GLUE TRAPS BY DARRYL GRAFF 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 140 PREVIEW

We are checking out a complaint of illegal occupancy at the basement of a building. It’s 8pm, near the end of the day for me and the Fire Department lieutenant and two probies.

The art deco lobby is filled with a warm, lamp-shade yellow light.

I take a picture of the blue and black terrazzo floor.

“What’s he doing, Lou?” Carlos, one of the probies, asks the lieutenant.

“It’s his thing. He’s got a whole collection of Bronx terrazzo floor photos,” Bobby says.

I ring random bells on the intercom until someone buzzes us in. We take the elevator to the basement.

“There we go,” I say at a beat-up grey metal door with a SUPER sign stuck on it. I knock on the door with the edge of my clipboard.

The door is opened by a guy in a white T-shirt. “What’s up?” he asks, leaning against the door frame.

“Department of Buildings. We got a complaint for illegal occupancy at the basement.”

“So?”

“So we have to check it out.”

“You need me?” the super asks, lighting a cigarette.

“You got the keys, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You just answered your own question.”

Read more

THE FLATNESS OF HYPER-REALISM BY ALLISON RICHARDS 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 110

Value is a funny thing to measure art by. Talking about conceptual art as if it holds no “value” is wrong in several ways and correct in a couple more. Let me explain.

On social media an artist–very talented in a very specific, hyper-realistic style of painting–posts a time-lapse film of their work from start to finish. We, the viewers, are stunned by how true to life the figure in the painting looks, how the eyes look so wet or the cheeks look so soft. It’s just like a photo, we think as we watch, impressed by this artist’s ability to represent life exactly as it is.

We’ve been looking at perfectly drawn figures and swooning over them forever. But now the artist films the process and speeds it up to less than a minute, and shares it with millions of viewers on an app designed algorithmically to show us things we will react to.

The glorification of hyper-realism we’re seeing right now is fascinating to me, not because I am a fan of the kind of exact replication of form that seems to stun viewers, but because this shift to labor-intensive, exacting, time consuming, rigid art makes perfect sense in the context of our waveringly democratic reality.

Surprise! Fascists hate conceptual, abstract, and expressionist art. Endlessly striving for some fucked-up idea of perfection is a pillar of white supremacy, and a barrier to entry into a world outside the joyless one most of us inhabit in good old late-stage capitalism.

We viewers cannot paint perfect figures, so we don’t make art. We don’t have the time, so we don’t make art. We watch a video on TikTok and the end result looks more real than our goddamn reflection in the mirror, and so we don’t make art.

So some people think abstract artist Rothko is full of shit. Fine, that’s fine. We can have specific tastes in art without being fascist, obviously. But what isn’t fine is the flatness of hyper-realism and the way it exists in our attention right now.

When the art we make doesn’t contribute to its own commodification, it is seen as having no value economically. When what is most commonly commodified is hyper-realism, our less exact, less time-consuming, or more wildly imagined art is seen as less valuable. So, in this way, yeah. Conceptual art can be economically valueless.

When we cannot commit one hundred per cent of ourselves to our art because we have to go to work and we have to take care of our families, or we don’t want to make art that way, we aren’t going to become pros at hyper-realistic art. We aren’t going to be able to commodify what we make like TikTok virals or whatever.

As an artist who has made exactly zero dollars from my art, I’m okay with this. Thing is, my economically valueless art still has value. Not only is it a rebellious act to spend my time making something “valueless”, it is also a practice in fighting idealized perfection.

More than any of this commodification shit, it is important to recognize that artists have been making provocative, ugly, confusing, weird, seemingly unimpressive, or seemingly disturbed art in response to global hardship since the First World War. Surrealism, right?

So while hyper-realism is having its day, what’s brewing is (hopefully) something really fucking weird. Make fucked-up art. Even if it pays you nothing back.

ALLISON RICHARDS

I’m a 20-something writer and artist living in East Nashville. Before this I was in Boulder studying writing and literature at Naropa University–which explains why I have no money and too much time to write. I write essays and poetry about walking home, my struggle and ultimate recovery from anorexia, what it’s like moving through the world as a woman, chess, sucking dick, being afraid, being in love. girlseekingpeanutbutter.blog

SMALL WONDERS BY DAVID P LANGLINAIS 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 64

Jim’s father dies in Denver. Jim manages to book a flight that leaves around midnight, but he wants to stand by in case an earlier flight opens up.

Jim’s wife Gina is at her father-in-law’s bedside when he dies. After calling Jim with the news, she calls Cathy at her office, two floors below Jim’s office. They work at the same advertising agency.

Cathy offers to drive Jim to the airport. As she pulls into the driveway, Jim comes out of the house with a suitcase as if he’s been sitting by the window waiting for her. He walks to the car before she has a chance to kill the engine. She pops the trunk. Jim gets in the car and sinks into the seat like a deflating balloon.

“How you holding out?” Cathy says.

Jim shakes his head. It’s obvious he’s been crying. She puts her hand on his knee.

“Look, there’s no sense in you sitting at the airport for five hours,” Cathy says. “Let’s grab a bite to eat on the way, okay?”

“Alright,” Jim says.

“Taverna sound good?” she asks, referring to the Italian restaurant they like. Cathy, Jim, and Gina eat there together all the time.

It takes a moment for Jim to nod and Cathy knows his mind is in Denver.

“C’mon, Jim, don’t be so hard on yourself,” Cathy says. “Your dad was in good shape when you left him. There’s no way you could’ve known things would take a turn the way they did.”

“I talked to the doctor,” Jim says. “I said is he out of the woods? and she said yeah, I think it’s safe to say he’s out of the woods.”

“I know,” Cathy says.

“Those were her exact words,” Jim says. “I mean she made it sound like he’d be going home in a couple of days.”

Cathy doesn’t say anything. What can she say?

“No way I would’ve come back to Dallas for that meeting otherwise,” Jim says.

“Of course you wouldn’t have,” Cathy says. She resists telling Jim it was God’s will. Or that it was meant to be. Or that his father is now in a better place. She hated it when people told her things like that after her mother died. They said it so often, at times she’d wanted to scream at the top of her lungs for everyone to just shut the fuck up about it.

Read more

DAUGHTREY AND RITA BY JOHN ALLISON 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 83

Daughtrey’s old Dodge pickup kicked up choking swells of fine yellow powder as he drove into Vandage that first time and saw Rita’s bar and grill. Janky, no other way to put it, jigsawed limestone rock walls peppered with ancient seashell indentations mostly obscured by grime overlaid with mildew. Two-thirds of the way up, the walls became clapboard wood siding last painted green, Daughtrey concluded, when the Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan show. His eyes drifting farther upward found a roof of faded composition asphalt shingles checker-boarded with patches of black tar.

Daughtrey visited Rita’s shortly after he settled in at the place he bought four miles outside Vandage with money Grandma Savage left him. He had been the only one in the family to drive regularly the 80 miles south from Minneapolis to Mankato on US 169 for visits with her, occasionally caring for her when she needed help. He hadn’t needed her money but decided she would have liked to see him invest in land.

Rita greeted him: “Haven’t seen you around here before. Visiting?”

“No, staying.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Know the Reale place just to the west? Bought it three months ago. Working on getting it in shape.”

“Yeah, sure, nobody’s lived there for a long time.” Slightly tilting her head, she said, “Join you for a bit?”

Daughtrey’s newly acquired place consisted of 20 acres of mesquite, cedar, post oak, and scrub brush enveloping a four-room house that might’ve been too old for carbon dating.

“Caulked and painted the house. Outside and in. Patched the roof. Keeps the rain and wind out. Shored up the big porch on the back of the house with some extra four-by-fours.”

“Cold in there sometimes, I’ll bet.”

“I fixed the fireplace. There’s enough dead wood out there to last a long time. And there’s enough brush, you know, old hard shrubs, that kind of thing, to give me kindling. Just has to dry. Grandma had a fireplace I tended when I was there. She taught me.”

“Those damned brushy things spring back up fast after they’re cut, right from the base of the stump,” Rita said.

“Put in a new propane tank out back of the house to run the heating stove in the living room, and the new range and oven I bought,” Daughtrey said.

“Where you from?”

“Minnesota. Grew up there, went to the university in Minneapolis.”

She noticed him tense up at the mention of home. “Something happened, didn’t it?”

Read more

WHEN GOD FOUND MATH BY AIDA BODE 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 75

Cracked and burst

into a shot of chaos—

light, confused

without direction,

G O D—bewildered

at his own words.

the sky, a mistress of

white

stars, the suitors of

darkness

I see them

wait for a deity’s

mind,

to find the beginning

sand is a prisoner of

a shore where

he’s started to count

knowing that

Pi begins

at T H R E E

AIDA BODE

I grew up in a communist country where faith in God was not only prohibited but also punished. When God Found Math may be skeptic, or even ironic and doubtful, but it is out of longing and thirst for what’s beyond human, and what’s certain in an uncertain world. I hope that as one reads my poems, one finds that no matter how harsh reality may be, we do have faith, imagination, and humanity to pull us through. Let’s dream together and make the world a better place!

STEALING HOME BY KAY BONTEMPO 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 78

Two bell peppers, Muenster cheese. Cauliflower, a pack of Newports, Tampax. Martinelli’s apple juice. Paper towels two-ply. English Breakfast tea. Boil-in-a-bag rice, paper clips, ramen noodles. Maybe some ice cream if there was money left over. America’s Choice vanilla, eaten straight from the carton. It wouldn’t be bad.

With an uncomfortable pop, he pulled out of her and lay beside her, breathing hard. It was 11.52pm. She wondered if the Shop’n’Save would even be open.

Lucas was 23, like her, and also graduated from the local college. He had a calm assurance that things would be the way they were forever. In his apartment he had hung the same basketball posters and St Pauli Girl beer sign that had adorned his dorm room. In the corner, a Yeti cooler-fridge hummed, relentlessly content.

She liked him, she thought, in the way that she liked cereal—enjoyed on occasion. Some things changed from week to week, from moment to moment, but raisin bran was perpetual, and so it seemed was Lucas.

She rose and dressed, and slid out of the apartment with a noncommittal goodbye. He didn’t see her swipe the mini cactus from the corner of his dresser.

Back at home she fiddled with the hundreds of assembled trinkets on her bedside table and wondered what she would tell the next boyfriend about him. Maybe about his impressive collection of polo shirts. Or that his favorite TV show was The Mindy Show. The Mindy Show Guy she would call him to the next boy and they would laugh without shame but also without malice.

She had carved Lucas’s cactus into the exact shape of the State of Texas.

Her office cubicle had three walls the color of unpolished pewter and a divider she shared with Marcia, a heavyset woman who typed with two fingers and gave off the ever-so-faint scent of mothballs.

Her desk was mostly bare, save for a too-smiley photo of her and Lucas that he had put there himself. In it, he was wearing a turquoise polo shirt and giving a thumbs-up; her eyes were half closed, something she had pointed out to him and he had ignored.

The desk drawer housed hundreds upon hundreds of cap erasers, stolen one by one from the supply closet when no one was looking. Matte and pink, they pointed upwards like small animals begging for direction. She had arranged them painstakingly into a map of the world, Africa looming large in the center and Japan hanging like a question mark.

She wondered what it was like in Japan. She pictured bamboo reaching toward the sky, TV-inspired images of temples built like layer cakes.

Read more

A HURTING GAME BY BEN FOWLKES 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 132

A HURTING GAME

Before he went all the way crazy I remember

how BJ Penn would greet these moments

of human carnage by saying

so calmly: This is a hurting game.

As in, of course you got your jaw cracked in half

or your shoulder torn out by its roots

or the divine weaving

of your precious knee ligaments

shredded all to shit.

What else did you expect,

you who have decided

to play this hurting game?

But who knows. Your ego says

maybe you’ll be the exception

who never has to see your own blood

speckling the floor or feel around

with your tongue for teeth

that aren’t where you left them.

I think of the old Brazilian that night

in Toronto looking down at his freshly ruined arm

with a placid wonder like he was regarding

a wounded bird

that had landed limply at his side

and was still too scared

of being touched

to let itself be helped.

SOME DAY

In a Houston steakhouse the middleweight champ

showed me his ear

bulging like a furious infant’s fossilized fist

and said See now this? I knew it

would happen to me some day

but once it happened I thought

wow I didn’t think it would happen yet.

He said it was the same

when he got his nose broken

the first time and when he got betrayed

by teammates and again

when he got screwed

by a promoter. You start out young

living in your van

in back of the gym and you see the older guys

all of them fucked up and deformed,

looking at you with eyes drooping

in permanent sadness

from the weight of the scar tissue.

Don Frye unfolding

himself to rise from a barstool.

Big Nog crossing

the Copacabana Hotel lobby

in his creeping little grandfatherly steps

at the age of 36.

Some day he said you know it’ll be you.

You think you understand that but you don’t

do you? Not until Some Day kicks in your door

and sits on your chest and asks

if you’ve had enough yet.

Then just keeps sitting there

smiling and saying how about now?

THESE THINGS YOU LEARN IN FIGHT GYMS

Dustin Poirier told me that the days are only intolerable

when you try to live them all at once.

He was talking about the slow ascetic rolling pin

of a long training camp but still.

And Daniel Cormier once said that if you can nudge

your own breaking point a tiny bit further every day

eventually it will be out of everyone else’s reach.

He was talking to 10-year-olds learning to wrestle

in an old racquetball court

but that doesn’t make it any less useful

for a 45-year-old man in an attic office.

Erik Silva once choked me to the darkening edge

of unconsciousness and then told me

in his blunt force English:

“You need believe more.”

He’d known me for all of 45 minutes

by this point but he wasn’t wrong.

Most of all I think of Robert Follis telling his fighters

that if we’re going to make up the future

we might as well do it in our favor.

And just because he shot himself in Red Rock Canyon

one December day it’s no reason for me to stop saying it

to myself at 3am. Because lying there

in the dark, clubbing yourself over the head

with someone else’s wisdom

what you realize is

that the difference between a mantra

and a prayer is as small as

who you think you’re talking to.

BEN FOWLKES

My specialty as a journalist is fight sports like mixed martial arts (MMA) and boxing, the extreme fringes of the pro sports world. I’ve worked for The Athletic, Sports Illustrated, USA Today, The Guardian, and now Yahoo Sports and FightingLife.Substack.com. I’ve taken that world and put it in fiction and poetry. Sometimes I think I’m doing it to make use of those ideas and images and stories that, for one reason or another, don’t work as journalism. And also I think I must just need some place to put those things in order to get them out of me and move on.

EAT YOUR HEART CAKE BY KAREN BREMER MASUDA 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 59

August in Japan was an emotionally taxing month for Katherine Nagasawa. She needed to take this cake to Penny, to lighten the heaviness. Katherine could close a chapter on her life that needed closing. She was the victim of something she knew not what, but taking a cake to Penny would signify taking the higher road.

She would take a cake, her heart cake, to Penny assured she’d done the right thing, regardless of all the hurt and pain. Penny was leaving Japan after losing her husband to cancer.

August was also heavy for Katherine because many mornings she shed tears in front of the TV as the mushroom cloud blossomed on the screen, or footage of the aftermath, the memorial services of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She wondered if it was because she had been to the peace park in Hiroshima, or because she had heard the voices of hibakusha, the survivors. Such stories left a lasting impression, held fast to her soul. It couldn’t be denied that war was affecting her. The memorializing was necessary she knew. The need to keep the story straight, so that it should never be lost or forgotten, the healing process, never ending yet something which could prevent it ever happening again. As much as it taxed her, Katherine believed in keeping the memory alive.

The end of the war, the Showa Emperor’s surrender fell on the 15th, the same date as their wedding anniversary.

“The day you surrendered to me!” Katherine could not even crack that joke to Takeshi any more. The pain of the atomic bombs still being inflicted generations after the fact, the playing God it took to inflict such chaos, unbearable, Katherine wanted only to hole up somewhere. Her country, inflicted it, her country.

Read more

THE WALL BY RICHARD P MAYER 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 59

THE WALL BY RICHARD P MAYER

.

Imbedded deep in hallowed ground

linked black granite slabs protrude,

like a healing wound that has not yet closed.

.

A few have described it as a gash of shame.

They say it’s not majestic like others of its kind;

however, most are comforted by its tranquil beauty.

.

The polished stone surface reflects the faces

of the kindred, the conflicted, and the innocent.

The image transmutes the past to the present;

those departed are etched in Optima font—names only.

.

The link is long and the etching deep, representing

a moment in time captured forever by its continuation.

The loss cannot be quantified or fully extinguished.

At a minimum it represents closure—a finality.

.

However, you need to look past the discernible.

To that grey area where spectral outlines roam;

bent by the memories gathered on their shoulders.

The wall may be a “distinction without a difference”.

There are damaged souls not yet etched in stone, who survive.

.

The cipher of the survivor is written in dust, windswept

on a wall, unstable and unable to support its burden of guilt.

It was a collective struggle grounded in moral depravity;

a celestial roll of the dice—some lived others did not.

.

Few have come out of the experience undamaged—unbroken.

Some have evolved to accept the dissonance and endure.

They exist as a silent army, without a memorial to define them.

But they exist, until one by one, they will be free to enter the stone.

.

RICHARD P MAYER

I started writing in my early 20s when I returned home from the military. I kept at it for a couple of years. There were only two poets that I was familiar with at the time, Rod McKuen and Hugh Prather. I lost the box that contained all of my hand-written poems and they were gone forever. A career in health care distracted me from writing, although I continued to write in my head for years afterwards. Recently, I enrolled in a creative writing course, read a lot of poetry. I view my work as not overly complex, hopefully easy to comprehend, and the cutting edge of nothing. But it is the voice that I hear.

The Wall is a poem about the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC and the wall on which the names of 58,320 men and women killed and missing in action are inscribed.

GETTING HIGH BY LORNA ROSE 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 58

The only drug I’d done was marijuana. But tonight. Tonight I was up for anything.

I got myself up just right: a striped gray tube top and matching miniskirt, black mascara on curled eyelashes, red stain inside red lip liner. I wore my dark blonde hair straight, shined up with pomade, ironing each section of hair until it fell flat and careful on top of the others, hung down just past my shoulders.

This was my first date with Graham. At a rave.

PAID SUBSCRIBERS DOWNLOAD

Read more

TOUJOURS BY HANNAH HORNSEY 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 56

DOWNLOAD ALL 14 PAGES

TOUJOURS BY HANNAH HORNSEY 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 56

334KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Under the story about a girl who had fled the fighting in Libya to go to Europe were countless comments. Some were kind, words of awe and support of the girl’s brave journey, and she wished those were the ones she could remember now. Others ripped like barbed wire. Go home, migrant. We don’t want you here.

THE WATER’S EDGE BY FLAVIA BRUNETTI 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 65

Leore walks down to the water’s edge, thinking hard. Her friend had emailed her—read the comments under the story, he had told her, though now she wishes she hadn’t.

Under the story about a girl who had fled the fighting in Libya to go to Europe were countless comments. Some were kind, words of awe and support of the girl’s brave journey, and she wished those were the ones she could remember now.

Others ripped like barbed wire. Go home, migrant. We don’t want you here. She feels the comments as if they are ripping her own skin, though she is not, nor has she ever been, a migrant.

The ugliest comment is almost hidden amongst several banal comments, a trap, jaws open. You can burn like your country.

Read more

POCKETS FULL OF PROMISES BY BLUE KIRKPATRICK 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 90

He hasn’t texted me all day. My hand trembles as I apply lipstick, leaning in close to the bathroom mirror, close enough that I can see each pore in my wide cheeks gaping open, laughing at me.

My little sister, Annie, sits on the bed in the open doorway behind me, paging through a glossy magazine full of shiny pink lips. She catches my eye in the mirror. “You’re not really going to go see him, are you?” she asks.

I shake my head at her. “I have to see him.”

“You don’t have to do anything, Vivian.” 

I say nothing. She lets the pause sit, uncomfortable between us, then adds, “What about Amy?” 

“Don’t talk to me about her. She’s not my problem.”

I plop down on the bed beside her, pulling out my phone and opening Bumble, feigning relaxation.

I do need to see him. Nothing else will take away the ache. In moments when I am caught with nothing to do, nothing to think, I notice it like a sock that has been hidden under the bed all along. I can’t remember where it came from or when it began. Maybe it was there right from the get-go. Maybe it’s built in, part of my fundamental technology, inextricable.

I can’t figure out whether he’s not texting me today because he’s finally gotten tired of me or if he’s just busy. He’s probably just busy but it’s better to assume he’s over me. That way, if it’s true it won’t hurt so bad. Besides, of course he’s over me. It was inevitable. But what if he is just busy? Is this even a big deal at all? I have to be reasonable. I have to be mature. If he is over me, though, it’s going to sting so badly.

The more I scroll through Bumble, the more pessimistic I become. No, no, no, no, left, left, left, left, I’m convinced there’s no-one in the world I can even half tolerate. Left, left, left. It makes me feel better in some way to see all these sad, ugly motherfuckers.

But even as I convince myself love is a delusion, I am simultaneously becoming frantic, almost hysterical, searching every face for some sign of tolerability, swiping faster and faster.This isn’t who I want to be.

I roll off the bed and tug on my boots, the sexy ones my mom got me for Christmas last year, soft black leather up to the knee and a painful-looking heel. 

“Don’t do this, Viv,” Annie says.

Read more

IF THIS WERE A MOVIE BY DAVID HANDSHER 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 51

It would begin, even before the opening credits, with this scene:

It is dark.

It is a Nebraska winter night. The road, I-80, is icy and the wind swirls up chilled foggy air.

Inside the car, I am driving. I am 24 years old.

Longish beard, longish hair. Archie, from Brooklyn, sits in the passenger seat and stares out the window. (Two months ago Archie left Phoenix House rehab and hitchhiked out west.)

In the trunk of the stolen car, a green army duffel bag is stuffed with a lifetime savings worth of Acapulco gold. The car is spinning on black ice. Spinning is not quite the right word. It feels like we are suspended and floating—

as if everything that came before and everything that will come is lost. I can see the overpass and how its legs straddle the sides of the road. Drifting out of my control, the car turns toward those concrete legs and there is nothing I can do.

Image by Erin Ng

DAVID HANDSHER

I had a poet as a teacher when I was in high school. As a kind of confession he told us once that he had gotten a long way in life (and bypassed some hard work) through his imagination. I think he was telling us not to do what he had done.

While imagination may not help all that much
in learning a foreign language, for example, in most things an imaginative approach, an eye for detail, and recognizing one’s own way of seeing things (in other words, the ability to write well) can carry you like elephants over the Alps.

If This Were a Movie is a fictional representation of an age in my life when I let go of my past and had no concern for the future. It started as piece of prose but as I put it into shorter lines and stanzas I recognized how the silence and empty spaces added an element to the piece that I liked. The poem exemplifies an interest I have in the intersection of prose, fiction, poetry, photography, and film.

CHOP SUEY BY KATHLEEN J STOWE 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 003

'“I like the color of your hat,” I said. “It matches the pattern in your scarf—and your eyes, too.”

My sister adjusted the bright blue cloche she wore, tugging it down over her ears. “Yours fits much better,” she said.

“Not really. And it’s such a dark ugly shade. I can’t imagine what I was thinking when I bought it.”

We sat at a table next to the window, in the long gray shadows of a January afternoon. Too early to light the small lamp with a chartreuse green shade that sat in the center of the table. And probably too early for dinner, but we weren’t the only ones in the restaurant. My sister moved the lamp to the windowsill. Her hands were restless and she repositioned the ashtray as well.

It might have been that she was simply hungry—we’d already ordered egg foo yung for her and shrimp lo mein for me and the service was usually fast even with the crowd for the early bird specials—but I thought her hands twitched and fluttered for another reason.

We’d agreed to meet to discuss last minute wedding plans. Mine not hers. I mentioned the problems with the bridesmaids’ corsages. And we laughed over our mother’s dress.

“Is she still calling it mauve?” my sister asked.

“Oh, yes. No one’s going to convince her it’s periwinkle.”

“And what about the catering?”

I smiled. “Oh, the catering is just fine.”

A Chinese girl delivered two plates of steaming food. With a bright smile, she asked, “Chopsticks? Soy sauce?”

I unwrapped my chopsticks, while my sister used a fork to scrape away the brown gravy that coated her egg foo yung. “You could send it back if you don’t like the gravy. They’ll do it over for you.”

“No, it’s fine,” she said. “And anyway I wouldn’t think of imposing.”

“No, really.”

“Actually, I love the gravy.” She lifted a limp bean sprout into the air and dangled it in the space between our two plates. “But what exactly is this?”

I laughed. “You didn’t have to come here to eat. We could have gone somewhere else. I didn’t know you didn’t like Chinese food.”

My sister let the bean sprout drop to her plate, then picked up her knife and began to cut her food into bitesize pieces. She stopped her careful micro-surgery to look across the table at me. “Speaking of likes and dislikes, what is it exactly you like about this man you’re about to marry?”

Read more

OCCUPATION BY WINDY LYNN HARRIS 34TH PARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 03

I deferred to my husband to handle the conversation during the meeting with our financial advisor at the bank. We sat in the masculine world of investments at the desk of a man in a suit. Our chairs were pulled up close. The sheets of paper were between the two men, just a little too far to my left to see clearly. I listened politely as my husband answered questions about our stocks, life insurance, and account balances.

My husband and the suit spoke the language of men: deep tones and full-size words. They were assuring each other of their intelligence with shared advice and guffaws. The men sized each other up during this and decided on a rhythm for their dialogue. I watched the predictable exchange not really hearing the words, smiling when faces briefly turned my way.“Do you work too?” the suit asked.

Read more

MAN & TROLLEY BY ALAN EMMINS 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 001

I see the trolley with the flags, and once again it is loaded with big black bin bags. The market is on in Union Square, people sit at tables selling paintings photography and crafts. I ask some of them if they know who the trolley belongs to.

“That guy is a total asshole,” comes the first reply. “Stay away from him!” “You don’t want to meet that guy,” comes the second reply. “Trust me!” Before I ask anybody else, I see him for myself.

He is a black man in his mid to late 50s with a grey curly beard and glasses. His wears jeans and a Day-Glo orange workman’s bib that are dark with grime and dirt. He looks livid and moves angrily. But then who wouldn’t? Whenever he finds a can or bottle he drops in into a big black bag. When I say the bag is big, if he is 5ft7, the bag is 5ft. He fills the bag to the very top, leaving just enough space to tie a knot. He appears oblivious to all those around him. He is like a machine, unrelenting. His expression is irate, tight. He looks ready to trample anybody that gets in his way.

Is this a man to speak to about canning? I have already canned with JR and Lisa. Is there any more to know?

The thing with this man here, is that he just doesn’t seem approachable. Which is exactly why I must approach him. Also he is canning in a different way. He is not canning until he has enough for some beers, he is canning until he can’t carry any more.

But should I just present myself now or wait until he has finished collecting cans? I don’t have the answer, but the man looks so angry about life that I am almost afraid to approach him. Still I wait.

He takes his beaten baseball cap off and finishes his drink. He takes a little look around the park and then walks over to the trolley, which contains three more gigantic bags, all bulging to capacity. He removes the bags from the trolley one by one.

He attaches one bag to another by tying rope to each of the bags knots. He does the same to the other two bags. Once they are secure he takes two bags, placing the rope over his right shoulder and he walks them to the entrance of the Union Square subway. He comes back to the trolley and picks up the other two bags. He walks them to the entrance of the subway. But this time he doesn’t stop, he takes them down the steps and walks them over to the service gate that is twenty yards in. He climbs back up and, collects the other two bags. He signals for the attendant in the booth to open the gate.

Click.

He slides all four bags inside the gate so that it can be closed. Then he throws two bags on his shoulder and walks them 50 yards, through rush-hour commuter traffic, to the top of the stairs that lead down to the 5 Train.

He goes back. Comes back. Down.

Up.

He walks the bags, two at a time to the far end of the platform and stands waiting for the train.

And this seems like as good a time as any to introduce myself.

After the usual explanations, homeless, England, book etc...

“Alan.”

“Preston.”

Preston speaks to me.

He says, “I been doing this 15 years, you know why?”

“No.”

“America is the land of the poor. Home of the idiot. This is what I have to do to put food in my belly cos the white man has had his foot on the neck of the black man forever. But not me, you try to tread me down and I’ll put you on your back! If you try to talk down to me I’m gonna put you on your back! If you’re gonna come to me you better come as you. White people treat the black man like shit.”

He says, “I do this ‘cause I ain’t gonna play your white man game no more!”

And, “I ain’t gonna be treated as second-class and fight my brothers for the little tidbits of life the white man throws our way every now and again.”

And, “I ain’t gonna fight my brothers and sisters the way the white man wants me to.”

And, “I got my own way of surviving.”

And, “I don’t need you!”

Preston speaks like this while we ride the 5 train all the way from Union Square to 149th street. It is hard to take everything in. I get the impression that he hasn’t spoken to anybody in a while. When the train doors open at 149th Street he jumps off with two of the bags. I follow with the other two.

“Well, what are you doing now?” he asks when he sees me with the bags over my shoulder.

“Well I’m here now,” I say. “Why don’t I just help you with these?”

He says, “You wanna try it? Well OK let’s go.”

Off we go, Preston leading the way out front, me five paces behind. There’s an elevator at this station that takes us straight up to street level. Outside we turn left and walk back on ourselves along a road overflowing with people who stop at vending stalls for batteries, belts and socks. People march up and down with thin transparent plastic bags that look as if they will split and break. There are mothers with litters of children hanging off them and fathers selling knick-knacks from foldaway tables. Dollar stores. Drug stores. Five-T-shirts- for-ten-dollars stores. We cross, turn right, cut in between a police car and a postal van and start walking away from the throng and up a hill in a side street. We keep walking. Now and again Preston turns around and asks if I am OK.

The bags are heavy - really heavy. Manageable, but heavy. I’m 30 and in reasonable health. This is the first thing I’ve lifted in weeks, maybe even months.

It is manageable, but for how long? What does this weight feel like to Preston, who does this ‘job’ four days a week every week of the year? What do these bags feel like to a 63-year-old man?

“OK, let’s rest up a minute,” Preston says, half-way up the incline. “It ain’t far now.”

We walk for maybe another five minutes.

We turn a corner.

Along the outside wall of a supermarket there are 10 recycling machines. Some take bottles of one size, some take bottles of another size, while the rest take cans.

In front of these machines stand a collection of human beings that you might expect to see on an envelope for the Red Cross. A collection of people so thin and drawn it is deplorable on the eyes. There are men, magically held up by thin wiry frames and then thrown off balance by swollen bellies, women dressed in rags, in T-shirts that are too small and full of holes. They stand in shoes that are falling apart.

Not only is every machine in use, with two supermarket employees manning the machines and fixing jams, every machine has a queue of people waiting to use it. Trolleys and bags full with collected cans and bottles sit in rows, their owners sit on top of them.

“Sir?” asks a woman desperately to a man at the front of a queue. “Please can I go in front of you? I’ve only got a small bag and I need to get diapers for my baby?”

The man, although shaking his head, tells her to, “Go ahead.”

What is he shaking his head at? The inconvenience or the desperation? Best not to ask, I wouldn’t understand. But could it really be that this woman left her house with the sole purpose of collecting enough cans so she could buy diapers for her child?

No, it’s easier to think that she lied, that really she’s going to buy half a pint of tequila.

I follow her into the store.

She buys diapers.

She takes them to the checkout, hands over her printed credit note and receives no change. She leaves and I make no attempt to talk to her, to find out about her life. What could I tell her? That I am writing a book about it?

Bully for me.

This is the most desperate gathering of people I’ve ever laid eyes on.

They are in New York, struggling and fighting for food.

Preston says, “This is America’s slave labour force right here, this country is run on slave labour, even right down to this here, canning. We get five cents a can, what do you think the supermarket gets per can? Who else is gonna do this for five cents a can? The fucking hungry, that’s who.”

He says, “Yeah, I saw your face on the train, you thought I was full of shit. You thought racism was a part of history.”

He says, “But tell me, who’s the only white person standing here?”

I look around.

I say, “I am.”

It is hard for Preston, who comes here daily, to grasp my shock. He leaves his bags in the queue and takes me over to the deli where he buys me an iced tea.

Preston asks, “In your weeks living on the street, how many Vietnam vets did you meet that were homeless?”

I confess the number is high.

“They take the lives of these young boys and when they can no longer function, when the atrocities that they had to witness and commit in war for their country breaks them down mentally, this country turns its back on them. Their own country leaves them hungry on the street, calls them names, “filthy”, “animal”, “nigger”, “boy”, “bum”!”

He says, “The black man is good enough to die face down in the mud for his country.”

He says, “But he ain’t good enough that he can get a decent job, a yellow cab, a safe place to sleep after he gave his youth to this here USA!”

I stand next to Preston while he slots cans and bottles into the machines. Almost fatherly he says, “You wanna try?”

I find myself thinking, “There’s a hole with a spinning belt, what is there to try?” But I take the bottles anyway and feed them in. The machine just keeps sucking. Whether there is a bottle there or not. It just keeps sucking.

After five bottles Preston steps back in and takes over.

“I don’t expect you to do them. I just wanted to see if you got it.”

I don’t think he is referring to recycling.

EXCERPT FROM 31 DAYS—A NEW YORK STREET DIARY

ALAN EMMINS

Alan Emmins wanted to be a golfer but became a writer instead. “I wanted to be a professional golfer, of all the rock‘n’roll things,” he says. “Basically from the age of 13 to 18 that’s all I did.”

Then I found out what a social life was, started chasing girls and partying. From that day on I was always too tired to make it onto the practice ground at 5am.

“But while writing was never something I considered for a living I did write a lot of really bad poetry.”

He started writing with some freelance stories for magazines in the UK, and sold the first one in a space of a few days.

“This is easy, I thought. But I didn’t sell another story for six months,” he says.

“I decided at this point that if I was going to make it as a writer, even a magazine writer, I had to get serious. So I quit my day job, booked a ticket to New York, and arrived there four weeks later armed with my savings and a battered second-hand laptop.

“Two months later, while waiting tables illegally in a Thai restaurant, I got a rejection letter from the editor of the Village Voice. He said, ‘quite frankly, I can’t stand your prose’. Things weren’t looking good.”

But Emmins re-edited the story and sent it to the New York Post. This is how he tells the story:

Three weeks later, when I hadn’t heard a word I called the editor, John Mahony.

“What was it about?” he asked.

“It was about the African drummers being thrown out of Central Park just for playing their drums, it’s beautiful...”

“Nah, that’s been written a dozen times.”

I was about to hang up when the editor said, “What are you doing here anyway, in New York I mean?”

“I’m a freelance writer,” I told him with a gulp. “I moved here just recently, hoping to pick up some work and experience a new country.”

“I did that 10 years ago,” he laughed. “Look, send me the piece again, I can’t use it because it’s an old story, but if you can write, I’ll see if I have anything for you.”

Three weeks later I had heard nothing from him. Somehow I managed to feel put out by this, and I called him to ask if he’d read the piece.

“Sorry I haven’t called you,” he said, much to my surprise, “I loved it. I’ve just been so busy. But look, can you come by Wednesday at 3pm, let’s see if we can find you a story?”

One of the first things he asked me when I sat in his office was, “So what have you been up to since you arrived?”

“Just going out mostly.”

“What did you do last night?”

“Actually, last night I ended up in these illegal after-hours bars. Crazy places. I was with a doorman from this other bar I go to. They are totally secret, some have passwords that change every week. Others have hidden doorbells. They generally don’t open until around 4 or 5am.”

John said, “There’s your first story. Have 500 words to me by the end of the day, just so I can see where you’re going with it. If it works, I will want around 2000 words.”

It was the deep end. One of the biggest selling newspapers in the world, a strange and crazy city, and a story that well, if the people at these bars realized what I was doing, I was going to need that health insurance that I hadn’t opted for. It kind of set the tone for the stories I would continue to do. Ten days later my story ran as a double-page spread, I had a New York Post press card, and a new assignment to get stuck into.

That break was huge. On the day the story ran I called every other magazine and newspaper in New York to introduce myself.

Everybody had a copy of the New York Post within reach and when they asked me who I wrote for, I told them to turn to page 34. I was in. Very soon I had regular work and a monthly feature, based on New York, in a UK magazine.

Outside of bad poetry, the first thing Emmins wrote was a novel.

“I was around 22 at the time,” he says. “I was writing it by hand until my girlfriend came home with a used typewriter she’d bought for me at a boot sale.

“But by then I was depressed by my crap, badly written story with a lousy plot and unappealing characters. The typewriter, with much grunting as it was a big prehistoric bugger, went up in the attic with the golf clubs.

“I’ll give you a brief synopsis of the novel as it still makes me laugh. It was about a girl, the town whiz. A girl talented in many ways, but mostly in photography. She dreamed of being a journalist (where are we going here I wonder?).

“One day she met the guy of her dreams. Handsome, charming, rich and a drug dealer to-boot. She was soon addicted, sharing needles, contracted HIV and gave birth to twins who were also carrying HIV. When she died of full-blown AIDS, the twins went to live with their grandparents. But as their condition worsened, the kids not the grandparents, the grandfather found it hard to watch the deterioration of the two children he loved so much. So one day he took a shotgun and killed them, then his wife and then himself. And nobody lived happily ever after.

“I got to the part where she was diagnosed with HIV, realized I knew nothing of the condition and would have to do lots of research, and gave up.

“Luckily this experience didn’t put me off writing. Somehow I found out what I was good at and spent the next eight years meeting people who were willing to help me and give me a chance. My first book deal was much the same. Corvo books publish fairly highbrow journalism, written for the most part by academics. I don’t know how I managed to engage them for more than a few minutes, when they offered me a book deal, which was to be an expansion on one of my published articles, I was very surprised. But they gave me more than a book deal. Working with the editor, Julia Rochester, I got an education in quality journalism and writing. Up to that point writing was something I could just do, which limited me on how far I could take it. It was only after working with Julia that I felt I knew not only what I wanted to write and how I wanted to write it, but how much there was to learn and experiment with. I was hungrier than ever. It prepared me for a bigger, more challenging projects.”

One of those projects was Emmins’s latest book, 31 Days - A New York Street Diary.

When writing a feature about murals painted in the train tunnels of Manhattan by homeless artists, Emmins was challenged by a homeless dancer. She told him that to better understand what he was writing about he needed to live homeless himself.

MOTHER’S DAY BY STEPHEN KAHN 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 86

I woke up to four missed calls from Zed. Before I could throw off the covers the phone rang again. “He’s not picking up, Felipé. I told you he wouldn’t.”

“It’s still early,” I said.

“It’s Mother’s Day,” Zed said.

“I know. I’ll be over soon.”

I had not seen Zed’s place in almost a year, not since she said we would be better off just friends. A grand house. Once the local freemasons lodge, Zed said. She had dreamed of raising her boy in the house but when that dream died the place fell by the wayside of lonely living, the knocker tangled in ivy, the gutters clogged with black leaves.

It had just stopped raining and the only sound was water dripping from the trees. On the steps of the wraparound porch, I remembered where not to step, Zed would hold my hand and point to the rotted boards.

We worked in construction, met on a job site, a new Olive Garden in Harrisonburg. She was the civil engineer and I was her helper because I spoke better English than the rest of the crew.

We never even shook hands on the job. But the guys would tease me, ask what color thong she wore, as if they never peeked. Tu novia this, tu novia that, tu novia needs you, tu novia owns you, and that may have been true because at that time I would have done anything for her. But time is time, always unfolding, less and less of it forever.

I found Zed around back sitting on the little wall circling the fishpond. “Still good,” I said, patting the wall. I had made it with hundreds of slates out of the brook that ran behind the old apple-packing garage.

“It’s good to see you too, Zed, especially not on a workday.” She looked ready for the field though, dirty blue jeans, a checkered short-sleeve button-down, muddy boots, neon vest slung over her shoulder. The lengthening days had worked on her farmer’s tan, kissed her blonde hair a shade lighter.

She was staring at something, a look full of wonder or a dead-eyed gaze, I could not tell. I sat beside her and traced her sightline. Through the overhanging tree limbs I spotted a bird gliding through the air.

“A hawk,” I said.

“That’s not a hawk,” Zed said, “that’s a vulture. But let’s say if we see a hawk this morning it’s a sign that we’ll see Daniel, too.”

“Sure,” I said, “but I have a feeling we’ll see him either way.”

I wanted to pull her close, but didn’t. I wanted to marry her, father a child, and make a nursery in the parlor where she used to read all her old books to me, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She was in her late 40s and she claimed it would be impossible to make a healthy baby. “Besides,” she said, “if he comes out wearing a pencil mustache like you, we’re all in big trouble!”

Zed was a self-proclaimed reject, one of a “mutant subculture”, so she said. She was no soccer mom. Zed seemed to conceal some secret I felt content with never knowing.

We watched the sky change second by second, the clouds drifting apart, shadows crawling across the yard, up the wood-frame house. Birds flew in and out of the broken windowpanes. In the pond a few orange fish made small, jerky movements, surprised in our reflections.

Zed’s phone buzzed. Her husband Rutson texted: happy cunts day. we love you cunt. come up school lane. we might be here.

This was pretty typical of Rutson. He would also call just to hang up on her. Zed wasn’t fazed any more. They had been separated for years.

She hadn’t had a drink in years either but her alcoholism had awarded the husband custody of their child, and now Daniel was old enough to decide for himself who he wanted to live with. This was how I understood it.

Zed said that one day she would be with Daniel again, that somehow she would find a way back into his life. Zed said a lot of things and I believed her on some level. But I guess deep down I knew she would never win.

Maybe that’s why I drove her car on that Mother’s Day. Even though she wasn’t my lover any more, I wanted to see her through this. I drove, and Zed rode shotgun, the two of us on a lonely parallel of hope.

The air that followed the rain that morning turned green coming down through the trees. Potholes steamed in the sun and frothed in the rearview. The asphalt crumbled to an end at a ledge in the mountain. We wheeled onto a dirt road, imposed upon on each side by slanted wildflowers watching us like craning one-eyed children. Somewhere a fire had been extinguished but the smell of smoldering pine lingered.

Out from the wall of flowers we reached a less fertile land, signs of humanity interrupting the wilderness, dragging us back to the uncertainty of everything. Rusted car rims, slouching single-wide trailers and scorched trash barrels were embedded in the earth, as if someone got tired of burying it all and quit digging. This place, this flaw in the iris of the mountain, School Lane, reminded me of my home in Mexico. Not the individual things (our garbage wasn’t as rich, we would have used those rims), but the landscape as a whole, the quality of life, the grade we were born into and could not graduate from. The lane snaked down between trailers, a crooked spine ending at the asshole of the neighborhood.

Zed glared ahead as if molding a mother’s wish in the new day, perhaps sizing up her own demise. The light carved wrinkles below her blue eyes. How was it possible to have such old-looking skin and still have such young, bright eyes? Zed was a strong woman. Before the booze and childbirth and the hard life under the Virginia sun she had been beautiful too, and someone beautiful never stops deserving to be. I looked at her, not as a lover any more but as an old friend.

Her phone rang. She held it in front of her like someone on their knees holds a crucifix, and said: “Hello.” No-one answered.

“Here,” she said, tapping her nail on the window. “There. Come on.”

She was out and walking, her neon vest flapping in the wind, her big buttocks swaying. She always wore her neon safety vest. Life’s a construction site, she said once, you never know when you might get run over.

A red gasoline can sat beside a black pit in the dirt; in the pit, a charred bicycle. A microwave lay on the ground, hooked to an extension cord that ran in through fabric hanging over a window. The skeleton of a Christmas tree leaned against the trailer’s plastic siding. And Zed’s husband, stepping out onto the porch. He flicked his cigarette into the yard and his hands reached for the gutter over his head as if he was going to show us how many chin-ups he could do, but he just kind of hung there, gazing down on us, a proud white soldier standing on his plinth. A big dude, solid muscle and gut, blue-collar skin, his hair in a bun, an allure in his light eyes the color of rust. Younger than Zed, closer to my age, although like his wife, he had lines on his face too: grape-colored blood vessels covering his nose and cheeks.

Rutson looked at me over the flame as he lit a cigarette and said, “You brought your little chihuahua with you.” It was nothing I hadn’t heard before.

“Is this the guy you’re finally gonna give me a divorce over, Zed?”

“Hello Rutson,” Zed said. “This is Felipé.”

“O-la,” Rutson said.

“Hola,” I said.

“What’s he doin’ here, Zed?”

“It’s Mother’s Day. We came to see Daniel.”

“Daniel?” Rutson scratched his head. “Is that the name we settled on? I could’ve sworn we went with something else.”

“He’s drunk,” Zed said.

“Drunk. That’s it. We named him Drunk. I knew it started with a D.”

“Fucktard.”

“And you are!” Rutson said, the veins in his neck popping. “Bringing him out here on Mother’s Day? You must be wasted.”

“I haven’t had any in years, Rutson. You know that.”

“You’re fucked up on hope.”

“It’s Mother’s Day,” I said. “She has a right to see her boy.”

Rutson laughed. “Look at this spic standing on my property talking about rights. See amigo, there are rules on Mother’s Day. One of the rules is no outsiders. I can tell you’re not a typical amigo—stepping to me on my property—I can tell you’ve got your own little bullshit dream. We might have more in common than I’d like to admit. But it would’ve done you some good to build that wall. You got no business being here.”

“Yes he does,” Zed said. “American or not, his heart beats for something.”

“What—a green card?”

“Lord knows there ain’t nothing domestic about any of this.”

“Go home, amigo. You don’t know where you’re at.”

“Just let her see her kid, man. I don’t understand—”

“That’s right you don’t. Now go back. Go home, amigo. I’m doing you a favor.”

“You raising a child here?” I said. “I’m illegal and I’ve got a bigger piece of pie than you.”

“Come on then,” Rutson said, rolling up the sleeves of his flannel shirt. “I dare you to find out how much I’ve got to lose.”

“My ass,” Zed said. “You’re not gonna do shit.”

“It’s okay, Zed,” I said, not scared of Rutson, but willing to bow to him and his empire of trash if it yielded something good for Zed. “I’ll wait outside.”

“No you won’t,” Zed said. “You’re in this now.”

I didn’t feel like I was being included in a family ritual but implicated in one.

“Go home, amigo,” Rutson said, flicking his cigarette. “I’m doing you a favor.”

“He is home, Rutson. Isn’t it about time we give Daniel a chance? We’ve got to give him a chance or he’ll never grow up. Out of this. Out of us. Felipé believes.”

“I don’t trust him.”

“Trust me,” Zed said.

“What’s he look like then?” Rutson said. “If he’s such a big believer, he can tell us what our son looks like.”

We were silent a while. Nothing stirred inside the trailer. Clouds got trapped on the mountain, the sky the color ash. The ground felt stony under my feet; nothing could ever grow there.

Rutson lit another cigarette. Zed looked at me, her eyes resembling the ever-glaze of the Rivanna River.

“Tell us, Felipé.”

I had seen Daniel so many times in my American dream. So many times, I couldn’t forget. He looked exactly like me.

STEPHEN KAHN

I don’t fully understand the piano. Sure, I can play some stuff but I don’t really know the language. Playing Carnegie Hall doesn’t look too good. But I still love it. The music has a hypnotic effect on me, especially the waltz. My top-played track is Chopin’s Mazurka in A Minor, in which Chopin breaks the key signature and seems to enter a trance himself. I listen and listen as in a daydream. Here’s where the writing comes in. Much like music, writing has mood, tone, and rhythm. I allow my imagination to become attached to the music. As I listen, the “story trailer” starts to play in my mind with its own color and sound. As well as classical there’s plenty of pop rock and punk music too that gets my fingers dancing on the computer keyboard. Like with the piano maybe it’s best that I don’t completely understand it. The inspiration to play is enough.

FAUX KING EARTH, WIND, & WE ARE ON FIRE BY BEN UMAYAM 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE ISSUE 133

I am used to protests. I remember in the 70s pulling into a rest stop in Maryland, buses full of queer folk running in to pee. Act UP, Dignity, Dykes on Bikes attending a protest, gay bowling league after, drinks at The Boots and Saddle late.

At the Denver No Kings, the 70s people are a group of “Are You Experienced” folks, with their canes, walkers, ski poles. Friend Barb says the young ’uns find out from the oldies what to do at these things.

We come to the big city Denver, big protest rally. Other reason, we have tickets to Earth, Wind & Fire at Fiddler’s Green.

No Kings. It is organized. Yet disorganized. We approach the Colorado State Capitol, walking down 16th. It used to be the 16th Street Mall. After four years of renovation, torn-up streets, they now call it 16th Street. Just that. Even though it really is like a mall now. It is one big walkway.

We are fashionably late, you know gays. People are already walking away, signs pointing down.

There are no scheduled speakers, just some impromptu music under a tent. No Band. No Dylan. No Neil Young. A local bluegrass group sings about the mountains.

A big bear bearded guy wears a blue grass skirt, a long one, he sticks out in front of the audience. When he sways, his coconuts threaten to stick out as well. The gays, again, long experienced with this.

We catch this when we arrive. Aha, I conclude hence the early exodus of people.

The numbers are in and about 250 thousand. Like Arlo said, “That’s a quarter million people man. You guys have closed the NY Thruway.” Sixty years ago, in this case, the NY Thruway is the RTD, the Regional Transportation District. Downtown Denver closed due to the events happening today. So says the guy on the PA system. Sixty years ago, “such a long, strange trip it’s been”.

Some of the protest signs are scruffy, last-minute scribblings on cardboard. A lot of NO FAUX KING WAY. One that stands out is NO DICK TATERS.

We do a lot of walking, more so than on our summer trip thru the ruins of Pompeii. We have walked to and from the Union Station. Our steps app proves it. 16 thousand steps down 16th Street, no longer the mall.

We hear reports from the birthday parade, updates on the big screen at the Noodles R Us. We watch the organized/disorganized shuffle of the armed forces. Not the stylized choreography of North Korea or the Russians. Someone yells over their pad thai, “Well what do you want, these guys are trained to fight, to defend our country, not to march in birthday parades.” Next to us a gal yells out with a mouthful of bolognese, “Not to prance like tin soldiers in some Nutcracker fantasy.”Later they are saying, “Let’s give him a show by not giving a show.”

No Kings has shut Denver’s transit system downtown. “Yas queens,” we shout boarding the delayed E that will take us to the F that will takes us to the K and G. Takes an hour, normally a 25-minute trip.

The concert. It is hot, radiant at Fiddler’s Green and although we arrive an hour early, the line at security is long, long, long. In our seats the setting sun is a hot one. It is a wait for E, W & F to take the stage.

I think about this music, the 70s post-innocence after the summer of love Woodstock, the burning of LA. The Motown music that bridged between black and white gives way to two divisions on the Billboard charts, black music versus white music, the line drawn thicker as the decade ages. Earth, Wind & Fire are formulaic, a sound that recording conglomerate Columbia pushed and defined, a 70s R&B music for everyone. It defied the trend with music that united the divide between black and white in America. This audience at Fiddler’s Green, like Colorado, is mostly white.

Philip Bailey, a native of Denver, his falsetto soars above it all, him at age 74. Google says he has a four-octave range. A bold beautiful black Julie Andrews, rising to the sky like Mary Poppins, thrilling the crowd. A different time, a different age, the 70s. A symphony of tight three-part horns, intertwined with a trio of funky bass and two rhythm guitars, that wail like solid rock, and with the trio of harmonies topped with Bailey falsettos, all held together by the Maurice White arrangements, long-gone Maurice White, a genius like the other recently departed Brian Wilson. Poetry in audio this throwback to a past age.

And this Denver day all takes place on the eve of the 10-year anniversary of the escalator ride down the tower on 5th to the music of Neil Young, Rockin’ in the Free World. Young threatens this first presidential campaign never to use his music again.

The Earth, Wind & Fire encore is the iconic song September, the defining Filipino line dance.

The line dance, arguably, was invented by Filipinos, a sort of Electric Slide version of The Hustle danced by not two people, a couple, but by a group, a line of people. Go to a Filipino wedding and the whole room will literally line dance to September. Perhaps it is the catchiness of the tune that Filipinos like me relate to.

More likely it is the irony. The song line goes, “Do you remember, the 21st of September.” September 22 is the date when the first Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines. The song is not about this eve. Filipinos have appropriated the date, a celebration of the innocence of the Philippines before its darkest day.

On this eve of the 10th anniversary of the escalator ride, I wonder if this encore, is the celebration, the jubilant calm before the faux king declares martial law on trumped-up charges of insurrection.

ONE MORE THING BY STEFAN SCHUMACHER 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSSUE 001

My father wasn’t there. He was meeting a woman at the bowling alley. “I’ve got what you call a romantic date,” he said to me.

“Oh, where is it?” I asked.

“It’s down at the bowling alley bar.”

If I was who I am today I would’ve said, ah, the bowling alley bar. That’s very romantic. Especially at three o’clock in the afternoon.

But I was only 16, and at 16, you’re barely past the level of mental retardation. So I’d thought nothing of it and watched as my dad put on a shirt (he was bare-chested when he told me he was leaving), grabbed his keys, and drove off down the narrow driveway in his old VW Bug with the passenger seat missing.

I didn’t live with my dad, and didn’t spend much time in his house. The only TV he had was a black and white with a rabbit-ears antenna, so I started snooping around.

Read more