ARTSHOP MAGAZINE
July 2006

Words:Unbound

One hundred stories on one hundred cards, this shuffle-able montage of the author's life. Here are four plates, in no particular order.

I.
I was about ten years old. One Saturday my mom and dad had a fight, which happened occasionally. But this time it was a really bad one. My brother and I stood in the other room, listening but not really involved with what was going on. The fight ended when my dad said that he was getting away for a while and walked out the front door. We saw him drive away in the car. We didn’t know where he was going.

My mom turned to us and sighed. She realized that we were old enough to know what had happened and that we didn’t need any explanation. We followed her into the kitchen. She announced that she was going to make apple fritters and she asked us if we wanted to help. So we did. As we mixed up the recipe and deep fried them in Crisco and ate them, we all started feeling better. We ended up making and eating a full batch. But we didn’t feel sick. We just felt better.

II.
At the beginning of the summer, Jack announced to me that he wanted it to consist of mainly three things: yoga in the morning, art during the day, and sex at night.

III.
It was the first summer that Intelligentsia, the coffeehouse, had been open. Christa was working behind the counter one afternoon with Doug and Emily, the owners. They had a window open because it was blazing hot that day. Christa was aware of a small swarm of wasps that was hovering outside near the window under one of the eaves. She was allergic to bee stings. She told Doug and Emily that they ought to close the window, but they shrugged it off and kept working.

Eventually, one of the wasps drifted in through the window and was flying around the store. Before she knew it, the wasp was hovering near Christa and she started panicking. The wasp must have been clued in on this. She was wearing very baggy khakis that day, and the wasp somehow managed to fly up one of her pant legs. It stung her on the leg. She started dancing around and howling. But wasps, unlike bees, can sting more than once. And being trapped in her pants, and angry, it kept stinging her again and again. Doug and Emily were trying to figure out what was going on and Christa was screaming and trying to take off her pants and the customers were all bewildered.

Finally she got her pants off and the wasp was either squashed or flew away. Her leg had swollen up like a baseball bat on steroids and she was about to faint. Emily led her to the storeroom in the back where all the sacks of coffee beans were lying on pallets and Christa collapsed on one of them. Doug, presumably, was on the phone to the hospital, or bringing around the car in order to make a trip to the hospital.

They didn’t even have a first aid kit at the store, not even any aspirin. So Emily dashed across the street to a liquor store and got a pint of Jim Beam. She gave it to Christa, who downed most of it very quickly. She stopped complaining about the pain and passed out.

IV.
I chatted online pretty frequently with this young guy who lived in New York whose name was TJ. At the time when we were first chatting, I was still living at home with my parents in Colorado. Even when I moved to Chicago we kept chatting whenever we saw each other online. TJ was finishing up his degree at college and his major was game shows. In fact he had written his thesis about them. He focused specifically on The Price Is Right, his favorite.

Finally, he graduated and decided to actually move out to LA to try and get into the game show world. I lost touch with him for a month or two. Then one day I ran into him online again. He told me that his move to LA had been quite successful. He had a good job waiting tables, and was settling in nicely.

He said that when he first got to LA, some of his friends out there had surprised him by getting him tickets to a taping of The Price Is Right. It was like a dream come true, being there in person. More incredibly, though, he had been chosen as a contestant. I asked for the rest of the details, but TJ refused to tell me anymore. Instead, he give me the date and time when his episode aired and said that I would need to tune in if I wanted to know the rest.

I had to work the morning the show as on the air, so I set up my VCR to tape it. That night when I got home, I watched it. I had to fast-forward past a lot of commercials and other contestants, but finally, there he was. Roddy called his name, and he leapt through the audience to take his place at the edge of the stage. A product was shown, everyone guessed its price, and it was TJ who bid the closest. He jumped up onstage with Bob Barker, hugged him, and then told him that The Price Is Right was his favorite game show. He told Bob how he had just graduated from college and moved out to LA to get into game shows. And then, right there onstage, he handed Bob Barker a copy of his thesis. Bob flipped through it, somewhat dazed, and then he showed it to Janice.

TJ won his individual pricing game, won the Showcase Showdown, and even won the Showcase. The grand prize, which included a car! It was hard to believe that this had actually happened to someone like TJ. Awhile later, I saw him online and told him how incredible it all was. He told me how unreal it felt. Until he had found a job, he had actually been living off his winnings, selling off parts of the Showcase whenever he needed cash. And the car that he’d won had come in handy too, living in LA and everything.

The two of us tried keeping in touch, but chatted less and less frequently. Later, I came out to LA to begin editing Kosher Messiah. We tried setting up a time to finally meet, but it never happened. I was staying in West Hollywood and he lived in the Valley, and I didn’t have a car.

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