Slices of Life: Pictures, Portraits, and Profiles

by Ian F. King

Part 1: Sometimes the Real Thing is More Than What’s Necessary

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Wait. No, I don’t. I have no idea what you are thinking, because I have no idea what I was thinking. There was no real reason my vacation ended up being spent in the largest “city” in the 49th most populated state in the United States (suck it, Wyoming). The vacation was almost a “staycation,” but the thought of having to use that tedious compound alone was motivation to go anywhere. The decision might as well have been made by throwing a dart at a map, so let’s say I threw a mind dart at a map of cheap places to go for a few days that would also offer some measure of tranquility. And there you have it.

Sometime after crossing the state line, I stopped shrugging my shoulders and decided to embrace my destination. All the green outside the train window was soothing. I forgot about the hot sidewalks and the hot garbage smell that emanates from them. Vermont’s nickname, the Green Mountain State, is half-earned. Its highest point is just over four thousand feet above sea level; the mountains here would only pass for foothills where I’m from. But the color green truly is everywhere, even in Burlington, the aforementioned largest city in the state.

Populated by roughly forty thousand souls, Burlington has the distinction of being the smallest US city to be the largest city in its state. That population is also roughly ninety-three percent white, which is one of many ways it feels like the Pacific Northwest, my home region; particularly the similarly-sized college town of Bellingham. Like Bellingham, Burlington’s population and industries owe a lot to a university that sits uphill from the old city center. It’s lousy with coffee shops and hippies. They are both also situated on the eastern shores of comparable-sized bodies of water, Lake Champlain and the Puget Sound, with the same green-hilled landscape meandering off in all directions.

This visual similarity was so close that, many times over the few days I was hanging out along the waterfront, when I turned my head or looked up from the book I was reading or closed my eyes for a second and then opened them again, I would become confused about where I was. In the weeks before going to Vermont I had become homesick for Seattle. It was a feeling that I hadn’t felt in years, and I couldn’t tell why I was feeling it. After those flashes of geographical displacement in Burlington, it finally came clear. I had been missing the view.

by Joa Suorez

You may need
some small life
carried loosely
in the mouth
to warble the sounds
trapped in the floorboards
of your house—the hard part
will be hunting one down.

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by Liz Mathews

Now that the Union Square theater has become one of the few in Manhattan without a reported bedbug infestation, I had little problem winding up there on a recent half-day Friday to view Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. But the movie and the theater have little to do with this.

Prior to the show beginning, I told the friends I was with to save me a seat, and dashed to the bathroom. Now, careful reader, you may recall the bathroom attendant I wrote of approximately one year ago, the one charged with standing in a bathroom without air conditioning, to direct a line of fidgety women. The one who was entirely positive even though her job left much to be desired.

At first I didn’t recognize her, this being one year later. Sure, I’d seen her a few movies ago, taking tickets and sweeping the lobby, and I was relieved yet somewhat saddened that she still had a gig at the theater. But now one emotion has settled in.

“Ladies, please take care to remember your valuables. Thank you for choosing the Union Square Regal Theaters. We appreciate your business and hope you enjoy your time with us,” the voice over the intercom in the bathroom sounded.

Except that there isn’t an intercom in that bathroom.

The voice was coming from the bathroom attendant, perched on top of a mobility scooter and moving slowly toward the sink area. As I washed my hands she moved past me to the bathroom’s exit, ever mindful of the other people in there, her voice still the canned one comparable to those featured on the new fleets of subway cars, or escalator safety reminders.

“Clear away from the entrance, please. Coming through. Please clear the entrance. Coming through. Step away from the entrance,” she sounded, back ramrod straight, all the way out the door.

And as I walked out after her, I thought of all the ways that people can change over the course of a year. And how, sometimes, the changes that occur are far from the ones we had hoped for.

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by J.B. Staniforth

Part two.

Read part one.

Continuing, he explained that he knew people growing up who’d been Duplessis orphans, kids of unwed mothers whom, from the ‘40s until the ‘60s, the provincial government of Maurice Duplessis shunted off into insane asylums run by the Catholic church, where they were physically and sexually abused. Nick claimed he had two friends who’d sued the provincial government years later and received huge legal payouts (he quoted a figure maybe 100 times as much as the tiny sum most Duplessis survivors actually got), but said they were “fucké” for life.

Then we were talking about prison. He had most recently been in Bordeaux, a provincial prison in the north end of Montreal, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying about other places he’d been. His French was fast and slangy and thickly accented. By the time I had caught up to him, he was telling a story.

“I’m in the mess hall,” he said, “and this guy starts to talk to me. We’re eating. Seems like a normal guy. I ask him what he’s in for, and he tells me he fucked a seven-year-old girl. With a pepsi-bottle. Can you believe that? He just comes out with it and tells me that, and he’s smiling while he says it. Laughing.”

“Me,” said Nick, “I just looked at him, my mouth like this”—he mimed a mouth hanging open—“and I got up and walked away. Then I’m in my wing”—he used the English word—“and I see the guy, he’s waving at me and calling me mon chum like we’re friends. He wants people to think he’s my buddy. I look around to see who’s hearing this. You know, in prison, those people—people who abuse children, we hate them. We kill them. I’ve got a sister, you know? My little baby sister. She’s like a baby to me. Can you imagine someone doing that to your little baby sister? With a Pepsi bottle? This fucking guy. He’s a piece of shit. He’s not even human. So I see him coming, and I don’t want anyone to think he’s a friend of mine. I go into my cell, and I’ve got a guitar, so I take a string off of it, wrap it around my hands like this,” he mimed, “then—” he mimed garrotting someone.

“They figured it was me,” he said. “But what are they going to do, take a finger print? Off the guitar string? No chance. Nobody saw me, so there’s nothing to prove. Anyway, the screws”—again, he used the English word—“they’re like me. They’ve got kids. They don’t give a shit if this trash lives or dies, you know? Me, I’m a bandit, and I go to jail, I get out, and I can go back to society and work. But that guy, he was sick. Sick in the head. Next time he gets out, what do you think he’s going to do? He won’t just fuck the kid: he’ll find a kid and fuck her, and then he’ll kill her. I think I did the world a favor. The screws, they didn’t say anything, but I think they agreed with me.”

My girlfriend and I refused his offer of beer or a joint to smoke, saying we’d been working a long day and needed to go home. Nick reminded us again that we should try to work in the high-tech industry, since that’s where the money was for smart young people like us. He shook both our hands before we left.

by Joa Suorez

The earths we lure them with
fit inside
their delicate mouths,
just sized
to sift sand.

We interrupt
great nebulas
they spit
with our universal nets,
no yield yet
but gravity
and celestial dust.

by Liz Mathews

On a recent Saturday afternoon I and my friends Pete and Harlan were seeking a bench in Tompkins Square Park. Pickings were pretty slim—it was a nice day—but then we came to the middle of the park, where a stretch of empty benches existed on both sides of the walkway.

Of course, the reason that everyone else in the park was not sitting on these benches was likely due to the crowd of 20-to-40-somethings and their pit bulls a little ways in, clothed in dingy black and brown attire, hair askew and taking naps or stumbling about in mid-afternoon dazes. Also, because it may be relevant, there were at least five pairs of shoes dangling from the branches overhead.

Still, we sat. We chatted. The group of gutter punks did their own thing and the pit bull puppies acted cute but dangerous.

Gradually members of the group edged closer to us.

“Got any good advice, young man?” an equally young man with a maroon mohawk asked Pete in passing.

“Sunscreen,” Pete replied.

Mohawk stopped. “That’s a good one,” he said.

Next, a woman approached with a summarized version of her life story. “I’m going home to Providence this afternoon,” she told us at the end of it. “I had to cry to my dad to get him to pay for it, but he broke down and when I get there I’m going to see my kids,” she said.

That’s great, we agreed. Thank goodness for your dad, and your ability to turn on the waterworks, we said without saying exactly that.

“I like to give out hugs,” she told us. My two friends stood up, hugged her.

“That’s my junkie husband,” she pointed to the man sitting next to Harlan. “Been with him for six goddamn years. My dad hates him. I guess this is love.”

While she was telling us this, her junkie husband was preparing a syringe of blue liquid. “That’s the stuff,” he said, turning to Harlan and flicking the cylinder. “Don’t you kids ever try this… because you’ll fall in love with it,” he said and jammed it into his arm.

Next thing we knew, the junkie husband was off the bench and standing in front of us. “Yup, I’m high,” he said, turning to me. “You have the most amazing eyes. What’s your name?”

I squeaked it out and the junkie husband held out his hand and I shook it, a little freaked out that he was still holding the syringe.

“My turn,” his wife said, and he got busy preparing drugs for her.

We took this as our cue to head out—plus I had an ice cream date to get to. But such a legitimate reason for leaving did not ease the consciences of the gutter punks.

“Look what you did, you asshole,” the wife yelled at her husband, “You scared off the nice people!”

He, in turn, stopped trying to shoot her up behind her ear. “Don’t go!” he cried. “We’re sorry! Don’t leave because of us!”

No, no, we tried to assure them. We have to get somewhere—it’s not you! we said with the hope we were being convincing. Have a safe trip! we encouraged, with regard to both the drugs and also their travels to Rhode Island.

And we left. And we felt genuinely bad for making the drug addicts feel like they made us feel uncomfortable. And it was a while before I could wash my hands.

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by caitlin macrae

Dear Sensitive Groper,

Hello there, dude. I bet you’d describe yourself as a sensitive guy, no? I can tell you would say that about yourself, on account of how you’ve only sort of been grinding on my butt for the past few songs, as opposed to going Full Hump. This, you must think, is what separates you from the truly sleazy. The sensitive dude, by contrast, informs a lady of his amorous intentions through unsolicited hip fondling and a light, tasteful boner graze.

But you know what?

Fuck it. You really may as well go Full Hump.

You see, Sensitive Groper, I get that you are probably very conflicted inside, but there is something to be said for really making a commitment to personal goals. I, for example, am cooking two new things a week in an effort to be a better cook. Why, just the other day I spent seven hours learning to make Oaxacan mole negro! And let me tell you, friend, it was worth the hours spent scouring my neighborhood for ingredients, and it was worth the thick paste now encrusted like a giant, richly-spiced barnacle to my stovetop. I was decisive, I persevered, and as a result I learned something. I like to think I am better for it.

Likewise, Sensitive Groper, it is your responsibility to really put in the effort, to gaze deep into your inner self’s shifty little eyes and say, “Self! Tonight is the night! I am either going to sip my cocktails respectfully from the perimeter of the dance floor amidst oodles of booty, or I am going to attack said booty with all the thrusting fervor of pistons or jackhammers or other things that thrust! There will be no in-between posturing, no fronting like, Oops, my awkward erection just happened to bump up against your ass in time with the booming beats of early nineties hip-hop, which—since I’m a nice dude—is totally not something I’d ever do unsolicited… unless you’re into it? Which, you’re not beating me up, so you must be at least a little bit into it? Oh, but you’re scooting away from me, so either you’re not super into my refined, ambiguous gestures… or this is some kind of sexy game? It’s a game, isn’t it! Those days, they are over! No longer shall I make women so vaguely uncomfortable they only kind of recognize they’re being lurked on, and as such don’t feel justified responding negatively to my dick pokes! From here on out, it’s all or nothing. Without guts, self, there can be no glory.”

For you see, Sensitive Groper, to everything there is a season. Leaves will fall, children will grow up and grow old, monuments made to last the ages will crumble and be replaced by stucco strip malls and prefab chain stores. Likewise, now is your moment to evolve, to reflect your truest self—a self which, I suspect, is in fact a gross, molest-y dickbag.

The time is yours, Sensitive Groper. Time to decide whether you are in fact a decent and respectful dude, or if you are the kind of dude who would nudge his erect penis against an unsuspecting woman’s behind, attacking from the rear to avoid easy identification. Try as you might, you cannot be both.

Kisses,
Caitlin B. MacRae

by J.B. Staniforth

Part one.

I knew his name was Nick, because that’s what the tattoo—a blurry, downward-slanting mass of ill-shaped letters on his left bicep—said. On the other bicep, there was a muzzy heart with what looked like a figure skiing off of it. On closer inspection that was supposed to be a banner running across and behind it. There was a name in the center of the banner that I couldn’t read; neither could my girlfriend. Finally Nick said, “It says Minou,” which is the general French pet-name for a cat, like “puss” or “kitty.” That was the nickname he gave a girlfriend he had, Nick told us. We could read it, right? It was easy to see that it said “Minou.” We nodded.

Nick explained to my girlfriend and I, in guttural Joual Québecois French, that the way they do tattoos in prison is they take black construction paper, scuff it on the concrete to soften it, mash it up in water, and turn that into black ink, which they then use “a brush” with a walkman motor to drive beneath the skin. I couldn’t figure out what he meant by “brush,” but I understood when he underlined that it wasn’t a needle. It wasn’t sharp. It was a blunt point being jammed over and over into the skin by a walkman motor. “Crisse, que ça fait mal, en hostie!” he said with a cringe. That basically translates to, “Fuck, it hurt,” but the literal translation is, “Christ, how it causes hurt, in the name of the Host!” which is part of the reason why Québecois French is a lot of fun.
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by Naomi Solomon

All told, Julia did not give off the impression that she would be a thoroughly difficult roommate.

Julia laughed a lot, and she had a great laugh. It started out low and soft, a rumbling in her chest, but when it really got going it was high-pitched, perky and joyous but not annoying—like the kind of person whose conversations you would want to eavesdrop on in public. Julia also had a great smile, cherubic between round pink cheeks, and her blue eyes—I’m going to say it—her blue eyes sparkled behind her glasses. In almost every way she came off as easy-going and even-tempered.

The awkwardness came from her English (which she spoke with precision and gusto). Julia was a German student, and the two of us were living in a university apartment with another American student, a Mexican student, and four local—that is to say, Spanish—students. I was the first of the non-native speakers to move in before the semester began, and though I had the notion that my housemates probably spoke some English, I never tested it. I figured I was in Spain, living with Spanish-speakers, and really when else was I going to have the chance to mime/interpretive-dance half of everything I wanted to say?

The day after she moved in, I came home to find Julia having a conversation with my roommate, Ana, entirely in English. For two weeks I had been saying things like “the yellow piece in the center of the egg,” and “I walked [circular hand gestures for ‘all around’] the street but I couldn’t find the store of food,” and here was Ana keeping up perfectly well with Julia’s rapid-fire dissertation on her first day of classes.

“Hola, um, you guys,” I said from the doorway, going through a mental catalogue of all the under-my-breath sing-talking I’d done in the past two weeks. (I tend to talk to myself a lot, and at some point I’d decided that singing everything I would normally say whilst talking to myself would make me seem less crazy to a roommate who hopefully wouldn’t realize that I was asking, “Where’s my clean underwear?” to the tune of “Livin’ on a Prayer.” In retrospect, Ana probably knew Bon Jovi and could have figured out that I was getting the words wrong regardless of any language barrier.)

I tried to bring it up casually with the other American in the house, Rochelle.

“I know,” she said, skipping straight to annoyance while I loitered in vague embarrassment. “When I got up yesterday she was complaining to Marco about how all her professors and classmates and everyone talk too fast, and she’s sooooo glad she can come home and speak English.”

“Wow… and English is totally her second language. I wish I felt that way about my second language.”

“But come on—we’re in Spain and we’re supposed to be working on our Spanish. It’s like she’s totally missing the point. Hey—let’s agree, let’s only speak Spanish at home. ¿Vale?”

So we agreed.

That night I walked into the kitchen to find Ana, Julia, and Rochelle all in various stages of cooking and eating dinner.

“¿Cómo van sus clases?” Rochelle asked the room.

“I guess they’re good, but one of my professors doesn’t know how to run a discussion. He will never call on the people who actually have something to say, he just goes down the class list and picks anyone to answer the question. And half the class hasn’t done the reading.” Julia paused for breath and Rochelle seized the moment.

“¿Y tú, Ana?”

“Más o menos bien,” Ana answered, “pero creo que esta clase de química me va a matar…”

Julia wasn’t quite glaring, but her eyes weren’t doing their usual sparkly thing, either. Her cheeks even seemed less pink than they had a few moments ago.

“Y… I don’t know why I’m even taking it,” Ana finished.

This turned into the pattern when Julia was in the room: every conversation was a tug-of-war between English and Spanish, with Julia on one side, Rochelle and I on the other, and the rest of the roommates holding their hands just above the rope a foot or two from the center, unwilling to throw themselves into the struggle. (Though I’ll confess that Rochelle and I sometimes cheated if we were the only two at home.)

Midway through the semester, Julia slowly tapered off from talking to either of us, until one day Rochelle and I found ourselves being ignored in all English conversations, trapped in the stuttering limbo between pride and a limited vocabulary.

by Katherine Cooper

The school for kids with special needs was two or three miles east off the main route in town. It was on a long stretch of grass surrounded by the county TB clinic and the juvenile detention center for girls. It sort of felt as though the town’s bleakest figures had been shooed away, only to converge later, in the corner of some abandoned field. The buildings were nearly identical from the outside—low masses of grey concrete—indistinguishable intuitions.

But inside, the school was different. It was lovely and colorful, brimming with a kind of warmth and energy that one would never suspect from its desolate surroundings. The walls were cluttered with collages and photographs, enormous signs with doilies and glitter and thick bold lettering. Students were awarded for everything, all the time: Most Helpful, Most Friendly, Most Smiley. Their faces taped onto glossy laminated frames.

Their disabilities ranged from mild to severe and affected all the different realms—emotional, physical, and cognitive. There were kids in wheelchairs with twisted limbs and tangles of tubes linking different parts of their bodies, but also those who ran freely in the yard with the ease and recklessness of most five year olds. I worked in Daniel’s classroom for a few semesters over the course of two years.

Daniel, by this point ten years old, had borne a diagnosis of autism for many years. Daniel was a big kid, heavy and ungainly, with a gentle face and a thick head of dark, curly hair. He wore baggy corduroy paints and white sneakers with Velcro straps. He had no verbal skills but used a range of different sounds and noises to articulate his needs and frustrations; I could never tell how he really felt about me—sometimes he’d smirk at me in this way that made me think that he loved fucking with me, that he was capable of so much more than he was letting on but wanted to see me fight for his attention. Other times he’d give me a look that indicated something like complicity, like we were working for the same team.

The other five or six kids in the class fit in at various place along the autism spectrum, some a lot more high-functioning than Daniel. The teacher was this amazing reservoir of patience and energy, though I don’t know what kind of progress they made—or even really how to measure such a thing. But they sang songs and learned how to hold pencils and trace letters and cut shapes from cardboard. She spoke in short, choppy phrases, telling the kids everything they would do as they did it. She guided them carefully through the routine of the day, always eased them slowly into change.

Daniel seemed to have a constant swell of energy trapped in his body. He was always tapping his feet and playing with this plastic, spongy lizard—shaking it violently between two of his fingers. Sometimes we held hands and jumped on the trampoline together, his legs flinging wildly behind him. Other times he’d purposely knock paint onto the floor or groan and clench his fingers when we’d try to write his name or make a mother’s day card.

Toward the end of our time together, Daniel was going through puberty. It was a really tough time, and seemed almost impossible for the teacher or her aids to help navigate him through it. The teacher was constantly reminding him to stop touching himself—there was a familiar chorus that rang throughout the semester: “Hands out of pants, Daniel. Hands out of pants.” She used the same sing-songy voice as always.

In May, the teacher told Daniel that I would be leaving, that I was moving away and wouldn’t be coming back to class. I hoped that in some small way, Daniel had appreciated our time together. I wasn’t sure it had amounted to much but he had enriched my life in some elusive way that I couldn’t quite understand. Maybe it was that we were connecting on some really basic, human level, one uncluttered by conventional language. Daniel looked at me blankly for a moment and then he stuck his hands down his pants. I turned away, but even from the corner of my eye I saw it—his hands moving around, in front and then in back. Then he took one hand out and he slapped me, a quick and ugly sting across my lips. He smiled, grunted twice, and then skipped away.

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