30 something year old men are so obnoxious. I mean obviously 20 something year old men are, as well, but I just see them as children now so it’s not the same. By 30, they’ve put down the bong and stopped going to keg parties. They’ve graduated college and started a career. They’ve decided to get in shape and it’s really easy for them because they are only 30 something. They can run a seven minute mile with little effort. I’ll be doing interval training, running as fast as I can and two of them just breeze by me casually having a conversation about a new mountain bike or how one of them saw Aidan Quinn at the co op and he drives the same Prius. Just a couple of masses of gleaming rippling muscles with no fat flying past me like I’m a fucking sloth. I hope to see one of them when they’re 50 something. He’ll be sitting there at the Rosendale Café with his crotch goblins and his still good looking wife because she’s 10 years younger than him and does Pilates or whatever is trendy then. His hair will be thinning and he’ll have a big paunch and I’ll sneak up to him and whisper in his ear, “Not so fast anymore are you, plump boy!” and then I’ll take off cackling on my Rascal.

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4 th place NY Times Pulp Fiction contest

Trouble with a capital T. That was Trixie. She had the big guns. She had the ammo, too. And if none of that worked, she also had a pink 38 special tucked into her garter belt. “Give me a whiskey and some fire,” she said, putting a cigarette between two scarlet lips. She knew how to bring on the heat, alright. “For the gentleman?”, I asked nodding toward the goon she had brought as muscle. “Some raw meat if you have it.”  She slipped off her jacket revealing a tiny yellow halter top, too tiny for its heavy burden. Yeah, that dame knew how to bring it on. So did I . She wasn’t the only one in the joint packing heat. You wouldn’t know it to look at me but I had a garter myself. And right then, it was chafing the Hell out of me.”

CULTURAL AFFAIRS

You, the Jury: Vote for a Pulp Fiction Contest Winner

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ANDY NEWMAN

DECEMBER 17, 2014 2:02 PMDecember 17, 2014 2:02 pm

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Gretchen M

Rosendale, NY December 17, 2014

Trouble with a capital T. That was Trixie. She had the big guns. She had the ammo, too. And if none of that worked, she also had a pink .38 special tucked into her garter belt. “Give me a whiskey and some fire,” she said, putting a cigarette between two scarlet lips. She knew how to bring on the heat, alright. “For the gentleman?” I asked, nodding toward the goon she had brought as muscle. “Some raw meat if you have it.” She slipped off her jacket revealing a tiny yellow halter top, too tiny for its heavy burden. Yeah, that dame knew how to bring it on. So did I. She wasn’t the only one in the joint packing heat. You wouldn’t know it to look at me but I had a garter myself. And right then, it was chafing the hell out of me.

“Trouble with a capital T. That was Trixie. She had the big guns. She had the ammo, too. And if none of that worked, she also had a pink 38 special tucked into her garter belt. “Give me a whiskey and some fire,” she said, putting a cigarette between two scarlet lips. She knew how to bring on the heat, alright. “For the gentleman?”, I asked nodding toward the goon she had brought as muscle. “Some raw meat if you have it.”  She slipped off her jacket revealing a tiny yellow halter top, too tiny for its heavy burden. Yeah, that dame knew how to bring it on. So did I . She wasn’t the only one in the joint packing heat. You wouldn’t know it to look at me but I had a garter myself. And right then, it was chafing the Hell out of me.”

So I had a ton of laundry to do and I packed it all in the car and got to the laundromat and this couple is using all the big load machines. Two double loaders and three triple loaders.  Every fucking one of them. Like they hadn’t done laundry in a month and thought, “Oh let’s just make a fucking day of it!  We’ll do all OUR laundry all at once and who cares if anyone else has to do any??” So half the machines are out of order but I managed to find two single loaders and stuffed them as full as I could which was still just maybe a quarter of my laundry since I haven’t done any in three weeks. I’ve been busy.

People sometimes leave stuff at my airbnb apartment. Usually it’s something I have no use for like milk or human insulin but a while ago, someone left a really nice grey slouchy hat. The guest was wearing it when she arrived and I noticed and thought it would look really good on me. So when she left it behind a few days later I tried it on and I was right. It looked really good on me, way better than it did on her. A few days later she texted me and told me she was pretty sure she had left her hat at my place. I texted her back to say I was pretty sure the guests who came after her had taken it.
I knew today was going to be beautiful and I was looking forward to going for a really good hike so, of course, I managed to slip on the wet mossy rock at the top of peak, twisting my ankle. It hurt like Hell and that surprised me because my childhood friend, Tawn Edwards, used to twist hers all the time and she said it hurt but she was mousy and flat chested and didn’t even kiss a guy til she was like 24 and I figured she just wanted the attention. Now I feel kind of bad but her parents must have thought the same thing because they never took her to the doctor. It took me an hour dragging myself down on my butt til I got to the barn. When I got there, there were people riding but nobody could hear me because a chain saw was going. It took me 8 tries throwing a rock before I was able to hit one of the horses. It bolted and threw its rider. Finally, the chain saw stopped and I was able to get help but I had to wait like 20 minutes while they made sure the rider had no concussion and they caught the horse. On the good side, the twisted ankle gave me a good excuse to try one of the other things left at my place.
We’ve all heard the horror stories about OxyContin. I read this one where this figure skater broke her pelvis. Apparently she been on the road to the Olympics, a future star. She got so hooked on Oxy, she started stealing from her grand dad and then almost killed him when he confronted her because she was jonesing so bad. What a fucking nightmare. Naturally, I was eager to try it out.
A younger me would have chopped it up and snorted it but, at my age, that just seems tacky. I haven’t snorted anything since the 80’s. Some of my friends were snorting cocaine even in the early 2000’s but it always looked sad and pathetic to me, like someone with thick calves trying to get away with ankle boots. It’s one thing to humiliate yourself but do you really need to embarrass the rest of us? So I washed a pill down with a glass of wine and set myself up with a heating pad and a bunch of NY Times magazines that I hadn’t gotten to yet. I did a Ken Ken first because, I figured, once it took effect, I wouldn’t be able to solve any. Then I started an article about Dupont knowingly poisoning everyone in West Virginia where Dan’s daughter works as a surgery nurse. That’s about the time I started feeling pretty nice. I put down the magazine and noticed Dan had left the tv on. and a movie called Racing Stripes was coming on. In it, this travelling circus gets caught in a big storm and somehow loses a baby zebra in a basket. That was the ‘stripes’ part of the title. This adorable baby zebra in a basket was stuck in the middle of the road during a huge thunderstorm. I was really very relieved when some guy came along in a pick up truck and took the baby zebra to his barn on a farm in Kentucky which of course had race horses. Hence, Racing Stripes.
So I figured I knew where this was headed but I was only partially right. Of course, the zebra ends up racing the thoroughbreds but what I didn’t anticipate was that I would be riding! The NY Times sent out some goggles a few months ago that you hooked up to your phone. You downloaded an app and watched a video in virtual reality. That was cool but what was going on now was much more sophisticated. I had no idea we even had it with our cable subscription. We were flying past the competition and then we were literally flying. It was wonderful and warm and peaceful and it stayed like that for quite a while until I began to feel the zebra’s hairs scratching the inside of my thighs. The zebra was hot and scratchy and uncomfortable but we were over the French Quarter by then so we descended and landed near the Abbey my favorite dive bar where I used to tend bar. I went in to get the zebra a bucket of water from the pump but it wasn’t the Abbey anymore. It was a brightly lit chicken place. That’s when I realized I was dreaming. I often go to the Abbey when I am dreaming and it is always a chicken joint. I knew pretty soon my teeth would start falling out and, when I reached into my mouth, I pulled out a large metal retainer that had cob webs on it. Then my teeth were coming out and I tried to keep track of them so I could have them put back in but they kept falling to the ground and rolling away. Meanwhile, the towel, the only thing I had on, started shrinking and the zebra hairs stuck to the inside of my legs had sprouted and I had black and white hair that I began to pull out in clumps leaving raw oozing skin with pustules. I pulled out clump after clump until I remembered the zebra and realized it was gone.
I searched the nearby French Market and then went to the river thinking maybe it had found the Mississippi but it wasn’t there and I felt nervous and guilty. Finally, I found the zebra just up the block from the Abbey at Kagan’s but, through my neglect, it had turned into a desiccated black rat laying in the shadows and panting from the heat.. I went to the bar to get water but no bartender was there, just a tv. On it a woman about my age in an acid washed denim mini skirt and fringed vest was telling a man that she dressed sexy to get attention from other men because her husband ignored her. The man responded by telling her, “I am not a Hassidic hillbilly with a snoot full of honey bees!” The woman opened her mouth to respond but the man tapped her on the knee and said “Just a minute”. He turned to me and I saw that his eyes had no irises, just red pupils, and his wide mouth was full of long yellow biege rodent teeth. It was Dr. Phil who also happens to be Satan. I don’t mean he is Satan because he is an exploiting whore but because I was in Hell and he was there. Years ago in Norway, I spent three weeks alone in the darkest part of winter in a tiny dismal apartment with almost no money, while my then boyfriend, Thomas Felberg, was recording an album in Sweden. I had no computer and no cable. I was so homesick and depressed that I actually looked forward every day to the one hour when the local tv channel would show Dr. Phil in English. Only Satan could make me look forward to watching that show. He put his face close to mine, so close I could smell his breath. It smelled surprisingly fresh, not at all like sulfur as I had expected. His red pupils went from my toothless mouth to my fist fulls of sticky hot zebra hair and broken teeth and then in his best most midwest chicken pot pie accent, Satan said to me, “How’s that werking fer ya??”

I love fall but not for the changing foliage which I find gaudy and even ostentatious, really.  It’s as if the trees, having been perfectly content to remain a tasteful green for almost half the year suddenly turn into the arboreal equivalent of middle aged Miami trophy wives competing for attention.   Only the Evergreens keep their dignity, though I did see a youngish Juniperus virginiana trying to accessorize with a magentaParthenocissus quinquefolia, or Virginia Creeper.    .  I was embarrassed for it.   There is a German word for that feeling of embarrassment for others.  It’s called  Fremdschämen

Even though one of my best friends is German, she, Ina Kleinsimlinghaus, did not teach it to me.  I had to learn it from a post on Facebook.  All Ina ever taught me to say is “Has Du Einen grossen doodle?”. I’m sure I’m not spelling it correctly but doodle is a term for a penis. .  As you can imagine, Cheez Doodles, or cheese dicks are not a popular item in Germany.   They are even brighter orange than Parthenocissus quinquefolia or California Creepers.

Jesus and Hector from down the street are hanging out under the trestle with the cholos, drinking beer and singing Charlie Daniels Band songs. My old landlord payed for them to come here to be bellhops in his hotel, basically slave labor, but they have other duties to perform as well. They just shrugged when he told them. They knew being bellhop slaves was too good to be true. Anyway, their other chores led them to meet the cholos and now they are drunk and teaching the cholos English by teaching them Charlie Daniels songs. When they were traveling through Oklahoma with all its wind and dust, they had taken refuge in a rusted out 1976 Chevy Nova. You could barely tell it had been turqoise. In the 8 track tape player was the Charlie Daniel’s Band, Fire on the Mountain. Hector pulled at it and, surprisingly, it slid right out. He fell asleep staring at the flowers, river and robust looking raccoons on the cover and took it as a good sign of things to come in America. He wasn’t very surprised to find out he was wrong. Now John has to make coffee for all of them while they sober up..

Gracie Finch

I was looking for batteries in the dollar store when Gracie Finch burst in with two guys who would have had mullets if they had any sense of style at all.  She’d been eating Cheetos and was chugging down a Big Gulp Mountain Dew.  I knew about the Cheetos because her hands and half her face were orange and, if that weren’t enough,  there was an orange dusting on her bare white stomach that fell out of her halter top over her skin tight spandex shorts.  Her eyes frantically searched the aisles  and  then she saw me.  I said, “Hi Gracie.  How are you?”  She adjusted her glasses which had fallen down her nose, blinked  a few times  and then  recognized me.  She rolled her eyes.  I had just wasted her time. “I don’t have time to talk now.”  and she plunged noisily  down the snack aisle, resurfacing moments later with a bag of Ruffles and a can of onion dip.  “If you are having chips, you gotta have you some fucking dip!”  she had told me once before passing out snoring in a sugar and carb coma on my couch.  That was down on Main street.  Stuff like that never happens up  here next to the trestle.

Last night, I swallowed part of a moth ball, mistaking it for a xanax. It was a natural mistake. Usually when I find a small white hard object wedged between my couch cushions it’s xanax. When I first get my prescription, I feel rich and I’m careless with it. I think, “You know what would be really great? How about I take a xanax , have a little drinky and sit back and watch some bad reality tv. It SOUNDS like a great idea but it always ends the same way. Although, I start out sitting, I awake in the opposite position, my legs up on the back of the couch, my head on the floor, my hair sticky and stained pink by that last vodka cranberry I made for myself before passing out and spilling it. Next to the empty glass will be the topless prescription bottle which I refill with whatever pills are in plain sight, knowing that when I finish the bottle and REALLY need one, I’ll be able to fish some out of the couch or pry one out of a gap in the wood floor. It’s like money in the bank. Well, last night I REALLY needed one. I just swallowed the first pill like object I could find.

The problem is my girlfriend, Trudie Von Muggenthal. She is driving me insane. A couple of weeks ago, we went to see the movie version of the Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Rosendale Theater down the street. We had a huge fight, after which she stormed off and we basically broke up. It all had to do with her insecurity. She played Columbia, in the Bardavon Theater’s production of the Rocky Horror Picture Show a year ago. In the movie, Columbia was played by the actress/dancer, Nell Campbell AKA Little Nell. Back when Trudie was playing the part, she always felt that she didn’t quite measure up to Little Nell. For one thing, she kept messing up the tap dancing bit. For another she didn’t think she had Little Nell’s great figure. Not realizing this, I made the mistake of mentioning that Little Nell had a great booty and it probably was from tap dancing. That didn’t go over well. She stormed out of the theater. She even threw her popcorn at me, first.

So, when she called and told me she had been using the time apart to get to know herself and get some therapy, I was pleased and ever so supportive. She told me that she had come to terms with her inability to tap dance and apologized for overreacting about it and I , in turn, told her that perhaps I had been insensitive. She told me she had learned that tap dancing is just not who she is and that just because she can’t tap dance doesn’t mean she should feel inadequate. She has learned to separate that from her ego. I can totally relate. I mean, when I was in high school, I had to take French and I practically flunked. It was humiliating. But now I just accept that foreign languages are simply not my forte’. I was in Norway for 6 months and all I learned to say is, “Where can I buy vodka?” which, honestly, is all I really needed to know. But, I digress. Back to Trudie. So, just as I think all is going really well, she suddenly starts projecting all kind of negative energy on ME! She starts telling me that I’M super competitive and condescending and that I was dismissive of her ‘art’. By art, she meant her doodles of LOL cats, which she would caption with kitteh talk, and ponies. OK, sorry but I don’t consider doodles of LOL cats riding ponies high art. Still, I admitted maybe I shouldn’t have made so many jokes about her being a closet Pegasister . Also, I did use the back of one of her doodles to write a grocery list. That was disrespectful. But, then instead of accepting my apology, she gets really insulting. She starts telling me that, if I want to make it as an artist, I need to stop painting dead guinea hens and photo realistic pieces of meat and, either paint stuff that sells or get some sort of real job because she is sick of paying for all of the PETA t shirts and herbal tea. So I just said, fine, whatever. I can buy my own herbal tea and I have enough PETA shirts. So then she starts crying. She tells me she misses Freddie, my three legged dog, and just bought him a really expensive evening ascot and she really wants to see it on him. I was touched. This was quite thoughtful of her. Freddie is a very elegant looking dog even with a leg missing, slender, mostly black with white paws and chest. Like a tuxedo. We once put a bandana around his neck like people do. It just looked wrong, like watching Martha Stewart drink milk straight out of the carton. Then she starts telling me she feels so conflicted about, once again, spending all the money and maybe I should reimburse her for it since he is MY dog. I pointed out that there is no way I would ever spend $200 on an ascot, even for Freddie. A casual daytime ascot for 50 bucks would have done just fine. Then, suddenly she goes from crying to screaming again and so I asked her if maybe she was feeling hormonal. Well, she hung up on me and, by then, I was having such an anxiety attack that I ran straight to the couch and swallowed the first white hard thing I could find.

The second it went down my throat, I knew what it was. In a Proustian moment, I was transported to my grandmother’s closet in 19 seventy something, going through her clothing, trying on her patent leather heels and exciting black lace and mesh veils that she had put away since whenever women wore them, stored in boxes with sparkly little white balls emitting a distinct odor that saved the lace from being eaten by moths. If I am going to stay in this relationship, the first thing I need to do is write down the number of poison control on the side of one of the couch cushions. I should probably put some towels on the floor, too.

Last night, when I arrived at the barn to let the horses in and feed them dinner, the rooster, Captain Salty, was cowering outside glancing, from time to time, fearfully toward the barn door. Captain Salty is a particularly disagreeable bird and I knew it must be something terrible indeed keeping him from his normal evening roost at the top of Dancer’s stall. I took a breath and entered the barn to see what horrible sight awaited me.

I don’t pretend to be an authority but, after spending 6 months in Norway, I should recognize a troll when I see one. That being said, it has been 10 years since I was there and trolls are scarce in this region. In fact, they are scarce in ANY region outside of Scandinavia and their presence anywhere else is almost always accidental as they are notoriously xenophobic and also too slow witted to navigate an airport. When they are outside of Scandinavia they naturally seek out woodland, particularly rocky woodland with caves. They are also drawn to small farms which, according to Wikipedia, they are likely to take over. A farm owned by people with a Scandinavian surname would naturally be enticing to a troll. It took me several minutes but I was eventually able to identify the specimen before me as a Grumbling Round Faced Troll, an exceptionally aggressive type, so named for its round face and tendency to grumble. This one had attempted to disguise itself by taming its usual bushy eruption of hair into a long thin rat tail of a braid. It sat in the middle of the aisle in front of a large pile of stones and grumbled testily upon seeing me after which it resumed its occupation which seemed to be testing the stones for palatability. It raised each stone to its round face, inserted it into its mouth and then, with a grunt, spit it out and threw it out the door, where the rejected stones formed a new pile. I needed to let the horses in but feared provoking it, as the Grumbling Round Faced Troll is known to have a fearsome bite. Having no fangs, it instead has enormous molars, which along with a significant amount of adipose tissue, contribute to its very round face. I decided to let it finish its gatronomous experimentation and go check on Wiley, the 26 year old thoroughbred, who had been very lame since the morning. He was near the house, having been allowed to graze out of the usual paddock which was rocky and too perilous for a lame horse. He hobbled slowly and, it seemed, painfully to the barn but, just as I went to halt him, broke into a trot, eluding me and entered the building where the troll sat with its stones. The troll grumbled indignantly at Wiley and then at me and then incomprehensibly tried to crawl inside a tack box. When it found it couldn’t fit, it grabbed a curry comb and hurled it at its own foot, yelping in pain at the impact. It then grumbled some more and trundled to the door where it broke wind violently before leaving.

This morning, when I returned to the barn, the troll was thankfully absent. The only evidence of it having been there was a large pile of stones outside the doorway and some large droppings which were definitely not equine or canine.