Student Showcase

Jacqueline Spinoza: Free Press Staff

I jabbed at the black rug with my broom, making a conscious effort to keep my mouth closed. Pummeling the pink and orange “D’s” in our entryway, I blinked furiously at the dust in my eyes, felt the inside of my nose stiffen at the gilding of filth. I thought of how after I swept I would have to go to the bathroom and blow my nose. I hated sweeping in between our doors, being isolated with the floating, gray remains of our customers.

When I was done in the bathroom I mopped, and returned to the counter where Dyan was cleaning. I had only worked one or two night shifts with her, but I liked her well enough, despite her explosive laughter and poor grammar. She was twenty-one; she had lupus.

We were extremely ahead of schedule and we did busy work for a bit, meandering about. I then had a customer, who was not impolite, yet somehow not entirely present.

He ordered a large coffee and a cup of water. “For my dog,” he explained. I looked outside and saw some strain of a Rottweiler, tied up, furtively glancing at those who passed him by. But he must have been a mutt, as his coat was oddly multi-colored and his disposition did not resemble that of a Rottweiler. I looked back at my customer. He was tan, leathery as though he spent a lot of time outdoors. The crown of his head was shiny and bare, yet his stringy white hair hung down to his shoulders. He wore a black t-shirt and worn black jeans. The t-shirt had a silk-screened scene of a desert, cacti, animal skull and all. On the tip of his nose were a pair of greasy spectacles; his eyes were almost a teal color. I could not read them.

Upon receiving his order, he paid and walked to the table in the far corner of the store. He put down a Dollar Store bag and delivered the water to his dog. As I watched him I recalled how hot it was outside and vaguely worried about the dog. When he came back inside he sat at his table and systematically unloaded the bag. My eyes darted towards the clock and I moved to clean the bottom oven, as everything else had been attended to.

Just as I was finishing up the oven, Verna charged in through the front door. Verna was one of my regulars, a long-winded deli worker with a tightly knit sweater of tattoos. Her tirade was as such:

“Hey, Alison, hey Dyan. Sir, is that your dog out there? Sir, it is too hot for that dog to be out there, I’m sorry. I’m sorry Alison, but I got a heart for dogs, he’s gotta come inside. He can be a service dog, alright Alison? I’m sorry; I’m gonna go grab him.”

Dyan, the dog owner and I watched as Verna brought the dog inside, who was friendly and surprisingly clean. The dog wagged his tail for a moment and promptly sat by his owner. Dyan had the presence of mind to give the mutt water and some meat, bacon and sausage. Verna babbled on to the owner, caressing the dog, begging to take him home with her. Her pleas were ignored. She then asked the name of our beast.

I directed my attention to the corner again.

“Top Dog,” the owner finally spoke.

“Top Dog! Top Dog! What a good boy, Top Dog, yes sir. I’m gonna have a cigarette and then bring you a treat. You wanna smoke, Dyan?”

Dyan raised her eyebrows at me to confirm and I waved her out the door. She looked as though she needed a break. Back problems, that was her other ailment.

The night’s work done, Verna, Dyan and the customers absent, I approached the odd pair. The dog rose when I stooped to pat him and shook his tail for a moment. He was fairly young.

I washed my hands after paying the dog some attention and gave him some more bacon. I sat across from the owner and observed what had been the contents of the Dollar Store bag. It was now a complex and precise collage, mounted by tape on a cardboard placemat adorned with images of Tinkerbelle. There were skulls and street lights with genitals in them, symbols of Satan and the Nazi party. There was color and symmetry and dark contention. I looked up and straight into his now bluish eyes, now mirroring my own. I did not need to provoke speech, as it came slow and coherently.

“Everyone in America believes a lie…almost everyone. There is no God, there is only government, and it is corrupt.”

He proceeded to tell me how and when the world would end, in 2012, he claimed. The world would flip upside down, buildings would tumble and create chaos, everything would collapse and we would all perish, in roughly two years, he said. I do not recall giving him a look of skepticism, so he must have foreseen it and had evidence at the ready. He drew a diagram on his receipt as he elaborated.

“You know the dial that tells direction in Faneuil Hall?”

I told him I did, speaking for the first time.

“Well the world has been rotating, tipping the wrong way since after it was built, see, and now, if you place a compass on it when the dial says north, the compass will read west. Eventually, the compass will be pointing south, and that will be the end. So I suggest that you dig a hole, fill it with mattresses and get inside, because no building will protect you when it happens. Everyone should be preparing, but only a few are.”

No frenzy or absent-mindedness could be detected in his voice or mannerisms, and had I too been destitute, maybe a little lonelier than I was, I would have suggested we dig the hole together.

He ended his quiet presentation by giving me the same receipt with several web addresses on it, my personal favorite being vaticansassassins.org. I took the slip and thanked him for his time. His head bowed over his work, Top Dog dozing under the table, I stood and returned to my post behind the counter.

About eight minutes has elapsed and Dyan re-entered the store with Verna in tow. In Verna’s hand was a translucent deli bag which revealed a thick hot dog. Top Dog quickly devoured it. Everyone soon left and we closed down the store.

I related the story to my mother later that night, and asked her opinion on the matter. Who was he? Was he simply senile? A genius? A drunk?

“Maybe he’s just a man with a dog.”

I knew not of a man, but I corrected her.

“It was a Top Dog.”

She did not question me, and I spent the remainder of the evening meditating on a trip to Boston sometime soon.

Jacqueline Spinoza: Free Press Staff

My most clear and insightful thoughts were done being thought by the time I was fourteen, when we moved to the beach house and inevitably to James Street. From ages nine to fourteen, years with no real identity, every meaningful thought I had was condensed into a three week period, a gradual turn of October to November, when careless coincidence had guaranteed me a place of absolute solitude. I learned later that adults called it meditation. But they preferred to do it in spandex with incense burning and a young person twisting their hips and readjusting their shoulders in various positions. But that happened to me frequently, finding out I had been doing things the wrong way for years and years. It did not bother me.   

             I was told by my mother that it was forsythia, but my grandmother and great aunts had called it witch hazel, which was a far better fit. It felt old, a little foreboding. The flowers looked like splayed banana peels, by no means pretty; slender branches brown like soil, like the underside of my hair. Not particularly sturdy, not particularly anything. Just a pedestrian plant to cover a more pedestrian, industrial eyesore. The eyesore was the heating unit outside my window, and it was engulfed by witch hazel, concealed from all angles. Had I not been poking around my building’s perimeter that day, parting and peering at every overgrown and undernourished piece of vegetation, I may never have realized the austere pedestal that sat waiting for a statue of equal caliber, something small and pensive and capable of feigning a stone consciousness.    

             Climbing up on top of the unit through the dense and angular thicket was frenzied and painful, as there was no real opening. But I never doubted that I should be there, which in itself was a foreign feeling, not having doubt about something, even something I made in my mind. There was enough space for me to lie in the fetal position or sit “like an Indian”, as they told us in preschool, with my head stooped low, eyes in a dull ache whenever I wanted to follow someone’s progress up the walkway. It was good for spying, but I did not care much for my neighbors or their affairs.  

            So there I sat, for three weeks, as much as possible, careful not to defile the fragile state of the yellow and brown canopy about me. For five years I did this. I thought what it meant to be a child, and an adult. A daughter. A friend. What people saw in Judy Blume. Why people named their children after cars. Why I wanted my eyes to be black. What it was to be dead. And alive. If only parts of you could be dead, and if someone could fix them again. How to hide anger. How to preserve a grim perch in a fraudulent forest for the rest of your life.   

             Until one day, and it always happened in one day, an equally careless gust of wind would strip the forest of its petals, leaving the branches to shudder in silence, the petals to rot in remorse on dry and unforgiving mulch. And the unit was exposed. On its own, no one would have noticed. I never did in all the winters I passed by before I made the discovery, when it was at the peak of its secrecy. But they would notice me without the yellow halo to overpower the fondant of my skin, lusterless eyes the color of the ocean in January, a mane of hair with blonde shocks left over from the summer exposure to salt and sun. It was probably the one time and place I could be noticed, which was terribly ironic, but I did not work myself up about it. I was far more sensible before I grew up. 

            I delved into books. Big books. Television. Crossword puzzles. Homework. Long, long showers that were so hot they would make me pass out upon hitting the cool plane of my sheets. Teasing my best friend. Biting things. Pulling things. Nails and hair. Not in anxiety or rage or insanity, but in waiting. A waiting neither patient nor restless, simply a lesser state of being. A time to hone my talents in smelling the seasons, waiting for the smell of Fall to blast my senses, tell me soon I would have a place to be, a sanctuary for my small and thoughtful person. Salvation for a statue on the brink of oblivion, without a pedestal to stand on.  

By: John A. Sugrue

When I look back I try to justify what he did. That maybe he had a reason for what he did to me. Never the less, it ended with pain. Even though that is not what gets to me. Seeing Mom's face hurts the most. I can still visualize her, full of intense fear when the door slammed as he charged in. Sometimes I could not see what was happening, but I can still hear the thumps and even though she never let out a sound, I can still hear her screams.

For the last eighteen years, I have hidden under my sheet. When I look back all I can see is violence and hatred. When I visit him, I pick up the phone shaking with a mix of utter fear and pure disgust. I ask him the same simple question that he never answers, “Why? Why did you do this to me? Why did you do this to Mom? At this point, I fight the urge to break the glass. “Look at me!” I would scream. “LOOK AT ME!” I imagine strangling him like the times he did to me before he was sentenced to his cage. His presence always had an effect on me; his eyes would hold me back. They reminded me of what he could and would do to me. His eyes trapped me in Hell. At the height of my emotional hurricane, he would always grin and say three words that drove me to insanity, “Cheer up bud.” His smile was an untainted reflection of the smile I saw on my seventh birthday eighteen years ago. That night marked the end of my life. On that night, I lost my soul and became just a copy of a person, a walking shell of a human being.

To Be Continued...