Everett Maroon's Blog, page 11

Pool of Leaves

In two weeks, Emile will turn 2. He and I have been enjoying parent/child swim class at the Walla Walla YMCA since he was a scant six months, so if I do the math (fine, it’s easy math), Emile has been in a twice-a-week swim class for about 18 months now. When we first started out, I had a bit of anxiety about a few swim class-related issues, including

If people would notice my chest scars (they don’t because they’re too busy staring at how cute Emile is)
If I would slip and fall on the wet floor while holding the baby
If the baby would drown or contract some horrible, chlorine-resistent bacteria that started the next zombie apocalypse
If the baby would take a dump in the pool in front of everyone

I grant that some of these are less probable than others, and that nearly all of them are ridiculous. But hey, they were my fears, don’t judge.

We managed to slip rather easily into our routine—put on swim diaper, swim shorts, pack pajamas, two towels, YMCA pass, stroller, diaper bag full of any potential tool the parent of a young one may need. I’d park, get out Emile’s stroller, bag, towels, and finally Emile. Put car keys wallet, and cell phone into stroller so they don’t go into the pool with me. Walk through men’s room into pool area, take off Emile’s shirt (or coat and hat and pants and shirt if it’s winter), take off own shirt, kick off flip flops, walk into pool with Emile and start the mantra of “kick, kick, kick.”

Over this year-and-a-half Emile has fallen for the instructor, Meagan, and had a few pool friendships with Nico, Eleanor, and Duncan. He enjoys the Hokey Pokey at the end most of all, but is a big fan of the safety sit and the monkey bar crawl as well. I try to encourage him to do his pool tricks when we’re in any generic pool, but the warm pool at the Y is his clear favorite.

For the first oh, six months, I was terrified that he would poop while we were swimming, but diaper after diaper, twice a week, he’d come up clean. It was like being in the pool shut down his colon—hey who knows? So routines what they are, I began to make assumptions about how swim class would go, depending on his mood before we even left the house. Of course we have missed classes, like when we’re on vacation or someone in the house is miserable with a head cold. But for the most part, my guesses are right on. I typically plunk Emile down on the dry towel and he looks at his reflection, saying, “Mirror, Daddy. Emile in mirror. Mirror.”

(Mirrors, by the way, are amazing. Thank you, Lacan, for belaboring the point of here/not here.)

So last week, during the penultimate class for the summer session, I followed all of my usual steps for a successful swim class experience. We were kicking and reaching/pulling, and monkey bar crawling, and doing our underwater dunks with the best of them. I noticed something in the water, like an old, flaky leaf that had partially decomposed—kind of like what one would see in a compost pile. Great job wiping your feet, people, I thought to myself. Not everyone took the care I did when coming into the pool.

We sang Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, and practiced floating. We worked on overhand paddling. We played Red Rover through a blue-and-white Hoola Hoop. I looked over as something went past my vision, and saw there was more compost in the pool with us. What the hell? You parents need to get your act together! Good thing this class is almost over.

Instinctively I picked up Emile’s feet and checked the bottom of his swim shoes, and they were free of debris. He giggled at me. We did the Hokey Pokey and the final cheer—Hip Hip Hooray! What are we? Awesome!—and then high-fived the instructor and walked out of the pool. I was glad to be away from someone else’s mess. The other parents and toddlers for the next class were gathered around, ready to start their half-hour. I said hello to two of them because I know them. Networks what they are.

Plunked down the towel, patted Emile dry as he chatted to the mirror. Then I slid his shorts off and ripped off his diaper.

To find he was full of compost. Except it wasn’t leafy debris. It was shit. Flaky, dry, dark brown shit.

Emile had shit in the pool. I gasped. He laughed at me.

I went through five, six, seven diaper wipe cloths. The shit was like, magnetically charged to resist the wipes. Oh my God I’m the crappy parent with the crapping kid, I thought, as I struggled to clean my son. Of course it’s my kid who took a dump in the pool at the Y.

Fresh diaper on, PJs on, filthy towels and swim suit tucked away, and I hauled us off to the front desk to tell the staff that they had a biohazard on their hands. There were two young men up front. One was talking to a gym member, the other was eating dinner out of a styrofoam carton with a flimsy plastic fork. I made eye contact with him.

“Can I help you,” he asked me with food in his mouth.

“I’m sorry, but my child pooped in the warm pool.”

He stopped chewing.

“Just now?” No asshole, three weeks ago. I just felt like ruining your pad thai.

I nodded.

He dashed past me, back toward the pool area. I sighed, defeated.

And I jogged out of the gym so we could disappear before anyone could spot us.

An Open Letter to National Public Radio

This is the second day in a row I’ve taken to the keyboard to write about the unnecessary and hurtful treatment from the media toward Chelsea Manning, the Army private who leaked government secrets about our country’s involvement in Iraq and other activities around the world. Chelsea Manning is a declared transsexual woman, which we all know now because of her public announcement to the media and the rest of us. I was bothered by several news outlets yesterday which continued to use masculine pronouns and her former first name, but most of those organizations have a history of transphobic and insensitive reporting (I’m looking at you, Daily Beast).

What I did not expect was that National Public Radio would be one of those media institutions to so ignorantly take up its reporting on Pvt. Manning’s declaration. Your position was very clearly stated by your spokesperson:

“Until Bradley Manning’s desire to have his gender changed actually physically happens, we will be using male-related pronouns to identify him.” —Anna Bross, NPR Spokesperson

My issues with this statement are the following:

This is not in concurrence with Associated Press guidelines for reporting on transgender individuals—Use the pronoun preferred by the individuals who have acquired the physical characteristics of the opposite sex or present themselves in a way that does not correspond with their sex at birth.If that preference is not expressed, use the pronoun consistent with the way the individuals live publicly. [Source: AP Stylebook]
NPR’s statement to wait until “actual physical” [sic] changes happen is without precedent in journalism, has not been used by their organization for other articles about transgender individuals, and is nearly impossible to define. What counts as a change? Is it after Chelsea begins hormone therapy, or until that therapy results in breast growth? Will she have to wait until she receives sexual reassignment surgery, unlikely for her in the next 35 years while she serves her sentence in federal prison? Further, as she is a prisoner, any of her medical changes are dependent on the prison system. Is NPR really comfortable adjusting their reporting until the government takes a specific action in her case?
NPR is showing some bizarre interest in refusing to comply with Pvt. Manning’s clearly articulated request, as if using feminine pronouns and her chosen name would what, demean your reporting? Impinge journalistic integrity? This request, after all, is only about her, not a request for NPR to give all of its subjects randomly assigned pronouns, or switch their pronoun usage for anyone else. NPR somehow managed to accurately report on Lana Wachowski’s gender transition without balking. And life went on for your news agency.

Unfortunately, NPR’s  poor reporting did not stop there. On The Diane Rehm Show, broadcast on August 23, the day after Chelsea Manning’s announcement, guest host Tom Gjelten referred repeatedly to Chelsea as “Bradley” and “he,” going so far as to suggest that transgender people shouldn’t be given security clearances in the first place. NPR’s link to the show also uses masculine pronouns for Manning (unsurprising, given the above statement from Ms. Bross). And although several people called into the show to complain about the ways in which Mr. Gjelten and the show’s guests were talking about Pvt. Manning, they continued to use archaic and offensive terminology, like “gender confusion.” GLAAD has an accessible, easy to administer guideline on this:

DEFAMATORY TERMS

Defamatory: “deceptive,” “fooling,” “pretending,” “posing” or “masquerading”

Gender identity is an integral part of a person’s identity. Do not characterize transgender people as “deceptive,” as “fooling” other people, or as “pretending” to be, “posing” or “masquerading” as a man or a woman. Such descriptions are defamatory and insulting.

Defamatory: “she-male,” “he-she,” “it,” “trannie,” “tranny,” “shim,” “gender-bender”

These words only serve to dehumanize transgender people and should not be used.

I would also like to note that many transgender people work in government jobs across the country, with varying levels of security clearance. I myself used to work at the Social Security Administration, and not only did I never breach any citizen or resident’s identity information (we call it the numident), I had a 4.5 (out of 5) rating as an employee. Transgender people are trustworthy, reliable, intelligent, and capable, as much as anyone else. To suggest during the Diane Rehm Show today that transgender people are any less is offensive, not based on science or evidence, and poor journalism. One of the show guests made a parallel back to the middle of the last century when CIA operatives were not “allowed” to be gay because it was seen as a potential security breach. This was both not a useful comparison (in that Pvt. Manning was never a covert CIA operative during the Cold War), and it served strangely to reinforce the same logic that kept gay government employees in the closet, rather than discrediting that (already discredited, no less) policy. To the average listener today, both the guest host and the guests on the show seemed very uninformed about terminology, LGBT history or culture, and didn’t have enough basis to be taking on this story.

National Public Radio struggles for funding, I know. I’m a long time listener, and by long time, I mean 25 years. NPR is not The Daily Beast or The Guardian, or The New York Post. I know better than to listen to FoxNews for progressive or objective reporting, but NPR? And yet after yesterday and today, I may now hold your news organization in the same regard. I expect a full mea culpa from the top of your administration, and a full turnaround on the way in which you’ve reported the Chelsea Manning story. Or I suppose I and many people I know will stop listening to you altogether.

UPDATE: NPR’s Ombudsman blog released this statement just now—

Thursday, NPR decided to use male pronouns and explained its decision to The New York Times. On Friday, NPR’s Managing Editor for Standards and Practice Stu Seidel issued new guidance, saying that NPR’s “thinking has evolved” and that the network will honor Manning’s preferences.

From here on out, on first reference, the network will refer to the private as Chelsea Manning, while in the “near term” noting that she came to prominence known as Bradley Manning. The network also will use female pronouns.

Chelsea Comes Out, Internet Loses Its Mind

The individual sentenced to 35 years in Federal prison for leaking diplomatic telegrams has officially come out as trans this week. Chelsea Manning, at the very, very least, has had a hell of a week. As if there weren’t enough invective around her role in Wikileaks, a military counselor’s office where she formerly sought therapy released a private photo of her in a wig and makeup. Or rather, they leaked it and said it didn’t come from them. Now with Manning’s statement that she intends to start hormone therapy and requests people to use feminine pronouns for her, she has taken what little agency she has and reframed such images of her. I fear the nuances of this reframing, however, will be lost on the general public, who in the margins of mass media’s online article comment fields have brought out every little bit of transphobia they can muster.

Seriously. Never read the comments. Never.

We’ve also seen a number of stumbles from mainstream news outlets, including from the Today Show (and CNN, and The Guardian, and The New York Times) which I linked to earlier in this post. It may very well be that journalists want to make sure their readership understands that Bradley Manning and Chelsea Manning are the same person, but the AP has come up with half-decent guidelines for reporting on transfolk, so why can’t they just refer to those? It is not actually the case that “Bradley” Manning made an announcement about “his” gender identity, especially if we read the announcement itself.

Her name is Chelsea. HER name. And whatever we think of Pvt. Manning’s role in the Wikileaks scandal-thingy, it would be nice if we could leave her gender identity alone. But now of course popular culture and mainstream America’s weaknesses to understand difference will have a hard time parsing apart Ms. Manning’s new prisoner status, health care needs, traitor label, and so on, not to mention what this means for the average tax payer (I call it the “I have to pay for what?” syndrome). Whenever anyone enters into a direct relationship to state support—be it welfare, disability, the prison system, etc.—culture presumes that everyone not in that support system has a right to judge that individual. So on top of people’s comments related to leaking diplomatic cables and other not-public documents, on top of all of the invective around Manning’s trial and sentencing, and on top of the sensationalized imagery of an American soldier in lipstick, we now have Chelsea Manning making an open statement about her feelings for the rest of her life. It may be too much for our media, who love maintaining the facade of a polarized environment, to be able to let her move on in peace. And I’ll note with some irony that in the midst of our collective shock that Russia hates gay people, we never stop to ask ourselves where our limits are in supporting LGB—and especially T—people.

In any case, for today at least, there is one more famous trans person than Chaz Bono. But I don’t think the country will be watching her on Dancing with the Stars anytime soon, and I don’t expect to hear any news show talking head cheering her on for her quote-unquote bravery. Except maybe Rachel Maddow. But she’s a lesbian, so she doesn’t count.

NOTE: Chelsea has asked for letters to be sent to her in prison. She received a 35-year sentence. Individuals can get her correspondence address and the addresses of other trans and queer prisoners here.

UPDATE:  Pvt. Manning’s current address is—

Attn: PFC Bradley Manning
239 Sheridan Ave, Bldg 417
JBM-HH, VA 22211

You should use “Bradley” on the envelope and Chelsea in the letter itself, to ensure proper delivery and respect of her identity.

Protected: Sneak Peek at The Unintentional Time Traveler

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Sneak Peek at The Unintentional Time Traveler

I’m posting this only through this weekend, but here are the first two chapters of my forthcoming, debut YA novel, THE UNINTENTIONAL TIME TRAVELER. Enjoy!

Chapter One

I first jumped back in time on September 22, 1980, just a few weeks into high school, but nothing about how that day started was odd in any way. It’s not like the sun popped out of the sky and said, “Hey Jack, how about if you take a trip to a completely different time and place? Nothing will make any sense to you, and it’ll get even more ridiculous after that? Doesn’t that sound peachy?”

Nope. It was a regular day at first. I woke up from my incredibly annoying alarm clock, which of course alerted King, our Golden Retriever, that he should burst through my bedroom door and lick me all over the face until I smelled like rancid dog. He followed me down the green hall like usual, standing behind me even when I whizzed into the toilet, lest I don’t know, he miss out on any of my fun. He and I didn’t even notice anymore that the sink was wrapped in rolled up towels, held in place by constantly unraveling, goopy duct tape. It had been that way since my parents had started letting me use the bathroom by myself.

I have epilepsy, see, which means that on a surprise basis I lose consciousness as the neurons in my brain decide to go on a bender and start firing like a bunch of hyperactive kindergarteners hearing the recess bell. As one can imagine, this gets in the way of conversations, walking, brushing one’s teeth, or anything else worth doing. But like the padding over the hard surfaces around the house, I’ve gotten used to having seizures, even if I’m not happy about them.

Sometimes—maybe half the time—the “episodes” gave me a tiny bit of warning, mostly by screwing with my sense of balance. The ground around me would drop out from under me, like a ship listing hard to one side. Or my own private earthquake. I mastered the art of quickly sitting down and putting my head between my knees, before I would fall over into humiliating twitchiness. Before the darkness could collapse over me.

In the kitchen that special day, my mother sat staring out the back window, surrounded by the orange flower wallpaper she’d hung a few years before. She drummed her fingers on the round table built by my father and me. There was a glob of varnish on one side that I liked to feel when I ate my breakfast, because it was smooth and irregular, and the wood underneath was more yellow. As usual, Dad had left the paper folded open to the comics section and put it next to my cereal bowl. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I didn’t read them anymore. I’d moved on to the X-Men and the Fantastic Four. Anyone with super powers, really. I wasn’t choosy.

“What do you have after school today,” asked Mom, still looking out toward the poplar trees behind our house. They’d turned bright yellow, but hadn’t started littering the lawn yet. It would be my job to rake the leaves when they had fallen. Joy.

“Nothing. I mean, hanging out with Sanjay, but nothing else. Why?”

Jay lived across the street from me. He was one of a very few people I knew who never teased me about my seizures, but we’d known each other since preschool. He was kind of an outcast, too, just because he was Indian. We had some stupid kids in our school district.

“There’s a new study at the hospital for children with epilepsy. I enrolled you in it.”

“A what?” I didn’t feel like any extra studying, so I hoped this wasn’t what she meant.

She turned to me. Her usual sad eyes looked bright today.

“They’re experimenting with a new process to see if they can cure some cases of epilepsy.”

“A process” didn’t clear it up for me. I envisioned the taffy pulling machine in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.

“Is it a new drug?” I was on my sixth different pill. Most of them didn’t stop my episodes, but two of them were particularly awful. Pill Number One gave me delusions that I was a doctor, even though I was still a toddler at the time. Mom had found me behind the living room sofa, cutting at myself with a razor blade, announcing I was doing “surgery.” Pill Number Three made my extremities feel mushy and heavy all the time. I tripped a lot back then, which made for a lot of yuk yuks at my expense. I was not a fan of Pills Number One or Three.

“No, it’s like they have a new way of looking at your brain waves, and changing them. Dr. Barett told me about it.”

Dr. Barett, my neurologist, was fresh out of some big name medical program, top of his class, said the nurses. He was nice and extremely fit, but he seemed to like nerve cells more than people. I wasn’t surprised that this juicy new experiment to fix brain waves was his suggestion. But “changing” brainwaves sounded . . . intense. I nodded though, since Jay and I could hang out any time we wanted, and forgot about the appointment until I came home from school, when Mom hustled me out the door, jingling her car keys in irritation, like they were a cow prod instead of a device used to ignite our Ford’s engine.

The first part of the study session was familiar to me, because every month since I could remember I’d sat in a similar oversized earth toned vinyl chair and let some nurse apply blobs of cold putty all over my head. The nurses smelled like soap and antiseptic and I tried not to inhale their breath as they hovered over my face. They took a long time to attach the long, thin wires all over my head. Unlike the nurses I had for my monthly checkup, these two women didn’t talk to me while they worked. I wasn’t sure if I liked the quiet or not. Finally I was ready for all of the electricity in my brain to be scratched out by a machine that looked like one of those boxes that measured ground tremors. Then for half an hour I sat as still as a scared rat while they watched the patterns of my broken neurons.

The second part of the study was different, longer, and involved the head of the study, Doctor Dorfman. He was a man with thick sideburns and gorilla hands, sending electrical signals to me to see if he could change how my brain responded. I could ruin the test if I moved so much as a pinky toe. I tried to come up with all of the ways that staying perfectly still could benefit me, but after two minutes had only listed Buckingham Palace Guard and mime pretending to be dead.

I sat frozen for something like ten minutes, which was a sure-fire way to drive me up a tree. Nothing like telling a guy to stay still to make him need to move as much as possible. My left elbow started itching, and my right foot was in full pins-and-needles mode. The glob of putty above my left eye oozed down my forehead as slow as a slug, or at least it felt that way. I tried to see the clock on the wall ahead of me, but with my glasses safely tucked away on the white counter behind me, I couldn’t make out the position of the hands. It was just as well; knowing the time would probably have made me obsess about how much longer I’d be stuck in the chair.

A metal click and then dull hum came over the PA, but I stayed still.

“How are you doing, hon,” asked Cindy, the lab technician. She had bright red hair not to be found in nature, and said everything through a smile. I liked her immediately.

My father had always said “Smile and they never know what you’re thinking.” So I worried I shouldn’t trust her, for all of her grinning. But since she’d asked me something, I answered her.

I hadn’t even spoken yet when the seismograph thing set up next to me went wild, scratching out thick, dark lines on the paper. Alerting the world: It’s alive!

“I’m okay. Itchy, and I think my right foot’s asleep.”

“Go ahead and scratch if it’s not your head, and shake your foot a little.”

I dug at my elbow through my shirt, which didn’t eliminate the itch well enough, but it would have to do. I couldn’t dig under my sleeve without upsetting the wires that trailed from all over my head. I pounded my foot on the floor, trying to startle it enough to wake up. Scratching and flopping my sneaker around, I am so cool.

Without thinking, I reached up to stop the glop on my head from getting in my eyes. I knew better than to touch anything other than the tip of my nose, but once I’d started moving itches popped up everywhere, screaming for attention, and I forgot myself.

“Oh, hang on there, bucko,” said Dr. Dorfman, who’d come into the room from behind me. He put my hand down on the armrest. His touch was heavy and cold; his hand a hairy giant on top of mine.

“Don’t mess with the wires.”

I took a breath and relaxed, having heard this a million times before. He walked over to the machine, running his hand over his sideburns. A long strand of connected paper had piled up in the basket next to the small monitor, and he bent down low to snag the printout in the middle until he had a ribbon of it to examine. Cindy came out from the next room.

“There’s the abnormality,” I heard him say to her, pointing at the paper in a few places. “Let’s run one more test since he’s still hooked up, only this time I want to make a change to the stimulus.” They walked away, talking, and I was free to sneak in a scratch at whatever needed attention. At the moment, nothing bothered me. My body never cooperated. It didn’t demand much when I was allowed to deal with it.

The doctor was back at my side, talking loudly to me as if I had hearing problems, not a seizure disorder. He was a lot older than my regular doctor, though in Dr. Dorfman’s defense, my regular doctor was like a Calvin Klein model. Dr. Dorfman had gray streaks clumping together at his temples and could maybe model vacuum cleaners, if that. Cindy said his work was the Rosetta Stone of neurology research, whatever that meant. I liked him enough, though nothing about rocks seemed cutting edge to me. Weren’t rock tools invented by cavemen?

“Okay, Jack, we’re going to do just one more test. It’ll only take a few minutes.”

I nodded, sighed, and waited. Always with the “few minutes.” A buzz zipped along my spine, which caused me to jerk a bit, and the machine roared.

I lost all sense of the room, the wires, the cold putty. In a flash of painful light I was on a hillside , in mid-step, running up a dirt trail, holding something in my hand. I wanted to know the shape of it, but couldn’t figure it out. I had the impression that I held it a lot. Something felt wrong with how I was running, too, as if the effort it normally took to lift my feet had been recalibrated.

“Do you notice anything,” asked the doctor through the microphone in the other room. I blinked, saw the pale green walls around me and the fuzzy metal clock on the far wall. I was back. But of course I hadn’t left.

“I saw something,” I said. With each passing second, I felt less sure about where I’d been. Like a dream fading away.

“Can you describe it,” he asked, panting a little at the end of his question. He creeped me out.

I told him, feeling foolish, about the hill and the dirt path. A weird image came to me just then, that I had been wearing strange shoes. Leather moccasins, maybe. But I lived in these red Converse high tops. Why would I think of moccasins? Where did I even learn about moccasins?

He wrote down what I said, turning off his microphone partway through. I could see him through the observation glass, talking with Cindy. This would be a good time to know how to read lips, I thought. He stepped back into the room after a couple of minutes and told me I’d done a good job, clapping a hand on my shoulder. His palm took up all of the real estate I had there, but I sat there rigid. I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to be tough.

Cindy unhooked me from the machine; I was grateful to end transmitting all my brain waves to everyone in the room, even if people couldn’t exactly read my mind from the printout. She wheeled over a tray, and dabbed a hand cloth into a steel bowl of warm water. Wiping most of the putty off of my scalp and temples in silence, I noticed she wasn’t smiling anymore. I looked at a picture of Olympic swimmers on the wall in front of me. What the hell was this poster about, and why was it here, of all places? Were we supposed to aspire to athletic greatness even if we could have a seizure in the water? Finally I was done and Cindy nodded to me that I could leave, so I wandered back to the waiting room.

The doctor was talking to my mother, who was hunched over an issue of People. She looked up at him and waited for him to update her.

“Jack was great today,” he said, “and I’d like to see him next week if you can bring him in. I think we can isolate the source of his seizures.”

“Oh, really,” she asked, looking at me. “He’s such a good kid. It’s just terrible that he has to deal with these episodes. I’d hoped he’d outgrow them by high school.”

“Mom,” I said, in an attempt to get her to stop.

“It’s okay, Jack,” the doctor said, now grinning, except he looked kind of in pain. It was clear he didn’t make facial expressions all that often. “I’m really glad we got you in this study.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I shrugged. But I was worried.

#

I’d almost forgotten about the weird sensation from the first day in the study. I stuck to my routine of alert against the episodes. The rest of that week I took my little blue pills with even more care about timing, and watched where I was walking, as if I was extra prone to a seizure. Maybe my wonky neurons knew their days were numbered and would try to act up more than usual. I stared at my bike after coming home from school the rest of the week after the study session, refusing to pedal even to the edge of the subdivision. The dirt hills and slopes a couple of miles out of town where there was new construction in progress would just have to exist without me racing over them. I could sense the little ninjas in my brain, getting ready to attack me the moment I lowered my DEFCON rating against my interior assault.

Even though I stayed on watch against an ambush, Saturday morning as usual I stripped the padding on my bathroom sink and threw the towels in the laundry. One week was all it ever took for them to get moldy and the tape to disintegrate, and then little sticky gray strings would hang off of the towels, clinging to my hands and clothes. Not exactly the fashion statement I wanted to make. And that tape glue was wicked hard to get off my skin unless I wanted to bathe in lighter fluid, which was a bad idea for obvious reasons. So I tried to keep things tidy. After I’d repaired my bathroom I wandered around the house looking for tasks to do. It made it easier to ask for movie money if I could point to things I’d already accomplished.

That afternoon Jay found me in the driveway oiling the chain on my bike.

“Whatcha up to,” he asked, craning his head around. He was as interested in mechanics as I was in entymology, which was to say, he couldn’t care less.

“Just keeping things lubed,” I said, rotating the pedals. I clicked the tin can, watching drops of oil fall onto the chain.

“Sounds hot,” he said, licking his tongue over his lips, and we laughed.

“Want to go for a ride,” he asked.

“Nah, I have homework still. But you could come over for dinner. Mom’s got a chicken in the oven.”

Jay was a secret omnivore, as his whole family was vegetarian. He was always happy to devour meat products.

“I could handle that,” he said, sniffing the air.

“You can smell it from that far away?”

“Nope,” he said. “Just your pits and the oil can. But I thought it was worth a shot.”

#

The Monday after the seizure study, I inhaled my cereal and washed it down with a small wavy glass of orange juice, ignoring the newspaper. Grabbing my lunch sack off of the kitchen table, I scrambled out to the street, knowing I was late for the bus. The driver, Miss Glover, never waited for anyone. We were lucky she even slowed down enough for students to climb aboard. She’d clearly chosen an occupation that would put her in close contact with people she detested, just so she could challenge us twice a day.

Hearing the door bang shut behind me, my mother told me to have a good day. Through the screen door she was grayed out, slightly ghostly. I turned and saw the bus lurching down the hill. It would be a race to the corner. Would she break the speed limit in the subdivision? Her gunning engine answered me: Oh yes. It’s on, you mofo.

Our school bus was a Thomas Conventional model, built on an International Harvester chassis. Bright yellow, with a short, wide snout, it had a rear-loaded diesel engine with a lot of horsepower but not very good torque, and so it struggled on any serious incline. I pounded up the broken sidewalk, hoping I wouldn’t trip or slip on any wet leaves. I figured everyone on the bus was watching me, but I didn’t spend time worrying about what I looked like. I flew through the last 10 yards, beating Miss Glover to the corner. I did a little dance as she opened the door.

“All right, Inman,” she said, “stop celebrating and get on.”

I walked around the front of the bus as the red lights clicked on and off. I’m sure I looked terrific panting up the steps, trying to catch my breath. I braced myself before my classmates could start heckling me.

In the second to last row, I took the only empty seat and set my bag between my feet. This was my usual spot, because although we grumbled about too many rules at school, we were predictable as hell. Jay flashed me a “hey” from the last row.

“Spaz,” said Kiernan Maloney, halfway under his breath. He was a stoner, in my grade, which he accomplished by getting held back one year. It must have been a shock to him that toking up behind the football field bleachers wasn’t a fast path to the honor roll.

Kiernan had fire-red, thick wavy hair, and freckles covered every inch of his head. Maybe in another school he would be the target of bullies because of all those freckles, but in my school, he did most of the bullying himself. I closed my eyes and pretended not to hear him.

Sanjay poked me in the shoulder from the seat behind me. “Glover really had to slam on the breaks, man. Way to run.”

“Thanks,” I said, turning around to face him. My heart was finally starting to settle down in my chest.

“Did you do the algebra homework last night,” I asked.

“Yeah, why?” Sanjay fumbled in his backpack and pulled out his tattered algebra textbook. Catholic schools like ours held onto things like math books way longer than the public schools did—in my textbook were the signatures of previous owners going back 13 years. The more basic math books were funny because the word problems gave their age away, with crap like, “Timmy needs 37 bolts for his wagon. If Tommy has 2/3 of the bolts Timmy needs, how many bolts does Tommy have?”

At some point our teachers relaxed about how carefully we handled our books, which we protected only with a brown paper grocery bag, taped to the hardback covers. Paper bags fell apart over the course of the school year, though, eventually disintegrating and revealing how beat up the book really was underneath. Jay’s algebra text was missing part of the back cover; mine bared the inside of its spine every time I opened it, and it smelled like wet soil.

“I can’t figure out number 24,” I said. Only the odd-numbered problems had answers in the back.

Kiernan leaned across the aisle, his white teeth showing against the tan polka dots on his skin. “Are you two queers cheating? You wouldn’t be cheating, would you?” His undone tie dangled; Kiernan always waited for a nun or teacher to force him to finish dressing for class.

“Do you hear something,” asked Sanjay, keeping his head turned away from Kiernan. I stifled a giggle. Kiernan huffed at us and sat back, and Jay rolled his eyes at me.

We hopped off the bus, walking to the oversized front doors of the school.

“I thought high school was going to be so great, but it’s just the same crap,” Sanjay said.

“Why should today be any different,” I said.

Two-thirty took forever to roll around because I was couldn’t stop thinking about returning to the brain study after school. I counted down the hours. None of the doctors before Dorfman had held out any kind of hope for me recovering. My mother had never gotten over her seizures, after all, but at least her medication kept her seizure-free, if not kind of tired all the time.

By the time I sat back down in the squeaky green vinyl chair, I’d mostly dismissed my weird hallucination, which is what I figured my experience was. Since it was a trick of my own mind, I thought it wouldn’t happen again. Brains were all just a gross mass of chemicals and electricity, and at least outside in the world, lightning didn’t strike the same spot twice.

Chapter Two

Mom held onto my arm so I couldn’t leave the waiting room.

“You’re such a strong boy,” she said. I translated this into “You’re as frail as a frozen petuna.” She often told me the opposite of what she was really thinking. She’d managed her own epilepsy her whole life, and was always on the lookout for new medications to get my seizures under control. When I was younger she often broke down crying about how she’d “made me wrong.” We didn’t have those conversations any more, the ones with her blue eyes holding onto mine, searching for the defect inside me. I never knew how to respond to her desperation. I wondered if she’d ever talk with me about how she feared I’d get lost to my bad brain waves, but so far she hadn’t brought it up.

“Mom, I’m almost 15. I’ll be fine.”

I reached over and squeezed her wrist, telling her I’d be back soon, and handing her an issue of Time Magazine. Something with a politician on the cover.

I waved as I walked out of the waiting room with the nurse because my mother still seemed nervous for me. Soon enough the machines would show the doctor that my heart was pounding, cause nothing beats having your body betray you to all the other people in a given room. Maybe by the time I was hooked back up to the chair, I would have calmed down.

“Okay, Jack, we’re going to do the first part of the test now. Stay as still as possible. You know the routine.” Cindy flashed me a quick grin. She was a Cheshire cat who’d convinced herself that she was just a nurse. I wondered who else was in this experiment. How many of us knew the routine? Were they all teenagers like me? Did we all have the same type of epilepsy? I had no idea. Other than my mom, I didn’t know anybody with a seizure disorder .

As soon as Cindy started pressing putty onto my head, body parts that needed scratching sprang up like thirsty weeds. I resisted, trying to imagine I was at the beach with warm ocean water splashing over my feet. I could be a mean raft surfer. I didn’t realize I’d started smiling. I relaxed my muscles and listened to the needles on the machine scribbling out my faulty brain waves. If the doctor minded me falling asleep in the test, a nurse would wake me up. But sometimes they wanted to catch me napping; I wasn’t sure why.

Some time later the recording stopped and the Dr. Dorfman piped up over the intercom. He had a new moustache today that made him sound different.

“It’s time for the next part of the test. You okay in there?”

I popped him a thumbs up. He had also gotten a hair perm since our last session and now looked like a cross between Wolverine and a standard poodle—two otherwise reasonably attractive beings that should have never combined into one.

“Good. Okay, here we go, Jack,” said Dorfpoodle.

A light started flickering on off, on off, on off, in rapid succession. Blinking lights were known to cause seizures, but no medical folks had ever used it on me.

Tingles along my arms. I tasted a ham and cheese sandwich in my mouth, as if I’d just swallowed it. What the hell? I racked my memory for when the last time had been that I’d eaten anything approximating ham and cheddar cheese, but that was crazy, since I’d been sitting here for hours and it’s not like anybody tastes something in their mouths that they haven’t consumed in six months. Slow down little brain.

I wanted to say something to the doctor—stop the test—or the technician—something is wrong. But I couldn’t open my mouth or move. The world jolted to the left, like the whole planet had crashed into a massive, interstellar iceberg, and then the room around me was gone. Replaced, somehow.

I tried to adjust to the very bright sunlight. I was moving, fast, still feeling like I was at an angle to the ground. Running, that’s what it was. I stopped and grabbed onto the thing next to me to steady myself and my stomach. Maybe it was that stupid Monte Cristo sandwich memory. Monte Cristo sandwiches are greasy and gross, anyway.

I sucked up huge swallows of air, and then I told myself I was stupid, because hallucinations don’t need to breathe.

Adjust, adjust, I told myself. I stood up straighter and looked around. I thought I’d been clinging onto a tree, but examining it more closely, I saw it was a pole. I was outdoors, on a hillside, the same as the last time. Maybe the pole had been a branch before, but at some point it had been whittled down and sanded, the kind of woodworking project I could see myself having. There were depressions in the wood under my thumb. I looked and saw a name carved into the side: Jac.

Jack is my name. It occurred to me that I should try pulling the wood from the ground. It popped out easily, and then I knew, like I’d only recently forgotten, that I had held the pole in just this way many times before. Calluses had formed on the insides of my fingers and palm where I gripped the pole. Not a pole. A stick. It was a walking stick. My walking stick.

I’d been running over a well worn trail of dirt with tall yellow-green grass on either side. I wore soft leather shoes and no socks. Moccasins again. This was one consistent hallucination. Go, me.

Behind me was a clearing, and past that a tiny village at the bottom of the long hill. Small wooden buildings bleached from constant heavy daylight lined up in a square, with small blond stones serving as a thin walkway between the structures. Most of them faced each other, built around the dusty courtyard. It was either early morning or late in the day, with the sun and moon passing each other in the sky. Birds chirped excitedly to each other but I couldn’t tell if they were waking up or squawking their goodnights. I mean, because I didn’t know anything about birds. Comics and car engines, okay, and bicycle gears, I had a sense of those, but chirping things and actual wildlife were not my forte.

I got a little more oriented. The scene felt slanted because I was on a steep hill. Don’t anyone call me Einstein, I thought.

I searched the space around me for other people. I was still panting a little but I’d caught my breath. I’d never had a dream before where I had any sense of control over it. So I trudged up the rest of the hill, feeling my quads resist the hard-packed soil of the narrow trail. Larger pebbles pushed against the tender soles of my shoes. If I was going to have a hella intense mind trip, I might as well check out the scenery.

“You’re tardy,” said a woman coming out from a rambling, large yellow farmhouse on the left. “You worry me when you’re late.”

In the small town there couldn’t have been more than two dozen buildings, but that was crowded compared to this. Up here was only this house, a bright red barn with white accents behind it, and expansive fields, until the land for the next farmhouse began, miles off in the distance, the silo next to it appearing only as big as my thumb.

Water trickled somewhere, but I didn’t see anything like a river or waterfall. I looked for cars but all I saw were empty dirt or gravel roads connected around the courtyard, and one wider dirt road heading south out of town. The road collapsed on each side, the result of narrow wheels cutting into the soft ground on a regular basis.

“Sorry,” I said, turning back to face her. I figured I should walk over to her, if we were going to have a conversation.

“Sorry who,” she asked. Well, wasn’t she precious?

She put one hand on her hip and stared at me. She seemed young, or at least younger than my mother, but she also looked more worn out, with ruddy skin and a streak of gray hair running from the top of her head into a tight bun at the back. She had the same build as my mother—lanky, but also with the slightest hump at the end of her neck where it met her shoulders, as if she’d spent a lot of time bent over.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” I said.

“Sweet Jackie,” she said, a small smile spreading on her lips. “Come on, I need your help with the heifer.” She paused. “Did anyone follow you?”

Paranoid much? I shook my head and she led me around to the back of the house. A few strands of her hair had fallen out around the bun, so it looked a bit like the frayed apron strings that hung down at the back of her waist. We walked past a few busted wooden buckets lying in the dirt and what I figured were bushel containers, all of them empty and dropped carelessly on the ground.

Nothing was familiar. And that was stupid of me anyway, since I was just in my head and not anywhere real. But this dream-mind gig didn’t seem to be based in any memory of mine.

I thought about the valley—no green street signs, no traffic signals, no fire hydrants, no curbs, no telephone booths. I had a nagging sense that I should know why those things weren’t there, but now I was having trouble finishing my thoughts. It was just so bright out here—

I woke with a start. Doctor Dorfpoodle was in my face, holding my eyelids open and checking my pupils with a pen light. I was surrounded by his massive sideburns. I could smell his perm. Perm didn’t smell so good.

“Jack, there you are,” he said, sounding worried.

“Yes,” I said, trying to push myself into the back of the chair to get some space.

“You had a seizure,” he said, putting the pen light away. Maybe I should call him Captain Obvious. His hands free, he began to stroke his beard. “We need to put you under observation for a few hours. But the good news is, I think we’ve found the source of the abnormality.”

“I don’t think I like ‘put you under.’ But this is good news?”

“Well, you’re clever. Yes, it’s a positive development.” He didn’t seem as happy as he should be.

He didn’t know how annoying he was. But because I still felt out of sync with gravity, I figured I shouldn’t tell him.

“Put your head between your legs and take deep breaths,” he said. The nurse unhooked the wires from my head one by one as I sat with my knees up to my chest, my heels digging into the thin foam seat. Of course I’d learned to do this when I was three, but I pretended his suggestion was brilliant neuroscience I’d never heard before. I played with the worn out corduroy fabric at my knees.

The doctor looked at me. “I have to talk to your Mom, but you’ll see her soon. We’re just going to admit you for a little while. It’ll be okay.” He walked out and I waited to hear the door shut. I thought about my world history homework that I hadn’t started yet. Now Mom would have to go home and come back to get my text book. Sorry, Mom.

“So I seized,” I asked Cindy.

“Yeah, I’m sorry, fella,” she said, washing my scalp with a warm sponge. I waited for a fake smile from her but it didn’t come.

She made a few more passes over my hair, and then another quick rinse in a small plastic bucket. Usually the nurses didn’t take much care to get the putty off of me, leaving me to scream in my own shower with a gallon bucket of shampoo and a loofa, but Cindy was working to get most of it out on her own. I wondered if she was actually nice. Maybe I should bother talking to her after all.

Also, I had questions. “I was out a long time, huh?”

“Oh no, dear, just a second. We were in here right away and you woke up on your own.”

“A second?”

“Sure, hon, just 15 seconds total. You’re totally fine.”

I felt like I’d been gone for at least five minutes. I wondered if I should tell anyone.

#

I couldn’t stop thinking about the hill and the woman in the apron—I could recall with clarity the detail of the flower pattern on the fabric, the smell of the earth, the sounds of chirping bugs, the crispness of the air and how it felt inside my lungs. I’d run up that hill, pounding away and stabbing at the ground with my walking stick. Why would a dream in a seizure be so thick with details?

I’d had weird non-memories invade before, all tied to grand mal seizures I’d had: a tool shed on fire, feeling the heat radiating toward me from the burning supports of the structure; getting to Contestant’s Row on The Price Is Right and not knowing how much to bid on a curling iron and a year’s supply of hair dye. In another seizure-dream I’d rowed across a broad, foggy lake in a leaky aluminum boat. Somehow, this experience was different. For starters, I’d never had the same false memory twice.

I got nervous thinking about it. What if I could get lost in a hallucination? What if I never came back? If the whole point was to find a way to end my illness, why was I having more seizures now? Adults sucked—always pretending to have all of the answers and then acting like nothing was wrong when clearly shit was falling apart. I didn’t want to be in the study anymore. But at the same time, I wanted to know more about the weird place that inhabited a spot in my mind. I told myself I’d go to the study again and not make a fuss, because even though there seemed to be so much bad going on there, I needed to know more. Where was this uh, mind-space? One thing I knew for sure: I wasn’t getting the whole story from Dorfman the Bearded.

#

My mother watched me push the food around on my plate. “You need to eat your salad, honey,” she said. I poked at lettuce with my fork, as if I could digest it through the metal utensil.

“Jack, come on. Do what your mother says,” my father said. I didn’t need to hear him tell me twice, not that he would have hurt me. Dad never raised a hand in anger, and good thing. If he’d been the violent type, he could have done a lot of damage. He had two of the largest, thickest hands I’d ever seen on a person. They must have weighed five pounds each. When we went fishing I had to set up all of the hooks with bait, because he just couldn’t handle little bits of squid on the tiny hooks. I didn’t know why I needed to hear my father tell me to eat lettuce; it seemed ridiculous and at the same time, I wouldn’t have taken a bite without him nudging me.

“Your Mom says the study is going well. What do you think?” Why isn’t anyone concerned about my seizure, I wondered.

“Other than having an episode today, it’s cool, I guess,” I said. I picked up the two blue pills next to my glass of milk and popped them in my mouth.  I took two pills in the morning, two at 3 o’clock, two at dinner, and 2 before bed. As I grew I’d had to take more of them, to keep my brain waves manageable.

“Well, Dr. Dorfman told us that may happen from time to time, but it’s a sign they’re isolating where the seizures come from.”

“I didn’t know that.” Because why tell the dumb kid?

Dad put down his fork and knife, studying me. “We all have something wrong with us, Jack,” he said. “If we can sort this out, great, but if not, you’re okay anyway.”

“Thanks for the badge of approval, Dad,” I said.

He looked at me, his eyebrows furrowed like two angry caterpillars.

“Jack, I’m serious. Don’t mock me.”

I nodded.

“I just wonder why I’m doing this study, is all. I don’t like blacking out.”

“See,” he said, picking up his fork and pointing it at Mom, who had gotten up from the table again to wipe down the kitchen counter, “he says it’s ‘cool,’ but it’s really not. Is it at least groovy?”

“Don’t say groovy, Dad, please.”

Before he could protest I stuffed an enormous piece of lettuce in my mouth, knowing that he wouldn’t ask me to continue while I was still chewing.

“Well, if it takes embarrassment to get him to eat well, so be it,” he said to my mother. “You know what came into the shop today, Jack?”

I shook my head to show him I would love to hear his answer, and was grateful he’d changed the subject. Iceberg lettuce was harder to eat fast than it looked.

“A 1949 Chevrolet Deluxe.” This was a sweet lowrider of a car, the sweeping back fading over an old-style chrome bumper, something like a 216 cubic inch, inline 6-cylinder over valve engine that sounded like a factory at high production when it fired up, but was so powerful it was the engine standard at Chevy for going on three decades. Where the engine and body work was solid on the ’49 Deluxe, the wiring faded fast and so my father probably had to start there, if it was in his shop for repair or restoration.

“Really? Who owns that?” Dad knew nearly everyone in town with an antique car because he was on the regional classic car circuit. I took another horrendous bite of salad, in a show of good faith.

“Arnold Metchum bought it at an estate sale a couple of weeks ago, and wants to get it into running shape. The whole electrical system needs to be stripped out and redone, for starters.” Arnold had a big plot of land near the border with Kentucky where he kept his nicest showcase pieces. My favorite was a 1924 Studebaker Big 8 Wagon, even if it wasn’t a hot rod or racing car. The Big 6 was more common, because it didn’t have quite enough horsepower to drag the heavier 8 frame, but I appreciated the enthusiasm for size.

“Groovy,” I said.

My father turned to Mom, who was tidying up the stovetop already, squinting at the counter to make sure she’d wiped up thoroughly. “I think he’s mocking me again.” She chuckled and sat down, placing a pitcher of iced tea on the table.

“No really, that’s cool. And I bet you’re happy to work a Deluxe, right?”

“I really am. I’m so sick of Pintos and Chevelles. All these crappy cars just because of the fuel crisis.” He stabbed at his meatloaf and made a cube of it with his fork. Meat cubes, mm. “Nobody in town can afford anything else, anyway. I guess it doesn’t matter. But stop by the shop if you want to help work on it. Armand and Frank like it when you come by. They get to show you things and pretend you don’t know more than they do.”

I laughed. My father’s employees had known me ever since I was a baby. I’d always be a baby to them. It was frustrating and nice all at once.

My mother sat down at the table. “Jack, you look tired. Maybe you should take a nap before you do your homework.”

“I’m okay, Ma. Besides, I did most of my homework at the hospital while I waited for them to send us home.”

“He’s okay, Melly. He’s old enough to know when he needs to rest, right, Jack?”

I nodded, and asked to be excused. I piled my dishes in the sink, not eager to wash them.

Back in my room I pulled out my history textbook, reading with great boredom about the Western Expansion. I flipped through the pages; three lessons ahead always seemed more interesting than what we were on at any moment. Staring at me from the page was a black and white picture of a man on a horse in some random town. Those stones in the street. Cobblestones. That’s what I’d seen in my vision. Cobblestones. The ones I’d seen were configured in a different pattern than this, less fancy. Who knew there were different ways to stick stones in the ground? How amazing-boring.

Was I hallucinating cobblestones because of my textbook? I didn’t know what it meant, or if it meant anything.

#

My mother had noticed something wasn’t working right after I started walking as a baby. I would stand, my eyes fluttering for long seconds while she waved her hands in front of me or patted me on the back, assuming I was choking in silence. I also had a habit of staring into space for whole minutes. Just as she would panic, I’d come around, either doing whatever baby thing I’d been engaged in, or with a blank look on my face that dissolved into some new interest as if I’d never been lost.

Because she’d had this same behavior as a child herself, she knew what it was, and she took me to the pediatrician right away, insisting they help me.

The doctor gave her a bottle of pills and a strict regimen, but wouldn’t sit down and talk to her about my diagnosis. That’s when she discovered me behind the pink living room couch, slashing my fingers with a razorblade, and declaring that I was going to be a doctor someday. We saw another doctor, this one a son of her coworker at Woolworth’s who had just finished his residency. He had carefully slicked back hair and a Timex watch, so she knew he had aspirations but wasn’t too smug with himself. He looked at the prescription bottle and ran tests on my brain so he could tell her about the nature of my specific disorder. She already knew about the haphazard firing of synapses that stole time out of my days and put me at risk as I learned to navigate the world.

That began the routine of pills, crushed and covered in chocolate syrup so I would take them, and the other daily precautions. My teachers and friends’ parents were brought in by my mother on the vigilance against vulnerable alone time, so all of my episodes happened in front of other people. This did wonders for my social standing at school. I became a favorite target of freckled Kiernan Maloney, friendly neighborhood bully. At least I’d gotten good at avoiding him, for the most part.

#

“Okay Jack, ready to go,” asked Dr. Dorfpoodle, who was sticking with his hair permanent for the long haul.

I nodded that I was set to begin, and he put a hand on my shoulder. As if I was ready to bolt and run. Maybe I was.

“You don’t have to be nervous. We’re here to make sure you’re okay.”

I wasn’t okay the last time, I thought, but I’m here anyway, aren’t I?

I nodded. I nodded a lot without meaning it.

I wasn’t even surprised that shortly into the text, I had zapped out of the lab room.

Once again I had hold of the walking stick. I felt the top part of the pole with my fingers and traced over the carved Jac in the wood. It was bright, like the last time, but I knew I just had to wait to adjust to the sun. The same terrain came into relief. Hilly path, village in the valley. I saw that farther up, past the small town, the steepness settled out and at the top was the yellow farm house from before. It seemed more run down than the last time I’d hallucinated—maybe I wasn’t as consistent an imaginer as I’d thought.

I turned around, noticing the uneven earth under my feet, and caught my breath—at the bottom of the hill more fields stretched through the valley in a green and brown checkerboard. Small white farm houses, most near bright red barns, a few with white or gray grain silos, stood out against the broad terrain. I’d seen farms beyond my suburban neighborhood, but never with such unbroken ground. I shaded my eyes against the brightness and faced the slope of the trail again. Crickets and birds harmonized all around me. There were no mechanical sounds in earshot. Birds couldn’t come anywhere near the noise level of a jet engine, of course. Which was, you know, fortunate for the other woodland creatures and all. On Friday nights at home I went to sleep with the steady sound of the local race track humming through my window. The quiet here left me too alone with my dumbass thoughts. I could try to walk my way out of here. I needed to pick a point and head there.

Up the hill seemed better. I returned to that sensation of walking in a new way. I should be alert for a seizure. When gravity seemed shaky to me, it meant I was on a course to lose consciousness. I breathed hard, hoping to flood my brain with oxygen, and potentially stave off an episode, which was probably silly, because if I was here I was probably seizing in the hospital clinic room. Early morning air rushed into me, crystalline somehow, refreshing. In the cloudless sky the sun and moon hung low, on a collision course. I’ve been here before. Last time.

Unsteady as I climbed the steep hill, I bent over, plunging my walking stick into the weeds and putting my free hand on my knee to brace myself as I went. My fingers explored the sides of my kneecap, noting differences. They were smaller, less pronounced than I knew them to be. This is a vision, I told myself. Just a hallucination. It’s a seizure-dream. It’s okay to be strange in a seizure-dream. All bets are off, right?

I straightened up and something shifted on my head. Reaching up, I removed a woven hat, frayed a little at the back. Something had taken a bite out of it. A thin brown strip of leather cinched the brim together, giving it a strong shape. Was I wearing a hat the last time I’d had a vision? I didn’t recall. Yanking my stick out of the ground, I started back up the hill. From behind me, horse hooves drowned out the bird calls. Up from the village a young girl trotted along on a brown horse, calling to the animal to slow down as she saw me clambering along.

“Jac, you’re usually early,” she said. This must have been directed at me, since there wasn’t anyone else around. “I don’t believe I’ve ever arrived before you.”

“There’s a first time for everything,” I said, huffing.

“That’s a strange response.” She looked down at me from her perch in the saddle. “You look unwell. Do you wish to ride with me?”

I’d never ridden a horse before and had no idea how to get up there with her.

“I can just walk.”

“Clearly, you are capable of walking,” she said, and she laughed, flinging her long blond hair around behind her with a whip of her head. She had on a tattered but mended dress, mostly white with blue piping, and brown ankle boots. Well she’s a strange bird, I thought.

“Here, I’ll drop the stirrup.” With that, the girl took her feet out of the leather strap where they had been braced, and held out her hand. She pulled her dress away so I could see what I was doing. I didn’t know where to begin.

“Good Lord, Jac, just stick your toe in the stirrup, grab the saddle, and pull yourself up.”

I did what she said and was surprised to find myself sitting on the butt of the horse before I even knew what had happened. The girl laughed and tossed her hair again.

“You even sit on a horse like a boy, Jacqueline. What an odd girl you are.”

Walla Walla, Come to Jesus

Ever since we moved to Walla Walla, Washington, we’ve heard at least once a week that this is just a great community to live in. At first, I was new to town and curious, so I would ask whoever had made the declaration to elaborate. Why specifically Walla Walla? How was it such a utopia? What made it special? In one of the first conversations I had on this subject, the conversation went something like this:

VISITING PROFESSOR: It’s such a great place to raise kids. [NOTE: I did not have any children at the time.]

ME: Oh? Why?

VP: Well, it’s very safe here.

ME: Is it? By that you mean, what?

VP: I mean there’s low crime here.

ME: [THINKING] Hmm. Well, in many neighborhoods in DC, crime was pretty low too.

VP: Well, in Walla Walla you know your neighbors.

ME: I knew my neighbors in DC.

VP: We have a farmer’s market.

ME: I lived in Eastern Market in DC, one of the oldest, continuously running open-air markets on the East Coast. But okay, farmer’s markets are great.

Now then, the market in DC offered fresh local chicken, a gourmet cheese counter, eggs, all manner of fresh sausages, fresh seafood and fish (which we never bought, given Susanne’s allergies), cakes, pies, cookies, loads of produce, and the requisite crafty junk I’m never interested in buying, like handmade jewelry and such. In Walla Walla there is also a ton of produce during the season, a woman who sells lamb, and two farmers who sell pork. You can also get fresh milled flour out here and that wasn’t available in DC, but for the most part there was a lot more diversity in the city than here. But going back to the conversation, I do tend to like my neighbors in Walla Walla more than my neighbors in DC. Some of my city neighbors were kind of snarky. Not that I know anything about that.

But here’s my point, John Inman’s amazing chicken roasters aside—the mantra that Walla Walla is near-perfect belies its deficiencies and makes it harder to improve the material reality of the people living here. Consider:

According to the 2010 Census, nearly half of all households in Walla Walla County are at 200 percent of the Federal Poverty limit. That means that half of the households here qualify for food stamps.
Depending on the definitions used, there are anywhere from 420 to 580 homeless people living in the city, which has a population of 36,000. That is a homeless rate of 1.3 percent, against a national average (633,782 homeless people on any given day, out of a population of 313,900,000) of 0.2 percent.
There is no single child psychiatrist working in the city limits of Walla Walla.
There is no orthopedic surgeon in Walla Walla willing to operate on an HIV-positive patient.
There is no medical detox available in Walla Walla.
There is no capability on the part of the school system to support a transgender child who wants to stay in school through transition.
There is no homeless or temporary shelter for youth, and the one that is in planning has no plans to house LGBT youth, who nationally make up 40 percent of all minor-age shelter seekers.
There are at least two gangs in town, M13 and the 18th Street Crew. In 2010, according to the city police department, there were 173 gang-related crimes reported. This year has seen at least 3 gang-related deaths. There is since February 2013, a new approach to confronting and ending gang activity in the city.
There is no comprehensive sex ed taught in the school system, and chlamydia incidence is at its highest level ever.

Source: Washington State Department of Health

Okay, so I must hate Walla Walla, right? That’s something of a damning list, or at least, it’s all negative. Honestly, I don’t hate this place. I mean, it’s not Walla Walla’s fault that when I rolled into town I had a busted knee and no friends in town. It’s not Walla Walla’s fault either that the entire global economy crashed and I didn’t find a job for two and half years, after applying to more than 125 of them. Those things did mesh together for me, it’s true. And I’ve spent the second half of these five years pulling them apart in an attempt at understanding my environment.

In Walla Walla, I have a flexible job that lets me see my son for three hours a day in the middle of the day. We go on “adventures” together—to Klicker’s for berries, or a local park, or the grocery store—and I wouldn’t give this time up with him for the world. If I’d stayed in DC I could still be commuting three hours a day instead, still spending $750 a month on gas to drive to Baltimore, still paying out $2,000 or more for an apartment every 30 days. The stakes at those jobs were so high, the pressures on contractors and government workers alike so dire, and now with sequestration? I’m sure I’d be a ball of anxiety. I do miss having new abstract problems to solve, but I’ve taken on the long-term project of raising Emile, and in Walla Walla, I’ve finally found a way to get to a keyboard and write. In five years I’ve gone from no confidence as a writer to having a published book and another one about to be published, I’ve been honored as a keynote speaker in front of my transgender peers, and been named a Fellow at a prestigious writing workshop, getting to improve my craft with other emerging authors and a couple of legends in the literary and activist worlds. I may firmly believe that the liberal arts college needs to do far more to support LGBT students than ask the spouses of faculty members to be mentors to them, but in that mentorship I think I have found as close to a true calling as I will ever experience. And it is precisely because Walla Walla has so few resources for LGBT youth that I am humbled to put myself out there to serve as one of them.

When I bristle at the “Walla Walla is a great place to live,” it’s often because I feel like the resource gaps here are erased in that sentiment, along with the strife and violence and harassment that many people here face on a daily basis. Of course the country’s major cities have their politically extreme blowhards too, but they seem to get more time here to spout off in the paper, in the local businesses and in public, and they get much less pushback from reasonable people here. For me, what makes a town or city a great place to live is how inclusive it is and how realistic it is about its opportunities and limitations. There is nothing Walla Walla can do to situate itself closer to Seattle, as much as I would personally prefer a 2-hour instead of a 4.5-hour drive to get there. So since we are so geographically isolated from any population center, it would behoove the residents here to remember that people living on the margins need some targeted help, instead of just acting like they don’t exist. If I see us moving toward public policies to improve all people’s lives, and not just people with old money from the turn of the last century, then I’ll nod my head at the sentiment of Walla Walla’s loveliness.

But not before.

Guesses about Breaking Bad’s Last Season

SPOILER ALERT: This is all speculation, so feel free to read ahead with no spoilers!

Tonight’s the night. This Sunday, once the domain of Murder, She Wrote and Touched by an Angel, and now the showcase for Breaking Bad, this Sunday we get to see what comes of a certain DEA’s toilet time revelation. I’m talking about Hank, of course, intrepid brother-in-law to Walter White, whose descent into darkness as response to his sudden sense of mortality has been the main story. We have watched, over the last few years, an emotionally shut down and foreclosed man become the antagonist of the series. Walter has gotten better taste in cars, but other than that, he’s also become a meth mass marketer, a master manipulator, and an unchecked murderer.

The last eight episodes start airing tonight. Thankfully this is AMC, and not an instant boxed set of a season vis a vis Netflix. I will likely scream at the television upon seeing each week’s cliffhanger, but I’ll love Vince Gilligan for it. So just for fun some thoughts on what may flicker across the screen during season 6:

Character Development—Skyler has had some development throughout the series, too, even pushing against her own idea of ethics. She’s laundered money and manipulated the IRS for not just one, but two businesses now (poor Ted). She’s clever and sick of all the bs around her from her kleptomaniac sister to her dear husband Heisenberg, the meth maker. If the series loves its audience, it’ll let us see Walt finally get caught from his own arrogance, and Skyler finding a way to keep the money rolling in to what remains of her family.

As for Walter Junior, I think he’ll learn about Walter’s secret drug crimes and retreat by going to college in the South Pacific. He’ll probably find a way to keep the hot rod daddy bought for him out of guilt.

Hank finally has his day, all because he needed some bathroom reading one lazy afternoon. It doesn’t get better for the DEA, does it? Jesse will do some time in prison but it won’t be too bad. And then he’ll hit the road on the high school circuit, telling kids not to do drugs. He’s been looking to settle down with a girlfriend and a kid for a while, so maybe that will happen for him. But probably not. Saul Goodman will enjoy all of the fees he can get lawyering on Walt’s behalf, but he will not so secretly be glad that the jig is up for Walt. He didn’t like him to begin with.

And Walter? My vote is that he’s ready to take his own ricin, stashed in the kitchen outlet. Cornered, Walter loses all of his power and is left only with his incredible anger. But before he can become his own martyr, the cancer inside him will give him a stroke or something, and he will be once again castrated from his own autonomy. Certainly weirder things have happened on this series. Karma has to pay back Walt somehow, after killing so many people so wantonly. It would be best if he were ultimately stopped by himself. Or maybe Jesse could kill him, possibly in self-defense, which would be a retribution unknown to Jesse for Walt letting Jesse’s girlfriend die of asphyxiation.

Major Plot Points—Skyler finds a way to keep the cash earnings from Hank during the enormous DEA investigation; Marie goes on an extended freakout over the news her brother-in-law is the focus of her husband’s hunt; Jesse finds a way out by turning state’s evidence; Todd runs off with Walt but makes mistakes that cost Walt; Walter starts lying to himself about what he’s done, living in a series of motels, winding up at the home of his billionaire ex-friends as Hank pursues him; Ted learns that Walt is under investigation and Walt sends Todd to kill him before he can talk.

Loose Ends—The ricin in the kitchen doesn’t stay there; Walter blurts out to Jesse that he watched Jane die and didn’t help her, and that he poisoned Jesse’s girlfriend’s son, which is when Jesse finally turns against him; nobody finds out that Skyler has been laundering Walt’s money; nobody finds Mike’s body; Hank figures out that Walt was behind Gus’s death; nobody finds the pile of cash Skyler has in the storage container (unless Walt leads authorities there by mistake); Lydia and the tank of methylamine are never discovered; the junkyard owner comes forward with information about Walt and the RV meth lab; both of Jesse’s street dealer friends confess what they know, but none of it is helpful.

Add your guesses about the end of Breaking Bad here!

The Very Incomplete Life Tips of Everett D. Maroon

At long last, Twitter has a feature for downloading one’s entire tweet history. As I have more than 27,000 tweets out there (think of all the wasted time, people), this took a little while to get on my machine. But I’ve been wanting to grab my tweets for a few years now because I wanted to see what the full list of “life tips” that I’ve written looks like.

Indeed, it borders on pithy, even if a lot of these aren’t useful to people. Here is the full list:

Life tip No. 4: People who like to tell you what’s morally pure usually aren’t.

Life Tip No. 9: No matter how appealing, never try to catch a falling knife.

Life Tip No. 10: Avoid thunking your infant’s head into the overhead compartment for a smoother travel experience.


Life Tip No. 19: Never rub your eyes after eating buffalo wings. Ditto for picking your nose.

Life Tip No. 20: If you have six chocolate chip cookies for breakfast, prepare for a mid-morning snack of heartburn.

Life Tip No.22: When everything and everyone around you suddenly start annoying you, consider that it might just BE you.

Life Tip No. 23: Whenever someone introduces their remarks as “Straight Talk,” know that it’s going to be bullshit.

Life Tip No. 33: When in doubt, call your sister. Or the first person you see who looks like she could be your sister.

Life Tip No. 39: Never wear damp wool. Unless you’re looking to score with a sheep.

Life Tip No. 46: Never let your siblings find out via Facebook that you’re engaged.


Life Tip No. 56: Never complain about a bodily function unless you’re wanting it to happen in the next 10 minutes.

Life Tip No. 82: Never complain about your sister-in-law on a social networking site, bc it will be the one she just joined yesterday.

Life Tip No. 83: Never tell a friend they’re aging well, even if you mean it as a compliment.

Life Tip No. 92: Never open a frozen soda can.

Life Tip No. 414: Focusing on work right before the weekend makes the weekend that much sweeter.

Life Tip No. 419: Don’t skip the funerals of people you once cared about.

Life Tip No. 719: When dining out near a hospital, be prepared for surgeons to discuss in intimate detail techniques for cutting human flesh.

Life Tip No. 812: Leg cramps are merely an adequate method of waking up in the morning.

Life Tip No. 4,867: When spitting out toothpaste in the morning, avoid splash back in one’s own eyes. Wintergreen & vitreous don’t mix.

Queer Life Tip #38: If you think an older gay man doesn’t care for you, try slipping a few lines from Mommy Dearest into conversation.

Writing Tip No. 2: To break writer’s block, write something. Anything. Find the character hook in your grocery list.

Writing tip No. 12: Never let them see you looking jealous.

Writing Tip No. 19: Don’t lose the business cards you get from agents, even if you move 3 times after getting them.

Parenting Tip No. 26: when making up rhymes for your baby, never end on truck or luck.

Cooking Tip No. 24: Never lick just-melted chocolate, no matter how enticing it looks.

How to Write Trans Characters (Or at Least Some Decent Ideas on the Subject)

For the most part last week’s Emerging Writer’s Workshop in LA was a love fest of prose writers, faculty, and poets. We sang karaoke together, we gave supportive critiques of each other’s work, we grumbled about dining hall food in an unseasoned bonding moment. If the workshop was in part to help us network, we hit a grand slam of connectedness. There were a couple of struggles, however, and one of them involved talking about how to help cisgender people “write” trans characters. Not surprisingly, several of us got hung up on definitions and the inclusivity of a given category of gender identity (or even gender-related identity). It’s not that we didn’t work through these issues, and everyone did their best to tease out what their questions were exactly and where they were triggered, and so on, but I’d like to suggest some other ways folks can write about trans people without maybe getting too caught up on the differences between changing definitions. And with all due respect to Jacob Hale et al’s list of how to write on transgender issues, that is really a non-fiction list, and as such, not as helpful for the fiction writer (but writers should read it anyway).

Learn about transfolk and the tensions in the trans community—Yes, one should look over definition lists, asking critical questions about the assumptions that inform the definitions. For example, does the definition of “transvestite” include that it is largely viewed as an archaic and derogatory label? Does the definition of “drag king” limit it to cisgender women only, or is it inclusive of trans-identified men? Is there a discussion about the debate between people who see transsexualism as only a medical issue and those who argue all gender is socially constructed? These differences have a real effect on the ways in which trans people walk through the world, how they use language to describe themselves, and how they relate to others. If you are trying to represent them, then your trans characters should have some background (it may not ever be shown directly in the story) on how they understand themselves.

Minimize your defensiveness about being cisgender—This is a recent term, yes, and one that many people haven’t heard or don’t feel mastery at using. It simply marks people who identify with the sex assignment they received at birth, as opposed to those of us who have taken steps to identify somewhere along the spectrum, up to and including the other pole. If the term “cisgender” makes you feel uncomfortable, okay. Sit with that, suggests a loved one of mine. Feel what that is like, to have an infrastructure of gender placed upon you. Trans people feel that all the time (or at least a lot of the time). If you’re feeling defensive about your own label, chances are that will seep into your story.

Be aware of the stereotypes regarding trans people—There are too many moments to mention in popular culture showing trans women as sex workers, dead sex workers, alienated and/or suicidal, and just plain dead. It gives young trans women a terrible message, and frankly, it’s a trope and not real characterization. If you’re writing about a trans woman character, give her agency, connections to other people, a strong voice, layers of interest, and don’t make her just the horrible lifeless body in the room. We’ve seen enough of that. To a lesser extent in contemporary popular culture, trans men have been shown as sexists, as murderers, and as pathological or psychologically broken. We don’t need that, either. Just as conscientious writers should steer clear of stereotypes in their work in general (for one, it’s boring, and for two, it’s so problematic as to have readers back away from your work), so should you avoid trans-specific stereotypes and overused narratives.

Avoid trans as a metaphor, or metaphors for trans narratives that have been overused—As a trans person, I enthusiastically welcome seeing trans lives portrayed in a complex and honest way in fiction, especially fiction, given the audience. What I’m less excited about are story lines that use metamorphosis of some kind in place of a trans character, or that use something like keeping secrets as an alternative to creating a multi-layered trans-identified character in the work. It’s been done. And not only that, but it may be too subtle for trans youth who are desperate to see themselves in a book. I suggest having a main character be trans and through their lens, making their transition a part of the story or a major arc. If anyone wants to write a YA novel about a trans kid in the zombie apocalypse, I will buy it and read it and review it.

Read works by trans authors who tackle the subject, and identify what works about those stories—The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard, from Topside Press, has 28 stories in it that are great demonstrations of the concept of featuring trans characters. It won a Lammy. I’m not suggesting it because I’m in it, but because it cuts across genres. Read Nevada by Imogen Binnie. Read Seasonal Velocities by Ryka Aoki. Or Refuse by Elliot Deline. Or any non-workbook by Kate Bornstein. There are more transgender works out on the market all the time, so identify what makes them successful and as an added bonus, you’ll support those writers.

Remember that trans is not devoid of other intersections of power—What does it mean for a Black female-assigned person to transition to male? Or for a male-assigned person living in poverty, with little to no access to medical transition? There are more than enough stories about transfolk out there that simplify transition to some “standard”  narrative, when in reality, transition (if a trans-identified person selects to go through it) is something that happens in a specific time and place. There are other aspects of a trans person’s life that affect how that transition happens, how people respond to it, and what kinds of possibilities open up or close off during and afterward. There must be thousands of potential stories in those intersections of position, at least.

I will say again that I love reading all kinds of books. I love science fiction and historical fiction. I love magical realism. I love literary stories, and young adult, and cross-genre work. To see trans characters in any or all of these makes the reader in me giddy. To see trans characters depicted with as much nuance and conflict as any cisgender character, well, that may make me faint. Make me faint, writers.

Simple Lessons from the LLF Emerging Writer’s Workshop

Skip the processed carbs. They don’t give you real energy and they don’t make your writing better.
Smile and say hello to everyone, especially for the first couple of days, while we’re all still a bundle of nerves.
Ignore your rule about talking next to someone smoking and go do it. Smokers, skip a cig here and there to continue a great conversation that happens to be inside.
There is always time for karaoke.
Linger at the dining hall. The stories more than make up for the quality of the food.
Listen more than talk. This is your chance to learn from other extremely observant people.
Take pictures with the people there, just in case you someday start telling yourself that it didn’t really happen.
Go ahead and drink or stay up too late, but maybe not every night.
Sneaking off campus is a great way to recharge. Staying on campus is a great way to immerse yourself in your work. There’s probably a balance in there somewhere.
Thank people for their generosity in giving you their time, their comments, their experiences, their support. It took a lot for every person to get here and carve out a week of their lives.
Make your criticism of people’s words be entirely about their writing, and zero about yours.
Bringing a French press was a great idea. Not having a convenient place to store milk was less great.
Canvas the campus for good writing spots on the first day, and use them.
When you run into someone from the workshop at the airport on the way home, hug them at least four times.
Find real, sustainable ways to keep in touch.
Make this one week the start of a lifetime of critical support and community.
Know when to stop writing any given sentence, even as you commit to writing for a lifetime.
Even bad coffee works.
Read work by people who write very differently than you, at least as often as you read work that you aspire to.
One week is too long to go without nail clippers.
Yes, you have to get the nail clippers even if you dropped them in the toilet.
Try not to pine away for your loved ones at home, but give them a very warm welcome when you see them again. They helped get you here.
Listen to your elders in the writing world, and let them go when they seem tired of talking.
Always be ready to break into another rendition of “Happy Birthday.”
It’s always okay to squeal in delight when someone you like gets up to read or walks in the room.