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Somebodies and Nobodies.

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Adrian/Sepulveda Blvd., originally uploaded by Here in Van Nuys.

Excerpt from “Somebodies and Nobodies”my new short story about a poor athlete, fatherless and street smart, who escapes the California desert and comes to Santa Monica in search of glory and finds himself mixed up between a divorced couple whose failures and successes echo his own life.

“He imagined and wondered, trying to understand his blood-bursting passions. Who was buried deep within his DNA? Who came before him? Whose genes were his?

Sometimes he imagined himself descended from a warrior, other times: a convict, a poet, a dancer; a fighter, a general, a killer, a composer, an explorer, a ship captain, a priest.

He was born poor in the low desert east of Palm Springs, near the saguaro and sagebrush, to Tania Santos, a 19-year-old Mexican housekeeper from Durango, and El Paso born Grayson Waypole, a black man, a 22-year-old cook and expert marksman, dishonorably discharged from the Marines, who was said to be father to 30 children stretching from Indio to 29 Palms.

After Colton’s birth, Waypole went wayward.

Tania was migrant and undocumented. She dragged Colton up and down to all the stifling desert towns where the air is hot and life is hard.

She took a job with the Coachella Valley High School and worked as a cook in the school cafeteria, dumping vats of potato salad, franks and beans into steel trays.

Mother and son lived in a flat, pebble-roofed house on dusty Bagdad Avenue, a place where people parked their pickup trucks in dirt-covered front yards.”

“Somebodies and Nobodies”

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An excerpt from my new short-story, “Somebodies and Nobodies”:

Parkour Hour

 

Colton drove his car into a back alley behind the Last Stop Bar.  He made a pillow out of his sweatpants and tried to fall asleep again.  His nocturnal mind raced with the excitement of that day’s rescue and heroism.

Unable to sleep at that blue hour, a time when food trucks make their deliveries and only rats and cops wander the streets, Colton drank black coffee, bit into a day-old rye bagel and got out of his car.

Along Main Street were rows of tightly packed, one-story buildings.  He picked one, grabbed a window security bar and hoisted himself up onto the roof.

There the young sentry stood, still bleary and sleepy, looking across dozens of dark rooftops. He rubbed his hands together, stretched out his legs and calves, and accelerated into an acrobatic sprint.

He ran and ran atop multiple roofs, rubber on tar, easily catapulting over skylights, over and around small protrusions, air-conditioning, water pipes and vents.

Packed with self-assurance, he dove across dozens of the little stores like an escaped felon, without falling or tripping, in grace and speed.

 

He landed back, hard, on top of the Last Stop Bar. He sat down on a milk crate to catch his breath.  Out of the darkness he heard a hoarse male voice.

“Hey you. Get down. I’ve got a gun in my hand and I’ll blast you!”

Colton disarmed doubt with deference, raised his hands up and stood warily and cautiously near the gutter. “Sir, I am just practicing. I’m not a criminal. I promise.”