Three Essays by Howie Good

On Becoming a Writer

Doreen, our across-the-parking-lot neighbor, is lavishly watering the pots of zinnias that decorate her stoop. I count the colors: red, pink, yellow, purple, orange. My own plants are drooping in the oven-like heat. Is there something to be gained from loss? I once locked eyes with celebrated novelist Philip Roth on Tinker Street in Woodstock, at the time the world capital of hippiedom. He was standing on the sidewalk outside a store that sold newspapers and sundries. I was too awed to speak or even nod to him. To this day, I wonder if I made a mistake by just walking past. Maybe he would have given me priceless advice on becoming a writer. The sun has climbed up the sky. I am all the ages I have been. Doreen notices me and waves. All her flowers are alight.


Gabapentin

Let me tell you something of what happens when the medication, an anticonvulsive also prescribed for persistent pain, breaches the blood-brain barrier. My head fills with mist. Suddenly face-chomping zombies aren’t the only ones in need of behavioral therapy. Rain hisses like an acetylene torch. I have unwelcome encounters in basements and back streets with women who torture their own bodies. One or another of them saws off my head under the cover of helping. Just prior, the future passed in an instant. Now flowers keep throwing themselves into the sea to get there.

In the Company of the Dead

Yesterday I returned to the cemetery for the first time since dad died. Thankfully, the rain held off. At graveside the ultra-orthodox rabbi, a short, feisty, bearded man in black, spoke with annoying confidence about God’s plan. “This would make a great ‘Twilight Zone’ episode,” I said when, back in the car, I realized we were lost inside the vast grounds of the cemetery. “An older, married couple drives round and round a cemetery for the rest of eternity, searching for an exit that doesn’t exist.” The cemetery roads, narrow and in disrepair, weren’t designed to accommodate humongous SUVs. I feared clipping a headstone as I turned onto one crumbling unmarked road after another, never sure which might lead out. Wherever I looked, I saw the same dismal view, a confusing sprawl of headstones of varied shapes and sizes stretching away into the distance. There wasn’t a single car or person in sight, only the dead and their monuments under a threatening sky. Barbara, who was initially her usual calm self, was breathing noisily now, but I don’t think either of us ever actually thought we would remain trapped inside the cemetery for all time – this time.

Two Poems by Howie Good

Ashes to Ashes

A human body produces five pounds of ash when burned. Twenty-five tons of ash from the Topf & Sons ovens in the crematorium had been spread as fertilizer on the surrounding fields. Whenever the wind came whipping in, it would churn up a bitter brown smog of topsoil and ash that stung the skin and burned the nose and mouth and choked the lungs. Visibility shrank to almost nothing. Cart horses refused to budge and received terrible beatings from their enraged masters. Looters smashed shop windows. Countless frantic calls for help went unanswered. We look back and shake our heads and tell ourselves we aren’t like those people. No, not at all. 

One of Those Days

None of us even knew God was dying until we heard He was dead. There was nothing the TV analysts could adduce that would stop the borders from bleeding or a shooting war from starting. A crow laughed at the old Jew being forced by masked vigilantes to climb a tree and chirp like a bird. I was inside this whole time tinkering with a machine for testing the concept that rocks communicate with each other. Parts and tools were scattered everywhere, but I wasn’t ready to say yet whether it was the machine or the concept that was flawed.

Blood Ceremonies by Howie Good

A phone ringing in my dream wakes me. I recite like a prayer the plain honest names of the streetwalkers whose throats were cut and bodies mutilated in the night fog by Jack the Ripper: Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, Mary Jane Kelly. I was only seven years old when I saw the movie, but I remember it was in black and white and that no one felt safe. Do not look behind you! The two atom bombs were dropped that summer. There was a glittering in the sky, and it went all over the world.