A Short and Essays

By Mike Frenz

Today we all have less time and smaller dollars. I have addressed this by writing seven good short stories so, Hitchcock, you can turn in your grave. I have renewed short story forms in this collection of works simply entitled A Short and Essays.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543472493

Book preview

Copyright © 2018 by Mike Frenz.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-5434-7250-9

                eBook          978-1-5434-7249-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 12/29/2017

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Are There Problems At Home?

Chapter 2: Survival

Chapter 3: Electrode

Chapter 4: Electron And Proton

Chapter 5: A Trinity Pivot

Chapter 6: Love And Cancer

Chapter 7: Processor 1

CHAPTER ONE

ARE THERE PROBLEMS AT HOME?

This is on a special location in upper middle-class America in the year 1970, with the academy looming over the author and a now faultless eldest sibling watching his sibling from private school 24/7 who has struggled for six years in a tough elementary school every semester with warning after warning for academic weakness and two now angry parents over the author’s lack of work and underachievement. As a six-year student in the school approaching high school or prep school at Andover or Exeter or Groton, my lack of interest in grades and school offended my stepfather and my mom’s family who were educated primarily at Harvard University in graduate school for education and law.

What they did not see was a dirty relationship at home during the withdrawal from Vietnam with two boys in a hot struggle for girls and an ashamed World War II veteran and war hero with the loss and money—being a predatory behavior by an eldest son who stopped learning at home for years by a cruel behavior that included theft of everything in the younger sibling’s room or makeshift world that was looted every school year to buy cigarettes. This harmed the Derby boy’s intellectual development—the theft of his favorite belongings by an intimately informed sibling who would steal any item that was precious to his sibling and an easy hit for the academy student in a second-floor dormitory. The academy sibling worked for a paper route for change(under a dollar a week). This went on for years, driving the sibling out of private school into a noncompetitive public system and an education that still flirted with minimum wage forty years later.

A double fault became a problem or dipsomania, and weekend alcohol abuse led to mental illness, drinking five days a week and to an inherited alcoholism (Wednesday through Sunday in college fraternities, creating two failures in the New Testament and art history—two courses that should have been easily passable). It also led to a diagnosis for mental illness followed up with a sixty-day paper in the state hospital. All these clues forced a proud family to start to change its behavior, moving slowly toward sobriety, a smokeless lifestyle with constant pressure from social services, a casual AA attendance by the private college admission, and a step toward narcotics by the young man halted by the state and Saint Luke’s Church in the South End of Stamford, Connecticut. I had the responsibility to buy food and get psychiatric care to eliminate the ability to buy drugs, along with a cigarette habit and a fierce tobacco addiction. I took every cent of the resident’s government benefit, which was liberal in amount and which had a retroactive pay out, giving the psych patient a little too much money. I used to buy cigarettes in the state hospital for two dollars each and instant coffee to try and offset the side effects of drugs from psychiatric medications. I had two big uncles—my psychiatrist and psychologist, Drs. Leo and Wright, at a community center in Springdale, Stamford, Connecticut, on Hope Street.

Ow, I quit snorting in 1986, only to be deeply hooked on cigarettes for thirty years of chain smoking that almost killed me at age fifty-two and saved by a famous hospital in Boston in the year 2013 on the evening of Christmas Day. A lifesaving operation stopped heavy blood clotting in my left lower leg, leading to my lungs, thus, causing brain hemorrhage and paralysis of my left leg, arm, and hand. Narrowly, it missed my heart, which needed a blood pressure drug to work right.

That’s right; I was lucky the stroke did not stop my heart and blind me, perhaps leaving me a vegetable with a pacemaker. I still work part time and have been disqualified from computer work that cost about two thousand hours to learn and is worth four dollars an hour, more than one-handed frustration. The local business would strike an unfair price for computer labor at the market bottom, paid at eight dollars for unskilled computer labor because they employed in-house training for 86 percent of the training or no job—with an overseer (the outright owner). The hiring and firing boss would calculate your work on a time percentage of hours, minutes, and seconds on the telephone that always showed an urgent red light for ten or more customers waiting for an agent. The demand for airline customer service was extreme and intense from 1995 to 1997 during the American travel invasion of GB, with an all-time low round-trip fare of slightly less than $320 a ticket for 45 forty-five-day advance purchases. Chances are, this business extreme will not happen again in my lifetime when mind lock occurs from a heavy burden of work at too low a wage to continue in the job past fifteen months when the authoritarian boss dismissed me in the month of March 1997. It created a hole in employment that would last twenty years until I wrote my first book in 2013 followed by a short story the next year or 2014. It nearly caused a second nervous breakdown when the net royalty was thirty dollars for three hundred fifty pages of work self-published in an autobiography and novel self-published by the author.

The biography was a good warm-up for the short story novel because the author had not worked for twenty-seven years when he published the last piece known as Operation Sickle. It started in his first year out of Fordham University and the navy in 1985 with a Brother Daisy Wheel electronic typewriter. It was up to page 20 out of about sixty when finished and a dismal failure in the reader’s market along with a three-hundred-fifty-page autobiography for a no-name writer in his birth name. The writing was no longer influenced by the big sibling because the two siblings did not live together, causing a rivalry between the two siblings stopping intellectual learning with an endless fights over valuables and money and the work that earned money with a hot eye on labor stress and pay rates.

Originally, the eldest sibling interfered with a two-year-younger student in private elementary school, ruining the sibling’s education over a six-year span, still making him a genius in the local public school in the top 5 percent of students that lasted for all four years in high school until the rout ended in 1979. He was a team captain and a national honors academic award winner at graduation. With the top dog in a different state in his father’s house, it resulted in success as an only son in Hingham, Massachusetts, until 1979 when the wheels fell off in 1980 and1981 at a prestigious private college a member of the richest fraternity in Hartford.

George Orwell would have laughed at how much the doctors know and can enforce in medicine and health who have locked me in hospitals for four years. It cost around a quarter of a million dollars and took five thousand dollars cash spent on my burial and a computer to pass years of time and engage my father’s retirement to get cable TV every month as a help in hospital living at over one hundred dollars a month. This was for the basic service and a need for hospital visits from friends and family, creating a burden among relatives and friends who were exposed to serious illness—that is, antisocial behavior—driving people who knew me out of my life with illness and fear from health dangers and social behavior, destroying my lifetime network of connections and associates as a health threat took command of my entire being called stroke along with pneumonia and diabetes plus hepatitis. This was all in one year after my marriage ended in divorce and the loss of my grandfather’s lifetime savings stripped from me by my spouse who had refused to pay the taxes, especially property obligations as a North Dakota tax collector’s daughter.

Who does not respect the local government’s business and demands for payments on what she really likes—real estate and vehicles in Fairfield County, Connecticut, that were heavily taxed to maintain roads and bridges, plus schools in the state and localities, although the taxes are heavy (in the thousands)?

Every year, payment was expected on a timely basis but not forever. It may be delinquent when the paycheck is consumed almost as fast as it is made by the employee with an endless list of bill collectors without giving and who just get angry about broken payment agreements and continued charges by the credit cardholder and debtor that is in arrears with energy suppliers that will not take anything but cash in distant payment locations. The customer attracts detectives from law enforcement