Statement of Record
In a galaxy far, far away, Larry lay dope sick on his parent’s couch.
This was before addiction had taken hold, flu-like, in the early years when he was immune to addiction — he was born free of the congenital disease — his immunity built by witness, by inoculating revulsion to his own family members’ personal struggles with the condition. He was a dope head romantic.
During the walk from his Avenue B apartment to Second Avenue, Conlon gradually transformed himself into a blind man. He had recently gotten an app for Uber, and his habit now was to have a car pick him up at least three long avenues away, where he was less likely to run into anyone who knew him as Dennis Conlon, a piano tuner with perfectly good eyesight. He carried...
When his phone chirped, Barney Mellina was safety-harnessed to a girder high above the new Tappan Zee Bridge. “Wilma’s calling!” shouted one of his co-workers. “Nah, it’s the doc,” said another. It was, in fact, the doc, Barney’s former girlfriend, Hannah Leland. She told him she had just been fired by the cosmetics tycoon Rick Schoenberger, whose personal physician...
I threw out the magazines under the stairs, the decade-old cans of beans, countless things my dad should’ve thrown out long ago. I should have thrown them out when I’d inherited the place, but I had also inherited his laziness, his facility for doing whatever was most desirable at the moment and hoping that conditions would somehow change before it became absolutely...
“It’s a miracle,” laughed my very Jewish daughter-in-law, when I called. “It’s a real, fucking Christmas miracle. Do you like it?” I hadn’t even opened the box when I rushed for my new phone. “Whatever it is I will love it,” I cried.
Trevor hated them, normal people who didn’t have staff telling them when to shit and clean the toilet. Neuro-typical idiots with their secret club, handshake and rules.
One day she started talking about reincarnation. That was interesting, because most people in our town went to one of the big evangelical churches whose parking lots took up almost as much space as the farms they’d replaced, and I figured Mary did too...
The woman in the toy store said the kite would be easy to fly. Sonny has his daughter hold the string while he tries to get it airborne. But the kite is flimsy and the wind ripping off the water batters it onto the sand. He tosses it again and again, and each time, it torpedoes straight down...
Maybe I was wrong, but I thought I knew what he meant. At a certain point,
you're old enough that it does all count. You've put your time in, one way or
another, and it has led you to where you are. The path you took might have
led you somewhere else entirely; and different paths might have led to where
you are. But, for better or worse, your path was your path.
I only realized in hindsight how close she'd come to killing me. One day, how many years later was that, I suddenly had to think—and how long had it been since either of them had crossed my mind—of course, of course, she was pondering it all the while, imagining sending me sailing straight off the cliff with one good, hard push...
They take the Red Line inbound, switch at Park Street for Kenmore Square, the car filling up at each stop with more and more fans and their requisite accessories: Red Sox baseball caps, T-shirts, jackets, flags, foam fingers, kids with streaks of red in their hair. By the time they reach their station, it's so packed, they can barely move and are swept along with...
She points to a man on a stool at the end of the bar. He looks like the creepy old guy from the Metallica Unforgiven music video. It's Alphabet City, he probably is that guy. He looks up at me, winks. Someone once told me that if people wink at you, it means they're lying.
Statement of Record