POETRY

FICTION

Holly Valentine gave me a hand job in the back of the school bus when we were in eighth grade. That was the last time she would talk to me for nine years.

When I was sixteen I said good bye to my teachers and enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania. I am not really a savant, but I did begin the kindergarten at the age of four, and skipped to the tenth grade when I was fourteen. I was informed of this great honor the very same day Holly Valentine decided to give me a hand job.

The tenth grade is tough enough when you are sixteen, to say nothing of being only fourteen. I certainly don’t mean academically. After all, the Chinese surely would not have bridged every technological gap if their school children were on the same academic course ours followed. What I mean is that every one was bigger, taller, hairier and generally, more alpha male. Holly Valentine dated a senior because he displayed the signs of an alpha male much earlier then all of her peers, including yours truly.

Devorah needed the help of little blue pills to keep the chemicals inside her mind from bubbling over and turning her brain to mush.

"You know what I simply can’t stand," she said to me.

I was ignoring her. Not because I’m a terrible person, heartless and blind to the handicapped or those in need of extra love, but because she was my sister and siblings do that sort of thing.

"I can’t stand the mirrors here." We were at this trendy bar in Hoboken called Reflections. "I always feel like somebody is watching us. Like the government or something." This is why she takes little blue pills.

She was right though. People were watching us. But they were marketers and analysts from the Hoboken Trust Corporation. They built Reflections before trendy bars filled Hoboken with the hint of lust with a dab of sin. The Hoboken Trust Corporation owned seven bars with plans for half a dozen more. And so they watched us in the hopes of building a better mousetrap.

Devorah was the product of my father’s first marriage. I was a product of his second. If only he had been able to love as well as he programmed computers, I never would have been brought into this world.

"Jackson, is that really you?" Holly Valentine said to me nine years later.

"I don’t think I am anyone else," I said, "who are you?"

And she smiled and responded, "Holly Valentine, silly goose."

We were rocking and swaying on the New York City subway. I tried my best to avoid eye contact with the people on the subway, but who couldn’t stare at Holly Valentine’s?

"Its nice to see you again, Holly," I said, "What are you doing here?" It was meant to be condescending. I think she took it as endearing.

Holly Valentine was about to have an interview, to see if she deserved the sixty-five thousand dollars a year Gilbert and Pierce Consolidated Merchandise was willing to pay for a lawyer fresh from New Jersey’s finest state law school. As coincidence would have it, I had already saved Gilbert and Pierce three quarters of a million dollars through management restructuring. And before I was to lose them seventeen million dollars. So I was at the top of my game. It was a good day. I told Holly Valentine she could count on a job. I of course said this while recalling her skills on the back of the school bus in eighth grade.

Devorah was waiting in my office when I arrived that morning. She too worked for Gilbert and Pierce. After all, our father was Michael Pierce.

"What a pleasant surprise," I said to her, "Aren’t you suppose to be in London?"

Devorah, when she took her blue pills, was a sales representative for Europe. We had finally decided to break into the lucrative, if erratic British market.

"I’m leaving at three," she said.

"What do you want?" I asked.

"Can’t I just come by to say hello?"

"No."

"Anyway, what was that friend of yours in London, Drew somebody?"

"Drew Thompson?" I asked. Drew was an Englishman who had attended the University of Pennsylvania while I was there. I showed him how to meet American girls. He showed me how to drink and be sad, as all Englishman do.

"That’s his name! Do you think he’d like me?"

She was only seven years older than he was. Drew was accustomed women half her age. I said, "what would he ever want to do with you?"

"It’s the first time I’ll be in London, I hope to enjoy myself."

I believe my dear half sister on this occasion had taken an extra little blue pill, which leaves its users feeling overly ambitious: Devorah needed a good dicking.

Michael Pierce, father and employer, purchased for me a small yacht when I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Masters degree in economics. I named her Penelope-Anne, after the girl who was kind enough to grant me my first kiss at the age of seventeen.

Often on the weekend I sailed Penelope-Anne up into Long Island Sound. The world’s largest great white sharks have been caught in Long Island Sound. Often I would share this fact with guests I brought on board Penelope-Anne, in part I think, to frighten them.

Penelope-Anne married a Protestant from southern New Jersey and now works for the state commission that oversees the operation of casinos there.

Drew Thompson granted me a visit several months after the rendezvous I arranged for him and Devorah. He was in New York in hopes of selling crackers. I offered to take him out on Penelope-Anne.

"Jackson," he said, "I think I want to give it all up, and move to Shangri-La"

"Drew, you are too young to be having a mid-life crisis. And do you even know where Shangri-La is?"

"I think though it would be more fun to have one now, while I’m still young enough to enjoy it, then to wait until I am so old I couldn’t play with Polynesian girls. And no, I don’t know where it is, but a travel agent surely would."

I agreed because he was right.

"Holly Valentine," I said, stepping out of the elevator on the day I was to lose seventeen million dollars for Gilbert and Pierce Consolidated Merchandise, "What a pleasure to see you today."

Holly was looking beautiful and glamorous, something she had not looked on the subway four months earlier, and had not looked since that penultimate day of her life when she was crowned queen of the Long Valley Regional High School Prom.

"My divorce just went through," she said, "I’m a free woman again. This is the greatest day of my life." She had married Dwayne, that alpha male from Long Valley Regional who’s father also was an entrepreneur. He owned a used car lot. Unfortunately, Dwayne and his father liked to drink heavily before, during, and after closing hours. One night his father on the way home from the used car lot, was killed by a passing motorist—ironically he had been walking. In short, Dwayne was a dud. Just as I was about to prove about myself in an hour or so.

Then I went to my office and drank a coffee with cream and two sugars, went through my messages, and then approved the payroll slips for the week of October seven. Somewhere in accounting however, the computers had quietly moved the decimal point on every check. And I approved an extra seventeen million dollars for distribution between our hard working employees. I suppose this makes me a socialist.

No one would know that I had bankrupted Gilbert and Pierce Consolidated Merchandise for another six days. I didn’t even know. Drew had sent me a postcard from a Tokyo sushi bar. He said they gave hand jobs in the back for five dollars.

Devorah was now three months pregnant with Drew’s bastard child. She was also very batty since she could not take her blue pills, for fear of birth deformities. I visited her on the weekends, but never stayed long. Devorah lived in New Jersey. As much as she feared the city (after all, the F.B.I. was there watching her), I hated New Jersey.

Tuesday Morning I entered my office charmed to be drinking an imported coffee from a new café that had opened a block from the building. Holly Valentine was waiting for me. In the four months of her employment with us, she had gained two promotions. She was a bright one.

"Jackson, you should close the door," she said. She said it so sweetly I was afraid for a moment we were about to make love. We were not.

"What’s the matter, Ms. Valentine?" For what its worth, I was still a virgin at the age of twenty-four.

"Gilbert and Pierce Consolidated Merchandise is broke."

"How can that be?" I said, "I’ve saved us three quarters of a million dollars." Isn’t that an alpha-male trait?

"But we are missing seventeen million dollars."

I needn’t wait for my father to come to my office, or any of my other superiors, or even for Devorah to get over her fear of telephones and call me. I began packing my things just as soon as Holly showed to me the payroll receipt with my name attached to it.

I didn’t have many personal things on my desk, not even a picture of a sweet young girl who loved me. After all, none did. Everything else belonged to Gilbert and Pierce, and would be auctioned off in November. At least I had Penelope-Anne.

I slept on the boat that night in the little cabin. I didn’t want to take the calls of condolence from my former classmates and peers seeking to benefit somehow from my loss. The only people who really called were those looking to take my job, or those who’s disappoint existed only because they could gain something from knowing me.

Penelope-Anne glided through the waters of Long Island Sound with only a quiet nudging of waves against her hull. Maybe I wanted Jaws to come swooping up from beneath her and gobble me up.

On Wednesday morning when I was docking Penelope-Anne at Liberty State Park, the stock market was beginning to fall apart since Gilbert and Pierce had lost seventeen million dollars. It was this day too that my father, descendent of a bastard born to the former President of the United States, shot himself. He left behind a daughter with a chemical imbalance, a son not worth his economics degree, three ex-wives, and a lover by the name of Holly Valentine.

When I sold my apartment in New York to the Japanese, I moved in with my pregnant half sister on Prosper Street in Hoboken, New Jersey. The Japanese were buying everything, since the American dollar had lost its value following the Gilbert and Pierce Consolidated Merchandise payroll debacle. As it turned out, a lot of other companies had just as many foolish sons signing off on payroll receipts and ordering raw materials and shortchanging accounting books and general throwing the wrench into the gears of American Industry. Nepotism fell apart that day.

Drew was doing well in Tokyo because he had converted all of his dollars to Yen. So it goes.

When Gilbert and Pierce was auctioned off to the Japanese, I invited Holly Valentine to live with Devorah and I because they replaced her with a computer. Devorah was six months pregnant and very fat, and very crazy. She carried her possessions around in a shopping bag for fear the F.B.I. was waiting to take them. The butterflies, she said, would infiltrate her mind if she didn’t wear earplugs to bed. She refused to eat anything green, since after all green was the color of the butterfly home world.

Then Drew came back from Tokyo.

He was very surprised to see Devorah carrying his child. He was even more surprised when she accused him of being a double agent working for the butterfly overlord. Drew was right to take his mid life crisis when he did, since now he was a father.

I taught Holly how to sail Penelope-Anne. Penelope liked Holly very much, and always glided gracefully when Holly was at the helm. And Holly liked Penelope-Anne so much, Holly took my virginity in the depths of the cabin of my little ship. We drifted from one port to another until we found ourselves swimming with movies stars and ex-presidents.

I woke before Holly had on an August morning while docked at Nantucket. I watched her sleep for a few minutes but grew bored. In her dreams she was smiling. The night before she told me that my sperm met her egg at a karaoke bar in Bridgeport six weeks earlier.

I left the little boat and wandered around the village looking for coffee. The town was in a tizzy as tourists began packing to return to school and accounting and doctoring. I found a table at Buck’s Baghdad Bomber Café, and over coffee wondered if Holly’s little package would take after me and be a bogus alpha male, or take after Holly and distribute hand jobs in the eighth grade.

I explained this to Layla, the waitress, who at the age of forty-two had not yet experienced motherhood. She had brown curls and skin darkened by sun and salt water. She laughed at my innocence, and also when I told her she was very pretty. It was true.

I met Layla that evening and walked along the dunes and we made babies under the moon.

Holly Valentine was the primary conveyer of my genes. I told her about Layla some weeks after our third little blonde girl came rushing through the birth canal, though before I knew that Layla had created an heir for Penelope-Anne.

Holly tried to cry, and then she tried to yell, but she was more upset she hadn’t thought of it first. The three little blonde girls now live in Nebraska with their grandparents.

Holly Valentine practices international law for the United Nations, though is due to be replaced by a Japanese computer.

Devorah gave birth to a very healthy baby boy, who was not in the least bit like his mother. That is to say, he was very sane. He is now a Senator from New Jersey.

Drew died in a car crash on the New Jersey Turnpike. An eighteen-wheeler carrying imported English crackers cut him in half. I always warned him about the dangers of New Jersey.

Layla found me in San Francisco. I had sold Penelope-Anne, and Holly Valentine had stopped returning my calls, and the little blonde girls forgot who I was, and Devorah had run off to Mexico because the butterflies had finally found her out.

The curls still held their color, but Layla’s skin had returned to color of normal Anglican flesh.

"I’ve brought your son," she said. I was confused but accepted the gift.

James demonstrated many skills of the alpha male. As we sat together in LAX waiting for the plane to take him to the University of Pennsylvania, I told him the story of beautiful Holly Valentine. I think it was on that day he forgave me for missing the first eleven years.

Dear Eddie,

I heard you say some mean things about in class today. I heard you tell Rachel that I looked in my pants. And I was very at you so when I got home I sat down at the computer to write you a complaint. I wrote:

To Mr. Edward J. Browne,

Although you may not be aware of it, I heard you telling Rachel Johns that I appeared fat in my pants today in English class. I believe these words to have been very cruel and I think you should take them back. Anyway, the only reason that I may have appeared fat in my pants is because some of us can’t afford the tight pants that your stupid girlfriend wears…

But then I looked at what I had written and it just didn’t look right all typed up. And I didn’t want to waste my precious ink cartridges on you anyway. And I didn’t want you to think that I cared so much as to type something up all neat and organized and use up my time. So I got out my stationary and black pen to write you a letter which went like this:

To Edward,

I had no idea that you were such a lousy guy until I heard you tell Rachel that I looked fat in my pants today in class. I can’t believe you said that, it really ruined my day and made me hate you. I hope that your mom finds out how you go to Billy’s house after school and smoke cigarettes…

But then I didn’t want you to think that I cared what you thought about my pants. And I didn’t want to use my stationary on you. Besides, the note looked weird on that cloud and rainbow pattern. So I got out a piece of regular old notebook paper and I wrote you a note that said:

Eddie,

You are such a jerk, I hate you!

I wish we were never friends at all.

You should shut up!

But then I though about how I’d have to wait until tomorrow to give you the note. And then I’d probably have to pass it to suzy who sites between us to pass to you and I didn’t want to get in trouble with Miss. Crosby because of you. So I took my bike and I rode it to your house and I wrote the meanest things I could think of on your driveway. Then I was deciding if I should write who it was from because I wanted to know that it wasn’t just anybody who wrote it but I didn’t want your mom to see it and call my mom and tell her that I was a terrible kid and she shouldn’t let me go to the movies late at night with Sandy because that was what it was turning me into. But then you came out and saw me so I had to run away.

So anyway, I’m sorry I wrote FUCK YOU on your driveway. I didn’t know you were talking about Eliza who sits behind me, she does look fat in those pants.

—Jane

The road was nothing more than a winding red line on the crumpled, rain-stained, ripped bundle of what remained of our map of Ireland we’d been creasing, folding, and poring over for days, searching every trickle of a line for something that might give any indication of the ruined famine village we searched for—a woman shopkeeper in Clonakilty who swept her sidewalk in short bursts between watching the cars pass, filled with Americans, had said, "No mountains here, keep on north, or west even," and in Dummanway my father asked a man with a red handlebar mustache to repeat his directions six times before we could decipher the thickly accented explanation that "the Boggeragh Mountains are to the north east, and then you have the Derrynasaggart Mountains north west, and if you go straight west, there’s the Shehy Mountains, and then over on the Beara peninsula by Bantry an old man walking his shaggy wolfhound put on his reading glasses and showed us with his craggy knotted finger the road to Glengariff where "someone’ll tell you how to get through those mountains better’n me;" we might have passed Glengariff by the time we came to a sign that read paintings by Matthew Forde with an arrow pointing us up the driveway to the open back door where his wife beckoned us with her four-fingered hand—her pinky a tiny stub ending at the knuckle—and as we got out of the car said, "Matthew is painting, but I’d be happy to show you the studio," and we were lead through several rooms stacked floor to ceiling with Hudson River School style paintings (the sublime and terrible of the Irish countryside people by small human figures in the shadow of great mountains or drifting in boats on the vastness of the sea) before my mother asked her how to get to the valley of Cummingeara in the Caha Mountains, and she fetched Matthew, who sauntered out of the painting room with his polished brass walking stick dressed in a three-piece suit and bow-tie to show us the line, the dotted curving line that stretched halfway out of the Beara peninsula and then seemed to end nowhere, which is what it did do at the end—just peter out into the grassy field of white daisies, and we left our car beside the dying road where there was nothing more than a sunken, rusted car-frame and single yellow farmhouse emitting sweet-smelling peat smoke from its chimney; a rickety wooden set of stairs had been erected to serve as a bridge over the still, shallow stream we crossed before we began to climb the hill scattered bones of dead sheep that came to serve as markers for the path we took to the top of the hill from where we could see the valley below us and a stretch of slippery glass along its edge, but no famine village, yet we followed my mother along the flattened grass bounded by a stone wall that rose steadily from the ground until the lane was a few feet higher than the sloping valley edge; my mother saw the village then and we all followed my mother along the flattened grass bounded by a stone wall that rose steadily from the ground until the lane was a few feet higher than the sloping valley edge; my mother saw the village then and we all followed the direction of her finger to the very lowest part of the valley at what looked at first to be nothing more than clusters of large boulders that slowly revealed themselves to be dilapidated stone structures so aptly blended into the rocky landscape as to fool the untrained eye, and my brothers leaped over the stone wall and ran down the valley side until we reached a wide swiftly flowing river and followed it along to a narrow place where we could leap easily across and then over a wall that ringed the ten cottages—rectangular foundations were all that was left of some, others had door frames and windows still, their floors overgrown with hardy grass, and in the corner of one house where maybe a child had once slept, a bloodied sheep carcass, a wolf having chased him through the valley until cornered—tiny one-room houses at the very base of the silent bowl-shaped valley, the only sound the trickling of the stream’s source that spilled down the sheer bald rock face where it fed into the rvier we waded through on the way back, the mud of the banks sucking us ankle deep as if to keep us, a dense fog like an invention of Yeats driving us from the valley.