The Short Stories Of Mila Strictzer (1)
and my muse, the big C.W. The Tigress The Farm Two Soldiers Happiness in New York City Seashore of Lake Michigan The Hit Man Cat’s Eyes A Scene From the Gulf War Not Quite a Whore The Strozier Reader The Gamblers and Such Things The Stinger The Man and His Wife You Can Take It With You The Bus II Rat in a Cage I Am Your Master Mila Strictzer As an author, I hate English teachers and publicists, particularly those from New York City. English teachers I hate everywhere, but publicists I could possibly tolerate if they’re not from New York. Not personally, of course, I don’t hate anyone personally, well, maybe one or two people, but I am just talking business here. Your hippy days are over, man, because the book itself is gone. You held on for a fucking long time, granted, and your music is still cool and all but even that is now officially a bygone, too, i.e. replaced by something better. And, oh by the way, thanks for ruining poetry, too. You took what had existed for several millennia as a real man’s sport and turned it into a political weapon like everything else and it is now "flowery". Thanks for that. This will take some time to fix. No longer does anyone care about what publisher they’re under, whose name appears on the book. The readers really don’t care but you probably know that. Even the book, as a paper product, is very close to being gone, too bad, so sad. We are in the midst of a real revolution, unlike your fake one, and anything written may soon be on the net. So to all ye old dinosaurs, I bid you a fond see ya! English teachers are like the person at the dinner table who tells you not to eat your salad with that fork. To you, I say; maybe I want a full mouthful of salad, bitch! Writing is a tool and I will use it as I see fit. Every avant guard writer did the same, Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce. So what if my sentence is not perfect or I misspell a word. Am I building an atomic bomb here? No. I am creating something for people to enjoy and it does not have to be perfect, nor do I have to follow the rules. Rules do change, which is by we say "you" nowadays instead of "thou". Guarantee English teachers have never had nothing to do with change in the English language. There is a ying-yang relationship between writers and English teachers. A writer is born and brainwashed by his or her English teachers. Then, he or she rebels and changes the style of the era, only finding some solace in writers of another era. An English teacher is born and taught the system the rebel writer just invented and believes it to be dogma. A writer is born and the cycle forever continues. I remember, one time, when I was a boy scout, we had these totem chip cards and if you got four corners taken off because of an unsafe or unwise act, you could not use the axe anymore. There was this one kid who followed my friend around as he copped with his axe one night and this kid studied my friend’s every chop as he manipulated his tool as he saw fit to cut wood for the fire so that we could build the fire and all be warm! The kid told my friend he was going to tell the scoutmaster on him for bad chopping practices and he did and the scoutmaster took away my friends totem chip card. Know what happened? One) we did not have a fire until much later in the evening and we were all cold and two) after the scoutmaster had left us all alone, my friend got his axe and chased that kid around the campfire. Well, that was entertainment, I guess, but you’re that guy! Which brings me to my point. This is my third book and I am tired of trying so I have decided to do it myself, because I want it done right. My first book is a collection of all my poetry that I have written to date. My second book is called Scarecrow Soldier and this is my third book, a collection of all my short stories and guess what? First, I am going to send back every email and letter of rejection I have ever got and then I am going to publish all three works myself! I don’t want your stupid label, Joe Publicist and I am not going to follow your rules, Josephine English teacher-only the ones I like. I am going to sell my books to people who want to read them for what they are-stories. I should break even with my investment, maybe make a few bucks for my effort, and then I am going to sit back and smile as I read my books. Now get in the pit and try to love someone! Michael Stefan Strozier, 2001 I was eighteen years old, I remember because I should have graduated when I was seventeen and I was held back my last year. I was held back because I had slipped just a little too far back in my chair as I daydreamed in my classes. That was a hard year but the most important year of my life. That year I conquered the demons of my past. We all have to win at something in life, even if it is only once. So in my last year I was allowed to go to vocational school. If I could complete the program in Agriculture Mechanics, then I would graduate, was the deal. My teacher I will never forget. His name was Jimmy Ray. We first spent the first few weeks in the classroom. Then for the rest of the year we were in the shop working on different projects. At the beginning of the year we each had to pick a major project and then finish it by the end of the school year and that would complete the majority of our grade, basically. There was an old tractor engine in the back, hoisted up by some wire chains, just hanging there, above the floor. I decided that I would fix that tractor engine up like new and with that simple decision I changed my life. I did not even realize until many years later how much that one decision would affect me. That one instant stands out in my mind now, clearly. I can see myself looking suddenly out of a eyes surrounded by cobwebs that had been threaded so long ago, I could not even remember when. All those years I realize now I had been trapped and I was about to break free. The first section of the course was in welding. We learned arc, mig and brazing with copper. I excelled at arc welding. With the mig, the fucking wire just came out too fast to manage for me and if I could not keep up, it was not easy to stop without some difficulty, and I did not like that lack of control. But with arc welding, I could pause at any time, just put myself on one giant pause while I collected myself, all it took was a little concentration and focus, something I surely had when I made the attempt. And the weld appeared instantly before my eyes in the form of a perfect bead. Then after a minute, chop the cover off and your work was good or bad, clearly visible. So I cut up some old pieces of metal with a hack saw and welded them together into a frame for my tractor engine to rest in. I drilled some holes and bolted the structure securely in place. Then I spray painted it blue, hoisted the engine up and laid it in the frame and welded it there. Then I started to work on my engine. I wheeled it outside to the sand blaster and sand blasted the exterior so that its smooth iron surface shown again. I removed the head and glass beaded it clean so that its surface was shiny steel again. I cut a new gasket for the head. I ground every one of the valves down, cleaned out the springs and the cams meticulously. I examined the interior of the engine, the pistons, rings and any linkage I could find. I greased the gasket and replaced the head, dead setting it as I followed every step along with an old manual for that year of farm engine. I took the ancient tractor manual home every night and studied it in my room until I would go to sleep. I set the timing with a timing light and took out the points and set them, too, with a feeler gauge. I replaced the spark plugs and made sure everything was tightened back up. Then I painted the engine the same blue as the frame with a spray gun. I worked myself into fervor. I knew my engine well, maybe better then anyone I knew and I probably knew as much about old tractor engines as most men alive at that point. Some of the other students would make fun of me or at least try to. I ignored them so blindly I don’t think I could even hear them speak. They could say anything they wanted to, I did not care. If they got in my way, then that would be different, but they never did. I was picked to go to a national championship and placed, swear to God, eight out of eighteen; I can still remember the principle announcing it afterwards to the class with the teacher there, just us seven or eight or so of us standing around the shop while he read from some paper. But all the while I was just thinking about my engine. One day, toward the end of the semester, as I was setting the pistons to top dead center, the instructor came over and kneeled down beside my engine. I kneeled down with him, even though it hurt my knees to do so. He grimaced at me and said, "What’s the name of this thing?" I was a little surprised because I did not have a name for it. "I don’t know," I answered. "How about…The Tigress?" "Okay." "Are you going to start it?" Mr. Ray asked me and then turned to look at my face. I realized later that he knew I had never even thought about starting it until he had asked the question. "Start it?" Was all I could say. "Well, yea, that is generally what you do with engines. You start them." "Oh," I had sure never thought about starting it until then and I was not sure what to do. Something held me back. It was the past, I think. Not just my own past and my own cobwebs but this engine’s past, too. How had this tractor engine come to be? What men, working in an assembly line, had put its pieces together? Who had first bought it and used it on his fields? I strained my mind to conjure up an image of that person working on his farm. The closer I got to owner of this engine, the further he slipped away from me, like looking into the sun. Had he been married and had children? Probably, given that he must have worked on a farm and if he had had enough money to buy this engine then he had had a farm and a family and maybe some hired help, too. Had he fought in WWI? Did he have to leave his wife, maybe before they had had children to go fight in France? He might have even died in some muddy bunker somewhere as his brigade charged the enemy lines along those barren fields lined with barbed wire and had taken a bullet in the brain and had never come back home to his wife. He would have died quickly, some pain certainly, but quick, in a descent death befitting of a warrior. There is some glory in death then, after all. At that precise instant of his death, his wife would have had no idea. Maybe she was sleeping with another man right then. A woman has her own needs, too, after all. Her husband had been gone years, even if he was a soldier fighting for his country in a war in a foreign land. Could it have been right at the instant that he died that she had her legs wide open and some man was giving her all the love that she needed? No one would know, not her husband, not his family, no one. It was just that simple. Too bad if she had met him at work, he was nice. She had to work and make a living, too. What if there was a child, cross that bridge when we get there. Probably no child, though. Not all men have kids easily. Maybe there’s something to be said about the ones that stay behind. Just to be a little melodramatic, his body would have had to come home to the states in a casket covered with an American flag and then he would be buried in Arlington, VA. His wife and father and mother would make the journey via train to the National Cemetery in Virginia, maybe take in the sights in Washington, D.C. for a couple of days and then go to the funeral. The casket would have had to be pulled by a black horse and a soldier played taps on a shiny brass trumpet. His mother, not his wife, was to be handed the American flag that draped his casket all to say thanks from a country. His wife would cry because all women cry sometimes and she would wipe her tears away and then be okay, because after all, she had someone to help her with it all now. There were to be hundreds of them just like that whose names are forever engraved in our town square monuments all across America. Or maybe the owner of my blue engine did not go to the war because he had flat feet and he had a wife and children so he got to stay home and watch carefully over his family and raise his children well and their house was not full of turmoil because their father was there. He could only work in the factory but he did his part, a noble part for the war effort. There were just so many women home… Whoever the owner of my blue engine had been, he had once been alive. He had once felt blood pumping through his veins and he had felt his heart skip a beat when he asked a girl out for the first time. When he got frustrated he would run down the country roads and scream out to the blue sky above him. He was just a man and somehow or other, he had died. He had felt all the glory of death and all the beauty in dying. Now I was confronting his life, or at least a small piece of his life, before me. "I don’t know how to start it." "You have to hand crank it like an old airplane. There should be a hand crank over there somewhere where the engine was." So I went to the back of the shop and dug around in the drawers for a few minutes and then produced the hand crank to my engine. I spent the rest of the day painting it the same color blue as my engine, purposefully going slowly. Then I went home and dreamed about my engine and even suddenly woke in the night covered in a cold sweat when my dream reached a point where I was confronted with the reality of starting my engine. But the next day, when I came to class, all the other students and the instructor were gathered around my engine as I walked into the shop. Not saying a word, I stepped up to my engine, and I took the hand crank out of my backpack, see, I had taken it home the previous night and now I eased the crank’s teeth into the engine and pressed firmly against the handle, holding it in place. Then I looked over my shoulder at the rest of the class, who were watching me with wide eyes. I was about to become a man, a thought suddenly flashed in my head. So I pushed as hard as I could and slowly the hand crank moved downward and then I pulled back up with all my might to bring the crank back up again and now the rod greased a little and I could feel the crank start to flow a little more smoothly in my hands. My past was beginning to let go, even if slowly. My cobwebs were clearing before my eyes as if I was bravely running my hands through them, unafraid. I was making an obnoxious adolescent grimace as I strained with all my might. My teacher, Mr. Ray, was smiling to himself as he watched. Then the hand crank suddenly started to move very slowly in my grip. The past had decided to not let go, after all. The past was just too painful and too beautiful to let go of and I was suddenly not sure if I even could let go. But I still fought on and just then, when one of the big pistons hit TDC, it slipped back down the casing a couple of inches and the hand crank flew forward in my grasp and I almost lost my hold on it but I quickly re-secured my hands again and pressed on through the temporary bump in my road to freedom with renewed vigor. And then, just like that, the crank started to do my bidding and I turned it with all my teenage might, around as fast as I could, until, to my amazement and delight, my engine that I had spent all those past months building, suddenly took over the job for me and the hand crank flew out of its teeth, nearly hitting me as it flew by and then slid across the concrete floor of the shop to the other side of the room. And then BOOM! The Tigress began to roar and the sound filled the room so loud that the other students, and even the instructor, had to cover their ears with the palms of their hands. I did not cover my ears because I was standing in awe. BOOM!!! BOOM!!! RABOOM!!! My engine began to roar and the deep bellows filled my chest. Thick, dark smog began pouring out the exhaust pipe. The Tigress’ roar was so purifying to me and now there were no more cobwebs at all in my mind. I did graduate high school, thanks to that engine alone. I never started it again after that. The instructor had had to come over and cut the fuel supply off to make it slowly cough to a stop as I just stood there, a few feet away from my mighty Tigress, amazed, speechless. I spent the rest of the year in the classroom reading, leaning down in my chair and daydreaming about something, not really following along any of the words in the book. The huge rat came running out of the old burning barn, terrified, covered in flames. It ran right by my father and I and then it ran into the bean field. We had been swaying ever so gently in that eloquent communication between father and son and we had been caught off guard. Daryl, our neighbor, saw it instantly and his dog Response, a coon dog, immediately chased after the burning rat into the low field of beans. All I saw for a second was the flaming rat and the dog tying to catch up to it. Then both beasts quickly disappeared into the bean field. And the old barn, that we were burning because it no longer served any purpose, burned down to ashes before our eyes. Daryl turned to my father and said, "Don’t worry, he’ll sure as hell catch up with that scoundrel." My father had replied, "I am not worried." Just then, the dog caught the burning rat and shook it back and forth, just slightly above the knee high bean field, the rat screeching in pain and still on fire, well stuck between the coon dog’s teeth. I guess I woke up about seven years old or so and I was playing Frisbee, standing in the white gravel roundabout that was our driveway with a friend of mine. I don’t remember who that was. Many years later, my father tied up my mother in a long white rope, all the way around her body with her arms inside of the rope, down to her ankles and she was out in that same driveway, standing still and I was watching as I always did and my father just kept applying his discipline as my mother kept screaming to stop. Eventually, he did stop and she did stop screaming on that night. And then everything was okay again. You can never know if you are insane or not. Sometimes, you think you are doing something that is insane and so you think, therefore, I am insane but its not so. I think that the insane don’t even know, they don’t even have a clue. I told my invalid grandfather just before he died, because he had been complaining about not being able to remember things, that as long as you can remember not remembering, you are still okay. He died not too long after that. I didn’t blame myself, I think he just got tired of trying. But he went to his grave fearless, he was an atheist and I always respected him for that. The basement was the scariest. Well, actually, the attic was the most frightening place but the basement was the scariest. They were both places that I just did not go. The attic I really never went to, unless for an absolute reason. But the basement, there I would explore the limits of my fear. In the back room, there were a lot of boxes packed with old stuff. The walls, the floor and the ceiling were all cold, wet concrete. In the room right before the far room with all the boxed stuff, there was a wooden workbench that my father had made. There rested the controls to the electric fence that surrounded the forty of so acres of field that our horses lived in. There was a large red box with two orange indicators on it that blinked once every other second, when an electric pulse was sent out. It all seemed so magnificent. In one of the boxes in the back of the room with the stuff I found a stack of Playboy magazines. I took about half of the stack out and carried them to this old trailer, kind of like an old RV trailer, and posted up all the best pictures I could find all over the trailer. I would always show my friends that trailer and the pictures when they came over to the farm and they would always be impressed. Today, what did I do? I jacked off once, ate three well-balanced meals, smoked some cigarettes and talked some shit with other fucking insane people. Maybe, that is about all anyone ever does. I guess I am insane. I guess what it truly means to be insane is to have a life where you are pitiful and to then live that pitiful life full bore. I had a secret place. There were three girls that would come over sometimes, I don’t know why because I sure didn’t like them too much, but they did come over, anyway. They always seemed curious, wanting to know about me; my body, my mind and anything else they could get their hands on. So, one time, I went running out to the back field, maybe more to escape from them then to lead them on but they followed me anyway. The field in the back was pretty big, it was way behind the horse’s field and there was a narrow section of wood that you had to run down to get there. So I ran as fast as I could, I knew every step to take, through the trees and the thee girls kept following me. I was going somewhere, I knew where. Out from the woods, the field opened up to some tall grass and I ran through it and then I ran down the back part of the field. There was a creek there, I had named it "Fred’s Creek" and there was a log that crossed over it at only one point. I ran up to that log and flew over it in about three quick steps. Far on the other side, I turned and watched the three girls try to navigate their way over that fallen tree very slowly with delight, well hidden by the tall grass. The girls eventually crossed over, without falling in the water and I met them on the other side, even though I did not want to. And I showed them my secret place. The secret place was a tree that had fallen over on top of a fence that was made of three lines of concertina wire that someone had hooked up a long time ago. The fence no longer encompassed anything. I told the girls to stop and wait. I climbed on top of the tree and said to them, "Now listen to me! This is the secret place, I can’t even believe you made it this far!" The girls just looked at me like I was some kind of God. One of the girls, the only one that was alright, I think two of them were sisters, but this one was not one of the sisters, said, "What are you going to do?" "I am going to show you how to talk to It!"
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Copyright © 2001 Mike Strozier |