Slices of Life: Pictures, Portraits, and Profiles

by Alex Littlefield

They were walking down Ninth Avenue, sharing a spliff, when the cruiser pulled up alongside them.

A sergeant stepped out of the passenger door and came slowly around the hood, sizing them up: Sid the Magician in his street clothes and Matthew the Metal Head in a Pantera shirt and frayed jeans. Both were more than their share of stoned, which may have been why Matthew’s first thought went not to the joint, but to the idea that he was the victim of some sort of post-racial profiling. The sergeant’s look said, I’ve got you, you lank-haired goon.

Then Matthew’s synapses crackled back to the joint, the contingency smoldering somewhere below his line of vision. He tried to see whether Sid had palmed it, but could only smell the thing.

The second cop cracked his door and stepped onto the curb, thumbing his belt. The sergeant spoke first. “What you boys got there?” It struck Matthew as a little too casual, given the starchiness of the man’s uniform and his Eisenhower haircut.

“Nothing, sir,” said Sid. The sergeant craned his neck, scoping out the pair’s hands, which they held out palms-up. Even the smell had vanished. After another minute of head-scratching, the cops swung back into the squad car and pulled away from the curb.

Had this been a W.C. Fields movie, Sid would now have coughed up the joint in a geyser of smoke. But instead it reappeared in his fingers as if it had been there all along. He blew on it to revive the waning ember, hit it, and passed it to Matthew, who took the joint without a word. He knew not to ask.

by Alex Littlefield

I still had one foot on the curb, which is probably what saved me. That and my then-girlfriend, who yanked the back of my t-shirt, suspending me mid-stride, and keeping me about half a foot from the first bike when it ripped through the narrow crosswalk.

Budapest is a city of long, stately promenades that give way to winding pedestrian malls sprinkled with furtive, back-alley brandy bars. We had been walking all day with our eyes and ears turned upward to take in the colonnades and intricate moldings of the buildings along our route, and it was this touristic obliviousness to our immediate surroundings that almost landed me squarely under the biker’s front tire.

He was a young guy, judging by his racing-striped bomber jacket and the untrimmed sprigs of hair that snaked out from beneath his helmet. The rush of air from his bike was still fluttering the collar of my shirt when two police motorcycles tore through the crosswalk and veered around the corner after him, the officers’ knees almost skidding against the asphalt as they leaned into the turn.

I had just enough time to wonder what he had done before the three bikes had disappeared, leaving behind only a receding whine and a gap in the crowd that quickly filled itself in, like tree bark healing over a wire. When I remembered the hand on my back I turned and, looking at Justine, saw the glimmerings of love in her shock-widened eyes.

by Alex Littlefield

I’ve never heard the word “bitch” so many times in my life. It’s 7:30 p.m. on the Friday before Mother’s Day, and I’m in line for the 6:30 bus to DC, listening to a fight play out behind me between two exasperated—and possibly drunk—travelers.

“Where your kids, fat bitch?”

“F#@k you, bitch!”

“Where your kids, fat bitch?”

“F#@k you, bitch!”

I don’t know how the fight started—I don’t think anyone here does, and we’ve all been here for the whole thing. Both women are running out of steam, so they’re doing the broken-record version of a smack-down, which is actually more stressful for the onlookers than when they were coming up with fresh insults.

“F#@k you, bitch!”

“Happy Mother’s Day, bitch.”

The woman is strangely calm as she says it, which could be either exhaustion or a nod to the holiday spirit. All day I’ve been hearing women wishing each other a happy Mother’s Day, which struck me as a little self-congratulatory—sort of like Jesus wishing himself a Merry Christmas. But it’s a change of scenery, as it were, so I’ll take it.

“F#@k you, bitch!”

“Happy Mother’s Day, bitch.”

“F#@k you, bitch!”

How quickly we lapse into routine. But just as I think I may have to strangle myself with the strap of my overnight bag, there’s a break in the clouds. When her “f#@k you” cue comes, the calm woman pauses for a second. Everyone in line holds their breath.

“Go to Sears, fat bitch. I hear they have a new bra that’ll hold your whole body up.”

It is by far the best barb of the fight, and later, when I find myself on the same bus as the two women, I remind myself that I am richer for having heard it. By then, the gunfire from a cut-rate action movie has drowned out any possibility of argument. We really have so much to be thankful for.

by Alex Littlefield

“Have you seen my legs?”

Francisco, the superintendent of our building, is sitting on the footstool outside of our bathroom, not fixing our leaking faucet. He is wearing his usual: saucer-sized eyeglasses, a yellow tank top, camo shorts, and construction boots. His hair is ash-grey, and evokes Beetlejuice or a Troll doll with its electrocution-victim frizz. His shins, which he is gingerly massaging, are covered with Spandex sheathes.

“I ran into a fire,” he says, as he peels off the protective skin.

Francisco’s legs are ravaged, plastic-looking things. He massages his left thigh just below the knee, and I see all the skin down to his ankle slide around in one solid sheet. I’ve heard that Francisco was a marathon runner, and also that he once got his son arrested for using drugs, and suddenly I wonder what sort of fire he was compelled to run through.

That information doesn’t seem to be forthcoming; Francisco is absently running his fingertips over his calf and scanning our kitchen thirstily. “Is there gonna be a glass of water?”

I’m amazed that we are having this conversation, though not for the obvious reason. We’ve never really been able to understand Francisco before. Whenever a problem crops up in our building (and they crop up frequently—the hot water is a repeat offender) and we have to call his cell, his side of the conversation is definitely not in any human language. Our neighbor thinks he conducts his phone calls in gobbledygook to avoid dealing with tenants’ work requests.

Now, though, he is perfectly intelligible. My roommate brings a glass of water from the tap, and Francisco takes a long, audible drink. He clinks the glass down on the counter top and goes back to working his legs, but one hand now stretches up to his forehead.

“Last night I fell down the stairs and hit my head real bad. Real hard. I had to go to the hospital.” Francisco looks up at us through lenses so thick they’re practically opaque. “I don’t know if I can do this job.”

“Yep,” my roommate says, moving past him. “It’s right over here, in the bathroom.”

by Alex Littlefield

With an eye to their health, some people don’t eat meat; others forsake fast food, or large portions. Savage doesn’t eat salt.

His conviction isn’t swayed by living in one of the many zones of America where the diet is starchy, sticks to your ribs, and is only palatable when it’s been thoroughly dusted with sodium. Salt is a thing of evil, and Savage is a man of resolve.

As a young man, Savage decided that his family’s history of hypertension and heart disease could be blamed on a single gastronomic culprit, which had recently come under some scrutiny in the popular press. Overnight, Savage’s kitchen was purged. It was a life-or-death decision; better a bland, unappetizing existence than no existence at all.

Now in his eighties, Savage has successfully thwarted his family’s medical history, and his clean bill of health has only strengthened his resolve. No salt is allowed the household—a rule unbeknownst to one recent visitor, a friend of Savage’s granddaughter.

“Who’s hungry?” Savage had asked when the girls arrived. He dropped several paper towel-wrapped parcels into the microwave and, in a few minutes, presented each guest with a desiccated, raisin-ish potato wobbling in the middle of a dinner plate. Per custom, there was no butter in sight. A lonely peppershaker sat on the edge of the table.

Remembering a cache of single-serving salt packets she had seen in the car, the friend excused herself, and soon was liberally showering the stuff over her sawed-open potato. Her hand was mid-shake when Savage sprung.

“What… what are you doing?” he stammered, truly appalled.

“Putting some salt on my potato?”

“Well,” he continued, regaining some of his composure, “you shouldn’t eat that.” He eyed the potato as if it had teeth. “Everyone knows that salt kills.”

Chastised, the friend forked her potato into the garbage. In a way it was lucky, she ruminated; she had gotten out of eating the thing. But Savage—ever the gracious host—had gotten up to swaddle a fresh potato. Behind the friend’s back, the microwave chirped and blinked to life.

by Alex Littlefield

Every so often, towards midnight, Sol visits her apartment. He arrives consistently at 11:30pm. Sol’s punctuality should mitigate the shock of his visits, but somehow she has never grown completely accustomed.

The conditions he’s imposed on her tenancy are more than a little invasive; no bikinis are to be worn in the back yard, she has had to disclose her profession (teacher, preschool) on move-in, and she has signed away her right to host more than fifteen people at a time. In this context, a sixty-year-old Hasidic man making late-night calls to her apartment can seem like just another rider on the contract.

In fact, Sol’s presence has come to feel almost heartening; he acts like her surrogate father in an otherwise faceless city. He slides into her apartment—seeming to levitate, since his black coat always hides his feet—and makes a pretense of checking the thermostat, which has been broken since she moved in. She thinks he is also checking for a gentlemen caller, but by some stroke of luck these two bodies have never collided.

“It’s 11:30,” he says, when he’s made his rounds. “You should really go to bed if you want to wake up on time.”

Most twenty-somethings would rile at this sort of directive, but she abides it and has even begun to anticipate—if not quite look forward to—Sol’s visits. One night, towards his usual hour, she leaves her front door unlocked.

Sol knocks, then tests the knob. When it slides open, he seeps into the room with more fluidity than normal.

“Hey,” he says, “you didn’t lock the door. This is a dangerous city. You don’t want just anyone walking into your home.”

Sol sees danger everywhere. He wouldn’t shake her hand the first time they met, explaining that he could not touch any woman who wasn’t his wife. His mother included.

She once asked if he had children. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I can’t count them on my fingers and toes.”

by Alexander Littlefield

Jane Alleyne learned she was narcoleptic when she tumbled out of her chair during a night shift at the hospital where she nursed. She kept her condition secret until years later. The giveaway: burns on her hands, sustained while working over a donut fryer. Having been raised in the colonial playground of Barbados by a father who tended orchids alongside his patients, Joan must have experienced these blue-collar burns and bruises with a special sort of pain.

Her affliction seemed to worsen as Jane aged. Perhaps because of her narcoleptic inability to sustain anything more than mild and ephemeral emotion, she was an icy matriarch, as prim as her muted British accent, and as tightly wound as the steel-gray bun she pinned back, each and every morning, behind her beautifully proportioned head. (Iciness aside, no one disputed the fact that Jane was achingly beautiful)

When finally unable to care for herself, she moved in with her daughter’s family, bringing along Winston II, her faithful Lhasa Apso. Days Jane kept to herself, but by night she terrorized the dinner table. Silent and severe, she never seemed to enjoy the meals, and could drop into a narcoleptic trance at the slightest offense—a grandchild’s speaking too softly; an elbow on the table; talking out of turn. Knowing that anger sent her swooning, Jane stifled it, letting it swell inside her until—eyelids drooping, head lolling on her neck, tongue fastened to one corner of her mouth in a last-ditch scramble for control—she was overwhelmed.

Some nights, through the walls, her grandchildren could hear her moaning, terrified, in her sleep.

Jane died in 2002, of heart disease brought on by her medication. Her fifth granddaughter cared for her in her final days, cleaning her after visits to the bathroom and putting in her dentures—before being forced to leave them out altogether, which only exaggerated Jane’s decrepitude and (humiliating, enraging her) gave her further reason for fits. Towards the end, Jane couldn’t even set her bun in place. Confined to her bed, wracked by nightmares and her own inexpressible rancor, she seemed to live out her final days in a single seething narcoleptic swoon. By the time she passed away, even Winston II was too terrified to go near her.