literary fiction

Talladega it ain’t, but still

STEVE BIERSDORF

Because I’m less of a social animal these days, interaction with the itinerant masses is confined to my morning commute. I don’t count social media. The last guy I got into an argument with on Twitter, I’m pretty sure was Russian, or a Russian bot if there’s a difference. Unable to refute me intellectually, he (it?) called me a traitor for positing that China was winning the trade war.  

Most of my commute is nineteen miles east on 98. If you look at it from a satellite shot, 98 looks like a cool throughway near water. In patches between trees and subdivisions, it is. You can see across the Sound, to hilly dunes with green vegetation, white sand like scoops of vanilla ice cream, the vegetation like candied syrup ladled atop. Or depending on the zoom, a long, thin, grainy line of blow.

Once I pass the causeway to the beach I know to be in the right lane, during heavy traffic season, which is the school year less holidays and summer vacay. Kids here get way more time off than I ever got. Christmas vacation is a month. They get the entire week off for Thanksgiving.

In the faster moving right lane I feel better about being mired in traffic. The left lane is intended to be faster, and yet it moves slower, reliably. If pressed to explain this phenomenon, I’d say we’re creatures of habit, slaves to our routines. Clinging to the way things were when we formed our habits, always struggling to adapt to change. The left lane is for faster moving traffic. When there isn’t congestion, it normally is. What this tells me is that many of the drivers battling rush hour traffic are my peers. Millennial or Gen Z drivers have no such preconceptions about the left lane. 

I’ll settle on a vehicle in the left lane and watch it in my side-view mirror, to validate that the left lane is the slower, reveling in this knowledge. Today I choose a Honda Element ahead of me. A tannish color, but not tan or khaki. Verve-less, primer beige. I pass it, I’m ahead of it now, watching it recede in the driver’s side mirror, disappearing behind a growing line of vehicles.

I’m east of the Tom Thumb light, where traffic thins out. From here the left lane can be, and often is, the faster of the two. We’re east of the Hurlburt Field overpass, old, overgrown trees with Spanish moss hanging over the road. On the north side of 98 are houses almost anyone can afford. On the right, behind the old trees or interwoven with them are houses on the Sound, big houses with an old Southern feel that almost no one can afford.

In the right lane, I consider changing lanes then don’t, figuring a truck ahead of me in the left lane will clot the lane. I move ahead of the truck. The truck moves ahead of me. I move ahead of the truck. The truck moves ahead of me. It’s a big truck, with a four-poster bed, a Pod truck. They’ve dropped off a Pod, and free of this burden are anxious to rejoin the traffic flow. Pass other vehicles. A shackle removed, a burden unshouldered, free and easy down the road they go. It speeds up close to the vehicle in front of it, tailgating, so if I wanted to change lanes there would be no room for me. Not in front of the Pod truck. 

We’re coming up on the Doolittle light. To get to work, I can turn left at this light or proceed through the light and take the next left on San Cristobal. The Pod truck gets in the left turn lane, to turn onto Doolittle, I get in the left lane it just vacated, where the Pod truck would have been. Through the light, take the next left on San Cristobal, no impediment. I glance back, the Pod truck stuck in line, waiting for the green arrow granting permission to turn left. I win.  

***

In traffic. Trucks pulling enclosed trailers for Quality Plumbing, Clean Dog LLC (portable dog grooming). Plumbers keep their wares under wraps, unlike landscapers or home improvement contractors. A tacit understanding exists, that all things plumbing are best kept unseen and not contemplated. Like what happens to all the excrement. When Tropical Storm Nathan passed through the local wastewater treatment facility dumped one hundred thousand gallons of ‘partially treated’ sewage into the Sound, where there are now relatively high levels of enterococci, bacteria that inhabits the intestinal tracts of humans and animals. Which sparks an idea for a sci-fi novel: The waste management division of NASA blasts so much shit into space that a more technologically- and morally-advanced species is deeply offended, collecting our septic rockets, prying them open, and raining all the shit back down on us. Shit Storm is the working title.

***

Commuting, early on, still west of the Navarre Beach causeway. A white truck passes me on the right. A white Dodge Ram, and on the sides right behind the cab and on the tailgate it says Power Wagon. In front of me is a silver pickup, Super Duty across the tailgate. 

I find the hyperbole to be patronizing. Wagon I associate with station wagon, a fake-wood paneled family transport from back in the day, littered with wrappers and discarded toys, children screaming at each other, parents slumped dejectedly in the front seats. Or a little red wagon for pulling your toddlers and their toys around. Power and wagon are dissociative. And Super Duty, your seventy-thousand-dollar employee capable of pulling something twice its weight.  

There’s no way I’m letting Power Wagon get where it’s going sooner than I get where I’m going. I move to the right lane, and sure enough, as dependable as the sun rising in the east, the right lane moves faster. As I’m closer to the Tom Thumb light, about two-thirds of the way, I get left. Power Wagon is lost behind me. I sleep on my advantage, remaining in the left lane as the right lane moves faster again, and there it is. Power Wagon is a tenth of a mile ahead, two-tenths. I stay left, and sure enough, the right lane bogs down. But then Power Wagon gets in the left lane, four or five vehicles ahead of me. We climb the Hurlburt Field overpass, and I get in the right lane, the ‘slower moving’ lane. Soon the left lane will bog down, as we get closer to the Doolittle turnoff. It always does. Sure enough, I pass Power Wagon. It’s a tenth of a mile back, two-tenths.

I turn left, off of 98, and it’s over.

King of the road, yo.

Usherette

STEVE BIERSDORF

Pulling up to a double wide, parked in a clearing inside a mangrove thicket. An old maroon pickup truck on tires nearly flat, you might make it to the nearest service station to put air in those tires, might, depending on how close the service station is. Walking to the door, knocking. Knocking again. Greeted with the sound of vehement hacking from behind the door, “just a minute,” managed between hacks. Entering the trailer, a deteriorated woman accessorizing with a portable oxygen tank and clear tube to her nostrils. 

“Hi dearie. Come in.” Hack, hack, hack. Full-body wracking. Tears in her rheumy eyes. Kasha thinks about asking “how are you,” but she can’t be doing well, Mrs. Ackerman.

Inside is dark, red drapes over the windows like oversized doilies defraying sunlight. Cigarette smoke has infiltrated everything. When she leaves, wherever she goes the rest of this day, her patients will think she’s been smoking. Chain smoking. Mrs. Ackerman sits in a tartan plaid recliner. Kasha assumes it reclines because there’s a wood lever on the lower left side of it. She sits on the matching sofa that smells like eight thousand smoked cigarettes.  

“How’ve you been?” Mrs. Ackerman asks Kasha with her incinerated voice. On the phone, people mistake her for a man.

“I’m good. What can I do for you today, Mrs. Ackerman? How about a shower?” Mrs. Ackerman smells worse than normal, her hair grease-flattened, split-endy. She’s the only person willing to help Mrs. Ackerman with that shower. Alicia the nurse won’t, her kids, son and daughter, no chance.

“Well, I don’t know.”

Mrs. Ackerman glances longingly at a pack of Virginia Slims on the battered-antique round end table next to her. The ashtray’s been emptied in anticipation of Kasha’s arrival. A glass of something clear, stagnate, probably room-temperature water with a dash of dust particles.

There’s really nothing Kasha can do for her other than to try to make her more comfortable.

“It’d make you feel better. Let’s get you all nice and clean.”

“Can I have a cigarette first?”

Kasha mock frowns at her.

“Will you at least smoke outside?”

She stands, holding out her arms.

“Come on, I’ll help you. It’s a beautiful day. Come outside and enjoy it some.”

***

The Kellers are new. Kasha’s given the address, and instructions from Clemenza, her supervisor and de facto dispatcher for in-home hospice care CNAs and nurses, to “see the Kellers.” She pulls into a middle class neighborhood of ranch homes on slabs, fenced-in patios and enriched-soil backyards, some with screened-in pools. She parks at the curb, goes to the door and rings the bell.

The Kellers answer the door together. Neither looks deathly ill, or anything other than lamé in their golden years. 

“Hi, I’m Kasha.” She takes a step forward but they don’t part and let her through, or invite her in.

“Nice to meet you,” says Mrs. Keller. Mrs. Keller locks on to her eyes and studies her. 

“Let me ask, you…Kasha did you say?”

“Yes, Kasha.”

“Have you been saved?”

“I hope so.”

Mrs. and Mr. Keller exchange a look.

“This is for you.” Mrs. Keller hands her a brochure. “I don’t think we’ll be needing you today. I thank you for stopping by, though, and God bless you. Find Jesus before it’s too late. He’s waiting, but frankly he’s losing patience.”

***

Into the brightly tiled Florida room, Mrs. Calpysa smiling at her as she enters. Mrs. Calpysa sees herself as a younger woman when she sees Kasha, or similarities. Kasha is older than she may realize.

“Kasha! Come here.” She’s lying on the indoor-outdoor sofa, propped up with pillows. She holds out her arm. Kasha hastens. She bends when she gets to her, Mrs. Calpysa taking her some of her hair between thumb and forefinger.

“My. Such beautiful curly blonde hair,” she says, as if seeing it for the first time.   

***

Dani’s out back by the screened-in pool. Kasha lets herself in. Dani’s Lhasa apso, Tammy, hopping up on her hind legs, yapping excitedly, clawing Kasha’s shins. Dani’s in her wheelchair, in the shade of eaves. A glass pitcher with a pale green concoction, almost empty, on a round, mottled-glass table beside her.

“I thought you’d never get here.” She says this like a single, long word. She holds up the glass pitcher.

“Replenish, my Lady.”

Kasha takes the pitcher, heads off to the kitchen.

“And when you’re done with that, please run to Mariachi’s, I’m completely famished. Shrimp quesadilla with black beans and Spanish rice, please. Here.”

Kasha, halfway to the kitchen, pitcher in hand, stops. Dani is holding up her Amex, waving it in the air over her head.

Over the clinking of the ice as she stirs in lime juice, she hears, “Oh, and Tammy needs a bath. She stinks. I’d have thrown her in the pool if I knew she could swim.”

***

Mrs. Young isn’t responsive when she gets there. She knocks on the door, no answer, rings the bell, nothing, so she tries it, it’s open. She lets herself in as she’s done before. The TV is blaring from the bedroom. The View. The women are worked up and shouting over one another.

Mrs. Young is lying in her king-sized bed, propped by several pillows, eyes open, with an open-mouthed amused look.

“Good morning,” Kasha says brightly. Mrs. Young doesn’t respond. Kasha looks for the remote, to turn the sound down. She’s forever turning the sound down. She hates loud TV, commercials especially.

“Mrs. Young?”

Nothing.

“Mrs. Young,” she says loudly, although loud is relative with the ladies on The View in background. “Shit.”

No pulse. She pinches Mrs. Young’s nostrils shut, no reaction.

Mrs. Young’s late husband founded a resort town to the east where they filmed The Truman Show. They’re wealthy. People will be keenly interested to know Mrs. Young has passed. Significant assets will transfer. 

***

His house smells of him, old man, unwashed clothes, accentually of urine. She opens the windows and turns on the ceiling fan. He lives in Florida and he has the windows shut and no A/C. She’s there long enough to get the clothes washed and into the dryer or hung. He has a skin allergy he attributes to electromagnetic hypersensitivity. She washes his clothes with an organic detergent that fails to leave his clothes smelling clean and fresh. 

She knows what Pastor Adams should look like, or did, from his pictures. Him in the Marines, crew cut, big ears and proboscis, toothy grin, calm blue eyes. A black and white of his wedding, in a white jacket tuxedo, feeding his new bride wedding cake. She imagines When I Fall In Love as background music (the Nat King Cole, Natalie Cole sound-mixed duet). It’s the distance from then to now, how optimistic they were about the life ahead of them, coming to this at last.     

First order of business is toiletry. He’ll have soiled his adult diapers. Get those off, get him in the shower if she can, restore a little dignity, make him tolerable to be around. She can see gratitude in his eyes, in his expression, when he’s attended to and settled in, resting on the old sofa near the front window. She can tell he resents the lack of autonomy, and sometimes he resents her because she does these things for him, as if he could do them for himself if it wasn’t for her. His pride is less of a glimmer by now, still flickering. 

With each visit she becomes like a bartender for his thirsty conscience, a repository for his regret. His voice is a hard whisper. Sometimes he’ll exhale as he talks and his words burst forth in what must have been his normal voice.

“When they’re little you just don’t know what they’ll become.” When she next comes, “he never read my books. Not one of them.” His hand rifles through his hair, an old habit, a faint echo of youthful vanity. 

“We haven’t spoken in five years, other than when he calls me on my birthday. Once he called and it wasn’t my birthday. Why are you calling? I asked him. Is it my birthday?” 

“What did you talk about?”

The Pastor turns his head to the side, toward the window, not answering. Something gnawing at him and he’s near the end. Kasha ushering him to eternity’s doorstep. She might be someone to relay these last few messages, as if from the beyond, to whoever they’re intended for. 

The next time he has more to say.

“I wanted them to find their own way. To be their own people. Learning from example. My father never explained things to me, I figured it out for myself. I found my calling. I would say none of them did. They found vocations.” A pause. “They work a lot. One thing I’ll say about them, all three of them, they’re hard workers.” 

When next she arrives, an ambulance is there. Parked in the driveway, lights off, back doors open. Everyone is inside the house. The EMTs have Pastor Adams on a bariatric gurney, ready to wheel him away. Wearing an oxygen mask, he sees Kasha and pulls the mask away from his face so she can hear him. She leans in to hear, turns her head and throws her hair to a side, holding it away from her ear, her other hand lightly on his forearm. Looking imploringly at her, wide-eyed, “tell them to read my books. Do that for me, please. Please.”

First responder

STEVE BIERSDORF

When the non-dairy creamer plant explodes in the Valley Hulk is quickly on scene, walking through a crowd of onlookers on the outskirts and safely at a distance, the crowd parting to let him through, comments at his back as he passes:

“I guess it’s time to drink my coffee black.”

“I’d say. Imagine what that stuff does to your innards.”

“Look, there’s Hulk.”

“What’s he think he’s going to do?”

The Valley is a bad place for this explosion and resulting fire, other industrial facilities in proximity, a developer’s idea of tony, assisted-living apartments that have to be evacuated, one resident expiring from the commotion.

To any of the firefighters or first responders on the scene, no amount of damage from a miscalculated leap can overshadow what they see that day, and they’ll tell anyone who’ll listen. No one sees what the Hulk does beyond the first responders, and the things he does are what make him the ever-loving Hulk. Things he does and does gruffly, that no one else can do, never responding to praise or thanks with anything more than a harrumph, his gruffness taken for modesty, part of the Big Lug mystique.

He controls the fire as it tears across a dry plain of neck-high weeds toward an acetylene production facility, this done by hopping around the front perimeter of the fire and blowing it to a standstill, Hulk able to generate 30-40 MPH gusts of breath, holding up the blaze as firefighters attack it from both flanks.

He lifts a collapsed cinderblock wall, still relatively intact, a wall only a crane could lift, beneath which are several people badly injured though still alive, Hulk carrying each of them to safety. He works through the rubble, casting aside blocks and girders and other decimated sections of the plant until he finds each of the fourteen people killed in the explosion, and carrying out their corpses, holding the corpses limply in his arms, almost reverently, carrying them out one at a time.

The shame of it is no one gets pictures. Of Hulk facing down the angry blaze, hopping frenetically from spot to spot wherever the fire attempts further incursions across the empty field of weeds. Of Hulk lifting the huge wall, maneuvering beneath it, balancing it on his hands, walking with it until it’s clear of the site, negotiating the imbalance of rubble from the decimated plant, uneven mounds of cinder blocks and steel girders with the huge wall aloft, tossing it out of the way. Of sooty Hulk carrying out the injured, of Hulk carrying the corpses, of Hulk going back into the mess time after time until no one alive or dead is left behind. The firefighters and first responders have their stories, and great stories they are. How legends are made. 

For the media, the Hulk angle doesn’t have legs. The patchwork, decades-old plant standards, regulations of volatile chemicals that don’t stack up against those of other countries, lax inspections, testimony in a Senate chamber about how this could have happened in the first place more compelling news.

Hulk and the drones

STEVE BIERSDORF

It’s first thing in the morning lucidity, unadulterated logic of a refreshed mind, reset-button clarity before the obfuscation of another day.

Hummingbirds are not indigenous, their migratory patterns are relatively provincial and they prefer humid subtropical. Not that seeing a hummingbird here is out of the question. And it’s the height of summer. Seeing four of them hovering around a red maple tree is unusual, nothing flowering there, no nectar to drink. If they were availing themselves of a flower bed they would be less conspicuous. They look enough like hummingbirds, though their bills are too short and their movements not fluid and the slightest bit too herky-jerky.

Regarding his reflection in the mirror, his face sleep-bloated, hair pushed from both sides of his head toward the center and pointed upward like a buzz saw, an inexplicable vertical crease beneath his left cheekbone. Downloading the grid map would have been a red flag, Dr. Banner accessing the grid map, and Hulk capable of breathtaking devastation, whatever his motives might be, and the appearance of the hummingbirds. He wonders what they know about what he knows about drones. If they’re insightful, they’ll assume correctly that the answer is plenty, but then they have four hummingbird drones hovering around a red maple and not flowers, betraying the level of competence with which he is dealing. He’s aware everything he does is under surveillance and has been, from the days of windowless vans and thumbnail-sized microphones in the receiver of his handset to now, every email read, every website visited like a muddy footprint, every inbound or outbound call or any text sent or received listened to, read, stored. Something about the drones makes him angry. Maybe it’s the unwarranted suspicion. Maybe it’s that they think he won’t know. 

Jade and Daley Hueman are bitmap images watching from behind a window screen, seeing Hulk backpedaling, lurching, dancing to some fractured beat, swatting at, what, huge flies? Giant mosquitoes?

“What on God’s green earth is he doing?”

“What are those?”

“Birds? Hummingbirds?”

“Why is he attacking them?”

“Maybe they’re attacking him.”

“Where’s my camera?”

Hulk wonders why the hummingbird drones don’t fly away under duress. Maybe the protocol for recalling the drones or overriding a command is more bureaucratic than it should be, or maybe the program’s too new for contingencies. Maybe no one has attacked these drones before and there isn’t precedence. It’s an algorithm missing from the program, making these drones better able to think on their feet. Not that they aren’t quick, impressively so. They dodge his slaps deftly, but they don’t fly away; they dart around him like giant bees, but they don’t attack. They’re half ingenious, prototypes, first or second generation in their evolution. It takes longer than it should, and Hulk feels like he’s waving at holograms. The first one rent into several semi-intact pieces, the next one ricocheting off his open hand and slamming into the wall of his apartment building, embedded in the aluminum siding almost intact. He catches one flush, looks it directly in its peephole, “film this,” and when he crushes it into bits, its guts explode from within his grasp like pulp from ripe fruit.

Hulk and the NFL

STEVE BIERSDORF

Sports talkers fixated on Hulk for a time, which is to say they obsessed about him. Which is to say that all day and late into the evening, turn on the TV and Hulk’s prospects as a professional football player were being contemplated, conjectured, mulled, kneaded, pulverized, tenderized, or bitterly disputed. To intrigued and fascinated conjecturers the subject of Hulk ranging from “good stuff” to “great stuff, compelling stuff, outstanding stuff,” even “amazing stuff,” any kind of stuff putting a capper on the segment before going to commercial. When Hulk became part of the daily sports lexicon he was hard to quit, a nagging, ringing addiction, Hulk the equivalent of two or three packs of cigarettes a day, the subject of Hulk chain-smoked from pre-dawn until late into the night on sports talk programs.

A rumor began, more than likely started by a producer of one of these sports talk programs, out of fresh material, nothing new or breaking, in the dead zone following the previous scandal with nothing probative on the horizon, the middle of baseball season and not far along enough yet for pennant races, past the conclusions of the NBA and NHL seasons and weeks after the NFL draft, weeks before training camp. Everyone in agreement Hulk would make an amazing football player, the conjecture centering on where Hulk would play. Quarterback was out of the question. Or was it? He might have a cannon for an arm, and he could nullify any team’s pass rush. Imagine, you might not even need blockers with Hulk at QB, line up with a center and nine receivers. Hulk would set the West Coast Offense back a hundred years. Why not Hulk as fullback, who couldn’t he block? Opening holes for the team’s tailback to run through, but then why not give the football to Hulk and let him run over anyone foolish enough to try and bring him down? Or Hulk on defense. How about at nose tackle? Forget about running the football against any defense with Hulk anchoring the nose. And how much salary could he command? Imagine the signing bonus, the guaranteed money. Worthy of Croesus, or that modern-day Croesus, Jeff Bezos.

Turn on ESPN and it was Hulk all the time. It got so sports bars began sponsoring drinking games, turn on ESPN and drink whenever they say Hulk, beers served with shot glasses for these occasions and Hulk to thank for brisk bar sales, Hulk also to thank for a spike in summer OWIs.

And how it snowballed from there, someone in player personnel from one team assuming these sports talkers had gotten the rumor from someone in player personnel from another team, possibly a division rival. The focus turned to which team would take the plunge, NFL insiders probing the front offices of various teams and the New York Jets was to be the consensus “best fit,” ample room under the salary cap, a major media market, holes along their defensive front, no running game to speak of, and question marks at the quarterback position. The rumor propagating like snails in a fish tank, after the requisite no comment from the team’s coach and front office, from the general manager and director of pro player personnel on down to the PR flaks, nobody confirming or denying the rumor, by not denying it confirming it in the minds of the many.

Until early on into training camp, a late July morning and the Jets arranging a scrimmage to see exactly what Hulk could do, how he’d fit in, a closed scrimmage with no media until the Jets could get a handle on what they were dealing with.

Hulk lined up at nose tackle, Hulk the only player on the field not in helmet and pads. Hulk shirtless and barefoot in stretch pants past the knee like culottes from a big-and-tall men’s store, Hulk like a big green cartoon in the middle of the defensive front, a man playing with puffy children. Hulk down in a three-point stance, the quarterback barking signals, the ball snapped, the center surging into Hulk as though to move him off the line of scrimmage.

With his large right hand Hulk grabbing a handful of the center’s jersey and front of his pads, pivoting on his back foot as he tossed the center effortlessly behind him, the 300-pound center like a missile fired diagonally across the field and crashing into several tubs of Gatorade, a Gatorade explosion, a tsunami of red Gatorade.

A few holy shits, a Jesus, and several players doubled over, gasping, unable to inhale enough to maintain laughing so hard. They would recall the sound of the big center projectile whistling by, speculating that if he hadn’t been obstructed he might have broken the sound barrier. Said one player: “From when he turned and flung him, when Hulk released the guy from his hand to when the guy slammed into the Gatorade seemed like it was instantaneous. And we’re talking about a distance of 30 to 40 yards and a 300-pound offensive lineman.” 

Before he could say it was fun while it lasted it was over, Hulk’s professional football career relegated to a single play in a training camp scrimmage. The NFL needed a legitimate reason why Hulk couldn’t play other than he was too powerful, and so gamma radiation was quickly added to the league’s list of banned substances.   

An Incapacity for Savoir-Faire

STEVE BIERSDORF

There was much more they were hoping to accomplish. In the back of their thoughts – tumbleweeds blowing by, squinting into the sun and windblown sand, A Gun For Ringo playing in the background – they knew they were wasting their time. No one likes Pho that much. They discover he’s lefthanded, likes his steak medium well (would have thought he liked his food raw or undercooked), dislikes kimchi (a surprise), and eats with Western utensils instead of chopsticks when given the option. Desperate for progress, diagnosing as false positive his use of forks, knives and spoons. 

By his command, Old Uncle strapped to a wall, by wrists and thighs, dismembered with one of those Chinese antiaircraft guns (88 mm, German made) with foot trigger, from World War II, so loud you wear headphones or your hearing is permanently damaged. Sawed off at the shoulders, at the tops of his femurs, the torso and head dropping to the floor with a sticky thud, arms and legs pinned to the wall. 

It would shock you to know he thinks he’s better than you, smarter than you. You assume he assumes you’re superior to him because you’re Caucasian and he’s Asian. He thinks it’s odd that you like him. He sees this as exploitable. If he can’t win, he’ll quit. Never was there the remotest possibility of win-win. 

If Satan were to walk into a crowded café somewhere under guise, strapped with C4, and detonate himself, this would be the anti-Christian equivalent of his dying to propagate sin (as opposed to absolving it), each bit of his flesh an incubus for evil and hate. You and he are two chunks of scattered incubus meat.    

Tagger

STEVE BIERSDORF

On my drives to and from work, I go on hiatus from the morning palaver I normally half-listen to, or have on for noise. I drive with only the hum of the tires or cars going the other way, passing me with a gasp, or the occasional off-key brass section of an approaching train. Sometimes if I have to wait on a train I count the cars. Sometimes the trains are over two hundred cars long, and during drive time. I could write my congressman, suggesting there be restrictions on how long trains can be during drive times. Fifty cars or fewer seems like a reasonable expectation. My congressman is notoriously pro-commerce and with a well-funded hammerlock on his congressional district, so any response is unlikely. Accountability doesn’t apply. 

During a momentary lapse from my hiatus I make a fortuitous discovery. I’m pretty sure it was Marge and Murray and not any of the other him and her morning drive-time concoctions, Bruce and Darla, Lefty and Carole, Johnson and Box. Marge says that would be a cool job, watching TV for a living. Murray says you can go to our page and check it out. On Marge and Murray’s page is a help-wanted advertisement for TV-watching positions in the UK or Ireland, for a well-known subscription service for movies and TV shows. If I’m willing to relocate I’m invited to apply. I think about moving to the UK or Ireland and watching TV for a living. Getting paid to watch TV might be worth the dearth of sunshine or living among people with jacked-up grills and pretentious vocabularies.

My cell phone number is like a porterhouse dropped into a river teeming with piranha. It’s on marketing lists cold-callers ply, the standard lists, not the high net worth lists. Occasionally I take these calls, usually not. Sometimes there’s an automated message telling me I’ve reached my credit limit but that if I call now they can extend it for me, or sometimes the automated message tells me it’s imperative that I call an 888 number immediately. I don’t have any credit cards (if I don’t have the money for it I don’t buy it, which as an American is counterintuitive of me). I’m not sure what’s different this time, but I take the call. 

A woman wants to know if I’m still interested in the TV-watching position I applied for. I’m not sure why we don’t conduct the phone interview right then, but we prearrange a time and date. A recruiter calls me at the scheduled time and gets my basics, then questions me extensively about what I watch on TV. I watch a lot of TV. Even if I’m doing something else I leave the TV on. I go to sleep with the TV on, my remote has a timer and the TV shuts off while I’m asleep. She’s careful not to react to my answers, but I sense she likes the smell of what I’m cooking. Sometimes she interrupts my answers with the next question when my answers are long-winded. I’m told my responses will be carefully considered and if they’re interested in moving forward they’ll contact me. On my drive home, I wonder if they have road construction in the UK or Ireland. I’d be willing to trade our road construction for their dentists, but not if I’m moving there.

A few weeks later and I recognize the same area code when the next call comes. The caller introduces himself as Jim Goodlatte. I ask if an affinity for lattes is genetic predisposition, and he chuckles as if he’s heard this a thousand times. Only good ones, he says, his stock rejoinder. He has only one question, why I want to be a Tagger, which is what a professional TV watcher is called. Who wouldn’t?  I ask. He’s coming to town, and wants to meet face to face. He schedules me for an interview at a local hotel. He’ll be interviewing people for two days, interviews on the hour. He instructs me to go online and take a personality test in the interim. 

The personality test consists of side-by-side responses to a single question, in rectangular boxes, with rounded corners, in big font and simple sentences, nothing so mind-bending as a double negative. At the outset I’m warned that it takes approximately forty-five minutes to complete the test and that I should set this time aside. I’m to go with the response that most closely matches how I am, or how I self-actualize. I’m encouraged to answer instinctively and not overthink my responses. The questions have nothing to do with watching TV. An example: When confronted with a difficult situation do I 1) trust myself to come up with the appropriate solution or 2) do I prefer to first gather input from others? Offended by these inane questions, I decide to be contradictory. I choose the same or similar response to sets of oppositely intended questions. I tear through the test in little more than ten minutes. 

And then I’m back at work, trying not to think about this opportunity, but that I might get out has me in a good mood. Watching TV in the UK or Ireland is an exciting proposition that I’m totally up for, I decide. A customer is telling me about the vehicles he’s modified. He’s a parts manager at an Audi dealership. He’s a nice guy, but he’s the tenth or eleventh customer of the day. I’m thinking about how I can get him to sign two more forms and break out my disinfectant wipes while he’s telling me about how he tripled the torque output of his Ram truck. I smile suddenly and he smiles back like I’m smiling at something he said, like discussing torque ratios really tickles my balls.

    

Singha

STEVE BIERSDORF

He usually parked at the edge of a weedy vacant lot for sale that would soon belong to someone, adjacent to a new home under construction. It was early, and he desired to get the day started right with a brisk walk. Atop a ladder was a man in a white t-shirt, injecting nails with a nail gun as if he was stapling the house together. As he was walking by the man looked down at him and said something, what, quite, he didn’t catch, only the word “local” and a number, and it was a question judging from the tone.

He noticed they were dressed similarly, he also in a white t-shirt and jeans, though his white t-shirt was an advertisement for Singha beer, a souvenir from his one visit to Bangkok, there for a week and a half, where he had unprotected sex with a deaf Thai hooker who started menstruating mid-copulation. And so he came back with the Singha t-shirt and six-months’ wait to see if he was HIV positive, an interminable wait for the results in those early, terrifying days of HIV. Since he wasn’t conversant in sign language, the deaf hooker had communicated with him by pointing and gesturing and making nonsensical noises. When she wanted to get paid, she pointed to his wallet and grunted. She observed as he counted off the bills, and when he didn’t give her enough Baht, she grunted with more emphasis. He’d felt entitled to a discount.

“Sure,” was all he could come up with, and the man on the ladder pointed toward the front of the skeletal house and he heard the man say, “start cutting those boards. And make sure you wear the safety goggles.” Appreciative that the man on the ladder was concerned for his well-being, he came into the front yard and there was a single board lying across two sawhorses, other boards piled nearby, one by sixes if he had to guess, the safety goggles hanging from a protruding shoulder of one of the sawhorses. After affixing the goggles he found the hand-held circular saw and began cutting, one board after the other, slicing easily through them and a pile of sawdust growing steadily like an ambitious anthill beneath where he cut.

A while later and the man had descended from the ladder, and he was trying unsuccessfully to shout over the zinging metallic whine of the circular saw. From the man’s expression, he appeared upset. He took his finger off the saw trigger to hear what the man might have to say.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“I’d think that would be fairly obvious. By the way, I’m getting paid for this, right? It’s not that I mind lending a hand, but I did have other plans.”

“I mean, what the fuck are you doing to this wood? This is all the wood we have. We’re on a schedule.”

“I’m cutting the boards in a herringbone pattern. For never having used one of these things,” looking slightly maniacal or overzealous with the safety goggles still on, he hefted the circular saw aloft and shook it for emphasis, the man staring at the Singha advertisement on his t-shirt, coming to a realization. “For never having been trained and thrown to the wolves, this is precise work if I say so myself.”

Ass Ventriloquism

STEVE BIERSDORF

On a walking/bike path through suburbia, eavesdropping on a couple twenty feet in front of him. They seemed unaware of him behind them, and he measured their walking cadence, matching it perfectly so as not to gain any ground and not to lose any, stay with earshot but not encroach, hanging back in their fuzzy periphery.

“It was Cinco de Mayo, so they were the Cerveceros instead of the Brewers, on their uniforms, in honor of the day, I suppose,” the woman was saying, alternately watching her feet take one step after the other, a mechanical process that might seem to her like she was detached from. Right foot and left foot trading places in the lead, and glancing at her male companion to check his reaction to anything she might say. They were confidantes and between the two of them there were suppositions aplenty.

“They have to appeal to their Hispanic fan base I suppose,” said he, as if she needed a mansplanation, or was angling for his usual pithy summation.

He would do that, eavesdrop, unrepentantly. If people were speaking loudly enough in his presence they were inviting him to listen, and they were intentionally loud to attract an audience so he was only obliging them. And anyway, they had nothing to worry about if they were being unintentionally loud and invidious. Most of what he overheard didn’t hold his attention for long. 

“Harley-Davidson was doing some kind of promotion, so just before the start of the game the Racing Sausages raced Harleys along the outfield warning track, and when I say race, I don’t think they broke thirty. Naturally the Chorizo won that race, and then they held the regular sausage race during the game, surprise, the Chorizo wins again. Seriously, would anyone have cared if the Hot Dog or the Italian won a race, or the Bratwurst? Would the Hispanics, Hispanic people, would they really have been offended…”

“…given a mierda…”

“…if the Chorizo didn’t win both races? Isn’t Cerveceros enough of a tribute?”

“How many Hispanics go to their games, realistically?”

“Exactly.”

He watched their feet as they spoke, feet taking them confidently and with determination to wherever they were going. She was wearing white running shoes with pink trim, upturned at the nose of them, the pink sole extended up over the front like a tongue trying to taste something on the upper lip of her shoes. His running shoes were glittery cloth, splayed to near bursting at the sides, as if he had wide feet, ever widening, as if the inevitable weight gain was causing his feet of clay to splay out to toed flapjacks, the breadth of his feet threatening to defeat his shoes. The outsoles were more worn as though he walked on the outer edges of his feet, as if he customarily walked on hot coals.

He watched their asses when they would speak, as if when they said anything they were really talking out of their asses within their shorts and lip-synching. His ass appeared flat and muscle-less beneath the long, baggy shorts, an ass pounded flat from sitting, her ass like two pumpkins beneath gym teacher shorts, shorts from years ago she could confound by still fitting into them, if gruntingly, shimmying, holding her breath, sucking in her gut and lamenting the inevitable spread of her hips. 

Drive Time

STEVE BIERSDORF

Orange construction barrels bordering either side of the freeway in tidy rows, equidistantly spaced, an orderly battalion waiting patiently for construction to break out. A woman I know, her husband works for the highway department and he moves them around. He never goes back for more, wherever more are. He moves them from one place to another. With the same spirit of decorum as calling shit ‘plant nutrition,’ orange construction barrels are known as ‘traffic safety drums.’ Sometimes they block off a lane with traffic safety drums when there’s no construction.

Last summer I changed my route to work three times to circumvent roads I normally take in varying states of disassembly. Sunbaked dudes in white hard hats and reflective vests of a florescent color somewhere between green and yellow, with their walkie-talkies holding a pole with STOP on one side and SLOW on the other. When they turn the sign to SLOW sometimes they think I’m going too fast and make frantic downward arm gestures for me to slow down. Everyone knows fines are double in a work zone, so the way I see it, it’s my risk to take. If there was anyone in these work zones I’d appreciate their concern.

On my commute the radio is on, sports talk when my other options are drive-time personalities or conservative talk radio. Apparently someone making $10 million or $15 million a year can be underpaid. They talk about how unfair it is that collegiate athletes aren’t paid, collegiate athletes on scholarship as a disadvantaged social class. I think little about these things the right-wing pundits rail on because I have my life to tend to and these things seem far removed from my reality. Distractions more than injustices. Things to get good and angry about that have little to do with me or that I have no control over.