Excerpts
VINSTORIES VOLUME 1
THE SERIOUS SILLINESS
OF THINGS
Excerpts from Vinstories
The party boat, Casual Lady, was fifty feet long with its age hidden under multiple layers of paint. The time showed seven minutes after the hour. The captain took his position. The boat was backed out of its dock and set out into the wide Atlantic. After some minutes the Lady was slowed and stopped. Poles swung into action, lines down, as others cast out in an underhand sally.
“I can still see the shore,” the high stilted lady noted.
“We’ll have twenty minutes here,” the captain announced, much as he always did. “Pay heed to the rules. Anything short of thirteen inches goes back in the soup.”
“That’s not very long,” Mrs. V noted. Artie smiled. She blushed.
“Keep an eye on this pole, okay? It’s supposed to be yours.”
“What’s there to see?” She looked over the side.
“Moby Dick, honey. Ahab didn’t kill it and he’s still around.”
Buster was fishing off the opposite side, peering over his shoulder every now and then, amused by the over-dressed woman who apparently had never been on such a trip before. She had a fine feminine line to her, but clearly put more emphasis on managing middle age than managing her thoughts.
Toadie came around to make sure every pole was baited and dipped correctly over the side into the brine. The captain, Ronald Rogers, walked and chatted a bit with his customers. It was the morning half-day trip, and the small group of twelve portended a red-inked outing. Things had been slow ever since the forecast of poor fishing hit the papers.
When he passed the Vusells, he nodded admiringly at the lady’s rear cargo area and attractive lines. Buster caught him and when their eyes met, his smile sent Ronald’s face into scarlet fire. Buster, with his hard beach ball belly and handsome brawny face, eyebrows a fur patch over each eye, and stubbled chin, signaled the boat skipper over.
“How ‘bout you stop this crap and take us out deeper where we might hook into something respectable.”
“Mr. Raab…”
“Buster,” he corrected, winking, fingering the other’s less bulbous belly. “You know me better than that, Ronny.”
“It’s kind of against policy, Buster,” he answered, pushing Buster’s hand away, but ever-so-gently.
A small man noted the request. His eyes brightened.
“The hell with policy, protocol and anything else you can dream of, Ronny. I need to haul in some good eating.” He licked his lips.
The captain moved away, nodded to a few others including the small man he’d missed during the boarding. He wore what appeared to be U.S. Navy pants and black shoes, and a clean white tee with an anchor over a small pocket. His hair was a frizzy mop under a tiny cap.
“I’m Jarrold, sir,” he saluted, tapping the backs of his hard heels together in a fashion that caused the captain to let out a sharp laugh.
“Good to have you with us, Jarrold,” the captain said coughing, not bothering with a follow up.
“I agree with that big fellow there…about going out deeper.” He pointed. “There.”
The captain nodded. Back at the wheel, he announced, “You’ve got five minutes. We’ll be moving farther out.”
Looking out from the shore of a picturesque lake sat a glassy-eyed man and an equally glassy-eyed woman. At some point they turned to one another and began smiling. They touched lips and laid themselves down on the grass. Already naked, they consummated that most natural of acts. His grunts and her cries carried over the body of water. Swans honked, ducks quacked and a lone dragon fly zipped off to another reed.
A tall, large-headed man stood behind them, having walked the short distance from his makeshift office at a defunct university. There, he bathed regularly in Emmanuel Kant, Sophocles and, in its original text, the writings of Marcus Aurelius. About him wafted the vague scent of old spice and book cover dust. His reading, interrupted by their grunts, was the cause of his visit.
“As you two fornicate,” he interrupted, “Jupiter’s moon, Io, erupts, sending plumes of liquefied ammonia twelve miles into midnight black surrounding it. I was wondering if either of you was aware of that.”
“Hey,” said the man, “I was into her, into her love thing, into it, you know?”
“Yeah,” chimed the woman, “he was into me and making me yip like this: Yip, yip, yip! Just like that.”
“Yeah, she yipped and yipped,” the man seconded. “I really got her yipping. We make babies like that.”
“No,” said the intruder. “Not today. Today I’m going to beat you both to well beyond an inch of your lives. I’m in a hurry, so we have to keep questions and answers to a minimum. There’s a meeting in Croton I daren’t miss.”
“Beat us?” the woman repeated. “You mean like an egg?”
“I will spare whichever of you can say something even marginally impressive. You can quote an author, hum a line of melody from a once living composer, or tell me something about that swan on the distant side of the lake. If you can even add two, one digit numbers together without using your fingers and toes, that would suffice as well.”
“Quote an Arthur?”
The two looked at one another and began laughing. “Go away,” said the man. “Yeah,” said the woman.
“And so I shall,” said the tweed-dressed intruder. “See this limb here above you? It hangs like a broken arm. Watch what I do. Okay, keep watching.”
The two watched, intermittently sharing amused looks as the stranger pulled down a hefty bit of bough after a series of twists and tugs.
“Okay. Look here. This is how you wield an object. Got that? And this is how you swing it to good effect.” He wielded and swung the hefty branch he’d broken off with his bare hands. He was quite strong for an egghead.
“Now,” he continued, “the idea, when bringing it down on your intended victim, is to aim for the medulla oblongata region in the back here. Aimed correctly, given the proper force, it will stop the heart and breathing. If it accomplishes even one of the two, the result will be the same.”
“Gee, why you saying all this stuff?” the woman asked, grabbing her long hair and twirling it into a bun atop her head, holding it there with a finger. “I sure wish I had a twisty for this.”
“Do either of you know the square root of four? This is your last chance.”
The man waited. Primed into action by their vacant stares, he swung and connected his wood with the back of the woman’s head. Like a stunned cow, she flopped down, eyes open.
“Hey,” her lover protested as the next swing caught him atop his cranium.
“Hey,” he repeated, as the swing thereafter found his neck, breaking it and severing his spinal cord.
“The answer is two by the way. Now, adding this number to another of its kind yields the very same four. Lesson over.”
The swans, unsettled before, began to reclaim their domain. The man looked upon them with a happy eye.
“No need to thank me,” he said.
He went back to his university office for a spot of Darjeeling and a chapter of Ulysses, first print copy. Later on he took his ancient Renault from the courtyard of the administration building. It had approximately seven gallons of fuel. The college town, once a bustling center of coffee shops and book boutiques and now no more, was but a short drive from the campus. Nominal humans amassed there and used it as a pleasing stop=over for rest, fruit picking, and urgent calls of the wild.
Arnold, behind the wheel of his Renault, a sassy burgundy color, drove to The El Alamaine Tea Kettle, a resurrected shop that housed exotic brands and spicy cakes. It sat squeezed between two other shops, both long emptied and decayed. Its tiny door and side windows were papered over in a repeating pattern of Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
Before leaving the Renault, he checked his pocket. He had thirty four dollars, all of them in ones, plus several quarters and a few silver half dollars from his small coin collection. He insisted on paying for his tea and cake dessert even though the money was returned to him at the end of the meeting.
Walking up to the door he recited the first four lines of Shelley’s Ozemandias. From behind the door flowed the next four lines. The door opened.
“You’re a bit late, ol’ boy,” Chadwick uttered from his preternaturally wet, oozy lips. “I do love that poem though. Mary created monsters as Percy buried empires.”
“Where were you?” asked Hildegard.
“I was taking care of a problem at the lake by my office.” Arnold looked around the room. “Montgomery? Where is that boy? I do enjoy his repartee.”
“We don’t know. What is that thing you’re carrying?” Hildegard asked.
“It once hung half broken over the lake. I gave a strenuous tug and it yielded and served an immediate and worthy purpose.”
Miriam was impressed. “You speak poetically. Are you in any such field? I love poets. Their bodies swim in expressive juices. You can almost taste…”
“I write little tales that I hide in drawers. It’s nothing. It’s not poetry. There is still a part of me not ruined. But it grows smaller and smaller and I cannot write past my condition. I fear one day, soon I mean, it will be lost and so will I. Then there will be nothing left of me but what I loathe.”
“Okay,” Miriam said, feeling the woman’s anxiety. “Let’s go slowly, shall we? What happened? Can you tell me anything of its nature? What is this thing you loathe?”
“Yes, I have to tell you, don’t I? I was hoping, how silly of me, that you would glean it without my having to spell it out. We do have powers beyond our normal senses, don’t we?”
“Surely, Pamela. I am a true believer in that. And, I say this in all sincerity: I do not dismiss claims made by my clients, no matter how improbable they might sound to the layperson.”
“That makes me feel better.”
“I once had a client who said he was an Immortal. He said that after fighting the forces of evil for Millennia, he was ready to call it quits, retire. He was tired and wanted some way out.”
Pamela giggled.
“I’m quite serious. He thought to prove it to me too.”
“How could he do that?”
“He stopped a meteor from hitting the earth,” Miriam revealed. “I checked too. I called the observatories and in one case I was told of a strange event. A meteor had changed direction just as the man in my office explained and at that precise moment.”
“That doesn’t prove anything,” Pamela complained.
“The point is I believed him.”
“So, what happened?”
“I married him.”
Pamela’s expression of surprise amused the therapist. The woman’s eyes had bulged to an almost outlandish extent.
“Okay then. It is a story, maybe true, maybe not. I am well traveled and have seen much in my time. You are but a disillusioned soul, like all who come here. What is this thing then, this great enveloping evil? Let’s have at it.”
Miriam set her jaw and gazed deeply into the other’s eyes. She was met with a pleading look. This gradually changed to one of acquiescence.
“I once went to visit the old country, my mother’s land in Eastern Europe. She warned me-her and her tales-but my father said go, enjoy, learn, bring back some of it to me, I miss it dearly.”
“And you did,” Miriam guessed.
“Yes. He was the first one I killed when I returned. I spared my mother. She went insane. They took her away and I cried. She looked into my eyes and knew. She knew. I almost went mad myself.”
“I see,” the therapist said, chewing on all she’d heard.
“But you didn’t, go insane, I mean.”
“No. I prayed right there.”
“How so?”
“I asked God to take me, to cleanse my soul. I asked for penance. But how could there be any? I’d killed my father. I was the embodiment of evil.”
“Oh, come, let’s avoid melodrama. I sensed an accent. It is well disguised. You were a child when they left there?”
“Yes.”
“And you met a man there on your travels back.”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“I’m trained. I read patterns well. I was a natural for this field. I help the hopeless. Who was this man?”
“He said he was royalty from the past.”
“What happened?”
Pamela pointed to her neck. “See?”
“Ah! There are marks. Bites?”
“Yes!” Pamela blurted. “So you see. I am lost. His blood and mine and now… Is it hopeless?” Pamela asked, suddenly tearful.
A gun popped in the August heat. Jawbone slept peacefully amidst the dancing Arabian girls. It was his dream and a little blue pill had taken him there.
Ninitto sat with a smoking pistol hanging between his legs on the street curb. He felt bigger and heavier than his one hundred twenty pounds and five foot six height. He was big man for the night. He had a smoking gun.
Around the corner sirens harmonized with one another in their plaintive monotony. Cops disembarked from their cruisers all geared up, eyes and ears open to everything that moaned or moved.
“This one’s dead, Sergeant Rojas; this other one’s on his way too.”
“Okay. The ambulance should be here soon.”
“Ninitto,” the dying boy forced through his rosy red lips.
“Who’s that? Is that you? You’re Ninitto?” Roans bent closer to the boy, hoping for some direction. “Who did this to you? Ninitto?”
“He lives around the corner,” some child spoke up. His father slapped him, scolded him in Spanish, and gave him a rough shake.
Rojas went over. “Don’t do that.” He got down eye to eye with the boy. “It’s okay. What’s your name?”
“Pedro,” the boy piped out.
“Around what corner, Pedro?”
The boy pointed.
“Martelou?”
“Si.”
Ninitto went into the building next to his, married by a common wall, took the stairs in twos, and stopped on the fourth floor.
“Hey, Jawbone,” he whispered, tapping the door. “Wake up.”
Jawbone, Junio on his birth card, a light sleeper, sat up in bed. His world could be summed up in one room: hot plate, small fridge, a stack of paperbacks, radio, a corner toilet and shower.
“Who?”
Ninitto answered, waited for the door to unlock.
“You in trouble again?”
The door opened.
“Take that chair. I have something’ll relax you, and give you a nice dream. You can use one now?”
Ninitto nodded, tried on a half-hearted smile.
“First, who did you shoot? That gun in your hand is still warm. So we’re talking maybe ten or fifteen minutes ago tops. I heard something, but I was off somewhere.”
Ninitto hung his head, unwilling to say much. He uttered two names.
Jawbone looked out the window, noticed the effect of the swirling red lights up and past the corner. “Two police cruisers. Probably Rojas and that dumb hombre, Roans. Good looking man, Roans, married too, three kids. I caught Rojas checking him out more than once. Maybe it’s a lack of trust. Roans, Janush is his first name, is a little green and a nervous type. So, let me see: anything else? Yeah. I hear an ambulance.”
The boy sat back in the chair, rubbing the barrel of the gun with two fingers of his right hand.
“Hmm. Let’s put this together, shall we? Put that gun on the floor at your feet. We don’t need more homicides. Pay attention. Let me see those eyes. Good.”
He drew pictures up in the air with his fingers.
“I heard your mumble. It’s those two boys who hit on your sister, right? Yeah, I thought so. They’re probably down for the count.”
Ninitto began shaking. “I’m a dead man,” he whined.
“No. You’re fifteen. A dead boy would be more accurate. Of course, being fifteen has its benefits in such situations. I’m sure you understand. Did anyone see you? Did either of them, Charlie or Angel, have guns? Of course they did. They’re always carrying. This is one of them, right? Sure.”
Jawbone looked around. “Where’d I put those pills? I’ll give you half a tab. They’re like tranquilizers, but with a pleasant side effect. The chemical structure is right on the box. I checked it out. A nitrogen atom is missing from the schematic. I called the company to let them know.”
VINSTORIES VOLUME 2
All the Lovely Oddity
3 excerpts from Vinstories Volume 2
“Can I stay, sir, in this house? I will do anything if I can only stay here and have it be my home.”
“I was hoping it would be. It is for you, every stick, knob, and lighted lamp.”
A dark shadow passed over Pastachi’s face. “But…I have no right, sir, none. You have paid me and that is enough, unless there is more you seek in me?”
“Yes, there is more. I am alone here. I trust no other and I am…vulnerable by nature’s cruel trick.”
“There are thieves, sir. You must be careful.”
Leopoldi laughed. “Yes. There are always thieves. All of us take from others in some manner, do we not?” He stopped to consider his next words. “A long time ago, Pastachi, I was bitten, and it changed me so that I was shunned. Do you understand what I say?”
“Yes, sir, you were shunned, uh…”
“They fear me and yet I am docile…uh, soft-hearted. I dare not take without asking but often it takes all the powers of persuasion in me; often I must use trickery or worse. It is exhausting.”
Pastachi got up and put a hand on the other’s shoulder. The man seemed frail, as if too hard a squeeze might crumble his flesh in his hand.
“Sir, as you have given me a happier life, let me do a turn for you. I will be your guard, your protector if you need me so. Please, it is my honor to do it.”
To his surprise, the other fell upon the table and began sobbing. “I am a wretched being,” he moaned.
“That cannot be right, Mr. Leopoldi, sir. You.re an honorable man indeed, in every deed. As for a bite, I think I know of what you speak.”
“On that last count you would be wrong, I assure you.”
Pastachi looked upon the man, his pallor, as well as other aspects that in themselves did not add up, but taken as a whole, wrote a story large. He took a deep breath and let it out in a gust.
“I have routed many thieves seeking my meat, sir, my daily bread. I am mild-natured but with a savage inside me when circumstance is such.”
“I should have had the courage to stand in the sunlight, but I fear death, my friend, fear the punishment waiting me.”
Pastachi felt his heart heavy from his employer and benefactor’s display. “I will help you. I’ll stay in this house you have blessed me with, sir, and keep all from your door. You need not worry.”
The other wiped his tears. “That is not all…but I will leave you for the present time. Thank you.”
“There is no thanks necessary,” Pastachi assured him. “I would cut my own flesh if need be.” He gave the other a knowing look. It produced a smile, this time without effort.
“Take this, sir.” Pastachi went into the icebox and came back with a small glass filled with a dark liquid. “Drink. It will do you a world of good.”
“I cannot drink just anything…”
“This you can, sir. Trust me as your friend and protector.”
After Leopoldi finished off the glasses’ contents, he sat back and closed his eyes. He began to fall into sleep, his breathing becoming slow and rhythmic.
“I am okay,” he said after some tense moments. “I feel better. But how…?”
“There’s too much in me, sir. I regularly bleed myself with a knife to my finger. See? It pours from it. I’m blessed with too much and you are cursed with too little. Even your color is better, sir.”
The elderly lady who sat in the front window of her house overlooking the street, with rows of similar houses on either side, called me over one day as I walked up the block on my way to nowhere. This window, open to let in air and an assortment of biting insects, perfectly framed her large head, its refined nose, impressive forehead and the dark-dyed ringlets hanging down it. She sat above it all like a Queen Mother.
“Do you know how old I am today?” she asked in a deep voice. “I am one hundred and two.”
I stopped to give the framed picture my attention. I said nothing. I stuck my hands in my pockets, shuffled my feet and lowered my head.
“I have watched you for twenty years, maybe more. You clearly have a problem or else you wouldn’t be walking back and forth past here so many times. It’s exhausting to my eyes.
I continued standing on that spot as she spoke. Little ran through my mind except for the dead mouse I’d seen in the gutter on my way.
“Your name is Stephen, Stephen Stapper. You’re five foot eleven and you still can’t wipe your backside properly. Your mother tells you all the time because she washes your underwear and still you continue the same behavior. Now, why do you think I said all this to you?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, not terribly bothered by the embarrassing revelation.
“Come on. You can do better than I don’t know, can’t you?”
“Are you really one hundred and two?”
“For today and maybe even for tomorrow, yes, but for Tuesday, maybe not. It depends. Of course, your name is not Stephen Stapper and why should it be? Now, another question: why didn’t you correct me on the name?”
“I don’t know,” I repeated.
“Can you try? And what are you doing here listening to me? I bet you’d stand here another hour, maybe all day, waiting for the next words out of my mouth.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I want to be this guy, Stephen Whatever. Maybe I just…I don’t know.”
“Well,” she said, “we’ve established one thing, haven’t we? You don’t know. Thank you, Stephen, and come back tomorrow. Don’t say another word now and leave.”
I watched the window close and a younger woman, large and robust, get behind her and roll her away. The woman was wheelchair bound? At one hundred two, what did I expect, a swinging trapeze?
I stood there for some time thinking she might come back. She didn’t. With nothing keeping me there I did a slow walk back home, forgetting my destination of nowhere.
The man gave him a curious look. “I’m Verrazano DiMaggio, like the old-time ballplayer and the explorer. I’m seventy-six, bench press three hundred fifty pounds and live alone in my own place, pulling out what little hair I have left. I come here to talk, even if there’s nobody willing to talk. You…you want to talk. I can tell.”
John gave back a small smile that quickly faded. He told the man his name.
“You’re the unhappiest fellow I’ve ever seen…no, there was Jerry. He was…well, he’s dead now.”
“Are you the Angel of Death,” he asked the man. “Uh…I mean by that…”
“I could be, but the angel part, hardly. I’m what you call a slow spill into the ground. “How do you suppose on doing it?”
John shook his head as a wave of sadness threatened to engulf him. “Uh, I was hoping for…” He couldn’t finish, began coughing.
“A little help? Sure. But first a little info.”
John was ready for more than a little info.
“Okay, calm down. Let’s see. Hemingway. When it was time, when he knew it was downhill, out came his trusty shotgun, off came the top of his head. Very effective, painless I hear, though to be honest, I believe there is that fraction of a second during which you go ‘ouch’.”
John nodded appreciatively. “I guess.”
“Let’s forget about hanging. That you’ll feel, especially if your neck doesn’t break in the drop-down. You’ll kick a while, shit yourself. Who needs that?”
“Did you ever…” John began and stopped.
“Kill myself? Once or twice, but I came back. I used to be a poodle.” He looked at the younger man, waited for the joke to hit. “Boy, you really got it bad, kid,” he told him.
“So, let’s continue. Here’s one that I find particularly attractive. I point to a certain actor, bless his departed soul, who decided on a more explosive terminal act.
“He blew himself up?” John’s eyes bugged.
“I didn’t think of that, but no. He asphyxiated himself and had an orgasm at the same time. Imagine? Coming and going. But I don’t know. You need to be a synchronicity genius to get that one right.”
“I’m not a genius. I never got anything right. I’m really…”
“If you’re going to throw up all over yourself, don’t bother. We’re both past that. You’ve made the decision and now it’s just a matter of how, isn’t it? I’ll wait for an answer.”
“Okay.”
“Let me guess. You’re in some kind of art. You have that tortured, emaciated, haunted look. Let me see your hands.”
John put his hands out on the table. The man looked at him, took them up into his own. He turned them over, felt fingertips, and checked nails.
“You’re not a painter. You don’t sculpt either. Judging by your fingertips, you once played a stringed instrument. Violin? Guitar? Ah, but no more. You’ve given up. The will has drained out of you. You can’t even look at your Stradivarius because it’s all pain to you. The dream of your lifetime is dead. There’s nothing left to do, no journey worth taking, no exit ramp to something equally challenging. I know. Relax. I’m on your side. We’ll get through this together.”
“It wasn’t a Stradivarius,” John corrected. The man smiled.
“I was a writer. I thought I was until the publishers gave me the news. My writing turned to crap, real crap, and there I was with fifty years to live and no real desire to do it. I recovered and wrote some more. It looked great, it felt great, but no one, absolutely no one wanted it. A friend summarized the whole thing. “DiMaggio, you have no talent. Come join the unwashed masses.”