Crowens / Salzberg / Straw New York: Give Me Your Best or Your Worst

1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-950384-14-3
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, Deutsch, 168 Seiten

New York, NY - Writer and photographer, Elizabeth Crowens is one of 500 New York City-based artists to receive funding through the City Artist Corps Grants program, presented by The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA), with support from the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME) as well as Queens Theatre. She was recognized for New York: Give Me Your Best or Your Worst, her photo-illustrated anthology with ten other author contributors.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Crowens, Elizabeth

Salzberg, Charles

Straw, Tom

Dawn, Randee

Krasnoff, Barbara

Tr,

Leseproben

Chapter 8 Slider
by Reed Farrel Coleman
1 Red flags on black poles planted in the sand every few hundred feet along the length of Brighton Beach. Black poles barely sway. Red fabric limp in the stillness and fog. Red flags mean no lifeguards on duty. Venture into the Atlantic, you do so at your own peril. 2 Thousands of windows look out onto the fog-heavy boardwalk, the beige sand, gray stone-jetties, the shoreline, the now invisible ocean beyond. Not one pair of eyes has taken notice of the body rocking in the cold, soulless arms of the surf at water’s edge. It is sin enough for a body to molder in a shallow, leaf-covered grave in the middle of a forgotten woods. There is something achingly perverse about it bobbing up and down in the shallows with only swirling gulls and hungry crabs paying it any mind. Especially this body—bloated and blue—once so perfect. 3 This is some wicked fog, Stallion thinks, peering through the landed cloud at the strike zone chalked onto the brick wall of PS 209. The pitching rubber is a crack in the schoolyard cement forty-five feet away from the beige brick wall. He winds up and releases the Pensy Pinky with a sharp snap of his wrist and fingers. That’s the trick of a good slider: the grip, the fingers, not just the wrist. Stallion imagines he can follow the trajectory of the tightly spinning ball as it cuts through the mist between the mound and the chalk box. He swears he can see a visible, transient memory in its wake: a smoke ring, a contrail, a stickball worm hole. Then gravity yanks at it. The rotation of the ball skews ever so slightly. The ball veers down and to the right. 4 Dina D’Agostino was the neighborhood wet dream. There wasn’t a guy from Coney Island Avenue to Shell Road, from the boardwalk to Avenue X, except maybe Jerry “Fagberg” Feinberg, who didn’t jerk off imagining what fifteen minutes with Dag might be like. Ask not what Dina D’Agostino can do for you. Ask what you can do for Dina D’Agostino. To this day, Pete McIlroy—Ish because he’ s half Pol-ish and half Ir-ish—got hand happy thinking about the time the two of them walked all the way to Plumb Beach. That was the night Anthony Peritorre broke up with her. His mom called her a freakin’ hoo’wa (Brooklynese for whore). Although Dag was crying so hard her body shuddered, she laid down on the sand with him, let him slip his hand under her halter, slip his tongue into her mouth, slip his fingers under her panties—her pubic hair was matted cashmere. Sometimes, even now, he imagined he could still smell the musk and feel her magic on his hand. Of all things that persisted from his childhood, his memory of Dag was strongest. 5 Through the fog a pair of Ukrainian eyes sees a bruise on the water—driftwood perhaps, perhaps the carcass of a lost dolphin. He imagines its story. It is what this ancient man does, he sees things and creates a past for them. Everything, he thinks, must has a past. Everything needs a past for it to have value. He has no need to embellish or create one for himself. The cruel forces of history have molded a past for him, one he cannot escape. The bodies, all the bodies he carries with him, give him no warmth, no peace, but they remind him. He remembers. First in the woods outside Kiev, the bodies-in-waiting kneeling at the edge of the trench. Some cried. Some begged. Most silent. None prayed that he could hear. Then the pop, pop, pop, pop of the Lugers and Walthers. With each bullet came the metal metamorphosis of human beings into cascading lumps of meat. Then— the quicklime the dirt more bullets more meat more quicklime more dirt more and more and more ... Layers and layers like a trifle. But what of the dolphin? The dolphin, he thinks, has used up its life. Old and sick, it has separated itself from its family. Lost in strange waters, too tired to go on, it has beached itself in this odd little world where creatures swim upright through a dry sea. 6 No matter how much he tries, Stallion can’t focus. His heart races, but not from pitching, not from stickball. He watches the pitch, Ish recoiling to swing. 7 Ish swings, his eyes locked on the spot in the air where he calculates the spinning pink ball will begin to veer down, to the right, under his bat-handled fists, and kiss the inside corner of the chalk box. For thirty years, he has swung and missed or taken the pitch, watching the ball all the way to the wall, witnessing the puff of dust as the ball bites the chalk and flattens against the brick. For thirty years, since they were seven, Stallion’s slider has for the most part eluded Ish’s bat. It’s not that Ish never hits it—he does, but late in the game, when: 1) Stallion’s arm is fucked. 2) When some of the piss is out of the slider. 3) When the spin loosens up. 4) When it flattens out. 5) When it comes in like a helicopter. But even then, he hits it straight down off his shin. And this is the third inning and Stallion is just getting warm and his arm is still full of vinegar. Time slows down. Ish is a camera. He sees the ball so clearly it hurts. He sees the bat connect with the ball a few inches out in front of him, the rubber bending around the wood of the skinny bat, the ball flying away, disappearing into the fog, landing over the fence to the basketball courts. Ish’s joy is short-lived. He knows something is wrong. The universe is disturbed. 8 Old and sick, removed from his family to die in a strange little world, he is the dolphin. Dolphins are intelligent creatures. They recognize themselves in mirrors, teach each other how to hunt, to play with rings of bubbles. Too intelligent, he thinks, to believe in God. In this way, he is also the dolphin. After the Kiev woods, he was arrested by the Soviets and forced to serve in one of Stalin’s suicide units. No gulag during the Great Patriotic War. No, just bullet catchers to waste fascist ammunition. Coming close to the dolphin, he remembers his comrade commander’s inspirational pep talk. “My dear comrades, if you retreat a single inch or do not press forward, we will shoot you in the back and make stew meat of your worthless carcasses.” He survives, but to what good end? To die in this place, alone? For his whole life he has been passed from one butcher to the next. He reaches water’s edge, the gulls squawking at him. The crabs ignore him. Some claw and peck away, unwilling to relinquish their prize. The old man is not a dolphin. The dolphin is not a dolphin, but a blue and bloated mermaid spit out by the sea. 9 Stickball is Brooklyn Zen, a meditation born of spare parts: a broom handle, a rubber ball, chalk, a crack in the concrete, a wall, imagination. Om. But Stallion and Ish are done now, out of the trance, back to their lives. 10 Sick with worry, Anna-Marie D’Agostino dials the phone and listens to it ring. A woman picks up, “Hello.” “Is Peter there?” Peter? No one calls her husband Peter. It’s Ish. Everyone, even his captain calls him Ish. “Peter? Do you mean Ish?” Anna-Marie is flustered. “Peter, the kid from Manhattan Court.” The wife puts her hand over the phone, turns, and screams, “Ish, it’s for you.” 11 The old man has told his story first to the policeman and now to the detective over and over. 1) I’m an old man. 2) I walk on the beach. 3) I thought it was a dolphin. 4) No, I didn’t touch her. 5) I didn’t see anyone else. 6) How did I know she was dead? I have seen dead bodies before. Really? (Detective lifts eyebrow.) How many? 1) Many more than you will ever see. Where? (Dubious) 1) The Ukraine. 2) Poland. 3) Germany. Okay, you can go. I have your name and number just in case. ...