TRIUMPH out; excerpt and more herein | Wing & Fly

After a long series of silences and polite dismissals, often accompanied by jarring though ultimately appreciated words of high praise, from publishers numerous – some of the writers among you will no doubt feel the sentiment — I decided to take a collection of short stories long evolving and under way to publication myself via THE2NDHAND’s sometime book-publishing endeavor. Ebook only, but available in a host of formats to fit most of the devices — Kindle, iBooks, Nook, etc. — including our trusty desktops and laptops, out there.

The book’s called Triumph of the Ape, and, written primarily between the years 2000 and 2008, chronicles my scribbling tour through the go-go dark days of the first decade of our 21st Century — the triumph of course less jubilant than a matter of course here in America. The stories, riffing on various styles and genres from New South satire to end-of-days dirge, by turns reach back into the past of my native South Carolina and forward into grim and/or not-so-grim futures where love — and no shortage of laughter — nonetheless remain our best hopes.

Find more about it via this link, including some slightly less biased descriptions of it all from some very kind, awesome people. (A-and what about print, you say? Well, hold on — time and money, but of course. Any wonderful editors, agents, publishers, patrons looking for something keen, a partnership, etc., I’m all open ears and saucer eyes.)

REVIEW COPIES
If you can blog about it and/or are interested in a copy for review, writers among you, for certain be in touch: todd@the2ndhand.com.

Below find one of the stories, one of the few to have not seen prior publication outside of my own erstwhile blogging, where portions of it originally appeared in the year 2005, I believe it was.

While I’m at it, here’s a shoutout to the editors of the mags/projects that took on one or more of the stories in Triumph long before this release. Roll call: Red Mountain Review (Birmingham, Ala.), Lumpen (Chicago), Featherproof’s mini-books series (Chi), Chicago Noir (Akashic-released anthology, Neal Pollack edited), Hair Trigger (Chi), Knee Jerk (Chi), Kiss Machine (Toronto), and Holiday in Cambodia (limited-run chapbook put out by Annalemma).

In any case, enjoy the story:

ZOO
High winter and Essie Mae Washington-Williams was on TV promoting her memoir, Dear Senator, about her semi-clandestine life as the illegitimate African-American daughter of the United States’ most notorious former segregationist. A picture of myself and said segregationist — he must’ve been in his 70s at the time, I was perhaps three — sits atop the mantle above the fake fireplace in my Chicago apartment. The old man looks happy enough, I guess, without a thought in his mind about any possible justification for his past, an interpretation I would make again and again, in my teenage years, meeting him repeatedly at various functions and being presented with the unfortunate opportunity to shake his limp, liver-spotted hand.

In the picture, the only one that I have from my prepubescent Carolina life, I am engaged in an activity whose legacy would follow me far into adulthood, a nervous fidgeting of hands. Strom Thurmond holds my three-year-old body high, and I’m doing my best, goddamnit, just to avert my eyes, I think, my baby hands poised in front of me, fingers half interlocked, nothing to hold on to but the old man’s face but God help us if I reached out for that. I leave the picture on the mantle to remind me the enemy is out there.

Visitors to my apartment get a kick out of it, too. Essie Mae wasn’t the only news item that season — it was a winter of repeat presidential inauguration for the done-up-and-come son of a Connecticut Yankee turned Texas cowpoke, a season of hurrah and hooray and guttural and disgusting huzzahing to the man’s evermore false message — America an economic ivory tower underpinned by a veritable caveman outlook, beset upon by the moral equivalent of club-wielding barbarians and responding in kind. Apropos, I wanted to do something dirty. I wanted to throw eggs at limousines on inauguration day as many of my upstanding Neanderthal friends were planning. That was the answer, I’d determined upon returning to Chicago from my folks’ home after Christmas, eggs that would crack and whose insides would dry on the black paint job, and woe to he or she who attempted to remove the dried remnants — a heinous fated awaited. Some kids hit my own American sedan once, and two weeks later, when finally the Chicago snow that had buried the bottom half of the vehicle sufficiently melted to grant access to the car’s driver-side door, I realized the calamity, proceeding to scour the spot with the heinously smelly sponge with which I commonly washed my dishes at the time. A mere five minutes in I’d ruined the paint job — the frozen egg remnants came off with application of hot water, but so did the color — further even than the numerous long key scratches on its flank already had, which is to say, irreparably.

Today I smoke. A lot. I like having something in my hands. If they’re empty and I find myself in a situation where things are expected of me — say I’m on the job, editors are asking questions about something I was supposed to do (maybe I did, maybe I didn’t) — my first instinct is to roll and light a cigarette and blow the smoke into the interlocutor’s face. Essie Mae Washington-Williams’ much more deferential personality manifested itself on the radio program, and I’d assume in the book though I’ll most certainly never read it, in a reflex action to continually apologize for the segregationist senator. Again, I wouldn’t have been so charitable. I walked out to work that day fuming a little, laughing all the while, at the preposterous history of the recently dead century-old man, to happen upon every window in my car shattered and a note scrawled on the back of a Spanish leaflet for a local grocery, whose edges fluttered in the slight winter breeze and which read, “motherfucker my chair bitch I know u.”

Chickens coming home to roost. Karma. I’d been on something of a crusade since the last snowstorm. In the time-honored American tradition of the citizenry’s utter lack of participation in anything resembling a community or society, my neighborhood’s denizens were using old lawn chairs and bits of board and other urban detritus to reserve “their” parking spaces in the public way while their cars were parked elsewhere — at work, for instance, or the grocery. To be fair, some street spaces were absolutely immaculate, having been shoveled dry by said denizens, while others, like the one where I’d been parked, were still buried a foot deep in snow but for tire tracks angling in and out of the street’s center right of way. But I had indeed shoveled, if only a little, and after digging at four or five different spots over the course of days and seeing said spots quite presumptively claimed later by someone’s ragged chairs, I began to take corrective action.

For three nights, I went out at 3 a.m. and furiously, however methodically, moved every chair or old bucket or, even, ironing board from my block, deposting each in the alley off my side of the street. I sat in my apartment in the dark till the break of day in hopes of catching the looks on the faces of men and women seeing their parking spaces taken, their chairs magically disappeared. My real hope in this, you see, was that they’d beam happy faces into the cosmos, see the ultimate error of their ways and chalk their losses up to experience.

Such, though, had not been the case. I’d yet to catch anyone. And each following day, miraculously, different chairs would be pulled out and used on different parking spaces and the cycle would repeat itself, three nights on.

On the fourth, I came home extremely late after a small get-together with a fellow South Carolinian, an old friend who, over drinks, brought up the subject of our late senator’s daughter. My friend thought it all quite laughable, really. He convinced me for the moment. Let us say, then, that my spirits were thus extremely high upon arrival home, so high that a measly wooden chair was not about to block my path to the glee of destruction.

There was nowhere to park, you see, with the exception of a space eight inches deep in snow and in the middle of which was placed, absurdly, its legs deep in the unshoveled snowdrift, a red wooden chair. I wasted no time in harnessing the inertia of my four-door sedan and backing in, tipping and then shattering the chair into a myriad pieces. I panicked — the cracking of the wood had been extremely loud, shattering the Chicago night — and pulled out immediately, rolling down the street to find another space, luckily only a half block from my apartment. I assumed now the chair’s owner saw me in the act, that or the big red splotch on the bumper from the contact, prime evidence.

Retribution is sweet release, I thought, standing on the street staring through the empty space where my windshield once was, the dashboard littered with small shards ofglass. I scanned the windows of the three-flats lining the block. Might the culprit bewatching me just now from an upper window? I pondered my options, ultimately deciding to call off work, after which I visited an auto-glass shop on Western Avenue (driving the few blocks with a 15-degree wind in my face) and spent a heinous amount for the replacements.

We pay for our actions — dearly. Most of us, anyway. Strom Thurmond, with respect to his illegitimate daughter, may have gotten off the hook entirely — at least emotionally. Essie Mae Washington-Williams tells stories to television talk-show hosts of traveling yearly to Atlanta from her various northern and/or west-coast homes to meet a representative of the senator who always bore an envelope of cash meant, it can only be assumed in my mind, to keep her quiet. She doesn’t quite see it that way. She interprets the cash as “his way”of caring for his estranged child, though Thurmond never actually made the delivery himself, nor did he ever come clean about his siring Essie Mae (who was now in her 70s and no longer any kind of “child” in the literal sense).

During the senator’s last days — you remember those times, full of mocking news reports of his many gaffs in the U.S. Senate, the man clearly around early adolescence on his journey back to infancy as he flirted with young Capitol interns, even going so far as to grab an ass or two, likewise using the old nasty epithet for the African-American men and women he employed — he saw fit to send only a single birthday card to Essie Mae, signed “Affectionately, Strom Thurmond…” on Senate office letterhead, maybe. I can’t remember. The journalist interviewing Essie really wanted to make a big deal of this letter, though I couldn’t see that it was, considering that the old man could hardly even put a sentence together during the entirety of his last term, much less a pen to paper. The television journalist must have asked the same question of Essie Mae four or five times in slightly different phrasing — “Do you resent his indifference?” “Does this make you feel slighted?” — trying to get a rise out of her, get her to lay all the hatred out on the table.

She wasn’t going for it. The old lady was promoting a memoir: her own emotional investment in the ordeal was little at this point; she’d take the money and run on back home, as she’d always done. This was somehow admirable, I thought.

My windshield replaced, I wrote my own note on a piece of hefty cardboard — “Happy, motherfucker?” it read. “We live in a society here!” I even signed it “Affectionately, Strom Thurmond,” just for kicks, and camped in my apartment into the wee hours, to the chagrin of my emotionally boxed-in girlfriend, once again to await the curious window breaker, the inevitable “return to the scene of the crime” of urban lore and television cop shows. As I sat through that afternoon and evening, lots of people walked by my car, strategically placed below my third-floor front window. Lots of people read the very large piece of cardboard stuck under the windshield wipers. But none had the look of a window smasher, I figured, and none lingered very long. I fell asleep at an uncertain point propped in the window, the advent of what would be a short, surgical war,but more importantly, a war of shadows, a murky war of words.

Meanwhile, the repeat ascendancy of George W. Bush to the abstract imperial throne approached, and at last the next day my urbane coworkers were engaged in snarky conversations about impending trips to D.C., about their own plans, or lack thereof, for the inauguration upcoming. I remembered my eggy design. But a quick search revealed last-minute ticket prices to have soared if they existed at all, and more importantly I picked up a copy of the Sun-Times in a café now just days before the celebration to find a picture of Mr. Bush blown wide across the front cover, the man predictably thin-lipped, his mouth gaping, and I couldn’t help but note looking quite like a particular chimpanzee I often visited at the zoo in Lincoln Park, a beast whose name I still can’t remember but whom I like to think of simply as Gilbo.

Gilbo likes to stand on his concrete perch and throw things at me when I’m there. Things like banana peels, which the zookeepers give him, I guess, preposterously, and which bounce very anticlimactically off the glass barrier between us. Among Gilbo’s other eccentricities are a penchant for addressing visitors such as me as his “fellow citizens,” after which he’ll go on and say things like “for the last nine days, the entire world has seen for itself the state of our union — and it is strong.” And then Gilbo will launch into diatribes in which he very clearly lies to me in every word. He once told me, for instance, that even though his pen in the brand-new Ape House smelled like feces — or more exactly “like a toilet with a large turd floating in it” — things were going just as he expected they should, that the workers, you know, they may have missed a pile here or there, and maybe even failed to spray some of the urine from the corner he used, but you’ve got to expect these kind of misapprehensivesions.

That word, misapprehensivesions, I don’t even think it exists, but it’s definitely the kind of word Gilbo uses. If you didn’t know better, you’d take him for a real smartypants.

At the terminus of his verbal bobbing and weaving I usually point the fact out to him that he is lying, and that I know it, but he just says it’s hard work sitting there all day and watching the people come and go on the outside making little baby faces at him when he’s got so many grand plans for his followers. “It’s hard work being President,” says the big ape, using the self-appointed title, as it were. Yes, Gilbo claims dominion over the lot of the zoo’s animals. I tell him, typically, to keep thinking, Butch Cassidy, it’s his strongsuit.

Gilbo doesn’t much like it when I come by.

I didn’t visit him this day. I had a long night ahead of me at the bar on a stool, where I worked a night a week as doorman. My car had sat all day while I was at the office downtown — apparently the message had not been received. I removed the cardboard from beneath the windshield wipers before driving to the bar, right on glorious Western Avenue, where I spent the night trying to read and getting much of nowhere, my recent battles holding on to a much more prominent position in my mind.

Western Avenue contains absolute mysteries. The road, purportedly the longest perfectly straight road in the nation, bisects my small street just a block and a half to the east of my apartment. The bar where I occasionally work sits on it far south of where I live, as well, and during my late-night trips back north on the road, I have become acquainted with the wonder of an old gentleman who stands at the red light I always catch at Lake Street — he washes the windows of passersby, a gentle wave of the hand is all it takes to wave him off, no need to get angry. But it’s what follows that is the ultimate discovery. Try it sometime if you’re in the windy city. When the Lake Street light turns green and your vehicle lurches forward down the nearly empty avenue, Western ceases her normally teasing ways and opens wide, each traffic light flashing to green as you approach just in time for your arrival so that it’s possible to end the mile or two north of Chicago Avenue at speeds in excess of 100 mph, if you like, while breaking only a single traffic law. I rarely take it much above 50, and even that’s beyond the legal limit — though I figure Chicago cops at 3 a.m. have more important things on their agendas.

Donuts. Dealers.

I wonder if Strom Thurmond ever had the pleasure of a drive north on Western at 3 a.m.? Certainly my nemesis has never heard of the old man. That next morning, I woke propped in my window, having replaced the scrawled cardboard message and waiting for the interloper to see it, my gaze instinctively drawn to the specter of my car, whose windows had been spray-painted over in black. Again, there was a note. “hey storm fucku,” it read. I shelled out more cash to have the windows stripped of the paint, filed a police report, and left my own note then in further retaliation, scrawled on a piece ofcardboard and secured under the painted-over and nearly destroyed windshield wipers — by then they weren’t even needed, though, as the weather had improved to the point that the street was almost completely devoid of snow. My note read, “What do you look like? Sincerely, Strom Thurmond.”

The reply came promptly the next morning. “i have brown hair,” without this time any retaliatory damage or invective. A dialogue ensued, myself the interrogator, my nemesis the detainee. “Are you fat? Sincerely, Strom Thurmond.” And the answer, in the trademark all-lower-case: “yes very.”

“Do you enjoy breaking chairs over your knees like, say, Hulk Hogan or the NatureBoy Ric Flair?”

“very much”

“How often?”

etc…

How quickly simple communication renders warring parties reconciled! I spent my spare time for a few days on the streets of my neighborhood, looking for a pro-wrestler-type, fat, brown-haired man or woman, even, all the while leaving messages, he/she Essie Mae to my Strom Thurmond. Then the final reply came with an attendant blow to the hood of the car, which was dented in. The note, answering my question, “Why do you continue to live? Affectionately, Strom Thurmond,” was “i love motherfucker.” And that was it. Every further request for elaboration, every further question, went unanswered, and the roles had shifted, the silent treatment the moral equivalent of a prison hunger strike. The Thurmond identity I could no longer claim with any wit or confidence, maybe. I don’t know, I got down a little and took a walk down Western all the way to the expressway, by the projects where boys threw rocks at me — I thought all the while of mystery, of the quality of mystery we can expect from our piddling lives. I smoked half a pack’s worth of hand-rolled cigarettes on that walk to keep my hands occupied, my fingers freezing in the cold wind where I rolled the last one, on the bridge over the freeway, cars streaming by below, wind blowing in great gusts to the west. The cigarette smoked, I tossed it finally into the traffic. I wrung my hands in the loud silence.

On returning to my apartment, I caught sight of the three-day-old newspaper: George W. Bush on the front page of the Sun-Times reminding me of my “friend” Gilbo the chimpanzee. Newspaper photo editors seemed to love running pictures of Bush mid-bark, right when he delivered some backhanded threat to one of those exotic Middle Eastern countries, his tiny lips pooched out in the middle of a word, his mouth a little open. I was filled with rage, fear, and hilarity at once. The inauguration scheduled for the morrow, I quickly tramped down to the corner grocery and cleaned out their egg case, then to the copy shop, where I got the Bush head enlarged to a full five-by-five-foot monster poster,which I took home and hung above my fake fireplace.I stacked the egg cartons along the mantel, where they would have rested through the night until, just at the inception of the oath of office, I would commence hurling egg after egg after egg right into the nose of his enlarged image. But the temptation, I’m afraid, of that imperial or imperious head in half-scowl proved too much to resist.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

This was my girlfriend, walking in at the end of the second dozen — admittedly, the grandiose effect of the Bush-head image was considerably lessened at that point, what with the now-smeared toner, the mess of egg whites and yolks running down the President’s chin and oozing slowly off the edge of the mantel, down into the fern in our fake fireplace.

My girlfriend’s next words: “Get the fuck out.”

She meant it literally, which was unfortunate to say the least. I’d been in the midst of a cathartic release of energy that, cut short, left me feeling quite glum. I made my way with a backpack to the zoo, where I found Gilbo in a state similar to my own, atop his perch picking idly at his nose and muttering to himself when I walked up to the glass.

When he saw me, though, he affected a stately bearing, pushing out his chest like a soldier at attention, and intoned, “After the shipwreck of communism came years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical.”

“Tell me about it,” I said. “I just got kicked out of my house.”

Gilbo nodded. “We have seen our vulnerability and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder, violence will gather and multiply.”

“And what of your keepers?” I heckled. I pulled a banana from my pocket and teased him with it from this side of the glass. “Do you proprose an insurrection?”

Gilbo let fly a terrific scream, jumped from his perch and banged a fist hard against the glass, then beating his chest once and yelling, “We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”

I grinned. “That might be two conclusions,” I said. He was a sly ape, he was. And freedom, sure, I thought, freedom for all. But I could not discount his implicit specific message, his desire to rid himself of his keepers. It was the first time his talk had chimed with anything close to the truth. Maybe the time of the great ape’s grand flourishing, in his walled-off world, was nigh. He banged on the glass again, harder this time, then going down on all fours and menacingly pacing back and forth in front of the slowly rising crowd of onlookers.

Gilbo wanted more.

“The great objective of ending tyranny,” he intoned, “is the concentrated work of generations. The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it.”

And the ape went on for over a quarter hour, an astounding outpouring. One man, also accustomed to Gilbo’s rants, remarked that it wasn’t like the chimp to be so eloquent, so lucid. I remarked that that was partly true, but this was a great gale of wind as well. Gilbo spoke beyond his mettle, of vagaries, “core values” common not only tohis oppressed zoo clan but to all living things, a surely preposterous notion.

“We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom,” he said. “Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is choices that move events. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of all beings, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul.”

And then he stopped his lurching back and forth and leveled a great stare, solely at myself — yes he picked me from the crowd of gawkers with his eyes, isolating me with the intensity of his gaze, the hair on his back and arms beginning to rise until it would stand fully extended from his body. “And,” he finished, raising a fist, “we will never, ever, underestimate our enemies.”

With both fists forward he came crashing through the glass and right for my throat, for the world, for us all.

**“Zoo” samples bits of George W. Bush’s 2005 inauguration speech. More about Triumph here.