Black & White

  “Give me another loan.”

  “Not going to happen.”

  “I got almost two hundred thousand between my house and lot…”

  “And you’re a deadbeat.”

  Darrin blinked twice.

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “You think that because I owe you six gees, you can just take everything I’ve got?”

  Rich’s phone started to ring.

  “No, but how else was I supposed to get your attention?”

  “What’s wrong with you man? I’ve known you twenty years!”

  “Has it been that long?”

  “Yeah Rich. It’s been that long, but I guess that can’t even buy a phone call from you.”

  Rich lowered his voice half an octave.

  “Do you think I have time to deal with that crap? Look at my desk. And seriously, what’s with the suit and watch? You came here wearing my mortgage payment and now you want more? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with you?”

  “Come on man. We went to school together.”

  “Yeah, and now you live off loans to impress your teenage wife. I did you a favor.”

  “You’ve jacked me, asshole! Now I can’t get a loan anywhere.”

  “Exactly.”

  Darrin blinked twice again, mouth agape in disbelief.

  “You racist motherfucker.”

  He lunged across the desk, scattering paper out the window in a fan-blown breeze. Rich jumped sideways, narrowly evading Darrin’s huge, grasping fingers. As Rich opened the door into the reception area, Darrin kicked a hole in the wall.

  Rich slammed the door shut. He grabbed a chair and braced the top of its backrest beneath the doorknob. He looked through the window to see Darrin squatting on his desk.

  “Amy, call the cops. I’m going to lunch.”

  Light Assignment

  Kohno

  THE PROJECT for my high school photography class was called “Light Assignment.” In those days, you only used black and white film in school. So the assignment was tailored to the medium. And vice versa.

  But my only interest in photography class was the teacher. Her name was Peggy and she was young and pretty and she treated her students as if they were her friends.

  And she coached girl’s lacrosse. I got to know her when she asked me to be a cheerleader for the team. That particular cheerleading squad was designed to be unusual. It was an exclusive club. You had to be male. And you had to have long hair. Hence her invitation to me. It was one of the few groups that would ever have me, and I was glad to belong somewhere for once.

  Peggy had a kind of Irish look, fair-skinned and freckled, and she wore her light brown hair parted down the middle. She was thin and petite. Plus her small breasts were usually visible through her shirt as she never wore a bra. She had gone to a fancy all girls’ school near D.C. It had been run by Scarsdale diet doctor murderess Jean Harris.

  But Peggy didn’t seem like the preppy rich girl she’d been, and I was instantly interested in her. So I transferred into her photography class shortly after I joined the cheerleading squad and got the “Light Assignment.”

  In hindsight, it wasn’t a good idea to make friends with my 11th grade photography teacher. And I’ll bet if you asked Peggy she’d express some regrets about that year, too. She probably learned to have more boundaries with her students.

  The first bad thing to happen was that I thought our easygoing, casual relationship meant that I didn’t have to hand in any work, so I didn’t do anything about “Light Assignment.” I did volunteer to help Peggy’s mom with some fall leaf cleanup, though, and I brought my friend Tom along, too. In my teenage imagination I thought that endearing myself to her would let to her kissing me one day, or at least leaning over to let me look down her shirt at those nibblings.

  But on the way to her mom’s place, Tom and I smoked a joint laced with PCP. I’m not sure what Peggy and her mom thought of me that day. I probably didn’t make a great impression.

  I did go to Photo Club every Wednesday night, though. This delighted my parents. Finally, their little stoner was doing something more socially acceptable than passing out in some ragweed field after smoking or drinking too much.

  The club met in the photo lab, amid the enlargers and developing and fixer trays, in the basement under the auditorium stage. Most of the students in photo club were actually productive and were printing and developing the pictures they’d done for “Light Assignment.” But I was among the red-eyed who showed up late and took a lot of “breaks” outside.

  Of course kids should experiment with pot. It’s part of growing up. You’ve got to know what’s out there. But experimenting is one thing and what I did was something else. When I got stoned, which was all the time, I got really stoned, and when I got really stoned, I was stupid.

  One night a really pretty girl named Dawn invited me over to the stagecraft side of the basement because she said she wanted to talk to me. I agreed and flirted with her as much as I knew how, which wasn’t much. I am sure she wanted to kiss. But I was keeping my ear out to hear if the other red-eyes in Photo Club were heading out to smoke another joint. I don’t have to say the lesson in that, but I can’t resist stating the obvious here: My priorities were all wrong, all wrong, all wrong.

  Then a bunch of us from the lacrosse cheerleading squad helped Peggy and her husband move to Georgetown. It was hard work climbing the steps of one of those old town houses. But we were rewarded with an invitation to the faculty Christmas party she threw in her new place. When I saw that her bar had so many different types of liquor I decided I should try one of each. I am sure it was the rice wine that made me get sick on her front stoop.

  I was out there for a while, until some of my friends moved me to the side of the house so that people arriving late to the party wouldn’t have to see me barfing. We left early and I was still heaving. I vomited out the window on the drive home, but it didn’t clear the car. So the next day my buddy called all pissed off – his dad had seen that the puke stripped some of the paint off the door and the rear fender.

  The end of the semester was coming up and that meant “Light Assignment” was due soon. Peggy realized a bunch of us fuckups hadn’t even shot any film for it, though, and started ragging on us – even threatening to give us F’s. That was a violation of our unwritten contract as student-teacher friends, though. In my mind, she was supposed to cover for us even if we didn’t do any work. She hadn’t thought about the implications and consequences of getting so friendly with students who had no motivation to perform at even C level.

  She was coaching some students who had shown interest and initiative in photography, but she had never given me any direction for “Light Assignment.” Maybe she thought I didn’t need any because of my outrageous humor. Maybe she liked my guitar playing and she thought I was cute. But I didn’t even know what “Light Assignment” meant and I was too dense and too self-conscious to ask. I took a camera and got to work.

  I thought a good idea would be to take pictures of pictures. Again, I don’t need to state the obvious, but I will anyway: It was a high concept for a teenage pot smoker, but a stupid idea for anyone else. I took a camera and rolls and rolls of film home and shot pictures and pictures of my Beatles memorabilia. I went to Photo Club, processed the film and printed out the results.

  There was no real light in my pictures and no contrast. Most of the pictures of pictures were even overexposed and came out grayish. But because I was stoned and stupid, I was impressed with my work and proud of my effort, so I brought the pictures to Peggy hoping for her approval.

  She looked at me as if I were crazy and sort of laughed. She finally realized that I had no clue what “Light Assignment” was, so she explained to me that she wanted photos showing contrast between light and dark, photos that showed light and shadow in nature or in everyday objects. Not washed out pictures of pictures.

  So the next day I went out with more fil
m and shot some scenery. Winter was approaching and the days were getting short; the only good shot I got was of the bridge on Old Baltimore Road from the embankment on the side. It showed the shadow of the bridge in the creek below, it showed light coming through the broken concrete barrier and the reflection of the thick steel cables above. I got a passing grade, but after seeing what some of the more motivated kids did I regretted that I hadn’t put the time and energy into creating art for “Light Assignment” like they had.

  To my relief, though, Peggy still seemed to like me. And that was even after I drank too much before a lacrosse game and got the cheerleading squad kicked off the field for yelling obscene things at the girls on the other team.

  Finally, one of my antics did end our friendship. And could have even jeopardized her job. On a day Peggy was out sick, I pulled this prank that I had been planning for a while. The part about using the photo lab as my base of operations was a last minute thing, though, and I hadn’t thought about what kind of trouble I could be causing for her.

  It was the day after a fight broke out between some black kids and white kids at the school. People were even calling it a race riot. I brought in my old Kustom 200 guitar amp and a Shure microphone and hooked them up to the P.A. system through the wiring in the photo lab.

  I began to make announcements to the entire school. Timmy was with me because he’d given me the idea – he’d done it one day in shop class. I handed him the microphone to say a few words, and before I knew it he was disparaging blacks, even using the “N” word. I was horrified. So I cranked the amp up so loud it almost blew the speakers out, and grabbed the microphone back from Timmy. I disrupted the entire school for a total of an hour, singing “Don’t Bogart That Joint” and reciting free-association nonsense as the principal tried to shout me down. I finally got busted by the vice principal: She thought of checking all classrooms belonging to teachers were absent. I was suspended for two days. Peggy got into some trouble, too.

  I don’t remember if she ever told me how mad she was at me. It was the beginning of an ugly pattern, though. In the years that followed, again and again I’d fail to think about the consequences of my actions as I inflicted injuries on women in my relationships. And in each case, I’d be initially oblivious, only finding out much later how much hurt I’d caused.

  I saw Peggy again 20 years later – a chance encounter at an AA meeting. I was there to speak at the anniversary of a friend’s sobriety. He’s a carpenter, and he’d done some work at Peggy’s cabin because they had mutual friends, so she was there to show her support for him, too. Peggy came up to me and smiled. Was it some kind of knowing smile, with her signaling that she’d believed my adolescent dramas would either kill me or not? I’ll bet it was just a smile, though: Happy to see you again, kid, after all these years.

  If I could do adolescence over I would do it sober. I would still want to be friends with Peggy but I would do the light assignment in earnest. I would still try to look down Peggy’s shirt as often as I could, but I would also try to get her to teach me what she meant by “Light Assignment” so that I’d know it was about the contrast between light and dark, and the relationship between the subject and its shadow. I would take go back to photo lab on Wednesday nights and I would kiss Dawn in the darkroom.

  I would still take over the public address system but I would splice the wires so they wouldn’t know were I was broadcasting from, and wherever it was, it wouldn’t be from Peggy’s classroom. I would still try to piss off the vice principal. After all, I’d need some stimulation, because all my other friends would be off smoking dope and drinking.

  The End of the Age of Cannibalism

  Joeebbe

  IN A DARK CORNER of Africa, I happened upon a tribe of cannibals. Thanks to my knowledge of the region’s dialects, I’d been able understand when I overheard talk of some of their rituals. Whatever outlander they happened upon – friendly or evil, man or woman – they ate. After the feast, of which every tribesperson was obligated to partake, they fasted. They deprived themselves of all food and all water, until they were beset by visions from another world. Sometimes this took two to three days. Once these visions began occurring, they knew that the spirit of the consumed being was escaping their bodies into the sky, and only then could they go back to village life as usual. This was the way to excise intruders, who were thought to bring corruption to the village.

  I crawled through the most heavily thicketed and hidden areas back toward my tent, slowly as to not make a sound. At night, I heard queer screams and percussions from the cannibal village. It was the glug of my canteen – a foreign sound to them – that must have alerted two hunters of my presence. They quickly apprehended me with tools woven from acacia.

  They demanded to know where I came from and what had caused my strange pale skin.

  “I was once like you, robustly dark. I was born in a nearby village, you know Glaxon? I fought with my father. He demanded that I leave our community. Even though in the outside world, people think it queer and evil to eat human flesh, I could not change my ways. I would wait by the sides of trails and pounce on men. I would sear their flesh and eat them as they still breathed. A cannibal is always that way and cannot change.

  “As I waited on a quiet trail I saw a strange pale man, dressed thoroughly and walking alone. His body was thick and powerful like a wildebeest’s. He heaved and tossed me off of him although I had already wounded him badly. He breathed heavily and yelled in a nasally language. I lugged him to my fire and began cutting off his flesh. He screamed, tied up as he was. But before I ate the first bite, he began speaking in words I could understand. ‘I am plague,’ he said, ‘you eat me, you become white.’ I ate him anyway, and as you can see, I did become white.”

  One tribesman laughed loud, from his stomach. The other breathed deeply and examined me. Tied up as I was, he approached me and rubbed my skin, pinching my flank. He then rubbed those fingers together and held them to his nostrils, again breathing deeply.

  “I will not eat him, then.”

  The other one, still amused, said, “We have to. It is custom.”

  “If we leave him here, no one will know about him and no one will eat him.”

  “We cannot allow an intruder to walk on our sacred land and walk out. I cannot lie to my cousins, either.”

  “Do you want your cousins to turn this color? Like him?”

  “He’s lying.”

  “How else do you explain this skin?”

  “He is like the mongoose with the brown tip. It is rare, but it happens.”

  “True.”

  “The elder can decide better than we. Our duty is only to bring him, not to decide.”

  “Once we bring him to the center of the circle there’s no way to pretend he never came.”

  They grabbed me by hands and feet and carried me at a trot. The elder was small and wiry with a body that contorted like an accordion. He danced to accept an outsider into the circle. At the beginning, only half of the tribal instruments were being played. The elder’s feet moved as deftly as a man’s hands, while his arms supported his weight as firmly as his legs. Only once, turning his head, did he glance at me. His eyes were hot and frightening.

  The two hunters carried me into the circle.

  “You ate the plagued man,” he said. “And how long did it take for you to lose your color?”

  “I felt a burning in my stomach which spread out into my groin and then my limbs, lastly my head. Within nine breaths I held my hand up to my eyes and saw it was white.”

  The elder crouched down in thought. The percussion from the gallery of villagers slowed. He rocked back and forth on his haunches and finally pronounced his decision:

  “I, but only I, eat you. We will keep you breathing. If I turn white, I will finish your whole body alone. If I don’t turn white, we will know you are lying and we will all eat you.”

  A stringed instrument, high and caustic in sound, began its piercing melody. They
untied my binds and began affixing the ceremonial ones, hot embers were pushed under my feet until I could find no cool place among them, and I began to smell burning flesh.

  “I hope you are lying.”

  “He’s lying. He’s from outside. They have strange people like him … You should have stayed where you came from.”

  “What will happen if the elder turns white?”

  “Nothing. We will laugh at him.”

  At that, they threw the dry brush on the embers and left me there in the growing heat. The elder approached me as my calves, thighs and flanks began to singe.

  “You are not white down here anymore,” he said mirthlessly.

  “I am plague,” I said. “You eat me, you become white. You’ll feel me in your stomach spreading outwards like a spider web of splinters. A hot raging bile will rise – ”

  “I don’t care. You think I don’t know where you come from. I know. Stop struggling and lying. You will pass through our bodies and into the sky.”

  All dulled. So it was my destiny to die this way, to go out the same way I came in.

  “What if,” a voice came out of the circle, “the elder resists the plague because he is strong, but we all are too weak?”

  Negative Time

  Sheisty

  I

  WHEN SAMUEL WENTWORTH heard that Arnold Rump had been nominated, along with himself, for the Academy Award, he put down his morning coffee, looked out the window at the long stretch of buildings beneath his Manhattan penthouse, and wondered if his whole life had been a series of mistakes.

  Wentworth was a well-respected Documentarian. For the last 15 years he’d been arguably the best living Documentarian alive. He’d already won three Academy Awards for his work, revolutionized the art with his neoclassical decadence, and worked from the same basic premise for the last thirty three years: Documentary was simply a high art form of propaganda. And the further he’d taken this premise toward its logical extremes, the more successful his work had become. But this morning, over coffee, a newspaper, and a fine cigar, all of that was about to be challenged by Arnold Rump.