About two blocks short of school, your mom pulls into an alleyway.

“Get out here and walk the last two blocks.”

Why?

“Don’t forget your lunch.” She hands you the bag.

I already have my …

“Take the bag.”

You walk down the street in the early morning carrying two lunch bags. A dark wind picks up causing a cloud of maple seeds to cascade around you. From nowhere, a tan Delta 88 Oldsmobile squeals into the driveway directly in your path. Two men, both their faces covered with ski masks, jump from the car and pull you into the backseat. Behind the wheel of the car sits Ms. McCallister in a shiny black jumpsuit.

“Buckle in kiddo,” she says, backing out of the driveway. “The ride is going to get bumpy.”

As the Olds shifts into drive, someone rear-ends the car hard. You look out the back window and see your Mom chomping on a cigarillo and driving with a small handgun pointed out the back window. Bullets fly. Ms. McCallister races down the block, taking skidding turns through busy intersections.

“We may have to drop him,” she yells to the thugs in back. “What’s he got?”

The two men dig into your lunch bag. They open your thermos and pour its soup out the window. You hear your mom swerve to miss. They peel back the bread from your peanut butter sandwich and find nothing inside. The entire bag of baby carrots is thrown to bounce off the family Kuga hood.

“I can’t shake her!” yells McCallister. “What’s he got?”

“We didn’t find anything, Maggie?”

“Did you look in both bags?”

“Nah, just one, we’ll look in the other.”

“Christ. You know what they say, ‘A woman needs men like a fish needs …’ ”

At this moment, the car hits a small prius driven by a stunned priest. The Olds goes up on two wheels then skids onto the boardwalk of the beachside. The priest steps from his automobile shaken, looks both ways, then looks to the heavens and crosses himself.

Your mother appears one block later, driving the Kuga up the granite steps of a park entrance.

“Damn It! I thought we lost the bitch!” one of the thugs shouts.

A meek voice comes from the front seat. “Am I going to kindergarten today?”

“Shut up, Tommy,” says Ms. McCallister. “Mommy’s gotta shake the fuzz.”

Hot dog vendors, roller skaters, women walking dogs, traffic cops – all of them barely jump from the way of the speeding vehicles. Three police cars join the back of the chase.

Ms. McCallister gets to the end of the boardwalk and bursts through the gates of a raising drawbridge. She clears easily. Your mother barely clears, as the police cars veer over the edge and into the water.

“Maggie, we found it!” one of the thugs reaches from the holds up a sapphire the size of a kiwi.

“Looks like this is where you get dropped off,” the other thug says. He grabs you by your collar and reaches for the door handle.

Wham! Your mother is on Ms. McCallister’s back fender. Wham! The Olds is jolted sideways and spins 180 degrees. You are thrown loose from the thugs. Wham! The Old runs into a parked car and both thugs are thrown through the front windshield.

Two police are at the car with guns drawn. “Freeze! Nobody move.”

Your mother storms up to the car and pulls you from the backseat. She removes her sunglasses and bends down, exhaling smoke in your face. “Are you okay now?” she asks.

I think so. 

“Do you still want to hide in the back seat and find out what I do?”

No, you say, no. Not really.

“Good. Remember that. I love you more than anything.”

Your mom turns back to Ms. McCallister as she’s getting loaded into the police van. She slowly looks her ripped and bloodied jumpsuit up and down.

“Jesus, Maggie,” she says. “Who gets arrested while wearing that.”

She tosses the cigarillo to the ground, puts her sunglasses back on, and walks back to the Kuga. It’s time to get to school.

 

Some things are not meant to be remembered.

You sneak on your Dad and his friends while they play soft jazz in the garage. Everything smells funny. They seem to be having a good time. Your father is holding down the beat on the drums. When he sees you, he calls you over to stand next to him.

“You see, son,” he begins. “An old jazz shuffle, like I’m playing now, isn’t that different from what your generation calls ‘rap.’ Here, let me show you.

“First I’m going to emphasize the back beat…

“Now I’m going to add the kick drum to the first and third …

“Then I’m going to switch to the high hat and simplify the beat. I want to keep the swing feel under it …

“You feeling that? Now Frank over here is going to use a deeper bass line …

“Ah yeah. You feeling it. I’m feeling the flow. This shit is tight, dawg. You know what’s about to happen? A rappin’.”

Your Dad unleashes what may be the worst thing you’ve ever heard. You will always look back at this moment whenever anyone asks you when the most embarrassed you ever felt was, but you’ll never mention it. You won’t – can’t – begin to try to explain the horror that you feel listening to your father freestyle about a local grocery store over a bunch of his jazz musician friends trying to play hip hop music.

Dad. Dad. Dad! Please stop!

The music grinds to a halt. Your father and his friends don’t even make eye contact with each other afterward. A half-minute of silence passes. Then Dad says, “Let’s never talk about this again. Let’s pretend like this never happened.”

From then on, you feel relieved whenever your father sticks to playing smooth jazz.

 

(Special thanks to the people that contributed to this affront to all that is decent in music.)

The phone rings and rings and rings and rings. You run down the stairs, your socks slipping on the wooden steps. “Don’t answer it,” your mom calls, but you’ve already put the handle to your ear.

“Hello, this is Stacy from Ameritech calling. Are you the primary account holder or is the primary account holder at home?”

“I’m the primary account holder,” you say.

“I’m sorry. But we’re looking for the person that pays the bills. Is your mother or father at home?”

“I am the father. My voice is high, yes, but I’m not a child.”

“Excuse me, sir. I didn’t mean to …”

“Don’t be sorry, just don’t make assumptions. I was in an automobile accident when I was twelve and it permanently damaged my vocal chords. As a result, they’ve never grown with me. Otherwise, I’m all man.”

“I’ve never heard of that before.”

“Well, now you have. No offense taken. Happens every time I pick up a phone. How can I help you?”

“Well, sir, we’re running a special promotion this month for new customers. Who is your current phone service provider?”

“New Bell.”

“And how do you like their service?”

“Well to be honest, Stacy, they offered us a special phone attachment like the ones you see on 60 Minutes. The ones that muffle your voice. You know when someone doesn’t want to be on the screen and they are in shadow and …”

“A muffler.”

“Is that the name? I don’t think that’s the name. I thought the name was something bigger like ‘Vocal Lowering Apparatus.'”

“I don’t know. Maybe New Bell has a different name for it. ”

“We’d like one of those, so when I answer the phone my voice doesn’t sound so high pitched. I’d like to not have to say that I’m not a child every time.”

“I’m not sure that Ameritech …”

“New Bell said they had one, but they never sent one along and I try to call them for one, but they always, well, they always think I’m a …”

click.

“Honey, who are you talking to?”

“Gotta go! Nice talking with you!”

click.

“Who is this?”

“Is this Stacy from Ameritech. Is this the primary account hold …”

click.

Matt Murphy meets you out at Mr. Fieldham’s Pond. Mr. Fieldham owns the woods across from your house and you often make up stories as you wander through the thick cluster of trees. In the winter, the woods thin and sans foliage, the entire area looks like magnified hair follicles.

Deep in the wood is a stocked fishing lake. You and Matt trespass often to get out to this lake. In the summer you sometimes swim in it. In the winter, you slide around on it in your stocking feet.

The two of you sit on a long hollow log. It sounds like Matt’s mom was pretty upset about the story you told to his brother. It contained all sorts of things that you shouldn’t have said, I guess.

Matt tells you that he doesn’t get it because his brother told him a ghost story about a boy that was trapped under a lake in Chicago when he cracked through the ice. He said that the boy still beats against the bottom of the ice on cold nights down near Navy Pier.

You tell Matt that he shouldn’t believe anything that his brother says. Anyone that is too scared of your story would probably make another story much simpler so they could understand it. Probably even if there was the ghost of a dead boy in Lake Michigan, it wouldn’t be able to make any sound, it would just have to stare up from its bed, the surface if the water seeming as impenetrable as ice.

Matt’s pretty quiet for a bit. “Do you still feel like sliding around on the ice?” he asks.

Not really, you say.

Matt gets up and walks away. Between the story you told his brother and the French girl project, you get the feeling you aren’t going to see him much anymore. You plod back to your house where you microwave a cup hot chocolate and heat up some leftover macaroni and cheese. Was it last year that you broke your arm? Really a year ago? There were so many things you couldn’t do, then, like pick up each macaroni and slide it over each tine of your fork.

Fevers break often in the middle of your dreams. You know when it happens. The very nature of everything changes, as if you’ve been sleeping with your toes balled up and someone comes into the room and straightens them.

Take this dream. There’s a man wearing very dirty clothes. It’s quite possible that the man has never changed his clothes. You know he must have because you can’t be born in clothes that will fit you your whole life. Some time a long time ago, though, he put on these clothes. These are probably it for him.

You look down in your hands and see that you have a set of clothes that are neatly folded and pressed that look exactly like his. When clean, this man wears a white jumpsuit with a little patch over the front pocket. Why not give him the new clothes? He has no reason to turn them down. He must like these workman’s clothes.

You walk up to him. He hasn’t seen you. He’s been fiddling with a ball of something so dirty that it’s probably at best a dirty ball and maybe something worse. The smell of the man is overwhelming. You feel yourself choke and sweat as you get closer to him.

“Here,” you shout the words at him as if his stench is so terrible that it’s muffling sound, “take these clothes.”

He takes the clothes and immediately, somehow, he has them on. The smell is gone. His beard is gone. His hair is cut and combed. He gives you a big smile of white teeth and good intention. “Thank you,” he says. “As a reward for your good deed, I bless you with the following: You will soon understand your father’s love of bad soft jazz. You will no longer see the woman with the baby carriage. You will soon find out what your mom does all day. You will get a receive a set of these clothes that fit so well that you won’t want to change them.”

You wake and your fever is gone as if it were a song that ended abruptly.