Fictional Novella written by William King.

1. King 1
Donald & Donald
By William King
ENGL 5595-02: Creative Capstone
Loyola Marymount University
Dr. Chuck Rosenthal
April 29, 2022

2. King 2
A Note:
This story went through many changes. I began with a plot in my head, and it changed
the moment I wrote the first few sentences. Then it changed a few pages down, and a few further,
and, eventually, It didn’t really take form until I returned to what I thought was a finished project
and re-read it. Maybe one day I’ll return to this story and shift it again. I’m starting to think
writing is getting all of your ideas out in one physical place. Editing is where the story is made.
The more I wrote, the more I realized I was airing out my own anxieties over working on this
project and counting down the days to graduation. In the end, I think this is the story of writing
my senior capstone. If it was a movie, the opening frame would read: “Loosely based on true
events.” Very loosely. Not to be meta or anything.

3. King 3
For Gampop (although I don’t think he would approve of all the language).

4. King 4
That One Stupid Fucking Night
A week before I had my first last drink I met a guy in a bar that told me he had killed
someone.
I had all the questions at once in my head but the first one I chose was where. I’m not
sure why I chose location, I knew what I really wanted to hear was why and how or how and why,
unsure of which one would prevent the next from being answered. I think I thought that where
was a safe question, that it wouldn’t offend him and it wouldn’t come off as too pushy for details.
He was drinking a sludge stout, a cup of mud bank and I thought it made sense. That’s
what a killer would drink: bitter, warm, mud, sludge, thick, like a potion, so black, a
skull-and-crossbones belonged stamped across it with a cartoon plumage of green, bubbling
smoke coming off the top. And then I thought that beer is entering the lips of a man who killed
someone and somehow the beer was either guilty or pitiful, but either way it was new, it wasn’t
what it was before. The music, the neon lights, the horny couples, everything felt a little more
sinister now. Everyone seemed either guilty or pitiful. The genre of the room had changed. I
could feel it.
He had a flannel on and I wondered if the manufacturers knew a guy who killed someone
would wear it. I wondered what he wore on the day he killed someone, whether he or the clothes
knew they would be involved in a killing. I wondered if the fabric softener it was washed in with
its sunny commercials and beautiful mothers and soccer practice kids knew that a man who
killed someone would smell it on himself and enjoy that same warmth and odor when out of the
drier. “San Antonio.”

5. King 5
“Like the Alamo?” I was drunk. He laughed, I couldn’t hear it over the music but I could
see it. He leaned in.
“Yeah like the Alamo.”
“You killed a man in San Antonio?” Another laugh. And a nod. “That sounds like a
Johnny Cash line.” He unbuttoned his shirt. “Check this out brother.”
Right on his sternum between two penny-sized brown nipples, one pierced, stretched over
the contours of a taut chest was a Johnny Cash with a Mona Lisa-subtle snarl and an ink slick
pompadour sitting on his head like a beret. I leaned in to get a closer look, swaying to the rhythm
of my last drink an inch from giving Johnny a peck on his lips. “No fucking way,” I said.
“Way.”
The girl I had been talking to before I met this killer tugged on my sleeve, reminding me
that she was to my left, watching me put my nose to a man’s chest. Her raised eyebrows and
pinched forehead suggested I was on my last chance, if it hadn’t already spilled with half my
Jack and Coke on the floor beneath my stool. “I’m gonna go find my friends.” she said.
“Should I help?” I asked as a momentary silence paved the way to a new song, my
volume still adjusted to the previous one.
She patted my cheek with her hand, finding me either guilty or pitiful but either way not
what I was before, and left me swaying towards where her chest would have been. I felt a tap on
my shoulder, reminding me that the killer was to my right. I swung my head like a metronome to
greet Johnny again. “You wanna see something else?” He asked. He fully unbuttoned his flannel
and my eyes followed the last button to his waist line. Emerging from the band of his jeans,
tattooed below his hip bone, was the handle of a revolver. I looked up and he gave me a wink,
“It’s a double entendre.”

6. King 6
“You speak French?” I asked, as objects and faces in the room began to shift like a slide
puzzle. He shook his head and pointed at his ear. I leaned in close enough to edge out Dire Straits
coming through the speakers above us, but the effort fried the remaining resonance and pitch in
my vocal chords: “I said I write screenplays. I’m a script writer.”
“What have you written?”
I cut across the bar to throw up in the bathroom, the lights splitting my attention, the
bodies slow then fast, the faces sudden then gone, the floor cool and relieving for my fever
cheeks. I’ll lay right here, I told myself, please, just let me lay here. Something about being on
the floor felt like falling asleep in a booster seat, there’s no intent or will or desire here, the body
is just giving up. I don’t care what I’ve done or what I’ve said, let me lay here. Let me be pitiful,
pity me.
I felt myself being embraced, and my head draped back, its weight fully realized, I
couldn't believe I had been holding it up this long, what a miracle, I should have been dragging it
across the floor everywhere I went. I saw feet stomp and mouths spit and drinks spill and asses
getting pinched, and I saw it all disappear with the swing of a closing door and I knew I was on
the pavement only after whomever put me there had left.
I only knew I had been sleeping when my eyes opened with a swift phlegmy inhale
through my nostrils. I saw polished shoes that had walked straight out of the office and into a
Friday night and I looked up to find two scarved, peacoated guys sharing a cigarette having a
conversation and trying to avoid me, but the occasional side glance told me they were finding it
difficult.
I asked them for a drag and they offered me another side glance, so I called them faggots
and tried to stay on the sidewalk but a few steps led my left shoulder into the side mirror of a

7. King 7
Nissan Versa. I pushed myself off and got a few more steps before my right shoulder found
support from the glass doors of a closed kebab place. I continued to a Honda Civic and then to a
pet store and went on this way until I saw the glow of cigarettes and the shifting of nervous legs
ahead of me.
I remember the bouncer telling me my face was bleeding, and that I couldn’t get in with
my face bleeding, but then I remember being on the dance floor with a girl’s hips matching my
own, dipping from side to side. I had a clear drink resting between one of my hands and her hip,
the drink moving with us and getting the back of her shirt and my hand wet. She mouthed over
the music, “Your face is bleeding.”
“Yours too,” I said. Then, I rubbed my cheek against hers, seeing my blood for the first
time blue streaked across her face reflecting the lights around us. We ended up in the bathroom
together. This is how I met Laura, but I wouldn’t know her name until later.
I woke up the next morning in her bed, a bed at the time, and I left her bedroom without
looking at the warm back I could feel pressed against my bruised shoulder. I kept my eyes on the
bedroom door until I opened it, entering a room of now silent, once chatting roommates, coffee
mugs in hand, eyes set on me. “Your face is bleeding,” one of them said.
“Where am I?”
“Our home,” said another.
“And how do I leave?”
They all pointed in the direction of a door across the room. I nodded and offered a smile
that passed as soon as my hand turned the door knob.
I walked down three flights and out the front of the apartment building into a
neighborhood with a Whole Foods.

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That one night. That stupid fucking night.

9. King 9
A Drink For Don
I had never seen physical death before. I thought about death, a lot, probably too much
for someone my age. But I thought about funerals, people crying, people noticing. I thought
about Times New Roman or Arial on a neatly creased pamphlet, two dates etched in a stone or
the wood of a placard in a place where paying fees came with some sort of post-mortem legacy.
It was the Elks Club for Uncle Don, above a sticky floor hanging over a bleach-spotted
blue felt pool table in a former firehouse in Warsaw, New York.
Donald Henry Fowler
Lecturing Knight
1932-2020
I visited him in the hospital with my mom and grandmother, a consequence of living at
home at the time. Death was given an image above a sticky floor in a hospital bed in Warsaw,
New York.
Death was bed sores printed on printer paper skin, chafed eyelids, matchstick limbs,
soiled bed pans and tubes. Lots of tubes. In nostrils, in forearms, in holes only the inside of his
gown knew.
Something about this old firehouse with a bar and pool tables gave me that inward
stomach feeling. The clinical linoleum floors and fluorescent lighting. I hated this scene, like a
church basement with a ping pong table for the kids. It was an office pizza party.
Every place I went to in Warsaw gave me this same feeling. Every one of Uncle Don’s
friends I met gave me this feeling. Like cough drops and medical bills and old Volvos or

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Mercedes with those cloth seats the same color as the carpet, that would get stuffy in the summer
and snuff out any sense of smell in your nose until all that filled your nostrils was stale heat.
There’s all this beautiful green in upstate, all this vegetation and these gorges and
expansive ocean-like, hill views. And then, there’s the little concrete opioid islands that populate
it. Little towns with little downtown streets playing Big Apple dress up, like It’s A Small World
versions of New York City, but all fucked up and haunted and cracked and abandoned.
These towns are snake skins, crustacean exoskeletons. A wave picked them up at some
point, a spirit, a kind of American gusto that you can see in the flags above eroding,
weed-infested porches and the banners hanging from street lamps that line the main road through
town, listing dates attributed to names just as forgotten whether their final year was spent in
Peleliu or Vietnam or Afghanistan or Warsaw. That same wave crashed and left this town
bobbing in the tide, water-logged and rotten.
All these upstate towns were “bustling” in the days of Charlie Chaplin and ore mines and
textile manufacturing, but somewhere between The Great Depression and AI sex robots, these
towns became death. This town is death.
To me, the Elks Club was the spiritual nucleus of Warsaw. A room full of veterans who
were proud of the fact that the wave picked them up and pounded them back into the shore, some
with a few less limbs, all in the same old skin they had momentarily shed.
They cultified their national service, fetishized it with rituals and traditions, and nullified
their memories to the contrary with nightly near-lethal doses of alcohol and a steady stream of
prescribed medication. Uncle Don was an elk from the time he returned from Korea, and from
birth to death he never left Warsaw. “That means third in command,” a gravelly, weak voice said
behind me.

11. King 11
I could feel a hot, coffee-dry breath on my neck. I turned to face a liver spotted elk with
skin stretched beyond its elasticity wearing a red blazer, pinned in place of a right arm. A few
strands of dead white hair stuck to his forehead from under one of those hotdog bun service caps,
an eagle globe and anchor pinned on the side. The only thing on him that hadn’t accumulated
crust and sag since his birth were his blue eyes, still crisp. “Lecturing knight. Third in
command,” he said.
“I was wondering what that meant,” I offered with a smile.
“I’m Fred.” He presented his left hand and an air of Jameson vapors. “It’s not a klan thing
by the way. Y’know, the knight? People sometimes think it is.”
I fumbled my coffee cup into my right hand to accept this rare handshake. “A few people
have told me now.” Fred stepped forward and stood shoulder to shoulder with me, scanning the
placard for a few labored breaths.
“You must be the namesake,” he said, eyes still forward.
“Yes, that’s right. Donald. Except I go by Keith.”
“You don’t like the name Donald?” I always hated the name Donald.
“It just…seems of a time that I’m not,” I said. Fred hiked his slack belt with a grunt.
“Don was proud of having a namesake. Couldn’t have any of his own. Caught some
chinc shrapnel on the vas deferens. They said it was the first Purple Heart for a field vasectomy,”
Fred couldn’t prevent an abrupt laugh. “He ever tell you about that?”
“Nope, never did.” Fred pulled his belt up again.
“Yeah Don was pretty proud of that too. Used to say he could stick any whore from
Bangkok to Newark and the only thing he had to worry about committin’ to was a course of

12. King 12
penicillin.” I waited for another abrupt laugh but when I didn’t hear one, I looked at Fred to find
his lips tight, maybe the beginning of a quiver in his bottom lip. “He was a good man,” he said
“Sounds like it.” I worked hard to sound sympathetic rather than sarcastic but was unsure
of which tone succeeded after the words left my mouth.
“Yep, lots of stories,” said Fred.
I nodded my ‘yep,’ although the only times I had ever seen Uncle Don open his mouth in
nearly three decades of Thanksgivings and Christamses was to take a sip of Coors Light or suck
the meatball off a toothpick. Fred grunted for me and cut back in. “He ever tell you about the
time he stuck a midget in Seoul?”
I used my head again to indicate ‘no.’
“Mmm, man of few words.”
I nodded ‘yep.’ Fred’s belly shook with a subdued laugh as he remembered something
else.
“He ever tell you about the time he almost stuck a pig in front of his entire company after
a night a drinkin’ Soju?’”
I looked at Fred again, his mouth shifting to conceal the growing quiver in his lip, his
laughs dangerously close to another physical reaction he didn’t want to release. Not in front of
me anyways. I didn’t want it either. I tried to think of something to say to push him back towards
a laugh. “He did a lot of sticking, huh?” was all I had.
His mouth twisted and his eyes glistened. This time his belly chuckle gave way to
sobbing. I thought about putting my hand on his shoulder but I wasn’t sure what I’d say after. I
didn’t want to say the wrong thing again.

13. King 13
I only knew Uncle Don as an easy punchline. He would always sit at the dinner table,
mute, sometimes mumbling with enough beer in him. My brother and I would ask him questions
and our necks would bulge with restrained laughter as we watched him groan and yawn his way
through an indiscernible answer. He would mix up our names- Katherines and Margarets, Ethans
and Keiths. He’d think his grandniece was his niece and his nephew-in-laws were his
grandnephews. And we’d hide our heads under the dinner table, whimpering our way to a calmer
state so our Nana wouldn’t see us.
When we ran out of things to say to each other we would play a game where we timed
how long it took Don to lift his fork from his plate and take a bite of his food. It never took less
than ten seconds.
Every year he would get us presents for Christmas and we would bury our faces in our
hands when we received them. He’d give crop tops to my aunts, tourist tank tops from New
Jersey gas stations to my uncles, something you’d see a European tourist wearing as they strolled
through JFK. “I’m sorry,” I said as my hand hovered around his shoulder without touching it.
He sucked an incoming sob through his nose, wiped his cheeks with a swift motion of his sleeve
and smiled, his eyes icy with moisture.
“He woulda never had me doing that when he was around,” said Fred. “That’s why I
loved him.”
I felt nauseous, so I sat at the bar, the weight of my hunched shoulders digging my
elbows to numbness against the thinning epoxy on the bartop wood. My forehead felt hot, and I
massaged it with my fingers as if it would somehow release its heat like a genie from a lamp.

14. King 14
I felt a strong pinch on my shoulder, forcing my neck into an awkward twist through some kind
of muscle communication
“What’s in your cup?” My mom was looking down at me through her wire-framed
readers, a look that sharpened accusations.
“It’s coffee.” I rolled my shoulder out of her pinch
“Let me smell it,”
“Are you serious?”
“Deadly so.”
She picked it up, impatient with the delay, and dipped her nose below the styrofoam rim,
breathing as if a Sommelier had selected it for her. She handed it back, with a doubt on her face
that twisted my stomach.
“Where’s your brother?” She said, looking out at the room as if everyone gathered was
hiding something from her.
“It’s coffee.” The pinch of her paranoia was still biting at my neck.
“Okay. Where’s your brother?”
There was a hushed white noise in the room, never rising above a certain volume.
Everyone talked like there was a larger presence they didn’t want to disturb. I envied every
person there who nodded and smiled and nodded and smiled and could continue to do so
seemingly without end. I wanted so desperately to know what they were talking about. What do
people say? But at the same time I can’t help but avoid these interactions. My brother found us
before we found him. “What’s wrong?” he asked. My mom’s face softened. She smiled.
“Nothing’s wrong.” She had an uncanny ability to flip like this; to chastise and pacify
two different people in the same room. Although the pacification aspect was pretty much lost on

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us at this point in our lives. There was always that underlying focus in her, one that always
sharpened her features and words to our eyes and ears. Once you knew her, it never let up.
“You guys looked tense when I was walking over.” He looked over at me, “Is he making
a scene?” My elbows dug a little deeper into their nerves and the wood below them.
“No one’s making a scene,” said my mom, with a snort to confirm the supposed
ridiculousness of my brother’s comment. “Where’s your father?” She was always looking for
someone, and if she found them, she looked for someone else.
“He was trying to see if they had more pigs-in-a-blanket,” my brother said, leaning up on
the bar next to her. Her focus came to the surface.
“We had four full trays, are we already out?” He backed away and stood straight, almost
dignified Atticus Finch circling around the bench.
“I have no idea what the pigs-in-a-blanket situation is. I’m not responsible for them, I’m
a guest.”
“Wrong. You’re family, you’re a host. And why are you being so defensive?” She said.
“How am I being defensive? You asked if we have enough and I have no clue, I haven’t
been monitoring the pigs-in-a-blanket.” My dad found us, his face tuned to his annoyance.
“They ate all the goddamn pigs-in-a-blanket,” he said before he finished walking towards
us.
“Who did?” asked my mom.
“The drunks.” He gestured behind himself with a flip of his hand, as if tossing out a cup
of water.
“What drunks?” The mention of alcohol pitched her voice to a higher and more grating
octave.

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“What drunks?” my dad asked.
“Which drunks.” my brother added.
“We had four full trays, how can they all be gone?” said my mom.
“People got greedy, I told you to put up a three pigs-in-a-blanket maximum sign.” My
dad grabbed a handful of peanuts from a ramekin on the bartop and tossed them all in his mouth
with one motion. She snorted, either at his suggestion or the volume and pantomime-like quality
of his chewing. Probably both.
“This is a memorial service, not Halloween. I’m not telling an adult how many
pigs-in-a-blanket they can have.” She pushed the ramekin out of his reach. I could feel the heat
in my forehead pooling into a dense corner above my eye. My head started swaying in my hands.
“Please stop saying pigs-in-a-blanket,” I said, loud enough only for the bartop underneath
me to hear.
“Why do you have to be so defensive?”said my dad, stepping towards the ramkin and
taking another handful. My brother laughed.
“I’m not being defensive, I’m just not putting a limit on food at a memorial service like
I’m handing out rations to a chain gang. I would expect adults to have enough self-control to not
stuff their faces with pigs-in-a-blanket.”
“Well you’re not dealing with adults, you’re dealing with drunks. They’re worse than
kids because you have to treat them like adults when they’re acting like kids,” he said.
“Would you quiet down? They’re not drunks,” her hard-boiled detective paranoia had
become one of the guilty.
“Are you kidding?” His mouth was still full of peanuts and I was somewhat glad that it
was only audible and not visible to me. “The air in this room has a BAC above the legal limit.”

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“Enough with the alcohol,” she said, unable to control the volume of what she intended
to be a whisper. There was a pause and I could feel all three of them set their eyes on me.
My dad cleared his throat to segue back in.
“Regardless, all that’s left of the pigs–in-a-blanket are crumbs, and I didn’t even get one.”
“Now you’re acting like a child,” she said.
“Is there an age limit on being hungry?”
“There’s an age limit on how upset you can be about not getting a pig-in-a-blanket,” she
said.
“I’m gonna be sick” I said, but not loud enough to be a warning or a plea for a trashcan or
a towel or for something anyone could do about it. Something about the image of little Vienna
sausages in a puff pastry, my Uncle fucking a pig, Fred crying, fluorescent lights, the stickiness
of the bartop, the smell of whiskey and my parents’ voices brought a hot concoction of stomach
acid and breakfast to my throat and to the bartop in front of me.

18. King 18
What Have You Written??
They sat me outside on the curb with water and a damp towel for my head, and gave me a
large shirt from a 1990s Thanksgiving turkey trot 5k that smelled like closet and vaguely of a
bodily odor that time and use had favored over detergent.
My mom sat with me rubbing my back but I could feel the thickness and hesitation of a
question she wanted to ask and it was making me feel nauseous again. So I asked her to leave.
She refused to leave me on the curb alone but someone came out to tell her that they were
running low on mini water bottles at the refreshment table and she went inside, a relieving
feeling that was taken away as soon as I heard the click of my brother’s heavy heels. “I’m Fine,”
I said.
“I wasn’t going to ask if you’re alright.”
“Then go the fuck back inside.” He stepped in front of me and made a pouty face. Then it
faded and he started kicking the gravel around him, pacing in circles. The thickness of something
unsaid.
“Mom thinks you’re drunk,” he said, looking at the invisible orbit his feet traveled.
“Is that why you came out here?”
“I just needed a break.” He shrugged. He made another trip around.
“Are you?” he asked.
“Do I seem drunk?”
“Well, you threw up at a bar.”
“There’s other reasons you can throw up.”
“hunched over a bartop?”
“You would’ve seen me drinking.”

19. King 19
“You went to the bathroom like five times.”
“I had to piss.”
“And one of those times you were in there for like fifteen minutes.”
“I had to take a shit. Why were you counting how many times I went to the bathroom?”
“Because you do weird shit all the time, it’s hard not to notice.”
“Like going to the bathroom?”
“Five times.”
When we were kids he used to sit on my chest. He would dig into my pores and get so
deep under my skin, my only line of defense was to call him the worst thing I could think of:
bitch, fatass, pussy, twat, fuckface, fucktwat, fuckmouth, fuckass, bitch. He would just sit on my
chest. I could squirm but it was always up to him when I could get up. He would squeeze my
breath out with a determined look on his face. “Everyone’s always gotta worry about you. Don’t
you get sick of that?” he said, “Don’t you want people to catch up with you instead of checking
in on you?”
“I don’t control whether people worry about me. That’s up to them.” I was feeling the
weight of his ass on my chest. He shook his head.
“You are so spoiled.”
“I’m spoiled?”
“Move back to LA.”
Fuck you fatass.
“Move back to LA man. Mom and dad aren’t gonna pay for your rent anymore, but go
ahead.”
You fucking pussy fucking fuckface.

20. King 20
“You don’t control shit,” he said, “You don’t want to be treated like a kid but you sit there
waiting for your diaper to get changed.”
“Don’t take your insecurities out on me!” I suddenly felt like I was measuring myself and
it left a pang of annoyance- a gas bubble in my stomach that I couldn’t expel.
“My insecurities?”
“You’re too much of a pussy to do what you really want to do, so you’re taking it out on
me!” He stopped his pacing and came close enough that he was standing over me, his head
blocking the sun.
“What do you do?” He said, “What’s your proof of concept? You’re a writer, right? You
call yourself a writer? What the fuck have you written? Where’s your writing? It was cute when
you were in college, but now?” He shook his head. I could feel that choke in my throat, and a
strain in my eyes as my cheeks grew heavy. It was a tear-swelling frustration I hadn’t felt since
we were all living under one roof, since I was young enough to physically wear the label of little
brother.
“I’d fucking hang myself if I only lived my life to be stable!” I said as he went back
inside. It sounded final and searing in my head but came out somewhere in the realm of closeted
teenager who wants to be a dancer and not a dock worker, like his father. My brother stopped at
the door and put on his pouty face again, squinting and sucking in his cheeks like James Deen.
“Have you ever wondered if there’s more to life than being really, really, ridiculously
good looking?” Zoolander. I used to laugh when he did that. We loved that movie. This time, I
felt the full weight of his ass on my chest. No air to laugh.
My dad came out a few minutes later and gave me a folded napkin with three
pigs-in-a-blanket inside. “They brought out a second round.”

21. King 21
What Can You Be?
After the sun on the pavement fried to an orange and the air was cool enough to dry the
sweat on my forehead and in my armpits; after spilled drinks soaked into a sticky layer on the
bartop, plastic tables and chairs were collapsed, and the Elks that were too drunk to keep a
conversation going fumbled in their blazer pockets for Buick keys, my mom found me where she
left me on the curb. We went to Don’s apartment to sparse out what was left of his belongings:
the little things, the trinkets, the “you can’t take it with you”’s.
If there was a decor or an identifiable aesthetic to his apartment, it was “in hospice.”
There wasn’t an aspect of the apartment that hadn’t been translated to a synonym of old or dying.
He had a bedroom but the bed he had been using was in the living room, in front of the tv,
with a remote control to lift the backing to a sitting position or lower it for sleeping. The shower
had a stool and a plastic handle suctioned to the wall to lower him onto it. The toilet seat had an
additional donut placed on top so his knees didn’t have to lower to an arthritic right angle to
place his ass on it. There were oxygen tanks under the sink and baby wipes on nearly every table.
It was strange to me that they would dress the body for an open casket but leave his
apartment like a field hospital with bloody bandages- any illusion that his dead body could attend
a cocktail party was shattered the moment we entered his home.
His nurse was a young, large woman, second-generation Jamaican with the faintest hint
of her parents’ patois when her speech was guided by emotion. She welcomed us with tight hugs,
tightly clenched eyes and lipstick kisses.
“Yuh just as handsome as Don described yuh.” Her thick forearms released my face from
the embrace of her chest, my cheek imprinted with the folds of her dress as if I had been sleeping
in that position the whole night.

22. King 22
“Don described me?”
“Of course. Yuh carry the man’s name.” She knew all of our names. I don’t know if Don
had ever directly addressed me. My aunt would dole out his gifts as he sat slumped in a parlor
chair with a beer in his hand on Christmas. Don was on the tag, and I would open it to find a
cardigan from Gap without so much as a look in my direction from him. We assumed he could
sleep with his eyes open.
We received our hugs like they were the price of admission and we shuffled one by one
into the living room: my mom, my dad, my brother, the aunts, uncles, and cousins that could take
the time off to make it. each of us as unsure as the previous where we should sit, standing around
his hospice bed like it was a headstone with our hands folded politely.
Save for my parents and brother, I had yet to talk to any of them, and I felt we were too
far along in the day for an attempt at a greeting now. Any attempt I would have made at talking
with them was expelled with my stomach’s contents on the bartop. So, instead, I hoped we could
stand together with the expectation that it was too late for greetings, and that there could be a
general acknowledgement of each other’s presence in the room and not have to voice it. But that
hope was squashed when my cousin Tom came up and put a hand on my shoulder, a boozy smile
but his voice hushed to a level of respect for the room. “How ya been motherfucker?”
“Good,” I said looking away, hoping this was enough.
“Been awhile.”
“Yeah.”
“Like, what? Five years?”
“That sounds right.”
“Fuck.”

23. King 23
“Yeah.” We nodded and examined the room, and I thought we had done enough. But he
was giving me a tutorial on funeral talk; smiles and nods.
“Dude, I heard you’re a fucking writer? Out in Hollywood?”
“LA.”
“You gotta tell me all about it.” He punctuated this with a shoulder bruising slap. There it
was. That question. I worked my way out of it with some vagaries along the lines of, “it’s going,”
and pushed him towards his job, and proceeded to have a profanity-laden crash course in
commercial real estate in Newark. Then came my cousin Abigail and I worked my way towards
a seminar on direct-to-client marketing. Then my uncle Jack and an informational interview on
personal wealth management. It felt like I was at a job fair. Here’s how the next forty minutes
went:
“How’s the writing?”
“What are you writing?”
“Damn, so you’re writing?”
“Let me read what you’ve written.”
“Like books? Scripts?”
“You gonna write about us?”
“You ever read that book that turned into a Tom Hanks movie?”
“Shit, you’re writing? I didn’t know you had all that going on in your head.”
“You could write a book and then get a movie deal for it, like that Tom Hanks movie. You
ever seen that?”
“You getting paid to write?”

24. King 24
“I read that one book where they find out Mary Magdalene was a whore. Christ, what’s it
called? It’s that one with Tom Hanks. You know what I’m talking about?”
Every question they gave me I could somehow segue into what they do for a living or
The Da Vinci Code, both of which gave us enough conversational grease for me to pretend to
listen and for them to walk away and say to someone on the drive home “You know, I had a great
conversation with Keith…” Until I got to Nana.
She was sitting on the sagging couch like it was a parlor chair in a tea room, with her
back impressively erect for a woman in her eighties. Her legs were always folded under her,
pointing in the same direction as the person she was talking to. I imagine she modeled herself
after Queen Elizabeth, with her scratchy skirt suits, and the same hummingbird brooch on her
shoulder. She watched and rewatched royal weddings like they were home videos. Every holiday
after dinner she would invite her daughters and their daughters into the living room for a viewing
with little tea cakes.
She didn’t laugh but was always polite, a slow blink and a nod when someone was
speaking to her. She hated Los Angeles and loved New York but was cautious of people who
moved to New York, and this is something she would never say but confirm with a slow blink
and a nod. She disliked that I lived in Los Angeles, something she would confirm with a slow
blink and a nod when I talked about it.
I hadn’t talked to her yet, I didn’t know how to approach it. She wouldn’t come up to me
in a boozy sway and ask “how the hell are ya?” It was like confirming a meeting time with an
executive or a priest- a parent or a relative would have to approach you first and ask, “Have you
spoken to Nana yet?” and if it was a “No” they would work you in after a cousin and before a
second-cousin.

25. King 25
My mom approached me while my cousin Peter was explaining how the belt system
worked in Jiu Jitsu and gave me her trademark pinch in the meat between my neck and my
shoulder, saving me from a choke-hold demonstration. “Have you talked to Nana, yet?”
“Yes”
She sharpened her eyes.
“No,” I amended.
The distance between Nana and I stretched as I walked towards her. She was talking to
my aunt Bella, and I waited at her shoulder, hands folded in front of me, same as when I was
five, ten, twenty. Finally she acknowledged my presence with a soft hand placement on mine. “I
need to ask you a question,” she said. I sat down next to her, my hands sweaty with anticipation.
“Why are you wearing a T-shirt?” For some reason I had thought I had on my dress shirt
when I walked through the door of the apartment, like a stress dream when someone asks why
you’re naked and you look down to find you have no pants on.
“Someone accidentally spilled a drink on my dress shirt Nana.” Her mouth tightened.
“I just don’t know why grown men can take one sip of a drink and undo a lifetime of
manners.”
“I don’t know either Nana.”
“Why do men think being a gentleman is conditional? It’s not a job you can clock in and
out of.”
“I agree.”
“Your grandfather was a gentleman.”
“I know he was Nana.”

26. King 26
“Thoroughly a gentleman, through and through. He never had a sip of alcohol in his life.
Not a drop.”
Our fridge was always stocked with non-alcoholic beers whenever he visited us. He
wouldn’t drink but accepted that the suggestion of alcohol or “having a drink,” was a necessary
social etiquette. He was so thoroughly polite that he would never let a drunk feel alienated at
dinner. If they were tasting beer, he would too. I did, however, find a stack of Penthouses in his
underwear drawer once when I was ten. I wonder if Nana knew about those. “I miss him,” I said.
“I have another question.” She swallowed with difficulty as she took both of my hands in
her’s.
“Yeah?”
“Yes,” she said, “I’m not your bunkmate.”
“Yes?” I corrected.
“Do you think Christina was getting comfortable with Donald?”
“Christina?” She pointed towards Don’s caretaker.
“She’s been crying like a widow.” I looked at Christina, with her black dress. Eyes red, a
box of tissues tucked under her massive wing. She was nodding with patient attention, listening
to one of my aunts. Her and Fred were the only two people I had seen cry that day.
“I think it may just be empathy.” My voice cracked on the last word, unsure if it came off
as sarcastic. Nana had a penchant for picking apart tones. She gave a slow blink and a nod.
“And Los Angeles?” She asked.
“Mhm,” I said, not knowing what she wanted out of me.
“Are you returning?”
“I’m not quite sure at the moment, I have a few things I need to figure out first.”

27. King 27
“What do you need to figure out?”
“Just a job situation, income, all of those things.”
“All of those things?”
“Yeah just, you know, finding a job and money and-”
“So, finding a job.” I nodded.
“And have you found any of interest?”
“Well, I-you know, I have writing-” She slowly shook her “No” as I said it.
“No, sweetheart.” I laughed, but knew it wasn’t a joke.
“Yeah, you’re probably right, I just-”
“No. It’s time.”
“Time?” She nodded and blinked.
“It’s time to get serious.” In high school when I talked about my writing she used to have
this excitement in her face. “A writer in the family,” she would say with a smile. But on this day
she said, “When you’re a kid, it’s, ‘What will you be?’ When you’re grown, it’s ‘What can you
be?’ It’s not your backyard you’re playing in anymore, Keith. It’s your parents’. Do you
understand what I’m saying?” I did even though I wished I didn’t. “Can you be a writer?”
I tried to say yes but remembered I was wearing a T-shirt two times my size at a
memorial service. I wished I had a drink to coat my shy vocal chords like honey and coax them
into honesty. She closed her eyes and slowly shook her head “No.”

28. King 28
Don’s Box
After hushed reminiscing and a mandatory catching up, an acknowledged austerness out
of respect for the word “death,” gave way to the clearance rack sale; an auction of sorts. Blazers,
ties, china, picture frames, all the little things were claimed by aunts, uncles, cousins and
nephews like a Sunday garage sale.
I had no interest in tweed blazers or penny loafers, even though my mom told me this
would be a good time to find a suit for interviewing. She said she didn’t care if people wore
flip-flops to the office in LA, no one would ever judge me for wearing a suit. But I’m not sure
how a job interviewer would react to me wearing a dead man’s slacks if they knew.
I pretended to flip through the blazers that were laid out on the living room couch.
Christina observed the whole scene from the couch, her hands wringing each other out in her lap.
She had a stack of dress shirts next to her. She noticed me and smiled, “Have you found anything
worth keeping?”
“I’m not sure yet,” I said, “It seems you have though.” She stared at me blankly for a
moment before she remembered the shirts at her side. She found her smile again.
“They’re for my brother.” She stroked the shirts with her fingertips and looked at them
like a coddled baby she didn’t want to wake. “He’s over at a home in Albany, touched on the
fontanel by the knowing hand of God, bless him.” She picked them up and placed them in her
lap, smoothing out nonexistent wrinkles. “They’re gonna release him into my custody in a few
weeks. Someone thought he was doing something only a less kind mind is able of.” Her face
soured. “He’s a big man and people see what they wanna see.”
“Well it’s good that you’ll be with him again.” She nodded and returned to smoothing the
shirts.

29. King 29
“Don tells me you like to write-” she said, but stopped herself, flashing a grimace like she
just had a back spasm. “-Told.” I stopped pretending to examine the blazer.
“Don told you that?”
“You sound surprised.” I laughed but held it when I noticed a confused blankness to her
expression.
“Well-I. We didn’t really talk much.” She held her smile with a strength to keep a
building moisture from leaving her eyes. Nothing puts me more at unease than the persistent
smile of a spiritual person.
“He had a lot to say. Maybe one day you can sit down with him and listen.” I nodded like
I understood and I moved on to the next pile. She returned to observing the scene, her smile
resilient and her eyes fatigued.
Peter approached me with passiveness about a beige overcoat I didn’t give a fuck about. I
told him it was all his and decided to go to Don’s empty bedroom, away from the negotiating.
The whole room smelled like a closet; stale, probably from the carpet and closed
windows. The bed was neatly made, and I wondered who thought of making it in his absence.
Probably Christina. The walls were undecorated, just the texture of the paint when close enough
to feel it. His bedside table was the only thing that suggested the room was once his. There was a
family photo from one of our summer reunions at my Nana’s house. Don wasn’t even in it, but it
was placed center-stage, the first thing that could be seen next to his bed.
The only other photo was of him as a young man in his army uniform, with a brimmed
hat balancing on his tiny head. It was two sizes two large I imagined, though I didn’t know how
the military dress code worked. The oversized officiality of his uniform only served to make him
look younger. My mom always told me Don was a late bloomer. Nana always said that old age

30. King 30
hadn’t made his speech slurred and slow, he had been that way since he was a kid. Nana said he
had a New York accent but I just heard groans when he talked. She insisted, however, that it
wasn’t his brain. Just his speech.
There was a box of tissues with the first one pulled neatly out of the plastic crease and a
bowl of cough drops next to it. and I found it odd that in his death the suggestion of bodily
functions was maintained. But I guess it gave the sense of life; of texture. This wasn’t a museum,
this was a bedroom. Maybe.
I went to his closet. The racks were empty except for the coat hangers and a few empty
suit bags. Everything else was being picked apart in the living room. It was his when it was
filled, now it was just measurements on a blueprint for landlords, inspectors and future renters.
I imagined he couldn't picture his life without his apartment of thirty years. If
demolished, his prior sense of self would be reduced to wood infrastructure, plaster and copper
piping. When the going out of business sale is over will Peter or Kevin’s sons or grandsons
remember that the tweed blazer they’re wearing to the school dance was Don’s? I still remember
when he crashed his car in my Nana’s driveway one Thanksgiving and we all held back laughter
as he scratched his head, confused, at his busted Buick being towed away. It was either
drunkenness or old age, probably both, but it was fucking funny then. I thought he needed a
theme song following him wherever he went. But now. I felt my stomach squeeze its juices like
the last bit of suds out of a dish towel. I felt my skin go cold and my hands get sweaty.
I closed the closet door and the living room was silenced. The feeling of closing the door
on a room full of people, and the sudden silence. There was no theme song in here. There was,
however, a box, on a plank above his coat hangers. I reached up and brought it down.

31. King 31
The box was unmarked but full of printer paper. Hundreds of them, full of words, top to
bottom. Each page was numbered, the last being 636. I flipped to the first page:
Memories of August
By Donald H. Fowler
The second page:
Poplar trees lined Alistair McHolden’s serpentine gravel
driveway like Rockettes at Radio City. They were planted the
previous summer by hired hands, migrant workers who had no
choice but to accept that life and work traveled together in a
caravan like the children, pots and pans they brought with them
across the border, from birth to death. He shuddered to think
that his fingers had no knowledge of the soil legally binded to
the name and body they were attached to
“Keith?” I heard a light rap of the knuckles on the closet door accompany my mom’s
voice. “Did you find an interview blazer?” I tucked the first twenty pages in the back of my
khakis and pulled down the blazer my dad lent me to cover their appearance. I shuffled the box
back into its place above the coat rack. “What’s going on in there?” She knocked again. I opened
the closet door, finding the distance between my mom’s face and mine closer than either of us
were prepared for.
“I was just looking around.” She stepped into the closet and gave it a once over.
“There’s nothing in here,” she said.

32. King 32
“I know.”
“Then what are you doing in here with the door closed?” Empty coat hangers were
leaving my brain dry of excuses.
“I just miss Don.” Her face scrunched with scrutiny. She leaned in closer to me.
“Let me smell your breath.”

33. King 33
Bullshit Motherfucking Fuckity Fucking Fuck
We stayed the night at a Holiday Inn. My mom and dad in one twin bed, my brother and I
in the other. They all fell asleep halfway through an episode of Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, and
I sat through two more before the mass and heat of my brother forced me to decide that I would
go sleepless. I took the pages I had from Don’s manuscript and went to the bathroom.
I sat on the toilet seat, turned on the fan out of a paranoia known by political dissidents
and horny little boys that the turning of pages might elicit a suspicious sound, and read them
under the insect-buzz of the strained light bulbs.
When I was done, I re-read them. Then, I stood up to get the feeling back in my ass, got a
drink of water, sat back down, and read them a third time.
The first read through brought about the physical symptoms of nostalgia- a tight throat,
moist eyes- and I felt myself shuddering with teary convulsions, yet smiling as Don described the
landscape surrounding a ranch in Texas, two locations I had never set foot or eyes on in my
twenty-seven years of existence. Somehow he made me feel like it was my core, like it was my
rosebud, the seed I had planted and forgotten. I cried for my lost youth running around on Texas
plains, chasing butterflies and chasing my father’s horses as they roamed the pastures. How had I
gotten so distant from my roots in the soil of West Texas?
On my second read through, I laughed uncontrollably. There was so much hidden humor
in the irony of Alistair’s situation as a patriarch still under the nose of his dead mother and the
way Don used the stables and the young ranch hand Miguel as a pinpoint satire of the political
climate in America’s west in the 1930’s. I never knew the death of the frontier and mining deed
disputes could be so goddamn funny.

34. King 34
On the third read through, I was pissed. Don never finished high school. He made his
earnings from VA disability checks for his shrapnel tattered left leg and bagging groceries at a
Safeway, and here was a box of written language, hundreds of pages of grammatically correct
English. Fuck. Don. How? How did this mumbling, bum-legged, grocery-bagging, high school
dropout, senile, Mr. Magoo fuckface pussyfuck yokel do this, all this in twenty pages? Who the
fuck was he? What did he do to achieve this kind of thought, this kind of resonance? The fuck
did he know about West Texas? Where was his BA in English with a specialization in creative
writing? Where was his checkmark on a senior capstone novella? He never had a class in
Dialogue and scene-setting. He never had to do exercises in describing childhood homes, or
describe an apple without ever saying the word apple. Where the fuck was my Alistair
McHolden? “Writer in the family?” Bullshit motherfucking fuckity fucking fuck!

35. King 35
It’s A Working Title
The next morning the entire extended family sat down for the Holiday Inn complimentary
continental breakfast. Shriveled breakfast sausages, flaccid bacon, stale pancakes and watery
eggs fought for real estate on their plates. I sat and stared at mine, a plastic fork at its side.
Travel plans and the previous afternoon’s mothballed-loot from Uncle Don’s apartment
were discussed between the smacks and churns of chewing mouths. Nana sat at the head of the
table, apart, but observant, watching everyone’s hands, elbows and shoulders, making sure no
one was clawing or leaning, or hunched, or shoveling, or forking with the left hand.
She settled on me but I was already watching her. Her hawk-like gaze softened into a
quick smile when made aware of my eyes. Her outfit hadn’t changed since she became a married
woman sixty years ago. Her insistence on manners, that look- those hadn’t changed either, and
they remained unbroken like the stream from a mall fountain through widowhood ten years ago.
I don’t think she had aged since my first memory of her.
What would she think if she read what I had read? She treated Don like Lennie from Of
Mice and Men, like a farmhand with a metal plate in his head; like a sixth toe. She was attentive
to him, but his ability to make her concerned was the only agency he held over her. He could get
her attention but her opinion of him couldn’t change. How could he not want it to? How could he
not want to rub it in her tight little fucking face? I used to tell my mom, “I don’t want to be the
Uncle Don of the family.” And she would laugh. It had been a long time since my family hadn’t
looked at me like inclement weather. “So Keith, Jeremy tells me you’re a writer?” It took me the
entirety of the prior day to realize the skinny blonde who spoke to me wasn’t the same skinny
blonde my cousin Jeremy had brought to Christmas that year. “You’ve got to tell me about what
you’ve been writing. I’ve got some friends in Los Angeles and I’d love to set you up with them

36. King 36
to have lunch or something.” My brother snorted. He was timing my meatball bites, laughing
before I could open my mouth.
“He doesn’t live in Los Angeles,” he said.
“So you’re breaking into the New York scene? That’s wonderful, such an artist-first kind
of environment. I have some friends in the theater I can set you up with too.”
My brother pushed his eggs around on his plate, a grinch-like, cheek pinching smile
growing on his face. “He doesn’t live in New York either.”
“Butt out,” my mom whispered in his ear. Jeremy cleared his throat and put his arm
around his date’s shoulder, as if she was committing a first visit faux-paus. You can tell when
someone knows something about you that you’ve never told them.
“I live at home,” I said, “In Jersey. For now.”
“A silent place to work on your writing? Very focused.” Jeremy tightened his grip around
her shoulder.
“You want some more coffee?” he said to her, hoping to shift gears. My brother looked
up from his plate at me. The blueprint of his smile fully realized.
“Tell her about what you’ve been writing Keith.”
“Butt out,” my mom whispered again, the spittle of restraint audible in her pronunciation.
“Keith says he’s a writer and she’s asking about his writing. I don’t see why he can’t tell
her a little bit about it-” My dad banged the table with his fists.
“Fuck off Daniel!” The Holliday Inn conference room went silent. He looked around and
gave the other guests a nod of apology. Jeremy’s date looked down at her oatmeal. The eyes of
the table settled on me again. “Right now, Keith is-” my dad lost his wording, and I couldn’t
watch him go through another explanation or another apology. I couldn’t watch him dance his

37. King 37
way around me. I couldn’t watch my mom explain why I couldn’t have a glass of New Year's
champagne with everyone. I couldn’t watch my brother smile while he sat on top of me, knowing
I didn’t have the strength to flip him over. I couldn’t watch the wrinkles of Nana’s mouth flex
and tighten when someone mentioned my name. I don’t know why Don never revealed his
secret, he wasn’t alive to explain it.
“-It’s okay dad,” I cut in, “I’ve actually been working on something.” I saw the restraint
in both my mom and dad’s faces drop without a secret they were in on. They surrendered and
looked to me for an answer with the rest of the eyes at the table. Nana’s mouth parted in
anticipation. Jeremy’s girlfriend looked at them looking at me not knowing what the fuck was
going on, and I could feel the smile from my brother’s face transfer to mine. I could feel my
cold, little heart growing by three sizes. “Memories of August,” I said, “It’s a working title.”

38. King 38
A Day in The Life of Don
When you think of celebrities that get a lot of pussy, you wouldn’t think about a writer.
Ball players fuck and writers are sweaty contorted little things who harbor sexual feelings for
mothers or sisters or aunts or cousins. The cool ones are lesbians and the brilliant, little heady
ones are virgins. But people forget Arthur Miller bagged Marilyn Monroe after Dimaggio.
It’s not about what you do, it’s about your name. It’s not about how good you are at the
thing you do, it’s about your brand. On average, ball players probably do fuck more than writers.
But what about a famous writer?
I sometimes can’t believe who I’ve done cocaine with, names that border closer to Tom
Hanks than Charlie Sheen. It’s unbelielavable how normal the life gets once you have it, how
fucking and cocaine and watching names you only read about in newspaper headlines fuck and
do cocaine in the same room as you becomes so normal- like getting lunch or a beer with your
friends. It all just becomes so normal. But then, sometimes, I feel my chest get tight like I have
bronchitis, and my air becomes thin like I just ran a 5k, and I’ll listen to my agent, publicist or
manager talk about how there is a thing they want me to do with another person and this person
is interested in me and what I have to offer and my vision becomes sparks or television static and
my ears ring and fingers tingle and I have to excuse myself to go sit and pant in a bathroom stall
on a toilet with a bidet and a seat heater. I then take 30 mg of oxycontin, go back in and tell them
I’ll think about it, and it’s off the table until I can find a hole to put my dick in.
Memories of August has sold just over 85 million copies in 22 months of circulation. It’s
number ten on the list of the highest selling books in history, right above Harry Potter and the
Chamber of Secrets. Subtracting the publishers cut, my agent’s cut and the United States
governments’ cut of the profits, I have made nearly $60 million from book sales alone. This

39. King 39
doesn’t account for speaking engagements (my price is $15,000 a speech, with travel and hotels
taken care of). I get paid to recycle old college lectures I have scribbled in notebooks and just
enough cocaine confidence to connect dots so fast, those in awe of my name have no choice but
to applaud.
Paramount and Warner Bros. are in a bidding war for the film rights to the novel, and
either one of them is buying me sushi for lunch nearly every day. They’ve both offered to have
me write the film treatment- to get my name in the credits and on a screen behind a presenter in
the Dolby Theater. One rep from Warner said to me last week, “Don, I’ll make you the next
Michael fucking Crichton.”
“I hate Jurassic Park,” I said. And I finished the drink he bought for me. I made him
stutter. I love Jurassic Park.
I bought my mom and dad a house in Woodland Hills with a heated pool that once
belonged to the seventh man on a mid-2010’s Lakers roster, just a fifteen minute drive and a
short security stop from my house in the Palisades. Mine used to be Josh Duhamel’s. I have them
over once a month for just a few sober hours. I thought they would never leave Jersey but I
bought them the home before they could turn it down. My mom was frustrated with the “gaudy
gesture” but she forgot all about it the moment she stepped through her new front door. My dad
was just happy he could wait out the rest of his life hitting golf balls by the beach rather than by
the Turnpike.
I haven’t talked to my brother since I moved out here. I offered him an apartment in
Hollywood, which he refused. I bought him plane tickets for a weekend visit but the driver I sent
waited for baggage claim to empty out before he gave me a phone call telling me no one came to
claim the name on his sign. My balls tingled with excitement when I got that call.

40. King 40
I get phone calls from relatives nearly every day, asking to come visit, to come speak at
events they’ve organized in their little nauseous towns, to ask if I can set up their kid or nephew
or godchild with an internship in a studio. I get phone calls for catch ups that end with stuttering
requests for loans. My balls tingle with excitement when I get these calls.
I’ve got four cars: one Porsche 911, a Mercedes Benz GLC 300, a ‘68 mustang like the
one from Bullitt, and a Cadillac XT6 Premium Luxury. I swiped a private trainer from Barry’s
Bootcamp and a chef that was on a season of Below Deck Mediterranean.
The image of this life used to seem so distant I wanted to kill myself just thinking about
it. Now, I’m sucking on it like a popsicle, tongue stained red and blue. I am best-selling author,
Donald Fowler.

41. King 41
That One Stupid Fucking Night Reprise
I was in my silk night robe, smoking a joint like Bette Davis with a cigarette when the
security intercom in my house crackled with an electro-cough. I heard the front gate guard,
Manny, over the speaker say, “Mr. Fowler? There’s someone here to see you.”
“Name?” The crackle held for a few seconds.
“A Ms. Klein.” Another crackle. “Laura Klein.”
By this time I’m sure there were more than a few Lauras I’d had sign the NDA my
lawyer drew up before I had my first late night show appearance. High and consistently
bordering on horny, I decided a blowjob might pair nicely with a glass of the 2003 Chateau
Lafitte I had cracked the seal on earlier in the day. Maybe pair those two with a foot soak in the
hottub. “Go ahead, Manny. Send her in.”
She didn’t look like the other Laura's I had in mind. She had frizzy hair and tired eyes,
and her combination of jeans, corduroy jacket tied around waist, and horn-rimmed tortoise shell
glasses made her seem like a sitcom lesbian moving into a new apartment. She stood outside the
door after I had opened it, hesitant about coming in.“Hi,” she said, holding her mouth the same
as her body, like more was to come but her mind had outpaced any further action.
“Laura?” I asked. Her eyes lit up as if I had taken a labored introduction out of her
jurisdiction.
“Yes. Laura.” She looked vaguely familiar. I thought maybe a second-cousin. She looked
more Jersey than Hollywood.
“Have we met before?” I asked. The relief in her eyes faded.
“Well-I. Yes, we have. You don’t remember, do you?” I no longer felt that mosquito bite
to appease socially, I hadn’t felt it in 22 months.

42. King 42
“Nope,” I affirmed with a slow shake of my head. She held her mouth again in
anticipation of an explanation, maybe one she had rehearsed with confidence but in that moment
reasoned her way out of. She fluttered her way into making a point.
“We met once. A while back and, well, we-um. We spent the night together-”
“-and I’m the father,” I said, unwilling to hear the rest. I’d heard it before. This wasn’t a
hottub-wine-blowjob combination kind of meeting.
“I’m sorry?” she took a step back.
“We fucked. You’re pregnant. You think it’s mine. Actually, you hope it’s mine and not
the dozen or so actor-barbacks you probably fucked in the same time period. So, unless you have
evidence beyond the fact that you want me to have been the sperm that cracked the egg-”
“I’m not pregnant,” she said. Maybe it was a hottub-wine-blowjob kind of night.
“Terrific. I have an NDA somewhere around here you can sign. And are you currently
wearing any panties?”
“No! I mean, yes, I’m wearing underwear but that’s not what I’m here for.”
“Then what is this?”
“I was pregnant. I now have a child. She just turned two last month.”
“Okay, again there is no way to prove-”
“-There were no barbacks.”
“Fine. Coworkers, Tinder dates, I don’t know who you fuck in your free time-”
“-I was a virgin!”
“I’m sorry?”
“You were the first person I ever had sex with, and two weeks after, I was pregnant. And
I now have the child I was pregnant with.”

43. King 43
I cut across the bar to throw up in the bathroom, the lights splitting my attention.
I began to close the door but she lightly resisted it.
“Your child.”
The bodies slow then fast, the faces sudden then gone.
“What do you want?”
“I don’t want anything.”
The floor cool and relieving for my fever cheeks.
“What the fuck do you want?”
“Nothing from you!”
I saw feet stomp and mouths spit and drinks spill and asses getting pinched.
“why are you here?”
“I had no idea who you were. At first you were someone my friends and I laughed
about-”
I had a clear drink resting between one of my hands and her hip.
“-And then you became the nameless guy who made me a single mother.”
“No.”
The drink moving with us and getting the back of her shirt and my hand wet.
“ I saw your picture everywhere-”
Your face is bleeding.
“-In bookstores, on TV, online. I looked at your photo trying to figure out the deja vu I
was feeling for so long.”
Yours too.

44. King 44
“And then a thought crossed my head, and I debated that thought and fought it and then I
accepted it and then I debated it again and it’s been a long two years but here I am and I want
nothing more than-”
I rubbed my cheek against hers, seeing my blood for the first time blue streaked across
her face reflecting the lights around us.
“- To let the father of my child know that-”
I left her bedroom without looking at the warm back I could feel pressed against my
bruised shoulder.
“-He’s a father.”
How do I leave?
“I don’t know who you fucked that night, but it wasn’t me. So go stand on someone else’s
doorstep.” I closed the door on her. A few moments later a neatly folded piece of lined notebook
paper crawled its ways under the door. 310-866-5789.
That one stupid fucking night.

45. King 45
Pig Fucker
“You been doing a lot of stickin’ huh?”
Uncle Don sat in a chair across from me, pug-faced, skin like hotel drapes, button down
shirt tucked into khakis so tight that the shape of his belly protruded below his belt line. They
said he once looked like Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, young enough to
be charmingly mischievous, right before the gut went and the hair thinned, but old enough to
elicit sketchiness. A felon, not a wayward. He was wearing the birthday hat my aunt had stitched
for him on his 80th:
Don Fowler
1932-2012
She meant to signify he had made it 80 years but it looked like an in memoriam; a
premonition. He made it eight more years but he still wore that hat like a headstone. “You been
stickin’ that stinkin’ dick in every hole from Sherman Oaks to Okinawa,” he said.
“I’ve never been to Okinawa Uncle Don. Or Sherman Oaks.”
“Would you fuck off? I’m trying to tell a joke here.” He spoke through a slick smile, just
like Jack Nicholson. He stepped out of the shadows and his wrinkles dissipated, his cheeks
tightened, his belly shrunk, his hair thickened and gained color. His button down shed into a tight
t-shirt with a pack of cigarettes tucked into its little sleeve. Very trailer park suave. Think Five
Easy Pieces. “Are you Jack Nicholson?” I asked.
“Are you Jack Nicholson?” He repeated, mimicking my voice in a way that made me
sound like, “a little bitch. That’s what you sound like.”
“I’m not a bitch,” I said.

46. King 46
He lit a cigarette with a match and put out the flame by whipping his hand with a swift
back and forth, the way they do it in the movies. I’ve always wanted to do it. But if I ever did it
at a party or in front of friends I’d look like a douche bag, not like a young Jack Nicholson.
He exhaled slowly and he squinted his eyes like he was a sexy little laborer laboring
away under the sexy little sun, like James Dean in East of Eden. Rub some grease on a pretty
little face and give them a cigarette. “Then what are you?” he said after the last tickle of smoke
had left his throat.
“I’m a-”
“-Pig fucker?” He finished.
“No.”
“Oh.” He laughed with embarrassment, the way someone would if they mispronounced a
word they already knew because they were reading it wrong. “My mistake, I thought you fucked
a pig.” He put the cigarette out on his tongue.
“Can you show me how to do that?” I asked.
“The fuck is there to teach? You just do it.”
“Can I have a cigarette?”
“Shoulda asked earlier. That was my last one.” The room started shaking. A quick shake,
then calm, a quick shake, then calm. My 2003 Chateau Lefitte made little waves, a little red sea,
with each pound. This is from a movie, isn’t it? “You better hide,” he said.
The shakes became more pronounced, more body-rattling and with each one my stomach
climbed to my chest. I didn’t have time to make it out of the room, so I made myself into a tight
ball of skin and robe, burying my face into black then closing my eyes and burying my eyes into
my eyelids: two layers of synched tight darkness. If I can’t see, I can’t be seen. There’s comfort

47. King 47
in this feeling. Like being too embarrassed to cry in a room full of people so you run away with
tears squeezing at the pores in your cheek bones, face hot with the build up, and then completely
melt in your mom’s arms. Complete release. Complete emptying. Leave me here. I am a child.
“No you’re not.”

48. King 48
Steve McQueen, Not Vivian Leigh
My agent gave me a call the next morning. The publishers were offering an advance on
two sequels, forming a trilogy for Memories of August. A dirt and dust Promethean story of
Modern America, the clay from which our skyscrapers and computers and soon to be launched
sex robots were and will be built. They were giving me complete creative control save for the
fact that they wanted me to work in more racial commentary, and they wanted a young, female
heroine, think Daenerys Targaryen, to take over the McHolden dynasty. But they didn’t want her
to fall into the trope of being too pure, they wanted a “female antihero,” they said. They wanted
her to transform into a vicious near-psychopathic matriarch, think Daniel Plaiview but female
and stately, but not without a sense of humor. A fun, quirky sensibility, think Harley Quinn.
I sat down at my computer to write, but the sun was reflecting off of my computer screen,
so I closed the blinds. On the way to closing the blinds I realized that I hadn’t brushed my teeth.
While brushing my teeth I wondered how long it had been since I flossed. I thought I had some
in an old dopp kit but the plastic tin was empty. I thought about sending my chef out for the floss
and some groceries but I figured it would be easier if I made the drive on my own.
I took the vinyl cover off of my Bullitt car and took off through the front gate. I realized
the breeze had a cool saltiness to it, and it made me think of the beach. I drove up to Malibu and
parked in an empty lot. I looked out at the water and something about the vastness of it made me
feel confined in my car. I felt further confined within the space of my car, locked somewhere
within myself, somewhere in my chest. My skin started to prickle with the desperation of sleep
paralysis and I started beating on my chest to see if it would release anything within myself. But
the beating wasn’t working and thinking about my inability to release tension made me feel more
tense, like someone was sitting behind me pulling on the seat belt strap. I unbuckled but it still

49. King 49
felt like the strap was fastening against my sternum. I focused on my breathing and then I
became conscious of my ability to control my breath and the physicality of breathing felt like a
lifelong affliction. My cheeks grew prickly then heavy and the corners of my mouth sagged with
their weight. And then I burst into tears, my inner temperature dribbling down my chin. I looked
in the rearview mirror and saw my twisted face and my red eyes and I wanted to pity that face
like I was watching the face of a little boy who had the books slapped out of his hands in a
school hallway. I wanted to see a single mother on a movie screen trying to make ends meet,
holding it together and staying strong but breaking down in a pivotal scene in a bathroom. But
my face kept interfering with these scenes and I felt nothing significant. Nothing about this felt
like a significant, pivotal scene; not the way I wanted.
I drove towards home, and stopped at a liquor store to pick up a cheap plastic handle of
whiskey. “Having yourself a day, huh?” said the cashier with a wink as his arthritic hands
dressed the bottle in a paper bag.
I got a quarter of the way through the bottle before I got back in the car. My chest
loosened and that little pilot light ignited behind my belly button. The paper bagged whiskey
paired well with the classic rock station, and Lynyrd Skynyrd made the pedal feel light below my
curled toes. I spit out the window even though I didn’t have to, it just made sense. I put my head
out the window and let the wind give me cottonmouth. I parched my lips with another swig of
whiskey and I felt like a swillin’ spittin’ dirt-dusted boot wearin’ fat-bottom-lipped son of a
bitch. But somewhere in imagination a thread of the now is guided by a needle, swimming up
like a little sperm and punctures an air hole, usually when an objectively innocent sight is given
your own color- that color blindness of the self.

50. King 50
I passed the last untouched mound of sand and found the first house in a row. I drove
under an overpass, and with it the butter melt of the late afternoon ocean snapped shut with a
spark like a hard backed textbook on a cold library desk and I felt a sick despair in my stomach.
The air grew colder and the street grew a shade deeper. Lynyrd Skynyrd suddenly felt like the
waiting room at a Pep Boys and styrofoam coffee and fluorescent lights and I felt like a pathetic
little horny thing. I rolled up the windows and stopped singing along.
Concrete and chainlink. Fast food and pharmacies. Linoleum tiles in cafeterias. Cracked
porches and overdue town holiday parade announcements.
I took another swig and I was no lighter; the rag grew waterlogged and heavy. If the car
stopped even momentarily at a red light the pit grew deeper. The movement of the car and its
treadmill windows kept me hanging just above the drop.
I got halfway through the bottle and numbed an already numb throat. I couldn’t think
about anything other than that deepening gravity in my stomach; the gray textures around me:
eternal twilight.
I cut someone off and they offered an obscene gesture in return and I drifted ahead and
kept drifting until my wheels struck the median giving the car and my body a jolt. I slammed on
the breaks and my seatbelt cut into my chest, my innards traveling forward into a wall of bones.
The ringing in my ears gave way to a symphony of honks from passing cars and I looked up to
find mute, angry mouths and middle fingers through the glass, like an aquarium tunnel. And for
the second time my cheeks grew heavy and I began to cry. “Un-fucking-believable.” A pair of
leather cowboy boots with a winding rattlesnake skin etching kicked themselves in leisure up on
the dash. “You’re really gonna cry in the car from Bullitt?” I laid my head on the dash and a
mucus strand shot from my nose and mouth in abrupt contraction.

51. King 51
“I’ve *sniffle* never *sniffle* even *sniffle* seen it,” and with that my body surrendered
to its teary convulsions.
“No shit,” he said, “Can you at least fucking pretend?” He shook his head and swiftly
uncovered the cigarette carton from his sleeve, pulling one out and lighting it with a car lighter I
didn’t know existed. “Show some restraint. You think I would ever dare to shed a tear in boots
like these?” He switched the cross of his legs so my attention would be drawn to them.
“You gonna drive Steve McQueen’s car you gotta drive like Steve McQueen. You gotta be Steve
McQueen. Not Vivian Leigh.” He took a long, body-limping drag on his cigarette. “Fuck,” he
exhaled, almost indistinguishable from the release of milky-yellow smoke.
“I’m not Steve McQueen,” I said into my hands.
“Say that again?”
“I said I’m not Steve McQueen.” He laughed, releasing the leftover smoke in tufts.
“Then who are you? A pussytwat fatfuck fuckface?” A distant wailing loop of sirens
announced the arrival of red, white and blue flashes in my rearview mirror.
The boots were gone, and so was the whiskey fog. My hand found the gearshift and my
toes curled to pins and needles against the bottom of my shoes, rubbing against the sole until
their little strands of muscle overpowered the slip of sweat. A single breath and the last moment
of ear whining silence cut to a growling engine. Before I could conjure an image of Steve
McQueen behind the wheel of a car, the gas pedal communicated with the engine and ripped me
onto the street.

52. King 52
310-866-5789.
I parked next to a wall of trash and recycling bins lining the sidewalk, guarding the one
story gray stucco house, the yard patchy and dotted with kicked up dirt from gopher holes. The
chainlink fence marking the boundary of LAX was visible from the street, and the occasional
crescendoing metallic yawn of passing airplanes interrupted any form of thought.
She had answered the phone without animosity, which cooled my nerves up until I turned
off the car engine. I hadn’t even thought about what I would say or what would come of this
visit. I drove those thoughts off with a wind whipped drive well above the speed limit and a radio
volume beyond discernible melody; eardrum rattling static. Now, I kicked around the gopher
dust, thinking of the right tone to use upon seeing her. I didn’t even think about seeing the kid
until I was a few patchy, potholed feet from the front porch. I heard the slide of a lock and the
released air of a door opening. “Keith?” All I could see was a silhouette occupying space within
the metal grating of the outer door: the thief barrier. “Keith?” She was waiting by the fridge with
a plastic cup in her hand. “You look pale, are you alright?”
“Is she here?”
“Who?”
“The-”
“Oh. No, she’s with my mom. I thought it’d be best if you and I talked it out first.” Her
absence put a drop of grease in my locked knees. “So, anything to drink?”
“What’s her name?” Laura smiled, her eyes inward. She was somewhere other than the
room.
“Julie.” Julie. It didn’t inspire anything new in me but a slight nausea. She came back
with two glasses of amber liquid in her hand. “Iced tea.”

53. King 53
“I’m fine.” She handed it to me anyway.
We sat down on the couch after she swiped a plastic set of keys and one of those animal
noise toys on the floor. I stroked the perspiring glass, watching the ice release little bubbles to the
surface. “I’m sorry,” I said.
Her voice softened. “Don’t be sorry.”
“I am for the way I talked to you when you came to my house the other night.”
She shook her head. “It was two years worth of information at once. It was a lot for me
too-”
“-And for leaving before you woke up.” She looked at her own glass. Her eyes were
somewhere else again.
“You can’t be sorry about that. I wasn’t really expecting anything else at the time.” I had
hoped there would be the whir of a fan or some kind of house hum or melody to cut the silence,
but only my ears and thoughts took precedence without a voice. Distant sounds of traffic put
pressure on me to speak, to interact. The way she forgave so easily made me feel nauseous again.
It made her seem girlish, and our act two years ago seemed almost pedophilic. I felt a wave of
guilt in that moment, like it was completely up to me to make sense of this whole thing.
“And now?” I said.
“Now?”
I took a sip of the iced tea to soothe an impending voice crack. “What are you expecting
now?” She watched my glass as I placed it on the table.
“I don’t know. To talk? I mean, I didn’t really have a plan other than, we should talk
about this. No?”
“I agree. but I don’t really know what to say other than sorry.”

54. King 54
“And I don’t really know what to say other than-” she laughed abruptly with a tone of
frustration when the next part didn’t come as naturally as the first, “-You’re a father.” This led us
to another impasse, but a distant honk beckoned me to break it.
“You should know that I wasn’t myself at the time,” I said. She nodded in thought.
“Who are you then?”
“Do you need to know?”
“Yeah,” she said, trailing off into uncertainty, with a hint of question mark. But then she
answered her own pseudo question. “I would like to know.” Suddenly I started giggling. It was
the kind of unexplainable giggles, borderline hiccups, that are one-sided, and further, internal and
unknowable to the one giggling. She did not join in my giggle fit. In fact, her mouth had a slight,
Mona Lisa frown to it.
“Are you the guy who asked me to sign an NDA the other night? And whether I was
wearing any panties?” My giggles subsided to heavy breathing.
“I-” The inescapable tickle in my chest turned to pressure. “No?” I said, but then it was
my turn to answer my own pseudo question. “No. But I’m not the guy who got you pregnant.”
Her Mona Lisa frown traveled up to her eyebrows, and her whole face sagged with the building
weight. The hush left her voice.
“But you are.”
“No, I know, but whatever made me do it that night was not-it wasn’t me.”
“Okay, but you did.”
“I’m not saying I didn’t, but I’m saying that-”
“-you regret it.”

55. King 55
“I-well, I mean, yes but it also wasn’t-” I used my hands to emphasize my frustration, but
she wasn’t going to answer for me. I tried again but ended up in the same place: “-It just wasn’t
me.”
“It wasn’t you?”
“That was a different person two years ago-”
“-You were a different person-”
“-I just-I can’t. I can’t be that person again-”
“-Well that’s true, because that person didn’t know he was a father-”
“-True, but that person also just wasn’t-” her eyes darkened with an eagerness, a forming
spittle spray in her mouth.
“-You?” I didn’t know what I was trying to say. I didn't know I was going to try and say it
when I got in the car and drove to her house. Something about the pressure in my chest was
pushing me to persist but I wasn’t sure what I was pushing towards. I shrugged and smiled,
hoping that she was picking up where my brain became a howling dust bowl wind.
“It wasn’t me.”
“You-” It was her turn to shake her hands and head with the frustration of not having the
words to express. “-loser. I don’t care, I shouldn’t care and honestly fuck you for making that
seem like some kind of excuse or-or way out. Fuck you. I wasn’t some guy you punched in the
face one night when you were drunk.”
“I know, I get that-”
“-No you don’t. I don’t care what kind of shit you had going on back then, I don’t care if
you’ve had some kind of life changing epiphany because my epiphany came ripping out of my
vagina directly because of you-” I tried to break her flow so I could get a second to think.

56. King 56
“I-”
“-You don’t get to be someone different now just because you regret it, you can’t just
leave it with your other shitty shit. I can’t-”
“-I’m just-”
“-I don’t care if you’re successful now, or what kind of Brokeback Mountain shit you’ve
written-”
“-I’m not-”
“-Be a fucking human and take some fucking responsibility-”
“-I-”
“-You what. Go ahead.” The dust picked up. I think the gophers found new holes in my
forehead.
“I’m sorry,” I said. And I opened the door and left as her voice blended with the yawn of
an overhead domestic flight, where someone had their shoes off and was eating peanuts out of a
napkin and drinking chardonnay out of a plastic cup, watching an episode of The Big Bang
Theory or The Middle. I never envied someone more.
I got in the car and as the crescendo of that Boeing yawn died down I heard the click of
metal on metal from the backseat. I felt a cold hard press into the nape of my head, right where
the spine met the skull. “Don’t scream. We won’t shoot you right now,” came from a woman’s
voice. “But I am gonna knock you the fuck out.”
I felt the pinch and pull of a needle on the left side of my neck.

57. King 57
What’s Your Name?
I came to a light. A white light that gave off a white heat. I wondered why I was so warm
and dense and internal and then I realized I was wrapped in plastic wrap. And the whole room,
when my eyes adjusted to the light, was covered in plastic wrap with blue painter’s tape keeping
it whole.
My fingertips and toes were pins and needles and memory and present and dream were
still being shuffled like Three-card Monte. I heard a voice as passive to my awareness as the
farthest reaches of the room beyond the ghastly fluorescent bruise in front of me. My sedated
comfortable grogginess faded to a focus that came with a headache. It smelled like a construction
site with all of the plastic and concrete coolness.
I heard boot soles pick up the plastic wrap and drop it with each step like fingers fiddling
with a Werther’s wrapper. The boots came from behind me, and when they passed by my side a
the figure of a large, broad-shouldered man placed itself in front of the industrial light at the
center of the room and suddenly the dimensions of the space materialized. The plastic obscured
the making of my surroundings, giving everything an opaque and dusty texture. The man wore
all black with black boots and a black ski mask, with white eyes, and black skin visible through
the mouth hole. He had a large black revolver, and it was held taut against his side like someone
who didn’t know what to do with their hands during a particularly anxious bout of small talk or
dancing.
He was looking beyond me like he was waiting for someone else. He made brief eye
contact but quickly looked away when he realized I was also looking. We made accidental eye
contact again and he gave me a nod, which it seems he regretted instantly afterwards because he

58. King 58
cleared his throat and crossed his arms as if the nod was part of this sequence and not in
recognition of my presence.
I was too dazed to fully appreciate a gun in a man’s hand. A trickle of piss warmed and
itched my leg in one irritating ravine through the hairs of my inner thigh and down my calf,
either a consequence of sleeping muscles or fear. I wasn’t sure.
Something about the way he waited, like he was staying after class to talk to a teacher,
looking at his feet and lightly swaying from side to side, made me comfortable enough to ask,
“What’s happening?” He looked around as if awaiting instruction on how to deal with this.
“Why is he talking?” The woman’s voice entered the room. The big man just kept his
hands folded tight. “Hit him,” she instructed. He raised the hand with the revolver towards me
but stopped to look at her again. “What are yuh doin’?” she said, “Hit him!”
He looked at me, eyes wild but not angry. More confused. And then he brought his hand
down and the ringing in my ears and the warm gush of blood down my eyebrows came before
the pain. Impact always shocks first then sinks in. The pain closed in on my head, impounded,
then, came out as a guttural, garbage disposal yodel from my throat. “Quiet! Yuh make another
sound without me askin’ and I’ll have him send yuh where the flames don’t have no ears to
listen!”
She walked the sticky plastic lap behind me and came into view next to the large man.
What she lacked for in his height she made up for in her width. She was also dressed in all black,
with a black ski mask, and had black skin where it showed. She leaned towards the large man
and said in a softer tone, “Don’t forget who has the gun in the room.” He looked at his feet in a
dog-like display of shame, a display only born of devotion, and he nodded. She brought the top
of his head down to her lips and kissed it.

59. King 59
Lovers or family, either way there was a closeness I found disturbing between these two
silhouettes. “Here you are,” she said, “Shakin’ like a beat dog,” with a spit. I felt the blood
trickle down to my mouth from a numb bengay-like spot on my forehead.
She paced an orbit only she could see, her hands uneasily tapping a beat on her
thigh.“I’m gonna ask you to speak. Do you understand?” The big guy watched her like a dog
watching its owner get dressed. She stopped in front of me and gripped my jaw, lifting it until my
eyes met her pupils. “Do yuh understand?” I could feel him take a step forward to punctuate her
statement. I nodded and spit the blood tickling my lips on to the wrap covering my lap. “Say it!”.
“I understand,” I said weakly, a hitch in my throat. She loosened my jaw and continued
her path uneasily, her steps more conscious than before.
“In the last two years I’ve seen your face on more television screens than a politician,
running your mouth about American dust this and mythology that and the motion of humanity
and industry and smog and sexual robots and other feverish nonsense. I’ve had to suffer through
watching you finger paint over a Matisse. I’ve watched you suck the fruits of another man’s
labor down to its seed. Such commitment playing in another man’s skin for that long. You must
be quite the actor-”
“-Who-?” The big man struck me again before I could fully comprehend what she was
saying. A small spray of blood landed on the floor beneath me and I was dazed enough to not be
able to understand that it came from my body. She cleared her throat.
“You speak outta turn again and he’ll rip your jaw clean from your body. He can. Now,
let’s have a little rehearsal.” She had a smile that fought her bubbling frustration. You can always
tell when a smile covers something: too large, too aggressive like it’s holding the face in place by
sheer force of muscle. “Tell me about your book,” she said behind this smile. Her shadow, cast

60. King 60
by the light, sucked my feet like a tar. A sludge, a mud bank drawing me into myself. Her
question hung with the fuzz of the light and the deep hum of cold air.
“I’ll ask yuh again an’ yuh better answer the question. Tell me about writing your novel.”
Her smile was twitching at the corners. I could tell my silence would soon break it. I couldn’t
remember how I usually answered this question. Maybe it was the lack of substance in my
system and the double daze of hangover and concussion. My head felt so heavy, it’s a miracle
I’ve been carrying it around for this long. “Okay, let’s start with this: What’s your name?” She
rounded my chair, touching the back of it lightly. “Alistair McHolden?” The name flushed my
body with weakness. “Who is he?” Maybe it was the fog of a cracked skull but I suddenly
recognized her frame on her second pass through. “Is he you?” And the vague Patois when
speech outpaces thought. “Is he your father?” That resilient smile. She came up and whispered in
my ear. “Is he your uncle?” I turned to face her. I held her eyes for a wordless moment. Her smile
faltered, my eyes beat, tired and free from shame remained unblinking. It made her pull back
ever so slightly.
“Christina,” I whistled through cracked lips.
“What did you say?”
“Christina.” I said.
“Quiet!”I repeated her name.
“Enough! You’re outta your mind”And I repeated it again. She shoved my chest and I
said it again. The big man hit me on the head and it took me a few seconds to get my bearings,
but I said it again. I repeated it, over and over, yelling, “Christina! Christina! Christina!” She
ripped the revolver out of the big man’s hands and aimed at me, the barrel close enough that I
could see the spiral, and it made me dizzy as it sucked my eyes down its path.

61. King 61
“Enough!” she said, “I know my name. I been knowing, I known it all my life! It’s you
who don’t know nothin’ about a name. Who are you? Donald?” Her hand began wavering and
she swiftly inhaled a drop of emotion. But her voice found it. “You’re no Donald. You know
nothin’ about Donald. All you ever knew about him you got snoopin’ through a dead man’s
closet. All the writing yuh ever done was done by snoopin’ through a dead man’s closet.” The
wavering traveled to her body and her breath grew thick and phlegmy.
“Christina,” I said. Her hand tightened around the revolver. “What do you know?”
“I know it all. I know what you got and I know how you got it. I know you got a bank
account with more numbers than I ever seen. I know yuh living on what belongs to us-”
“-Us?”
“What’s Don’s is mine. You stole from Don, you stole from me and you stole from my
brother. You haven’t earned a damned cent of what you got!” The brother started plugging his
ears and swaying, his sister’s volume layering confusion on an already indecipherable scene for
him. “You ripped the words outtofa dead man’s mouth like pulling teeth from a grave. You’re a
grave robber! You’re despicable! You’re low! You got no soul! You got no self! You got no
name!” The brother started moaning, either out of pure sensory overload or in an attempt to get
his sister’s attention. It didn’t. Her finger was getting tense around the trigger. “Who are you to
take to take to take! Who are you?” Her brother was now screaming and I was now accepting
certain death. I was calm, I guess. I wasn’t really thinking. I guess I was more calm than I ever
would have assumed I would be in a situation like this. When it’s there, there’s really not much.
Just confusion. In this moment, watching her brother, watching her and feeling blank in
anticipation I felt that life was just confusion. Just sensory overload, and any decision we make is
like grabbing for a branch while falling off a sheer rock face. It’s just there. But, there has been

62. King 62
and will be many times in my life where I’ve felt and feel like life is just__. “Who are you, huh?
Who are you? Who-” He charged. There was a deafening clap.
Saggy, pug-like, underbite, big Liz Taylor shades on, a ballcap and beer pouch of a belly
hanging over his belt. His mouth is open wide, tongue out in anticipation before he’s lifted the
meatball from his plate. The meatball never makes it. It’s constantly moving towards his mouth
but I look away and look back and I’m not sure where it was the last time I looked but it hasn’t
gotten there yet. After a while I sweat, I pound, I throw a plate. He doesn’t look at me. I want to
jump across the table and put my hands around his neck, but I can’t. There’s no forcefield, I just
can’t get myself out of the chair. I laugh at him but no one joins me. I look around. My brother
and my cousins are there. But they just mull on their food and watch their plates, leaning over to
one another and saying something quick I don’t understand, smiling and nodding. I look down
and a single meatball is on my plate. I think I’ve already picked it up, but I haven’t. I think it’s in
my mouth, but it’s still on my fork. Suddenly I feel a presence on my back, but no one is there.
It’s not hanging over me, it’s with me. It’s warm, I’m warm. “What a lovely dinner,” someone
says. The warmth coaxes me into a smile. I smile and nod. I look up and Uncle Don is chewing,
a gummy chew, with a smile on his face. A mother helps her daughter wipe her face. She looks
up and smiles at me. I’m full. I don’t feel like meatballs. I just watch everyone else eat, smile and
nod.
I woke up thinking I was still in Laura’s apartment. “You’re not dead,” she said, “that’s
not what I want.” The room came into focus. Christina was sitting with her back against the far
wall, unmasked. Her brother was laying down, asleep. A sudden awakeness opened my nostrils
and kicked my restrained legs as I remembered the revolver. I looked my body over, thrashing in
my plastic restraints. “It hit the far wall,” she said without looking up.

63. King 63
She traced circles in the plastic with her finger, smoothing old wrinkles and creating new
ones. “He used to read it to me every night,” she said, “We’d work through it chapter by chapter
and then we’d start up again right after finishing it. Sometimes on the same night. We memorized
it. He’d get going and not even look at the words.” She silently traced for a few breaths. “Good
memories are like a cigarette, an intoxication gone by the time the flame burns out-” I knew this
line. I had hated Uncle Don for this line. I loved this line. I finished it for her without memory.
“-Bad memories are like gray hairs, stuck to our heads and marking time.”
“He never spoke like that, you know.” she continued to trace. “It only came out of him
when he wrote, only through his fingers.”
“I’ve memorized it too,” I said. She nodded and held onto a private thought. “Your
brother?” I said motioning with my nose towards the mound on the floor, rising and falling with
the deep, consistent breaths of an unburdened mind. She nodded again. An exhaustion was
evident in her slumped posture. Whatever energy she came into this situation with, seemed
sapped from her entirely. The adrenaline and anticipation and excitement had worn off and here
she was with no one else in on her secret except for a mute wall of a reliant brother, and a
restrained, bleeding audience of one. Loneliness isn’t considered, it’s a feeling that rushes the
body like a sudden spell of dizziness. It arrives often without warning. “I’m sorry,” I said. She
nodded. “For your loss.”
Like loneliness, crying often comes without warning too. It began in her belly, a visible
shuddering. Then an outburst of sound she quickly restrained, but its desire to be released shook
her entire body before she let it out. An eruption. A loud, snotty eruption. Her brother woke up
and watched her. His breathing grew rapid and eventually he joined his sister: shuddering

64. King 64
violently, outbursts rising from the belly. His sound overcame hers and he fell to the floor. She
got up, still shivering, and crouched beside him.
She put his head in her lap and let him cry which lessened her need to do so. I wasn’t sure
where it came from, but in that moment, I felt an immense relief looking at them. We shared a
secret we didn’t know what to do with. There was nothing to hide from anyone in this room. She
lightly removed the revolver from his grip and placed it out of arm's reach from both of them.
She hugged him with both of her arms and he now had nothing to question in the placement of
his. He wrapped her tightly.
“I’m sorry,” she said in between her brother’s sobs and her own snotty inhales, “I was so
certain until I came here. I don’t know why I’m here anymore. I just-” her brother moaned and
rocked and crying came to her suddenly again. “-Forgive me. I hope He can forgive me. I hope
he can forgive me.”

65. King 65
George Clooney
Christina let me go without condition and begged me to turn her in to the police, she just
asked that I would leave her brother out of it. Instead, I invited them both to stay with me in my
home as long as they needed. We left the storage unit they had rented to hold me captive in and
we drove back up to the Palisades. They stayed for a week.
“I was angry because I loved him. I did it because I loved him. Because I love my
brother, more than I fear God. because love is in my nature” she told me one night, “But anger
isn’t.”
I told her, “I’m not sure what’s in my nature, but I’m starting to think writing isn’t.”
She said, “You haven’t even tried writing.”
I had her tell me about Don, all the things beyond the relative I smirked at from across a
dinner table. She told me his presence was one without anticipation or need. Despite his few
words, this could be felt. She said it could have been his age, but a patience like that doesn’t
come so suddenly. She told me how good of a lover he was despite his physical decline, because
his sexual prowess was a mental one, and I even sat through that portion as trying as it was.
He loved to read and write. He had written tens of thousands of pages and thousands of
stories throughout his life but he never liked to keep them. He enjoyed the act of writing, it
cleared his head, it said all the things he couldn’t. It was his private practice; his meditation.
When he was done, he would burn the pages along with all the thoughts and concerns he
had poured into them, only mentally retaining what he found to be inspired from his pure self.
Memories of August was the last piece he wrote, and not even his favorite, but it was her favorite.
He wrote it while she was taking care of him and she found much of herself and their time

66. King 66
together weaved into the pages. She made him keep it, and he adored her so much that he broke
his ritual. If he could burn his words he could burn a ritual.
He did not care to have his stories in bookstores, on TV, or reviewed by critics. They
were all his, and for a long time he thought no one else could share in what was his until she
came along. He loved his drinking buddies, he loved his drinking buddies and he loved to blend
in with the sights and sounds.
I released an official statement on my website and social media accounts announcing the
true identity of the man who wrote Memories of August. I lost all of my deals, my upcoming talk
show appearances and everything that involved my presence. The book stayed, the story was the
same, just with a recall and reprinting of all copies. My name became a headline everywhere, but
I kept it. I like my name, it feels not of this time.
I gave all the money I had made from the book to Christina through Donald’s estate, and
all future royalties were given to her the same way. He left everything he had to her in his will. I
offered her my Palisades home but she declined. She wanted to stay in Warsaw, New York.
I moved back in with my parents in the home I had bought for them, the only part of the
earnings I had kept, then checked into a rehab facility. They made me keep a journal there and it
became the one part of the day I looked forward to.
When I checked out, I searched for a job for a while. I worked at a pizza place, a Bevmo,
and an Enterprise rent-a-car, and then my cousin Peter helped me get a job as a junior copywriter
for an organic dog food brand. As soon as I could afford rent, I got an apartment in Mid City
with two other roommates I met on Craigslist. They are a lesbian couple and they cook me vegan
meals on the weekends.