Tag Archives: Staycee

by serialjones | February 22, 2012

Forbidden Truth #168: Grotesque

Dean had been right when he delivered his confessional to those gathered around the table tennis court, that they would know what had happened within a few hours. It turned out to be a lot sooner than that.

Shortly after Dean ascended to the main house and made his escape, Mick stuck his head through the open door. He was trying to call his brother Gene to hustle up, that Jerry had to be at the airport when they called out the names on the standby list or he would be dropped.

Gene nodded, began to bid a hasty Happy Holidays! to the members of the downstairs party. Scilla waved impatiently. She was too preoccupied with the old man and what he knew about any of this.

“Here we go — I am ready to kick some ass! Who wants to play?” said Staycee Gellen, but there was no response. Her soft voice and unfamiliarity with the sporting challenge struck little fear in the hearts of the other players.

Scilla turned from Blake. She was quite confused. “Harlan? Where’s Dad run off to?”

“I don’t know. And I don’t know what he’s talking about in that speech he gave. Lies? Who did he lie to? About what? I know nothing.”

“Wait!” shouted Blake, as best he could. “Just wait, everyone. Please. Be quiet. Please.”

Gene stepped in front of Blake on his way to the stairs, where Mick had just implored him again, with ever increasing urgency, to either hustle up the stairs or throw Mick the keys to the van so he could drive Jerry to the airport.

Blake grabbed Gene’s upper arm with both his hands.

“Dean gave you my little deerskin bag, didn’t he?”

From the door into the main house, Mick said, “Hey, let the man go. We gotta get our brother to SFO or he’s gonna miss his flight. Come on, man, let him go.”

Gene brushed off Blake’s hands and turned to go up the stairs.

“Later, man. I have to talk with Dean, but first I gotta get my brother to the airport.”

Then Gene smiled and waved at Flo: ”Great talking to you. Keep looking for the truth. Stay brave. Don’t let ‘em scare you into silence.”

“Come on, Gene. Jerry’s already out at the van. And Mom and Maggie, everyone. We’re all waiting on you.”

To his hostess, Gene said, “Scilla. Great party. Thanks for having my whole crew.”

“OK.”

“No. It was great. Really appreciated.”

“I insist that whoever has my little deerskin bag, that they return it immediately.” Blake’s voice was void of any expectation that his stern pronouncement would produce anything.

Then Candice spoke up. “My dad did have it. He told me it was a present for Harlan for when he turned 16. He told me he got it for him, and that I wasn’t supposed to tell…” She turned to Scilla, “…my mom. That’s ’cause Staycee and me– Well, I don’t want to get into it, OK?”

Blake’s reddened. The skin stretched across his face as tight as a balloon just before it pops. “He told me he doesn’t have it anymore. Please! Who has my little deerskin bag?”

Perhaps Candice and Staycee were carried on their memories back to that drizzly spring day when they had the escapade at Dolores Park, with Farley Ralston and his crew and the police and the homeless guy, the dog running off with the deerskin bag in its teeth and Dean and Chato in that unexpected embrace on the sidewalk. As they had laughed at the homeless man’s plight with his rain-pants that would not stay up, they now laughed at Blake as his voice went tight and tiny. It seemed they wanted to contain their mirth but the backs of their hands were not sufficient to damn it up.

This only increased Blake’s frustration. “I want my little leather bag and I want it now!”

“Gene, Bro, just throw me the keys then, I’ll take good care of your van. We gotta get Jerry to his flight. Come on, man.”

Gene took one more step up the stairs. He put a hand on Blake’s shoulder. In a soft voice he told him, “I have your little bag. Man, we should talk. You know? In private. Just you and me.”

“Are the contents disturbed? They were not intended for you.”

“Like I said, we should talk. But I gotta get my family rolling. Seems like we been trying to get to SFO for hours. So, OK, man, we’ll talk, but later.”

With that, Gene bounded up the stairs.

Scilla turned to Blake.

“What’s this all about? Aren’t you the man who spent the night with us in April? The homeless man my husband brought home from his cult that night? What are you doing here?”

“Aunt Scilla,” said Josh, “this is Uncle Burton… He came with us. He’s spending Christmas with us. Uncle Burton, this is so uncool, what you’ve done. My dad’s gonna be mad at you. You have some problems, Uncle, and you ought to see, like, some geriatric professionals or something. This is so not cool. You messed up this Christmas. These are nice people here, and you messed it all up.”

Blake put on a smile that stretched nearly ear to ear. It was rubbery in its grotesque shape, and stubborn. It froze to his face as if it were stuck there. Then the smile collapsed and his countenance collapsed, ancient with fatigue. “I need to sit,” he said. “I don’t feel so good.”

“Who’s surprised? I mean, after all that you’ve done.”

Scilla was not at her most compassionate. Her trouble with Blake’s machinations was compounded by the pieces of the puzzle Candice now supplied, as she told how she and Staycee had discovered the deerskin bag in Dean’s underwear drawer in her parents’ bedroom. “A long story, Mom, don’t go off on me with this, OK?”

Staycee squeezed Candice’s hand and whispered into her friend’s ear a barely audible “Thank you” for not incriminating her in the telling of the story.

All this made Blake more upset: ”He took what I had given to Harlan, and he did whatever he did with it. He gave it to that man with the silver hair. I don’t know why, I don’t know why.”

Dewey suddenly stood and went upstairs. No one questioned this; the look of urgency on his face suggested he was on his way to the toilet. But as trivial as his exit appeared, it was, nonetheless, duly noted along with everything else, by Josefina Sedgewick, her thumbs still dancing over the keypad of her smartphone.

Dewey, though, did not go to the toilet. He went to his dad in the living room, where Mitchell sat with Dewey’s mom and his Grandpa and this semi-stranger, semi-relative Uncle Hank.

Dewey hung back for a moment and waited for a break in the conversation. The adults were energized by a discussion about old-growth redwoods. It seemed Hank and Flo lived near an old-growth grove. There appeared to be cordial agreement about the majesty of these giants, along with some different angles on the rights of property owners and whether a two-thousand-year-old tree has any legal standing in a sane political society. After Grandpa asked the rhetorical question, “Yes, but are stoned hippies sitting in trees in protest the most rational way to settle these notions of legal philosophy?,” Dewey saw his chance to interrupt.

“Dad. Uncle Burton — he’s downstairs. He’s done something weird.”

“Just now?”

“No, not exactly, though he is being a little weird right now. He’s downstairs with the table tennis. I guess he, like, angled for the Colfaxes to put him up? You know, to take him in as like a homeless guy or something, in need of a place to stay. Back last April. And he never told them he was, like, related to us. It’s really pretty weird. Aunt Scilla is seriously not happy with him. They’re all down there in the garage.”

“Excuse me.”

As Mitchell stepped down the stairs he walked into what appeared to be more of a courtroom, with a full-open-throttle cross-examination of the alleged perp by Chief Prosecutor Priscilla Colfax. With his booming voice, those tight-knit eyebrows casting daggers of shame to anyone within range who might be questioning whether they had done the right thing of late, Mitchell quickly commandeered the proceedings.

“Uncle Burton! What have you been up to? Come on. Out with it. What’s this all about? Did you insinuate yourself into this family’s life? Why would you want to do something like that?”

Blake sat in one of the folding rental chairs. He stretched his legs out as if he were sleeping on an airplane, his hands carefully folded in his lap. He closed his eyes. His upper lip quivered with an involuntary spasm. His mouth opened but what came out of it was mostly mumbled and incoherent. “All by… by zeezearch, ina deerzin bag.” He opened his eyes. They had a distant, crazed look in them. “Zere’s two Mitchells now, zere’s one zere and…” He tried to rise up but fell back onto the chair, bounced off it and landed on his side on the garage floor.

“Oh, my god!” said Mitchell, “I think he’s having a stroke! Someone, call 9-1-1 — Quick! Who’s got a phone down here?”

“I’m on it!” said Josefina.

“I’ll get Hank.” Flo bounded up the stairs, taking two steps with each stride.

Minutes later, the sound of sirens rose and fell with ever-increasing volume as they approached Regan Street.

Comments Off

Filed under Forbidden Truth

Tagged as Blake, Candice, Dewey, Gene, Mick, Mitchell, Priscilla, Staycee

by serialjones | February 15, 2012

Forbidden Truth #163: Q&A

“Hey. Is this a private party? No relics allowed?”

With this greeting, Gene Cassidy led Flo down the stairs to the garage where the table tennis had been set up, with folding chairs, a picnic cooler of drinks, the Colfax family’s boom box. The space heater that usually created a cozy wall of heat in Dean’s garage office had been brought over, its BTUs beaming at the seven youngest members of the Christmas party.

Harlan said, “Naw. It’s OK, Gene — we’re done talking about you old farts. It’s safe down here in the Underground.”

The other teens laughed, the older boys with daring guffaws, as if tempting the adults to discipline them for laughing at the “old farts” comment. The girls held their hands to their mouths and laughed with their eyes. This all made Harlan grin.

Ward smiled a little. He was ready to serve to Staycee Gellen. He had been trying to give her some instruction, starting with her posture. Her legs were crossed with a laid-back elegance, one foot just over the toes of the other, her paddle poised to return the coming serve.

As Gene opened the door to the stairwell, he had heard Ward tell her, “Spread your legs apart,” and then Harlan’s voice: ”Dude! How rude is that? It’s Christmas.”

The laughter from this exchange had just subsided when Gene announced that two older folks were crashing the party. Now, having reached the ground floor with Flo, he walked over to the cooler and flipped it open.

“So, does your old man have any beers in here?”

“Naw. Kiddie drinks only, man. But if you wanted to bring some down for us, we’ll like…”

“You’ll like… what?”

“Naw. Joking only.”

“Ah, well. I’ve already had a big bottle of IPA. I should cool it anyway — I still gotta take my brother to the airport. He’s waiting to hear if they’re going to get him on standby for a 9:30 flight. Then I gotta drive everyone back to Marin, drop off my mother-in-law and my wife so someone can walk the dog. Then I take my other brother and my mom to Alameda and then back home. Better hit the road straight, they’ll probably have those sobriety checkpoints set up. Great way to wreck a holiday, get snared in one of those. So, how’s the tournament? Who’s the champ?”

Josh was, hands down, but there followed a lot of jockeying as to who might be second, based on who had beaten whom and by what margin.

“You want to play, Gene?”

“No, no. Keep doing what you’re doing. This young lady’s got to have her chance to beat one of you guys, don’t you think?”

Gene and Flo pulled a pair of folding chairs toward the wall and receded from the focus of the players, the audial screen of the Black Eyed Peas’ “Monkey Business” providing just enough privacy that they could resume their conversation largely ignored by the younger crew.

“Hey, Flo, sorry about that scene upstairs. I must have talked a little too loudly. Your dad kind of lost it, didn’t he?”

“He’s got issues. He’s torn. I don’t want to say too much,” she said quietly. “Even with all this music, grandkids can have big ears. But I’m not surprised. You do know that I went ten years with almost no contact with my family?”

“Wow. That’s a lot. And I thought we Cassidys were screwed up. Yeah, I guess, come to think of it, Dean did mention that a few times. He said something about it but he never really got into it.”

“It was when I learned that he–” Flo mouthed the words my dad “– had been told by these friends of his to cash in stock, airline stock, just before 9/11. And he did.”

“Oh, so he was one of those people. The airline stock. Yep, that’s one of the smoking guns for 9/11. Someone obviously knew. That, and then the secretary of state telling the mayor of San Francisco not to fly on 9/11, that something was going to come down. Another smoking gun.”

“So, yeah, my dad is a bit sensitive about all this. I can understand, I really can, but he also overreacts. But I get so irritated with smart people who can close off their minds to the facts about 9/11. You know about the nanothermite residue found in some of the wreckage, right? You know, the explosives they probably used to take down the WTC? People just don’t want to hear about that.”

“Yeah, true. It makes me a little crazy, too. But things like that, skeptics can say someone in a lab messed with the results to get the conspiracy nuts all worked up. I mean, it can be questioned. But Condi telling Willie, Don’t fly because it’s not safe, and the airline stock, those are both in the public record. The fact that none of this was at the forefront of the commission’s report, or on the front pages of the newspapers, or on the evening news, ought to smell like a rat to the average person with even a year or two of college. When I think about smart people sort of sleep-walking their way through this stuff…”

“Yeah. See, I know, from working on my self in therapy and the like, that the anger I feel toward that mass of humanity that can’t bear to look at the truth is something I cannot realistically vent. So I tend to focus it on my father. It’s not really fair to him. Still, he is part of the problem and he ought to be capable of some dialog with me. But before we came down here — we live in Mendocino County — I told Hank — my partner, the doc? The tall, thin guy, with the wire-rimmed glasses? — I told him I was going to button up, be the good daughter –”

“Till Big-Mouth Gene Cassidy shows up and ruins the party!”

“Don’t beat yourself up. I think, in the big picture, it will be good that this happened.”

“So, who’s the guy our age who came to his rescue? He looks like he’s pretty much afraid to cut loose and have any kind of good time with life.”

“See the two boys over by the big cabinet? Watching the game? He’s their dad. My other brother-in-law. Mitchell.”

“He’s kind of a hothead, it seems to me. Unless I just caught him on a bad day.”

“I’ve never before seen him get that excited. About anything. But then, I haven’t been around for ten years. Maybe he’s changed, gotten a shorter fuse. You know he works for the FBI?”

“Holy shit! You’re kidding. And here I am, shooting my mouth off.”

“He works in an office, a crime statistics analyst.”

“So he’s not packin’ heat, ready to perp-walk me as a domestic ‘terrorist’ just because I know too much?”

Gene and Flo both found this so funny that they rocked in one rhythm of laughter. All the kids but Josh and Dewey looked over at them and smiled once they realized they weren’t the object of some parent-generation derision.

Flo felt justified in having a chuckle over her brother-in-law because he, and his sons, had been cool to her. It started with her nephews, who had arrived a few hours before their parents and Uncle Burton. Josh’s girlfriend, Josefina Sedgewick, held Flo’s hand in both of hers when they were introduced. Perhaps she was delighted meeting a blood relative of her boyfriend who, like her, had darker skin, and whose nappy hair looked a lot like that which the younger woman hid under a sleek hairpiece.

But the boys, after a tokenistic handshake, largely ignored Flo. They hung back, borderline cordial. She felt like a pariah. When she asked if they remembered her and Hank, they simply said that, yes, they did remember. The looks on their faces added, Of course, you moron, we were six and eight. Where the hell have you been?

So Flo, too, withdrew and left them alone without bringing further discomfort to anyone.

While Flo had promised Hank that she would not provoke her father, Gene Cassidy had no such promises to keep, no restraints binding him. As the two talked in the living room, and he drank from his bottle of ale, he seemed not to be aware of Flo’s attempts to soften her politics.

When Gene told her he had recently heard the account of an eyewitness who claimed she saw trucks unloading in front of the WTC at 3:00 in the morning on 9/11, Flo recognized a look in his eyes, knew that she had her own version of that look. It appeared whenever she found what she thought was another piece in the narrative puzzle, the ironclad narrative that would satisfy the closest scrutiny of any rational person, the means to educate the few open-minded among those whom she called 9/11 Truth Deniers.

She mentioned this to Gene, this denial of truth, that she saw it as a symptom of a kind of delusion wherein the substitution of a happier, more palatable story pushes out facts that point to another, unpleasant conclusion.

The happier story is something they need or they feel they’ll go crazy.

She spoke discreetly to Gene, her head turned to him, her chin resting on her open palm to add even more privacy to their conversation. There was no way her dad could hear her if she continued to speak softly with her hand shielding her mouth.

While Gene listened, he continued to drink from the tall bottle of ale. After she made her latest point, Flo paused to concentrate on the food on the paper plate she held.

She thought he must have been about halfway through the bottle when his voice grew louder. It boomed. Probably louder than the poor guy intends, she thought.

In his too-public broadcast, Gene told Flo about a 9/11 Truth Memorial he had gone to on the tenth anniversary in September, at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. There was a man in the audience during a Q&A session who told of having grown weary trying to break the denial of his relatives. One of them, a woman, had told him that she could not refute one word of what he said, but neither could she accept it. She told him she knew that this was because she could not bear the thought of living in a world run by people who would do those things.

Gene told Flo that this guy’s relative had admittedly closed off her rational mind because it threatened the feel-good mind. He wondered aloud if there were maybe some mind-control techniques at work. Or was it just human nature? Both, maybe?

At this, first Darryl, and then Mitchell, confronted Gene. Where do you get this crap? What kind of loonies are you listening to, what radio stations or websites or books are telling you these things? You’re being duped by forces you don’t understand. You want to shoot your mouth off about things you only guess at, be my guest. It’s a free country. But keep it to yourselves and your tripped-out friends. It’s Christmas, come on. Can’t you put the tinfoil-hat trash aside, for just one day?

Like most disturbances at holiday parties, this one was brief and somewhat civil and fairly trivial. Certainly it was big enough that it would remain in people’s minds as one of the more dramatic features of the day.

Not, by any measure, the most dramatic. That was yet to come.

But everything seems to be linked to everything else, right? And so it was that the migration of Flo and Gene downstairs set the stage for the much bigger drama of the Colfax Christmas to Remember.

From the far-flung corners of the intricate Web, items of interest and intrigue (some even stranger than fiction):

Monkey Business

The Tinfoil Hat Song

Comments Off

Filed under Forbidden Truth

Tagged as Darryl, Flo, Gene, Harlan, Mitchell, Staycee, Ward

by serialjones | August 26, 2011

Forbidden Truth #40: Slapstick

Dean got surprising effectiveness out of his work effort the next day, the Friday before the three-day weekend. He tapped a little-used well of hyper-discipline, the virtuous worker who gets the job done, with some unexpected value added. Throw in that it is delivered on time.

He did not believe there was an old-man god who measured the worth of a mortal by weighing the virtue against the sins. That was his grandmother’s expectation upon meeting her maker. Dean’s father and mother did not believe that was likely. Neither did Dean.

But there was something internal, some part of him that still evaluated outcomes and performances, big and small, that could still cause him to redden with glee or redden with shame. Dean would chafe at the idea that he might be superstitious. Yet he would have also copped to an element of deal-making that Friday morning. He sensed that he had engaged in a negotiation but he would have been embarrassed if we were to ask him, With whom or what did you negotiate? It was probably some primitive notion of fate, from the fear of adverse outcomes, an evolutionary residue that felt good to activate.

Though he did not spend time figuring out how he could be both superstitious and not, he used the dealing and wheeling with the whatever to tap those reserves of energy available to us in crises. Riding that adrenalin, he became the dedicated good boy for TAC.

He felt better, then, about heading off for the holiday weekend not long after lunch.

Dean walked into his house a little before 2:00 with a good part of the afternoon to devote to the real work. Candice had not picked up any of his calls.

He thought of texting her but first decided to call his dad to work out the details for Sunday’s barbecue. He dumped that call in a patronizing hurry when he heard the front door open and close and saw his daughter walking down the hall. No one else was home, just the two of them. Perfect.

He quickly inquired. His hopes were soon dashed. Staycee was hanging out with a guy named Farley. Sometimes he wanted her around, sometimes he didn’t. This was the time of day, late afternoon, especially on a Friday or Saturday, when she learns whether she’s in with Farley’s entourage for the night.

Dean was stretched between two points in an inner debate. He was breathing in little huffs. He had another string of parental bromides to trail before his daughter’s eyes. He needed to say something that would counteract the influence of this girl with the low self-esteem and the accommodating boyfriend. The good parent needed to dismantle that behavior as an option for Candice when she became 14.

But triage kicked in again. Save the lecture for later. Get back to the bag. Where might it be? With Staycee? Not with Staycee?

Of course, if you have followed along from the beginning, you will know that, the mystery of its contents aside, the real value of the bag for Dean is that, should the homeless “researcher” resurface and ask Harlan if he received the little leather bag he left for the boy, the bag could be produced, with that somewhat lame rationalization Dean had come up with about his overzealous parenting: thinking the boy was too young for packets from strangers who may have unsavory agendas. It was the dominant theme at 667 Regan Street, this jockeying between kids and parents: Who was old enough for what? And if not now, when?

But none of this is possible without the bag. Staycee was with Farley, most likely. No way she’s going to pick up Candice’s calls.

Dean brought the image of Staycee into his mind. He had only seen her four or five times. Maybe once or twice in their home and at a few Modern and Jazz recitals and performances. She seemed more eager for the director’s approval than the other girls, or was perhaps less able to dress it up in an attitude of cool.

A thought came to him. “Would Staycee pick up if Ted Price were to call her?”

Yes, Candice thought Staycee would. She offered to text Ted Price to ask if they could borrow his phone. Dean told her he wanted to do this old-school, just pay an unannounced visit to Ted’s place.

Ted Price was entertaining some friends. They were gathered late afternoon for drinks and a Friday night dinner party. Dean was most surprised that neither their unexpected appearance, nor Candice’s request, seemed to faze the Modern and Jazz director.

Candice began. “Um, I need to warn Staycee about this guy she likes. I just heard something. He’s not a very nice person. And ’cause she’s with him, she won’t pick up when I call her.”

Ted Price, preternaturally thin, with skin a smooth light brown like the color of a polished walnut and a little grey-brown mustache, turns a quick pivot and hands the phone to Candice. She steps away.

Dean jabs a thumb at his own chest and says, “Me, I’m the chauffeur.”

“That’ll change before you know it.”

Dean gave out a few compliments about a short piece Ted Price had choreographed in sympathy for the victims of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Dean was mostly sincere as he steered the discussion toward the more successful features of the piece.

Thanks and the borrowed phone were conveyed to Ted Price.

Back in the car, Candice told Dean that Staycee was at Dolores Park with this guy Farley. Or had been. The cops had come. But now the boys were walking away, and the policewoman was through asking all her questions, and the police car had gone.

“She said a homeless guy has the little leather bag. It’s in his shopping cart.”

Dean and Candice found a parking place a couple of blocks uphill from the park. They hustled up the stairs and met up with Staycee.

She pointed to the homeless man. He had a worn-out broom sticking straw-end up, though dirtied yellow stubble was all that remained of that part of the broom. Staycee told them he took out his broom and used the butt end of the handle to stuff the bag deep down into his belongings. It was in there somewhere.

The man stood on the grassy hill that overlooks Mission High across 18th Street. He was focused on a singular task. It had to do with his pants. They were actually outer pants, rainy-day coveralls, though once they had probably been paired with a rain jacket. The black rubber looked quality and could have been useful to him had the suspender material not been so exhausted that it allowed his almost-useful rain pants to hang around his knees. He wrapped the stretched-out fabric around his hand and tried to secure it to his waist but the pant waist dropped again. The fellow cursed and redoubled his efforts. Dean approached him.

“I’d like to buy you some new rain clothes, man.”

Dean said this as if only the built-in suspender material, stretched to its death of usefulness, was the reason for the man’s anger.

“Lea’ me ‘lone, lea’ me ‘lone, lea’ me ‘lone,” he said in response to Dean’s offer.

But Dean wanted that little bag. “Man, I could buy something from you. I could pay you 40 bucks for that little brown bag down in there.”

Yes, Dean’s scanning eyes had seen, amid the dented cans and soiled clothes and sleeping pads and bedroll, the object of his quest. It was framed by the weathered chrome mesh that made up the walls of the cart.

Tears nearly welled up in Dean. So close, so close.

“Lea’ me ‘lone, I tell you.”

The man shooed at Dean, who was, in fact, an intruder into this guy’s only owned property, a shopping cart and its contents and the mephitic fragrance it emitted. As his arm swung back and forth, the elbow banged once, twice, three times against the cart. The vehicle was precarious enough without this accidental coaxing, resting as it was on three of its four wheels on the uneven park lawn. The lawn was wet from the late May storm.

One more elbow jab and the cart tumbled over and slid downhill a little on its side. Its owner (no longer Safeway) grabbed the handle and stopped its slide. As he did, though, he shook loose some of the cart’s contents, including the little brown bag.

The homeless man picked it up. He aimed the bag at Dean’s face. He shook it.

“So what’s the big fuckin^‘ deal with this? Huh?”

Then, as he shook, his rain pants dropped down to his knees. Staycee first, then Candice, viewing this drama from just up the hill, shrieked with laughter at the slapstick timing of the poor man’s mishap.

This derision put new rage into him. He turned at the sound of their mirth and let fly the leather bag. But an athlete he wasn’t. The little missile looped up the hill only about 20 feet.

A tidy man in a newsboy hat bejeweled from the drizzle walked past, pulled along by a grey and brown, mixed-breed dog long overdue for a run. The creature picks up the bag as if the homeless guy were taking over for the regular master in the toss and fetch part of a full-on day in the park.

The tidy man leaned down to take the bag from the dog’s mouth, but the pooch jerked the leash free and ran past Dean, who went off in pursuit.

The dog owner followed and, farther behind, came Staycee and Candice.

They all ran down across the lawn to Dolores Street. The dog turned right and dashed along the sidewalk till he was slowed by two women who stood astride their bicycles. One was talking, the other listening intently.

The dog’s owner caught up to him and stepped on his pet’s leash. The dog dropped the bag. The women rolled their bikes off the sidewalk and onto the park lawn as two large men strode up from the other direction. The men stopped at the little leather bag lying on the sidewalk in front of them. One guy bent down and picked it up and put it into the pouch in front of his hoodie.

“Hey, excuse me. That’s mine.”

“Whoa. Wait a minute. It is yours?”

Dean bent over to catch his breath from the run. That sound was familiar. He heard a Mexican accent but with many years of English stirred into it.

The big guy in the hoodie went on: “Oh, yeah? And who are you? I seen it on the sidewalk.” He looked at the women straddling their bikes. “He with you?”

The women looked over at Dean. One of them seemed to take mild umbrage, as if Dean had misled this guy into thinking he was with them.

“No. We don’t know him. His dog just came up behind us and dropped the bag.”

“So, zat your dog?” he asked Dean. Dean reluctantly admitted that it was not.

The man smiled. “So?”

Comments Off

Filed under Forbidden Truth

Tagged as Candice, Dean, Staycee

by serialjones | August 24, 2011

Forbidden Truth #38: Shopping Cart

Part of what attracted Staycee to the Colfaxes was that Candice’s father (“Dean, not Mr. Colfax, OK?”) had also gone to General Vallejo High. And they lived “nice.”

So maybe her high school wasn’t a factory that cranked out losers, like that private-school skank Melanie said one day. Maybe there was hope for a girl with a dad who had just gotten kicked out of the house for being, like, mega creepy, hope for the girl who at times felt she hated herself. When that poison vapor cloud billowed from within her, she could make some funky choices.

Though she knew better, she sometimes felt she was blamed for her parents’ separation. It was hard to resist that temptation. Her parents did not help. Both hinted that she was culpable.

Mostly she knew she was not to blame. What she did hate was the luck, the (she had just begun to use this phrase) bad fucking luck of it all. Her dad, a perv. Her mom, not a perv, but weird in her own special way.

The luck of it. The rotten fucking luck of it!

The day she met Farley Ralston, her English class was watching “To Kill a Mockingbird” for those students who still needed to write their book reports on the novel but had not yet read it. A question of aptitude for some, attitude for others, a blend of the two for most.

Farley Ralston had just been transferred across the city from Galileo High. It was said that he needed a “change of scenery.” That’s one huge euphemism, is it not?

Staycee and Farley clicked in that adolescent way that mixes hormonal drives with emotional needs and opportunity. They had messed around a little. Probably what they had most in common was that they both felt disdain and even a little disgust for Staycee herself.

Staycee had fallen into a late afternoon habit. She found out where Farley was likely to be, and she would get herself there and hang around, hoping for some connection. Friday, May 27 was no exception. Maybe she would be included in the Friday-night fun. Three-day weekend, Friday night, whoa…

She found him at Dolores Park near the steps that go up from Dolores Street. The day was drizzly, heavier than foggy mist and too light to be rain. The people at the park were walking dogs, or employed to do maintenance, or they had no other place to go. Most of them were dressed against the weather. Farley was in uniform. OK, not really a uniform in the sense that an ROTC cadet wears a uniform or a member of a sports team wears a “uni.” So not official, but uniform in that other sense of the word, a conforming look not unlike most of the young guys with whom he wanted to identify.

Farley’s blood ran hot. In most weather he wore baggy shorts, knee-length and black, and a sleeveless T-shirt, also black. On most cold, rainy days in Northern California one can see people like this, impervious to the wind and the rain. Then there are their counterparts, those folks bundled up in wool caps and gloves on an afternoon in the 80s.

Farley was 16. He kept his wallet attached to his pants with a choker-style chain that looped down to his knees.

Staycee hung around him because she liked the way he worked hard to coax her out of her shell, when the pull she felt toward introverted detachment kept everyone else away.

The other side of the equation, though, was that, once out and at play, he could send her back inward with a derisive put-down. Farley was an addictive dice game for Staycee.

She walked up the steps where he was hanging with his current posse, Pablo Mortensen and two or three other guys she did not recognize. Would her numbers come up today or would she crap out?

As she joined them, her feeling was so-far-not-so-good. Farley looked over at her and tilted his head in a way that seemed to ask, “What the fuck are you doing here?”

Then he turned to the other boys and continued on, about Cassie Carvahal, how she was supposed to be at Clear Lake that weekend. He was going up there to stay at his uncle’s cabin. The weather could suck, so maybe they’d just have to stay in and party. The men-to-be explode, then, as one laugh machine: Ha! Ha, ha!

Staycee was not ready to join Farley in loathing her, at least not before he did some soft-talk to persuade her to stay. Her feet felt heavy as she slowly descended the stairs toward the street. She was angry at the dissing and the anger felt weird, not exactly fun, but, in a peculiar way, it felt good to her.

It then occurred to her that maybe she had some things all upside-down. Maybe the playing around with Farley had been less and not more grown-up than what she’d done with the smart ballplayer. At least that guy wasn’t such an asshole.

As is often the case when one is ready to walk away, Staycee found herself with an apathy about the outcome that gave her license to take a risk. She paused and turned back to the boys whose bodies undulated like plant life in a stream, the waves in this case from the laughter over something their brilliant leader had said.

She reached into her purse and had to dig around just a little too long to make her scene cinematic in its perfect timing. Her face made a look that would yield a cartoon balloon showing “Glug.” Then her hands found again the soft pouch, like the smart ballplayer, hanging just above the crotch of his workout pants, and she withdrew it and held it up with a smile of secrecy, as if she knew the contents of the little brown bag, as if she had a power of knowledge and possession that could lure the right ship to crash on the rocks.

She swung the bag like the gold watch of a stage hypnotist.

“What zat?”

The boys came down the stairs to Staycee. They stood around her, not thuggish, not crowding her, not with threats of violence. Yet the absence of all of these made her uneasy, as it showed they felt they could get what they wanted without resorting to strong-willed behavior.

“What zat?” Farley repeated. “You into drugs? Hey, my ho, she into drugs.”

Yeah, this white boy been listening to a lot of hip-hop.

“Whatchu got dere? You, like, score some weed, girl?”

“Be nice. I ain’t gonna show you, you be mean to me.’”

“Yeah, bitch, and you are 14. Get it? Let me see that thing. Whatchu got in there? Gimme that bag.”

Staycee held the little brown deerskin bag up to him but first she wrapped the drawstrings around her wrist and held their ends in the palm of her hand. In her dark grey hoodie with “Vallejo Vikings” in athletic block letters in front, she extended her hand toward the boys, a few steps higher up the stairway than she. Is this a posture of supplication or benediction? One cannot tell. Probably Staycee herself couldn’t tell us.

“Open it, bitch!”

“It’s too tight.”

“You tied it, you open it!”

“I never tied it.”

“Then who dunnit?”

“My friend’s father.”

“Gimme it.”

Farley grabbed the bag and Staycee pulled it back.

It was not as if Staycee did not want to give up the entire bag and its contents to Farley Ralston. We have told you about the magical properties that she projected onto it, as a totem of the nice life Candice lived now, and the nice life Staycee hoped she would also live some day.

But no doubt you have known, perhaps you yourself have been, one of those people willing to throw away something of great value to earn the regard of someone they love. Could the little bag have the power to make Farley forget about a weekend at Clear Lake with Cassie Carvahal? Then take it away, dude, it’s all yours!

But she was not going to give it up without something more substantial in return. She wanted to negotiate the price. And Farley wanted the bag, at least to look into the contents. But he was not about to negotiate, not in front of an entourage that would show him no mercy if he did.

Farley pulled, yanked, shouted out, “Come on, Staycee! Give it up.”

“No!”

He grabbed the bag in both hands and pulled her around like a slave girl bound by the wrists.

“Hey. You. Stop that!” came from the base of the steps, the male police officer of the pair that lumbered up the stairs. The woman officer looked fierce and impatient. Upon seeing them, Staycee’s hand fell limp and Farley wrested the bag from her. He turned and headed up the stairs. When the officers told him to stop he did. He held his hands out in the open to declare that he had no weapons.

Where was the little bag? Staycee saw it, then, on top of a pile of garbage on a trash receptacle. A crew was emptying the cans to ready the park for the long weekend.

The male officer gathered the boys by the trashcans, near the bathrooms at the top of the stairs. The policewoman, meanwhile, examined Staycee’s wrist.

“Did he do this to you?”

“We’re like boyfriend-girlfriend, you know. We were just, like, trying to figure out what to do this weekend. He’s OK. Just, like, a little argument, you know?”

The officer looked into Staycee’s eyes to track the truth of what she said. Staycee looked away, up the stairs to the boys being questioned. She did not want Farley to get into trouble. It had all been her fault. She should have walked away, not taken out the little bag.

This could be awful.

Just beyond the boys, Staycee saw a homeless guy, frizzy blond hair flaring out like a tutu from under a red bandana folded to make a headband. Beard-vanity would have compelled him to shave daily, were he lucky enough to dwell near hot running water. He had been picking up the cans and bottles that had been piled around the full recycling containers. He sees the little brown bag among the refuse, grabs it and tosses it on his shopping cart.

The police conferred. They might have taken one or more of the boys down to their cruiser on Dolores, and run their names through the system and come up with something on someone. But it was a drizzly late afternoon before a three-day weekend. It seemed the officers were not even sure how to let Farley and his devotees off with a warning. The policewoman went back to Staycee and told her to be careful with guys who argue like that. “Rethink your choices, OK?”

Then they left. The entourage made its way up the hill toward the streetcar tracks. Farley turned to Staycee and pointed at her with a digit extended like a mock pistol. She thought it was supposed to mean, “Thanks, girl.”

She could have snitched him out but she hadn’t. How’s that for a real bargaining chip? Better than a little bag with unknown contents.

The homeless guy was pushing his shopping cart across the rough, uneven, hilly lawn of the park.

Staycee’s phone rang. It was Ted Price, Mr. Modern and Jazz. Awesome!

The instant she heard that voice, she recoiled. No! Tricked! It’s Candice, using his phone, the little bitch!

“Mm, hey Staycee, um, you see a little brown leather bag, dark brown, my dad says, deerskin, he thinks, in that drawer in the dresser, you know, where you knocked your foot?”

Comments Off

Filed under Forbidden Truth

Tagged as Candice, Farley, Staycee

by serialjones | August 23, 2011

Forbidden Truth #37: Creepy!

While we promised to follow the little deerskin bag on its adventure, and asked that you hold that frozen image of Dean while we took you along on the little bag’s journey, it has occurred to us that a little more about poor Dean’s state of mind would help in that deep-freeze effort.

Hours after Staycee assured Candice that her stubbed toe was warm and happy, Dean was anything but. He was momentarily decommissioned. As he lay on the bed sweeping his hand back and forth, as if trying to smooth out the disordered condition in his psyche, he examined each possibility and nothing made sense. No one in the house or visiting the house would have any reason to go through his drawer.

Scilla did the laundry once a week. She put the folded clothes on his side of the bed and he put them away. This had been their habit for 15 years. They had no housekeeper. Scilla had studied the subject and concluded that the legal ones mostly did a cosmetic swish-around and cost too much. The illegals did the best work, but she thought it was a bad idea to court that kind of trouble.

When she was a girl, there had been some trouble with two maids. A missing bracelet, valuable, an heirloom of her mother’s, then accusations, a police report, an angry dismissal, and finally a 4:30 AM recollection of the jewelry being stashed in an old sock in the back of the linen closet before one of the trips to Europe.

Scilla wanted nothing to do with housekeepers.

Dean had come home to an empty house. Harlan was off somewhere with Ward. Candice had been invited to dine at her friend Staycee’s house, the new girlfriend from Modern and Jazz. He was the first one home. Or so he thought.

He thought back through his day to find some clue as to what might have happened. His mind wandered from the bad thing, the missing bag, to the good things that had occupied the first part of the day.

The meeting had been a good one. Leona and Sonia, both smart, apparently not driven too much by funky agendas, you know the kind, where someone’s primary mission in the workplace has less to do with the firm’s stated purpose than it does with answering those life-shifting questions, like, am I attractive to you? Am I bright enough? Where does one go to get the real money in this firm? Am I showing my social stratum in ways detrimental to my goals here?

It was a good meeting, devoid of much of this sideshow.

Over a million could flow into TAC over the next four years if they could work out this partnership with AirWatch! Dean was rocking with the synergy when Sonia brought up chemtrails as the likeliest candidate for the initiative. Hefflin avoided his glance and almost took full credit for what Dean had proposed the previous week. Hefflin told Trona that the idea already been explored by TAC. Big, nodding smiles all around the conference room. Dean wanted to bounce up from his chair. Talk about a score.

How quickly a day can go from sour to good and back again. Only hours before, he had been late for work, angry and uptight. By lunchtime, he was basking in the glow of a promising collaboration. Now, sick with this discovery.

Then he remembered the dresser drawer. He’d left it open six or so inches. He tracked the day, marking it with false assumptions. The family goes off in the morning. The kids stay out all day (first false assumption); he comes home first (second false assumption); the drawer has been raided of its treasure (only true assumption).

His attempt to play detective yielded nothing. Dean wallowed in the stew of emotions spawned from this mystery. He was angry, but he did not have a target so this emotion quickly faded. Then depression, that sense that some superior being was playing games with his head. He did not have enough belief to sustain that one. Then there was the ugliest fear of all: that he was losing his mind. This came in for a cameo appearance.

Then he found the perfect target for the anger that cycled back through: Blake. That homeless asshole! He had turned the son against his faithful, do-no-harm dad. Dean now loathed the man who had stunk up his psyche with his questionable (at best!) gift. To an underage boy, no less.

We hope we have thus refreshed the image of poor Dean sweeping his arm like someone making half a snow angel. We will return to Dean on the bed before too long.

But we need to turn back to that nascent stream in our narrative, freshly broken free from subterranean captivity. That is, we need to follow the little bag on its journey from 667 Regan Street. Dean knows nothing of the course of this adventure. Worse, he thinks he knows some things that are, in fact, quite wrong. So let us leave him to sink into self-pity, bewilderment and loathing.

At her first opportunity, Staycee stuffed the little dark brown bag deeper into her purse. She liked to touch it. It was soft. Like the smart ballplayer from Lowell who told her he had shaved his balls and, when she didn’t believe him, bet her $20. To settle it she had to reach into his workout pants where she found out she owed him $20. Soft like that.

When someone recounts a human event, the question often looms, are we fed truth or melodrama? We need to address this as we consider Staycee’s offense. Thieves are universally disparaged in most human communities, especially when by “thief” we mean one who steals from one’s own people. The closer one gets to family, the worst the offense, usually. To steal from a trusting friend’s parent, maybe that’s a close second or third.

Given that, it would follow that Staycee should have earned the villain’s part in this portion of the serial.

But that is for melodrama and we strive here for truth, for the facts that reveal real matters, with complexity of motivations, the mental and emotional aberrations that take us from the black-and-white courtroom of good and evil. It is not our intention to frame the act as a good one. Or even to try to exculpate the perp with a sob-story about her reasons for stealing this little bag.

Is it not true, though, that the history of this bag in the Colfax family has, as a main theme, thievery? From a family member, no less. And would it not be astonishing to learn that Blake himself stole the bag into his own possession?

Not altogether true, that, and yet, with a wee stretch, not altogether false. But we leap way, way ahead here. Let us reel the story back in. Staycee’s theft was a rotten act. Dean’s act was, oh, could be – however lamely – assigned to “parental caution.” As we have reported, Dean’s anticipated alibi leans on this notion.

But Staycee? Weak and rotten. Her act, inexcusable. It cries out for correction, right? Yes! We are agreed then.

But the trouble is this. Rotten, yes, but at her age, a window of reformation is still open, though soon it will close forever. She is facing choices now that will correct or exacerbate the corruption. Her problems gain complexity when we embrace the reality that her family was the source of that corruption.

First there was kid life. Dance rehearsals and recitals and school and friends and all the fun girly stuff that made that time special. Her father took little interest in her. Magma Financial Services had recruited him from Los Angeles to manage their high-rise tower in San Francisco’s financial district. He often worked late. When he was home, he frequently slept in his lounge chair, both before and after dinner.

Then, December of 2008, in the wake of the economic collapse, Magma let Benny Gellen go, and replaced him with a man from Pakistan for half the salary. Staycee was going through an early puberty. If the lounge chair represented her father’s interest in her, let the fully reclined position with the snoring sound effects be Daddy when she was full-on little girl and he worked long hours. And let the upright position be Benny on the edge of his seat as his daughter became a little woman and he was no longer employed.

Her mother also took an interest in her daughter’s pubic awakening. She brought home what she called “mother and daughter thongs” from a trip to the mall in Colma where they had a special if you bought two three-packs.

The first day Staycee wore one, her father remarked that she had a “whale tail showin’; better to learn to wear one o’ them things or the fellas from work are gonna have a little too much fun takin’ a look at you.” Forget for a second that the “fellas” were formerly his co-workers. They did drop by for a beer now and again. The whole thong enterprise had turned bad, and quickly. Bad? Downright creepy!

Then her father sends her that e-mail with the link to the clitoral masturbation site. Let this most recent piece of inappropriate parenting stand as one bookend and the thong incident the other, with several lurid volumes between them, and you begin to get the picture. Really creepy. Then Dad tells Staycee how her mother used to be a lot hotter in bed before she put on all that weight. Double creepy!

Also between those bookends, Benny grew weary looking for jobs that weren’t there for experienced men in their late 40s. His unemployment benefits went first, then the credit union savings, including his severance “bonus” as the punctilious rep from HR called it.

As the money ran out, so did his wife’s patience. And as that ran out, up rose even more intrusive comments to his daughter. Once, with a couple of Jack-and-Cokes in him, her dad told Staycee he’d seen what she was doing with the ballplayer from Lowell. As he smiled, the sad bloodshot eyes paraded midlife sexual hunger before her. She suspected he had not seen anything but rather had wanted to see something.

He leered. “Bet he’s a lot of fun. I was, too, back in the day.”

Is the phrase “perfect storm” over-used? Probably, but we are short on alternatives to describe the night Staycee told her mom about the more egregious comments from recent years. The money was gone, the work was gone, and her mom had found on Benny’s computer some porn of teen girls who may or may not be underage. She kicked him out.

People who steal often feel stolen from. Staycee did not know this about herself. She was only aware that when she took something from the house of one of the “good families” she felt better just before the guilt and self-hatred kicked in. A “good family” was affluent, had two parents, neither of whom acted creepy. This was the Colfax family. The little leather bag, the way it seemed to slide right to her as the boxer shorts parted, was like a totem from the world of the normal. It had magical powers. Even if she never got the knot untied, it would always resonate with the power of the other ones, the kids without families full of creepiness.

Since it did not really matter if she got it open, when she tried again to clamp it between her upper and lower teeth, she stopped when the animal came alive. She did not know it was deerskin. She knew it was from an animal. Its juice made a taste on her tongue. Really it was just saliva with a little flavor in it, the kind of “nourishment” starving people hope to get from chewing a shoe tongue. The flavor grossed her out. No need to open it, not then. She was in bed in her pajamas. She put the little bag under her pillow. The knot was looser.

Maybe it would yield tomorrow.

Comments Off

Filed under Forbidden Truth

Tagged as Dean, Leona, Lou, Staycee

by serialjones | August 22, 2011

Forbidden Truth #36: Warm and Happy

Well, that little old deerskin bag seems determined to pull us from the back-story of Flo and Hank and their adventures and travails. This is a pity, because there is so much about them yet to be told, and theirs is not a trivial role in the coming turn of events. But they will cycle back through the serial at the appropriate time.

The missing deerskin bag now draws us into that looming drama. We ask that you freeze a moment of the story, an image of Dean Colfax on the telephone in his bedroom. The phone had rung while he sat on the bed, his underwear drawer upside down, its contents strewn about the floor. Flo, his renegade sister-in-law, is talking to him for the first time in nearly 10 years.

Picture the numb man, temporarily quite insane, as he holds the phone at a distance from his head as if hoping to prevent the connection. Picture the look on his face as he is summoned by circumstances, fate, what have you, to improvise niceties with his sister-in-law who, with the exception of maybe one or two calls to her mother, one or two to her sister Artis, has had no contact with her family since Labor Day, 2001.

No one even knew where, specifically, she was living. Northern California, but not San Francisco, that kind of thing. The issues that bred the separation remained vague, too. Seemingly it was about principles trashed. It was something that emitted the fragrance of idealistic youth, marinated in melodrama, then seasoned with old familial rancor and cooked for years over the steady flame of stubborn pride.

Poor Dean. He surrendered to the bed. He reclined, supine, one arm bent to put handset to ear, for now he was in conversation and there would be no more fantasies that the connection would miraculously snap, freeing him to continue his search for the missing deerskin bag. As he listened to Flo, the other arm waved across the surface of the bed from pillow across the material of the spread to his thigh and back up, like a mechanical part set in motion but for no real purpose. Picture this scene; freeze it enough to preserve it.

Then consider Dean’s mind on May 25, the night before. He had worked his gig at the Fellowship, talked briefly with Bert Quant on the way to their cars.

Dean was preoccupied with a meeting the next morning at 9:00 in Lou Hefflin’s office.

A group called AirWatch! had proposed TAC join them in pursuit of a grant offered by the Magna Fortuna Foundation for two organizations to combine efforts on a pollution-mitigation initiative. Public interest law firms were encouraged to apply. Dean had the draft of an old, successful AirWatch! grant proposal to review before the meeting, in order to assess the agency and their competence in grantsmanship. Are they flaky idealists who don’t know how to deliver quality product, or can we maybe work with them?

That document, however, remained in his manbag when he got home. Dean needed a little baseball. It had been a long day.

He caught the end of the Giants’ game. They not only lost in extra innings, but their star catcher was seriously injured in a collision at home plate. Those of you who are not fans of a sports team or a celebrity will have as much trouble understanding how such events can dominate one’s consciousness as a person averse to pets will have understanding someone’s grief over an 18-year-old tabby who has had to be put down. Dean’s chance for a restful night was lost from seeing repeated replays of the collision.

Here is how Buster Posey’s injury resonated through the Colfax family: Dean overslept on Thursday. Normally, no one at TAC cared if he came in at 8:00, 9:00, or 10:00. He got the work done. But this day was different. It was the morning of the meeting with AirWatch!, with that organization’s director, Leona Trona, and someone named Sonia Everson who wrote their grants.

Scilla had given Dean a firm shake when she arose. She would later tell him he nodded and mumbled that he was awake. She showered and went to the kitchen to start her coffee before coming back to dress. Dean sat up with a start hearing her re-enter the bedroom half an hour later. He looked at his clock and jumped out of bed. He barked out questions: Why had she not awakened him? What, did she forget he had this meeting? Scilla said, “Not my fault,” and continued, intent on getting dressed.

Dean yanked open his dresser drawer and grabbed a pair of undershorts. He shoved the drawer back in the direction of the frame, not back into a cozy, nested alignment with the rest of the dresser. About six inches stuck out.

The two or three times a year when something like this happened to Dean, he made the mishap into an athletic event. Not usually very competitive with other men, he turned the problem into a beat-the-clock drill. He usually did pretty well against that adversary. This Thursday morning was no exception.

Since this portion of our story is focused on the little deerskin bag, we must now leave Dean to his man-versus-minute-hand athletic event, and turn our attention to Candice and one of her friends from Modern and Jazz. But we ask that you hold onto that image of Dean, sweeping his arm like the wing of a dying bird as it pays a kind of homage to the power that passes from it.

Thus did part of the deerskin bag’s adventure begin, from a poor night’s sleep induced by a tragic injury to a popular player. Another part began with Ted Price, director of Modern and Jazz. Ted Price had found on YouTube a few instructive performances of a piece the class would perform at the July recital. He had asked Candice and Staycee Gellen to dance the duet from the suite. He gave them four versions of it to view online.

These two girls made an interesting pair. Staycee was different from the quartet of girly, giggling, surrogate sisters Candice had been friends with in recent years. Zoe, Reiney, Trey, Sandy, they were wonderful fun, but Staycee was two years older. She was experienced, had even tried weed with an older cousin (twice!). She was the friend who had given Candice the link to the website on clitoral masturbation.

But, relatively rich as she was with experience, Staycee peered into Candice’s life with eyes saddened with materialist comparison. Staycee’s parents were separated; likely they would divorce. There had been a lot of problems. Later, Candice would learn that it was Staycee’s father who had directed her to that website. She pitied Staycee for having a creepy dad.

Staycee loved the widescreen computer theater in Dean and Scilla’s bedroom where Candice queued up the YouTube videos. The girls felt like grown-ups, leaning against the headboard of the parents’ bed while they watched the big-screen show, music booming from the Bose speakers.

Between videos, Candice had to pee. Alone in the bedroom, Staycee slid down from the bed, enchanted by the equipment her own family had neither the resources nor the resourcefulness to own.

Before she could get close enough to the seductive equipment to touch it, she walked into the bottom drawer of the dresser, the one Dean had been too late to shove in all the way. She yelled out in pain and rage, “Ow! You fucker!^“ She pushed the drawer but it went nowhere. It was jammed. She turned her now-doubled anger at the recalcitrant box and jerked it out. The front part of the drawer landed on the rug, the other end resting against the dresser. The folded boxer shorts in the drawer slid to the front, revealing a little brown leather bag.

“You OK?” came from behind the closed bathroom door.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.”

Staycee touched the little brown bag. It felt soft, like the pouch of that smart boy from Lowell when she reached inside his workout pants. She picked up the bag and passed it between her hands. The drawstrings were tight. She bit the knot between two of her teeth and wiggled it back and forth. The toilet flushed. Staycee quickly put the bag into her purse and zipped it shut. She returned the drawer to its rails and slid it into the dresser.

“What happened? You OK?”

“Someone left this drawer open. I got up to look at the screen but I stubbed my toe.”