are... Crap, that's been taken. This is hard.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

I want to be Tommy



            2011 is where the world bends for me. All Toms are Kat-cool.  
Before today, I was a level four, cape commander on Playstation II Battleberms and Dungeons.
But not anymore. I Google ‘Toms’ and my trusty computer finds a thing called a Peeping Tom. It must be where you start! I bet like, you get like, training from a real Tommy. Who takes you under his wing and says stuff like, “Yo Bros, this is my peeps.”  
I’d be like wearin’ my shades, standing with my hands stuck in my armpits.   
The website says; “You be Peeping Tom! $24.00 Dollar. You download now.”
I open page one.
1. You wait till dark.
2. You sneak under windows.
Like spies or something. Wait till the chicks come out. They must be the ones with the goods; you know, the information on how to be a real Tomcat. I bet they keep it hidden in a drawer or something. That’s why hardly nobody knows how to be a Tommy.
That night, I crawl under Trisha Tittle’s window, sliding along the siding. “Cranium-crack, it’s starting to rain.” I pull my salted-in-the-shell peanuts from my pocket. An old habit from my Donkey-Kong days.
High in the tree, the aroma alerts a squiggle of squirrels high on pistachios. They drop from the sky, bent on bag-snatching my nuts. Landing on my back, they crash me to the ground face-first into the mud.
Tastes like mud-covered nuts.
Out of the window-well, darts a poky of porcupines low on patience. I sit back on my haunches, right on top Pretty Porcupine Patty. I sky rocket upward, land with my fingernails clawing the windowsill.
Inside, Trisha Tittles is pulling something out of her drawer. The Book of Knowledge of Tom. Of course!
I scream as my nails give up their post and I fall back to face Pretty Porcupine Patty and her date, Puddy. Known in the burrows as ‘The Beast from the East Puddles.’
Quills fly through the air and I am doomed, because inside my pocket protector is a laser pointer. The missiles hone in, I scream as squirrels spin through the air picking my pockets.
I am coated eyebrows to britches with mud, shells, sticks, squirrel fur and porcupine quills. I struggle to my knees when Trisha Tittles opens the window and screams “It’s a bear! Call 911! Call 911!”
Mere minutes later, a cage-truck, side-slices across the lawn. Out steps the figure of a man wide at the shoulder, narrow at the mind.
Ernie Shootumfirst, critter-getter and sewage-plant wedding ring recover-er.
Back before the metal plate in his head, between the divorce and the incident with the brake press, simultaneously with the affair over right-of-way on a one-way one-lane bridge, the same day he got the bill for the trailer-on-fire-drove-at-high-speed into the new fire department. (Four Million at $42 per week comes to 1,831 weeks). Yes, that was the day that led him here.
Now standing at the back of the cage-truck he pulls out Betty-Lou. She’s the one, double-barreled, triple-scoped, heat-seeking shotgun.
He shouts out, “Ernie been on a bear hunt before” rattling the bear claws safety-pinned on his yellow slicker.
He whistles, using his missing tooth. It, lost when Louise Littleton tossed the winning beer-barrel toss in Anchorage during the Land-where-men-are-men festival. (No one would tell her she couldn’t enter.)
 “Where ya at Yogi!”  
Lightening strikes the cage truck, runs down Betty-Lou seeking the metal plate in his head. Ernie lights up like a fire fly. Again.  
I run for the street wailing like a little girl who just got Christmas canceled.
Ernie stands smoldering, turns the gun and bellows one down the sidewalk.
The buckshot scorches the porcupine quills hanging out my butt. I go up an octave.
I round the corner and head straight for my playstation II, and my Star Trek screen saver, and my posters of Farah Fawcett and Jabba the Hut. My shot-gunned quills make me look like a fresh plucked chicken.
Tenderly I sink into my chair and type my 2012 resolution; never leave my room; never leave the room again.
Ever.


Sunday, July 10, 2011

The secret is in the position

Here's a short piece I did for my writing group. We did an exercise in observation on State street,  and this is what became of it.

The secret is position. A well placed observatory. I can see The Mexicana, Portifino, and The Popcorn shop. Across the street is coffee claiming the art of the bistro served in liquid genius.
I always bring two crisp Grant’s folded two by two inside the brass money clip. That I use to paint a portrait, not to buy my meal.
Me, silver and sophisticated, beyond the metro sexual, I am everything that a woman desires.
 I watch them, it’s entertainment you can’t buy. Beautiful families walk by. A young mother fulfilling her dreams with her handsome man by her side, two darling dark haired girls in hand.
 Broadway Billy walks past, sliding his feet in oversize gym shoes. Bleary eyed and as I, on the prowl. Billy lives here, always here jimjanging his thoughts. He says he can’t stand a cart. “All those other people on the street got to have a cart.” Billy says, “A tee shirt and a toothbrush is all anybody needs.”
Truth is, he would swap them both for a bottle. I know, I get some wine for him if the mark is right, if she is really good.
You need to watch. To know her story just by the lessons she trails on the sidewalk all around her.
And there she is. She has a lypo suction ass and expensive tits.
She stands outside, hesitates, wishes she had someone to desire her, to decide for her. I see it in her eyes and her little frown. The shyness of a woman taught that a woman alone is hot to trot. And she knows it’s true, for her.
She walks back and forth, window shops the people inside. How desperately she wishes she knew someone, someone from her second life, and she scans all the faces to be sure no one from her first life, when she was married to him, is there. Her stance ready to bound, her hand by her face to cover it.
 Now self-conscious she gathers herself and tells herself she won’t die in the big house, she will come back outside, and have a life.
The Mexicana. Her choice made, she seats herself at the outdoor table. Smiling falsely for her much more than the patrons. The Mark is made.
I stand up and fairly spring to her table.  “Heidi! I sorry, so late.”
She stares at me coldly, frightened. She reaches for her purse but I put my hand on hers. I give her a dreamy look. “Oh. You are not Heidi.” I apologize in Spanish. “Forgive me, I have an American friend and I don’t know the restaurant we meet.”
I wait until she forms a word with her lips.
“I will have to light a candle when I return to Barcelona.” I say.
She hesitates, her eyes following my eyes and I look down, encouraging her to walk her peepers down my neck, along my chest and over my leather pants. Tight leather pants. “To ask forgiveness of my thoughts just now.”
The waiter comes over and I begin to paint.
 I pull out the money clip and peel a bill. “How much is this?” I ask.
She takes my hand and brings it to my chest. I cup it sensually and exhale, making the muscles ripple under the black silk.
She smiles and laughs. “Let me help you.” Her gaze hungry and fresh with the commencement of new found pleasure.
Broadway Billy takes a seat in the gutter across the street. The scraps of the kill nearby.
“I am Enrique, from Barcelona. I am scared I don’t know where I sit.”
“You mean afraid. Afraid you don’t know where you are.” She leans toward me and arches her back, the new assets earning their way. I stare right at them, huddled in the low cut Prada. Trophies held inside a trophy case; to show her how pleased I am with her investment.
Hours pass before I sit down in the gutter next to Billy, hang my head in my hands. He doesn’t ask, he never does. Instead I shake my head, “I had her, and I had her good.” 
“What happened then?” Billy asked.
“She excused herself, and looked hungrily over her shoulder at me. I kissed my hand and blew it to her. I knew right there I had a free meal and some good bedroom games.”
“And?”
“She went inside, came out the far door, and gave me the finger.”
Billy whooped a laugh, quickly changing over to a liquid cough. “Pay up, a bet is a bet.”
I handed over the last Grant. Busted twice at once. Shelia is going to be pissed.

My Goal

Oh future followers;
Bring me the wisdom of the pen, the cultured knife of the editor, and the panache of the wiseass satirist.