Tag Archives: Writing

Simply the Best Man

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I met Shane in 1992, and he was a year and a half older than me. I quickly looked up to him as a mentor. My senior year of high school was full of a lot of new and old friends and adventures, but sitting in his studio apartment while he painted, and chatting and bullshitting was probably the highlight.

When I moved New York adjacent, he was there for the first several months. He showed me around, including a method of buying weed that landed us in the middle of Louis Farrakhan’s Million Youth March. While I taught myself how to draw, he was my biggest cheerleader, and the first person to call me an artist.

He and his family moved upstate, which is where I spent my three-day weekends, working on two screenplays, one of which was lost to poor archiving and a then-sixteen-pound Newcastle sitting on my laptop. The other was completed, and because it was absurdly long, he and I spent a week last summer lengthening it into a five-episode series.

Our relationship had its ups and downs, and he’s not the best at long-distance communication, but we have stayed tight. An eternity ago, he was my Best Man. My ex-wife hated him and schemed to keep us apart, and it worked. However, we’ve reconnected since then, and I’m constantly sharing with him some of the many little drawings I’ve been doing.

I’ve prematurely written my memoirs, with each chapter representing an important character in my life, and you can bet Shane got one. With his help, I was able to correct a lot of the misinformation drilled into my head by someone I was married to, and now I have an accurate chronicle of our relationship until June 2022. I should probably update that.

The reason I’m calling you all here is because Shane is an accomplished painter, with shows across the US and a distinctive style I’m proud to say I’ve watched evolve, from awkward (but still beautiful) nudes of Sherilyn Fenn to the Cubist/Outsider style that is his brand, which seem to feature the same woman. I can’t judge because I frequently draw the same woman. Long story short, nobody paints like him.

As artists, we couldn’t be anymore different. His medium is oils and large canvases. Mine is pencil, ink, and watercolors. His subjects are deserts and cityscapes and surreal costumes. My subjects are characters from my writing oeuvre. He’s a painter, I’m more of a cartoonist.

Even though we see each other as equals and have been mistaken as brothers, I still look up to him, and I thought it would be really cool if I drew one of his paintings in my style. The result isn’t nearly as good as the original, but the process was fun and engaging and exactly the reason I’m an artist. (Mine’s on the right, in case you couldn’t tell.)

Kitten Season in Albania

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In my old writing group, we had a contest too see which of us could write the most words. The winner got a sticker. If you looked at Kat’s laptop, she was covered in stickers. It’s a free-write—you can talk about how much you hate writing for ten minutes, and you’re still qualified to win. This is surprisingly coherent for a free-write, but that’s the way I roll. The prompt was the phrase, “It was kitten season in Albania.”

It was kitten season in Albania, and no matter how much you sprayed, they were everywhere. And you know what they say about kittens: if you see one, there are dozens around that you can’t actually see. I had a particular problem with the kittens during my stay in Albania as part of my top-secret diplomatic mission with the State Department, and that was this: I had a lot of knickknacks. A LOT of knickknacks. And if there’s one thing that a kitten loves, it’s destroying the knickknacks. There was an owl that my grandmother had given me—she was Albanian, which is how I scored the sweet undercover gig—and a kitten came out of nowhere, bit its head off, knocked the remains to the floor, and disappeared into a portal. Fucking kittens. I don’t know where these portals go, but I vow one day to find out.

I called the kitten exterminators the other day—don’t worry, they don’t actually kill the kittens—they just round them up and put them into a vacuum cleaner to be sent to the kitten retail outlet in Bangor, Maine. They have a portal expert whose job is specifically to figure out where the kittens go after they create their swathes of destruction and adorable, adorable mayhem. We have theories—some of us think that it is a beautiful, sunny world of fluffiness and cotton candy. Others believe—as do I—that it is a dark, hell dimension full of evil and stuff. This makes as much sense to me as anything, being that I really, really loved my Albanian grandmother’s owl statue. I wanted to kill that kitten, but it looked at me with those big kitten eyes and mewed a tiny kitten mew, and it was all over. I’d adopt the little fucker, but I have other owl statues that my Albanian grandmother gave to me. Many owl statues. There was an army of them. I think she used them to unleash dark, Albanian magic upon the world. So who knows, maybe the kittens are a force for good, destroying those talismen of evil. Or maybe they’re just tchotchkes. What kind of magic is dark, Albanian magic? I’ve heard of Dark Macedonian magic, and dark Lithunanean magic, but never dark Albanian magic. I don’t know who spread that rumor, really. I think it was my mother, who never did like her mother-in-law. But still, labeling someone as an evil Albanian magic-user seems a little harsh, don’t you think? Maybe there was a grain of truth about it? I mean, there was all the chanting and the weird lights that eminated from Grandma’s room late at night when she thought everyone was asleep. I wasn’t asleep because the prescriptions I was on for my insomnia never actually worked. The ones for psychosis, however, were magic. Just like my grandmother. And that kitten. Fucking kitten.

Tales from the Cubicle

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*thunder and organ music*

Gather round, boys and GHOULS, for I bring you DOUBLE the frights in tonight’s chilling tale: “Terror in Team Room 5.”

*lightning*

It seemed like such a normal day. The sky was overcast, and the air was warm, but not too warm. It was more of a cuddle than a scalding. I had done a great deal of work that day, I made a drawing I can’t wait to share, and I gathered in Team Room 5 with the managers and the giant TV to talk to the editors and those who couldn’t make it that day.

Then there’s Brandy (not her real name). Brandy’s desk is fifty yards from Team Room 5, but she Zooms into the weekly meeting. I’m sure there’s a good reason. She’s our staff influencer, and there might be some reason she can’t leave her desk. Whatever.

The meeting was pretty typical, until three-quarters through, when a figure stepped into Brandy’s blurred background. I was watching the editor-in-chief at that moment, so it took Clara (not her real name) whispering at me around the Vice President of Publishing for me to notice. When I looked over Brandy’s shoulder, I saw me.

My height, my build, my bad posture, my complexion, my burgundy T-shirt, my jeans, and platinum blond or white hair were all there. There was no way to communicate to Brandy while he just stood there, shuffling around, giving me the heebie-jeebies.

The Vice President of Publishing, visibly bored, got the editors to stop talking and set us free. After confirming on Brandy’s screen that I was still there, Clara and I raced to her desk. We were between my doppelganger and the elevator, so there was no way he was getting out. And yet, he was nowhere to be seen.

We asked Brandy who he was, and she told us she never got a look at his face. Who was he? Where did he go? We will never know. Watch the background. Always watch the background.

Well, that tale was TWICE the scares! Hahahahaha! It was TWO frightening! Hahahahaha! That’s a tale you enjoy with a hot cup of COPY! Hahahahaha! It gives a whole new meaning to “talking to yourself”! Hahahahaha! I hope you enjoyed this DOS of horror and tune in next time to Tales from the Cubicle. Hahahahaha!

*thunder and organ music*

Create Expectations

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When I started writing again after a long hiatus, I was working at The Container Store, which is the most on-the-nose name for a place of commerce since I hung out at The Coffee House in Lincoln the summer of 1996. My shifts were typically six hours, and they could be at any time the store was open or closed, which meant overnights or every Thursday at 5:00 a.m. I was itching to write, but I could only pull it off if my shifts were in the afternoon and evening, as after work, I had no energy or focus.

I didn’t want to be one of those writers who talks about writing but never writes. Writing isn’t work to me or a duty or something I have to do; it’s a process that brings me joy. Every day I couldn’t do it left me frustrated and depressed, leading me into deep planning mode. I noted that, because I’m crashing from my day, the only thing I do in the evening is watch TV or scroll slack-jawed through the internet. My solution was this: hack off that part of the day and gift it to myself on the other end when I have the energy.

Now, at four in the morning, I wake up and get ready, and by 4:30 (I’m a boy), I sit down at my desk or on my stoop, weather permitting, and this was my time to write, every day. I could write a lot or a little, as long as I was writing. I could scribble, “I got nothing” in a notebook for two hours, and it would count as writing. Several months ago, I started drawing, which crowded the writing from my schedule. Now, at 6:30, when I usually need a break, I hop the train to work and draw at my desk until I clock in at eight. The hour at my desk is important because I use my time in the ungodly early hours of the morning to illustrate my comic, which I can’t and shouldn’t bring with me to work. That leaves me with an hour plus lunch with my sketchbook and no restraints. As much fun as the comic is, it’s nice to branch out and play around a little.

I put a lot of time into being creative, so you’ll understand why a man with a lot to worry about is still pretty content.

Unfortunately, I’m entering a bit of a depressive period. I don’t mean depressed like sad, or even the kind of depression that turns my world into black and white and freezes my joints. Aside from concern over Newcastle, I’m actually doing quite well. The problem is, food doesn’t taste good to me anymore. Music doesn’t sound good to me anymore. The new Guardians of the Galaxy is out, and is apparently pretty good, and I couldn’t give less of a fuck. And yet, even this numb is better than the alternative.

Another sign that I’m on a downswing is that my artistic output goes down. I still work during the aforementioned mornings, but I’m more likely to wrap up early or get pulled into the movie I have on in the background. I’m still cranking out pages—I just filed page 6—but I’m less satisfied with the work I’m producing than I’d be if I were level. I’m still drawing in the morning, but I’ve been setting up my drawing gear for lunch when I’ve changed my mind and skipped it altogether to eat while I work.

It’ll come back, it always does. It’s hardly worth mentioning. Except that Newcastle has been extraordinarily clingy lately, and I don’t want to miss any time with him, so I’m probably not finishing page 7 by Sunday evening. Up until just now, I was cranking out two, maybe three pages a week, but between my inspiration drying up and my muse being such a narcissistic asshole, I’m not finding a lot of time to work on my project.

But my reason for creating art is so I can take pleasure in the craftsmanship, from watching a plot unfold before me to scribbling a circle to stand in for a head while the body takes shape. I got to letter in the word “diarrhea” today, with an accompanying facial expression and pose that really sold the dialogue. If I’m not having fun, there’s no point in doing it, so I’m going to have to take it slow for a while.

And if it means I have to be even slower for the sake of my cat, then I will gladly take my sweet time. Doing it amateur means no deadlines.

Convenience Store Maniac: an Ode

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It’s only natural to mourn the things you loved and are no longer with you, whether it be a person, a pet, a childhood house, etc.

Convenience Store Maniac was a semi-autobiographical portrayal of a man working at an S-Mart gas station and convenience store too seriously. who only lives for his job. One day he snaps, believing that commerce is a religion, and he is the but a humble minister. This means an inquisition of sorts with his regular customers, some of whom really piss him off. And then he starts killing people. It was clever and a little over-the-top, and that’s exactly what we were going for.

I remember when Shane first conceived of it, in depraved journals he wrote in during his overnight shift at the convenience store he’d been shipwrecked in. I read a few of the entries, and what I saw was a rambling, incoherent, violent mess, and I told him, “I don’t know what this is, I want in.” I loved what I saw, and together we breathed life into Leonard, playing to each other’s strengths, arguing over the use of a single word, as well as brainstorming our way around corners we’d painted ourselves into. We named all of the regular customers after classic country-western performers (except for the teenage assholes, who were Kurt, Chris, and Dave). Even though the names were never said aloud, they helped shape the personalities of people who got maybe one line in the whole movie. We manufactured and fine-tuned chaos. We wrote the first act, at the end of which Leonard takes his first victim, and then I got married, and my asshole cat broke my hard drive, and the first part of Convenience Store Maniac is lost forever.

What isn’t lost forever is the memory of the long weekends I spent in his house on Bear Town Road twenty years ago, getting baked and joining forces with my best friend to create something great. We haven’t talked about it in decades, and if we put our minds to it, we could bring it back to life. On the other hand, there’s nothing I could type that will live up to the first fifty pages that lives in my memory.

Can You Hear the People Sing? 

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In an unexpected plot twist, I spent yesterday afternoon in the Kennedy Center, watching Les Miserables. The plot twist is because I don’t particularly like musicals, and I can’t spell Les Miserables without miserable. I had just started working on page one of my new comic, and I wasn’t ready to call it quits for the day when my friend used the telephone function on her cell and told me she had an extra ticket for that afternoon.  

I have never seen Les Miserables all the way through before. It had never popped into Popejoy Hall in Albuquerque during one of my GATE trips, and Broadway was prohibitively expensive when I was there. (I’ve seen Rent on Broadway, but that was via shenanigans.) I saw the movie with my ex-wife, and we got an hour into it when we had to give up. However, I’m trying to accept invitations now (despite my art) because I’m thrilled someone thought of me.  

I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected. The set was dumbfounding, and damn, these people could sing. And I knew that kid was dead the instant he climbed the barricade. Sure Marius and Cosette had the personalities of wet cardboard, Marius’s bestie (whose name I forgot because I can’t remember anything) was fun and memorable and dead early into the second act. It was nice to be able to hear what Javert was singing about.  

But what really made my brain jump out of the top of my head and jump off a bridge was the aforementioned sets. Les Mis (as all those in the know call it) is epic. It takes place in France as revolution after revolution happens, in the streets, in the slums, in gated residences, etc., and through a miracle of engineering, they made it happen, from the docks at night to a wedding in a palace. There were no people in black moving scenery around—the scenery moved itself. And it did it so smoothly, the lights didn’t have to go down.  

One day in the office a while ago, when there were more people willing to stand around and chat for a half-hour, one of them, who is only a couple of years younger than I said, “You have to watch A New Hope. Just try to ignore the bad effects.” I almost broke my keyboard. The original Star Wars did not have CGI. It had dozens of craftsmen making the rantings of a filmmaking lunatic look like something you’d see in real life. They were sculptors, metalworkers, electricians. Like the lighting tech and the people ultimately running the sets, they were engineers. They were artists. Tom Savini, Stan Winston, they were artists.  

What disappoints me is that with CGI, you can make literally anything happen. There is no limit to the scope of your movie. As a practical effects artist, you are limited by what you have. Sometimes, while accommodating your limitations, you create something even better (i.e. hiding the shitty-looking shark in Jaws). You can’t freestyle with digital effects. The sound of the TARDIS in Doctor Who is a planer running over a piano. How did that guy figure out to do that? 

Something else I don’t like about digital art is that you don’t have to make mistakes anymore. If the brushstroke you just made bleeds into the background, hit control-Z. I have correction fluid, which doesn’t take paint or most inks. It’s my responsibility to leave my error on the page or make it a part of the picture. And I love it. I have hardly any experience with photo-editing software, but I have enough that I could erase every mistake I’d made in any painting or sketch. I won’t do it. I scripted, laid out, penciled, painted, inked, and lettered a whole comic, paint and ink on paper, because I love limitations. Limitations inspire me. The woman who designed the first Cyberman on Doctor Who had some tights and a vacuum cleaner (true story). That’s part of the reason I love Classic Who so much. What they created was cheesy, but it was genius. 

Digital artists are artists. I could never get into it because it required a completely different set of skills that I had been honing in my adulthood, but I recognize how hard these artists work. Sam Yang is a digital artist I admire, for example. I try to discuss it as easier than what I do, but it’s not. It’s just different. 

Going back to Les Miserables and the various Cirque du Soliel performances I’ve seen**, and Rent, they have a budget, but everything they create must be seen from as close as a hundred feet away, and it has to be convincing. Everyone who’s ever done theater knows this, and it takes a particular kind of maestro to pull it off, performance after performance, play after play.  

Bravo, set designers!  

*My ex-father-in-law, a stoic, strong, soft-spoken, masculine man, lived near Vegas, and he had a thing for shows, especially showtunes, and he was a millionaire. I saw a lot of shows. 

Spite of the Lepus 

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I’m sure you might remember how I once expressed my mourning for the lost art of making a tape, especially when putting together a playlist is what people do now, and it sounds unsatisfying. When you made a tape, you had to listen to each song, calculate how long each song was so you didn’t have too much blank space at the end. (Or, as many chose to do it, just play as much of the next song as you can before the tape runs out.) You put stickers on the tape, you decorated the case. You only made tapes for someone you’re trying to impress. A mix tape was a goddamned work of art, and you couldn’t do that with any other music medium.  

Another work of art I miss is letter-writing. I have had several pen-pals, and they were my closest friends at the time. One of my correspondents told me she said to her doctor that she did go to therapy—she wrote me every week. I would illustrate the margins when I was feeling whimsical, and if I was feeling ambitious, I’d do something fun with the envelope. The paper smelled like paper and felt crisp in your hands, while you reread what the final line was on a page so you could make sure it matched up with the next one. I’ve tried to revive letter-writing as an adult (I’ve got all these blank cards I never sold), but it never caught on with anybody. Writing a letter is a commitment, one most people don’t seem have the time or the will to make anymore. But when you take the time to write someone a letter on paper, you are spending every minute you work on it with them, and that is an act of intimacy that you will never find when someone slides into your DMs.   

For our evolution, we next got email, which was about 75 percent less commitment. You could say whatever you want, but not how you would say it. It’s not like your typing changes size or sprawls when you’re agitated. In email, you can capitalize words for emphasis, like some people still do in their comments and IMs, but that just gives people headaches. From there society moved onto comment threads, and the less said about that, the better (though that is how I met my ex-girlfriend and one of my best friends, so it’s not all bad). From there, we moved to IM, which had been around since the beginning, but went mainstream with social media (which is not at all bad, in that I met my eyes and ears in Finland, Wippa, the Norse Goddess of Punishment, through Myspace).  

But going back to email, I called myself a writer, but I hardly wrote because I was I was putting so much energy into emails. I just wanted to entertain my friends, so I wrote little plays, limericks, newscasts, an Oscar speech, the screenplay for a Kung Fu movie starring my coworkers, an ode to my missing button, and song lyrics that I made up. 

I only wrote two songs, one being a blues song about being dumped completely out of the blue that did not obey the laws of music. The other one sounded suspiciously like “A Boy Named Sue,” by Johnny Cash. The subject matter is a little difficult to describe. 

When I moved into my apartment in Jersey City, New Jersey, after the last tenant was removed on a stretcher, which I witnessed, I discovered what I considered to be a design flaw. There was a single pink strip of wallpaper that ran the circumference of my room, and it was decorated by bunnies, rolling around on their backs, sniffing flowers, wrestling, chasing butterflies.  

I looked around and decided that I was never going to get laid in this room (I was wrong), so I got the landlord’s permission and tried everything I could think of to get rid of the accursed bunnies. I even went to an Internet café and looked up how to get rid of wallpaper. I left the one wall for the bunnies that talked to me, but I covered the other walls with magazine clippings, art, and posters. If anything on my walls was going to cock-block me, it would be that. 

One day, while lying in bed and listening to the bunnies, I thought of a song. I emailed it to my friend Barry, and I thought it lost on the median of the Information Superhighway. Today, while poking around on my laptop, I found it: the song. And now I bring it to you. 

“Ballad of the Bunnies” 

When I was young, just twenty-two, 
I sought a place that had a view
, 
And one that didn’t cost a lot of money. 

I found a home, in Jersey City;  
It was cheap, and not real pretty,  
But still the deal was looking kind of sunny. 

So I unpacked my little room 
And saw what would now be my doom:  
A ring around the wall—and it was bunnies. 

Their background: pink. Their pelts were gray.  
Their poses were prepared for play.  
Their coal black eyes were looking at me funny. 

Their origin: I did not know,  
I didn’t care—they had to go, 
Or never would I find myself a honey. 

I scrubbed and washed and scraped that wall.  
I steamed and peeled; I tried it all!  
It only made my paint look kind of runny. 

Those rabbits cut me down to size,  
I had to reach a compromise; 
And now I’m left with just one wall of bunny. 

“This,” He said quietly as he got onto the bus, “is cool.”

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Every couple of years this comes up.

In 1991, I was sitting in drama class with the person I most looked up to in early high school, and we came up with some truly bizarre, baffling, high-energy situations to share with our friends. It was a tale that couldn’t be told by one story. It needed three stories. It needed “Three Stories in One.” Since I made a noble effort of illustrating the whole thing, getting distracted at fifty-six pages, I have a clear idea what they look like, and I like to revisit them. I can’t just pick up the last 10-15 pages because comparing my style to the style I had seventeen years ago is like asking Michelangelo to fill in some of the gaps on a cave painting. I’m proud of the work I did, but I’ve made some improvements.

This time, I thought hard about these faces as I worked on them. Since everybody’s based on a real person, I concentrated on features I remember most and spent a lot of time erasing. Luke didn’t look like that. Amber didn’t look like that, and Wendy didn’t look like that, except for the parts that totally did. Amber smiles with her eyes (still does), Wendy always looked annoyed at me—but with affection. Luke was robbed for the Best Dressed in the Class of ’93 (I mean that sincerely). Naturally, Jeremiah looked exactly like that in 1991. Boone really did have that playful smirk when she was up.

And now we need to have a quick word about Boone. A few years ago, Boone transitioned into Severian, a woman. I have not spoken to her as a woman, I have not even seen photos. I’m not even sure I got her name right. The only conception I have in my mind of Severian is when she was presenting as Boone, and the only reason I know about the transition at all is because one of our mutual friends chewed me out for dead-naming her in my last “Three Stories in One” post. Once I knew, I don’t refer to her as Boone anymore.

Last summer, I presumptively wrote my memoirs, each chapter representing the most influential figures in my life. And she was, without a doubt, going to be a very important. I did not dead-name her once, not even in my first draft. I believe that you should be who you need to be. A trans woman is a woman, period.

That said, I’ve spent a lot of time debating this in my head, and I’m not going to change Boone’s name or gender in “Three Stories in One.” The reason I won’t is because Boone is not Severian. Boone is a character based loosely on Severian when she was sixteen. While Severian was throwing bullets at elaborate Lego constructions with her buddy, Matt, Boone was picking up cheerleaders and playing meaningless board games with them.

On the same token, Luke is not a complete bastard, only kind of a bastard. Wendy was not a good driver back then, but at least she wasn’t driving her sweet Karmenn Ghia like it was the Batmobile. Amber was perky, but she was more than just a smile and the attention span of a hamster. (What I remember most about Amber was how kind she was to me. The popular girl treated me as just another student she was on a first-name basis with, not a nerd on the lowest rung.) And if I suddenly found myself, on my bike, in the middle of the Indy 500, I’d be a smear. At the risk of grandiosity, “Three Stories in One” is a historical document.

To be clear, if Severian tells me that “Three Stories in One,” particularly my decision to leave Boone as is, is offensive to her, then I’ll stop making these posts. I hope she doesn’t. I hope she appreciates it for the playful, teasing nostalgic spirit that went into these illustrations.

I’m not George Lucas. I tend to let things go when I’m done with them, but sometimes present circumstances demand that you change the past. Once again, I’m not going to. They were a product of their time.

Calling my Shot 

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My five-year dry spell making art came to an end a few months ago, as you’d know by the sketches choking your feed. Part of the reason is that I am going to illustrate another comic. I did four of them twenty years ago, and they look terrible, but I’m endlessly proud of them. I’ve learned a lot since then, much of it this winter, like (some) basic anatomy, a little more control with the brush, the usefulness of references, et cetera. I’ve been experimenting with lettering, poses, and panels, I’ve been honing characters’ faces, I’ve been buying the necessary supplies, I’m finding pictures of my old college for backgrounds (which are going to look rough, but that’s what I’m going for). I took a couple of weeks to visualize some of my unrelated characters, and now I’m back to work on the comic prerequisites.  

I’m running out of things to do to prep for doing the comic, so I’ve decided to give it a month. The last week in February, I’m going to sit down and lay out my panels. When that’s done, I break ground on this awesome new paper I bought and see this through. It won’t be great at first, and one day in the future, after I’ve really had the opportunity to hone my craft, I may dig up the old layouts and illustrate issue one and redo it. Or I’ll leave it. The comic series Mage was Matt Wagner’s second book, and it did not start out well. By issue fifteen, his style evolved into the graceful curves of what would be his storytelling through the eighties and nineties.  

As much as I love the scripts I have pounded out, I have entry-level skill, and unless I redraw it every time I have a breakthrough, it will stay that way. My friend in San Francisco shared a video with me about an art class where half the students had to make as many vases as they could in one week, and the other half had to make one perfect vase. The result was that the first half produced the perfect vase first because they were practicing by doing. That’s why I illustrated MortalMan twenty years ago, even though I wasn’t ready. Even though I illustrated two horrible issues of The Book of Jesse, and I still wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready when I decided to illustrate Three Stories in One and made it most of the way through the book before I got distracted. But I drew a lot of pictures, and they got better. I have a few Three Stories in One illustrations hanging on my wall because I think they’re so cool, including the one where Jeremiah rebounds off of a commercial airliner. 

If I had kept making comics after I moved in with Kate, who knows where I’d be right now with my pen and ink. (Correlation is not causation: My next big project after quitting comics was Three Stories in One, which I started after Kate went to Namibia for a year.) Like having an entry-level-adjacent job at forty-six, I feel like I’m going to be starting out with the skill level of an ambitious college student, whose father I could possibly be. But I’m middle-aged, not dead. 

I start February 26. Cheer me on.  

Danger Returns

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Since she was on campus, Lisa thought she’d ask the asshole in person. He’d been missing for a few days, and she might like to see her worst enemy in person again. She knocked on his door, and he didn’t answer, like he hadn’t answered the past few days she’d been checking on him to make sure he wasn’t in the process of killing himself. She knocked again, and again he didn’t answer. She thought nothing of pulling out the key his mother gave her and opening the door, like she did whenever he didn’t answer. She would never forgive herself if he was successful, but she couldn’t sit with him every hour of the day, especially with his sleep schedule. Maybe when he got back, her boyfriend could take a couple of shifts.  

The door swung open, and when she saw the asshole, he was scrambling, and he straightened out with his hands behind his back. He wasn’t wearing his ratty-ass cardigan, and he liked baggy clothes, so the sight of him in a yummy black T-shirt (did she just think of the asshole as yummy? Ew!) looked so good you could forget he was a walking skeleton. 

“Oh, hi, Lisa! Why are you breaking into my dorm room? I know you have a key, but you can’t—” 

“Sean,” she snapped, “I’ve been worried sick about you. I promised your mother that I would protect you, and she meant from yourself.”  

“I’m sorry,” he replied, “I’m fine. I stayed in a hotel for a couple of days.” 

“Why is your hand behind your back, Sean?” 

“It’s like that military thing,” the asshole said. “You know, at ease?” 

“Let me see your hands, Sean.” 

He raised his left hand to shoulder level. “See?” 

She breathed in and out and growled. “I want to see your other hand too.” 

He started to return his left hand to its at-ease position when Lisa pounced. She grabbed his left arm and twisted it behind his back while slamming him against the wall. He coughed. “Now use your words.”  

She peeled him off the wall and slammed him again. 

“Safe word!” he groaned. 

Now that she had him where she wanted him, she could focus on what he was holding. Was it a bottle of pills? A sharp knife again? A fucking gun? She emptied his hand, and it was not any of those things. It was a thick, round disk about the size of her palm. The disc was split down the middle on the narrow side. In the center was a wound-up slip of string. “Is this?” she demanded. “A fucking yo-yo?” 

He sat down on his bed and hung his head. “I didn’t want anybody to see me like this.” 

“How long do you think you could hide this from us?” 

“Why do you think I disappeared to a hotel this past few days?” he said. “I just wanted to try it out.” 

She sat next to him and put a hand on his knee. “Look, Sean,” she said with a sign. “Just because you’re curious about yo-yos doesn’t make you a bad person. Everyone experiments with yo-yos at some point in their life.” 

“Really?” he sniffed, finally looking up. “I thought it was just me. 

“I know how you feel. I used a yo-yo when I was younger. But I’m okay now,” she told him. “You will be too.” With the hand that wasn’t on his knee, she held his. “We’re going to get through this together.” 

He put his head on her shoulder.  

She held the accursed thing directly in front of his eyes. “Now tell me, where did you get this? Who taught you how to use this thing?” 

“It’s going to be okay, Sean,” she cooed soothingly. “Do you trust me?” 

“YouTube tutorials, mostly,” he replied. “As for how I got it, I was walking by a toy store, and in a fit of whimsy, I went inside. Toward the back was where the forgotten toys of yesteryear dwell—the wooden bock, the hula hoop, the ball on a string with the cup on the top, you know what I’m talking about. There was this employee using a yo-yo, and I didn’t know what to do. I just kept watching. He seemed so happy. There was no sign of the misery and pain yo-yos cause. I knew that yo-yos came with a price, and I knew I shouldn’t pay it, and I know a bunch of tricks now. Would I do it again? I don’t have the answers. I know I can’t keep living like this.”

“Do you trust me?”

“Of course not,” he replied. “You’re a succubus.” 

She smiled weakly. “Then it’s not going to be okay.” 

He smiled back.  

They turned to each other again, and once again, she was alarmed at how close they were. Lisa couldn’t figure out where this was coming from. Why was her heart rate increasing exponentially? Why was her mouth so dry? Why were her palms sweating? Did she get covid? 

The asshole quickly looked away and sprang to his feet.  

Her heart immediately began to slow down. She had no idea what was causing this. “You said you picked up some tricks.” 

“Why do you think I spent three days in yo-yo boot camp?” 

“Show me.” 

He dropped the yo-yo until it reached the end of its string, and it hung there, until it returned to his hand with a snap of the wrist. “Sleeper.” 

“That’s just yo-yoing in slow motion. I want to see more advanced tricks.”  

“Check it out. Walk the dog. Elevator. Cradle. Those are basic tricks. One I could never get ahold of is the loopty-loop.” 

“Try it,” she demanded. 

He tossed the yo-yo, pulled it back, and didn’t catch it when it wound back up the second time the asshole screamed, “It’s coming back!” and dove to the floor. He forgot that it was attached to him, and Lisa laughed her ass off.