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the face and neck with the barrel of a large automatic pistol, rape, chewing on tin foil, food that did have giant quivering gobs of pus and fungus with tiny eyeballs and tentacles and raspy teeth crawling all over it, court appearances, drowning, cancer, canned vegetables, snowboarding, moments of sudden, unshakable and complete comprehension of one’s own mortality, artificial breasts, lard in Mexican cooking, man’s inhumanity to man and beets. He had at various times in his life been a lifeguard, a mailman, a boxer, a telephone sanitizer, a build-maintenance engineer, a dental hygienist, a sucker, a straight-man, a second-story man, a minor functionary, a middle manager, a bum, a dwarf, a dwarf-bum, a dental-dwarf-hygienist-middle-bum-manager-engineer, a contractor, a consultant, an activist, an anarchist, an anaesthesiologist, a picador, a conquistador, a barrista, an underclass, a phalanx, a junta, a soccer team, the upper twenty floors of both towers of the World Trade Center in New York, an ant, a microbe, a giant quivering gob of pus and fungus with tiny eyeballs and tentacles and raspy teeth that crawled along the ocean floor in search of food, or companionship, or stimulating entertainment, or heroism, or just to end it all and see what happens next, and he had also been the driver of a school bus full of blind orphan quadriplegics on the way to a lacrosse match against a school of deaf test-tube amnesiacs, as part of an intramural handicapped lacrosse program funded in part by the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, when a sudden mechanical failure in the transaxle caused everybody’s heads to detach from their necks and fall off onto the floor and roll up and down the center aisle bumping against one another like bowling balls do in the bowling ball return mechanism exit chute storage groove thing that they have at bowling alleys, and understandably he had been scarred by this experience so he didn’t do that any more. When I met him, he was dead. I haven’t seen him recently. I often wonder where he is, what’s he’s doing, whether he’s finally gotten over the trauma of that horrible day, or that other trauma of that other horrible day when he woke up on the ocean floor to find giant quivering gobs of pus and fungus with tiny eyeballs and tentacles and raspy teeth chewing on him, and he said: “Hey, stop that, cut that out!” and they looked at him with their tiny eyeballs assuming an expression that said: like, who’s this guy? Like as if he was the one who was interloping and being rude, and presumptuous, and not these horrible unreal parasitic pus-fungus creatures that were touching him with their hideous clammy tentacles and digesting his flesh, and it was all very awkward. I wonder if he ever found love. I wonder if he’s still a dwarf. Maybe someday he’ll call me.

My Armenia

    I often find myself at parties, drunk and cornered, or else simply cornered, by someone who wants to ask me getting-to-know-you type questions. Where am I from? Where did I go to school? What do I do for a living? Oh, really? Maybe they find me attractive, maybe they feel some social obligation to be chatty. Either way I find these questions tedious, and the answers more so. It’s fortunate for these inquisitive party types that I am a professional liar, er, I mean, author of fiction.
    “Where are you from?” is a popular question, and I have been asked this one many times. Where I’m from is a long story that’s not particularly easy to tell or interesting to hear. Some time ago, I began lying about this, just to get things going. “Armenia,” I say. “My parents moved to the U.S. shortly after I was born.”
    “Armenia? Really? I’ve never been there!” Their eyes light up. People want to hear all about it. “What part of Armenia are you from?” As if they’ve heard of the different parts of Armenia. “Do you speak Armenian fluently?” “No,” I answer, “Armenians generally speak French and