Two Stories

By John F. Callahan

Two Stories written by John F. Callahan. In Florida & To Asmara.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 29, 2010
• ISBN: 9781304964892

Book preview

Two Stories

Two Stories

In Florida

To Asmara

Two Stories: In Florida & To Asmara

Copyright © 2010 by John F. Callahan

ISBN:

978-1-304-96489-2

All rights reserved. For private use only.

Not to be reproduced for profitable use or distribution. Do not publish or sell in any form, by itself or as part of another work, without express written permission.

Introduction

Here are two stories with autobiographical overtones. They describe something about what my life was like in another time. I wrote them in 1980 and 1981, for the most part. But I am just now getting around to putting them into permanent form. These things happen the way they happen, I suppose.

In Florida is pretty much a realistic look at the life and times of North Florida in the 1970s, with certain fictional embellishments. The legal case was a real case, and my strange adventures as a law firm investigator were real enough. However, the character in the story is modeled on my close college friend, John Dawson, who worked the same job before me – before he himself went on to law school. Dawson was a tall, angry, caring, good friend of mine, who is worthy of a sad, dramatic book all his own. He ate the barrel of his father’s WWII .45 automatic after many years of disappointment and alcohol.

To Asmara never really happened the way it is written here, although this story also has autobiographical features. Many of the scenes actually did happen, although I’ll leave it to the reader to speculate about which ones. Some of the action is set in Ethiopia, which was engaged in a bloody civil war at the time, resulting in the ultimate secession of Eritrea. Basically, the story is the result of my family’s Chicago-land legacy of corrupt political money and travel to exotic places – things I flirted with in my youth. As a result, I spent a lot of my young adulthood imagining what my peripatetic lifestyle must have looked like to outside observers. That imagining led to this story.

Both of these stories have been safely held, until now, in the possession of my good friend Kathleen Conway. We met at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, in 1980. Besides her penchant for collecting stories, Kathleen has many virtues that I recognized immediately, among them her Chicago Irish heritage. She moved permanently to Toronto as a young woman in order to escape some of the horrors of an earlier misguided American military adventure that was the keynote of our generation. By reasons of the heart too involved for this introduction, she kept the original copies of these two stories for nearly thirty years. Otherwise, they surely would have been lost.

John F. Callahan

September 2010

In Florida

Dawson watched himself sweat. He grasped the steering wheel with his left hand and his left elbow rested in the open window, and he watched his arm. He watched the sweat accumulate and he thought of the expression beads of sweat. What he thought about was that it is all wrong, something said by people who never sweat or never watched. Dawson watched the sweat ooze out of his arm like blood oozing from a skinned elbow.

The heat made John Dawson’s car stink, or rather it stank and the heat made it just that much more noticeable. He didn’t like to think about the old Volkswagen as his, didn’t like to identify that closely with it, although sometimes he would think about it falling apart at speed, killing everything in sight: Surely be mine then, he thought, be my fucking coffin. Dawson watched the sweat ooze from his arm onto the ugly light-blue paint at the window frame, noting the progress made by its biological etching process. He felt deeply disgusted.

The ‘Time and Temp’ sign on Silver Springs Boulevard read 93° F, then 34° C perhaps for Canadians. Dawson was now convinced that the stoplight that held him up was not going to change, ever! A man in an air-conditioned Buick sat next to Dawson at the light, comfortable in a suit and tie. Dawson hated him. Dawson wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his biceps and a tie pulled down to his sternum. (He had five white shirts and washed the sweat out of them every Sunday.) Dawson considered the possibility that he