I've Told You About the Italian Boys, Haven't I?

Grandpa leans back in his chair and clears his throat. “The Italian boys were the best at fishing for clams,” he says. “They had a method.”

We don’t dispute this, but he elaborates. “The fishing wardens would count your clams at the end of the day, but the Italian boys got around this with a baguette and a bottle of wine under their arms.”

I picture this, and in the most absurd terms; teenage boys with dark hair and dark half-mustaches, wearing ascots and rolled-up pants, parading up and down the docks of Monterey, California, circa 1947.

"They’d be out all day in the harbor, and they’d pull a lot of good clams." Grandpa pauses, his eyebrows rising, and we can tell this is his favorite part of the story. "But sometimes they’d pull a small one."

No one knows where this is going, and that’s the way Grandpa likes it.

"When that happened, they’d shuck the oyster, take a bite of bread, down a swig of wine, and toss the shell back in the water. Wardens never knew a thing."

I suspect otherwise, but I smile all the same.

Ghostlights

We pass a cemetery at 78 miles per hour, just enough time to see it lit up like an Illinois strip club and wonder who would want their loved ones’ gravestones outlined in red and green bulbs from Big Lots. Not much farther, a single flame burns in the upper window of a derelict farm house, a relic wrapped in the indigo hue of another indifferent night. Motel neon waits patiently for an end to its orange vacancies, while the closest thing to life as we know it stocks up on Red Stag under fluorescent white at a Sac-N-Pac near the state line.

We pay our dues and ditch the funeral procession for a freshly paved turnpike, but all the way down I’m haunted by the lights, the corpse of America at the side of the road.

Pretty Soon I'll Be Holding Fire

I light a cigarette because I can’t skate because the railings and driveways all zig zag across each other and I can’t get anywhere on them.

I light the cig and I look forward to enjoying it for a good long time, but one drag and the thing is down to the filter and the heat is approaching my fingertips.

I put it out on the concrete in front of my feet, but I can’t leave it there because this is someone else’s concrete and I don’t do that.

I pull an envelope from my backpack – the manilla kind I used to call “vanilla” when I was a kid – and I scoop up the butt and the ashes, but there’s still a grey smudge on the ground, and now the envelope feels hot and I worry that the cig is still burning and pretty soon I’ll be holding fire.