Buddhist Catnaps and Broken-Down Hymns: Stories

By Tommy Housworth

The men and women who inhabit Tommy Housworths stories are all chasing down redemption. As in life, some of them find it while others tumble into karmic detours that lead to harrowing - and at times, darkly humorous - results.

An art critic becomes obsessed with an exhibit by a provocative performance artist. A man takes in the widow of a migrant worker after her husband is gunned down at the Texas border. A photographer faces a personal crossroads after being the sole witness to a suicide jump from the Golden Gate Bridge.

At once idyllic and satiric, Buddhist Catnaps & Broken-Down Hymns captures the miracles and malaise of life in 21st century America.

Soulful, honest, hilarious writing. Sean Daniels, Geva Theatre NYC

Piercing and unforgettable...with grit, grace, humor, and wisdom, these stories reveal us to ourselves again and again. Stacey Brown, poet, Cradle Song

These stories take you on a rush of a ride. Buckle up, put your bare feet on the dash and get ready to fly. Janece Shaffer, playwright, The Geller Girls

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491709474

Tommy Housworth

Tommy Housworth, the head writer for The Cooking Channel’s How to Live to 100, is the author of Welcome to Storyville (2005). He lives in Atlanta, where he is working on his next collection of stories.

Book preview

Contents

Chasing Cassiopeia

Watching TV

Joe Strummer’s Boots

Rough God Goes Riding

These Things Happen

Simpatico

Dry Lightning

Jigsaw Falling

Heat

The Grievous Angel and

His Ramshackle Cathedral

Night for Day

Ascension

I’m Your Man

In This House,

on This Morning

Prozac Kerouac

The Art of Almost

Sidewalk Bodhisattva

Deliver Me

Bury My Heart at Wal-Mart

Cutthroat Razor

Traveling Light

About the Author

For Jessica, Dot, and Vince.

Thank you for living your stories

with such immaculate grace.

A short story, because of its physiological and psychological effects on a human being, is more closely related to Buddhist styles of meditation than it is to any other form of narrative entertainment. What you have in this volume, then, and in every other collection of short stories, is a bunch of Buddhist catnaps.

—Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box

Time to take over the world, one story at a time.

—Vincenzo Tortorici

Chasing Cassiopeia

THE BUICK IS LONGER THAN a steamship and it cloaks the open road, tires over tar. It is a roiling fist, a ghost, a bullet out of this place and a thousand others like it. Places promising little, capable of nothing. Tonight, we are free of it. Tonight, you and I ride past the crooked pines and the boarded-up Citgo station on Acacia, the Flatiron, and every last marker of mediocrity to a place we’ve only read about, a place we didn’t believe could be touched.

A thrumming 364. Nailhead. Four-barrel Rochester. Tailfins slicing the fog. Twin turbine, deuce and a quarter. A phantom surveying the outer edges of paradise, Eden’s passing lane. Climbing out of the stale mire onto a ribbon of road curling past refineries, dunes and bogs and everything we were told we might regret. The tintinnabulation of the carillon wanes behind us and the hissing of the road becomes our sole hymn, an epic tone poem, and we follow its tantric Odyssean hum without question. Cassiopeia’s our map and the quarter moon our unfailing lighthouse.

It is here that we realize, perhaps fully for the first time, that we are alive. Alive and capable of nothing but goodness and madness, truth and trust. A trust in a sky ripped open like a canyon floor, pouring redemptive rain down on our windshield, the sound of it playing free jazz against the glass. A trust in flight and gravity and nuance and Bacchus and the sutras of the ages that have paved this route before us.

It’s summer. The air is thick. Your pale and naked feet hang out over the passenger mirror and your hair blows back in angelic tousled streams. Your parents are still young and so are their dreams. Elvis is thin and Robert Kennedy is alive and Brando still gives a damn. Camelot unfolds before us with an ending not yet written, not yet decided by lone gunmen and conspirators and Cuba and Nixon and your father’s curfew limits and your mother’s prudish insistences.

And we ride through Elysium without once putting on the brakes, just to see what happens when you exit the barricades on the other side. To see what happens when you don’t stop until the wheels fall off.

Watching TV

THE TELEVISION IS ON CNN and neither of us is paying attention. Nothing new. Around-the-clock news has rendered the once thriving body of journalism a corpse that just didn’t know it was dead yet, a zombie staggering to and fro between channels 34 and 39. But we’ve had that discussion before and were in lockstep agreement, so we don’t talk about it, just as we don’t talk about a thousand other things anymore.

You read your architectural magazine and I my Clemente biography. I am near the end of the book for a second time, and even though I know what is coming, I’m not in the right headspace to take it all in. A man who sees death’s insistence a thousand ways to Sunday, a guy who believes an airplane holds his final destiny, but climbs aboard a Managua disaster relief flight, a cargo plane no less, and goes down off Isla Verde. I know this story. I know how death haunted Roberto, how he lived with it always on the periphery, for what reason we’ll never know. Or maybe we do.

Anyway, I can’t keep going. I can’t read about his empty flight case being all that was found or his insistence that he travel with the fourth plane of supplies because the first three were diverted from the victims. And I can’t fathom one of his teammates skipping his funeral to dive deep into the black morgue of the Atlantic looking for his remains.

You seem to be spent as well, carrying your work home for weeks on end, even looking at trade magazines during what has been ordained as downtime. Kissing my forehead, you drag yourself into the bedroom.

Still, I sit, too immobilized by my own rusted spontaneity to find a foray into lovemaking or even seek out the bed to do something as sensible as getting a solid night’s sleep. Walking the dog? Too laborious. Too many steps.

A story comes on about the immolations in Tibet, young monks and nuns setting themselves alight in the streets of Sichuan to protest their oppression. Forty-four of them in the last two years. Maybe not an epidemic, but certainly it was trending.

The images you’re about to see are graphic in nature, and not intended for all audiences. I watch as some unkempt reporter on the streets of Ngaba, where fully half of the sacrifices have taken place, interviews a man older than the Himalayas. The man’s Tibetan is stated and measured, as subtitles fill the lower third of the screen. Something about the heel of China on their throats. I don’t grasp it all, too taken with the horrific footage intercut with his comments. A young girl, barely in her twenties, sitting in perfect repose, a flower in lotus. The flames begin at the outer edges of her robe and curl inward, engulfing her ribs and chest. The fire rushes up and consumes her motionless body. She is a burning death shroud. She is a beacon. Dying half a world away, dying on television.

The reporter says that often these suicides will run through the streets, screaming in agony, while citizens look for a way to extinguish the staggering burning ball before it becomes a blackened corpse. The Chinese police try to prevent the sacrifices, beating these Tibetans with long sticks, even shooting them in an attempt to deny them the privilege of dying on their own terms. But this girl is so still it’s as if she’d died before the match was ever lit, like she’d transcended and was merely waiting for the shell around her to melt away, the chrysalis of this world.

The story leads to some hollow closing comment from the anchor, a maddening cliché, and then to the campaign trail and a cornerback indicted for possession and the latest Apple gadget and why we won’t believe what Kim Kardashian said this time and so on into the night.

I sit and I wait for the story to cycle around again, and it does, like clockwork, same time next hour. And the next. And I watch it all. The ignition. The rising. The determination. I sit in wonder of a life forged in fire. The Clemente book weighs heavy in my hand, my finger a numbed bookmark flagging the page that takes him from diamond to embers. You lie a mere room away, asking if I am going to come to bed. But I don’t move. I just sit while the world burns away around me.

Joe Strummer’s Boots

I’VE UP AND JOINED THE circus. That’s all Harry could think sitting in the waiting room of the HMO practice his company selected for him. Third time this year, third emergence of some new pain or malady he couldn’t remedy on his own. Third time checking another box or two on the ceaseless medical forms.

Last year it was sleep apnea, requiring the nightly use of a CPAP mask, an intimidating, clumsy piece of equipment you’d imagine a mass murderer or sex pervert might choose to wear. It ran like a pipeline from his face through a ribbed tube to a box of reinforced plastic that sent bursts of moist air into his passageway, keeping him from choking on his own thickened throat every night. But most nights he took it off. It was suffocating. He’d take his chances.

Then there was the plantar-whatever that had him walking on the sides of his feet, totally altering his gait, tilting his equilibrium. I walk like Fred Sanford now, he told his wife. I walk like an old man.

More recently, it was early onset arthritis, which caused his hands to swell whenever he played golf too long, managed to get the weeder started or the hedges trimmed back. The most mundane of tasks now required near-herculean efforts. With all these frailties in need of attention, he dared not tip the financial scales by seeing what modern pharmaceuticals could do for his waning testosterone or fickle vision. Even Rogaine seemed like a luxury. There was a kid to put through college, after all, and priorities were priorities.

Still, as Harry looked around the room, he couldn’t help but wonder what would become of him—him and Gina, for that matter. She wasn’t getting any younger, and she was now talking about things they’d once made gentle fun of in their younger days: aquatic classes at the Wellness Center rather than morning runs, hot flashes instead of hot yoga. Life wasn’t about adrenaline. It was about pain management. God, what a phrase, he thought. It sounds like something out of an S&M movie.

The menagerie gathered in the waiting room looked like something out of M*A*S*H—no, not M*A*S*H, he thought—that new zombie show everyone was talking about. Everyone here moved like they were in slow motion, blank stares and head shakes at the news on the TV monitor, as if to say, It wasn’t like that in my day. And it wasn’t. Harry knew that, because their day brushed up close enough to his own for him to recognize it. That man over there with his jaw agape like a dumb chimp, the one who cupped his hand to his ear to hear what the receptionist was saying to him, he saw Vietnam unfold, but Harry saw it end. Harry watched Nixon resign, wrote a paper about it the next week. He could pick Begin and Sadat out of a photo of a dozen Egyptians and Israelites. Sure he could.

What got to Harry most was the music they played in the waiting room. When he was a kid, he remembered going to the dentist’s office and rolling his eyes at the tepid selection of lyric-free music they’d play. Mantovani, Ferrante & Teicher, Music Box Dancer. But now the music he’d longed for in that dental chair—Elton John, Paul Simon, the Eagles—was being served up to his generation in waiting rooms and it sounded somehow benign. For all its might and majesty in the days of his youth, his boyhood sound track was now piped-in Muzak for a new generation to hate, to rail against for its insipid lack of balls. Johnny Come Lately, there’s a not-so-new kid in town.

And it was true. He’d stopped going to concerts because he realized how pathetic men his age looked amid the sea of cocksure swagger populating shows by the Gaslight Anthem and the Dropkick Murphys. He justified this act of surrender by proclaiming that Green Day couldn’t carry Joe Strummer’s engineer boots, that today’s antiheroes were just preassembled posers. But secretly, he strained to embrace every muted strain of the Foo Fighters’ Wasting Light seeping from beneath his son’s bedroom door. But it was a strain. Everything was a strain. And Joe Strummer? He was dead.

How’d he let himself get like this, and why was he so accepting of it? Was he mistaking grace for acquiescence? Possibilities for inevitabilities? Why was he sitting here amongst these old men, these desperadoes waiting for a sad and final train? Just another $40 deductible in a slouching parade, waiting to have his prostate groped by a doctor who had to look at a chart to get his name right. It was only a matter of time before he ran through the short list of obvious jokes that made that somehow bearable. Using the whole fist, Doc? Buy me a drink first? Pathetic.

Why do we do this? Harry asked no one in particular, largely a query for the stars. But then he decided the question was worthy of another’s ears.

What are you in for? Harry said to a long-legged African American man, likely late sixties, gray, wizened.

The man turned to Harry. What’s that? He raised a cupped hand toward his ear.

Harry smirked. I said, why are you here… if you don’t mind my asking.

Heh. You don’t wanna know.

Sure I do. If you don’t mind telling me.

It’s… bleak, the man said, looking Harry square in the eye.

Cancer?

No. The man laughed. Lord, I wish it were.

Oh. Harry wasn’t sure what to do with that.

You really want to know?

Harry leaned in. The man moved over a seat, settling in directly across from Harry.
 It’s called FFI. Fatal familial insomnia.

What is that?

Just what it sounds like. Can’t sleep, and there’s no cure. It’s gonna kill me.

Lethal insomnia? That’s a little extreme, isn’t it?

It’s very rare. Caused by a mutated protein—only about a hundred people have gotten it so far. None of them survived. I’ve got a year or less.

So, you just… don’t sleep?

Not much. A couple hours here or there every few days.

Harry found himself strangely unguarded with this man. What about sleeping pills? Nyquil? Jesus, a glass or two of wine?

Nothing helps much. Sleeping pills actually make it worse. Your body fights harder against your brain and you just wear out, but can’t sleep. Plus, now I have to take meds to help keep the panic attacks under control.

Damn.

Hallucinations too.

What kind of hallucinations? Harry was enthralled now, a passenger on this man’s ship of agony.

Phobias mostly. Whatever is eating at me that day, whatever I saw on TV. A gunman, a fiddleback spider.

Does it all seem real?

It’s vivid. Petrifying. There’s a reason they used sleep dep in Guantánamo.

How do you… I mean, how can you function?

One minute at a time. I stand guard and keep the beasts at bay one blessed minute at a time. And each minute seems like an hour. I have no concept of time anymore. It’s all just one unforgiving requiem.

What happens from here? If you don’t mind my asking…

It is what it is. You not asking or you asking isn’t gonna change that. He took a breath as long and deep as Harry had ever seen a man take, the breath of a man going under, completely submerged. Swallowed up in the belly of a whale. From here, they tell me more panic attacks, weight loss, dementia, maybe going mute, and then totally unresponsive.

Sweet God.

Is He?

No, I mean… how awful.

Yep, no two ways about it, it’s fucked up. Anyway, if I’m lucky, this thing will have a little mercy on me and let me die right after I turn fifty.

You’re not even…

Fifty next month.

Wow. Harry flagged the man for closer to seventy, and he knew his response drew attention to his misperception. So he threw out the first thing he could think of. You should create a bucket list. Jump out of a plane or something.

A man having severe hallucinations shouldn’t jump out of a moving airplane.

Yeah. Harry paused a good long time. Maybe not.

The man mustered a small laugh. Harry realized the laugh was for his benefit.

So… Harry realized he had nothing more to say. An offer to help? How? Condolences seemed so hollow. He just looked at the man, a long, empathic look that settled Harry into his own pulsing blood. He felt synapses firing off, the apoptosis of cells, the increased vasodilation of the vessels in his cheeks and the ensuing blush. The man looked back at him with equal intensity, a knowing glare borne of despair or destiny, Harry couldn’t say which, but it was honest. Honest and real.

The receptionist called the man over to the window and he went without a word, as resigned to his fate as a soul could be. Harry watched him, then looked around, eyeing the men and women lining the beige walls like passengers on a long and wearying train ride. There was nothing more to be accomplished here today. No doctor was going to screen him; no intern was going to run down another tiresome checklist. Not today. Harry picked up his jacket and, teetering on his heels until he could strike a balance, he walked out the door.

He drove home. On the way, he stopped and got two nice cuts of Alaskan Chinook salmon from the farmers’ market. He also got a newly baked loaf of Italian bread and some fresh olive oil and the greenest asparagus. A bottle of Wild Horse Central Coast Viognier and a strand of snapdragons.

That afternoon, he told Gina he would prepare dinner and for her to enjoy a book or one of her reality shows. She did both as he took the time for a short walk in the waning sunshine and, using Gina’s yoga strap, some of the belt stretch exercises the podiatrist had shown him to help stave off the pain from his plantar fasciitis. He put on some of his son’s music, the Foo Fighters CD he’d wanted to give his attention to, and began to prepare the salmon for the grill. His son was at his girlfriend’s place and had a habit of strolling in well past dinner many nights—We’ll pick up something; we’re good, he’d assure his parents. It wasn’t Harry’s favorite thing to