Dossier Fall 2014 by CMU Dossier

DOSSIER

Fall 2014 dossier fall 2014 |

A LETTER FROM DOSSIER Dossier Coordinators Jennifer Coloma, Benjamin Chang, Mark Dyehouse, Kaytie Nelson Design Staff Jennifer Coloma Benjamin Chang Cover Image Gabe Vidal-Hallett Photos courtesy of p19: brokinhrt2, p22:Scott Tidlund, p22:Ralph Arvesen, pg30:~BostonBill~, and p32:Dale via Flickr p14:Posh Little Tutus p26: Total Sports Complex p5: Teach Thought

Dossier: a French word meaning a bundle of documents. That’s what this little booklet is — a collection of works created by students and published for the students of Carnegue Mellon University. Carnegie Mellon is the home to talented writers and illustrators, designers and musicians, and Dossier is our humble attempt to share some of their work with the students of our community. Dossier was a biannual publication until several years ago, when it mystiously disappeared in 2011. This issue will be Dossier’s first issue in three years. We are accepting submissions at ALL TIMES. If you want a chance to show your work to the Carnegie Mellon community, please send your work to cmudossier@gmail.com, and we will notify you if we plan on using your work. Dossier accepts all forms of art that can be printed, be it prose, artwork, photography, architechture, product designs, and even code! We know there are many shy people who are fansastic closet writers or illustrators out there. Remember, your artwork is meant to be shared — and even critisized — in order for you to develop and grow as an artist! Be fearless and support Dossier by submitting your work! We’d like to formally thank Jennifer Coloma, who unfortunately had to graduate before the publication of our comeback issue. We hope this is what you’ve envisioned Dossier to be and we wish you all the best. Thank you so much for you dedication to writing and to Dossier. To everyone else: Enjoy! Sincerely, Benjamin Chang

Contact Us! at cmudossier@gmail.com Visit our Facebook page for updates at https://www.facebook. com/cmudossier Carngue Mellon University Dossier dossier fall 2014 |

TABLE OF CONTENTS Test - Alex Lee ..........................................................................5 Night Rendering - Gabe Vidal-Hallet .......................................10 Variations on a Theme by Larry Levis - Michael Mingo ...............13 Final Fridays at Schenley Plaza - Michael Mingo...........................14 How the Puritans Did It - Michael Mingo ................................ 15 Austin - Gabe Vidal-Hallet ....................................................16 Axon - Gabe Vidal-Hallet....................................................... 17 Deer - Jacqueline James .......................................................... 18 Chuckâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Boys - Tyler Rice......................................................... 22 7336 - Jacqueline James ...................................................... 28 Carambola - Gabe Vidal-Hallet............................................... 33

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Test

by Alex Lee

asl1@andrew.cmu.edu

his is a standardized test.

Read and follow the instructions below. your temporary home, a golden reThis test measures your proficiency triever shimmering in the path of a in mathematics, vocabulary, reading cracked windowpane. Do not blame comprehension, and self-delusion. your uncle for not mending the crack, It also evaluates your perseverance not once offering in the nine years in the face of contempt: ignore you lived there. Think only of these the stares of the other students, all years as a prelude, a period of incuyounger than your daughter. Do not bation. Interpret the lazy circles you be engulfed in their amusement and drew on your desk as metaphors for cocoons. their embarrassment. A standardized test is administered in the same manner for all students. Do not threaten the test proctor. Unlike those who allow you to debase them, this test cares nothing for your cruelty.

The results of this standardized test may be used in consideration for applications to colleges and/or universities, in conjunction with your previous history and extracurricular activities. Your academic history, for reference:

The following items are not permitHe finds solace at the rear of the ted within the testing area: class, amongst the wreckage of the • Pen(s) drunks, the junkies, the outcasts who • Cellphone stumble out of their childhoods. • Libido He manhandles smaller boys. He • Undeserved confidence doesn’t taunt them, however — his • Programmable calculator wit won’t surface until he’s nineteen, • Shelved letter to your first wife romping with rich girls on the cusp • Textbook(s) and/or marked of adulthood, learning their mannerpaper isms and easy needs. He gives them • Reconciliation desperation and daydreams of East This test requires a #2 pencil. The Coast diners and the residual odors yellow shell of the Ticonderoga may of gasoline. He drops out of school arouse slivers of childhood: beige fast. He begins part time at a cannery smears on your aunt’s apron, sour and listens to tales of Vietnam from honey leaking from the firs behind either side of the assembly line. dossier fall 2014 |

The results of your standardized test will be mailed to you three weeks after the date of the testing session. Resist the nascent smile as you slide your index finger along the inner lining of the envelope. Resist the familial pride that the impossibly large score, nine percent above the national average, evokes in you. Your uncle, riddled with Alzheimer’s, remembers nothing of the derision with which he had repudiated you and your life. And do not, even in the agonizing hours before dawn, call your daughter with the number you scrounged from a Michigan phone book. Crumple the number, scribbled in pen on the back of a 7-11 receipt, and discard it forever.

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The circumstances of this test may remind you of a girl from your adolescence, the one you liked best, blew a month’s salary on to impress, an upper-class blond as simple as her name: Anne. Anne was the only girl to return after the languid summer in which you did nothing but ball girls, bearing a pregnancy test marked with the fatal perpendicular lines. You told her to marry you. Your fear died in this ostentatious display of your maturity, your image of a fruitful life far removed from your childhood. You convinced Anne to skip her college entrance exams, to bind herself to you. She agreed out of doubt. Anne’s mother, much younger than her plump father, tentatively consented to your offer, having reared a child at an early age, and discovering in you a wildness she craved and had been denied. The child — a girl — was born. The stock-broker-father demanded she be named Rodine, after his deceased sister, a Germanic 6

name. At first you thought it dull, but then you revered it, needed it, those two dense syllables that contradicted your daughter’s airiness, that alone grounded her to this world. Do not speak during the duration of the test. Raise your hand if you require the assistance of the test proctor. Do not curse or snarl as you did with the lanky doctor who told you Rodine was deaf, ten months after she was born. A rare complication whose name didn’t concern you. You understood her symptoms only in retrospect: preternaturally quiet, unable to reciprocate your rough play, Rodine did not laugh or cry. She slept sixteen hours a day. You started to get angry at her and at Anne. She wasn’t breast-fed long enough; her room was too dark; she wasn’t held enough. Your child didn’t fit into the life you had imagined, turbulent and cheery, like the previous summer in which you had gorged yourself on lust. She could clap, at least, mimicking her mother, but without rhythm, lost outside the progress of time. Anne came home the day after the diagnosis with a stack of volumes on American Sign Language. You hated her complicity. You learned how quickly a family could sour, lives desynchronize. Rodine became the subject of every argument. Little of your youth remained in you, embers smothered in silence. Anne rarely sought out your heat – your young marriage became sexless, motionless. You attempted to staunch the flow of inertia, like seeping molasses, from every wall of Rodine’s bedroom. Her presence was a void, emanating

negation, annihilation; the air in her room sat sealed and stale like the interior of a submarine. Even the walls, painted Iguana Cerulean, appeared nautical, lazy. Anne begged you to practice the hand signs and you managed a week before you began ripping pages from The A.S.L. Handbook. You despised the sign for no, the index and middle fingers clamped over the thumb like a vice. You started using this sign in place of words. The perfect answer to every instance of Anne’s pleading. You never learned Rodine’s routines. You overlooked her allergies and fed her a daub of peanut butter that sent her to the hospital. The purple blotch on her leg thrived and multiplied, the result of your argument with Anne. You were mismatched with Rodine’s fragility, her need for familiar landmarks, lodestars in the infinite darkness of her deafness. If you have difficulty with the format or content of this test, contact your test proctor. Ignore her wariness as she approaches your desk. Surely you’re used to it by now. The following topics may provoke some confusion: • In the Vocabulary section, you may encounter unfamiliar words. Compare them to more recognizable ones by examining their prefixes and suffixes. Also try placing the unfamiliar word in different contexts, to determine whether it loses its monstrousness. • Ignore instances of the word you, a word you have heard in too many contexts. You is a compli-

cated word, weighted by connotations of fascination, lust, exasperation, finality, as if shouted across a huge distance, a child’s misshapen cry for her father. Replace you with I. The limited perspective, the scarcity of empathy, comforts you. • If you encounter the word redemption, call the test proctor immediately. Redemption is not authorized by the testing board — it is too often mired in superficiality, in specious resolutions. Nothing remains for which you may atone: your misdeeds spill into the riverbed where fervor cools and lies dormant forever. The contour of your mouth as it forms a scream is now but the outline of your daughter’s occasional bad dream, and even those die in the dawn, in her husband’s quiet touch. • If you come across references to fatherhood, think in generalities. Draw from media. Bury your recent dreams in which you catch orange dragonflies in a bed sheet, the other end held by a young woman whose name you admire. • The number 8 is not a symbol denoting eternity. You may encounter a problem you cannot solve. Mark these and return to them later. Unlike your history, you may abandon these questions with no consequence. Do not make the inevitable comparison to the morning in which you left three year-old Rodine stranded in her dark blue bed. You ignored the silence rumbling in your dossier fall 2014 |

ears, punctured only by Anne’s small hopeless cries for acquiescence, pulling yourself through the master bedroom, and the hall, and the anteroom, and the front door of your rigid and illustrious house provided by Anne’s parents. You slammed the front door hard enough to make it rattle — to leave quietly would be to surrender to Rodine’s condition. You drank prodigiously. A decade later, you knocked on that door again to find Anne stunted from years of heartache, willing but ultimately unable to harbor you. Two decades later, you did an online search to see if Anne had remarried, already jealous of her new life, and found she died of uterine cancer. Ignore the words of this page muddying and tearing in your vision. Concentrate on the tactility of the cardstock. Do not accept that you sought this test on a whim. You built small worlds with married women and returned them damaged to their homes. You rarely dined alone; you knew the wine selection of every restaurant within ten miles of your apartment. The dance of thighs and motel-room keys bored you. You briefly married again. You tried a couple sessions of AA and find too much to empathize with. One evening, you encountered a poster stapled to the bulletin board of an adjacent conference room. APPLY FOR COLLEGE printed in bulky sans-serif, huge and commanding. You could not comfort Rodine when she returned from preschool that first day, wholly incompatible with the other students. You could not greet dossier fall 2014 |

the teacher who saved her curiosity at thirteen, nor her first boyfriend at nineteen. You could not embrace her during her graduations, one tumbling after another, far too fast. These milestones were raindrops in a distant pond. But you could take this test, this small act of solidarity. You are a staunch naturalist. You understand only the reality of things, the calcified calculus of grotesque lives and deformed love. Without imagination, you rely on wit and wickedness culled from hundreds of unresolved relationships. Never before did you consider the purity of academics, its loose relationship to life. Each beautiful child you notice on the street demolishes you. This opportunity for redemption fascinates you in your old age. Your hair is greying, becoming dust, saltpeter. This test consists of thirty-six multiple-choice questions and eight shortanswer questions. Resist your refusal to comply; do not claim that multiple-choice delineates your individual experience into brutal minimalism. Without your excuses and exigent circumstances the fantasy of your life easily sloughs away. When asked to respond to a prompt with a paragraph, do not transcribe your recollection of Anne’s face, particularly her lips and/ or jawline, nor the prim V of a chin that first attracted you. This is a sample multiple-choice question:

How many opportunities are left in your life? A. Zero

B. One C. Two D. Impossible to determine

nore your alcoholism. You are swept outside by anguish, heaved from the house’s accusatory silence into the This is a sample short-essay question: ambience of the night, still too uniform, too tamed — you seek a cat’s Rodine, a newlywed, locates screech, a breaking wave, any unfaher father’s telephone number miliar cadence to fracture the castle in the Yellow Pages. She wants of your horrendous solitude. A low to reconcile with him. She is vibration, the sensation you imagine willing to ignore that mistake Rodine feels in the place of sound, in which he tried to reinsert rattles through your body, refusing to himself in her life, thirteen abate, coalescing into a phrase: “Hey, years too late, wedging himself you fuck – you can’t sleep there,” the in the irreparable family dypoliceman shaking you into the next namic. She remembers that she afternoon, pushing you onto the sidetolerated him for two days bewalk, to your home, vomit sloughing fore pointing a .357 Magnum from you, spattering on the white at his torso and mouthing get concrete, and only then do you realize out, get out, never saying the Rodine is no longer in the next room. words aloud. Her mother had She isn’t calling for you. purchased the pistol years ago Do not acknowledge the dampness in from some unknown desperayour eyes. Do not allow tears to intion. Now, Rodine wants her exorably pull themselves from your father to meet her husband at soul and break apart on the instruca coffee shop that afternoon. tion sheet. Do not watch the blue ink How does the father respond? smudge, disfigure, surrender mean(Note: this question is a hypoing, now mere undulating lines on thetical and will not appear on a sea of white, rows of hands clapthe test.) ping without rhythm, surf smashing Consider why you are taking this stan- soundlessly against the shore. dardized test. Consider what meaning this gesture might have, at this late Do not allow yourself the enormous stage, when your verdict has already agony of regret — that opportunity has passed. been decided and meted out. The San Francisco apartment is the smallest world you’ve built yet. Moths rotate like planets on the ceiling. They patiently watch you disintegrate. Often you lie awake in the deep dark and wonder how many opportunities are left in your life. You stumble on all fours pursuing thick-necked bottles in the murk of the carpet. You ig-

You may now begin the test.

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night rendering

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Artwork: Night Rendering - Gabe Vidal-Hallet

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FEATURING

Three Poems by

Michael Mingo mmingo@andrew.cmu.edu

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VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY LARRY LEVIS

I love you the way I loved the baseball cards I bought with my lunch money and won in bets with schoolmates. I kept them in my pockets, under plastic.

I love you the way Mom loves her Cavalier as it sputters down the parkway, breaks churning like my stomach. I flinch. “Don’t worry,” she says, “It just needs gas.”

I love you the way Harold Lloyd loves the clock hands as he hangs seven stories above the street. Watching, I think, “So this is how it ends.”

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Artwork: Artist’s Loft - Gabe Vidal-Hallet

Final Fridays at Schenley Plaza A brown-haired girl, seven-years-old, dressed in pink bow and matching skirt prances, pirouettes, stumbles in step with the Bastard Bearded Irishmen, who sing of spending quality time with their fathers over whiskey. I see her father sunk in a lawn chair cheering her on, and wince because from a distance he looks like Dad. I wonder how he would react if I were the girl dancing to drinking songs. He wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t cheer. He would dance along.

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How The Puritans Did It Absolutely still, the canopy conceals the lovers completely. She brushes off the moss and reaches for his cheek. Her fingers are like silk pulled from a spider web. He believes this is how the Puritans did it: after Sunday service, theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d sneak past the jailhouse to some remote thicket beneath a new moon. Only the pill bugs, too indifferent to look up, could see them in the moss. He tells her so. She laughs, but counters: the Puritans were sailors. Their first love was the beach, and on the beach they made friends with seagulls surveying the sand. They slept with no trees overhead, just endless open space.

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FEATURING

Artwork by Gabe Vidal-Hallet gvh@cmu.edu

Austin Check out more of Gabeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work at http://www.gvhallett.com

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Axon

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Artwork: Axon - Gabe Vidal-Hallet

Deer

By Jacqueline James jmjames@andrew.cmu.edu

I crush it after starting up the car anyways. I regret it but then I really don’t. I need to get home.

* ’ve been watching a snapping turtle cross the road for the past My car makes this ticking noise and seven minutes. it drives me crazy. Tick tick tick. But Its eyes are mean, its mouth turned it’s irregular, arrhythmic, so I’m condown in a hard sharp line. It has stantly waiting on a tick that drops a long, thick tail. Longer than I the moment after my brain decides thought turtle tails are supposed to when it should have been. I tried to be. When I saw it, I stopped my car fix it a while ago, but I don’t know and walked over to move it out of anything about cars. It doesn’t matter but it drives me crazy. Through my the way, but I’m not about to touch windshield I can see the fog seeping something that looks like it can bite out of the pores of the woods. Slipmy hand off with apparent ease. It ping out from underneath the soggy can move itself. I have nowhere to leaves and the patchy fur stuck to the be. rotted skins of dead animals. I speed I shift from my spot on the roof past a bloated deer corpse with its of my car. The trees are pressing in legs tied up in a knot. around me, very green. Cicadas are I said I would be home for dinner, and rasping and buzzing and they are very I will be. My mom is apparently makloud. The moment is very. Which ing a special dinner for me. Which is sounds stupid but if I want to be a nice and I appreciate, so I’m getting poet which I do want to do then I’ll home on time. I stare at the herd of have to start coming up with more deer that lives in my front yard as I shit like that. Very moments. Big eyes turn in. I hate deer. I have nightmares and no teeth. A man watches a light about them. bulb flicker and then cut out and all I drop the keys on the front seat, slam he can hear is the snow. the car door, open the garage door, This turtle is taking forever. I hop slam the door, walk into the house. off the car and walk around to the edge of the road. I pick up a stick and “I’m home!” poke the thing with it. The creature. I hear my mother bustling around The turtle. I knock the stick against somewhere, crumpling papers and its mouth, teasing it. Turtle snaps, coughing. hisses, wiggles its legs faster. Good. I thought snapping turtles were sup- “In the kitchen!” posed to be the fast ones. I turn the corner and see my mother,

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standing in the kitchen with a smile. “Ta-da!” I sit down at the table next to my younger brother. My dad looks up from his newspaper. Mom sets down the pot. We eat it. * My room never gets completely dark. It just gets bluer and bluer until it is the deepest of blues even when the moon is new and just a dark nothing in the black sky. Back when I used to have really weird nightmares I used to think that a girl with long hair was pressing through the membrane of my ceiling, struggling, like a fetus in the womb. I laid there and watched her try and claw her way through, pinned to the spot. Waiting for her to drop and smother me with thick fluid and hair down my throat. She never made it, but her friend was usually in my bathroom jiggling the handle and sometimes she managed to get the door open. I pad up the stairs and drop on my bed. I’m ready to leave. Just a night and then I’m gone. I hardly miss anything from this place. From my spot on the bed I can see the edge of the lawn, where it meets the street. The moon streams through my window and I feel like just another blue thing. I push up to the window and look out. There’s deer on the lawn. One looks up, but doesn’t see me. I shrug my coat on and creep down to the garage. I stand before my dad’s extensive tool collection and pluck dossier fall 2014 |

away the standard carpenter hammer. Left behind is the dusty outline of the hammer against the wall. I turn and slink out the side door, twisting the grip in the palm of my hand.

plaint, but police like dogs and people who like dogs, so it still lays in the corner of its chain-link cage. By the mercy of the neighborhood. I press up against the link, rattle it a bit. The dog is a bunched muscle with skin thin like latex. It growls low in its throat and releases a bark, like someone will come.

The deer are pale against the moonlit vegetation of the yard. The biggest one, a female, dips her head to work at the grass. I walk slowly, a painful crook in my knees, keeping low to the The boy who cried wolf, though. ground, as if that will make less noise. I jam my fingers through a diamond And I get close. in the fence and the dog lurches at I feel cold and liberated. It is the them, teeth individual and shining, summer but it seems like my breath but I’m fast and I yank my hand away should be fogging in the clear air, a as it crashes with a musical jangle. It film separating me from space and scrabbles nails against mud for purwatchful eyes. The grass is slippery chase. I pull my arm back, eye the under my sneakered feet. But I ex- head of the hammer, hooked end out, hale too loudly and a small one cocks and swing it forward. I aim for the its black eyes right at me. It doesn’t dog’s head but I hit its neck instead. move though, in a trance, and I’m Slow then, I twist the hammer and only about ten feet away. I know I pull it out. The bull falls unconcould spring forward and break its leg scious with fair speed, its brain dewith a quick smash. nied oxygen. There’s a lot of blood, My muscles quiver. I’m ready.

I’m not surprised that it’s red, but it seems human in quality, thicker than I expected.

A sharp bark cracks across the yard, and all the deer are gone. In their wake they leave a soft fluttering noise, A dog is not a deer. A dog’s eyes their hooves against the soft earth. have whites that expose themselves in death. I turn the hammer in my A dog. hand, and idly wonder if I should be I pop up and start my march over to worried about a forensic investigathe neighbor’s back yard, around the tion. Dogs have DNA. Over the weak garage and through the tree line that wheezing, I decide that I don’t care. divides our properties. The sky bleeds Besides, this was only the first. I slip red. through the trees back to my glowing The Foleys have a pit bull prime for square window. There will be plenty euthanization. It bit the old woman of clear nights this summer. across the street once, and it barks incessantly. My parents have called the police several times to file a comdossier fall 2014 |

Allegheny Bazaar dossier fall 2014 |

Chuck’s Boys By Tyler Rice

n October 24th, 1993, Joe Carter hit a one-out, three-run walk-off home run off a fastball slid low across the plate by Mitch “Wild Thing” Williams. He connected with a honeysmooth swing and launched it clear over the 394 feet marker in left field, giving the city of Toronto its second straight World Series title. “Touch ‘em all Joey, you’ll never hit a bigger home run in your life!” Tom Cheek’s hoarse voice roared over the radio, serenading the city’s hero as he rounded third and belly flopped into home with a choir of 49,000 chanting his name. I watched all six games of that Series on a pocket television in my top bunk. I yelled and spat at the first base umpire when our manager Cito Gaston was ejected from Game Two, and I tugged relentlessly at my rally cap as the Jays reeled off eight runs in the final three innings of Game Four. Everything about their streak through those playoffs was plain and simple, no-way-to-deny-it, magic. I bought my first mitt for six dollars the day after the Blue Jays won the title. Every boy in Toronto who knew a lick about baseball wanted to go pro because of Joe Carter and the rest of that team from ’93. Six months later, the magic wore off. The J’s had the worst championship

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hangover in baseball history. They limped to a record of 55-60 for their first losing season in a dozen years. They entered the 1994 campaign with seven All-Stars and the best bullpen in the game, and they fell flat on their faces. That July, my little brother Benji and I left our seats on the third base line after the Jays were shellacked 12-1, just days before the Major League Baseball Players’ Association went on strike and ended the ’94 season with half the games left. We met our dad at Harley’s, a clammy tavern two blocks from the ballpark, where men would stumble from the games and argue baseball until the neon signs were turned off and the beer maidens stopped handing out free shots of whiskey. Dad never liked to go to the games with us. He said baseball was something that brothers should share alone. Before we got past the first row of crimson-tinted leather booths, he spotted us, stood up from his stool at the bar and shuttled us back through the door. We walked toward our car without speaking. I hung my head and stared at the pavement as we went.

“I can’t root for a team that doesn’t win games. They stink.” Dad clapped me softly on the neck and combed his fingers through my hair, as if to say stop being so dramatic. But then he looked down at me, and I looked up at him, and he noticed the tears that had started to well at the corners of my eyes and we stopped walking. He stretched out his thick hands and grabbed each of my shoulders, then crouched into a catcher’s squat in the middle of the street. As frustrated drivers pounded on their steering wheels, the long vertical creases on either side of his mouth settled and his eyes focused only on mine. “Listen, you can’t stop rooting for the Blue Jays. You’re a fan now, and you are going to stay a fan. Until the day you stop loving the game. And even then, you don’t change your loyalty. A man who changes his loyalty is a coward.” He stood again and continued to walk.

A week later, my parents were hosting some friends from out of town and they took them to a diner down the road from our house. I’m told that in “What’s the matter, sportsfan?” Dad the middle of the meal Dad dragged said. He called everyone in my fam- my mother through the front door ily sportsfan. It was like a catchphrase and he slapped her around in the that he thought we all loved. parking lot until her chest and neck “I’m not going to root for the Jays were purple and yellow and green. anymore,” I told him. I’m not sure what she said or did to “Oh, and do they know that?” Dad deserve it. But an hour before we joked as he ripped open a fresh pack had to get up for summer camp, my of Skoal and stuffed a wad of the mother nudged Benji and me awake, kissed us on our foreheads, and said minty tobacco into his cheek. she had to leave. She’d made our dossier fall 2014 |

lunches and they were on the counter. We’d have to catch a ride with the kids next door. Through wet sobs, she told us that her brother Charlie would be staying with us to keep an eye on Dad while she figured some things out. She must have already had the car packed because only seconds after walking out of our bedroom I heard the engine of her Wagoneer squeal to life.

for teams in the United States. He sported the white and orange of the Ft. Lauderdale Bolts, the Tar Heel blue of the Reno Raging Rhinos and the electric yellow of the Whitmans of Fargo. For a short time, he was a legend of double-A baseball. He was a heavy hitter, a massive chunk of a man carved from marble, with thick thighs that jiggled and tightened when he walked. He maintained a perfect set of jet-black muttonchops and wore a silver cross on a shiny chain around his neck. Managers of most of the teams he played for – sometimes a couple years, other times just a game – called him a “fierce competitor”, and they said they would have killed to have four of him on their roster. That was until he threw a half-full water cooler at an opposing fan who heckled his teammate and the league commissioner told him he would never play professionally again.

Apparently I’d met Uncle Charlie a year earlier at my cousin’s wedding in Nova Scotia, though I didn’t recognize him when he came through our front door like a man on fire. He pulled up in a yellow cab and swung two bags from the trunk, one a green alligator skin case squeezing out on all sides with loose sleeves and underwear, and the other a drooping duffel bag swollen with wooden and metal baseball bats and an assortment of jerseys with yellowed armpits and tobacco juice stains on the bellies. He A minor setback, he called it. set his bags on the ground and pulled each of us into a bear hug with a I was obsessed from the moment he walked in. I crawled on the floor in the hearty laugh. kitchen, dived into the pile of rank, In the kitchen, he grabbed the duf- unwashed uniforms and pulled from fel bag by the bottom and dumped it it an extra-large Birmingham Honey onto the linoleum floor. Gear and uni- Bees jersey. I swam in the folds and forms spilled out and clanked against layers of the shirt, rolled the sleeves the drawers and the refrigerator and four times and tucked the tail into my the oven. With his muscly, vein-lined waistband so it seeped through the forearms crossed against his chest, bottom of my shorts. he leaned on a counter and declared proudly that Benji and I could have For the first few weeks that Uncle Charlie lived with us, I wore a differwhatever we wanted. ent one of his jerseys to every bat“I’m too fat for most of it now.” He ting practice. Uncle Charlie loved chuckled and slapped his stomach. that I wanted to be a ballplayer. He Charlie Wyndam played sixteen years would come with me to the field and of professional ball as a utility fielder stand on the other side of the chaindossier fall 2014 |

metal fence, taking swigs from a can of Jolt Cola, cooing whenever I made perfect contact with a ball and banging his boots against the fence when I was on a roll.

time for her to come home, that they needed to raise their children together and that we missed her. He said he regretted what he did and he promised it would never happen again.

“Tiger Woods’s daddy used to holler through a bullhorn when he was in the middle of his back swing. Taught him concentration. Fans are gonna try to get in your head, so you have to be prepared,” He said and then mooed like a cow as I took my biggest windup and whiffed, clobbering myself in the shins with an aluminum bat.

But she said that he embarrassed her and frankly she was scared. So to work on regaining her trust, Dad took a few weeks off from work, packed a bag and went to stay at Aunt Clara’s. Aunt Clara lived by herself in Belleville, two hours away. Her husband died long before I was born and she worked the graveyard shift at the hospital.

Sometimes Dad and Benji would come along to the field, and on the hottest summer weekends when the sun was directly over our heads, we would open the doors to the pickup truck and blare Michael Jackson. Uncle Charlie made me throw hundreds of pitches. Benji danced and kicked in the bed of the truck in nothing but a bathing suit and white tube socks. Dad relaxed in the dugout with his feet propped up on a clay-covered bucket of balls. He clapped proudly. I think watching me took his mind off of my mother.

While they were gone, Benji and I were left under Uncle Charlie’s supervision, which meant fried foods and sweets for all our meals and TV late into the night. We laughed hysterically at midnight reruns of Whose Line Is It Anyway? and built Lego towers until our fingers were numb.

Every Saturday that Dad was gone, Uncle Charlie would march into our bedroom at 7 o’clock in the morning with cups of coffee and a plate of cinnamon scones that he made from scratch, riding a sugar rush that started around 5:30. He’d struggle to sit He called her on the phone most still in a miniature beanbag chair, and nights, waiting the full seven rings be- he’d let out booming laughs as Benji fore the answering machine prompt- tried to dress himself and I hollered ed him to either leave a message or from the shower the names and bathang up. He’d always slam the phone ting averages of my favorite players. down on the receiver and look at us “You guys are too much, you know and smile as if nothing was wrong. that? This is a great thing we got toThen after dinner one evening, he gether,” Uncle Charlie would say. called and got no answer again. He said under his breath that that was it, When we were ready, Uncle Charlie and he went to see my mother at her would let us apply a few dabs of his sister Clara’s house. He told her it was sweet-smelling cologne to our wrists, dossier fall 2014 |

on the mound. He said he saw great potential for a career in pro ball. And really, he was the reason I got good at baseball so fast. He worked with me for countless hours, telling me to hit just one more when all I wanted to do was crash on the couch and play Nintendo 64, so his opinion was my religion. He cared more than anyone else. Some people would say it made and we’d line up in front of the house him wild. from tallest to shortest. Then we’d jog in a line to my little league game. Ben- In the final game of my seven-game ji and I looked like little village people season, my team went up by three runs. We scored in the first inning chasing an ogre down the street. when a player on the opposing team During my games, Uncle Charlie dropped a pop fly and accidentally shouted from the top bleacher. stepped on the ball and rolled his The players’ parents loved him. When ankle. The umpire didn’t know what he started chants, they joined in. to do, so he gave us a run. We scored When “O Canada” was played over again in the second and once more in a little stereo before the game, Uncle the fourth. I’d pitched a shutout into Charlie stood at attention underneath the last inning when a kid dressed in the flag and the kids in the stands cargo shorts and a T-shirt with his froze like statues at his feet with their number drawn on the back wiggled hands over their chests, peeking up to his way into an awkward batting see if he noticed and giggling when stance, his butt poked out high like a he winked at them. proud puppy. His mom, with frizzy He was a little league groupie. He hair and a Styrofoam visor, had to knew the first and last names of all kneel behind him and hold his elbows my teammates and rooted for each up so he didn’t hit himself in the face one of them individually, howling when he swung. when they got on base and booing I stared him down for a few seconds, the umpire when they got a bad call. looking deep into his sunscreenIn my second game, I went all four innings without giving up a run and Uncle Charlie was so happy that he left Benji at a friend’s house and he took me out to Fuddruckers in Saskatoon City. We scarfed down Buffalo wings and chugged Mountain Dew, and he told me that he was so proud of the way I handled myself dossier fall 2014 |

smeared face, then wound up, dragging my left knee across my body and pinning it tight against my chest. I sucked in air and exhaled quickly as I shot my leg out in front of me and released the ball. It slipped from my hand and flew into the boy’s cheekbone, hitting him hard enough to knock his huge plastic helmet clean

off. He dropped to the dirt, shrieking and stretching out his hands for support. His mom dived on top of him as if more baseballs would rain from the sky like heat-seeking missiles. Everyone in the stands cringed and held their breaths. An infant moaned in empathy. I hid my face in my mitt.

seconds into the face of speechless terror. I heard the woman whimper, less of a plea for him to stand down and more of a sounding of disbelief. He finally relaxed his shoulders and faced me. “Great pitch, kid.” Uncle Charlie squeezed my neck, and the sharp pink shade of his own softened. I followed him off the field with every pair of eyes burning against me. They didn’t stare at the aggressor. They stared at me, as if I was the one who leveled that kid’s mom. Without a sound from parents or coaches, I gathered my bat and water jug from the dugout and walked home behind Uncle Charlie.

The umpire called time, coaches from both teams hovered over the boy, and all of the infielders wore their mitts on their heads and spun around in circles. While the boy’s coach carried him to a medical tent behind the backstop, his mother paced towards me with giant steps, pointing her finger and puffing out her chest. She turned me around and smacked me We sat at the dinner table that night, hard on my ass. thanked God for our meals and “You’re a brat for throwing a ball like chewed in silence. Uncle Charlie that in soft pitch!” she shouted. She kept his eyes fixed on the TV behind was cocking back to swing again and Benji’s head. He laughed quietly and I started to turn away when a strong breathed loudly through his nose. hand snatched her wrist. Uncle Charlie threw her arm away and shoved Benji pushed his food from corner her to the ground with a flattened to corner on his plate, oblivious to palm. She landed with a thud and a what he had witnessed that day. And thin cloud of dirt puffed up around I watched my uncle. Iw ate without looking down. The longer I looked, her head. the more I saw. In his thick fists I saw “You keep your fucking hands off my own hands. In his smile I imagthat boy,” he said. ined a temper that I would one day My uncle, at least a foot taller and develop. I felt the heat of his skin a hundred pounds heavier, stood on my cheeks. I figured that we both over the boy’s mother with his fists knew what the other was thinking, clenched and his eyes bulging. I imag- but he never said a word about it, and ined him doing awful things to this so neither did I. I’m certain now that woman. He could reduce her to ash the way he saw his response that day with a squeeze of his fingertips, and is much different from the way I saw yet he just stood there, breathing in it. I think he was proud of himself, and out, the veins in his neck pulsing and I wonder if he has any idea how and growing. He looked for several scared it made me. dossier fall 2014 |

7336

By Jacqueline James jmjames@andrew.cmu.edu

can’t stand most songs by Bruce

Springsteen. I know this fact will alienate me from the crowd, but he garbles his words and bangs out his power cords and my dad leans back in his lawn chair, sucking cigar smoke deep into his belly and exhaling, leaning forward and opening his eyes, reverent, he says “That’s the boss.” Can’t stand the Boss. Every summer of the useful years of my life I’ve spend dragging my 90s Toyota Camry from house to house, delivering pizzas and hoping people choke. I don’t like when their hands brush mine as they pass the money. I don’t like the feeling of most things chafing on my skin, especially in the summer when it’s constantly hot and my head is pounding. I wish I could be naked, like when I was born, writhing in a doctor’s hands. But that’s against the rules and regulations, so I am always up to my teeth in a black collared shirt, (short sleeves thank god or I would do something nasty to the manager, maybe involving bleach, maybe involving long term damage) and khakis and a fucking visor that makes me look like a goddamn Labrador retriever, I swear. My father is a former academic former writer turned gardening enthusiast. He stays up all night planting bulb after bulb for next spring, even though it’s the beginning of the sum-

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mer and the old ones have hardly stated to wilt yet, always something clenched between his teeth. Lately a spade, which frankly has been getting him to looking ridiculous. I am also constantly outside gardening and I hate that too. My father has the radio tuned to 106.4 fm, which is a station that plays a lot of the Boss among other things that set me on my edge. I like the way the earth smells when it’s wet, and sometimes it’s hot enough that I can take my shirt off and roll up my jeans and let myself breathe a little more than usual. But Springsteen usually ruins those moments and my father does too, asking me about my future. When he starts getting to that I will head inside to talk with my mother, who normally provides a glass of water and some talk about the neighbors. I click my nails against the granite and when she is done I put my cup in the sink, always. I head upstairs after all that, and it’s a good day when I can get upstairs before seven-thirty when the sun goes down. Upstairs I alternate between pretending to do math practice and pretending to write. Summers are the worst time for me. In the summer I’m home, away from the place I’ve carved for myself at school, away from friends that high five and the dark room I’ve learned is good for being alone and for developing pictures and thinking. Anyway, my parents are like aliens who have slipped into the wrinkled skin of a quiet suburban couple. Like someone has stretched their skin over a generic taxidermy model. It creeps me out to think that in the night they

might have to pee or get some food and walk around the house while I’m asleep. So the pizza job isn’t so bad if you take into account that it gets me away from the eager piles of wrinkle and smile. I do most things you might think a guy who hates his parents might do. I yell at them and I make my mother cry over buying the wrong type of jam. I think about jamming the spade down my father’s throat, into the soft flesh of his mouth. I balance on train tracks and stroll around with my friends from high school until far after curfew, I stand on the neighbor’s lawns at night until they call and complain nervously to my mother. When my father steps a little too far over the line I push him back in place. I’ve broken his favorite records in descending order and poured lemon juice in his whiskey a few times. I am not a child. I thought about Windex in the food but decided against it. I get to thinking sometimes that I am a bad person, or a bad son. When I dig in that further I’m not sure the bad label sticks. Maybe just stifled, to be introspective. I think every son considers murdering his father.

The housewife is wearing a thin cotton top and red lipstick that’s worn in the middle, like she’s been eating. A pair of pink flip-flops is wedged between her toes, and she leans forward on the balls of her feet, a hand on the doorframe. She’s got on those capris that moms wear, with pockets on the side and strings hanging down from places where they might cinch. I realize slowly that she might have been very attractive before she squeezed out some kids and started wearing mom capris. I watch her mouth as it opens to speak. “Yes, that’s my order.” She doesn’t reach to take it from my hands. “Well that’ll be $17.95.” Her lips pucker and her nose wrinkles a bit, like maybe she’s about to laugh. “Keeps getting more and more expensive, doesn’t it?” She grins and slaps her right flip-flop repeatedly against the hardwood floor inside the door. She flips some blonde hair over her shoulder. My fingers are getting tired of gripping the greasy boxes. “Well that’s the price.”

She stares at me sideways and continI’m on the last delivery of my shift, ues slapping her flip-flop. I’m about and then I can head over to the tracks to open my mouth to ask for money to meet my friends. I walk up some again, but she interrupts me. slate path up to a red front door with “Say, you used to go to Glenbriar a brass knocker, which I use to be of- High, right?” She twirls some of that ficial. The house number reads 7336. hair between her pointer and middle The door swings open and there’s a finger. youngish housewife standing there, “Yeah, now I’m out though. Why?” blinking at me and ghosting a smile. It’s hot. It’s only seven and my visor “Benecio’s pizza. Two large pepperoni is not doing much in way of blocking and a small caesar salad.” This is the the sinking sun. chant. Hardly changes house to house. dossier fall 2014 |

“Oh, I used to see you around. My one son goes to Glenbriar, he must be a couple years below you. But my other son, he’s the handful. Preschooler.” I shift forward, the pizzas still in my arms.

and juts her hip out, like she might place a child on it. She turns and reaches into the house, to the right of the door, as if she’s searching for the money to pay me. When she retracts her hand after a few long moments, “Yeah. So $17.95?” She starts and there’s no money. She shoves a cigalooks at the pizza like she’s forgotten rette in her mouth and digs a lighter out of her pocket. “Smoke?” she she ordered it in the first place. asks? She lights. “Oh, yes. My son’s name is Robbie, do you know him?” She leans forward “Um, no. If you could just takes some more but doesn’t take the pizza. these,” I say, still polite, because the Soon I’ll be late for the next delivery. sight of her smoking a cigarette is strange. She jerks the hand wielding “Robbie who?” the cigarette behind her, into the dark of the house. It looks cool, out of the “Robbie Fitz? Strike a bell?” sun. I have never heard of Robbie Fitz in “Put them on the kitchen table, sweet. my life. I’ll make you up a glass of lemonade. “Maybe, a sophomore now, right?” I can only relax when my husband I don’t know. The last thing I need is has got the kids out of the house.” for this lady to be pestering me more She takes a deep drag and blows the about maybe perhaps seeing her son smoke in my face. I notice, absently, that there are no toys rising from the once. darkness of the house that a child “Mm, no, a junior.” might play with. It’s all very neat. I adjust my hold on the pizzas. “Oh, “That’s alright, if you would just take that makes sense.” them. I have to get to the next house, She smiles with a tight closed mouth the pizzas are getting cold.” She taps red fingernails against the doorframe. I swallow. “Don’t be so serious, sweet.” “It’ll just take a moment. My wallet is in the kitchen anyway, and it’s the hottest day of the year so far. I’m sure you’re thirsty.” My feet are starting to ache, vaguely, from the standing. “No thank you—” “Mrs. Fitz.” I wasn’t planning on saying her name. dossier fall 2014 |

“No thank you Mrs. Fitz. If I’m late to the next house my boss will definitely fire me, I’ve already been late three times since I got the job. I really can’t.” She laughs, smoke puffing out from her nose in bursts. “Your boss? Aren’t you a college boy now? Why do you care about bosses? Now come on in, I have lemonade in the fridge.” She doesn’t turn to move inside. I need the money for the pizzas or it’ll come out of my paycheck, basically it will be my whole paycheck.

“I really can’t—” “But we’re the last of your shift! You got the time. Come on now.” “No it isn’t. I need to get on to the next house.” “No you don’t, sweet. Your shift ends at seven. Don’t be a stick in the mud, my son always said you were one of the fun ones.” “How do you know that?” “Know what?”

Behind her, I hear the scrape of a chair against the floor.

I swallow. I can hear someone walking around the house. “Know my shift ends at seven.”

She keeps on that puzzling smile. “Come on now. Just some lemonade, then you’ll be on your way. I just want to help you cool off.”

“My son has told me all about you. Now come one. Nothing is going to happen if you walk in and have some lemonade. Don’t be silly.”

My palms are sweating against the box. One of the house numbers, the second 3 in the 7336, pitches forward from where it was leaned against the clapboards next to the red door. “Oh, my husband has been needing to fix those for weeks. The lemonade?”

“Fine, lady.” I turn around and start walking to my car, but it’s not on the street where I left it. There’s nothing but pavement and the deafening sound of the crickets. “Where are you going now Ben? You can’t leave yet!”

There are two cars in the driveway. I I turn back, my mouth dry. “I—how can’t hear the idling of my car any- do you know my name? Where’s my more. car?” Her smile has turned down in the “Well I don’t know where your car corners and her eyes have taken on went, but you definitely can’t leave an intimidating edge. now.” There’s the noise of someone filling a glass from the dark of the house. “The lemonades ready, hon. Just come inside for a glass, what do you say?” The heat has caused her makeup to melt a bit, so that it settles in the wrinkles of her face. She looks old, maybe not a youngish housewife.

“But—who told you my name?” She laughs and flicks what’s left of her cigarette to the ground. The orange tip winks out after hitting the porch. “I told you that, my son. Are you coming in or not? No car, you can’t leave. You left your phone in dossier fall 2014 |

there too, didn’t you?” I bend and put the pizzas down, breathing heavily. I can feel sweat dripping down my back, soaking my socks. “No, I have it.” I don’t. “You can use our phone. It’s in the kitchen. And the lemonade.” I stumble back, off the porch, and stand on the lawn. It looks very green to me. “Hey!” She sounds angry. “Don’t you—” she breaks into a cough, long and hacking. “Don’t you walk on my lawn. Get back up here.” All I can hear are the crickets. They’re swelling in my ears. making my muscles shake and my skin cold. I walk back up to the porch and take the steps one by one. “That’s right. Easy. Now come on in, there’s the lemonade and the phone.” I hear a cough from the house, and see a man cross a doorway, silhouetted. I take off my hat and put it on top of the stacked pizza boxes. “Come on, just inside. Nothing’s gonna happen.” I shift my weight back and forth for a moment, overwhelmed by the heavy quiet of the night, heated, stifling, and cross inside.

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