By John G. Hartness © 2010
Chapter 1
I sensed him before I saw him. I always do. I was just sitting there, minding my own business, playing a little blackjack when I felt his presence over my right shoulder.
“Hi, Lucky.”
“Big A.”
I hate that. He always has to go there right away. And he’s supposed to be subtle. Ass.
“Been here long?” He asked.
“A while. Playing a little cards. You?”
“Well, you know me, Big A, I’ve got a place here. I love this town. Everything about it just calls to me.”
“Yeah, I think I heard that somewhere.”
I finally glanced over and gave him the satisfaction of a look. A new look for him this time around – red riding leathers, no helmet of course, black boots, black hair tied back in a ponytail and sunglasses. The sunglasses were kind of a given, I suppose.
“Nice outfit. You look like one of the cavemen in that insurance commercial.”
“Thanks. You, as always, look well put-together.”
I’ve never been sure how to take his compliments, and I wasn’t in Las Vegas to think, so I just went for face value. I was wearing a worn t-shirt I’d picked up at a roadside store somewhere in Montana sometime in the past, and a thrift store work shirt with the “arry” over the left breast pocket. I don’t know if it used to say “Larry” or “Harry.” Neither one was my name; I just gave Goodwill $2.99 for the shirt.
“Thanks.”
For once he didn’t press the issue and stopped talking, just sat beside me and slid the dealer a hundred. So we played blackjack together for a while. Me playing green chips, him moving quickly from green to black to purple all the way up to the yellow $1,000 chips in a couple of short hours. He lost just enough hands to keep from getting thrown out, but not quite enough to keep the eye in the sky from getting suspicious.
“A, looks like we’ve got company.”
“You got a mouse in your pocket? I’m not the one that’s been sitting here counting cards for three hours.”
“Yeah, but I’m not the one who took twenty grand in chips out of my safe deposit box this morning. Chips, I might add, that came from a casino that was demolished a couple decades ago.”
I hate that he always has more information than he rightfully should. I suppose, to give him his due, that he does have people literally everywhere in this town. But it’s still annoying. I’ll grant that visiting a box that hasn’t been touched in 25 years might raise an eyebrow or two, but I’m still blaming the attention of the lummox in the off-the-rack suit on my unwanted companion’s unabashed card-counting. Either way, the brutes in suits might have had a few questions for me that I wasn’t fully prepared to answer at exactly that moment, so I looked at my old pal Lucky.
“Keys?”
“Might I suggest California? I hear San Francisco’s nice this time of year, and you know how much you love seafood. Why not check out Fisherman’s Wharf, visit Alcatraz, you know, see the sights a little. My bike’s out front. You’ll know which one. You owe me.”
“We’d have to be even for me to owe you. And we’re not even. This doesn’t even come close. Nowhere near to close.”
“You really know how to wound a guy, Big A.”
“Bite me.” With that, I grabbed Lucky’s keys from the table, tossed a green chip to the dealer and headed for the cage. I spotted another security goon between me and the cage, so I decided on discretion as the better part of valor, tossed a couple grand in chips into the air and used the resulting pandemonium to make my less-than-subtle way to the exit. As I glanced back towards the table where I had left Lucky, I noticed that he and the two guards were having a beer and yukking it up like long-lost frat brothers. Which for all I knew, they might have been.
He was right; I picked out his bike right away. It was a big, loud ostentatious black thing with flames painted on the gas tank. Subtle. I swear the thing looked hungry. I put the key in the ignition (an apple key chain? Really?) and headed South down the Strip, putting California firmly behind me as I remembered Lucky suggesting it. I’m not a contrary person by nature, but I learned a long time ago that it was a pretty safe bet to do the opposite of anything that Lucky wanted me to do.
Okay, so looking back on it, maybe opening a 25-year-old lock box wasn’t exactly the most under the radar move I could have made. I know that people take out safe deposit boxes in this town all the time. But not all of them pay the rent on those boxes with automatic debits from numbered accounts. And I just had the bad luck to run into the same security guard that rented me the box the first time, on his first day of the job 25 years ago. Little bugger had a good memory, that’s for sure. And I guess I hadn’t changed much since then. Ok, make that not at all. But I’m still blaming Lucky. After all, he’s been taking the blame for things for millennia now, so what’s one more little incident?
Maybe I should back up a little. This is as good a time as any for introductions. My name is Adam. No, I don’t have a last name. Yes, that Adam. No really, you can feel for the rib if you like. But it’s better if you don’t. I’m ticklish.
John Hartness is a writer from Charlotte, NC. He's the author of The Chosen.
Showing posts with label John Hartness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Hartness. Show all posts
June 01, 2011
May 03, 2011
Cheers
By John G. Hartness © 2011
So I woke up hung over. Again. With no idea of where I was. Again. With a woman whose name I didn’t remember asleep on my arm. Again. This was getting to be a habit, one that wouldn’t be so bad if there was anything good to be said for it. So I slowly and gently slid my arm out from under my sleeping bedmate, trying like hell not to wake her, and started the search for my clothes.
As I scanned the bedroom for my clothes I began to take stock of the room and the woman who belonged there as obviously as I did not. She was stunning, a brunette goddess of the professional set rather than the emaciated, coke-strewn model set. She looked a little like the best bits of Sandra Bullock, Eva Longoria and Angelina Jolie all got tossed into a blender and poured out onto 800-thread count sheets of Egyptian cotton. One long, long leg was tangled outside the sheets, and the comforter was thrown halfway across the room to land partially atop the hardwood dresser. No Ikea for this lady’s boudoir, that was for sure. I wondered briefly where I had met her, and wished I could remember what line I used to score a night with a woman that beautiful. My best pickups are always vampires, they never last past daybreak.
It took a few minutes, but I found everything. Well, almost everything. Socks are the enemy to nameless, faceless trysts. They treat morning-after retreats like laundry day and always end up with at least one MIA. So I carried my shoes and crept out her front door with one sock on, and slipped into my shoes on the front stoop of her building. I thought I had gotten away clean when I heard a window open above me.
“You forgot something.” I heard from the third floor. I looked up, and she was leaning out of the window mostly wrapped in a sheet, her hair spilling down over her left eye like an over-eroticized Jessica Rabbit. One amazing breast was playing peek-a-boo as she reared her arm back and threw my sock at my head. I caught it, heard her mutter “asshole” under her breath and slam the window as I shoved the sock into the front pocket of my pants.
I found a couple of crumpled dollar bills in the pocket with the sock, and bought a cup of coffee from a cart on the corner. I stood there for a moment and squinted into the sunlight, trying to get my bearings. It looked like I’d ended up all the way over in Queens, a pretty good feat since I knew I didn’t start last night with enough cash on hand for that kind of cab fare. And that was not the kind of woman who spent much time on the subway. I checked my pockets and found my wallet (devoid of cash), cell phone (dead battery) and a claim check for valet parking on the Upper East Side.
Odd, seeing as how I don’t own a car. And can’t afford to eat anywhere on the Upper East Side. My sunglasses were still in my shirt pocket so I slid them on, slugged down the last of the coffee to get the cat-shit hangover taste out of my mouth, and dug my MetroCard out of the folds of my wallet. I started down the steps to the subway, peeking at the dates on the newspapers trying to figure out how many days I’d lost this time.
Looked like it really was Sunday, so just a few hours for a change. Maybe things were getting a little better, after all. Of course, as soon as I thought that, I slipped on the steps leading down to the platform and landed on my ass in a puddle of puke. So much for things getting better. Oh well, looking on the bright side, at least I didn’t have any coffee left to spill on my crotch.
A half hour on the subway later, and I was staggering up the steps to my oh-so-humble abode. The door was slightly ajar, which was not how I had left things, so it was with a certain level of caution that I entered my foyer. Foyer has always been a generous term for the eight feet of hallway between my front door and kitchen, but it’s the term we have, so there it is. My morning went from bad to worse when I turned the corner and saw, standing in the squalor that is my kitchen, my worst nightmare.
“Hi, Ma.” My mother, the matriarch of all my familial nightmares, stood in my kitchen wearing an expression that can only be described as utter, blinding, nauseated disgust. She was, as always, immaculately turned out in her Sunday best, this time a solemn black dress with a black hat and black patent leather shoes that had been polished to within an inch of their life. Under the veil of the too-small dress I could see the outline of a girdle that was stretched far beyond the laws of physics, and her plump feet were spilling up and out of the tops of pumps that hadn’t fit since before I’d had my first drink of whiskey. And I’m Irish, if that gives you an idea of how long ago that was.
“Jacob? You look like shit.”
“Good to see you, too, Ma. What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for you, obviously. Or did you forget?”
I decided to avoid the slightly ridiculous “forget what?” and opted to go for fewer syllables. “Yes.”
The lines around my mother’s eyes tightened, and her mouth looked even more like she’d bitten into something sour, but she only said “I figured as much. Well, get cleaned up. There’s still time to make it if you don’t spend too much time on your hair.” Nice, Ma. Pure class.
“Alright, have a seat while I go take a shower and put on some cleaner clothes.”
“I’ll stand. There’s no telling what’s growing on your sofa.”
“Whatever. I’ll be out in a few minutes.”
I headed off to the bathroom, picking up random pieces of clothing along the way. Most of them passed the sniff test, so I felt pretty good about my ensemble as I warmed up the shower. Polo shirt, jeans without any obvious or identifiable stains, socks that matched and didn’t have any holes in them, and a blazer just in case whatever I had forgotten was particularly formal. I scrubbed furiously for a couple of minutes and then let the water run over me, loosening up tight shoulders and banishing the final remnants of last night. My hamstrings were tight, there were some scratches along my back, and it felt like I might have pulled something around my ribcage. I thought briefly that I had to start taking a video camera with me when I went drinking, just for the health insurance folks.
I shaved my face, then looked at the stubble on my head and took an extra minute to shave that, too. I started losing my hair in high school, and I’ve kept it shaved since then. Just makes it easier. But my hat budget is a little ridiculous. I took care of the rest of my morning business, including a bowel movement that would have made me really reconsider what I’d eaten for dinner, except that I couldn’t remember what that was, or if I’d had any non-liquid dinner at all. Anyway, it felt like wasabi. Probably chased sushi with Jagermeister again. I never learn.
I walked back into the den and sat down on a pizza box on the sofa to put my shoes on. The one guarantee in my place: there’s no pizza in the pizza boxes, so you can sit on one without getting anchovies on your ass. It’s good to have a few constants.
“Alright, Ma. I’m ready. Now where are we going?” I stood in the doorway, holding it open for her.
“You really don’t remember?” She seemed shocked by this, and a little more upset than normal. She came to me in the doorway and put a hand on my chest.
“No, Ma. I really don’t remember. So where are we going?” My head was starting to hurt, and I couldn’t blame it all on the Jager. My mother always brought out the migraine in me.
“We’re going to the church. It’s your cousin Samuel’s funeral today.”
Sammy? Fuck. I guess I hadn’t been drunk nearly long enough. I staggered back a little as the memories hit me like a freight train. Or like a city bus, which is what happened to Sammy. Little shit was listening to his iPod and not looking where he was going like always, but this time I wasn’t around to grab his arm and pull him back onto the curb like I’d done so many times before. Oh, I was there alright, I just wasn’t paying any more attention than Sammy was, my gaze having flickered to the tight navy slacks on a meter maid in the half-second it took for my cousin to make the transition from pedestrian to statistic.
“Oh.” I said in a small voice. I looked at my mother’s damp eyes and realized I was going to have to fortify myself for the day ahead. I lurched into what passes for a kitchen in the city these days, grabbed a bottle of Stoli out of the freezer and knocked back a couple of deep swallows before I came up for air. Then I grabbed a sports bottle out of the cabinet, poured the rest of the Stoli into it and dumped a couple of packets of orange Crystal Light powder into it.
“What in holy hell do you think you’re doing?” My mother asked from the threshold of the kitchen. She looked like she couldn’t decide what was more disgusting - me, my concoction or the counters. Probably a close contest at that.
“It’s a new invention, Ma. I call it Tang. All the astronauts love it.” I reached into the pocket of my jacket, put on my sunglasses and headed toward the door. “Come along, mother, let’s go face the family.”
The funeral was a hazy, weepy affair, conducted in the surreal sunshine of the ridiculously lovely and expensive Woodlawn Cemetery. My family has had a vault there since sometime in the Dickensian past of my great-grandfather’s Industrial Revolution fortune. I stood near the back of the gathered mourners and ticked off the categories as I noted their inhabitants. There was the family nearest the casket, my aunts, uncles and Grandmother, sitting stoic in her best imitation of grief. Cousins of various degrees filled the rest of the seats, along with some childhood friends of my Aunt Elizabeth, Sammy’s mother. Clumped around under the awning were the co-workers, college buddies and an ex-girlfriend or two. The people who didn’t really want to be there, but felt obligated by either old ties or fiduciary interests.
There were a couple of folks like me, the fringe-hangers orbiting solo around the solar system of grief and regrets. If Sammy’s coffin was the sun, with his parents and my mother Mercury and Venus, then I was a moon of Uranus, just barely tangential enough to be part of the gathering. The priest was finishing up his last tired homage to Sammy’s now-immortal goodness when I spotted Janet, floating even further from the asteroid belt of cousins than me, Pluto to my Umbriel. I drifted over to her as the assemblage broke up, forgoing my chance to throw a fistful of dirt on my best friend’s eternal box.
“Hey.” I said as I walked up to her, not sure how to begin a conversation at a funeral with my ex-girlfriend who left me to marry my now-lead-shrouded cousin and then left him to be an Upper East Side stiletto heel-wearing lesbian fashionista.
“Hey.” She wore sunglasses that gave a vague impression of ski slopes, but her mouth was pinched and her posture tired.
“You okay?” I asked, surprised to find myself actually caring about the answer.
“No.” She said. When she looked at me again, she took off her glasses and I could see tears in her eyes. I thought she’d had her tear ducts removed at puberty, so inured was she to the heartaches she left in her wake like the Typhoid Mary of Craigslist’s Missed Connections.
I did something totally out of character then, something so unlike me that it seemed for a minute like I’d stepped out of my skin, and was just an observer as someone who more closely resembled a normal human being set his sport bottle full of firewater down on a nearby headstone and took Janet in my arms and held her while she fell apart under a flowing dogwood tree with workmen lowering my cousin’s coffin into the ground behind us. We stood there for a few long moments, just holding each other and crying like we’d lost something precious, which we had, and let the rest of the world flow around us back to their town cars and limos.
After we’d cried ourselves dry, we pulled back and assessed the damage to her makeup and my detached reputation, and broke up laughing and crying again at the ridiculousness of it all.
“Of all the people...” she started.
“Yeah, I never thought...” I continued.
“That it would be you that set me off.” she finished.
“I have that effect on women.” I responded with a sideways smirk.
“I remember.” She said, not smiling, but not angry either. “You gonna offer a lady a drink?” She asked, reaching for my bottle.
“This shit? Not on your life. Besides, I’m quitting.” I said, holding the bottle out of her reach.
“Yeah, as of when?” She laughed as she reached for the bottle.
“As of now,” I said. With that, I turned and chucked the sports bottle in a perfect spiral to land with a hollow thud on Sammy’s casket just before the workmen started dumping backhoes full of dirt onto it. I looked down at Janet, who was nestled in the crook of my right arm like she’d never left, then looked back at the hole in the ground and the confused groundskeepers, and turned to walk up the hill to my ride.
“Cheers, Sammy. Cheers.”
John Hartness is a writer from Charlotte, NC. He's the author of Hard Day's Knight.
So I woke up hung over. Again. With no idea of where I was. Again. With a woman whose name I didn’t remember asleep on my arm. Again. This was getting to be a habit, one that wouldn’t be so bad if there was anything good to be said for it. So I slowly and gently slid my arm out from under my sleeping bedmate, trying like hell not to wake her, and started the search for my clothes.
As I scanned the bedroom for my clothes I began to take stock of the room and the woman who belonged there as obviously as I did not. She was stunning, a brunette goddess of the professional set rather than the emaciated, coke-strewn model set. She looked a little like the best bits of Sandra Bullock, Eva Longoria and Angelina Jolie all got tossed into a blender and poured out onto 800-thread count sheets of Egyptian cotton. One long, long leg was tangled outside the sheets, and the comforter was thrown halfway across the room to land partially atop the hardwood dresser. No Ikea for this lady’s boudoir, that was for sure. I wondered briefly where I had met her, and wished I could remember what line I used to score a night with a woman that beautiful. My best pickups are always vampires, they never last past daybreak.
It took a few minutes, but I found everything. Well, almost everything. Socks are the enemy to nameless, faceless trysts. They treat morning-after retreats like laundry day and always end up with at least one MIA. So I carried my shoes and crept out her front door with one sock on, and slipped into my shoes on the front stoop of her building. I thought I had gotten away clean when I heard a window open above me.
“You forgot something.” I heard from the third floor. I looked up, and she was leaning out of the window mostly wrapped in a sheet, her hair spilling down over her left eye like an over-eroticized Jessica Rabbit. One amazing breast was playing peek-a-boo as she reared her arm back and threw my sock at my head. I caught it, heard her mutter “asshole” under her breath and slam the window as I shoved the sock into the front pocket of my pants.
I found a couple of crumpled dollar bills in the pocket with the sock, and bought a cup of coffee from a cart on the corner. I stood there for a moment and squinted into the sunlight, trying to get my bearings. It looked like I’d ended up all the way over in Queens, a pretty good feat since I knew I didn’t start last night with enough cash on hand for that kind of cab fare. And that was not the kind of woman who spent much time on the subway. I checked my pockets and found my wallet (devoid of cash), cell phone (dead battery) and a claim check for valet parking on the Upper East Side.
Odd, seeing as how I don’t own a car. And can’t afford to eat anywhere on the Upper East Side. My sunglasses were still in my shirt pocket so I slid them on, slugged down the last of the coffee to get the cat-shit hangover taste out of my mouth, and dug my MetroCard out of the folds of my wallet. I started down the steps to the subway, peeking at the dates on the newspapers trying to figure out how many days I’d lost this time.
Looked like it really was Sunday, so just a few hours for a change. Maybe things were getting a little better, after all. Of course, as soon as I thought that, I slipped on the steps leading down to the platform and landed on my ass in a puddle of puke. So much for things getting better. Oh well, looking on the bright side, at least I didn’t have any coffee left to spill on my crotch.
A half hour on the subway later, and I was staggering up the steps to my oh-so-humble abode. The door was slightly ajar, which was not how I had left things, so it was with a certain level of caution that I entered my foyer. Foyer has always been a generous term for the eight feet of hallway between my front door and kitchen, but it’s the term we have, so there it is. My morning went from bad to worse when I turned the corner and saw, standing in the squalor that is my kitchen, my worst nightmare.
“Hi, Ma.” My mother, the matriarch of all my familial nightmares, stood in my kitchen wearing an expression that can only be described as utter, blinding, nauseated disgust. She was, as always, immaculately turned out in her Sunday best, this time a solemn black dress with a black hat and black patent leather shoes that had been polished to within an inch of their life. Under the veil of the too-small dress I could see the outline of a girdle that was stretched far beyond the laws of physics, and her plump feet were spilling up and out of the tops of pumps that hadn’t fit since before I’d had my first drink of whiskey. And I’m Irish, if that gives you an idea of how long ago that was.
“Jacob? You look like shit.”
“Good to see you, too, Ma. What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for you, obviously. Or did you forget?”
I decided to avoid the slightly ridiculous “forget what?” and opted to go for fewer syllables. “Yes.”
The lines around my mother’s eyes tightened, and her mouth looked even more like she’d bitten into something sour, but she only said “I figured as much. Well, get cleaned up. There’s still time to make it if you don’t spend too much time on your hair.” Nice, Ma. Pure class.
“Alright, have a seat while I go take a shower and put on some cleaner clothes.”
“I’ll stand. There’s no telling what’s growing on your sofa.”
“Whatever. I’ll be out in a few minutes.”
I headed off to the bathroom, picking up random pieces of clothing along the way. Most of them passed the sniff test, so I felt pretty good about my ensemble as I warmed up the shower. Polo shirt, jeans without any obvious or identifiable stains, socks that matched and didn’t have any holes in them, and a blazer just in case whatever I had forgotten was particularly formal. I scrubbed furiously for a couple of minutes and then let the water run over me, loosening up tight shoulders and banishing the final remnants of last night. My hamstrings were tight, there were some scratches along my back, and it felt like I might have pulled something around my ribcage. I thought briefly that I had to start taking a video camera with me when I went drinking, just for the health insurance folks.
I shaved my face, then looked at the stubble on my head and took an extra minute to shave that, too. I started losing my hair in high school, and I’ve kept it shaved since then. Just makes it easier. But my hat budget is a little ridiculous. I took care of the rest of my morning business, including a bowel movement that would have made me really reconsider what I’d eaten for dinner, except that I couldn’t remember what that was, or if I’d had any non-liquid dinner at all. Anyway, it felt like wasabi. Probably chased sushi with Jagermeister again. I never learn.
I walked back into the den and sat down on a pizza box on the sofa to put my shoes on. The one guarantee in my place: there’s no pizza in the pizza boxes, so you can sit on one without getting anchovies on your ass. It’s good to have a few constants.
“Alright, Ma. I’m ready. Now where are we going?” I stood in the doorway, holding it open for her.
“You really don’t remember?” She seemed shocked by this, and a little more upset than normal. She came to me in the doorway and put a hand on my chest.
“No, Ma. I really don’t remember. So where are we going?” My head was starting to hurt, and I couldn’t blame it all on the Jager. My mother always brought out the migraine in me.
“We’re going to the church. It’s your cousin Samuel’s funeral today.”
Sammy? Fuck. I guess I hadn’t been drunk nearly long enough. I staggered back a little as the memories hit me like a freight train. Or like a city bus, which is what happened to Sammy. Little shit was listening to his iPod and not looking where he was going like always, but this time I wasn’t around to grab his arm and pull him back onto the curb like I’d done so many times before. Oh, I was there alright, I just wasn’t paying any more attention than Sammy was, my gaze having flickered to the tight navy slacks on a meter maid in the half-second it took for my cousin to make the transition from pedestrian to statistic.
“Oh.” I said in a small voice. I looked at my mother’s damp eyes and realized I was going to have to fortify myself for the day ahead. I lurched into what passes for a kitchen in the city these days, grabbed a bottle of Stoli out of the freezer and knocked back a couple of deep swallows before I came up for air. Then I grabbed a sports bottle out of the cabinet, poured the rest of the Stoli into it and dumped a couple of packets of orange Crystal Light powder into it.
“What in holy hell do you think you’re doing?” My mother asked from the threshold of the kitchen. She looked like she couldn’t decide what was more disgusting - me, my concoction or the counters. Probably a close contest at that.
“It’s a new invention, Ma. I call it Tang. All the astronauts love it.” I reached into the pocket of my jacket, put on my sunglasses and headed toward the door. “Come along, mother, let’s go face the family.”
The funeral was a hazy, weepy affair, conducted in the surreal sunshine of the ridiculously lovely and expensive Woodlawn Cemetery. My family has had a vault there since sometime in the Dickensian past of my great-grandfather’s Industrial Revolution fortune. I stood near the back of the gathered mourners and ticked off the categories as I noted their inhabitants. There was the family nearest the casket, my aunts, uncles and Grandmother, sitting stoic in her best imitation of grief. Cousins of various degrees filled the rest of the seats, along with some childhood friends of my Aunt Elizabeth, Sammy’s mother. Clumped around under the awning were the co-workers, college buddies and an ex-girlfriend or two. The people who didn’t really want to be there, but felt obligated by either old ties or fiduciary interests.
There were a couple of folks like me, the fringe-hangers orbiting solo around the solar system of grief and regrets. If Sammy’s coffin was the sun, with his parents and my mother Mercury and Venus, then I was a moon of Uranus, just barely tangential enough to be part of the gathering. The priest was finishing up his last tired homage to Sammy’s now-immortal goodness when I spotted Janet, floating even further from the asteroid belt of cousins than me, Pluto to my Umbriel. I drifted over to her as the assemblage broke up, forgoing my chance to throw a fistful of dirt on my best friend’s eternal box.
“Hey.” I said as I walked up to her, not sure how to begin a conversation at a funeral with my ex-girlfriend who left me to marry my now-lead-shrouded cousin and then left him to be an Upper East Side stiletto heel-wearing lesbian fashionista.
“Hey.” She wore sunglasses that gave a vague impression of ski slopes, but her mouth was pinched and her posture tired.
“You okay?” I asked, surprised to find myself actually caring about the answer.
“No.” She said. When she looked at me again, she took off her glasses and I could see tears in her eyes. I thought she’d had her tear ducts removed at puberty, so inured was she to the heartaches she left in her wake like the Typhoid Mary of Craigslist’s Missed Connections.
I did something totally out of character then, something so unlike me that it seemed for a minute like I’d stepped out of my skin, and was just an observer as someone who more closely resembled a normal human being set his sport bottle full of firewater down on a nearby headstone and took Janet in my arms and held her while she fell apart under a flowing dogwood tree with workmen lowering my cousin’s coffin into the ground behind us. We stood there for a few long moments, just holding each other and crying like we’d lost something precious, which we had, and let the rest of the world flow around us back to their town cars and limos.
After we’d cried ourselves dry, we pulled back and assessed the damage to her makeup and my detached reputation, and broke up laughing and crying again at the ridiculousness of it all.
“Of all the people...” she started.
“Yeah, I never thought...” I continued.
“That it would be you that set me off.” she finished.
“I have that effect on women.” I responded with a sideways smirk.
“I remember.” She said, not smiling, but not angry either. “You gonna offer a lady a drink?” She asked, reaching for my bottle.
“This shit? Not on your life. Besides, I’m quitting.” I said, holding the bottle out of her reach.
“Yeah, as of when?” She laughed as she reached for the bottle.
“As of now,” I said. With that, I turned and chucked the sports bottle in a perfect spiral to land with a hollow thud on Sammy’s casket just before the workmen started dumping backhoes full of dirt onto it. I looked down at Janet, who was nestled in the crook of my right arm like she’d never left, then looked back at the hole in the ground and the confused groundskeepers, and turned to walk up the hill to my ride.
“Cheers, Sammy. Cheers.”
John Hartness is a writer from Charlotte, NC. He's the author of Hard Day's Knight.
April 01, 2011
Zombie Mom
By John G. Hartness © 2011
I never gave a whole lot of thought to what it must be like for the zombies. You know, I was just like everybody else: I saw a zombie, I hit it in the head with a baseball bat, or an axe, or on a really good day a chainsaw. But when my mom got infected, I really had to change my opinions on a lot of things. It’s one thing when it’s your fifth-grade PE teacher you’re shooting in the face, but it’s something entirely different when the woman who makes your pancakes every Sunday is the one trying to eat your brains.
It all started on a Sunday morning. Like I said, we had pancakes. We had pancakes every Sunday morning, even after the Plague started. I mean, you can’t let a little thing like the friggin’ zombie Apocalypse change your whole routine, can you? Well, after we finished breakfast, all of us (me, Mom, Dad, my bratty kid brother Eugene and our dog Dilbert) went into the living room to watch some TV. It was too early for the early game, so we were watching ZSN (Zombie Sports Network) just for kicks. They were showing Zombie Skeet, where they launch zombies in these huge catapult things and shoot the crap out of them with anti-aircraft guns. That used to be our favorite. Eugene was being a little snot about zombie rights, so we changed the channel to Zombie-Animal Planet, which was showing Zombie Manor, where these zombies in Africa were running from a lion. That was pretty cool, too, but needed more explosions.
Anyway, we were all chillin’ out waiting for football to start when Mom decided to go get the newspaper. Dad barely looked up from the TV, just said, “don’t forget your body armor, dear,” and went back to his show.
Mom suited up, grabbed her pink aluminum Lady Slugger, and headed down the driveway. It took us a while to notice that she’d been gone too long because just then a new episode started and there were all these cool scenes with zombies trying to run from rhinos and getting gored, and still climbing the rhinos and trying to bite through the rhino’s hide and all, until finally the rhino would run into a tree or a bus or something and put this huge hole in the side of the bus and leave zombie smeared all down the side, but because the rhino didn’t know to crush the brain, the zombie smear would just twitch and twitch until finally the camera guy went over and shot it in the head.
So we were a little distracted, and it was the second commercial break before we noticed that Mom hadn’t come back with the paper yet. So Dad suited up, and I grabbed the shotgun to go with him when he was all like “Where do you think you’re going, young man?”
And I was all like “I’m going with you to find Mom.”
And he was all like “You’ve got to stay here and protect your little brother.”
And then I was all like “He’s big enough to protect himself! And besides, I don’t care if he gets eaten, but I like Mom!”
And he was all like “I don’t care, you’re staying here.” And he had used the grown-up voice so I knew he wasn’t messing around this time. So I sat on the couch with the shotgun and watched as he went out looking for Mom. I might have slugged Eugene in his arm just for being a Eugene and generally ruining my life by his very existence, but I wouldn’t swear as to exactly how he got that bruise.
They were gone a long time, and I was actually starting to get worried about them, not to mention hungry, when Dad finally came back carrying Mom over one shoulder and swinging like a madman with her Lady Slugger. He looked pretty stupid fighting off zoms with a girly bat, but I guess he’d lost his somewhere along the way. As soon as he was in the door, he yelled “Billy, shoot!” Then he dove for the floor and I opened up on the zoms at the door. I was behind the couch using it to brace the shotgun, so my aim was pretty good. I blasted zombie brain all over the foyer until my shells ran out, and then I ran out and slammed the door. Once I got the door barred again, I looked at Dad to see if he needed my help.
He was out of breath and covered in zom-goo, but he didn’t look hurt. “Help me get your mother tied to the couch,” he panted, and I thought about how some guys had dads that used to be firemen and jocks, but my dad the accountant had somehow managed to survive getting his brains eaten all this time. I really don’t get the world sometimes.
We put Mom on the sofa, and I took her shoes off while Dad tackled her body armor. I don’t know what good it does to take your shoes off, but Mom always says after a rough day she can’t wait to get her shoes off. To me it just makes the room all stinky, but maybe Mom feet don’t stink like kid feet do.
So we got mom out of her body armor and her shoes, and then Dad ran into their bedroom. He came back with two of his ugly neckties and a pair of handcuffs covered in pink fuzzy feathers. I looked at him like “what?” and he looked back at me like “don’t ever mention this again,” so I didn’t ask. He tied Mom’s feet together and handcuffed her wrists, and then sat back down in his recliner.
“Dad, what happened?” I asked.
“Well, son, it looks like your mother got bitten by a zombie on her way to get the newspaper.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Well, we have two choices. We can either bash in her head like every other zombie out there, or we can try to keep some little shred of your mother alive in her.”
“I don’t even know what that means, dude.”
“It means we either kill her and learn to cook, or we chain her to the stove and try to stay out of biting range.”
“Oh.” I thought about that for a long time, and looked over at Mom sitting there on the couch, moaning and trying to eat the sofa. Then I had an idea. I jumped up off the living room floor and ran to my bedroom. It took a little digging, but finally, in the very back of my closet, I found what I was looking for. I ran back downstairs with my prize held high above my head, and presented it to Dad like Indiana Jones finding some cool Indiana Jones-type thing.
“What is this, son?” Dad asked.
“It’s my old catcher’s mask.”
“I know that, but why do I have it?”
“Because I gave it to you.”
“Don’t be a smartass. What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Oh. Sorry. Put it on Mom, then she can’t bite us. She’s not smart enough anymore to take it off, so then we can tie her to something in the kitchen and she can cook for us.”
So we did. And after a few days of trying to eat us and bouncing off the bars on the catcher’s mask, she finally gave up. I also gave her Eugene’s old pacifier, which he had kept all this time, even though he was like nine. He’s a weird kid, and this is coming from a guy who keeps a zombie chained to the stove. But anyway.
So Zom-Mom stays chained to the stove, and even though she’s now a brainless shambling flesh-eating fiend, she still makes killer pancakes. And if every once in a while she drops a finger into the batter, what’s the big deal? Eugene’s gotta eat something.
John Hartness is a redneck from Charlotte, NC. His first novel, The Chosen, is available for the Kindle, iPad or in analog edition. You can find out more about John at his website, www.johnhartness.com.
I never gave a whole lot of thought to what it must be like for the zombies. You know, I was just like everybody else: I saw a zombie, I hit it in the head with a baseball bat, or an axe, or on a really good day a chainsaw. But when my mom got infected, I really had to change my opinions on a lot of things. It’s one thing when it’s your fifth-grade PE teacher you’re shooting in the face, but it’s something entirely different when the woman who makes your pancakes every Sunday is the one trying to eat your brains.
It all started on a Sunday morning. Like I said, we had pancakes. We had pancakes every Sunday morning, even after the Plague started. I mean, you can’t let a little thing like the friggin’ zombie Apocalypse change your whole routine, can you? Well, after we finished breakfast, all of us (me, Mom, Dad, my bratty kid brother Eugene and our dog Dilbert) went into the living room to watch some TV. It was too early for the early game, so we were watching ZSN (Zombie Sports Network) just for kicks. They were showing Zombie Skeet, where they launch zombies in these huge catapult things and shoot the crap out of them with anti-aircraft guns. That used to be our favorite. Eugene was being a little snot about zombie rights, so we changed the channel to Zombie-Animal Planet, which was showing Zombie Manor, where these zombies in Africa were running from a lion. That was pretty cool, too, but needed more explosions.
Anyway, we were all chillin’ out waiting for football to start when Mom decided to go get the newspaper. Dad barely looked up from the TV, just said, “don’t forget your body armor, dear,” and went back to his show.
Mom suited up, grabbed her pink aluminum Lady Slugger, and headed down the driveway. It took us a while to notice that she’d been gone too long because just then a new episode started and there were all these cool scenes with zombies trying to run from rhinos and getting gored, and still climbing the rhinos and trying to bite through the rhino’s hide and all, until finally the rhino would run into a tree or a bus or something and put this huge hole in the side of the bus and leave zombie smeared all down the side, but because the rhino didn’t know to crush the brain, the zombie smear would just twitch and twitch until finally the camera guy went over and shot it in the head.
So we were a little distracted, and it was the second commercial break before we noticed that Mom hadn’t come back with the paper yet. So Dad suited up, and I grabbed the shotgun to go with him when he was all like “Where do you think you’re going, young man?”
And I was all like “I’m going with you to find Mom.”
And he was all like “You’ve got to stay here and protect your little brother.”
And then I was all like “He’s big enough to protect himself! And besides, I don’t care if he gets eaten, but I like Mom!”
And he was all like “I don’t care, you’re staying here.” And he had used the grown-up voice so I knew he wasn’t messing around this time. So I sat on the couch with the shotgun and watched as he went out looking for Mom. I might have slugged Eugene in his arm just for being a Eugene and generally ruining my life by his very existence, but I wouldn’t swear as to exactly how he got that bruise.
They were gone a long time, and I was actually starting to get worried about them, not to mention hungry, when Dad finally came back carrying Mom over one shoulder and swinging like a madman with her Lady Slugger. He looked pretty stupid fighting off zoms with a girly bat, but I guess he’d lost his somewhere along the way. As soon as he was in the door, he yelled “Billy, shoot!” Then he dove for the floor and I opened up on the zoms at the door. I was behind the couch using it to brace the shotgun, so my aim was pretty good. I blasted zombie brain all over the foyer until my shells ran out, and then I ran out and slammed the door. Once I got the door barred again, I looked at Dad to see if he needed my help.
He was out of breath and covered in zom-goo, but he didn’t look hurt. “Help me get your mother tied to the couch,” he panted, and I thought about how some guys had dads that used to be firemen and jocks, but my dad the accountant had somehow managed to survive getting his brains eaten all this time. I really don’t get the world sometimes.
We put Mom on the sofa, and I took her shoes off while Dad tackled her body armor. I don’t know what good it does to take your shoes off, but Mom always says after a rough day she can’t wait to get her shoes off. To me it just makes the room all stinky, but maybe Mom feet don’t stink like kid feet do.
So we got mom out of her body armor and her shoes, and then Dad ran into their bedroom. He came back with two of his ugly neckties and a pair of handcuffs covered in pink fuzzy feathers. I looked at him like “what?” and he looked back at me like “don’t ever mention this again,” so I didn’t ask. He tied Mom’s feet together and handcuffed her wrists, and then sat back down in his recliner.
“Dad, what happened?” I asked.
“Well, son, it looks like your mother got bitten by a zombie on her way to get the newspaper.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Well, we have two choices. We can either bash in her head like every other zombie out there, or we can try to keep some little shred of your mother alive in her.”
“I don’t even know what that means, dude.”
“It means we either kill her and learn to cook, or we chain her to the stove and try to stay out of biting range.”
“Oh.” I thought about that for a long time, and looked over at Mom sitting there on the couch, moaning and trying to eat the sofa. Then I had an idea. I jumped up off the living room floor and ran to my bedroom. It took a little digging, but finally, in the very back of my closet, I found what I was looking for. I ran back downstairs with my prize held high above my head, and presented it to Dad like Indiana Jones finding some cool Indiana Jones-type thing.
“What is this, son?” Dad asked.
“It’s my old catcher’s mask.”
“I know that, but why do I have it?”
“Because I gave it to you.”
“Don’t be a smartass. What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Oh. Sorry. Put it on Mom, then she can’t bite us. She’s not smart enough anymore to take it off, so then we can tie her to something in the kitchen and she can cook for us.”
So we did. And after a few days of trying to eat us and bouncing off the bars on the catcher’s mask, she finally gave up. I also gave her Eugene’s old pacifier, which he had kept all this time, even though he was like nine. He’s a weird kid, and this is coming from a guy who keeps a zombie chained to the stove. But anyway.
So Zom-Mom stays chained to the stove, and even though she’s now a brainless shambling flesh-eating fiend, she still makes killer pancakes. And if every once in a while she drops a finger into the batter, what’s the big deal? Eugene’s gotta eat something.
John Hartness is a redneck from Charlotte, NC. His first novel, The Chosen, is available for the Kindle, iPad or in analog edition. You can find out more about John at his website, www.johnhartness.com.
March 01, 2011
Hard Day's Knight: The Black Knight Chronicles, Vol. 1
By John G. Hartness © 2011
Chapter 1
I hate waking up in an unfamiliar place. I’ve slept in pretty much the same bed for the past fifteen years, so when I wake up someplace new, it really throws me off. When that someplace is tied to a metal folding chair in the center of an abandoned warehouse that reeks of stale cigarette smoke, diesel fuel and axle grease - well, that really started my night off on a sparkling note.
My mood deteriorated even further when I heard a voice behind me say “It’s about time you woke up, bloodsucker.” I mean, seriously, why do people have to be so rude? It’s a condition, like freckles. I’m a vampire. Deal with it. But we can do without the slurs, thank you very much.
“Go easy on the bloodsucker, pal. I haven’t had breakfast” was what I tried to say. But since my mouth was duct-taped shut, it came out more like “Mm mmmm mm mmm-mmmmmmm, mmm. Mm mmmmmm mmm mmmmm.” My repartee was gonna need an assist if I was going to talk my way out of this. Of course, if my mysterious captor had wanted me dead, he’d had all day to make that happen, but instead I woke up tied to a chair. I tested my bonds, but I was tied tight, and whatever he had bound me with burned, so it was either blessed, and he was devout, or it was silver. My money was on silver. The true believers are more the stake them in the coffins type than the kidnap them and tie them to chairs type.
“I think, bloodsucker, that since I’m the one with the stake, I get to call you whatever I want. And you, as the one tied to the chair with silver chains, get to sit there and do whatever I say.” My captor moved around in front where I could get a good look at him. I knew him, of course. It’s never the new guy in town who ties you to a chair; it’s always that creepy guy who you’ve seen lurking around the cemetery for a couple weeks. The one that you’re not sure if he was there to mourn, or for some other reason. And of course, it was always some other reason.
I’d seen this guy hanging around one of the big oak trees in my cemetery, near the freshest grave in the joint, for a couple of weeks. I never thought much of his wardrobe until now, but in retrospect he was wearing almost stereotypical vampire hunter garb. Black jeans, black boots, long black coat, wide-brimmed black hat. Christ, I bet he owned the Van Helsing Blu-Ray. I swore then that if I ever got the chance, I was eating Hugh Jackman’s liver. No, we don’t usually eat people, but liver’s liver, and I was pissed. I had been caught and trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey by a skinny twenty-something who watched too many bad vampire movies.
This kid was white, about twenty-three, with mousy brown hair and looked like he played too much Call of Duty instead of getting a job. His skin was paler than mine, for crying out loud, and I’m dead! His clothes hung loose on his scrawny frame, giving him a scarecrow look about him, and either had an asthma inhaler in his front pocket or was happy to see me. God, I hoped it was an inhaler.
“Mmmm mmmmm mm mmm mmmm mm mm mm?” I asked, which was supposed to be more of a what do you want me to do type of query, but my mouth was still taped shut. The kid reached forward and ripped the tape off, taking a layer or two of skin with it. “OWWW!” I yelled, straining against my bonds. “You little rat bastard, I swear to God I am going to drink you dry and leave your body on the lawn like…like an empty bag of flesh!”
I admit, my similes need some work.
“I don’t think so, bloodsucker. I think you’re going to do anything I tell you to, or I’ll just leave you tied up there to starve.” He had a point there. It’s not like there were very many people who would miss a vampire, and I hadn’t yet figured out how to get loose from whatever silver-lined bonds he’d created.
“Alright, what do you want?” I asked. Might as well find out right now if he wanted something simple or...
“I want you to turn me,” he replied. The look of hope on his face was a little pathetic, really, but there was a determination there that was disturbing. This was not going to be easy.
“No.” I wanted to get the short and simple part out of the way first, then we could move on to the lengthy explanations.
“Why not?” Wow, from zero to whiny little bitch in .4 seconds. If I’d ever had any thoughts of actually turning this scrawny little zit-farm into a vamp, they would have just evaporated.
“Because I don’t turn people. Because this life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Because you’d miss all those romantical sunsets you probably write maudlin poetry about. Because it’s not fair to the ecosystem to add another predator. Because we don’t really sparkle. All of the above. None of the above. Pick a reason, kid, any reason you like. I’m not turning you.” I started to look around for another way to get out of this mess, but it didn’t look good for our hero. Or at least my hero, and it’s my story.
For a skinny little gamer-geek, he’d done a good job tying me up. I guess that’s another thing we can thank the internet for - unlimited access to fetish porn has improved the knot-tying ability of men who can’t get dates. I couldn’t exactly see my hands, but by straining around, I could see that my ankles were tied to separate legs of the chair with those plastic zip-ties you get in the electrical aisle. I could see a silver necklace wound around each tie, and by the way my wrists felt, he’d done the same thing there. The chair was the standard metal folding type, the kind that gets sacrificed in countless professional wrestling matches. So I was pretty well neutralized. The silver sapped the strength from my arms just by the contact, and I couldn’t get enough leverage with my legs to do anything useful. I looked up to try and Jedi mind trick my kidnapper, when I noticed two things – one - he was wearing polarized sunglasses, which was a neat idea, although ultimately useless against my mental abilities, and two – he was crying.
“You have to turn me!” He wailed, tears streaming down his cheeks. “I’m running out of time and this was the only thing I could think of to fix it!”
I couldn’t believe it; I was actually starting to feel sorry for the guy. “Okay, kid. Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong and I’ll see if I can help?”
“No one can help, but if I were one of the Undead I could help myself.” I swear I could actually hear him capitalize undead.
“You know that’s kinda my job, right? Helping people that can’t help themselves. Kinda like the A-Team, without the Mohawk and the van. Reach into my shirt pocket and grab a business card. I promise not to bite you, and as you know we Undead cannot tell a lie.” Total bull, but I’ve often found with people dumb enough to romanticize the whole vampire thing that a little mendacity goes a long way. He reached into my pocket and took out a business card. It had my name, James Black, and cell phone number under a logo that said “Black Knight Detectives, shedding light on your darkest problems.” Neither the company name nor the stupid slogan was my idea. And I prefer Jimmy.
“You’re a detective?” I nodded. “And you think you can help me?”
“Well, I can’t really know that until you tell me what your problem is. So why don’t you untie me, and we can talk about this like a pair of reasonable people?” I put a little mojo into my eyes, and he started towards me with a pair of wire cutters in his hand. And that’s when things went to hell.
John Hartness is a writer from Charlotte, NC. He's the author of Hard Day's Knight.
Chapter 1
I hate waking up in an unfamiliar place. I’ve slept in pretty much the same bed for the past fifteen years, so when I wake up someplace new, it really throws me off. When that someplace is tied to a metal folding chair in the center of an abandoned warehouse that reeks of stale cigarette smoke, diesel fuel and axle grease - well, that really started my night off on a sparkling note.
My mood deteriorated even further when I heard a voice behind me say “It’s about time you woke up, bloodsucker.” I mean, seriously, why do people have to be so rude? It’s a condition, like freckles. I’m a vampire. Deal with it. But we can do without the slurs, thank you very much.
“Go easy on the bloodsucker, pal. I haven’t had breakfast” was what I tried to say. But since my mouth was duct-taped shut, it came out more like “Mm mmmm mm mmm-mmmmmmm, mmm. Mm mmmmmm mmm mmmmm.” My repartee was gonna need an assist if I was going to talk my way out of this. Of course, if my mysterious captor had wanted me dead, he’d had all day to make that happen, but instead I woke up tied to a chair. I tested my bonds, but I was tied tight, and whatever he had bound me with burned, so it was either blessed, and he was devout, or it was silver. My money was on silver. The true believers are more the stake them in the coffins type than the kidnap them and tie them to chairs type.
“I think, bloodsucker, that since I’m the one with the stake, I get to call you whatever I want. And you, as the one tied to the chair with silver chains, get to sit there and do whatever I say.” My captor moved around in front where I could get a good look at him. I knew him, of course. It’s never the new guy in town who ties you to a chair; it’s always that creepy guy who you’ve seen lurking around the cemetery for a couple weeks. The one that you’re not sure if he was there to mourn, or for some other reason. And of course, it was always some other reason.
I’d seen this guy hanging around one of the big oak trees in my cemetery, near the freshest grave in the joint, for a couple of weeks. I never thought much of his wardrobe until now, but in retrospect he was wearing almost stereotypical vampire hunter garb. Black jeans, black boots, long black coat, wide-brimmed black hat. Christ, I bet he owned the Van Helsing Blu-Ray. I swore then that if I ever got the chance, I was eating Hugh Jackman’s liver. No, we don’t usually eat people, but liver’s liver, and I was pissed. I had been caught and trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey by a skinny twenty-something who watched too many bad vampire movies.
This kid was white, about twenty-three, with mousy brown hair and looked like he played too much Call of Duty instead of getting a job. His skin was paler than mine, for crying out loud, and I’m dead! His clothes hung loose on his scrawny frame, giving him a scarecrow look about him, and either had an asthma inhaler in his front pocket or was happy to see me. God, I hoped it was an inhaler.
“Mmmm mmmmm mm mmm mmmm mm mm mm?” I asked, which was supposed to be more of a what do you want me to do type of query, but my mouth was still taped shut. The kid reached forward and ripped the tape off, taking a layer or two of skin with it. “OWWW!” I yelled, straining against my bonds. “You little rat bastard, I swear to God I am going to drink you dry and leave your body on the lawn like…like an empty bag of flesh!”
I admit, my similes need some work.
“I don’t think so, bloodsucker. I think you’re going to do anything I tell you to, or I’ll just leave you tied up there to starve.” He had a point there. It’s not like there were very many people who would miss a vampire, and I hadn’t yet figured out how to get loose from whatever silver-lined bonds he’d created.
“Alright, what do you want?” I asked. Might as well find out right now if he wanted something simple or...
“I want you to turn me,” he replied. The look of hope on his face was a little pathetic, really, but there was a determination there that was disturbing. This was not going to be easy.
“No.” I wanted to get the short and simple part out of the way first, then we could move on to the lengthy explanations.
“Why not?” Wow, from zero to whiny little bitch in .4 seconds. If I’d ever had any thoughts of actually turning this scrawny little zit-farm into a vamp, they would have just evaporated.
“Because I don’t turn people. Because this life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Because you’d miss all those romantical sunsets you probably write maudlin poetry about. Because it’s not fair to the ecosystem to add another predator. Because we don’t really sparkle. All of the above. None of the above. Pick a reason, kid, any reason you like. I’m not turning you.” I started to look around for another way to get out of this mess, but it didn’t look good for our hero. Or at least my hero, and it’s my story.
For a skinny little gamer-geek, he’d done a good job tying me up. I guess that’s another thing we can thank the internet for - unlimited access to fetish porn has improved the knot-tying ability of men who can’t get dates. I couldn’t exactly see my hands, but by straining around, I could see that my ankles were tied to separate legs of the chair with those plastic zip-ties you get in the electrical aisle. I could see a silver necklace wound around each tie, and by the way my wrists felt, he’d done the same thing there. The chair was the standard metal folding type, the kind that gets sacrificed in countless professional wrestling matches. So I was pretty well neutralized. The silver sapped the strength from my arms just by the contact, and I couldn’t get enough leverage with my legs to do anything useful. I looked up to try and Jedi mind trick my kidnapper, when I noticed two things – one - he was wearing polarized sunglasses, which was a neat idea, although ultimately useless against my mental abilities, and two – he was crying.
“You have to turn me!” He wailed, tears streaming down his cheeks. “I’m running out of time and this was the only thing I could think of to fix it!”
I couldn’t believe it; I was actually starting to feel sorry for the guy. “Okay, kid. Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong and I’ll see if I can help?”
“No one can help, but if I were one of the Undead I could help myself.” I swear I could actually hear him capitalize undead.
“You know that’s kinda my job, right? Helping people that can’t help themselves. Kinda like the A-Team, without the Mohawk and the van. Reach into my shirt pocket and grab a business card. I promise not to bite you, and as you know we Undead cannot tell a lie.” Total bull, but I’ve often found with people dumb enough to romanticize the whole vampire thing that a little mendacity goes a long way. He reached into my pocket and took out a business card. It had my name, James Black, and cell phone number under a logo that said “Black Knight Detectives, shedding light on your darkest problems.” Neither the company name nor the stupid slogan was my idea. And I prefer Jimmy.
“You’re a detective?” I nodded. “And you think you can help me?”
“Well, I can’t really know that until you tell me what your problem is. So why don’t you untie me, and we can talk about this like a pair of reasonable people?” I put a little mojo into my eyes, and he started towards me with a pair of wire cutters in his hand. And that’s when things went to hell.
John Hartness is a writer from Charlotte, NC. He's the author of Hard Day's Knight.
October 05, 2008
Happy Anniversary
By John 'Falstaff' Hartness © 2008
I walked into work roughly on time and said to my boss "Victor, I need to take a long lunch today, I'm going downtown to get married."
Victor, being the gentle, caring soul that he is, replied "Really? Hell, take the whole afternoon off!"
"Nah, Suzy's gotta be at work at 3, so I'll come back. And we're not really getting married, we're just going to get the license."
"Oh, okay then. Well, hurry up and get your ass back to work.”
So I meet Suzy at the courthouse a little after noon, and we walk in to get our marriage license. We pay our $75 fee ($45 of which goes to domestic violence prevention programs, something that I found less than promising), and the nice lady behind the counter says "Y'all gone do it today?"
"We called yesterday and they said we could only get married by the judge on Tuesdays, so we figured we'd wait 'til next week."
"Oh no, honey. That's just when he does it in the courtroom. Y'all can go across the street to the magistrate's office anytime and get married."
I looked at Suzy, she looked at me, I said "You want to?"
"Why not?" she said.
So we went across the street and asked the receptionist where we went to get married.
Then we had a thought - no witnesses. Shit. So we asked the receptionist if she could come back and be a witness if we needed one. She cooed a little bit and thought that was just the sweetest thing, and then said that we should be ok, there were a couple of people in the office.
So we went back to a little gray room where two people were filling out paperwork, a twenty-something woman with crutches and a severely swollen eye, and a friend who was reading the paperwork to her and filling in her answers on the papers.
"Y'all go ahead."
So we went up to the glass and asked the magistrate if he would marry us. He asked if we had witnesses, and we asked the two people filling out paperwork if they'd witness our wedding.
"You ain't serious!"
"I am serious."
"Alright. I'm Darryl, this is Dawn."
"What are you guys doing here?"
"We're filling out a complaint against Dawn's boyfriend. He done beat her in the head with a telephone last night."
"Wow."
Without much else to say, we all four walked (or crutched, in Dawn's case) our way up to the front desk, where the magistrate read us our wedding vows through bulletproof glass. He slid the paperwork under the glass, we all signed it, and went on our merry way.
As we stood outside the courthouse in our newly wedded bliss (which also somewhat resembled the look of people who have just survived a tornado, as it happened much faster than we expected) we decided that since Suzy didn't have to be at work for another couple of hours, we'd go have lunch. So we scraped together a few bucks and trundled over to a nearby McDonald's. Suzy went to the pay phone in the parking lot to call her dad and leave the good news on his answering machine, and we got in line to sit down and have a nice romantic Happy Meal.
As we stood in line discussing the mild level of ridiculous involved in the whole thing, the cashier overheard us talking about the fact that we had just gotten married and were having our wedding lunch at McDonald's, and told us our lunch was on the house. A nice gesture, but if she'd said that before we ordered, I probably would have added an apple pie. So we had our first wedded meal at a McDonald's in the middle of the work day, then we went on our separate ways back to our jobs.
It might not have been the big elaborate wedding every little girl dreams of, but for the past twelve years, it's lasted. Today I woke up, rolled over and kissed her on the forehead and said one of my favorite phrases, that I only get to say one day a year.
Happy Anniversary.
John Hartness is a writer and thespian from Charlotte, North Carolina.
I walked into work roughly on time and said to my boss "Victor, I need to take a long lunch today, I'm going downtown to get married."
Victor, being the gentle, caring soul that he is, replied "Really? Hell, take the whole afternoon off!"
"Nah, Suzy's gotta be at work at 3, so I'll come back. And we're not really getting married, we're just going to get the license."
"Oh, okay then. Well, hurry up and get your ass back to work.”
So I meet Suzy at the courthouse a little after noon, and we walk in to get our marriage license. We pay our $75 fee ($45 of which goes to domestic violence prevention programs, something that I found less than promising), and the nice lady behind the counter says "Y'all gone do it today?"
"We called yesterday and they said we could only get married by the judge on Tuesdays, so we figured we'd wait 'til next week."
"Oh no, honey. That's just when he does it in the courtroom. Y'all can go across the street to the magistrate's office anytime and get married."
I looked at Suzy, she looked at me, I said "You want to?"
"Why not?" she said.
So we went across the street and asked the receptionist where we went to get married.
Then we had a thought - no witnesses. Shit. So we asked the receptionist if she could come back and be a witness if we needed one. She cooed a little bit and thought that was just the sweetest thing, and then said that we should be ok, there were a couple of people in the office.
So we went back to a little gray room where two people were filling out paperwork, a twenty-something woman with crutches and a severely swollen eye, and a friend who was reading the paperwork to her and filling in her answers on the papers.
"Y'all go ahead."
So we went up to the glass and asked the magistrate if he would marry us. He asked if we had witnesses, and we asked the two people filling out paperwork if they'd witness our wedding.
"You ain't serious!"
"I am serious."
"Alright. I'm Darryl, this is Dawn."
"What are you guys doing here?"
"We're filling out a complaint against Dawn's boyfriend. He done beat her in the head with a telephone last night."
"Wow."
Without much else to say, we all four walked (or crutched, in Dawn's case) our way up to the front desk, where the magistrate read us our wedding vows through bulletproof glass. He slid the paperwork under the glass, we all signed it, and went on our merry way.
As we stood outside the courthouse in our newly wedded bliss (which also somewhat resembled the look of people who have just survived a tornado, as it happened much faster than we expected) we decided that since Suzy didn't have to be at work for another couple of hours, we'd go have lunch. So we scraped together a few bucks and trundled over to a nearby McDonald's. Suzy went to the pay phone in the parking lot to call her dad and leave the good news on his answering machine, and we got in line to sit down and have a nice romantic Happy Meal.
As we stood in line discussing the mild level of ridiculous involved in the whole thing, the cashier overheard us talking about the fact that we had just gotten married and were having our wedding lunch at McDonald's, and told us our lunch was on the house. A nice gesture, but if she'd said that before we ordered, I probably would have added an apple pie. So we had our first wedded meal at a McDonald's in the middle of the work day, then we went on our separate ways back to our jobs.
It might not have been the big elaborate wedding every little girl dreams of, but for the past twelve years, it's lasted. Today I woke up, rolled over and kissed her on the forehead and said one of my favorite phrases, that I only get to say one day a year.
Happy Anniversary.
John Hartness is a writer and thespian from Charlotte, North Carolina.
July 07, 2008
Of Lattes and Stuffed Monkeys
By John 'Falstaff' Hartness © 2008
I saw her sitting there, at the only patio table with an open seat. Sitting alone listening to her iPod on a gorgeous Spring morning. One of those sparkling mornings that's just cold enough to carry a sweater, with just enough warmth in its smile to promise you won't need it.
"May I?"
"I... OK, sure." She gave the patio the once-over to see if there was another option, then gave me the required polite response when she saw it was either sit with her, or juggle my latte, muffin and novel while standing.
"What are you listening to?" I could see she was upset, and probably didn't want to talk, but I had a feeling it might be worth it to pry.
"I... it's a new Alanis Morrisette song. Her new album is all acoustic.” I loved the way she paused for a second before answering, just that slightest hesitation when she wanted to tell me to piss off, but couldn't quite bring herself to do it. I leaned over, took the dangling earbud, and popped it in. You Oughta Know sounds so different with a live drummer and acoustic guitar, but it still transported me.
Scent is supposed to be the sense most closely tied to memory, but for me it's hearing. A song can take me almost physically back to a moment in time, and this one was no different. It was almost ten years ago, the album was new, Alanis wasn't a superstar yet, just another angry young chick carrying the Ani DiFranco banner for the next generation. And I was twenty, bleached blonde and jilted with her hit single blasting through my dorm room as I threw all of the sorry bastard's pictures, CDs and clothes out the window onto his head, drowning out his protestations and apologies with projectiles and expletives.
He at least had the wisdom to run when I appeared in my 8th-floor window holding his guitar. He must have known the amp was coming next. Annie, my roommate, opened the door, peeked in at the carnage, and swiftly decided that this would be a good night to study at the library. I spent another hour or so playing the raving Medea; then decided I needed to be at home.
So I abandoned the carnage of my room, leaving an apocalypse of shattered glass and plastic on the sidewalk and the oak outside my window garlanded with t-shirts and sweaters. Five hours later I pulled up in front of my parents' house without ever really noticing how fast I was going or really having a plan as to where I was headed. My kid sister, just fifteen, was sitting on the porch swing when I got out of my much-abused Cabriolet.
"Hey."
"Hey."
I sat down next to her on the swing. We sat there for somewhere between twenty seconds and an hour; swinging on the porch, listening to the crickets and trucks on the highway. Just sitting and swinging. I didn't need to talk, I just needed to be with somebody I still trusted.
"He fucked my best friend."
"I know. Annie called. She thought you might come home."
"He's a fucking piece of shit."
"Yep."
"I still love him."
"Yep."
And I curled up into a little ball on that swing, and my kid sister held me while I cried myself to sleep. I woke up the next morning in that swing under a faded blue blanket, with a pillow from the bed I grew up in under my head and her stuffed monkey tucked under my arm.
A passing truck jolted me back to the present and I caught the girl looking at me strangely. “I know this tune,” I said.
"Yeah, the song's old. But the album's cool."
"Yep."
We sat there for a time without time, listening to Alanis on shared earbuds, until I reached out and touched her hand.
"You know he's not worth it, right?"
"Yep."
"Doesn't matter, does it?"
"Nope."
Then I reached into my bag, handed her the monkey, and held my little sister while she cried out her soul on the Starbucks patio.
John 'Falstaff' Hartness is a writer from Charlotte, NC/
I saw her sitting there, at the only patio table with an open seat. Sitting alone listening to her iPod on a gorgeous Spring morning. One of those sparkling mornings that's just cold enough to carry a sweater, with just enough warmth in its smile to promise you won't need it.
"May I?"
"I... OK, sure." She gave the patio the once-over to see if there was another option, then gave me the required polite response when she saw it was either sit with her, or juggle my latte, muffin and novel while standing.
"What are you listening to?" I could see she was upset, and probably didn't want to talk, but I had a feeling it might be worth it to pry.
"I... it's a new Alanis Morrisette song. Her new album is all acoustic.” I loved the way she paused for a second before answering, just that slightest hesitation when she wanted to tell me to piss off, but couldn't quite bring herself to do it. I leaned over, took the dangling earbud, and popped it in. You Oughta Know sounds so different with a live drummer and acoustic guitar, but it still transported me.
Scent is supposed to be the sense most closely tied to memory, but for me it's hearing. A song can take me almost physically back to a moment in time, and this one was no different. It was almost ten years ago, the album was new, Alanis wasn't a superstar yet, just another angry young chick carrying the Ani DiFranco banner for the next generation. And I was twenty, bleached blonde and jilted with her hit single blasting through my dorm room as I threw all of the sorry bastard's pictures, CDs and clothes out the window onto his head, drowning out his protestations and apologies with projectiles and expletives.
He at least had the wisdom to run when I appeared in my 8th-floor window holding his guitar. He must have known the amp was coming next. Annie, my roommate, opened the door, peeked in at the carnage, and swiftly decided that this would be a good night to study at the library. I spent another hour or so playing the raving Medea; then decided I needed to be at home.
So I abandoned the carnage of my room, leaving an apocalypse of shattered glass and plastic on the sidewalk and the oak outside my window garlanded with t-shirts and sweaters. Five hours later I pulled up in front of my parents' house without ever really noticing how fast I was going or really having a plan as to where I was headed. My kid sister, just fifteen, was sitting on the porch swing when I got out of my much-abused Cabriolet.
"Hey."
"Hey."
I sat down next to her on the swing. We sat there for somewhere between twenty seconds and an hour; swinging on the porch, listening to the crickets and trucks on the highway. Just sitting and swinging. I didn't need to talk, I just needed to be with somebody I still trusted.
"He fucked my best friend."
"I know. Annie called. She thought you might come home."
"He's a fucking piece of shit."
"Yep."
"I still love him."
"Yep."
And I curled up into a little ball on that swing, and my kid sister held me while I cried myself to sleep. I woke up the next morning in that swing under a faded blue blanket, with a pillow from the bed I grew up in under my head and her stuffed monkey tucked under my arm.
A passing truck jolted me back to the present and I caught the girl looking at me strangely. “I know this tune,” I said.
"Yeah, the song's old. But the album's cool."
"Yep."
We sat there for a time without time, listening to Alanis on shared earbuds, until I reached out and touched her hand.
"You know he's not worth it, right?"
"Yep."
"Doesn't matter, does it?"
"Nope."
Then I reached into my bag, handed her the monkey, and held my little sister while she cried out her soul on the Starbucks patio.
John 'Falstaff' Hartness is a writer from Charlotte, NC/
October 05, 2007
Driving to See Mama
By John "Falstaff" Hartness © 2007
This is a story my father told me, in the best re-creation of his words I can devise. The year is 1950, the place is Camp Atterbury in Edinburgh, IN.
So this ol' boy Briggs come into the barracks one afternoon and says "Johnny Bob, you got any money? They're giving out three-day passes and we got a quart of liquor and a tank full of gas, but we ain't got enough money to get all the way to Asheville. If you got enough money to get a tank of gas in London, Kentucky, I can get more money in Asheville."
Now this was 'long about the end of the month when didn't nobody have no money, so I told him No.
"C'mon John, I know you always got a dollar or two ratted away, count up your change and see how much money you got."
Well, I did have a dollar or two stuck back, and I had two dollars in my pocket, and when I counted up all my change I had $5.30. We decided that was enough for a tank of gas, so off we went. We had us an Oldsmobile 88 convertible, and it was February, so we had the top up, and the windows rolled up, and as soon as we pulled out of the base, Briggs tore the top off that quart of liquor and threw it out the window.
Well, we got to London, Kentucky, and we filled up, and it cost us four dollars and a quarter for a tank of gas. Now I had $5.30, and that's all the money that was in that car. The other boy had done spent all their money on that quart of liquor and the first tank of gas. So we bought another quart of liquor, on credit, from that store in London.
Now I always did wonder why that ol' boy let us have that liquor on credit, but come to think of it, there was six of us, all of us big men, all of us MPs from Camp Atterbury, and all of us about half drunk. Hell, he mighta been a little scared!
But the funny part of the story is this - Briggs had it in his head that that Oldsmobile was the fastest thing ever been made. Now this road from London to Asheville would go from four lanes to two, then back to dual lane for a little while, then back down to two lanes. And we're clipping along right real good on one of these dual-lane parts when we saw lights in the rear view. I think they were red lights back then, but it don't matter, it was the police.
Well, Briggs said "What kind of car is that that thinks they can catch me?" We told him it was a Chevrolet, and that ended that. Briggs stepped on the gas and thought he was gone pull away from the police car. Well, that didn't work out so good, and the faster Briggs went in that Oldsmobile, the closer that Chevrolet got. I tell you, he couldn't get no farther apart from that police car than I am to you. Well, he kept going 'til he finally got scared, and said "I guess I gotta pull over."
Well, there was six of us in that car, and we'd been drinking and smoking cigarettes since we left base, so when Briggs rolled down that window, all that smoke just chimneyed up out of that window and that policeman had to jump back.
"Damn! Smells like y'all been brewing whiskey in there!"
Well, he made us all get out of the car, all six of us. And then - now Briggs was a big man, about 6'6",250 lbs. and he didn't have no gut on him. He was just broad through the shoulders, a big man. And Briggs, he just starts to sob, right there on the side of the road. And he's just weeping, and out he comes with this.
"I'm sorry officer, but my buddy Warren here's mama is dying and we're just trying to get him back to Asheville so he can say goodbye to his mama. We just gotta get him back to see his mama before she dies."
Now Warren was an orphan, and never knew he even had a mama, so this was all news to him! And that policeman thought about it for a minute and finally he said "I don't know if I oughta believe that sob story, but if I take you in and lock you up, and then I find out it is true, well then I'd feel like a real heel. So if you'll let the soberest one of you drive, I'll let you go."
Then he comes over to me, and says "I don't know if you're any more sober than they are, or if you just handle it better, but if I let you go, will you drive?"
I said "Yes sir, and I'll drive carefully." And damn if he didn't let us go!
Gold, Pop. Pure gold. He told me he's been telling that story for 57 years, and it's still funny. I agree.
John "Falstaff" Hartness is a hillbilly from Bullock Creek, SC and now lives in Charlotte. Check him out at Poker Stage.
This is a story my father told me, in the best re-creation of his words I can devise. The year is 1950, the place is Camp Atterbury in Edinburgh, IN.
So this ol' boy Briggs come into the barracks one afternoon and says "Johnny Bob, you got any money? They're giving out three-day passes and we got a quart of liquor and a tank full of gas, but we ain't got enough money to get all the way to Asheville. If you got enough money to get a tank of gas in London, Kentucky, I can get more money in Asheville."
Now this was 'long about the end of the month when didn't nobody have no money, so I told him No.
"C'mon John, I know you always got a dollar or two ratted away, count up your change and see how much money you got."
Well, I did have a dollar or two stuck back, and I had two dollars in my pocket, and when I counted up all my change I had $5.30. We decided that was enough for a tank of gas, so off we went. We had us an Oldsmobile 88 convertible, and it was February, so we had the top up, and the windows rolled up, and as soon as we pulled out of the base, Briggs tore the top off that quart of liquor and threw it out the window.
Well, we got to London, Kentucky, and we filled up, and it cost us four dollars and a quarter for a tank of gas. Now I had $5.30, and that's all the money that was in that car. The other boy had done spent all their money on that quart of liquor and the first tank of gas. So we bought another quart of liquor, on credit, from that store in London.
Now I always did wonder why that ol' boy let us have that liquor on credit, but come to think of it, there was six of us, all of us big men, all of us MPs from Camp Atterbury, and all of us about half drunk. Hell, he mighta been a little scared!
But the funny part of the story is this - Briggs had it in his head that that Oldsmobile was the fastest thing ever been made. Now this road from London to Asheville would go from four lanes to two, then back to dual lane for a little while, then back down to two lanes. And we're clipping along right real good on one of these dual-lane parts when we saw lights in the rear view. I think they were red lights back then, but it don't matter, it was the police.
Well, Briggs said "What kind of car is that that thinks they can catch me?" We told him it was a Chevrolet, and that ended that. Briggs stepped on the gas and thought he was gone pull away from the police car. Well, that didn't work out so good, and the faster Briggs went in that Oldsmobile, the closer that Chevrolet got. I tell you, he couldn't get no farther apart from that police car than I am to you. Well, he kept going 'til he finally got scared, and said "I guess I gotta pull over."
Well, there was six of us in that car, and we'd been drinking and smoking cigarettes since we left base, so when Briggs rolled down that window, all that smoke just chimneyed up out of that window and that policeman had to jump back.
"Damn! Smells like y'all been brewing whiskey in there!"
Well, he made us all get out of the car, all six of us. And then - now Briggs was a big man, about 6'6",250 lbs. and he didn't have no gut on him. He was just broad through the shoulders, a big man. And Briggs, he just starts to sob, right there on the side of the road. And he's just weeping, and out he comes with this.
"I'm sorry officer, but my buddy Warren here's mama is dying and we're just trying to get him back to Asheville so he can say goodbye to his mama. We just gotta get him back to see his mama before she dies."
Now Warren was an orphan, and never knew he even had a mama, so this was all news to him! And that policeman thought about it for a minute and finally he said "I don't know if I oughta believe that sob story, but if I take you in and lock you up, and then I find out it is true, well then I'd feel like a real heel. So if you'll let the soberest one of you drive, I'll let you go."
Then he comes over to me, and says "I don't know if you're any more sober than they are, or if you just handle it better, but if I let you go, will you drive?"
I said "Yes sir, and I'll drive carefully." And damn if he didn't let us go!
Gold, Pop. Pure gold. He told me he's been telling that story for 57 years, and it's still funny. I agree.
John "Falstaff" Hartness is a hillbilly from Bullock Creek, SC and now lives in Charlotte. Check him out at Poker Stage.
December 15, 2006
Fugue in Geek Minor
By Falstaff © 2006
I was 18 years old and full of my own independence. Jason, Steve and I had torn off down to New Orleans for Fall Break, gotten drunk at Wet Willie's, pissed in a public park under a streetlight and gotten front row seats at Big Daddy's Topless & Bottomless, where a Eurasian chick with a black pageboy cut and three tattoos did things to Jason's hat that made him swear he would never do laundry again. So when the chance popped off to go to Dragon Con that year, I was totally there.
I'd never done a major Con before, and Dragon Con was pretty damn major. I found out that Todd McFarlane was going to be there, so I packed up my Spiderman #1 in my backpack, tossed a bottle of Mescal under the front seat of my 1978 Impala, and we cruised off down I-85. Steve was originally from G-Vegas, and we were meeting up with Jay and a bunch of his friends from the Greenville Rogues Society, who threw an annual party at Dragon Con that was apparently something not to be missed.
Hell, the whole trip was something not to be missed. From drinking White Russians with Jay that had so much liquor in them they actually fermented the milk, to seeing the bodies lying in the hallway of the Atlanta Hilton (I think) sprawled on the floor, mouths agape with black drool dribbling down their chin after drinking The Black Death (a Rogues Society Specialty), the whole weekend was incredible. It can all be summed up for me by one brief moment.
We were in a ballroom waiting for the dance to start, but there was no music. We'd had about a gallon of White Russians at this point and I felt the need to lie down. As I lay there, I noticed that the chandelier in the room was really neat-looking from that angle, so I called over Jay's friend Carol, who also was feeling a bit of a need to be recumbent just about then. So Carol and I lay in the center of the ballroom exploring the landscape of the chandelier when I felt a twinge in my neck.
I turned my head ever so slightly to notice that there was someone biting me. A smallish woman, at least from what I could tell given the relative angles, with tricolor hair. Platinum, red and goth black. She nibbled a little longer, then she kissed me. Rather intently. I decided this couldn't be all bad, so I kissed her back and nibbled a little on her neck in return. After a couple of nips and nibbles, she suggested we depart the ballroom for somewhere a little more private. I thought briefly of going off to have wild gymnastic monkey sex with a woman with whom I had yet to actually and who introduced herself to me, if you could call it that, by getting down on her hands and knees in the middle of a hotel ballroom floor and biting me on the neck, but then I decided I was really drunk and should get a second opinion.
"Carol, should I go fuck her?"
"No, honey, that would not be good."
"Sorry, my friend says I shouldn't go fuck you. But thanks."
"Thanks, Carol."
"Friends don't let friends fuck dogs, baby."
I saw the tricolor-hair vampiress the next day. I wept a little as I thanked Carol from the bottom of my little bitty heart, because while she didn't have the kind of beauty that makes time stand still, she certainly had a face that could stop a clock.
Falstaff is a poker player and writer from Charlotte, NC. He's still a geek.
I was 18 years old and full of my own independence. Jason, Steve and I had torn off down to New Orleans for Fall Break, gotten drunk at Wet Willie's, pissed in a public park under a streetlight and gotten front row seats at Big Daddy's Topless & Bottomless, where a Eurasian chick with a black pageboy cut and three tattoos did things to Jason's hat that made him swear he would never do laundry again. So when the chance popped off to go to Dragon Con that year, I was totally there.
I'd never done a major Con before, and Dragon Con was pretty damn major. I found out that Todd McFarlane was going to be there, so I packed up my Spiderman #1 in my backpack, tossed a bottle of Mescal under the front seat of my 1978 Impala, and we cruised off down I-85. Steve was originally from G-Vegas, and we were meeting up with Jay and a bunch of his friends from the Greenville Rogues Society, who threw an annual party at Dragon Con that was apparently something not to be missed.
Hell, the whole trip was something not to be missed. From drinking White Russians with Jay that had so much liquor in them they actually fermented the milk, to seeing the bodies lying in the hallway of the Atlanta Hilton (I think) sprawled on the floor, mouths agape with black drool dribbling down their chin after drinking The Black Death (a Rogues Society Specialty), the whole weekend was incredible. It can all be summed up for me by one brief moment.
We were in a ballroom waiting for the dance to start, but there was no music. We'd had about a gallon of White Russians at this point and I felt the need to lie down. As I lay there, I noticed that the chandelier in the room was really neat-looking from that angle, so I called over Jay's friend Carol, who also was feeling a bit of a need to be recumbent just about then. So Carol and I lay in the center of the ballroom exploring the landscape of the chandelier when I felt a twinge in my neck.
I turned my head ever so slightly to notice that there was someone biting me. A smallish woman, at least from what I could tell given the relative angles, with tricolor hair. Platinum, red and goth black. She nibbled a little longer, then she kissed me. Rather intently. I decided this couldn't be all bad, so I kissed her back and nibbled a little on her neck in return. After a couple of nips and nibbles, she suggested we depart the ballroom for somewhere a little more private. I thought briefly of going off to have wild gymnastic monkey sex with a woman with whom I had yet to actually and who introduced herself to me, if you could call it that, by getting down on her hands and knees in the middle of a hotel ballroom floor and biting me on the neck, but then I decided I was really drunk and should get a second opinion.
"Carol, should I go fuck her?"
"No, honey, that would not be good."
"Sorry, my friend says I shouldn't go fuck you. But thanks."
"Thanks, Carol."
"Friends don't let friends fuck dogs, baby."
I saw the tricolor-hair vampiress the next day. I wept a little as I thanked Carol from the bottom of my little bitty heart, because while she didn't have the kind of beauty that makes time stand still, she certainly had a face that could stop a clock.
Falstaff is a poker player and writer from Charlotte, NC. He's still a geek.
August 30, 2006
Salt
By Falstaff © 2006
I can still taste the salt on your lips -
Sun-kissed blonde and sweet, sweet seventeen
Graduation week daiquiris, sand surf
summer lovin'
tell me more
tell me Mooorrrree
Wave-tossed kisses
Under the Boardwalk
As the water licks our toes
You giggle.
I can still taste the salt on your lips -
Tangled clothes bare back sticking to the car seat
Elbows, knees and nothing fitting right
Ooooh, ow, no, yes, right theeerrrreeee
Shit, car's coming
Can't see to drive
Laughing, sweating, panting
growing up fast together
on an empty dirt road
Shirt on inside out walking in the front door
and Mama waiting in the kitchen
I can still taste the salt on your lips -
Feel your hair on the back of my hand
As the wind blows off the lake
You cling to me
One
last
time
And a single
Sweet
Salty
Tear
Runs down your face
Or mine.
Falstaff is a writer and poker player from Charlotte, NC. He can be found under a rock at Poker Stage.
I can still taste the salt on your lips -
Sun-kissed blonde and sweet, sweet seventeen
Graduation week daiquiris, sand surf
summer lovin'
tell me more
tell me Mooorrrree
Wave-tossed kisses
Under the Boardwalk
As the water licks our toes
You giggle.
I can still taste the salt on your lips -
Tangled clothes bare back sticking to the car seat
Elbows, knees and nothing fitting right
Ooooh, ow, no, yes, right theeerrrreeee
Shit, car's coming
Can't see to drive
Laughing, sweating, panting
growing up fast together
on an empty dirt road
Shirt on inside out walking in the front door
and Mama waiting in the kitchen
I can still taste the salt on your lips -
Feel your hair on the back of my hand
As the wind blows off the lake
You cling to me
One
last
time
And a single
Sweet
Salty
Tear
Runs down your face
Or mine.
Falstaff is a writer and poker player from Charlotte, NC. He can be found under a rock at Poker Stage.
July 26, 2006
Grits
Grits
By Falstaff © 2006It was my friend Melinda's birthday and we were in Birmingham, Alabama. That right there should tell you that this will not end in a pretty fashion. We start our night at Dreamland, a legendary rib joint with the face of a smiling pig painted nine feet high on the side of the building. I'm always puzzled at the desire of barbeque restaurants to make you feel like you're dining on a Looney Tunes star, but the smiling pig picture has kept legions of sign painters in business for eons through the south.
So we get a table for twelve, and the waitress who seats us obviously knows how to deal with rowdy convention-going dorks like us.
"Y'all want beer or tea?" Remember this is Alabama; there is no question to the sugar content of said tea.
In chorus, a dozen theatre lighting salespeople harmonize the holy chorus of "Bee-eee-eeeeeee-eee-rrrrr!"
"Y'all want chicken or ribs?"
I've never seen the word "chicken" sneered before, but I swear that's what she did. This lovely woman, Alabama's own answer to George Jefferson's Florence, with (I swear) an Aunt Jemima-red bandana on her head, actually sneered the word "chicken."
"Ribs. Lots," this from Alan, Melinda's boss, who had very fastidiously tucked his napkin into his necktie in preparation for the splatterfest that was soon to ensue.
We suggested that he might consider removing his jacket for the feast, but he assured us that he was a trained professional, perfectly capable of making it through a meal without wearing any sauce on his sleeve. In other words, this was not his first barbeque.
About 16 seconds later, Florence came back with twelve beers, emerging from various pockets and apron receptacles like clowns from a VW bug, deposits two rolls of Bounty paper towels on the table, and two loaves of Wonder Bread.
The sad thing was, not a soul at the table even thought to ask "what’s the bread for?" Every single, solitary person seated there immediately understood that not only was the bread going to be a far more effective napkin than anything else, but without bread, there can be no sopping. And with any good meal, the sopping is the best part, obviating any requirement for dessert or after-dinner drinks (although there would be plenty of after-dinner drinking).
About 47 consumed beers later (about 28 minutes in real time, but we were drunks on a mission), we had consumed everything but a local microbrew called Iron City Beer, and there were three aluminum foil roasting pans in the center of the table, playing host to enough ribs to create a 1/8th scale model of the Capitol Dome. If you are ever in Birmingham and get the opportunity to try Iron City Beer, haul ass to the Mississippi line as quickly as possible.
After decimating the ribs and making short work of both loaves of soppin' bread, we decided that it was time to DANCE! This serves as an acceptable indicator of the higher level thinking that a dozen adults with about 19 degrees between them can engage in after consuming roughly their body weight in beer and ribs. This was not going to be pretty. It got less pretty when we found the nearest dance club, a charming place called Bell Bottoms. All disco, all the time. And me without my white suit. But it was Melinda's birthday, and she wanted dancing, so a-dancing we went.
Immediately upon entering the bar we were confronted with the sight of the inimitable Randy K and thirteen kamikaze shots. Walt two-fisted, because, well, somebody had to drink the last one. Several hours worth of dancing, drinking and Twister ensued (no Crisco was harmed in the playing of this Twister game), finally culminating in the removal of neckties, the blowing of kisses, the sprawling on floors and the closing down of the bar for the night. Salespeople in their barbeque-splattered convention clothes are less than appealing at 2:30 AM in fluorescent lighting.
But since it had now been six hours and about 137 alcoholic beverages since we all last ate, we decided that a Waffle House run was mandatory. Now, let's look past for the moment the fact that Waffle Houses are somewhat frightening before midnight. Even when you're sober. But when you're drunk, fearless and hungry, you'll go places where no Yankee has ever gone before, the Birmingham Waffle House at 3AM. And trust me, in Birmingham, being from North Carolina marks me as a Yankee.
There might have been a few wrong turns to get us to the Waffle House. This might have been assisted by the fact that we had no directions and no one in the car was sober. Or had ever been to Birmingham before 24 hours prior. There may have been an incident where we made a Secret-Service level reverse-and-peel-out change of direction when we noticed a field sobriety checkpoint up ahead as Walt hung out the rear passenger window yelling "Here, piggy, piggy, piggy" while we ran like West Virginia virgins.
But finally, up ahead, was the welcoming golden glow that told me all would soon be well with the universe, the familiar yellow squares with one burnt out letter (because there’s always one burnt out letter in the sign).
We took our seats at the bar and placed out order. In my best amazingly drunken Elwood Blues impression, I ordered eight slices of white toast, two orders of bacon, and a chicken breast. Plain. Melinda had a waffle, which I'd never actually seen anyone eat at a Waffle House before, so it struck me as odd. And Walt ordered a monstrous breakfast with eggs, a double order of grits, bacon, sausage, toast and black coffee. I became very concerned with the upholstery on the ride back.
As our food arrived, two members of Birmingham's finest walked into the diner, looking for all the world like they really needed to find some drunken out-of-towners to lynch before they got off their shift at sunrise to return to their coffins. They walked the entire length of the bar, paused behind each one of us as we tried our best to sit upright, and sat down on the stool right next to Walt just as our food arrived. BubbaCop 1 ordered, asked Walt to pass the napkins, and as he turned around after giving BC the napkins, all the stress, strain and Kamikaze's of the night finally caught up with Walt. He took a good look at the cop sitting next to him; his face took on an expression of the deepest thought, and then morphed into utter calm as he finally passed out, facedown, right into his double order of grits, extra butter.
The cop and I looked at each other over Walt's slumped shoulders, shrugged in unison, pulled him back into a sitting position, and ate our meals, one hand on each of Walt's shoulders while he snored little grit snores in the middle of the Waffle House.
Falstaff is a poker player and writer from Charlotte, NC. He can usually be found at Poker Stage.
April 29, 2006
It's a Matter of Perception
By Falstaff © 2006
Do you have any idea what this is talking about?
I looked to the left, and hanging out in midair beside my chair, was a brain. I knew it unmistakably as my brain, because it had my eyes. None of the rest of the things that comprise a face, or even a head, just a brain floating in midair with my eyes in front. I was only a little surprised to see it there, and that might have been part of the problem.
There may have been drinking involved. Actually, there was definitely drinking involved, but no alcohol. We couldn't afford it. Not even the 18-pack for $6 Milwaukee's Beast from the gas station on the corner. Underage was beside the point, underfunded was the obstacle. So we went to the next resort – acid. Nothing. Couldn't find a tab on campus at all for less than $10, a friggin' travesty given the quality we had been experiencing – that shit should have definitely been in the drug dealer’s equivalent of a dollar store. So the last resort sent us across the less-than-busy four-lane road that was the main drag in Rock Hill, SC to the grocery store across from campus. We knew the route well enough to have walked it blindfolded – in the front door, turn left, 10 steps, halfway down the aisle, middle shelf – Tussin DM.
You wanna talk about white trash hallucinogens, you can't really go any further into the trailer park than chuggin a whole bottle of cough syrup with a Dr. Pepper chaser at 1PM on a Tuesday. So there was me and Chris, swaying a little at the foulness we'd just ingested, trying not to puke, and failing miserably. Didn't matter, even with the puke, a whole bottle of tussin was still good for about seven hours of seriously bent reality.
So what do two 18-year-old kids gakked outta their minds on cough syrup do on a winter's afternoon? Go to the mall and look at the pretty lights, of course. Now we weren't satisfied with the local Trasheria Mall in Rock Hill. Oh no, we had to put the rubber to the road on the interstate to truck it up to the big two-story mall in Charlotte. Great fuckin' idea. I'm sure there was driving, but my next recollection is looking at all the coooooolllllll shit in the Everything's A Dollar store in the mall, then I see the really neat texture on the wall. Cool fleckstone paint always deserves a closer look, right?
This is when I realized one of the great truths of physics – matter isn't really solid. We all know that there are really far greater spaces between atoms in a wall than appear to the naked eye, right? Well at that point, at 1:47 PM on a Tuesday afternoon in 1992, I could see the precise molecular alignment of not just the wall of the Dollar Store, but also of my hand. I had found how to pass through solid matter, and it was time to try it out, right now!
I slowly extended my arm towards the wall, being very careful not to move too quickly, lest I misalign my molecules with those of the wall. Closer, less than a foot from the wall, I could see everything lining up for me to be able to reach through the wall and wave at Chris from outside while part of me stays inside. Closer, six inches from the wall, moving, moving...
"Hey, you okay over there?"
SLAM!
The bright lights of the mall go off like sirens in my head screaming, "They all know you're fucked up! Act straight! Act like you're not tripping daisies!"
"Dude, he just got out of the hospital, leave him alone," Chris to my rescue. And we bolt, giggling like 8-year old girls (albeit really, really fucked up 8-year old girls). And as we settle into the car for the return trip to campus, I look over at Chris with a look of absolute terror on my face.
"Dude, what if he'd done that while my hand was in the wall?"
(Pause)
(Pause)
"Dude?"
"Yeah?"
"I got an English exam in an hour."
"That oughta be interesting."
"Yeah."
And that's where I was when I looked over, saw my brain floating just to the left of my head, asking me if I had any idea what the prof was asking for in that essay.
"Nah dude, you?"
"Not a clue."
"Then get back in there where you belong before you get me in trouble."
"That flushing sound? Any chance of the dean's list for that semester."
Falstaff is a poker player and writer from Charlotte, NC. He can usually be found at Poker Stage.
Do you have any idea what this is talking about?
I looked to the left, and hanging out in midair beside my chair, was a brain. I knew it unmistakably as my brain, because it had my eyes. None of the rest of the things that comprise a face, or even a head, just a brain floating in midair with my eyes in front. I was only a little surprised to see it there, and that might have been part of the problem.
There may have been drinking involved. Actually, there was definitely drinking involved, but no alcohol. We couldn't afford it. Not even the 18-pack for $6 Milwaukee's Beast from the gas station on the corner. Underage was beside the point, underfunded was the obstacle. So we went to the next resort – acid. Nothing. Couldn't find a tab on campus at all for less than $10, a friggin' travesty given the quality we had been experiencing – that shit should have definitely been in the drug dealer’s equivalent of a dollar store. So the last resort sent us across the less-than-busy four-lane road that was the main drag in Rock Hill, SC to the grocery store across from campus. We knew the route well enough to have walked it blindfolded – in the front door, turn left, 10 steps, halfway down the aisle, middle shelf – Tussin DM.
You wanna talk about white trash hallucinogens, you can't really go any further into the trailer park than chuggin a whole bottle of cough syrup with a Dr. Pepper chaser at 1PM on a Tuesday. So there was me and Chris, swaying a little at the foulness we'd just ingested, trying not to puke, and failing miserably. Didn't matter, even with the puke, a whole bottle of tussin was still good for about seven hours of seriously bent reality.
So what do two 18-year-old kids gakked outta their minds on cough syrup do on a winter's afternoon? Go to the mall and look at the pretty lights, of course. Now we weren't satisfied with the local Trasheria Mall in Rock Hill. Oh no, we had to put the rubber to the road on the interstate to truck it up to the big two-story mall in Charlotte. Great fuckin' idea. I'm sure there was driving, but my next recollection is looking at all the coooooolllllll shit in the Everything's A Dollar store in the mall, then I see the really neat texture on the wall. Cool fleckstone paint always deserves a closer look, right?
This is when I realized one of the great truths of physics – matter isn't really solid. We all know that there are really far greater spaces between atoms in a wall than appear to the naked eye, right? Well at that point, at 1:47 PM on a Tuesday afternoon in 1992, I could see the precise molecular alignment of not just the wall of the Dollar Store, but also of my hand. I had found how to pass through solid matter, and it was time to try it out, right now!
I slowly extended my arm towards the wall, being very careful not to move too quickly, lest I misalign my molecules with those of the wall. Closer, less than a foot from the wall, I could see everything lining up for me to be able to reach through the wall and wave at Chris from outside while part of me stays inside. Closer, six inches from the wall, moving, moving...
"Hey, you okay over there?"
SLAM!
The bright lights of the mall go off like sirens in my head screaming, "They all know you're fucked up! Act straight! Act like you're not tripping daisies!"
"Dude, he just got out of the hospital, leave him alone," Chris to my rescue. And we bolt, giggling like 8-year old girls (albeit really, really fucked up 8-year old girls). And as we settle into the car for the return trip to campus, I look over at Chris with a look of absolute terror on my face.
"Dude, what if he'd done that while my hand was in the wall?"
(Pause)
(Pause)
"Dude?"
"Yeah?"
"I got an English exam in an hour."
"That oughta be interesting."
"Yeah."
And that's where I was when I looked over, saw my brain floating just to the left of my head, asking me if I had any idea what the prof was asking for in that essay.
"Nah dude, you?"
"Not a clue."
"Then get back in there where you belong before you get me in trouble."
"That flushing sound? Any chance of the dean's list for that semester."
Falstaff is a poker player and writer from Charlotte, NC. He can usually be found at Poker Stage.
January 30, 2006
Anniversary in Italy
By John "Falstaff" Hartness © 2005
"This is the best swordfish steak I have ever tasted," I said to the maitre'd. He was hovering since we were the first couple in for the dinner hours.
"Thank you, I will tell my uncle you enjoyed it."
"Is he the chef?"
"No, he is a fisherman. He caught that fish this morning."
This conversation simply does not happen in North Carolina. For one thing, all the grammar was too good. But since I wasn't in North Carolina, rather Taormina, Sicily, I didn't think too much of the statement. It was our anniversary, and we had ditched the tour group to do a little shopping and have a nice romantic dinner all to ourselves. So we meandered through the cobblestone streets of Taormina, wandered through the piazza centro and set off down a side street where I noticed a small sandwich board in front of a lighted canopy.
"Let's try this place."
"Okay, whatever you want."
"Happy anniversary."
"Happy anniversary. So where are we going next year?"
"Let's just see if they have seats first, then we can think about next year."
They did have seats, since it was only 7PM and barely the beginning of dinner hours. I love the idea of a siesta, the nap in the midday that allows everything to be postponed a little into the evening. After all, only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. And Americans, but that's beside the point. The point is, 7PM was very early for dinner, so we had the restaurant all to ourselves for our anniversary dinner, from the antipasti all the way to the tiramisu, which after that meal I simply refuse to eat anywhere on American soil. It's simply a pale reflection.
The bruschetta was fresh, and sliced thin enough to be pinkly translucent. The wine was exquisite, a light and airy Aetna white, so named because the vineyard was on the slopes of that great smoking mountain where we had spent the previous day exploring. For a pasta, I chose spaghetti with sea urchin, tiny balls of sea urchin meat the size of the end of a Q-tip, with a flavor that exploded across the mouth and tongue like a rich, salty firecracker. An oddly earthy taste, sea urchin, brought out well by the slight dusting of Parmesan cheese (Suzy had made the tactical error on our first afternoon of assuming that Parmesan cheese in Sicily was as milquetoast and bland as the Americanized green cardboard can version. Not even close.)
And then there was the grilled swordfish, which I ate without the slightest interest in overfishing, endangered species, or anything else except the fever pitch my taste buds had been brought to by this meal. Light and flaky, but not dry. Exquisitely seasoned, with herbs and sea salt, the fish was substantial enough to rival any NY strip steak I've ever eaten, without the sense of substance. It was filling, yet after the meal was finished I felt almost as though I had dined on moonlight and rainwater. There was nothing to weigh us down as we thanked the nice man for his hospitality, took a photo with him for our scrapbook, and wandered back down the cobblestone alley into the night.
Falstaff is a writer, stage director and poker player in Charlotte, NC. His writing was featured in the collection My South: a People, a Place, a World All Its Own. He can be found online at Poker Stage
"This is the best swordfish steak I have ever tasted," I said to the maitre'd. He was hovering since we were the first couple in for the dinner hours.
"Thank you, I will tell my uncle you enjoyed it."
"Is he the chef?"
"No, he is a fisherman. He caught that fish this morning."
This conversation simply does not happen in North Carolina. For one thing, all the grammar was too good. But since I wasn't in North Carolina, rather Taormina, Sicily, I didn't think too much of the statement. It was our anniversary, and we had ditched the tour group to do a little shopping and have a nice romantic dinner all to ourselves. So we meandered through the cobblestone streets of Taormina, wandered through the piazza centro and set off down a side street where I noticed a small sandwich board in front of a lighted canopy.
"Let's try this place."
"Okay, whatever you want."
"Happy anniversary."
"Happy anniversary. So where are we going next year?"
"Let's just see if they have seats first, then we can think about next year."
They did have seats, since it was only 7PM and barely the beginning of dinner hours. I love the idea of a siesta, the nap in the midday that allows everything to be postponed a little into the evening. After all, only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. And Americans, but that's beside the point. The point is, 7PM was very early for dinner, so we had the restaurant all to ourselves for our anniversary dinner, from the antipasti all the way to the tiramisu, which after that meal I simply refuse to eat anywhere on American soil. It's simply a pale reflection.
The bruschetta was fresh, and sliced thin enough to be pinkly translucent. The wine was exquisite, a light and airy Aetna white, so named because the vineyard was on the slopes of that great smoking mountain where we had spent the previous day exploring. For a pasta, I chose spaghetti with sea urchin, tiny balls of sea urchin meat the size of the end of a Q-tip, with a flavor that exploded across the mouth and tongue like a rich, salty firecracker. An oddly earthy taste, sea urchin, brought out well by the slight dusting of Parmesan cheese (Suzy had made the tactical error on our first afternoon of assuming that Parmesan cheese in Sicily was as milquetoast and bland as the Americanized green cardboard can version. Not even close.)
And then there was the grilled swordfish, which I ate without the slightest interest in overfishing, endangered species, or anything else except the fever pitch my taste buds had been brought to by this meal. Light and flaky, but not dry. Exquisitely seasoned, with herbs and sea salt, the fish was substantial enough to rival any NY strip steak I've ever eaten, without the sense of substance. It was filling, yet after the meal was finished I felt almost as though I had dined on moonlight and rainwater. There was nothing to weigh us down as we thanked the nice man for his hospitality, took a photo with him for our scrapbook, and wandered back down the cobblestone alley into the night.
Falstaff is a writer, stage director and poker player in Charlotte, NC. His writing was featured in the collection My South: a People, a Place, a World All Its Own. He can be found online at Poker Stage
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