Slices of Life: Pictures, Portraits, and Profiles

by Liz Wyckoff

On our Delta flight from Portland to Atlanta, we all watch a precautionary video. No more flight attendants with poorly-choreographed clicks and tightenings. No oxygen masks held up to the ceiling and dropped dangerously close to passengers’ faces.

Now, we get Katherine Lee: star of Delta’s airline safety video. We get the subtle cups of her cheeks, a finger wag warning us that our “mobile phones and other electronic devices should now be turned … off;” the seductive snap of that cell phone in her well-manicured hand. We get tangerine-colored hair swept across her forehead like a smooth cirrus cloud.

We, the passengers, are a motley crew. Lots of glasses. We chew the ice in our complimentary drinks. I get the sense we’re all playing the game I usually play in tight spaces with strangers. If the plane crash-lands on an uninhabited island, with whom will we make babies to propagate the species? We glance at each other out of the corners of our eyes.

Most of us, I believe, are remembering the video. Her voice echoes in our heads like something a partner once said during sex. “Insert the metal tip into the buckle.” “Adjust the strap so it’s low and tight across your lap.”

Every once in a while, we tune our mini television screens to the program that charts our path across the country. We cruise over the cookie-cutter borders of Nebraska and Kansas and Missouri. Altitude: 37,004 ft. Ground Speed: 943 km/h.

We all want to be somewhere: the place we just left, the place we’re going, or somewhere else altogether.

Later, we watch a beautiful sunrise—the moon hangs pale and white as a clipped fingernail in the sky. About an inch from the horizon, the atmosphere shifts into a deep red, then a brilliant orange, then, finally, the color of the Delta woman’s hair. Tangerine.

We, the passengers, have dull, greasy hair. We lower our window shades and shut our eyes. Thankfully, we’ll be here for a few more hours.

by Kate Axelrod

A few nights ago, three thousand volunteers walked the streets of Manhattan attempting to gather a rough estimate of the island’s homeless population. Dozens of groups canvassed small pockets of the borough, and at one o’clock on a Monday night, the streets were mostly quiet, the city in a rare moment of calm. Taxis glided past on freshly hosed pavement, and doormen lingered beside awnings.

There were of course, some businessmen stumbling from bars and a few women in stilettos heading toward their apartments, who quickly brushed us off. No, they did not have time to answer a few quick questions about their housing situations tonight.

By two AM we spotted a number of people who’d made homes for the night—wrapped in quilts and tucked behind thick constructions of cardboard. An elderly Asian woman with a small wire cart and a swollen lip hurried past us. No, she said, I am not homeless and I cannot talk.

And later, a handful of people who were eager and alert, ready to talk. Two young guys, after having just visited a needle exchange, were heading east to bed down for the night. Their hands were bathed in a film of gravely dirt. They wanted some more information about places to grab a meal or two, maybe take a warm shower.

We were surveying the same area for roughly three hours, weaving in and out of streets and alleyways. An older man kept appearing, almost as though he had been circling the blocks with us. When I finally approached him, he told me emphatically that he was not homeless, that he had a place in Queens. But he held his gaze so long and hard, like perhaps he didn’t want us to leave him or had nowhere to go. We had been told to use our judgment when determining if an individual was homeless, they would not necessarily be forthcoming with the information. And for a moment, I wondered about him. Why had he been moving through the neighborhood so slowly, so cautiously? But really, he could’ve been anyone, lost and lonely, looking for some place to go.

by Ian F. King

If you had to guess what song a crazy person might sing out loud while riding his bike on the avenue outside my apartment (or your apartment, whatever), what would it be? “Mac the Knife”? Maybe some Frank Sinatra, or the Beatles? “It’s Raining Men”? Okay, I know, that’s a fairly random thing to speculate about. The point is that it might never occur to you to think of what songs a crazy person is more likely to sing until you are confronted with a crazy person who sings songs that you never thought a crazy person would. It’s even weirder when those songs are ones that were in heavy rotation in your Discman ten years ago.

I first heard the crazy bike rider singing not long after I moved into my apartment in the summer of 2007. I was sitting in my living room reading, when from outside my window rose a tuneless yodel over the usual low hum of traffic. I swore I recognized the song he was singing and I jumped up to look out the window, just as he was heading out of earshot. Though I only heard the snippet as he rode by, it immediately came to mind: “Photobooth” by Death Cab For Cutie. Not even an album track, but an obscure-ish older EP song from way before they were famous. I dismissed it as random, but over the years I’ve heard that guy out my window, seen him while I was walking down the street, even walked by him in the park, and he’s always riding his bike and singing an indie rock song from the late ’90s. Even tonight, as I laid feverish on my couch trying to watch La Dolce Vita for the second time (I failed again, I should stop trying to watch it only when I am sick), there he went by outside again, singing “Pink Chimneys” by the Promise Ring. Definitely not the first time I’ve heard him sing a Promise Ring song.

That’s when it finally clicked. People like me think that indie rock—because it is, or at least was, supposed to be sort of under the radar—would only be the realm of sane people who might consciously go to the trouble of finding music that was more difficult to hear or get a hold of than popular music that is readily available. Because crazy people just listen to the radio and don’t have discerning musical tastes? That’s what I thought, apparently. Somehow, I have been under the impression that the music of my teenage years was, and is, only appealing to non-crazies. You might think the bike rider I’m talking about is just “eccentric,” but I assure you, people that warble loudly like that in public consistently are voluntarily handing over their sanity cards. What I should be most thankful for is that I’ve been forced to confront this stereotype of mine head on, and see that people of all walks of mental stability can like cuddly sweater boy guitar bands of the 1990s. Either that, or I’m crazy, too.

Epilogue: Ian was still sick the next day and finally managed to make it through La Dolce Vita. He wonders what the hell that girl is saying to Marcello at the end. He’ll give an extra special George Washington medallion to whomever can come up with the best answer.

by Liz Mathews

You could say morale is low. Variations on the phrase, “I have to get out of this place because it’s eating my soul,” are commonly heard at my second job, where I have the opportunity to work two shifts per week to add padding to my income. Coworkers commonly call out, others have ulcers, and still others are constantly muttering appalling things about customers under their breaths.

Kenneth does not work at our store. Kenneth has probably never worked at our store. But Kenneth has worked for our same company since 1989, and he has never missed a single one of those days. For twenty years, Kenneth has not been ill. Kenneth has not been hungover. Kenneth has not had a family emergency. Kenneth has not felt too depressed to get out of bed. Kenneth has not pretended to be sick so he can go to a movie instead. Kenneth claims that guilt spurs him to go to work, and plays a large part in his perfect attendance because he doesn’t want his absence to burden the people he works with. He would rather be useful, he says, instead of sitting at home and thinking about all the others having to carry on without him.

From the standpoint of our company, Kenneth should be an inspiration to the rest of us, one who we should all strive to emulate.

But at my store, at least, Kenneth’s story had the opposite effect. “Did you read about that shmuck who’s been here for twenty years?” my supervisor asked as I clocked in on the day Kenneth’s story broke. He pulled me to the nearest computer, and called up Kenneth’s article. “Never missed a goddam day. What the fuck.” He gave the computer monitor a solid flick with his index finger.

This display of bravado drew a crowd of coworkers.

“There’s got to be something wrong with that guy, Kenneth.”

“Wow. That is so depressing.”

“I wonder what they gave him. Like a bonus or anything?”

“Not like he’d use any extra vacation days.”

‘He’s not even a manager—just a lead! ‘This is a great place to craft a career,’ my ass! Dude hasn’t moved up at all!”

“What’s wrong with him! We should call that store—see if they gave him anything.”

“We should track him down and punch him in the face, is what we should do; see if he goes to work then. Maybe kick him a few times, give him a reason to use his sick leave.”

On that note, we dispersed.

But for the rest of the evening, Kenneth hovered at the back of our minds, his twenty years of perfect attendance flashing like a strobe light behind our eyeballs. But none of us did our work any better or more efficiently. It’s possible we did an even worse job that evening, to prove a point.

If we were not who we are at my store, Kenneth might be an inspiration. But as it is, you could say morale is low.

by Rose Annis

The only reason I ever talked to Bob was because he said he was going to drown those kittens. He already had captured three and he promised that as soon as he found all five, he would tie them in a bag and throw them in the river—the French Broad—it was just the other side of the highway. Those small mewling faces had an expiration date. I wrote down in my day planner “save kittens” as if I had something better to do.

“Bob”, I said. “This isn’t a just add water situation.”

Bob listened to Alex Jones every night and slept in a bus, a bus that had its front seat carved out and refashioned into a toilet. We met because I was living on what used to be his land. He had sold it six months previous to my friend Chad for 10,000 dollars in silver. Bob didn’t believe in banks. Or the government, or shirts apparently. He burned his social security card back in 1987 and still wandered our side of the mountain like it was his.

He called me Wendy. As in Wendy Darling. From Peter Pan. I told him I wasn’t maternal enough. He told me I reminded him of his daughter. He told all the girls that. A few times he tried to teach me to play horseshoes, but he would always stand too close to the stake, and we lived on a slope. The only direction the horseshoes would tumble was down.

Every few weeks Bob would say something about Jesus, or pussy, or the New World Order, and he would be banned from the property. Days would pass and we would forget that he was out there. Occasionally the putt-putt growl of his motor scooter could be heard out on the gravel road, and we would be satisfied that he hadn’t thrown himself into the river along with those kittens.

by Kiersten Tarr

Upstairs, standing in front of the window in what used to be the guest room but is now my bedroom, I’m painting “dark umber” mascara onto my eyelashes with the aid of a small handheld mirror. Between strokes, I glance up through the trees at the sky. It looks hazy, like there are lots of thin clouds everywhere, but there must be a break in them someplace, because there is bright sunlight kissing the driveway below.

My mother knocks on the door, then opens it a few inches without waiting for an answer.

“I need you to call Grandma and Grandpa before they head over to Jeanne’s.” (Jeanne is her half-sister.)

“I’m half-dressed,” I complain, gesturing to myself in sweatpants and bra, hair wet, mascara wand in hand. She looks me over from the doorway.

“Well, you don’t have to do it now, but if it isn’t soon, you’ll miss them.”

Realizing from her tone that this means I will have to either expedite my primping, make the phone call now, or catch hell, I opt to throw on a t-shirt and trek downstairs with my damp locks and lopsided eyelash thickness. There is a phone in my room, but it’s analog and actually tethered to its cradle, so down the stairs I go.

This is my annual holiday duty—not going to midnight mass, not helping roast or baste or dice anything, not licking envelopes for a few hundred cards featuring a glossy portrait of us wearing matching Santa hats—no, it’s my designated task to call my mother’s parents and make all of the initial small talk so that she can spend as little time as possible on the phone with them, and also just in case her stepfather answers instead of my grandma. I am the ritual sacrifice, the slaughtered innocent, the tender, tasty lamb. I go along with it because I’m grateful I wasn’t raised in the style practiced by my grandparents on their four kids. Running interference is an unspoken thank-you-for-not-doing-that-to-me to my mother.

As I listen to the line ringing, I recall an anecdote my mother told me after I moved to New York two Springs ago. Her stepfather told her that “no daughter of his” would ever be allowed to move to such a place, a filthy hole full of “weirdos.” Weirdos was code for the big bad Other, which for him includes queers, liberal idiots, illegals, and anyone the girls from Prussian Blue wouldn’t date. In turn, I am reminded of the last Christmas we spent with them, at which the most enthusiastic dinnertime conversation was about why it was okay for us to use the n-word. (Because “they” call each other that.)

After several rings there is a short pause before the recording of my grandmother’s very faint voice begins to play. I feel my face tighten into a smile that no one will see, necessary for getting my voice into character.

“Hi, Merry Christmas! It’s your granddaughter! You must’ve left for Jeanne’s by now, so, sorry we missed you, but we hope you’re having a nice time over there, and we’ll talk to you soon. Bye bye!”

As the sigh of relief I’m heaving begins to escape my lips, I turn to find my mother standing behind me holding up her address book, open to the J’s. We exchange wry smiles as I start dialing, and no explanation is needed. Just in case Jeanne picks up.

by Naomi Solomon

The saint—Saint Thomas Aquinas, I believe—is still there on the side of the building, hovering on a small concrete platform just above the third floor, looking out onto a dull strip of Fourth Avenue: a fenced-off lot under construction, a fast food Chinese restaurant, dirty snow, parked cars. Or would be looking out onto, if not for the box he has been in since the vacant St. Thomas Aquinas School became the new P.S. 124 in September.

The conversion seemed frantic after years of silence. (Granted, it took me a while to notice the silence: I work less than a block from the school, and walked by it at least twice a day for over a year before I realized that there were never any school buses, never any kids coming and going, that the giant area of scratched-away paint on the front door that sometimes looked to me like a hunched-over alien and sometimes like a baby with a balloon never grew more chipped. That the same brown-and-tan tweed couch cushion that someone had, at some point in time, tossed over the fence was always sitting there moldering in the same corner of the schoolyard, surrounded by weeds growing completely undisturbed between cracks in the pavement.)

At first I couldn’t tell if the school was being torn down or fixed up. Construction workers filled the yard with dumpsters, and filled the dumpsters with a rubble of plaster, scratched chalkboards, and rusty-looking electrical equipment. Open windows revealed mangled lighting fixtures and heaps of dirty classroom furniture. Then they set up a little booth for a security guard at the school gate, and the alien/baby-with-balloons disappeared under a fresh coat of paint—red this time—and one day I walked by and the yard was paved, and a man in an orange vest was tracing out a four-square court in chalk.

Lastly, just a week or two before Labor Day, bright plastic signs announcing the building as a public elementary school went up over St. Thomas’s name set in concrete over the doorways, and wooden panels painted brown went up around the statue of the saint himself. The transformation is strangely temporary, as if the Department of Education is prepared to hand the school back at any time, put uniforms on the kids and take evolution out of the textbooks. Tear down the signs, let the saint out of his box, and return to the way it must have been before the paint on the door chipped away.

by J.B. Staniforth

I was visiting friends in Oakland in the late summer of 2001, and we found ourselves most nights at the Ruby Room, a small bar near Lake Merritt which may or may not still exist. It had a great jukebox and DJs that played music that I could enjoy, rather than just tolerate. And it had a single pool table, which one signed up for by writing one’s name on a chalk board by the cues.

One night, I was in line to play. The guy who had just won the game was an older fellow named John, and sported long dreadlocks and a faint Caribbean accent. He asked me where I was from and what I did—I told him “Canada,” and “a writer.” I asked him the same, and he said he lived in Oakland and that he’d gotten out of prison that afternoon, where he’d spent two months for being caught with some marijuana. I explained that in Canada you had to try hard to go to prison for marijuana, and that we didn’t use those stupid laws much anymore. John laughed ruefully and said that things were different in the States. I told him he should move up to Canada, that things were saner up there; John said he was happy enough just to be out of prison, but he’d think about it. Then he suggested we get to playing pool.

I won the coin toss and sank a solid off the break, but missed a second shot. He sank a stripe, then missed his next shot. Then, to my own surprise, I ran the table—sinking each of my remaining balls one by one, as though I had a plan. John didn’t mind—every time I sank a ball he laughed and said, “You’re killing me!” I was left with a table full of stripes and the eight-ball.

When it comes to angles in pool, I’m capable but not great. The eight-ball was resting against the bumper, half-way between the side and the corner pocket, while the cue-ball was right across the table from it. It was a hard shot to make either way, and I thought a long time about whether I should try to hit it from the side to scoot it into the corner on its left, or bounce it off the bumper and put it in the opposite corner.

“How you going to play it?” asked John. We were calling our shots. Finally I figured it’d be easiest to try and bounce the eight into the opposite corner, so I called it. “Alright, whenever you’re ready,” John said with a defeated smile.

I worked out the angles, lined the shot up carefully, wound up, and let go. The cue-ball fired across the table, hit the eight, and shot it like a bullet into the closest side-pocket. It went in with a sound like a cleaver hitting a cutting board. I closed my eyes, then opened them and looked up at John.

His eyes were huge and his mouth was open in a giant grin.

“You lost!” he said, bewildered.

“I guess I did,” I said.

“Ha! I can’t believe it!”

“Me neither.”

“You were so good!” said John. “But you lost!”

“Yeah,” I said.

“And I won!” he said, his grin widening as he surveyed the table full of stripes.

“You got it,” I said, starting to smile.

“I should just give it to you.” He paused. “But I won’t! Because you lost!”

I was laughing now too. “Congratulations.”

“No, I have to congratulate you!” he said, putting down his beer and vigorously shaking my hand. “What a great game you lost! You’re a really great loser! You should play against me all the time.”

by Vanessa Hope

Though rarely physical
Everyone is reaching in hunger
Safety is the place where you shall not be touched
Where diminution is a blanket or a shield
And to be hard is of little help

by Liz Wyckoff

She doesn’t look happy to see you, or the old woman to your right. Funny, you think. Helping people to see is her job. Think about that some more, though, and you realize it’s not true. The optometrist helps you to see. She’s just in charge of the diagnosis.

“This first one is for colorblindness,” she says, when she gets you into the testing room. She’s young and tall and looks like one of those sassy nurses from a television series. You can tell she’s dying to see something else. A boyfriend, maybe, during her break. Or an issue of Cosmo. Anything other than your hazy black pupils. Her voice is a lazy monotone: “When you’re ready please tell me what numbers you see.”

You stare into the screen full of blobs—pebbles in a streambed, a dish of mixed nuts, Dippin’ Dots: the ice cream of the future. You once read that the dessert was invented by a cryogenic scientist, which makes you think about your life, not just fifty years from now when your vision will be gone like that woman in the waiting room, or eighty years from now when you may be freeze-dried in some storage unit, but two hundred years from now when you may be youthful again, with perfect eyesight.

You call numbers out into the room like lottery powerballs: “Five, forty-two, sixty-seven, nine.”

“Which of these circles stands out?” she asks to test your depth perception. Now you’re leading a square dance: “Left, left, middle, right.”

“And this,” she says, “is for visual acuity.” It’s the standard vision chart with letters arranged in a pyramid—the old friend you’ve grown distant from after all these years. Without your contacts, you can’t even distinguish the E.

She leads you back out to the waiting room and delivers you into a chair. “The doctor will see you shortly,” she drones. On the flat-screen TV, a video provides information about glaucoma, “The Silent Thief of Sight.” A speeded up portrayal of the disease shows black shadows hovering around the periphery of the screen, then stretching in smoothly, like the gloved hands of a burglar, until everything goes blank. That’s when she takes the hand of the old woman next to you and leads her down the hallway. They get smaller and smaller until, finally, you can’t see them at all.