McSweeney'sI Feel Free

McSweeney's 21

I’d been dating Karen for two weeks, maybe three, when she told me an ex-lover was stalking her. “Relentlessly,” she said. They’d broken up over a year ago, she insisted, but Trang just couldn’t take a hint. He followed her everywhere, threatened her with a bowie knife, and had even kicked another man repeatedly in the mouth with his combat boots. Major reconstructive surgery. “He’s huge,” she said. “And crazy.” (Read more)

 

SunDefiance

The Sun Magazine, August 2003

In the YMCA sauna, Bill Drucker, a pharmacist, was holding forth on the subject of mutual funds, pros and cons, when the door banged open and an icy blast of air slapped everybody’s cheeks and chests. Pontius Pilate strode in, his wool robes shushing against his naked hairy ankles. “Hello, boys,” he said. Father Delmont, who was seated next to me, cinched his soggy white towel at his waist and scurried out of the sauna. Pilate insinuated himself between Drucker and me on the wooden bench and tapped my knee with his white-taped fingers. “I have been looking for you,” he said. “We’re on at three, my friend.” (Read more)

Open CityPhysical Discipline

Open City 21

In the winter of 1983, when I was twelve years old, my older sister Cathy carried a ventriloquist’s dummy with her wherever she went. The dummy’s name was Marilyn, and at first nobody had the heart to tell Cathy that Marilyn was not really a dummy, but was in fact a charred strip of bark from our fireplace. But what could we do? Cathy skated freely on the frozen pond of her imagination, and as she wasn’t hurting anybody but herself, we generally ignored her eccentricities. She had just turned thirteen. Every night she slept with this burnt, splintered wood in her narrow bed, she snuggled with it on the sofa after school while she watched soap operas and sit-coms, and she left big black streaks across everything she touched, from the refrigerator door to my previously white gerbils. Mr. Barker, Cathy’s homeroom teacher, was concerned. The school psychologist, Nancy Palermo, asked my father if we had recently lost any family members to a house blaze or a fiery car crash. My father answered in the negative. Ms. Palermo wanted to see Cathy three times a week after school for private consultations. (Read more)