Sample Code

Don't You Miss Your Water, Momma?

With her hands folded, palms down on the bar, Momma said that she can't suffer pets in the home but loves it when people "make babies." i think she said she had six kids, and she mentioned that one of her children had died very young. in the old world, children increase the relative wealth of a household, but in the new world it gets complicated. Momma knew what she was talking about. she had years to draw upon, and her origins, El Salvador, when she was young and in love. she talked of her husband and of marriage. her husband is gone, too. recall the feeling of passionate love and the world does stand still for a moment, this woman, a certain light in her eye, suggested, her mouth softening somewhat. she treated these matters with much gravity, though. and she cautioned us, or she seemed to be cautioning us, me and Abby, advising us that marriage was nothing to enter into lightly, sacred, to be honored. of course, no divorce, no surprise here, no one likes divorce, but especially Catholics. i listened intently. was she speaking to us directly or just making casual conversation?

Momma called the card room the boom-boom room because she walked in on a couple have sex in there one time. bada-bing. i watched two black guys play ping pong in the back. they were both wearing shorts, which struck me as odd considering the single digit temperature outside. they were both damned good ping pong players. Abby told me that they come every wednesday and have with them matching blue gatorades. i unerstand that that's an extreme flavor, relatively speaking.

i'll have the crab juice, personally. Diet Sip, which is a fictional brand of soda for which i used to do mock-believe television commercials when i was a kid, comes to mind. Diet Sip. Sippidy-doo-da, Sippidy-ay, Have You Had Your Diet Sip Today? that's . . . i just made that up on the spot, nothing like that but a lot of long, glass-draining gulps of water with lime in it. We used to make ominous concoctions: into regular tonic water (which my brother loved to drink) we would squeeze lime or lemon juice, using whatever was on hand (what else were we going to do?) if only we had stopped there; what would start as an inviting potable would always end up like a science experiment -- pickle juice, milk, you name it. always my brother would have to drink. the beauty of Diet Sip, what really sold it to consumers the world over, was the fact that, when you stripped away the name, the brand, the image, and got right down to the essence of Diet Sip, Diet Sip was nothing but regular ice water. that's it.

looking back, i just may have been on to something. water. selling water. how could i have known at age ten, about the rise of the bottled water industry? Diet Sip. Water. Poland Spring. Deer Park (the water that deers park their behind in and go you know what, hee-hee. little propaganda there, Diet Sip style.) vitamin water, meet my friend, smart water. hey, who invited Snapple? water in every color of the rainbow. water from every corner of the globe: the French Alps, Fiji, Maine. they should sell an Antarctica water. or water bottled fresh from the melting polar ice caps.

i notice they sell no water bottled from the icy-clear streams of Iraq. it would probably be something like the water that remained inside the canteen that Michael Kelly gave me, one that had belonged to an Iraqi soldier, one who was quite possibly killed in action, as Michael was more than ten years later when he went back. back then, the Iraqi soldiers were the enemy, but now we are trying to train them all over again from scratch. the desert is still the desert though, and water is still water.

"Old Dan and I with throats burned dry and hearts . . . that cry . . . for water . . .

Cool, Clear water."

The Street Explodes

There was a fire engine at the top of my street where it meets the Avenue. i was coming home from work and it was already dark. i walked to the top of the hill and past my house, which was only a few yards away from some serious activity. yellow police tape cordoned off the intersection. my feet crunched over shattered glass as i lifted the tape and ducked under, because there was no reason not to continue on to the corner and get a better look. my neighbor's mom was there at the corner and we exchanged amazed pleasantries, marveling at the hole in the street. i surmised that there had been an explosion. further on, some firemen were finishing up with what had been a burning car and was now a steaming, blackened shell of metal. behind me, the classy real-estate brokers/art gallery stood. it's front window was shattered. the glass i had walked over came from the third floor window of the apartments above it: the rest of the window hung dangerously in its frame.

a small young woman said, "what happened?" and Margie, my neighbor's mom, who is no taller than 5', told her something, but it was still not exactly clear, what had gone down. i said something about the hole being about the size of an average New York City pothole and the small young woman laughed and Margie nodded and smiled. it was actually much bigger and perfectly rectangular, and what appeared to have happened, i thought, was that the hole had been covered by a heavy cast iron grate. well, something solid enough to be taken for part of the street, when it wasn't exploding. the grate lay in two pieces some distance from the hole. one of the pieces was resting a few feet from me, so i could nearly stretch my leg out and toe it from where i stood at the head of the curb. Jeez, i thought solemnly, someone could have been seriously effed up here. i went inside.

and to my surprise, the Red Cross was on the scene. i passed their mobile command center a short time later as i walked down 5th. they were a couple blocks from the hole and the burnt out car. i didn't see anyone receiving aid. i wondered what kind of aid was available. i passed a cop sitting motionless in his patrol car, which was parked in the intersection of 5th and Berkeley. the presence of three huge Con Edison trucks back toward my street and numerous Con Ed workers told me that what had happened was related to the electrical. sometimes in Winter the salt-melt they set down on the street ends up melting more than the snow. last winter a woman had been killed while walking her dog in the East Village. her dog walked over a manhole cover that had become charged with electricity from corrupted cables below the street level. the woman was electrocuted when she tried to help her dog. i stepped gingerly off the curb.

when i got home again i turned on the news to see if they were reporting on the explosion. the anchor man said, "dogs are shocked by a live mahole cover on the upper west side, when we return from these messages." outside, the grinding of of heavy generators and machinery. the lights in my apartment flickered. i massaged my right shoulder with my left hand and switched the channel.