Slices of Life: Pictures, Portraits, and Profiles

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 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 Katherine Cooper

I saw Lindsay everyday for a while. She’d always sit, hunched over, beside a stained yellow wall at the L stop at Union Square. She had pale skin, watery green eyes and a spray of freckles across her face.

I didn’t ever hear her ask people for money, or even really see her look up. But she held onto one
of those cardboard signs, generic in its pleading: desperate for cash, homeless and alone, please help. In the midst of their frenzied, hurried commutes, I watched people stop and stare, frozen for a moment in their tracks. Two seconds, or maybe three. She was just so young, undoubtedly still a teenager. I think we all stopped, struck by the same thing—this girl, so sad but also salvageable.

I never stopped to talk to her, but sometimes she’d linger in my thoughts throughout the day. So many of the folks I see and work with everyday are hardened veterans of the streets—they’ve been outside for so long that they can’t even pinpoint when or how they got there. But Lindsay, it seemed, was still right in the very thick and heart of that moment.

Maybe it could be a minor blip, just a tiny part of her story. I imagined her having fled from a drunken, abusive father in a cold, Midwestern town. Or maybe she’d been shooting up heroin for years and her mother, weak and exasperated, just couldn’t take it any longer. A couple of Greyhound buses through the night and here she was.

After several days of passing Lindsay during my morning commute, I saw her downtown by my office. She was sitting cross-legged against some big stone building just off Wall Street. My coworker and I crouched down and did our usual spiel. How long had she been staying outside? Did she need any services? Did she want a list of places in the area to shower or get a warm meal? It was the first time we’d made eye contact. She told us—softly and patiently—that no, she didn’t need or want anything. She said she was okay, but she looked so weak. It seemed as though it’d taken so much effort—all her strength—to utter the simplest phrase. I started to walk away but then asked her name.

Lindsay was back by the L train the next day. I had left work sort of late and missed the flurry of rush hour commuters. Her head was down and her hair, thin and blond, hung limply by her face.

“Lindsay?”

She looked up and said hey. I realized I had absolutely nothing to say. I just felt so compelled to call her name—to somehow make use of the information she’d been willing to offer me. We were quiet for a moment and then a guy approached us. He was tan and heavy, his hair fragrant and slicked back. He stared at her and then turned to me.

“Is this for real?” he asked, as though we were watching those men who, covered entirely in gold or silver paint, pose as statues.

“Excuse me?”

“Is this kid for real? Or is she faking?”

I told him no, I didn’t think she was faking. He dropped a five dollar bill by her feet and then headed down toward the track.

On the train back to Brooklyn, he sat down next to me. “You know, it’s impossible to tell, she could’ve been pretending. You never know what someone will do for a sociology degree.”

I said I hoped she was faking, but it seemed unlikely. He told me he could probably help her out a bit, and that he was so rich he basically owned the Giants. He pressed the back of his hands against his cheeks, blotting the sweat that had accumulated on his thick, leathery skin.

I haven’t seen Lindsay since that day. I wonder if maybe, she made it home—if she too felt what the commuters sensed that morning by the train: that tiny flicker of hope.

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by Liz Wyckoff

You are on the bus. But the woman in the opposite seat makes you feel as if you’ve walked into a scene from Snow White—you glance to the side, expecting singing squirrels and bunnies to jump out from behind the plastic benches. At any moment, birds might swoop down from the steel poles to tie bows in her hair.

You have never seen anything like the top she is wearing. The material puckers in spots and then falls into a series of lovely drapes and folds around her waist. It is water burbling delightedly over a stone before spilling through the air in a smooth, white sheet. It is nature interpreted through cotton.

You say something obvious, like, “I like your top.”
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by Katherine Cooper

When I meet Roosevelt, he is seventy-seven and just recently retired. He’d been assembling parts at the nearby Ford factory in Lorain, Ohio, for about fifty years. In addition to health insurance and a steady pension, Ford is now paying for Roosevelt to enroll in some classes.
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by Matt Weston

As the man held the silver disc above his head, looking ridiculous, no doubt feeling ridiculous, I had this thought: while he would like to be anywhere else but here, in this field holding a disc above his head in the heavy August air, there is no place I would rather be than here, centered in a spot of shade under an oak tree, watching him struggle. He seemed to communicate his plight in his posture: his right knee bent (Is she even using my light?), his back bowed (This shot ends at three. What time is it?), his hands grabbing at the disc, slowly turning it (Sonofabitch).

A dog, a small dog, maybe a dachshund, ran off its leash and started barking at the man, then stopped barking and opened its mouth and licked one of the man’s shoes. He just stood there, defenseless. Past the dog and the man, down a short drop in the field that lead to a cement walking path, stood the subjects of the shoot, a man and a woman, he a full foot taller, their hands hugging a bouquet of flowers. To their right squatted the photographer. With camera in hand she either jumped up or lurched to one side, all the while pointing her finger at the man holding the disc. He took a step forward or back in response, doing his best to make like he was fully invested, giving 110% all the time, the shot was all that mattered.

I took a bite of my proscuitto and mozzarella sandwich (Delicious) and stretched my body out a little longer on the blanket. A satellite dish rose in my mind, one built with serious, industrially thick crossing bars painted white that fought for real estate with a swimming pool in my friend Mike’s backyard. Inside the house his dad would change the channel and outside the dish moved to pick up the signal, nearly hitting the side of the pool. We joked that it wasn’t the chlorine in the water that stung our eyes but the radiation coming off the dish.

I wondered then if Mike’s dad was still watching that old TV with the huge bulb swelling the set all these years later, and what the odds were of an errant signal bouncing off the clutch of Comcast satellites above Mike’s house and reaching this man’s disc in a field in Brooklyn, a man who would have given anything to change the channel.

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by Liz Mathews

It was a regular Monday night at my part-time job, around ten-thirty. I was staring off into space and wishing I was anywhere else when my coworker, Eric, prodded me. “Look, it’s a white sheik.”

I looked, and indeed, the man standing near the hardcover nonfiction bestsellers was wearing a turban with blonder than blonde wisps of hair peaking out from under the edges. He had an equally pale beard feathered about his chin and cheeks. Along with his white turban, the man was sporting a Yankees jacket and baggy blue jeans.

“Huh,” I said, ready to go back to evening-dreaming.

“But check her out.” Eric nodded at the gorgeous pixie of a woman at the man’s side.

“Hm,” I said, trying my best to not to feel inadequate.

“What is it with the weirdos and their hot girlfriends?” Eric asked, then walked into the cash office, slamming the door behind him.

The minutes ticked by. The couple disappeared. Eric came back. More minutes passed. Slowly.

Suddenly the couple was standing at Eric’s register. She was buying a book. He was standing off to the side, sipping bubble tea from a clear plastic cup via a magenta plastic straw. Eric remarked on the book she was buying. She responded charmingly in a hybrid accent—call it Austrian-French—completing her answer with an extravagant and glittery smile. The man sipped his bubble tea and checked her out out of the corner of his eye, a look of satisfaction splattered across his whiskered face.

Eric asked if they’d like a bag for their purchase. “Oh, no plastic in our home,” the gorgeous woman with the strange accent replied. “We’re green,” the man added, and smirk-smiled. “Thanks for getting me that, babe.” He took another sip of his bubble tea.

Eric put the receipt in the book the beautiful lady had just bought for the turbaned blond man. She took a sip of her own bubble tea from a clear plastic cup with a blue plastic straw and picked up her handbag.

“Have a good night, now,” the man said to Eric and I as they went past, his left hand coming to rest below the small of her back.

The couple walked toward the door with their book and without a plastic bag, do-gooders heading out into the night, slurping up their teas the whole way.

“What is it about that guy?” Eric asked. “Some freaky mind-control sex thing? I guess that exists.” He shook his head and turned to go back to the cash office.

I waited until the glass doors closed behind the couple, obscuring my view. “Hey Eric, do you suppose they’ll throw those plastic cups away before they go inside their home?”

Eric laughed. All the way into the cash office, Eric laughed and laughed. I smiled, too.

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by Ian F. King

On a Friday night around this time last year I was walking down to the 4th Avenue F stop to catch the train into the city. On my way down the street I walked past a small group of people, and made slightly prolonged-for-New York City eye contact with one of them, a woman who looked oddly familiar. Five seconds later her name came to me: Kristen Schaal. I had only recently become aware of her existence through finally giving Flight of the Conchords a chance and watching a few episodes, but I was admittedly a little smitten for all the obvious reasons. Well, the one obvious reason: she was hilarious.

I had also recently seen her perform an awesome two-person dance routine to Britney Spears’ “Toxic” (wearing hazmat suits, of course) at another comedian’s book release party at a local club. The next day a friend of mine who was also at the show noted that she had accidentally followed Schaal most of her way home that night, though Schaal eventually turned up the street right before hers, carrying a mattress costume from another bit she had done under her arm. So I was already aware that she lived in the neighborhood.

Two days after that Friday I was in a local restaurant having brunch with another friend. We were just finishing. “Well, should we get going?” my friend asked. Completely out of nowhere, I said, “Maybe we should wait until Kristen Schaal shows up.” I believe I said this because the thought crossed my mind that we were near the street she had apparently turned up that night a while back. My friend looked at me funny, so I explained as much. Two minutes later, Schaal walked in the door. I had conjured her. My friend and I exchanged spooked laughs, and asked for the check. I decided she must be stalking me.

A while after that I walked by her on the street yet again, but it didn’t carry the same weight as the previous sightings. Maybe because I was now just taking my Schaal sightings for granted, or maybe because her stalking me had failed to escalate like I assume stalking should. But that was the last time for ages. When I finally saw her again last night at a small stand-up comedy show, funny as she might have been, I almost felt a touch of sadness, lamenting the loss of my celebrity stalker.

by Rose Annis

You enter the grocery store; sliding doors part like a lazy red sea and immediately you know to avoid her. She has arranged herself casually amidst the produce section. On either side of her makeshift display, mangoes and avocados sit fat with rot. Gracelessly, you try to maneuver your cart around her cardboard sign, but a stack of canned goods block your way. She shoves a coupon into your hand.

“Five portraits for seven dollars, honey,” she brays at you.

You try to hand the coupon back. But it’s too late. To her, once that crummy piece of paper has stuck to your sweaty palm, the transaction is guaranteed.

“Take a picture with your family. Pay now, pick ‘em up later”

She gestures to the gallery behind her. Shots of terrified babies, each framed by airbrushed borders, gape at you. Unhappy-looking Latino families dressed in communion best stand rigid, captured forever in 8X10 glossy.

“No thank you,” you mutter, terrified that she might make you leaf through the binder she clutches to her sagging chest. You’re really not interested in a wallet sized option.

The key is to break eye contact. Once that connection is severed, her attention is turned towards other customers. Stealthily, you slip into the first empty aisle. Over the noise of unlubricated shopping-cart wheels and indefatigable salsa music, you can hear her proposition other shoppers. She is trying to make them feel at ease, relax them, seduce them into her Kodak coven.

You wander into the deli section. Wet slabs of spongy pork and gnarled chicken feet lay frosted in the coolers. Sausages, bursting from their casings, hang more for decoration than for sustenance. You can still hear the photo lady hollering. She has found a customer, or a friend, someone who is willing to listen to her talk. Although you’re not sure who or what she is responding to you hear her say, in a loud, righteous voice, “Work? Yeah. I work hard. One time I had a lacerated colon and I still showed up on time.”

You glance once more at that dangling string of fetid sausages and then longingly towards the exit. Slowly, you take your place in the check out line.

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by Naomi Solomon

Nina has called me at work often enough that she knows to ask for me by name if I don’t answer the phone, and expects me to recognize her voice when I do. This may not seem like overwhelming evidence of anything, but most of my calls are from women who have been referred to my nonprofit by caseworkers, counselors, hospital crisis intervention staff, shelter staff, and similar social service workers. These callers are pretty evenly split between women who have learned to deal with the system—who file their papers promptly, write down or retain the information they need, and glide through, only coming to my attention once or twice—and women who have seen so many professionals in so many agencies (usually in the midst of severe personal issues) that they struggle to keep track of programs, referrals, dates, places, names.

Either way, they usually go through the programs at my nonprofit and disappear, or never show up and likewise fall off the map. I wouldn’t expect any of them to remember my name from one month to the next, and that’s okay—trading niceties with the girl who answers the phone should be the least of their worries. With Nina, though, it’s different.

Nina first started calling about eight months ago. I signed her up for the program, gave her a reminder call a few days before it started (she asked for directions and assured me she would come), and figured we were square. She didn’t show up, but called a few weeks later with an excuse and a request to be enrolled for the next start date. I made a new note on her forms, moved them from one folder to another, and told her she was set.

Nina never showed up for any of the programs she signed up for. Three short-term sessions came and went, and then she starting calling to tell me she wanted to sign up for an ongoing class, when could she start? Eventually she started calling just to call. She left a few slurred and heartrending messages at odd hours, saying she was in the hospital but would be out soon, sometimes adding that she would definitely show up to the class when she was well again. She didn’t leave a phone number. Once she called and asked me how my date had gone—I couldn’t figure out what she was talking about that time, whether she thought I was someone else or was just trying to chat. A few weeks after that she called and told me she was moving to San Francisco, and did I know of any programs there? I told her I would send her some information as soon as I could find any, but I’ll admit that I didn’t, and soon enough she called back asking again about classes here in Brooklyn, the move to California apparently forgotten.

I don’t expect to ever meet Nina in person, to ever know what she looks like or how she carries herself. I have a mental image of her, of course, the way you do with familiar characters in books, but the truth is that I could sit next to her on the subway, pass her on the street, buy my coffee from her, and I would probably never know it. I’ll never know if she gets anything out of calling, confidence or reassurance or just the feeling that comes from always finding someone on the other end.