Fiction

My mom loved detective novels, all of them, but especially Sherlock Holmes. As our last name was already Holmes, she named me Sherlock when I was born. Maybe it was always in my nature, or in part because I wanted to please her, but becoming a detective became an obsession to me. Harriet the Spy, The Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown, I read them all, and I entered the academy right after community college. I learned at college and at the academy that the fictional Sherlock Holmes’ way of thinking or deducting was horribly flawed. He leapt to conclusions and spoke fast. In retrospect, he seems more like a carnival huckster than a real detective. You can’t just look at a corpse and tell its life story based on some calluses or old shoes — you actually have to work extremely hard to avoid whatever inherent biases you have. At thirty-seven years old, I’m…
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Few parents will admit this, but we often forget the names of our children, especially if we have more than one.  I woke up reeling with another head-splitting hangover and little Joey tugging at me.  “Christ kid, what time is it?” “Papa, come on, you must get up.” Isn’t that just like a kid? Can’t even answer a simple question. There’s something wrong with this generation. With every generation. I shake Joey off and start rubbing my temples. I had no job and nowhere to be.  “Whatever you have to tell me, you can tell me here.” Joey shook his head.  “No, Papa. The Spectrum man is here to restore our internet, so we can resume our schooling!” Schooling my ass. The kid probably just missed playing Minecraft. And a hell of a lot of good school had done me, even if I did have the money to pay Spectrum.…
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I was 26 and had just finished my first novel, or technically, novella. It was a crazed, pointless story about a drunken airline pilot with no discernible plot or structure. My main point, or “meta” point, was that books are mostly filler. Was it vital to know that Gary’s shirt was wrinkled, or that there were always little white blotches of spittle at the corners of his mouth, when he does nothing of consequence and we never see him again?  A person’s size matters if they have to cram themselves into an airline seat. He or she had a name if they needed one. The smear of whitewash where some lazy painter had wiped off his roller was important if it helped you to recognize a building. Otherwise, it was just crap. Words to make a book heavy or large or long enough to justify its price. The more time…
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I was coming out of the movies at Union Square and saw a mother dropping off her twin daughters, presumably to see a movie. The mom was youngish, or at least youngish looking, and her twin daughters were 14 or 15 and both undeniably sexy. The mom noticed me watching and was giving me the stink eye, but I hung around at the periphery anyway. There are a lot of people around Union Square but not as many creepy ones as there used to be, but I still didn’t really stand out. Once the twins were safely deposited in the theater I approached the mom.  “Excuse me. MIss?” She was ignoring me, which is to be expected. All strangers do is ask, for change or cigarettes or time, and who really wants to talk with anyone after a certain point? Especially some strange middle-aged guy who was just checking out…
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Ramsey sat at his desk with a coffee and a copy of the NY Post. He got it for the sports section, the crime blotter, and the borderline satirical reporting. He had started reading it whenever he found a discarded copy on the subway, and it gave him a boost. The sports and news sections took him out of himself. They reminded him that there was a great big world out there, a world that would continue regardless of his personal successes or failures. A week into June and the Yankees were in first place. The Mets were in fourth. The Middle East still had problems.  The crime blotter was his Page 6. If there were enough details, he could sometimes figure out who had handled the call and whether or not he knew the cops who had likely been involved.  Ramsey never arrested anyone if he could help it.…
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Sam had lived a cliched life from the moment he was born. He had grown up in the thick of it, at a time when the majority of Americans had learned how to live from watching television. Everyone acted like television characters–his parents, teachers, and friends when he was a kid, and his wife, bosses, and coworkers when he was older. In elementary school, his classmates would repeat the popular jokes and catchphrases of the season (life moved slower back then). Some of the kids had loved Pee Wee Herman and imitated him constantly, while others had repeated lines from Predator, Robocop, and other movies or television shows. It was as if they were rehearsing for adulthood. Crucial moments called for a certain gravity. Someone had once said that all of life is a stage. Maybe Shakespeare. Maybe no one. Who knows? No one knew anything anymore, except about television…
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