Category: Florida

The Game

Enrique Quinones started playing tennis at the age of four. He was good. Everyone in his town said he was good. His parents gave him lessons. His mother told everyone she knew that it was Enrique’s dream that he would one day be a great player like Alex Olmedo or Pancho Segura, or Gonzales. He, of course, wanted to be good like them but he said to his mother, “Mama, it is your dream for me to be a great champion, but it is not my dream.”

And so, when he was ten and old enough to travel on an airplane by himself his mother sent him to stay with her sister in America so that he could have a great teacher and become famous.

When his aunt Bellissima brought him to the tennis schools in San Diego, they looked at him and told her to take him home because he was too old to learn to be a really great player. And so she took him to the biggest and best and most expensive schools in California and soon found the one she liked the best: the SHOQ Academy.

“What does SHOQ stand for?” she asked the director. “Swing. Hard. Or. Quit,” he told her. She thought that sounded just right, this was America after all, and she signed him up. She told Enrique good-bye, that she loved him very dearly, that she would come visit him every two weeks, and that one day he would reach his dream of being a great tennis player. “Good-bye, Tia Bellissima,” he said.

When Enrique graduated from college and turned pro, Edberg, Sampras, Chang, and Agassi were the top pros and Djokovic, and Federer, and Nadal were about his age, and he knew that he would never win a tournament they were in. But his aunt told him not to be discouraged. She sent him money and care packages and told him to remember to swing hard and not to quit. And so, he did.

He played on the pro circuit, in feeder tournaments, traveling from one city to another, staying in cheap hotels and, reading Kant and Nietzsche and Arendt, and eating takeout and Clif bars with the other players.

He kept hitting hard and not quitting and he became better and better, earning more and more ATP points, which put him higher and higher in the draws, letting him play lower ranked players in the early rounds with a better chance to make it into the quarters, semis, and possibly the finals. The promoters were making money. The sponsors were making money. The coaches and managers were making money, and he was making money. But not anything like one might dream of.

For a couple of years, during which he was playing both singles, doubles, and mixed doubles on the tour, he made enough to cover the airline and hotel costs with a little left over.

In his tenth year on the circuit, at a tournament in Palm Springs, Fiona Adler, a woman he knew at SHOQ and who had become a sports journalist when she realized her tennis career wasn’t going to happen, approached him and they started seeing one another when they were both in the same city for a tournament. They ended up spending more and more time together, nothing serious, and eventually she told him her sister had seen him play and she had a young son for whom she and her husband wanted to find a teaching pro.

“Enrique, face it,” said Fiona, “you’re good but not that good, you’ve been in this game ten years and you’re never going to make it big. Quit while you’re a name people know and have some money saved. You’re good looking. You start teaching and women from all over will want to bring their kids to you.”

“I doubt it, but okay,” he said. And so, Fiona introduced him to her sister, Ariana, and her son.

The boy was quick and confident, with near-perfect, sweet, natural strokes. He could feel the game. You could see it in the way he met the ball, not overswinging like most kids. He was loose. He hit like he was having a conversation with the ball. A natural talent. Enrique moved to Long Island took a job at a upscale tennis club and took the boy on.

Ariana brought the boy for lessons every day after school and all day on weekends, though Cal, her husband told her it was a waste. He said, “Let’s take him down to Bollettieri’s school in Florida. The hell with this loser teaching pro. What can you possibly see in that guy?

Ariana saw a lot. “He’s a good teacher and he knows what tennis academies do to a young kid. He knows that Conor is good, not enough to beat a Djokovic. But he sees him playing in college and maybe pros and loving it. Let him do that. Don’t turn Conor into a commodity you can market for your own sake. Give Enrique a year to get him into the juniors and see how he does.”

“You’re being small minded,” he told her. “Conor needs a chance to be great. He can have six months. That’s all.”

Ariana said, “Thanks. You won’t regret it.”

Enrique took Conor to the boys’ twelves and in three months he got a national ranking in the juniors. Ariana went along to all his matches. The three of them got along well. Conor liked Enrique and Enrique liked Conor. The problem was that Ariana liked Enrique a lot and Enrique liked her too. A lot. And one night after they had all said good night at a cheap hotel in Cincinnati … well, you know what happened.

So Cal, hurt beyond belief, said, “Ariana, what did you think would happen?” He sued for divorce and he took Conor, who was hurt well within belief and would not say a word to his mother, and their other son, Chris, who was too young to believe or understand anything or even to know what was going on, down to Bollettieri’s, leaving Ariana the house and all of his winter clothing.

She was heartbroken. All she had left was a home with an island in the kitchen and a gazebo in the backyard, friends who didn’t call, and the hope that Enrique would not leave her too.

He did not. He told her he loved her, and they sold the house with the island in the kitchen and the gazebo in the backyard and moved to Ecuador, where he taught tennis at a club outside of Guayaquil, not far from where he’d grown up.

Ariana cried a lot, missing her boys, sending them cards on birthdays and holidays and in three years they went to see Conor play doubles at the US Open where he lost in the third round, and they all went out together to an Asian fusion restaurant on Queens Boulevard in Flushing.

Their waiter asked everyone to smile and to lean in together. “More close, please” he said, and he took their picture with two separate iPhones and brought them two separate checks.

Pickleball? Yeah, That Sounds Like Fun or Myron’s Pickleball Altercation

So, tell me, Myron, what happened.

I got into an altercation in the park.

Did you get hurt? What kind of an altercation? What park?

The park by Brooklyn Bridge.

Did anyone get hurt? Did the police come?

No, no. Nothing.

What nothing? You look a wreck.

It got a little heated. Nobody got hurt. Millstein stepped in before anything got out of hand. Millstein’s a big guy. He stepped in.

Where did he step in, Myron. Just tell me what happened. What did you do?

I was playing doubles with Singer, and that guy Mickey something, and Rosalie.

Rosalie?

Singer’s sister-in-law, and she had to leave and so this guy comes on the court. You know, the pickleball courts by the bridge.

Yes, yes.

And so this guy I never saw before comes on and he says he’ll fill in for her and before you know it, we’re warming up doubles, and it’s not like the usual friendly game. He’s hitting smashes and boom-boom right at you. In the warm-up! And so then when we start to play, he’s telling us all where we’re supposed to stand and how to call the scores and which side we should be serving on and who goes first. And what he was saying doesn’t make any sense, it wasn’t logical at all.

Wait Myron, you have to understand, not everybody thinks like you do. Not everything has to make sense. Yes, to you it does, but not everybody. Myron, you can’t argue with some people. It’s not good for your heart. You just have to walk away. Leave it be.

I should have but I admit I was thinking I know how to play this game and who’s he to tell me? We’ve been playing all summer. Nobody said we were doing it all wrong.

And you got into an argument about some farkakteh game? Give me a break. You don’t have enough things to worry about? Now you have to worry about somebody thocking a wiffle ball at your head when you’re standing in the kitchen. Please, Myron.

It’s not that.

Then what is it?

He was serving the ball from the wrong side of the court.

And what.

So I told him and he said that I was wrong. And I told him what the rule was.

What rule?

The rule about serving from the lefthand side when your score is odd, and he tells me he’s first server and the first server serves from the right side of the court, and I tell him no and he says that’s the way it is where he plays.

And where does he play?

The Villages. In Florida.

What’s he doing playing in Brooklyn Bridge Park on a Friday morning in September?

He comes up to live with his sister in Bensonhurst for three months in the summer.

What, they don’t have air conditioning in the Villages?

I don’t know, but that’s not the point.

What is the point?

The point is that he said that he knows the rules because he plays in big tournaments and everywhere he plays they play by those rules.

What rules?

The ones about the first server. I tell him he should read the rules.

I should read the rules? he tells me, you should read the rules, he says.

Myron, listen to yourself. Calm down. Show me the rules.

Why?

Because I want to see why two grown men are arguing over something so important as a pickleball game, that’s why.

Here’s the rule book. I’ll show you.

Myron, don’t show me. Let me read the rules. Go make some tea. I’ll come in when I’m finished.

Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes pass. Myron’s tea has gotten cold. Millie comes back.

Myron, you like this game? Obviously. This game with server one and server two, but sometimes server two serves first, and alternating sides of the court, side out, side in, even, odd, a line is in, but sometimes a line is out, and what’s the score? Two-two-one? One-one-what? Who makes up a game like this. With an eighty-six page rule book, yet? You know who? People with too much time on their hands and nothing else on their minds? And they make rules so that you get into an argument with some know-it-all-from Florida yet, with a two hundred dollar uranium-coated power paddle in his hand.

Silence.

Look, Myron, I have news for you.

What.

I hate to say this, but you’re both right, I think. Both you and Mr. Florida Villages bigshot, and neither one of you is totally right. Or wrong.

What do you mean?

It’s the rules, Myron. They’re screwy. They contradict themselves. I think.

Listen to this, “Rule 4.B.2. At the start of each game, the starting server begins the serve from the side of the court dictated by the score.” Okay. Then, “Rule 4.B.6.a. At the start of each side out, service begins in the right/even serving area.” It’s starting to get confusing. And then, “Rule 4.B.6.b. When the team’s score is even, the team’s starting server’s correct position is at the right/even serving area. When the team’s score is odd, the starting server’s correct position is at the left/odd court.” That can’t be, can it?

Right. No. Yes. Right. It makes no sense. I don’t know.  

So, you can understand how someone would believe the part that doesn’t make sense to you because it’s right there in the rule book and it’s just the part that makes sense to them?

Yes. Now I do.

Listen, Myron, you go back there and if Mr. Villages is still there you tell him you’re sorry and that it’s all so confusing and no hard feelings and that he should come home with you and have a cup of tea. And, look, if he’s not there just forget about it, he’ll tell all his friends about the Brooklyn jerk he met. So what? Then next time just play with people you know and if someone new comes on the court you just say we play by the Official Brooklyn Bridge Rules, and if he has a problem with that, he should go take it to City Hall like everyone else does. On the other hand, maybe he knows what he’s talking about.

The Surest Thing

We heard that my father’s friend, Mel Metfessel, was buying Palestri’s market on the corner of Yonkers Avenue, across from the racetrack and next door to my grandfather’s hardware store, where my father worked as the assistant manager.

My grandfather owned the business and he said that made him the manager. From opening the store at nine until he locked the door at five, he sat beside the counter while my father stood behind it all day running the cash register.

Customers would walk all the way back to the counter, passing the washing machines, lawn mowers, hammers, screw drivers, nail barrels, and paint to talk to my grandfather, who they called Benny, sitting in the wooden fold-up chair with one leg crossed over the other, and ask him for what they wanted to buy.

“So, Benny, I’m looking for a fah.”

“What kind of fah?” my grandfather would say.

“A metal fah,” the man would say.

“Rasp or double cut?”

“I don’t know.”

“Whadaya mean you don’t know? Whadah you need it for?” my grandfather would ask him.

My grandfather would sit looking off at the wall on the opposite side of the store. He always did that when he was working. He never looked at the customers when he was talking to them, just at where the fahs or hammers might be, but not right at them.

“I gotta fah down the end of the spindle where it fits into the hole in the sta in Millie’s rocking chair,” said the man.

“Nahhhhh, you don’t need it!,” my grandfather would inevitably respond.

“Whadaya mean, I don’t need it. The spindle won’t fit the hole the way it is.”

“You don’t need a file for that,” my grandfather would tell him and then he’d turn to Dave, my father, and say, “Give him two sheets of thirty-six and two of the eighty sandpaper and charge him forty-nine cents, no tax, and put them in a bag.”

Benny never looked at my father either when he talked to him. Only after he’d say something and then only for a quick second and then he’d look away at something else again.

Metfessel, tall and beefy looking, missing one tooth, used to work for my grandfather. He made deliveries, unloaded inventory into the storeroom, and swept up before closing. He always covered his mouth with the back of his hand when he talked to you.

One day, Metfessel didn’t come to work. My grandfather said he’d got another job. “He don’t work here no more,” he said. That was all he said. That’s when we found out that Metfessel was going to work in Palestri’s grocery.

Palestri did a good business in dry goods, kitchen utensils, and grocery items. There was a Coca-Cola cooler across from the counter filled with ice. He taped a “No leaning” sign on the side by the crate for empties. Candy bars and cigarettes were on the shelves behind the counter. You had to ask Palestri for whatever you wanted, and he would reach behind him for it without taking his eyes off you and slap it down on the counter with a pack of matches on top, if you were buying cigarettes.

Every afternoon my mother sent me down for Chesterfields and told me to tell Palestri they were for her, not to forget the two cents change or matches and I could keep the two cents.

My father had gotten Metfessel a job working for Palestri as a stock clerk. He was working there for about two years when Palestri decided to sell the store to him and move to Florida. Metfessel told my father that he’d set Palestri up with a friend in Miami who’d get him a stake in the Dania jai alai fronton and maybe he might work his way into a piece of the greyhound action in Palm Beach. My father says that Metfessel knows all the right people.

My mother told my father, he shouldn’t get involved with Metfessel. “He’s a slick one,” she said.

“Slick?” my father said. He was smoking in the TV room.

“Turn the TV down,” my mother told him. “I can’t hear you.”

“Slick, I said.”

“No, Dave, you said, ‘slick?’ to me like a question. As if all of a sudden you didn’t know what slick means. And where does Metfessel get the kind money to buy a store in the first place?”

“What kind money?”

“What do you mean, Dave, ‘what kind of money?’ The kind of money you need to buy a store on the hottest real estate corner in the whole city.”

“Hottest?”

“Dave. Stop.”

“Stop what?”

“That.”

“What’s that?”

“Dave, cut it out. I know what you’re doing.”

“What’s he doing, ma?” I said.

“Yeah, Shirl, what’s he doing?”

“Go to bed, Ruthie.”

“Why do I have to go to bed?”

“It’s late. There’s school tomorrow.”

“School?” I said.

“Dave, tell her to go to bed.”

“Go to bed, Ruthie, and say goodnight to your mother.”

“Goodnight, mom.”

I lived upstairs, then. We all lived in apartments above the hardware store. My parents lived on the second floor. I lived with my grandparents and older brother up on the third floor. 

“David, did you have anything to do with this?”

“Which ‘this’?”

“Answer me, are you involved with Metfessel in this deal? Did you give Metfessel any money again? Did you ask my father for money? And don’t answer me with another question.”

“It’s a sure thing, Shirl. We could make an easy ten percent of the profits he makes over and above what he would owe us.”

“There is no sure thing, Dave. Here or anywhere. The hardware store was supposed to be a sure thing. The property in Florida was a sure thing. Look at us. We have nothing. Less than nothing. We live with my parents. I’m forty-seven years old. You’re fifty-six. We share a phone line with them. You work for my father. If he loses anything we lose everything, it’s over for us. All of us.

“Shirl.”

“Don’t ‘Shirl’ me. Did you ask my father for money? The truth. The absolute truthy, truthy, truth.”

“The truthy truth… no, not yet.

“Honest?”

“Honest truth. I swear to you on my mother’s soul, wherever she is.”

“Please don’t ask him. He hates Metfessel for selling Ralphie and Ernestine that pool for the roof over their garage. Dave, look at me. We have a kid in college. We own nothing. You know Metfessel would sell Ruthie and her dog for gas money if we ever took our eyes off them.”

“Ruthie, honey,” my mother called up to me, “I know you’re listening, I didn’t mean to say that about anyone selling you and Sinclair. I was kidding.”

“Shirl, baby.”

“Stop laughing and stop calling me Shirl baby, Dave. I hate that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“My mother calls you ‘The Prince.’ She reveres you. We eat Chinese at their dinner table every Sunday night. She’d cut up your vegetables and spoon your soup into your open mouth if you’d let her. And all that matters to my father is that you married his only daughter.

“I know.”


“David. What kind of store is Metfessel planning to open? … David?”

“What kind of store?”

“Christ, Dave, you do the right thing! Stay out of this. Metfessel is trouble in a tee shirt. We don’t need his kind of trouble. We have plenty of other kinds.

“He has a head for business.”

“Yes, he has a head for business, and he has contacts and friends, and one day he’ll end up either in Sing Sing or in the river. Guaranteed. I need you, Dave. Please stay out of this.”

Metfessel got the store. But not with our money. Nobody ever heard from Palestri again. My grandparents moved to a condo in Lake Worth and gave both the store and the business to my mother. She told my father he should be the manager and she would do the bookkeeping. They changed the name to Dave’s Hardware and hired Ralphie to run the cash register.

Breaking the Judy Blues Eyes Rule

Nathan M. flew from Logan to West Palm Beach. He had taken a few days off from work. His son, the oldest one, picked him up at the airport, and they talked, mostly about the weather in Boston, their jobs, and the Mets on the car ride up to St. Lucie. It was spring training season and it felt like late July in the Back Bay.

 Nathan asked his son if he could turn up the car radio. Billy Joel. Piano Man.

His son always had Billy Joel on whenever Nathan got in his truck. He wondered whether his son really liked Billy Joel or if he only played it because they used to listen to him, volume turned high, when the two of them lived together. That was in the years after his mother and Nathan had split and his son moved back home after college. Either way, it made him happy. He could feel his shoulders relax.

“He says, ‘Son can you play me a memory?

I’m not really sure how it goes

But it’s sad and it’s sweet and I knew it complete

When I wore a younger man’s clothes.’”

His son had started calling Nathan pretty regularly after his mother had been diagnosed with ALS. This was after he’d finished grad school, gotten married to a young woman from Mississippi, and they moved to Florida to be near to his mother.

Nathan and Helen, the boy’s mother, had three children and all three had moved to Florida to be near her.

Nathan now had two young children with his new wife. They lived in Boston, close to where her family lived.

He’d flown down when his son called to say that Helen was dying, asking if he wanted to come see her for the last time.

Each of his children and their partners were there. They were all in her spare bedroom with the hospital bed and medical equipment. No one spoke when he walked in. They looked at him and smiled. He and Helen had had a troubled past.

Each of them took turns sitting briefly in a chair by Helen’s bed. The IV drip had been unplugged, though the line with the morphine pump was still clicking on and off. Nathan sat by the bed once, maybe twice, for a few minutes each time, hoping and not hoping she would open her eyes and see him there. A thin blanket covered her body. Her face was sharp and gaunt.

He and Helen had married in August of sixty-six. It was hot and he’d worn a suit he’d rented.

Nathan had kept one picture of her. The first one he’d ever taken of her. On one of the first days they’d spent together. The only one he had of her by herself—not with friends or in a crowd of tourists wearing plaid and untucked shirts in front of some famous monument or around a table with smiling people with raised glasses leaning in towards one another though they’d only just met one another.

In this photo she’s standing beside his car. In three-quarter profile, one skeptical eyebrow raised. Her hand shading the sun from her eyes. In a light-colored summer dress. The photo was from September ’65. A little less than a year before they were married.

After Nathan had been there for a while, the hospice nurse had said, “Sometimes, right near the end, you see, one or the other of you might consider leaving the room, to ease the passing.”

She’d said it to all of them, but he was the only one who then left.

He went out for a walk. Passing pastel condos like hers. Neat lawns. Palm trees. Swept driveways. Clean white cars with Michigan and new Sunshine State plates. Nobody to be seen in the yards. No sounds other than those of yelping poodles behind drawn curtains and trucks on the interstate.

He was not in the room when she died.

In the ten months before he and Helen were married, they had taken short, uncomplicated trips. Sampling large pizzas with garlic and onion in places they’d never been before, sharing a Coke with no ice. Eating the whole pie right there in the booth, wiping the grease off their chins and fingers, laughing, giving half-serious points for crust, chew, sauce, cheese, and its New York-style foldability, compared with the others they’d eaten. Tony and Tina’s on Arthur Avenue, Joe’s on Carmine Street, Pasty’s on 56th Street. The Famous and not so Famous Original Rays.

Driving around with the windows open playing the Zombies and Stones tapes. Cramming for organic chemistry exams together: The sequence of steps in the hydrohalogenation reaction of an asymmetric alkene. The Bischler-Napieralski reaction. He wanted badly to go to medical school. She wasn’t interested in any more school and wanted to get a job.

So, instead, they got married.

 Before that, in June or July, Nathan told his older brother that he couldn’t do it. Couldn’t go through with it. No way. He was twenty-one. Scared. Rushed. Not at all what he wanted. His brother said if that was a legit reason for not getting married, nobody would do it. “You need a better excuse than that,” he said. If that was his only reason, it wasn’t good enough.

It was during that part of the sixties that still wore the clothes of the fifties. Pre-Woodstock. Pre-sexual freedom. Pre-EST. Pre-consciousness-raising. The pre-let’s-think-about-this-and-see-the-world-for-a-while-before-we-just-rush-into-something-stupid part of the sixties.

His brother said their mother would throw a shit fit if he backed out. And so, he didn’t. They moved into an apartment together. Bought an Ethan Allen couch and a rocking chair. They nailed pictures up on the walls and kept their socks and underwear in separate dressers.

Neither of them knew anything about marriage, at least not good ones. They followed a hand-me-down script they were given, with nothing more than that to go on. Nothing that might help them avert twenty years of quiet unhappiness, depression, anxiety, resentment, isolation, loose and muddled affairs, and weariness. No real, deep, understanding of love to guide them.

Both wanting, expecting, to love and to be loved. And when they didn’t know how to make that happen and didn’t see a way out, they both kept stepping deeper into a muddy river which only got wider the further they got in.

They were little more than adolescents made up to look like adults, with three children and the old thin-at-the-elbows neuroses their parents had given to them. They were no good together, and each was too afraid to say it.

They split. They found they were so much better apart. Happier. It just took so long for that to happen.

She died that afternoon while he was out walking.

Then, as she lay, so recently alive, so recently herself, all of that past came welling up in him.

And so, he cried. For her. And for himself. For their shared and separate sadness before they split. For the joy they had missed when they were together.

On the flight back up to Logan, looking down at the blue, blue ocean, he listened to the circling lyrics of songs he once knew by heart and only now remembered as fragments on repeat in his brain. Words and melodies worn deeply into the grooves of his synapses.

Only then, belatedly, did he see that he had broken the Judy Blue Eye’s Rule.

He had stood by her bed. Taken his turn in the chair beside her. And, even then, at that moment, when she had so little time left, he had not seen her as who she was. Only who she had been … and only in relation to himself. As he had done in the past, seeing her only through his too-young-to-see-clearly eyes.

Even then as she was near to breathing her last human breath, his vision of her was still clouded by the remnants of who she had seemed to be in the past. Not the woman she was. The one who she always had been, and he could not see. CSN. Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.

“Don’t let the past remind us of what we are not now

I am not dreaming

I am yours, you are mine, you are what you are…”

Hannah and Murray Discuss the Future

“Ma, where’s Murray?”

“Out with Zeus.”

“He names a dog Zeus and he gets away with it? Isn’t that like sacrilegious, or illegal or something?”

“Hannah dear, it’s only sacrilegious if you first make a law against it. Like, ‘thou shalt not covet’ or ‘thou shalt not name a dog after a major- or minor-, or even half-god of the universe’, for example.”

“And could I do that?”

“Maybe, ask your father.”

“But what if I make a law like that and someone breaks it?”

“Well, Hannah, I guess it might depend upon several things like, who breaks it, or if only one breaks it, or if a whole lot of them break it, or if they break it by only thinking about it, or planning to do it, or doing it only once, or if they do it a lot while no one is watching, or if they do it and then apologize after but nobody believes their apology, or if…”

“Ok, ma, thanks, I’ll ask Dad.”

“That’s good dear. He’ll appreciate that since…”

“Dad, Ma said I should talk to you. It’s about Murray.”

“Have you spoken with Murray about the matter first?”

“Not exactly, sort of, but not in those exact same words.”

“Well, dear, it’s disrespectful if you go over your brother’s head without speaking with him first, and so I suggest that you give some thought to possibly…”

“My god, no wonder nothing ever gets done around here anymore.”

“What was that dear?”

“Nothing, Dad.”

“So, Murray, Dad said I should talk to you about something super really important.”

“Did you leave a note in my in-box?”

“I tried, but it was full and not accepting any more messages, not since the BCE changed to AD.

“Am I detecting a note of hostility and an incipient challenge to the established proto…”

“Cut the crap, Murray, I’m you your sister. I need you to get in touch with Moses.

“Unfortunately, Hadassah…”

“Hannah.”

“Unfortunately, Hannah, Moses passed on some time ago.”

“Too bad. He was your front man, your mouthpiece, your homey with the commonfolk. And then you just drop him off at the edge of the Jordan like a day-old knish? Who’d you get to replace him.”

“Ah, good question. I’m still interviewing. I’ve had so little time to… I wish I had made better use of his skills, sending him off into the desert was just a holding action until I…”

 “You’re shitting me, right?”

“I’ve had a few good prospects but, you know how it is with…”

“I cannot goddamn believe this. You’re telling me that you you’re okay with things down there with the floods and fires, polar ice melting, a million species of plants and animals you made yourself all those zillions of years ago, gone (and don’t tell me it was only six days because we both know that’s a crock because of the mutability of spacetime) and you do nothing? Nada?”

“Nada?”

“Murray, are you even paying any attention? It’s not like it was just an unpaid internship with Moses. He traipsed through the wilderness for forty years to find the promised land and when they got there you told him you’d changed your mind, and said ‘no dice folks’, go back down the mountain and walk around for another 38 years and then attack the Amorites and, no worries, you just massacre them and take their land. Are you kidding me? Then you did the same with the Reubinites, the Gadites, Manassites, the meteorites and stalactites and stalagmites, the Hittites and the Bagelbites, and the others.”

“You’re mocking me.”

“And you sent them off smiting and wandering, meanwhile saying don’t worship the stars and the moon and the earth and the water but the should obey you about what they should eat and how many prayers to say how many times a day, and don’t eat anything non-kosher. When soon there’ll be no more shrimp or pigs anyway, Murray. I hope you took pictures of all the mountains and valleys and islands, giraffes, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and Euterpe precatoria palms, because you can say ‘sayonara baby’ to it all unless you get off your skinny-ass butt and do something. Maybe you should have just let them go on worshiping the sky and the trees and the water in the first place.

“Look, bro, you signed up for ‘eternal.’ No one told you to say that. Moses kept calling you ‘the Eternal.’ He didn’t call you the ‘maybe-sometimes-guy’, or the ‘just-for-a-little-while-guy.’ They counted on you. People believed that shit. Have you looked at your firmament, by the way? Filled with satellites and pieces of satellites, used rocket parts, methane, microplastics, mylar balloons, and dead insects.

“You wanted a monopoly. ‘Have no gods before me.’ You said that. And with me and Myron here, and all the rest of us, Artemis, Aphrodite, Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer, Buddha, and Gaia, … sure, we had our problems but nothing like what’s going on now. At least we answered the phone. But with you, who does anyone get when they call customer service?

“Face it, Murray, Deuteronomy may really have been the last chapter for you.”

“Thank you, Hannah. I get it. I don’t need your help if that’s what this is supposed to be. I’m not interested. I just figured I’d get them started and then, you know, let free will take them the rest of the way, right? That was the whole point with the snake and the apple.”

“But Murray, look where that got them. I mean after they ate the apple and put clothes on, you could have dropped some hints about the black plague or Styrofoam, or anything with the word ‘atomic’ in it, or don’t build houses downhill from Vesuvius, or avoid anyone with Stalin as a last name, or don’t dig down further than say ten cubits, and stay away from gun powder, bat caves, and people who won’t wear a mask, for example.”

“So, what should I do now?”

“You need a new Moses type, Murray. One with creds. Experience. Charisma. I’ll set you up, man. Word! I can get you touch with this guy named LeBron.”

Los Días de Muertos

After.

After they had walked.

After they had walked, they drank soft red wine.

After they drank the wine, they ate. Sweet slices of pan de muerto with honey,

And, after they ate the pan de muerto, they danced.

“This is rich! Two men dancing in the middle of the afternoon,” said Sedge. “This is rich!” he said again. “That’s what me Mum would have said.”

They had gone back to Javier’s house. It was the day after the election though that was not why they had met on the beach or why they were dancing. Nor why Javier was wearing a mask, a COVID mask, a black one with the cadaverous white bones of a smiling skull face painted on the front, una calavera. It was the one he made for the Days of the Dead, on the weekend just past.

When they had gotten back to the house. Before they had the wine, Javier turned to Sedge. “I am sorry, my friend” he said. “Maybe we should not have walked all the way down to the inlet. Not today.”

“Maybe we had no choice,” Sedge offered. His voice as thin as a reed.

They had walked on the hard-packed sand as far south as the mouth of the intracoastal inlet. The closer they came to it, the more anxious Sedge felt.

They stood looking down at the water.

The tide was rushing out, forced, through the narrow inlet, pulling the water through in swift and strong swirling eddies. Coiling currents over and under one another.

Sedge could see how easily a person, a body, would be dragged down in an instant, below the surface, twisting and turning in the turbulence and carried out into the dark sea, possibly never to be found or perhaps, he thought, carried back somewhere along the long stretch of the shore by a reciprocating, incoming, tide, as had been Adelaide.

Adelaide.

It was a year, almost to the day, since her body had been found on the beach. In her black bathing suit. The suit she loved, the one she wore in the picture he has of her on his phone, holding her glasses down at her side, rows of incoming waves behind her, standing in that quarter-turned, shoulders-back, way she did for photos. Her vanity showing. After which she put her glasses back on because she could not see more than a colorful blur without them.

The two of them, Sedge and Adelaide, had met Javier years back at a Ritmo 95.7FM fundraiser for Miami’s troubled Hispanic youth. He’d been the weekday morning man before the station was bought and went to all-day-cubatón programming and the youthful audience had become Latinx and Javier’s olden-days voice had aged him out.

They had become tight. The three of them.

After her body was found on the beach that evening, Sedge was beset with grief. So deep and so constant, it filled his days as completely as darkness fills a room when the lamp is extinguished. He wore his grief like a repellent raiment of rags.

At the sharp drop at the water’s edge, where the stream erodes away the sand, Javi touched Sedge lightly on the arm.

“Take this,” he said, separating a marigold from the bunch he held, carried from home.

Sedge took the flower as Javi tossed one and then another into the water, watching as each one was spirited swiftly away on the surface. He felt the near-weightless earthy vibrance of it, smelled its unmistakable pungency and, as Javi had done with the others, he tossed it into the stream.

“We do this to remember. To celebrate the dead,” said Javi.

“Celebrate?”

“Yes. To celebrate their lives and what they have left with us. Siempre, always, una mezcla de la felicidad y la tristeza. The happy and the sad. So, we gather at their graves, or just together as we are now and we think good things about them and tell their stories. All of them. All the lives lost. Each one mourned. Those laid to rest and others who have never found a resting place. They all look to us to recognize them and to remember.

“How can I celebrate her death? What a horror that must have been. To die like that.”

“Do you know of any death, Sedge, that is not a horror?”

“And we celebrate that?

“No, of course not.”

“Then what?”

“A person just like us who lived and died. As we will. Is that not what you want in some way. To have your life celebrated?”

“The marigolds?”

Yes. The marigolds. We believe they have the power to open the door between the living and the dead, to bring their souls, their beingness, if you will, into the present moment. Your mom. Adelaide. A Salvadoran man with a family of eight who was disappeared. Trayvon and Breonna. A million people who had the COVID. My parents, who were Marielitos who climbed into a twenty-foot boat in the dark with one bag and held onto me and my brother for dear life. For dear life, and then…,” he said. “When we lose someone close to us, when we grieve in our hearts, and give room to the emptiness we feel, when we share that loss with others, we bring ourselves closer to them, both the ones we’ve lost and ones we grieve with. This is why we do this.”

“I am sorry for you. For them.”

“Listen to me, Sedge, I miss her too.”

“Not as much as I do.”

“Oh, no? How do you know that? You are not the only one to grieve for her.”

Sedge was silent for a moment. “I’m sorry, he said. “I don’t know. I cannot know. I should not have said that.”

“Nor should have I, Papi,” said Javier. “Let’s forget that. Come with me. We will bake some Pan de Muerto together and talk of other things. We will put aside sad thoughts and pray together for them and us, and dance La Danza de los Viejitos, for we soon will be little old men ourselves.”

And they turned back. The sun hard and warm on the back of their necks and they spoke of Adelaide and their parents and friends and even those who they had never known.

The Death of a Friend

“The death of a friend,” thought Sedge, in the days after Adelaide had died, “was like a tenacious, frightful, early morning dream. One that holds you so tightly that you feel your lungs cry and you strain to pull yourself away and at the very same moment you feel so hopeless you want to give up and die.” Continue reading The Death of a Friend

After Adelaide

Sedgwick sits alone on the soft sand. The tide is receding. The sun stretches long shadows down the beach from behind the condos along A1A. The low-rise two-bedroom models suited to the needs and savings of the less-than-wealthy and less-well-connected winter people who couldn’t afford the tall, balconied, places fronting the intra-coastal. Single people mostly, women mostly, who come south when it gets too cold and too quiet up north. People he knows. Women he knows.

Adelaide was one of those women. Continue reading After Adelaide

Adelaide On the Beach

When Sedgwick saw the body on the beach, in the evening, he didn’t believe it was Adelaide, the woman he had been seeing for a few months, earlier, until they had wordlessly drifted away from one another, having never, he thought, made any sort of commitment to one another, save for the general assumption that they’d spend an evening or two together, sometimes during the week, when she was in town, Continue reading Adelaide On the Beach