April 2006
Sure enough, if you stood on the corner of Sixteenth Street and looked toward the entrance of Prospect Park, you could see him.
In his seemingly innocuous short story "Basement Jack," Clark Merrefield brilliantly disguises a sophisticated allegory on the nature and existence of God as a story of an unstable drug addict trapped in another man's basement.
He threw in a few sudden brake jolts with his swerving when he saw I was turning green - a maneuver that sent my first batch on the floor behind the driver’s seat. He thought we were on some sort of pornographic amusement ride.
It was in the grocery store, this path, the one that contained both Honey Moser and Bob Plumb.
We were lying on our backs, looking up at the cloud formations and finding animals.
"Doc says nicotine and corn likker are killing me. Wants me to stop both. Crazy bastard knows TB will kill me in six months. Just wants to take the fun out of living that last six months."
As he stared blankly at his faded Bob Dylan poster, he took a long drag on his Lucky Strike to shake the sleep from his bones.
"Son of a fuck," he snarled. This wasn’t shaping up to be the kind of day Push Up had envisioned when his alarm went off an hour earlier.