I hadn't expected him to show up last night. Hell, I wasn't aware he knew where I lived, so imagine my surprise when he was the unexpected guest blowing up my front door. I wished I could've said it was hard to watch him breakdown before my eyes, but I can't. If I was willing to admit it or not, my masculinity had desperately needed the encouragement that I...
As an introduction... The year was 1973 and the college was in upstate New York. This story is based on a long rambling conversation I had late one night at a party with a college classmate who had never been very talkative with me (or the rest of the world I believe) before that night. We ended up talking in a quiet corner and he began a confessional of...
"I have a delivery for a 'Mr. Eric Grant'?" A delivery? "Uh, sure. That's me. Come on up." I buzzed through disembodied delivery man, and curiously awaited him until five knocks on my apartment door announced his arrival. Opening it, I was surprised by the sight of two dozen long-stem red roses and a velvety red gift box with a gold bow and ribbon. "What...
I was standing over my father's grave at Sunnycrest Cemetery as the cleric spouted empty words and prayers, and as my mother wept crocodile tears into her lace hankie. "Be strong, Lucinda," said my Great Aunt Martha, patting my mother's shoulder. Aunt Martha was my father's mother's sister. My mother sobbed even more energetically into the damp embroidere...
Young Billy landed in Charleston, South Carolina, by ship, at his uncle's own wharf, Brown's wharf, at the Cooper River foot of Queen Street. He was surprised to find that it was a lot warmer in Charleston in late October than it was in Massachusetts. And after coming from the more staid Boston, he was also taken with the frivolity he found here; it was the...
Maybe I'm just stupid. Maybe that's the reason. I have to learn and relearn the same lesson over and over: Sometimes our dreams and goals spin around and bite us in the ass. I'm Chip Beaker. I'm in a lot of trouble. And it all started with that damn apartment. Way out on Santa Monica, it sat high over the street and glimpsed the big, blue Pacific, out ther...
The guy was on his back on my kitchen floor, working on my recalcitrant dishwasher, which had stopped working just when every dish in the house was dirty and loaded into it. His name was Pete and he was in a tight blue Dish-o-Matic uniform, his long legs stretched across my kitchen floor. While Pete labored on, I was sitting nearby at my small breakfast tabl...
"Isn't that precious," the matron sitting to my left in the Minstrel dining room of the cruise ship was saying. "A young man has taken his father on a cruise. And he's so attentive to the older man's needs. I so wish my grandson... uh, my son... John could be like that." That was Margaret. Sheila, sitting to my right and a little close for comfort, agreed w...
Note on Language: This is a story about two blokes who are from northern England. While I've toned it down a little, there's a lot of linguistic references in this story which might take some explaining, especially in the dialogue. It might help to know that "Nowt" and "Summat" are "nothing" and "something", that "da" and "fatha" both mean "father", that "...
A person can only tolerate so much self-reflection before it becomes detrimental to one's health. That's how I was feeling by ten o'clock the next morning. The realization that I was a fuck-tard was weighing heavily on me—so much so that I'd started to feel depressed, which wasn't a normal feeling for me. I was a good person—I worked with sick kids, was debt...