The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

These days he sells insurance in Brewer.

‘He told his mother he wanted to be buried wearing his button.

That is so bogus.’

I said, ‘His mom just moved it under his vest. I looked.’

It was a leather vest with silver buttons.

Tommy bought it at the Free Fair.

I was with him that day. There was a rainbow and

from a loudspeaker Canned Heat sang ‘Let’s Work Together.’

I’M HERE AND I’M QUEER said the button his mother moved beneath his vest.

‘She should have left it alone,’ said Indian Scontras.

‘Tommy was proud. He was a very proud queer.’

Indian Scontras was crying.

Now he sells whole life policies and has 3 daughters.

Turned out not to be so gay, after all, but

selling insurance is very queer, in my opinion.

‘She was his mother,’ I said, ‘and kissed his scrapes when he was young.’

‘What does that have to do with it?’ asked Indian Scontras.

‘Fuckin Tommy!’ said Phil, and raised his beer high.

‘Let’s toast the motherfucker!’

We toasted the motherfucker.

That was forty years ago.

Tonight I wonder how many hippies died in those few sunshine years.

Must have been quite a few. It’s just statistics, man.

And I’m not just talking about

!!THE WAR!!

You had your car accidents.

Your drug overdoses.

Plus booze

bar fights

the occasional suicide

and let’s not leave out leukemia.

All the usual suspects is all I’m saying.

How many were buried in their hippie duds?

This question occurs to me in the whispers of the night.

It must have been quite a few, although

it was fleeting, the time of the freaks.

Their Free Fair is now underground

where they still wear their bellbottoms and headbands

and there is mold on the full sleeves of their psychedelic shirts.

The hair in those narrow rooms is brittle, but still long.

‘The Man’s’ barber has not touched it in forty years.

No gray has frosted it.

What about the ones who went down

clasping signs that said HELL NO WE WON’T GO?

What about the car accident boy buried with a McCarthy sticker

on the lid of his coffin?

What about the girl with the stars on her forehead?

(They have fallen now, I imagine, from her parchment skin.)

These are the soldiers of love who never sold insurance.

These are the fashion dudes who never went out of fashion.

Sometimes, at night, I think of hippies asleep in the earth.

Here’s to Tommy.

Drink to the motherfucker.

For D. F.

In 1999, while taking a walk near my home, I was hit by a guy driving a van. He was doing about forty, and the collision should have killed me. I guess I must have taken some sort of half-assed evasive action at the last moment, although I don’t remember doing that. What I do remember is the aftermath. An event that occurred in two or three seconds beside a rural Maine highway resulted in two or three years of physical therapy and slow rehabilitation. During those long months spent recovering some range of movement in my right leg and then learning to walk again, I had plenty of time to reflect on what some philosophers have called ‘the problem of pain.’

This story is about that, and I wrote it years later, when the worst of my own pain had receded to a steady low mutter. Like several other stories in this book, ‘The Little Green God of Agony’ is a search for closure. But, like all the stories in this book, its principal purpose is to entertain. Although life experiences are the basis of all stories, I’m not in the business of confessional fiction.

The Little Green God of Agony

‘I was in an accident,’ Newsome said.

Katherine MacDonald, sitting beside the bed and attaching one of four TENS units to Newsome’s scrawny thigh just below the basketball shorts he now always wore, did not look up. Her face was carefully blank. She was a piece of human furniture in this big bedroom where she now spent most of her working life, and that was the way she liked it. Attracting Mr Newsome’s attention was usually a bad idea, as all of his employees knew. But her thoughts ran on, just the same.

Now you tell them that you actually caused the accident. Because you think taking responsibility makes you look like a hero.

‘Actually,’ Newsome said, ‘I caused the accident. Not so tight, Kat, please.’

She could have pointed out, as she had at the start, that TENS units lost their efficacy if they weren’t drawn tight to the outraged nerves they were supposed to soothe, but she was a fast learner. She loosened the Velcro strap a little while her thoughts ran on.

The pilot told you there were thunderstorms in the Omaha area.