http://paulsilverman.com/stories Fri, 29 May 2009 20:21:05 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The next sound after the alarm clock shrieked was the clank of corn-fat train cars uncoupling, and for another day Tawny decided not to bother herself with the hot plate. She threw on her blue uniform dress and walked past the forlorn city beach, the little sand crescent that had ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/wigwag-week/ Matt finally had a reason to break up with the computer. He began setting a chair by the largest window in the trailer and staring up at the fire show, the fat yellow tanker planes swooping onto the lake, alighting like monster bugs and gulping tons of water, then swooping ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/break/ There were four of us on this jaunt in Japan. Angie and me, and the hula girl and the old soldier. It was a real east meets west thing, all of us crossing the long Pacific night, though the two of us had jetted from clam-frying Ipswich, Mass. and the ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/the-hula-war/ The Cane Palace brochure said nothing about swarms of Portuguese Man of War in the waters of their very expensive private beach. Yet there was the official sign, posted not ten feet from where Ray Ryan interrogated the towel boy. “Your sign says Portuguese Man of War hazard December through ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/beached/ Frank wanted a “heart of the hide” glove ever since he was in the PeeWees, but the dad of all knowledge said nothing doing, a glove like that had to be earned, game by game, and by earned he didn’t mean a season of games but an eon. The ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/heart-of-the-hide/ We've just arrived, late, and we’re all crammed into the entry-way of a small efficiency unit. To our left is a tiny kitchenette, dimly lit with a flickering fluorescent tube. To our right is a shut door, presumably the bedroom. In front of us is a combination sitting and dining ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/waking-eddie/ Leonora labeled him the Russian salesman, as though he were a kind of foreign pastry, but Maurice Baran wasn’t Russian at all. He spoke English with a perfect broad American accent. However, Maurice warned her that she could never be sure of his origins, because the KGB trained native Russian ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/leonora-the-great/ From the ferry, Ray and Maddie were limo-driven to the huge ebony doors right under the painting of the cane plant. From there, they and their luggage went into a golf cart and they were motored around to their suite. The driver was a silent islander who seemed disturbed when ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/cristal/ In less than an hour, the ferry was at half-speed, the wind had died and the magnificent flora of Cane Island was in full view. They were in the brochure again, the one the travel agent had given them: Lush, tall trees, a great belt of them bent by the ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/island-escape/ Cookie Murphy Milbach in the Cadillac, surging into barn country, somehow moving backwards. Strains of that one Novena still rippling around her brain. Seeping like cave water, old pools of it trapped in the hollows behind her eyes. The echo of it unstoppable, even when she pushes up the volume ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/guard-donkey/ Now I can talk about the place with the long-handled shovels and the dirt. Take you there, just like I took the kid. In the end Didi threw me out of the house for it. She said I had no business taking the kid to a place like that. He ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/pine-cut-thin/ In an earlier life Phil Blodgett was just Blodgett, because it suited him better. It was a time when he felt preyed upon by men in black suits, and when he was wild about cherrystone clams, the raw, pink wet ones. Blodgett couldn’t resist those clams. He was a pig for ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/blodgett/ The woman with three breasts stopped to look at the card, and even picked it up. It was one of those all-occasion greeting cards done in mock retro style. On the front was a fifties-style illustration of a prim but sexy and curvaceous housewife. She wore the dress you always ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/the-time-of-heroes/ After the snowshoeing, Karl sat in the lodge near the fireplace and the guitar-playing cowboy and vaguely watched the lanky massage woman take on a new customer at her sit-down massage station. They had given him a trail map but he was bad at maps. In fact, the map was ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/snowshoer/ “Didn’t you ever hear of a dog pre-nup? They do them now, you know.” Janet’s girlfriend Molly said this as an aside, not an accusation. She had read about it in one of those Brangelina-type stories in a fanzine. But Janet looked accused. She couldn’t even open the Pinot Grigio, which ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/the-kid-machine/ Alana’s book club friends have suggested that nocturnal pole-dancing – under the shield of a Dolly Parton wig – might be a faster way to fill the cookie jar. Meanwhile, waiting on tables at The Chadwick Grille is still Plan A for hanging onto the house, a 1786 saltbox with ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/the-new-twiggy/ In her Greek English, Melina told the psychiatrists the attacks were like vertigo, but not the kind you feel standing on the edge of a roof. The first one came on the plane from Venizelos to Logan, where she sat on her hands because she felt the hands would assault ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/helen-of-troy/  Charlie is a skittish, skinny man, so full of the wind that drives him coast to coast his pants bag out. This ticks off Stella, who says it clashes with the green of his steeply climbing paychecks. “No more hip-hop look,” she announces, and they drive in for a clothing ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/charlies-new-suit/  The bus pushed off under whipping Boston rain, so much of it the windows smelled like wet fish until they hit the cornfields, where everything dried and smoothed out. Denver was the longest stopover, and from there to the state line the only sound around them was passenger snoring and ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/steam-city-girl/ We were just out of Williams driving to Flagstaff in the dead of winter in the dead of night when one of us, the driver, shouted the rest of us awake and said he just saw one honker of an elk in the thick snow by the ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/overnight/ When Philly was ten he had only heard about the Nepco man, never even seen him, except in bad dreams in the dead of night. Mornings there was something of him in the kitchen as well. It hovered over the battlefield, the table where Herschel and Bertha bombarded each other ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/the-nepco-man/ Irene Lesserman was a nurse, a live-alone widow who ministered to ancient men and women. But she was heavy-hipped, which excited the skinny ten-year-old, Jack Kopinsky, and she wore the white nurse’s uniform, anchored in a hem wide and round as a tent, and she would stand on the grates ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/hands/ Today, Alfred wore his blue and gold Thunderhead Properties fleece vest over his golf shirt, and every time he saw his breath steam over the table and make ghost shapes on the window he wished he had brought the full-sleeved jacket too. It was as cold at the table as ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/waiting-for-joey/ In the frock shop that employs her, Justina is considered a treasure, someone who’s good for the soul. They call her Brady, after the Brady Bunch, because the stories she tells are so warmly colored. Even if on occasion the subject is sad – an uncle or a pet dying ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/eggs/ He did it with Ainsley just to get rid of his headache. Why Ainsley did it with him was anyone’s guess. Then he got dressed again, took off and headed West in the Saab she let him borrow, in that disdainfully agreeable way of hers – pressing the keys in ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/polluted/ The embolism that strikes the sinner Muzzy Farber gives him a holy roll, and sets him off on a religious pilgrimage of sorts. But that hardly means he can’t pause and have the loafers buffed when the plane drops him at Logan. Re-entering Boston’s Fertile Crescent, he figures, you ought ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/john-hancock-is-gone/ Charles Mulcahy folded the pieces of paper into a neat square and inserted it in his lapel pocket. At the coat closet, he spent more than a moment with his car keys, holding the biggest one between his knuckles and brandishing it like a street-weapon, a blade that could be ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/back-to-the-shamrock/ Nothing counts but this moment, and in this moment there is nothing.My wife Cathy says the sentence was uttered long ago by some Zen master, and then it echoed around Japan for ages and eventually came to Maine inside the head of Sedge Hanto, the bomb-burned duffer who worked the ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/sedge/ Elizabeth clearly thinks of Goldberg as some kind of fop, an advertising fruit, and Goldberg knows it, but still he presses on. He fastens the silver tongs to the little cucumber sandwich and lifts it to his plate, just as she has done. Goldberg knows about tea, too, in his ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/mourning-the-rag-man/ As Jacob Kopens emerged from the soup of foam and sea-spinach a large man came over a sandy rise and headed straight for him. To Jacob he was a complete stranger, a man he had never seen on the club beach before, never seen anywhere. But there was nothing about ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/the-burnham-woods/ In an earlier life Phil Blodgett was just Blodgett, because it suited him better. It was a time when he felt preyed upon by men in black suits, and when he was wild about cherrystone clams, the raw, pink wet ones.Blodgett couldn't resist those clams. He was a pig for ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/the-butler-of-fredos/ Haggerty was a Catholic patriarch, the old school. So when he found out Francine, his art-photographer daughter, had been seen leaving Room 303 at the crack of dawn, his face got as purple as a bishop's cloak and he pinched his praying, sniveling wife. Haggerty's style was to pinch instead ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/the-entrepreneur-of-room-303/ As Steve jogs around the room he grabs glances of the daddy of love. The TV host is asking Barry White the secret of his success as a recording artist. Steve sees Barry really think about this. Barry wants to give the true answer – a legend has a responsibility ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/room-service-comes-till-midnight/ It’s not even close to sunset yet and the settling of the forthcoming Benz. The Garrets have broken from work – because they can – and finally arranged their lone son Andrew’s student visa. To Johannesburg, which he says is a pinnacle music city. That took so long they’ve decided ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/think-beyond-wood/ At the time, Jack Kopinsky was still little enough to confuse the world gallach with challah. So when his mother said they were going to Boyle’s house to see the gallach he thought she meant they were going for another holiday feast of some kind, where there would be bumpy ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/the-blue-scar/ When I catch up to Al, what a day, what a mood I'm in. The mood I'm in comes from that feeling we all know. That feeling you have on that bad morning in a strange city when you walk into a barber shop you know is a shade dirtier ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/promo-sapiens/ Once again, Marnie and Jon had traveled light, not even bringing spouses. They knew the drill and booked adjoining hotel rooms on-line - at the bereavement rate – in the same motel as before. The Standish was one notch up from no-frills. But with the Wake, the Mass, the burial, ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/last-reunions/ Gil Bounsall, the man who named the Chicken Amigo Sandwich, was giving his opinion of Shula Kaplan's Happy Playgrounds video."I'm closing my eyes and not seeing it," Gil said. "You got a problem here."They were in the new business conference room - now officially called "war room" by the agency ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/happy-playgrounds/ The ferry lurched into its berth like a drunk-driven vehicle and Gert tottered down the gangplank wanting to throw up. Kit paraded down onto the wharf like an admiral and got her and the luggage into a cab and over to the hotel. Before Gert could even get her legs ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/getaway/ Who were they shitting? They said it was a rare whale, but all it turned out to be was a juvenile humpback from out on the Stellwagen Bank, one of the forty-foot regulars that the Whale Watch crowds from Kalamazoo all go ooh and ahh over. They said the poor ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/rammed/ It was all about Cal being littler than Nicolene was, and thinner too. She was one of those former field hockey types, trim and toned and big. It intrigued her that in any actual physical contest she could likely overpower him. She found it alluring, in fact. It also didn't ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/bonsai-love/ The nick on the back of my neck has healed, healed a long time ago. But it's only disappeared on the skin. Under the skin, where the nerves feed my brain, the nick festers and oozes and makes me wash my hands all day long and focus on nothing but ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/blue-light-special/ From the get-go I know I won't be putting this one on my reel because we're shooting in Queens, and Queens is where I always end up with what the old Catskill guys used to call a wish sandwich. You know - two slices of bread and you wish you ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/the-big-time/ Longing to see some people with clothes on, Amrhein Sharkey tugged the brim of his salt-stained Braves cap, grabbed his lunchpail and hit the reeking public beach. To him the cap was as functional as it was for Johnny Sain, or any Braves star. He wore it as work clothing, ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/river-street/ The mountains seemed toy-sized, like sand castles, or topographical formations in a model train set, and part of Gene wished he could stay up there forever - dawdling with a gin and tonic, making molehills out of the mountains.But soon enough they were taxiing to the gate at the Bozeman ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/sky/ Death professionals are so cool. In Gary's view, the ability to do death was what separated the men and women from the boys and girls. Gary was at his Aunt Minna's apartment the day after his Uncle Ernie died. The undertaker came by to talk about the funeral. Right away ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/credenza/ What did Harv know? Carol was supposed to know - and she said it would be okay so it would be okay. He and Carol would go to New York for the show and the kid would stay home with the dog. Thea was a good kid - she was ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/what-did-harv-know/ “Danny’ll get you. You called his little sister a whore, and he’ll get you.”Robert leaned on the window sill and listened to the horseflies make that angry zooming sound, little fighter planes on the attack. He stared out the screen through the fire escape grates, down at the wide, ragged ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/the-weeds/ “Now Mr. Nguyen, here, he could benefit from a little trip over to Harold’s Running Bull. Quaff a few, soak up the local culture, and shake hands with the biggest griz ever shot down in this valley. Stands eleven feet if he stands an inch. Fangs dripping right over the ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/big-country-2/ To Jenna, Heckie would always be the man made of river rock, even though all he did now was hang around the Pin n’Cue like a fat Buddha in a baseball jacket and shoot eight-ball now and then, his belly hanging out and blocking the pockets, or else sit in ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/oak-park-stop-2/ If he told the story once he’d told it a hundred times, told it while they scribbled: the day Abraham grabbed the leather case, shuttered the store early, and shooed Jacob towards his car, which he called “the machine,” a midnight blue Pontiac with an Indian head crowning the hood.“No ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/the-picture-2/ Alf had just finished telling the two guests how he’d ordered the biggest cage in the dog catalog, “big enough for the Hound of the Baskervilles,” just so Fargo could be comfortable."Oh let him out," said Lali, still chewing her crab-dipped cracker. "He wants to come out, the poor thing.""He ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/lali-pops/ I’ll go into this, Dear B., in some detail, because it’s all about you – what you might not know about yourself.I can only tell it the way it was, the way I saw it, sitting there watching the wind whip Huntington Avenue so hard even the cabs stayed away.Right ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/letter-to-b/ Since he had so little to his name when he died, the reading of Henry Fromm’s will went quickly. But if you subscribed to the Gloucester Daily Times, there was plenty to read. Maybe more than you ever wanted to read about Henry Fromm.But Henry was a dancing fool, that’s ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/halibut-inn/ “So when did you get into eating raw fish? What are you, some kind of pelican?”The one who was squat as a keg, Vic, thrust his jaw out after he spoke, making his face seem even more like a bulldog’s. The sweetfaced stringbean, Eddie, rolled his eyes and sniffed the ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/swords-crossing/ She had little appetite for the salmon he wanted to make, and insisted they get out to eat dinner. Everywhere she breathed it reeked of stale flower arrangements. Clumps of ripped wrapping paper and velvet bows were still all over the parlor Tabriz, not even swept away to a corner ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/packers/ She had little appetite for the salmon he wanted to make, and insisted they get out to eat dinner. Everywhere she breathed it reeked of stale flower arrangements. Clumps of ripped wrapping paper and velvet bows were still all over the parlor Tabriz, not even swept away to a corner ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/the-next-kate-spade/ A mile from the madhouse, burning in the sun, lies a minute but vast plain called Hancock Field. Its vastness comes from the density of everything that surrounds it, a jungle of wooden three-decker tenements so bunched and yardless they seem to sweat together in the August broil, pooling the ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/a-stones-throw/ “So when did you get into eating raw fish? What are you, some kind of pelican?”The one who was squat as a keg, Vic, thrust his jaw out after he spoke, making his face seem even more like a bulldog’s. The sweetfaced stringbean, Eddie, rolled his eyes and sniffed ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/swords-crossing-2/ Out of the corner of his eye Harold watches his son build a sandwich, thrusting the tongs into the pastrami cauldron and fishing up a fat wad of brine-soaked, heat-curled slices and dumping the slippery mass onto the base of a roll. He possesses an eyeball that could have been ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/the-home-front/ It was on one of those Hanukah-warmed Christmas nights that Jacob Kopens learned of the perverse reverse. This being the story of Robert, a high school friend of his who had gone and married a Christian girl and then a year later caught a fierce case of the Hebron fever. ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/the-trees/ Now they can say all that stuff about the blacks and the Jews this and the blacks and the Jews that, but they don’t know about the Blue Hill Deli back then, summer of 1957, on a night hot as a steamtable clouding up the counter glass with greasy pastrami ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/the-you-all-avenger/ Sky Lake, Montana. Many miles from Sebago Lake, Maine, and Eli Franz still getting used to it. Still getting used to those Montana ways, such as the fact they elect instead of appoint judges. To him, they’re nothing but popularity contests, same as the bucking-bull runoffs at the pre-rodeo. They ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/the-red-rocket/ She would say things like, " Have a tuna sandwich, honey, I got to move the tuna."She would say it to guests in their home. To daughters-in-law and grandchildren. And he would too, not even thinking twice about it.No offense was meant. They were a restaurant couple. That's just how ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/the-restaurant-life/ Ever since they started trying, there is this question about breakfast. For the wife it is no problem at all. A bowl of raisin bran, a squirt of skim milk, a swallow of coffee, and it’s over and done with and off to work. It’s all so automatic the wife ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/seeing-red/ The machine said 160 over 120. The man, Henry, was with a girl who seemed more like some after-school burger flipper than a trained physician’s assistant. She gave him a death’s door look as she wrote the numbers in his file. The tattoo on her writing hand wriggled. Next, ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/blood-pressure/ After all this time the father still thought of the old buckskin Indian woman. As he drove home in the late afternoon he thought back, for the thousandth time, to that way she’d prepared an orange for him, how she’d hacked the skin off with a large machete-like knife instead ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/manny-by-the-sea/ The List was in a fat, vapid magazine for rich fucks. As far as my life is concerned it would have existed but not existed, like the falling tree in the forest you never see, if someone from my old place of employment hadn’t called and told me I was ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/the-list/ Animal? Harsh I’d say, although Lefky did have what some might call animal ways. He broke a face or two – we all heard the stories. Jaws cracked, noses flattened. He was a soup-slurper, an onion-eater. He was my father. Lefky’s favorite dish was a whole onion in one hand and ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/lefky/ When Philly told his niece about the Stride Rite x-ray machine she got that aha look in her eyes. It was the rays, she said. That’s what chewed your voice. Philly wasn’t so sure it was the rays or the machine or anything at the Stride Rite store that chewed his voice. ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/allys-first-step/ Another day of eternity at the Bullseye. Gary charged into the mall and pushed through the smeared glass door into the front office, where the day's respondents were shoveling heaps of knockoff Cremora into their styrofoam cups of free watery coffee. He did his best to convey an investigative poker ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/the-one-way-mirror/ The Jewish year was 5702, but in Boston it was still mostly 1963. Shavuot was the day Herschel Kohn, Philly’s father, had picked to hit the Revere Beach white way with McGuirk, his cook. After copious clams and ale and fan dancers he elected to get the word Bunny, furled ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/the-hoagie-king-of-the-strip/ Right after the first pothole Robert’s showers began to change. He showered less and he stopped using any soap. The soap bar stayed in his dish, round and smooth as it was the day it came out of the package. After a couple of weeks it was twice as big ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/dirt/ Barry, then as now, was just about twice Carroll's size. They began hanging out at age fifteen, when Barry was this thing. Hognecked, rhino-bellied, punch-throwing, skull-cracking. He was a Visigoth in a Don Eagle, now known as a Mohawk. It was Barry who taught him, with a thumb and a ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/ak-and-barry/ This is nothing the National Geographic would ever cover. There are no foreign lands involved, no exotic places. What is about to happen – the whole matter – is just here, somewhere in nowhere, my few feet of cracked linoleum, a zip code on a mailing label stuck to a ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/to-whomever-it-may-concern-at-the-national-geographic/ When the waiter bent over to serve soup to the next table, his aproned ass brushed the top of Melinda Fellows’ salade de haricots vert; that was how dense and cramped it was in the little greasy spoon, where the special of the day – and night - was raw ... http://paulsilverman.com/stories/working-with-jimmy/