Page 13 - Vol V. #8

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I thanked the electrician as he left our house. He
asked, “Are you John Skoyles, the writer?” Shocked to be recognized, I said I was.
“So those are all your books stacked next to the fuse box?”
Answer that and stay fashionable!
Doctor, my eyes
Tell me what is wrong
Was I unwise to leave them open for so long
Judy Shahn reported the phone call about her panties to the police. A cop visited her house, took a look around and told her not to hang her laun- dry on the line for a few weeks.
“A
rt: the struggle
Mr. Lobelli, our fifth-grade teacher, weighed nearly four hundred pounds and threw erasers at the head of any student talking when he wanted quiet. Once in a while he slammed the wrong kid in the face. A cloud of chalk dust and a bloody nose was cause for a weak apology. He used to exit and enter the classroom door sideways, he was so large. I checked out his belt at a rehearsal for The Sound of Music—a sixty-two-inch waist.
between what we want to do and
He had a long-standing feud with Miss Prentiss. One day she stomped into our classroom and began an argument, saying he knew none of our names. She challenged him to name just one boy out of the forty of us, but he couldn’t—he called each of us “Sonny.” They yelled at each other, loud- er and fiercer while the class watched. Finally,
she left, but turned at the door and called him a faggot. Mr. Lobelli said, “Why don’t you plaster up your vagina, you’ll never use it again.”
When I had brain surgery for an acoustic neu- roma, I returned from the hospital with large staples running up the side of my shaved head. At the same time, my wife’s father was dying and she left to be with him. I needed to refill the prescrip-
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what we are able to do. Like being very young or very old.”
He placed his desk near the window he kept open because he smoked: one menthol, followed by one regular.