other stories
other stories
2 MINUTES 45 SECONDS
A troubled guy gets higher than he wants to be and remembers things he wishes he could forget. Barren Magazine issue 21. Fiction.
Excerpt: A huge chunk of my ceiling falls off onto my bed while I’m sleeping like something out of the Godfather. I mean, that’s not really how the Godfather goes, but I did wake up to a chunk of plaster in the shape of a horse’s head in the bed next to me. I can’t think of anyone else to call and of course Dustin is still up because he’s always up at two A.M. just smoking weed and listening to LP’s (“fuck streaming, man”) and he’s like “of course, dude, come over. Mi casa and all that.”
But when I get to Dustin’s house, the house I lived in less than two months ago, he tells me that my old room is “Occupado, man,” offering me a sip of his whiskey. “Of course I needed to rent it out. But there’s a mattress on the floor in the basement. It’s pretty comfy, actually.”
THE FLOOR CHAMPION OF FOOSBALL
Runaway Darla gets placed in a teen psych ward and maintains an edge over her fellow inmates by secretly tossing her medication. Identity Theory. Fiction.
Excerpt: We were on the high security floor of a private teen psych ward. Our section was called "Violent Suicidal Ideation and Attempt." It was very elite. I was in because the cops found me nodding out in an abandoned apartment with a hypodermic needle to the right of my arm. My mother insisted I was trying to kill myself, so she put me in the psych ward instead of drug rehab. Fine, I told her, easier to get drugs handed to you in a Dixie cup than to have to buy them on the street, but that Haldol paralyzed me. With heroin, you sit still because you want to. On Haldol, you're trapped in your body. Some days you're too stiff to move, other days your hands are like rubber and you can't pick anything up, so I stopped taking it. They gave me the cup, I pretended to swallow, and then I spit the pills out in the toilet. After that, I'd go sit in the common room and drool on myself for a while so the nurses didn't get suspicious. I was the only one who could color in the lines and I was the floor champion of foosball.
Before I was a professor, I wrote a few feature articles for Bay Area weeklies. These were mostly about work: a faux finisher gold-leafing bathrooms, a studio manager reading countless job applications, a professor elected the “Sexiest Geek Alive” and a Bed and Breakfast proprietor who taught high school in his spare time. I did also write an article about not going to Burning Man. Click the button below to look at this archive.