The rollicking, profound pieces in Swearing in English take readers on a wild ride, from Mercer quitting law after getting his degree (and taking acid) to sheep farming and herring fishing in Scotland to a cosmic encounter with Elvis in the Sierra to taking his son to spring training and trying to get an autograph from Barry Bonds. (Full disclosure: I copyedited the book for John, whom I met when our sons were on the same Oakland Little League team.)

The good news is that John’s health is improving. The bad news is that since he is unable to work, in the theater or at his day job as a cabinetmaker, he isn’t earning any money at the moment. As a way to support him during this difficult time, his publisher, 125 Records, is giving him 100 percent of the cover price ($15) of each copy purchased via its web site. (The book is also available at Pegasus Books in Berkeley and Oakland, or can be ordered from your local bookstore.)

ZYZZYVA: Can you explain the title Swearing in English?

John Mercer: Christy and I were invited to a wedding of two Shotgun members, and I was in the buffet line, and there were two or three women behind us, and there was a certain amount of flirting going on, and I stared swearing. Rather than being upset, they’re thinking it’s really cute and giggling and want to hear more. I turned to Christy and said, “Listen to this, it’s swearing in English. I can say really crude stuff to them and they think it’s fantastic. If an American did this he’d never get away with it.”

Z: Your stories go beyond the core anecdotes. There are lots of digressions and personal reflections.

JM: If the story has me realizing something within it, and I start talking about it and it goes off on a tangent, that’s actually happening to me while I’m writing the piece. It’s entirely arising in the moment. Like Scottish storytelling, it wanders off somewhere, and you think, Where has he gone now? And then it’s, Oh, he’s come back again. Then, he’s gone off again, but now he’s tied up the two wanderings and he’s got them going through the story line as well.

Z: What do you mean by “Scottish storytelling”?

JM: When I was a boy we would spend time with this Scottish family that was very literary and talkative. This was the wee Scotsman I write about in the book who would drink his whiskey with milk and tell crazy stories from when he was in a Scottish regiment in World War I. His daughter, Zoe, would give me books to read like Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, which was stories of Durrell’s childhood on Corfu. She gave me that when I was 12 or 13. Maybe that was the great inspiration: I loved his stories of his family and crazy things that happened. That was the beginning of my really loving books.

Billy Connolly tells stories like that. Then when I lived in Scotland, I found this is what everybody does. You sit down and have a few drinks and then you go to someone’s house after you’ve spent the night in the bar and you’ll carry on drinking, and that’s when the real stories come out, and the secrets. To be able to tell a story like that is one of the best things in the world. And they’re unbelievably funny—the kind of stuff you can’t make up.

I think that’s the thing with my stories: They include the ridiculous and the outright unbelievable, but they’re all true.

Z: How did you approach the story “The Day We Met Elvis”?

JM: I went up to the place where it happened—Packer Lake in the Sierra, where we’d gone in the summers as a family—and stayed in a little cabin. I was filled with remorse about whether it was as bad as I imagined it was. I wondered if my children would tell stories of how they went off on summer vacations and how dreadful they were. And that led into the anecdote of meeting Elvis [an Elvis impersonator singing in a run-down motel].

I asked myself why Elvis had appeared to us that day, and that’s how I found the ending for the story: Elvis had appeared to bring a message from the great rockabilly beyond to tell me everything’s OK, the past is the past and we’re not tied to it.

Z: You have two “perfect moment” stories in the collection.

JM: I think all my stories are about the same thing. I had this one called “A Perfect Moment,” which has the scene of me on the bridge at Bolton Abbey, and that was always in my memory a perfect moment—that was the epitome of what a day could be for three friends hanging out. And then I realized I had another “perfect moment” story about a little dog barking and a little boy, so I titled it “Another Perfect Moment.” Then I realized that’s all I write about. They’re all perfect-moment stories. They’re all ridiculous and true.

Regan McMahon is senior editor, books, at Common Sense Media and copy editor at Zyzzyva.

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Although he found temporary refuge with his wealthy grandparents, Daniels grew up, understandably, confused and angry. With admirable tact and dispassion, he has channeled that turmoil into a memoir, Cloudbreak, California (228 pages; Owl Canyon Press). Warned by his father that the cousin’s son might someday seek revenge, Corleone-style, upon him, Daniels contemplates his fate: “A boy, my age, a hidden enemy, was growing up alongside me, plotting revenge.’’

Putting on a hounds-tooth cap like the one worn by Sherlock Holmes, he roams the streets, hoping to avoid, but half-inviting, confrontations: “I slipped out of the house without Mom noticing, walked away from home and into the neighborhood west of Orange Street to the part of town I was supposed to avoid,’’ he writes. “In a quiet park of cracked basketball courts and grass covered in dandelions, I studied the graffiti etched across the handball court, as if trying to crack a code. The dozen cholos standing around a low-rider in the parking lot ignored me. […] In a flash, I ducked into an alley and, halfway to the end, cut up between two houses and back onto another street, shaking my invisible stalker. Trouble would find me one day, and when it did, I was going to have to be ready.’’

The author’s adolescent Raymond Chandler fantasy morphs into more adult forms of discontent. Ten years after his father jumps bail (he subsequently returns to face trial), Daniels breaks up with his girlfriend for no good reason and heads down to Central America (with a pit stop in San Francisco first) as he tries to outrun his demons.

But the expatriate game is dispiriting, and he can’t make a go of things, despite a romantic interlude, taking odd jobs, camping out, and, at one point, staying for free at a bat-infested “government resort’’ in El Salvador.

Inevitably, Daniels’ Odyssean journey ends with a reconciliation of sorts with his father, who manages an early release from Soledad with the help of a smart lawyer. The two try surfing together, though Kelly remains no match for his dad’s aquatic prowess. Eventually, he drifts into a restaurant job at the ritzy Ritz Carlton, treading water until he can decide how best to meet his fate.

But something clicks, somehow, perhaps through the partial reconciliation. Daniels, who is now a professor of creative writing at Augustana College, gets accepted in graduate school, on his way to a better life. It’s certainly a vast departure from his stint at the lonely Salvadoran “resort”:

“After a dinner of avocado, tomato, bread, and hot sauce, I bedded down. It felt strange to be alone in a place meant for hundreds. I imagined ghosts in the other cots, benign ones, hanging around because they had nowhere to go, glad for my company. This reminded me of my father’s notion of the afterlife. We, as disembodied and eternal souls, hung around an enormous casting studio, waiting to audition for roles here on Earth. In this view of things, the stories of our lives had already been written, if not rehearsed, and we only forgot what was coming by some magic initiated when soul entered flesh.”

Kelly Daniels has written the story of his life—so far—with courage and conviction. As Joyce wrote in a different, though related, context: “I bleed by the black stream/For my torn bough.” The pure products of America may yet survive the roots of their raising.

The post Buffeted in His Father’s Wake: Kelly Daniels’ ‘Cloudbreak, California’ appeared first on ZYZZYVA.

Mother throws in the cow stomach and this makes the boiling water jump from the blue tin pot. Now she drops in a little deformed thing that must be a cow’s foot. Then go in the tomatoes, the rosemary, the mint, the garlic and oregano. On weekends Home is fragrant with spices. Nowadays when the aroma of certain natural condiments hits me, I often remember the economic crisis that began in December 1994 in Mexico.

Father wakes up early and empties the stew in the pot onto Styrofoam plates. He carefully puts them in the car, as if they were recently dug-up treasure: so not a single drop spills over, so not a single precious jewel falls, so that the menudo arrives safely at its destination.

In Monterrey it’s typical to eat barbacoa on Sundays, but Father’s friends are true. On those Sunday mornings in 1995, instead of trying barbacoa, they eat the menudo they buy from Father.

During the week, Mother puts other things into the pot that always seems to be boiling water. In go chickens, rice, vegetables. Then Father places the contents into the thin receptacles and the destination of the plates is much, much closer. One goes to the neighbor next door, the other to the neighbor across the street, to those around the corner, to that neighbor who just moved to the other block, to the mean woman who punctures soccer balls and to Mother’s friends, who are also true friends.

The kitchen at Home is the neighborhood kitchen. In northeastern Mexico there are no fondas. The word fonda is not used to describe a cheap, homestyle restaurant like it is in other places in Mexico. But Home is a fonda. A fonda that offers food delivered right to your door.

And the topic everyday at the fonda is Home. For a moment Home has nothing to do with the walls and the ceilings between which my childhood and adolescence transpired. The word Home refers to a problem. Home means uncertainty, the bank, risk, evil, unemployment, struggle and, above all, a strange and very aggressive word: Hipoteca. Hipoteca—mortgage—is the word nobody wants to hear, or to say, at Home.

Some advanced future civilization will have to somehow erase this word from the dictionary.

But in that year, the word Hipoteca is there, in the everyday speech, though it is actually spoken little.

Mother’s boiling pot defies the word Hipoteca. Father’s Styrofoam plates do, too. Yet, in those times of crisis (said to have been all because of an “error made in December” which devalued the peso and sent interest rates sky-high), the word Hipoteca is very powerful. It can’t be defeated by the aroma of the oregano or by the friendships that are true.

For the word Hipoteca to leave us in peace something else would be needed.

One day Tio sends fifteen thousand dollars from the United States. That day the word Hipoteca lost a battle, leaving Home in peace.

Tio is a cowboy who crosses the border in silence. His name is Gerónimo González Garza.

I promised to one day tell his story.

***

They dismounted. They tied up the horses under the shade of the same tree. They walked, each one with his rifle. They were talking softly and sparely, the alert black eyes of Magdaleno and the alert light brown eyes of Gerónimo. A half hour and some miles later, they couldn’t find any game to shoot. Nothing stirred, not even a tarantula. The hot wind dried up life on the mountain.

They split up to increase their luck while they explored. A while passed and at last the first shot—the only shot—of the hunt was heard. Magdaleno ran into the thicket to look, but instead of an animal lying on the ground, he found Gerónimo’s hat. Gerónimo was kneeling, he had a bullet hole in his neck and it was bleeding. He died soon after.

Magdaleno went back to find the horse. He untied it, and later turned it over, along with his best friend’s hat and body. He described in detail what had happened and said that they could do what they wanted with him. The family banished Magdaleno from Sabinas Hidalgo, Nuevo León. He never returned. Some say that he crossed the R.o Bravo and then hanged himself from a mesquite tree on the Texas cattle ranch where he had found work as a ranch hand.

The years passed, and on May 24, 1953, in her house near the city’s bus terminal, María de Jesús Garza gave birth to a baby of little more than four pounds who came into the world with a full head of hair. The baby’s umbilical chord was cut and buried in Monterrey, his birthplace, as was the custom of the day. The father, Guadalupe González, was content that the baby was a boy. He had wanted a son to name Gerónimo, after his brother who had died tragically by a bullet from his best friend’s rifle.

***

Gerónimo crawls for a few seconds and then slumps to the floor. He seems distracted. Something weird is happening and his parents think they know what it is, but they take him to the hospital to find out for sure. They get up at dawn and are seen by a doctor at the public clinic. He looks over the baby, touches his ears, and speaks in front of him in different high and low tones. Then the doctor becomes grave and asks the parents to go to a laboratory so the baby’s hearing can be studied. Ten days later they return. The doctor receives them with the same serious tone from the time before. He gives them the news that Gerónimo does not hear, nor is he ever going to hear. When he sees things he will not be conscious of their sound: He is totally deaf. Everything for him will be like a silent movie.

They are going to have to speak to him with their hands like mimes, so he doesn’t go crazy. They are going to have to show him that he shouldn’t eat with his mouth open, or that when he needs to drink milk he has to say so with his hand. They will do this, and little Gerónimo will watch them and they will wait for him to imitate them. They have to be patient. It’s no small thing: they will create their own language to communicate with each other. In this way they will gradually show him how to live.

The parents listen to the doctor and his advice. More or less they know what they have to do. Graciela, one of their other children, also was born with hereditary deafness. They have investigated and know that deafness runs in the family on Gerónimo’s father’s side, at least two generations back. Due to the profound deafness, Gerónimo will not know sound and won’t be able to use his vocal chords to talk, even though they are not damaged in any way. No person born deaf can use his larynx, his voice.

***

Guadalupe González works from Monday through Friday at Trailers of Monterrey Corporation. The small company has a storehouse into which noisy trucks coming from the United States are jammed in together every day. As part of their cargo, they carry oily car transmissions, obsolete medical equipment, peeling multicolored wires, broken hydraulic tubing, loose furniture, and other things. Guadalupe’s job is to weigh the junk and bargain as much as possible with the junk collectors.

María de Jesús Garza makes red chorizo that she sells in their neighborhood in Monterrey. Before, they had spent a long time in Rancho Nuevo, a communal land in Los Ramones, Nuevo León, some ninety miles north of the city. It was a good-sized piece of land María de Jesús had inherited, but the soil was broken up and of the kind that doesn’t allow for easy sowing, and so they had to immigrate to the city.

On weekends, to cover the family’s expenses, Guadalupe travels to Rancho Nuevo in his cherry Ford pickup truck, driving through a remote landscape—one mesquite tree here, another over there. There he kills baby goats, which he later sells in Monterrey. If it is the birthday of one of his children or some other truly special occasion, he kills one of the cows that graze on the paltry pastureland at the ranch. Enough barbacoa and menudo comes from the animal to last for days, and it makes everyone happy.

Sometimes there is no time to kill animals at Rancho Nuevo, and the sacrifices are made at the house in the city. It is not unusual for dead goats to appear strung up in the patio of the small home, hanging as if they were recently washed clothes waiting to be dried.

Of the six children in the González Garza family—María de la Luz, Graciela, Teresa, Guadalupe, and Martha—Gerónimo is the one who collaborates most in the weekend slaughters. His siblings study instead, and their chores include helping with the sale of the chorizo and in the butchering and packing of the meat. They treat Gerónimo normally. They run away for hide-and-seek or jump around for hopscotch. Gerónimo spends the first ten years of his life in this way, without him, his parents, or siblings knowing official sign language. All of their communication comes from moving the hands, a voice that doesn’t emit any sound but that can be seen. They use a silent alphabet they created.

Gerónimo’s parents don’t impose on him the world of those who do hear, they try to understand his. It’s a normal, spirited, and happy family.

It’s not unusual to see Gerónimo in bloody jeans after he’s spent the whole day with his father in their improvised slaughterhouse at home. Killing a goat is arduous work: first you have to calm it down, later bury a knife in its jugular, let it die as it screams, hang it up so that all the blood drains from it into a pot, take out its intestines by hand and strip it of its coat. There is one Saturday when Gerónimo, alone, without his father’s help, kills all eighteen goats to be eaten at a wedding to be celebrated that same night in Monterrey. He is ten years old.

***

Someone knocked on the door on a summer night in 1965. Guadalupe went out to see. A young visitor approached him and gave him a white card on which was printed many small hands drawn in different shapes—the hieroglyphics of the sign language alphabet. On the reverse side there was a message in Spanish: “I am deaf. Please donate to my school.” Ger.nimo’s father took out some change and gave it to the boy. He kept the card and the following afternoon took his son to the address written upon it.

It was a big house on Madero Road, one of the most important avenues in old Monterrey. There they taught Mexican Sign Language. (One might assume there is only one sign language for all deaf people in the world, but that’s not the case. There are many differences even between the sign language of one country and another. Deaf gringos speak American Sign Language. The language of deaf Mexicans even includes its own regional slang, and a deaf person from Monterrey doesn’t speak the same way as a deaf Mayan.) The place had few windows, three rooms, and a large area where in 1951 the first school for the deaf in northeastern Mexico was established. In the entranceway there was a sign that gave its welcome by offering the Greek definition of man: zoon logon ejon, “the animal that has language,” as well as photos of a deaf lucha libre wrestler who, at that time, every once and a while shared the ring with the famous fighters El Santo or Blue Demon. He was called El Prisionero, the Prisoner. There were also images of “Deaf” David Rodr.guez, another lucha libre performer, who was lesser known but a native of Monterrey.

The school was affiliated with the Mexican Association of Deaf-Mutes Corporation. Its symbol was a squirrel. The incessant movement of the hands of the sympathetic nut-eating rodent seemed to the professor Abel Sauza to be similar to the deaf students during their class discussions, and so he adopted it as their logo. It was Professor Sauza who involved Gerónimo in the rest of the activities at the school. The place doubled as a recruitment agency. The young deaf children who traversed the populous neighborhoods of Monterrey asking for money for the school were attentive, so if they came across any other deaf people they would invite them to join the community they were trying to form.

The deaf students, once they learned how to communicate through Mexican Sign Language, would form soccer teams and compete in amateur tournaments, or they would go out together to get to know other cities in Mexico. They would sell key chains, pens, or toys which they offered with cards bearing signed phrases on them, like “Te amo” (right hand with two bent fingers making a type of horns to be placed at the chest, at the height of the heart) or “Que D.os te bendiga” (left hand and right hand symmetrically in the form of horns).

The professors presented these trips to parents as a way to integrate their students into the world, though they had a commercial logic to them as well, as part of the sales went to the school and another, smaller part went to the young deaf entrepreneurs.

Gerónimo made his first trip at 14 years old. It was like going to another planet; the never-ending asphalt of Mexico City contrasted with the loose topsoil of where he had grown up, as much so in Rancho Nuevo as Monterrey. He spent four months there. He made short visits to the other states of Puebla, Aguascalientes, and Guanajuato. He met deaf people from Mexico City who were infamous for being abusive to those from the countryside, but some of them became good friends of his for a long time. The Monument to the Mexican Revolution was Gerónimo’s preferred site to sell key chains. The tourists behaved generously, especially the regular evening customers of the neighboring cantinas. Whereas outside the nearby offices of the Federal Security Department (DFS), a shadowy organization that coordinated paramilitary and “counterterrorism” efforts at the time, the pickings were quite slim.

Before returning to Monterrey, the group traveled to Guadalajara for a few weeks. While he was there, Gerónimo decided he would go as a mojado, or “wetback,” to the United States.

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Little Green

The story opens with Easy recovering from a near-fatal car accident. Enlivened with a voodoo concoction called Gator’s Blood, the private eye gets right back to work, helping his stalwart friend Mouse find Evander “Little Green” Noon, a young man who went missing after dropping acid on Sunset Strip. Finding Evander is complicated by an incident during his trip that somehow ended in bloody burlap sacks filled with money and several gangs in the city looking for him. Easy is tasked with finding and protecting Evander, hiding the money, and unraveling the story of what exactly happened.

Mosley, an acclaimed veteran of the mystery, layers intrigue through the book, particularly displaying his mastery in pacing. Little Green is not a straight whodunit but a winding journey, one filled with new obstacles, courtesy of side jobs involving old friends from the Rawlins series. Events don’t occur too quickly, yet there is never a lull. Even when the action peaks, new problems arise, propelling the story toward its unpredictable end.

Those already familiar with the Rawlins series will appreciate how Mosley weaves past history into the current lives of his characters in Little Green, showing how previous encounters shape present decision-making. Yet Easy’s strong narrative voice—at once cynical, yet capable of a developing world view and open to weighing the changing environment around him— seamlessly fills in the gaps for any reader meeting Easy or his homicidal sidekick Mouse for the first time. (For example, upon his initial meeting with Evander’s mom, Easy explains his history as a private eye: “I took out my wallet and showed her the license I’d procured after helping the police with a crime that they would have never solved on their own.” The line is a nod to Devil in a Blue Dress, but doesn’t require knowledge of the book to inform the story.)

As he works the streets of a richly depicted Los Angeles in a Barracuda, Easy sees a city that hasn’t repaired itself following the 1965 Watts Riots. Driving through L.A., Easy notes how his “community had suffered decimation as I had. It was trying to come back, but there was no promise that it would rise again either.” At the same time, the Sunset Strip, which has been overrun with hippies consuming drugs and preaching free love, offers some hope. The white hippies there have been marginalized from society much like the non-whites in Los Angeles, and perhaps they do indeed provide a chance for peace.

Little Green is more than a new serial installment in genre fiction; it’s a compelling exciting story examining racial tension in one of America’s most diverse cities.

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But he shouldn’t be thinking about Nicki. He shouldn’t be thinking at all. Follow the breath, the teacher had said. If you feel your mind drifting, just label the thought: thinking, thinking. She made it sound so easy, as if it were no small matter to shut down the mind. To have thoughts, label them without a running commentary, then let them go, presumably to float up, up, up and away, to some sort of graveyard of lost thoughts.

The teacher’s name was Samjana, the Sanskrit word for awareness, but her surname was Resnick, and Jerry would bet—meditation seemed to put him in a betting mood—that her given name was something more along the lines of Sarah. Or Rachel. In another life, he might have seen her during Yom Kippur services, her head bowed in contemplation during the silent Amidah.

But instead, here they were at the River Bend Retreat, a former monastery situated, aptly, at a bend on the Snake River in Idaho: a thirty-something meditation teacher (not just any meditation teacher, as Nicki had told him back home when trying to persuade him. Samjana was a rock star, the Lady Gaga of meditation teachers) and he, Jerry Adelstein, a fifty-seven-year-old intellectual property attorney fresh off a triple bypass.

Now that, he really, really didn’t want to think about. If he thought about his heart, it would respond, as if in a pas de deux, by thumping irregularly against his chest wall. He peered at Samjana, still and stately as one of the trees outside the picture window which overlooked the rapids. Her legs were crossed in a full lotus position, and it seemed from the peaceful upturning of her lips that she could effortlessly remain that way until nightfall. Thinking, thinking. Behind Samjana, hanging high up on the wall, was a photograph of the Swami who had founded the place. When Jerry had first Googled River Bend, he found many references to the Swami, mostly involving his hasty departure years earlier amid swirling rumors of both sexual and financial impropriety. Thinking, thinking.

Mentally, he slapped himself. Snap out of it, Adelstein! Discipline ruled his life, from the half grapefruit he ate for breakfast each morning and the daily 3.4 miles around the reservoir (a thing of the past), to the color-coded files he meticulously kept on every client past and present. Christ, he even got through The Brothers Karamazov last summer when he and Nicki spent the last two weeks of August on the Vineyard, but this—just turning down the volume, slowing down the avalanche of loose data pinging through his mind—this seemed to be beyond him.

It had been his cardiologist at Mount Sinai who first brought up the idea of meditation.

“Medication?” Jerry had asked.

“No, meditation.” The cardiologist hadn’t realized that Jerry was joking. What was the expression: about as funny as a heart attack?

“Be serious, Jerry.” This, from Nicki, who had been in the room at the time. “You know, I read a study last winter. There are significant benefits.”

Two weeks earlier, his chest had been sawed open, an event that occurred less than twenty-four hours after a stress test and subsequent angioplasty had revealed major blockage in three coronary arteries. It had been a routine visit—an annual checkup—and Jerry couldn’t help but feel that if he’d skipped the visit, none of this might ever have happened. It could have been, as his kids used to say when they were little, a do-over. No railroad track of an angry red scar in the center of his chest, still bare from being shaved pre-surgery. No new normal, a phrase he abhorred. And certainly no fucking retreat in the middle of nowhere led by a woman with a cockamamie Hindu stagename.

Sadjama tapped an ornate gong with a soft mallet, and a single, mournful note filled the room. Slowly people started to come back from wherever they had been, as if returning from a country to which Jerry had been denied access. It seemed like a peaceful place, if perhaps a bit boring, and he found himself wishing that he could at least visit—though he was certain he didn’t want to live there.

As the final vibrations of the gong faded into silence, he trained his gaze on Nicki, willing her to turn around. His fellow retreatants (was that even a word?) stretched and rolled their necks. Joints cracked. Knees popped. The rustling sound of a hundred asses shifting position. Come on, baby. Come to Poppa. Nicki lifted one long arm, then reached behind herself and scratched her back.

“And so.” Sadjama’s bird-like ribcage rose and fell. Her voice seemed to pick up where the gong left off, as if part of some sort of ancient chorus. “And so, we begin to see the contents of our minds. In following the breath, we meet ourselves.”

Jerry pictured a cartoon version of himself, shaking his own hand.

“We are like busy little monkeys, going, going, going so that we don’t have to consider the truth of our own insignificance, our brief time in this vessel, this physical body.”

Jerry didn’t see the upside of pondering his own insignificance. And he was quite fond of his vessel, thank you very much. His physical body staged a rebellion against Sadjama’s words. Surges of uncomfortable energy coursed through him, wave after wave. He wanted to do something. Maybe a few dozen push-ups, though that might kill him, or at the very least mess with the cardiac surgeon’s handiwork. You weren’t supposed to leave the room—another rule on a list of unspoken rules—but still he could feel himself on the verge of leaping up and stumbling to the door. Through the picture window, a foggy mist rose from the river. It looked almost like a photograph of a river, a postcard designed for tourists. If his thoughts weren’t real, then what was? Please, baby. Turn around.

As if he had spoken aloud, Nicki swiveled her head and looked straight at him, her large dark eyes gleaming. The rest of her face didn’t move. No amusement, nor frustration, nor concern creased his wife’s lovely brow. Her eyes, those twin pools, offered him exactly nothing, which was, of course, worse than nothing. A few seconds passed, maybe more. He was drowning. Nicki turned so that she was once again facing Sadjama, her posture as straight as a knife.

His grown children called Nicki “the homewrecker” when she wasn’t around. It was their loyalty to their mother that caused this mean streak, which was otherwise quite out-of-character. Amanda was twenty-eight, Ben, twenty-six. They were good kids, excellent kids, and Jerry was aware that he didn’t have any grounds for complaint. They had sailed smoothly through their childhoods on a sea of academic achievement: Dalton, then Taft, where they boarded during the divorce, and then Ben had followed Amanda to Wesleyan, where both had distinguished themselves. Law school for the girl, an MFA in poetry for the boy, though Jerry couldn’t help but wish it had been the other way around. It was only this one ugly word, homewrecker, which he had overheard as they planned his fiftieth birthday party, that let Jerry know that the wound of the split had remained open, festering. A blight on their otherwise blessed lives. Though, in Nicki’s presence, of course, they were unfailingly polite.

Twelve years since all that had happened—surely long enough to legitimize any sense of sordidness about the whole thing. Yes, Nicki had been a summer associate. Yes, he was a partner, and married, a family man who should have known better—who did know better. Nothing like this had ever happened, or likely ever would have happened if it hadn’t been Nicki. Only Nicki. He wasn’t looking for trouble. In fact, he’d thought of himself as relatively happy—as content, he would have said, as anyone trying to run a law firm and raise two kids in the pressure cooker of Manhattan. But when the firm’s number one recruit arrived at the beginning of that June in the form of a small, fine-boned young woman with the gait of a dancer, whose soft-spokenness masked a formidable intellect and, what’s more, a wicked sense of humor, Jerry found excuses to stop at her desk, to hand-deliver correspondence, to ride the elevator just as she was leaving for the day. An impulsive invitation for a drink, which led to dinner, which led to a lie to his wife about working late. The gentle, quizzical expression that first crossed Nicki’s face, that night, as some invisible hand began to knit the air between them, connecting them in a way that felt bizarrely inevitable. By the time he stopped to ask himself what he was doing, he had already done it. He had fallen in love with a woman technically young enough to be his daughter, and whom he had met through work. He couldn’t have made a bigger mess of things if he had tried.

“The whole world doesn’t just revolve around you, Daddy. What about us?” He could still hear Amanda’s wailing voice. She had been sixteen years old, and she thought of herself, her brother, and her mother as a unit. To violate one was to violate them all. But Jerry couldn’t explain to her, couldn’t barely even explain to himself the way he had been dying a little bit each year, the way he had been feeling numb from the neck down, a head bobbling along on a set of insensate shoulders, all brains and no heart, just getting through day after day. It wasn’t about sex, but rather, a desperate need to feel—to be back inside his body again.

“I’m sorry,” was all he could say, and say it he did, over and over again until the words broke down into syllables, until they lost all meaning.

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This is a story about illusions. The two brothers worship different ones that goad them onward — Ali betrays his family to defend his hopelessly ravaged Kurdish community, and Saladin follows the dazzle of cinema to Hollywood. Their exile begins when eleven Revolutionary Guards assemble the brothers’ fellow Kurds and neighbors for wrongful execution. Sweet-natured Saladin is unable to prove his loyalty to Khomeini by finishing off Babak, a peddler of German soccer balls. Instead, Ali fires three shots in the direction of the Guards, grabs his brother, and runs.

Khadivi interweaves their getaway with lyrical chapters describing the exodus of Iranians at large. Placed in this context of disembodied voices—a choir of frantic decision-making—the setting is a non-setting, a placeless diaspora. Yet the Iranian immigrants are drawn to the same place as Saladin: Los Angeles. In an informative chapter, Khadivi, who lives in Northern California, lists the ledger of Iranian immigrants’ arrival to the world’s cities. The top three were London and Istanbul (at a distant second and third, respectively), and, overwhelmingly, Los Angeles. “We are here because this is the direction the dusty air blew out of the projector and filled the sails of our imaginations,” Khadivi writes. Those who stay in Iran are guided by their nostalgia (“the photographs of you as a baby, the guitar we shared”) only to miss the things that mattered more: those who left.

Khadivi’s tone is haunting. Her lilting lists describe the objects of home, and become an incantation honoring the sacrifices made by the refugees of Khomeini’s revolution. Her description of the execution at the book’s opening is chilling: “A man with a wound to his mouth and blood for words.” She acts as a witness to atrocities by underlining their horror. At times, she uses a casual tone to explain life-or-death subjects, evoking indignant laughter. For example, Sharia law:

“That ancient thing where every woman has to wear a veil and every thief has his hand severed?

“We laughed nervously in the silence after their response.”

Throughout the brothers’ journey, Saladin pushes toward California, and Ali pulls backward to a vanishing home. Militant and dogmatic, tall and muscular, Ali constantly shakes his head at his younger brother: “At seventeen you still don’t understand that if you are a Kurd, you can never be anything else.” But what at first seems like loyalty to the Kurds eventually inspires Ali to leave his brother and betray his fellow exiles. Saladin puzzles over his brother’s deceit while he wanders Los Angeles alone. He is kicked, rejected, and abandoned to starve, until he finds a community of fellow immigrants, a relief that feels unexpected and absolute. Still, Los Angeles is not what Saladin had seen in the movies. “We had not at all become Americans,” the immigrants say, “but instead America, California, Los Angeles became a bit more like us.” Saladin, though working at a Persian rug store, has no sense of belonging among the patchwork of international strivers he encounters. In the end, unaware whether Ali is alive or not, Saladin “turns his bones south and walks on.” The Walking is a striking tribute to all that Iranians have lost.

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“I have it,” our grandmother repeats. She again extends a dime, four nickels, and ten pennies pinched in her beige cotton glove. Our mother, behind the wheel of the Hudson, bats the gloved hand back as we near the tollgate. “You paid last time,” our mother says. The car sways over the dividing line to the right. “I certainly did not,” our grandmother says. “Yes,” our mother says, digging for a fifty-cent piece through the open purse on her lap, “you did.” The car sways over the dividing line to the left. “I think I know what I did and did not do,” our grandmother says. She reaches across our mother to thrust the money toward the open window. Our mother slaps her back. Our grandmother plants her elbow in our mother’s chest. Our mother backhands her. The coins from our grandmother’s glove shoot across the dash; the coin from our mother’s purse rolls onto the floor. Our car lurches and brakes. The car behind us screeches to a stop. Two other cars honk. A man yells. We kids sink down in back. “Now look what you’ve done,” our grandmother scolds. “Look what you’ve made me do,” our mother screams. My brother and sister and I search our pockets. I have three pennies. My brother has a nickel. My sister doesn’t have anything. We roll down the back window and give the man in the tollbooth our change. He waves it away, nods toward our mother and grandmother hugging each other, each of them weeping Sorry Darling So Sorry and says, “Just get them out of here.”

1950

Hey you. Yeah you. Don’t be scared of us. See this red shoe? Guess where it came from. Can’t? Well we’ll tell you. It came off the foot of a little girl just like you who was killed in a car crash; she was hit so hard by a Mack Truck on the bridge her shoe flew straight across the bay and landed here in our back yard in Sausalito. How do we know? Because Jimmie and Stevie and Pete and I saw it happen. If you look close you can still see something dark on the heel. Something wet. That’s right. Blood. The little girl’s blood. No one knows where the other shoe is. Maybe a shark swallowed it. Maybe it’s in China. Want it? No? It’s your size.

1956

Squinched in a window seat on the Greyhound Bus with white gloves on my lap and my first Kotex belt digging into my hip while the fat woman beside me scratches a pink hand oozing with poison oak and an old man behind me reaches through the space between the seats to stroke my elbow, once, before I yank it away to frown at a freighter passing in the gray water below and will myself to be on it, a foreign correspondent bound for adventure, adult and brave and free.

1958

Ralph Mathis works in Tollbooth Three Ralph Mathis works in Toll booth Three Ralph Mathis works in Tollbooth Three—perhaps this time he’ll notice us—four high school girls from Drivers’ Ed—and let us into Johnny’s show for free.

1960

Dan smells like Aqua Velva and Marlboros and I smell like Arpege and Tareytons. We pass a plastic cup of my parents’ gin mixed with his parents’ Scotch back and forth as we drive. My head is on his shoulder; I help him shift; he’s such a good driver he can steer the Ranchero with his knees. We have never seen each other dressed up before but this is surely how we’re meant to look from now on: he like Peter Gunn in his dark suit, me like Kim Novak in my strapless lavender gown. After the prom we are going to the Tonga Room and after the Tonga Room we are going to not-go-all-the-way under the bridge at Fort Point. I have not been this happy since

I was a baby. I will write a poem about the city, the way the lights look like jewels on velvet, no, sequins on slate, no, diamonds on a pet jaguar’s back, but I will have to write it later, for there is nothing in my purse but lipstick and a dollar, no pen, no paper. Dan turns the radio up—it’s our song—Andre Previn, “Like Young”—and blows a perfect smoke ring and I poke through the center with my index finger like I always do and we both laugh as we cross over our bridge into our city.

1962

The baby sings in the backseat. The baby does not know that the lanes are too narrow. The baby does not know there’s a drunk in a Corvette careening in front of us, a legion of tourist buses crowding behind us, a blind man on one side, a stroke victim on the other. She doesn’t fear the proximity of the guardrail or expect the towers to crumble or the girders to buckle or the pavement to break in midair like a plank sawed in half, which is exactly what will happen the minute we bomb Cuba and Russia bombs us back and I am forced to roar into the open gap braking all the way down to the ocean floor as the baby sings in the backseat. E I E I O.

1966

Jay jumped. Twenty-seven years old. No one knows why. Oh there were reasons. He’d lost his job at the paper. He’d started drinking again. He feared he was gay. He feared he was crazy. His wife had divorced him. She’d taken his son. She’d taken his dog. His son called her new boyfriend Dad. There was a lump in his groin. He owed ten thousand dollars. He had to beg from his father. He hated his father. His car had blown up. He lived in a motel. He was losing his hair. He’d gained thirty pounds. His left molar throbbed. He was brilliant and kind and funny and good but Jay had never learned and never would learn to play the saxophone the way the saxophone should be played so what was the point, Jay whispered, leg over the railing, what was the goddamned point?

1970

Toni meant to jump. She parked at Vista Point but when she saw the perfect moon rise over the perfect silver water she thought: Not now.

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***

If you live a long time with chronic pain, when the levels spike it helps to have a map. Tonight I imagine my body as a night sky, and certain stars are hot spots. They constellate to form a picture, a self-portrait. Star light, star bright.

 ***

Poetry is cellular matter, connective tissue, interstitial stuff, not skeletal. “Life,” writes a friend, “is lived in its transitions.” Thus the fatigue of writing: it comes from sustaining that awareness of a life that never quite arrives or leaves.

***

Daylight Saving Time. Saving Light in Time. Late day, sunlight breaks into the kitchen but along the way diffuses into powdered ores on my unwashed windows. Yesterday, a fat, faintly opaque moon like buff linen. In the A.M. the whiter light of morning spreads west across white buildings to the blue-gray plateau of the Pacific. A raven’s shadow wipes the rooftops.

***

How I love Schiele. His “Sunflowers” is nature as root cellar, drab greens and browns, all snotty effluvial color, the blooms sickened, failing, and in the middle sky a sun blanched of its fires, its sunfloweriness.

***

Back in Marfa and its high-desert West Texas heat. Winds today at 30+ mph. I’m accustomed to the sea wind in San Francisco—it’s frontal, it comes at you. A windstorm here comes for you. It’s a woman’s voice halooing right outside the door late tonight, trying to slither into the house and harmonize with the Figaro I’m listening to. It shimmies, it turns corners, it bullroars, in this otherwise silent place. How can you not believe that the wind carries the voices of the dead, long interred but now singing again for us to come to them and their sweet fine nothingness.

***

What if death is just another country of contingency, contingency we can’t imagine, so we have to believe it’s an empire of pure necessity. Then imagine death not as a state, not non-being, but a condition where consciousness is free in a way that it cannot be free in life.

***

Dreams are the deranged, disguised partners of our clarified waking mental life. A recent twosome:

1: A young Asian woman walking with a much older man, their arms sexily around each other, the image rich with feeling of a lasting passion undeterred.

2: A neurologist shows me three sketches he’s made of the interior of my skull; on each one, a mark indicates the same abnormality: “Priapism.”

***

Fat Tuesday then Ash Wednesday. Runny pork fat chased by dry charred atonement. An excess of ashes is as inviting as an excess of meat and beads and bacon grease. Poetry treads water in the stream of the process, wet to dry, fat to dust, superfluity to barely surfeit. In my childhood the ashy forehead smudge was more a mark of fallenness than sign or promise of rebirth. We were already—at eight years old—consigned to earth or urn. What had we children done to cause this to be required of us?

***

Riders on public transit bent to the shape of piety, ensorcelled by smart phone, iPad, BlackBerry. The prayer beads of our time. Checking, checking. How’s the universe doing today?

***

I’ve decided to sell off or give away most of my books. If I read them well in the first place, I’ll always own them. They have certainly owned me, which is a reason for letting them go. I want them out of my apartment, out of my sight, and me out of their sight, for they’ve watched me—watched over and examined and compassed me—long enough. Time to go now, old friends, old obsessors, forsakers, forget-me-nots. Give me reprieve finally from that life of mind and heart that has come to oppress me. Time for you (and me) to go.

***

Concentration is a distraction. Hiking the rim of Taos gorge I was looking down so I could get as close as possible to the verge, I wanted to see the river running below where it combed in explosive little bursts over the rocks, I wanted to feel the rush of suddenly falling, but while looking down I missed the two bald eagles my companions saw flying above the river at eye level.

***

Aspirations. I wanted to write a poetry that enacted what it felt like to live in that impossible moment when a lived instant seems to recapitulate every previous instant—I wanted to engage consciousness as it lived into its own layers or zones. Reading all those books I’ve been selling off was as aspirational as it was instructive. And as a prettily pious Roman Catholic child I muttered my way through who knows how many thousands of aspirations, though a short walk through online dictionaries doesn’t give up that meaning: a prayer or devout utterance that’s no more than a breath.

***

The country of contingency is full of rain.

***

In the Museum of Modern Art, my heart’s adrift and achy with thoughts of young sons who lose their fathers when I hear a guard—from the islands, from St. Vincent, it turned out—softly singing to himself what sounded like Gospel, and was Gospel, he said when I asked. The sound of song in public—doesn’t matter if it’s Gospel, opera, tuneless humming, or rap: it thrills the air. (Today in a streetcar, a high school kid improvised a rap he was still pattering when I got off after several stops: as riders entered he worked into his song their clothes or shoes or belongings or skin type.) After that museum song came the formless sorrow I feel before one of Rothko’s dark-smoky pictures, the nocturnal palette, always enchanting and unsettling, and I overhear a father tell his son how R’s pictures were like windows and how you can see or imagine all sorts of feelings looking out windows, right? “He wasn’t a happy man,” he tells the boy. While I’m thinking about wisdom and tradition, R’s mental agony, the hurt heart, I hear somebody call my name (sharply, like a cell phone dropped on a hard surface) but when I look around, nobody’s there.

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The Intimidator Still Lives in Our Hearts

Of the book’s nine stories, several feature a first-person narrator, including “Breezeway.” In that piece, the narrator reflects on the breezeway between the garage and the house of his grandparent’s house, the basement of which he lived in as a child. He would frequently sit in the breezeway and think in silence. Looking back through old pictures, he also remembers when his younger brother died, and the effect it had on his family. In one scene, the narrator examines an old picture of himself and a dog, and mentions the foreboding look in his eyes in the photo, indicating something unpleasant would happen to the dog. “That such things happen all the time to everybody fails to alter the character of my grief—that is to say, of inexplicable loss. You can in fact see it in everybody’s eyes: that’s what life is.”

In “The Cold, Cold Water,” Bobby visits a cabin he owns on an island in Lake Superior several times in his adult life, with different groups and different wives. Twice, Bobby nearly drowns in the lake, and believes something draws him to the cold water, though he’s willing to acknowledge after his second near-death experience that “he was alive, and ought not be so foolishly in love with the idea of the end of it.”

“Saddling the Sorry Ass of Self” is an epistolary story about a man who travels through New England betting on Division III hockey games. An existential crisis, though, leads him all the way to Los Angeles, convinced that he’s going to die while he tries to write a book. The question of death is not as dire in this story as it is in some of the collection’s other stories thanks to Amdahl’s skill at shaping the voice of his narrators. The sardonic tone of “Saddling the Sorry Ass of Self” varies greatly from the serious narrator of the “The Breezeway.”

The stories here, some of which are novella-length, also show Amdahl’s tremendous range as a writer. In “We Whistled While We Worked,” teenage girls working in early 20^th century mills in Massachusetts spark a labor movement. And in “San Luis el Brujo,” two East Coast women staying at a money-laden Californian coast ranch come to realize the horrors of the outside world are closer to their expensive stay than they realize.

Each story in The Intimidator Still Lives in Our Hearts varies dramatically in terms of time, place, and tone, offering different takes on the same question: What is life? The answer, of course, is never clear.

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Maryanne, whose father owned boats out of Kelso, kept a supply of Metabolife under her bed and would slip a vitamin-sized pill into the pocket of her friends’ hoodies if she saw them lagging on the slime line or growing emotional. The first night of the season, which stretched from the bell at midnight to noon the next day, she was giving out painters’ dust masks to people who were cold. She handed one to Hannah, who had started shivering around five in the morning. Maryanne helped her put the dusk mask on, tightening it in the back and saying:

“The mask will keep you warm, but the warm air around your mouth will make you sleepy, OK? It’s an even trade.” Hannah nodded, tears of gratitude in her eyes.

When Hannah’s head started dipping after breakfast, Maryanne got sharp, and yanked the mask down to Hannah’s chin.

“If you get dozy, take the mask off!” Hannah nodded doggedly. “Also, don’t eat much at breakfast. If you’re hungry, you’re awake. Fill up on coffee.” She clapped Hannah’s cheek, hard enough to make her understand, gentle enough to get away with it.

As Maryanne moved away, Betty heard her muttering, “That girl has broken taco written all over her.”

Betty had worked with Maryanne the year before, and she knew enough to treat her with respect. She knew well enough what “broken taco” meant, and she new how to avoid becoming one: don’t lag, tow the line, don’t quit the cannery before the last sockeye run comes in. Betty wondered why they didn’t just say “pussy.” To be a broken taco was to be the lowest of the low: incompetent and spineless. Maryanne was the head of the roe house this year, working with the skinny Japanese men who wore white boots and smoked cigarettes as they packed boxes of Grade C roe to ship back to the low-end sushi buffets back home. Maryanne would pick only her friends to work in the roe house. It was the best position you could get: the roe house was away from the noise of the machinery in the cannery and the fresh-frozen house and you could play music and take breaks whenever and maybe learn Japanese.

In the first few days of the season, when everyone worked in the evening and got twelve hours off to sleep and everyone slept, even, often for ten of the twelve hours, there was a quiet held like an inhaled breath. The days were sodden and gloomy, and the bunkhouses stunk of wet wool and sleep and the sweetness of fish blood. The bunkhouses would grow louder by ten p.m., the sun still glowing behind the clouds, and by midnight everyone, flabby faced with sleep, would troop over to the cannery buildings. One of these first few nights the Child brothers, Zack and J. Child, started working in fresh-frozen, and the season had its first fight and real beginning. The Child brothers were delinquents from Portland: Zack’s face was pleasant, round and ripe with acne, and J. Child was sullen, pointedly handsome. Both of them were already notorious for covering up the smell of fish blood with Axe body spray. Both of them had bought their plane tickets from Portland to Alaska on cannery credit.

It was Nusky, the veteran foreman, who assigned the Child brothers to fresh-frozen, stacking fish on pallets and moving them to the freezer. Everyone called Nusky “Leatherneck,” behind his back because his neck was wrinkled and tanned from years on boats. That evening, the Child brothers sauntered in late and Nusky ran up to them and started yelling. Zack, cowed, backed away, but J. Child yelled back at him, calling him, in a voice louder than the machinery, “You leathernecked old bastard.” Nusky stopped talking, grimaced a smile, and patted J. Child on the back. J. Child was wrong to make an enemy out of Nusky, because he put J. Child on duty stacking fish, and J. Child’s carpal tunnel got so bad that the vein started to blacken. Everyone said that he had put things in that vein, though, and no one but Hannah, who later started sleeping with him, held him up as a pitiful martyr. Betty, who decided to cope with her exhaustion through anger, supported J. Child because she decided to hate Nusky.

Betty didn’t get to work in the roe house. She was put in the sorting crew, separating the sockeye from the chum and pink salmon. It was lonely, the work started at midnight, and there were only girls for company. Hannah was on the crew, and Hannah’s roommate, and a Polish or Ukrainian girl named Ilsa. There were a lot of internationals this year—the stringy Japanese and then all these Poles or Ukrainians. Some were returning: Jozef, the machine, was a favorite. The sorting crew left for work when everyone else was getting off and going to sleep. Every two hours they got ten minutes with a coffee pot and a selection of white bread and cold cuts—but even the coffee breaks were lonely for the sorting crew. Betty got angry. The fresh-frozen house was colder at night, and echoed.

Last season, when she was working in the cannery and was good friends with Maryanne, Betty was a favorite of Nusky and the other foremen who rode around on their bicycles with haughty impunity, regally nodding their heads. Bicycles were for the foremen only, but last season Betty hadn’t known this, and when she had found a bicycle by the incinerator, rusted and dented and missing a saddle, she brought it back to the cannery. She saw Maryanne set her mouth in disapproval, but in the excitement of the moment she continued riding in circles around the dock. She set it down to go in to dinner, and when she came out of the mess hall she saw that someone had thrown it onto the rocks. Every low tide, the bicycle was revealed, hanging with seaweed. This season it was gone, dragged into the bay by some angry winter current. Now, standing at the sorting belt, watching the salmon rolling, squirming or stiff with rigor mortis, it seemed clear that Maryanne had thrown her bicycle off the dock. Maryanne kept her distance from Betty, and kept a close eye on her Metabolife. Sometimes Nusky would ride around late at night to check on the night crews at the sorting belt and the beach gang. He was still pleasant to Betty; he offered her chocolate. That was his bartering tool, his restorative—little fun-size candies he’d produce from his pocket with a flourish.

Jozef the machine had already abandoned sleeping. He came up, one night, to the sorting perch, unsteady on his feet, and Hannah asked in a small whisper if he was drunk. His eyes were red, he swatted at the handrail and missed.

“Is he—Is he drunk?”

Jozef lurched. He said nothing about why he was up there. He turned to address the conveyer belt of salmon and spoke in Polish. He had a ring of spittle, dried white, around his mouth. Hannah was watching him with a half-open mouth, backing away.

“He’s not drunk, he’s just sleepy.” They all used the word “sleepy” to describe the various stages of exhaustion, because it sounded cute and chummy. Betty took Jozef’s arm.

“Joe,” she said, and Jozef wheeled: shocked, rocking. “Joe, get some sleep. It’s time for bed.” She helped him down the stairs. He walked in the opposite direction of the bunkhouses.

Back at the sorting belt, Hannah was stock still, glazed with concern.

“He’s fine. He’s just sleepy.”

Betty understood Jozef’s aversion to sleep: without sleep you got the elation, the slamming heart and joy that hammered like a headache, between the troughs of sadness and fear.

Hannah got hysterical when she was in the trough, weeping silently. Eyes scanning the moving shadows in her vision, she would ask, “What was that? What was that?” pointing at nothing. When she was happy, she was silly, giggling and recounting the snippets of her dreams. Betty’s trough was anger—she spat and punched at the fish when she sorted them, sometimes pulling the softer ones apart. She engaged with what she saw moving at the edge of her sight, cursing. When she was happy she was also angry, but giddily so. The girls on the sorting crew tried to stay in rhythm, so that no more than one of them was spooked or anguished at a time. At coffee breaks they poured and sugared each other’s coffee. Sometimes there were fights—they liked the fights best if they were between the Ukrainians or Poles, because they could sit and relax and pretend to interpret what they were saying as they hit each other. Hannah sat and rocked gently and giggled, and Betty balled her fists and said: “Yeah! Yeah!”

Her real name was Tess, short for Teresa, but she had changed it to Betty. The inspiration for this name change was her boyfriend. Her boyfriend’s name was Carl, but his stage name was Mikey Mnoxide. He was never really onstage; he worked repairing motorcycles, and once, when they talked about their plans, he said that they should start a joint bike-repair shop and beauty parlor so that the Bettys could get their hair done while the Johnnys got their bikes looked after. He said it casually, in his bland Kansas accent, and she decided right then to go to beauty school. Now, to practice, she teased her hair into a bouffant, or a beehive, and drew on her eyes with liquid liner. She combed her boyfriend’s hair back into a ducktail, using egg white to give it that sheen and hold. When she opened her beauty parlor next to the bike shop she would make sure that the only haircuts the Johnnys could get were ducktails and crew cuts. She never called him Carl, but she never got used to calling him Mikey, so she called him “you.” He called her “the little lady.”

Even at the cannery, she did her hair before work. She brought a can of hairspray and a jar of pomade. She told the girls on the crew about her boyfriend; she called him “my boyfriend.” She brought a tape deck, and a collection of tapes, all doo-wop. When she was in a trough another girl, usually Hannah, would play “My Boyfriend’s Back” to cheer her up. When Hannah was acting spooky, Betty played her “The Leader of the Pack.” After work some days, they would sit and listen to the tape deck in Betty’s room. Their personalities changed at each song, and grew wistful during the love songs and hard, almost manic, when the music was raunchy. They always skipped “Last Kiss,” because it was about death and made the shadows in the corners of the room flutter with ghostly portents.

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With the same sweep—one, two, or three lines

so handsome in engraving, embellishment, and finish

makes all-day speed easy for the operator

you will be delighted to the point of ecstasy

a combined one-motion carriage return and line space

ensures the hunter good sport

no lost time, no wasted energy, no mistakes or misplaced letters

the proper aim is up to you, but you can leave the results to us

the inexorable law of Survival of the Fittest is proved

take it with you and give yourself a fair chance

ball bearing, long wearing, hair trigger

improvements cease to stand out against the background of “No Shortcomings”

a necessity for emphasizing

the fullest possible pleasure in the field, and the maximum game in your bag

no necessary operation takes the hands from writing position

prevents fumbling and delay

a key for every character

it speaks with a directness and force

which leaves no room for doubt as to its meaning

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