Excerpted from the book Mozos: A Decade Running with the Bulls of Spain I woke at dawn when an officer kicked my foot and walked away laughing. Laborers finished standing and securing the barricades fifty yards away. I wandered to Telefónica, the section of the bull run course near the bull ring. Beautiful young Spanish women swept past by the hundreds. I stood in the center of the street as they passed. I met eyes with them, told them bonita. Some […]
I was eight years old and running for my life. I sped into the men’s bathroom, opened a stall door, and hid. “She isn’t allowed in here,” I thought to myself, “She can’t get me in here.” Four years earlier, my mother first had her way with me. It was a children’s fashion show at our Thai temple. She dressed me up as a young girl from the hill tribes of Northern Thailand. She attacked my four-year-old boy cheeks with blush, applied […]
“I cannot believe,” I announce to my mother and father from the back seat of the car, “that there will be a live donkey at church today.” We are driving to the small Quaker meetinghouse my family has attended for nearly two decades. When I was a child, I was a wise man in the pageant for three years running. I wore a maroon choir robe, a paper crown, and a garland of crumbled tinsel, saved and reused like it really […]
The pregnancy was lovely. John and I were more in love than ever. I wore my girlfriends’ hand-me-down maternity clothes, craved apples and apple juice and applesauce. I read Louise Erdrich’s memoir about early motherhood and What to Expect When You’re Expecting. I would be lying propped up in bed reading when John came home, he would tell about his day, and the baby would start to kick at the sound of his father’s voice. Every. Single. Time. We celebrated […]
I lost my mother when I was 15. I don’t mean that’s when she died – I mean that’s when she stopped being my mom. My parents’ tortured marriage had finally ended, and my mother wanted my three sisters and I to choose sides. When I refused she chose for me, leaving any parenting I was going to get to my father. For a variety of reasons, I couldn’t live with my dad. So I stayed with my mom, but […]
It’s December. A cab driver picks me up on my way home from a friend’s Christmas party. The driver of Yellow Cab medallion number 4520 spends the next several miles trying to coerce me to sleep with him after his shift ends at midnight, in just 20 minutes. I tell him no and change the subject, again and again. He persists. A sign in front of the passenger seat tells me his cab number and directs passengers to report incidents […]
“You’re pretty strong for a girl.” In retrospect, I believe it was those six brief but toxic words that sounded the death knell for the beautiful, flowing locks of sandy brown hair I sported as an eight-year-old. They were uttered to me at the St. Croix Valley YMCA summer day camp after an archery lesson left a blunt-tipped arrow embedded firmly in a hay bale, unyielding as Excalibur to the pre-adolescent grasp of my fellow campers. In an uncharacteristically bold […]
So there’s the name you are bestowed at birth, the one on that certificate with the curlicue border that you can never find when you need it for some official purpose. Then there’s the name you get from your mother or your older brother or your cousin that highlights some attribute that only they see, or maybe, their rhyming abilities – like in my case, Ellie Bellie, Ellen Ellen Watermelon or, my personal favorite, Ellen Blum the Sugar Blum For […]
I have a friend. I use the word friend because the word fuckbuddy is, as of late, something as ethereal as the beautiful human-unicorn. We’re friends but we’re mostly benefits, so awhile back we did what adult pals do together- we had a play date. He came over. Our friendship at that point was based on the logistics surrounding the benefits, where we gave each other directions, a brief hug of hello, a little bit of chit-chat. (How’s work? Congrats! […]
