Gabriel Ricard

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Mornings have occasionally been reserved

for the hotel swimming pool. Less and less often

these days,

but it used to be something I wanted to do

because it was 5 o’clock in the morning,

and I wasn’t going back to sleep anytime soon.

 

I’ve always woken up early,

because it’s not just the inherent gentleness

of anything from the industrial park

you find in the creaky cityscape of every horror movie daydream,

to three thousand cars punishing things

like my attention span, the human spirit,

and the larger subject of alarming fragility.

 

The pink death phantoms,

some people allegedly call them clouds,

and the moon showing some kind of fairytale insolence

about hitting the fucking road is admittedly more satisfying

than the actual science of whatever is going on.

 

Coffee is literally or just seemingly everywhere.

That’s fucking great.

 

I used to want to do things late at night.

Plenty of stupid things. The legion of profoundly regrettable.

Alcoholic misadventures that still justifiably

make some people nervous, scared, or basically and reasonably angry. This has changed

a lot in my 30s.

 

I still love getting up early. Coffee. Cigarette.

Noise or anything overtly remarkable can be an actual novelty.

 

Makes me want to do things. There generally isn’t a lot available.

 

So if I was at a hotel,

I could go down to the pool,

think about the ocean,

dive and rise a half-dozen times,

and try not to make anyone uncomfortable

when you notice them.

 

Or if you’re tired,

because who isn’t these days,

and you get caught staring at people.

 

It’s hard to resist sometimes,

just seeing how someone else

is processing the same things you are.

 

I haven’t gone to a hotel pool in a while.

Or a hotel. Both on the long list

of stuff I’ve been missing lately.

Split between things I really want

and everything I just think I should wish for.

 

What with things being the way they are.

 

Hotels and swimming pools

probably come from a pretty sincere place.

 

And would be more exciting

than how I’ve been spending my time alone

in the aftermath of dawn emphasizing

that things go on.

 

Which is becoming more unsettling all the time.

 

 

 

 

Two Times Combined

 

With three TVs playing

three-hour loops

of The Three Stooges,

in three different rooms

of, obviously, just the one house,

she fights the long arm

of the law of trying to find focus

in her grandparents’ house

on the sixth Christmas Eve

in the past four weeks.

 

These have been ordinary numbers

for as far back as she can remember,

and for as far back as she can remember,

it has been five weeks of a winter vacation

that survives on gratitude

and unbelievable amounts of money.

 

They have eaten hot dogs in Alabama,

New Mexico, Mexico, Texas,

Oklahoma, and there will be more,

If they are really going to drive

all the way to Anchorage.

 

And there will be pancakes.

Bandages that dissolve in either palm

of a pair of very small hands.

 

Postcards that tell long stories

about things like polar bears,

balloons that understand the depths of puns,

and umbrellas that travel state after state

after cartoon bridge over the lights and stars

that are anywhere from two feet

to nine thousand miles under her hands.

 

Which are getting heavier again.

Worse than the last two times combined.

 

And the umbrellas travel by a slow,

dedicated series of windy thunderstorms

that make you want to stay in the basement,

watching cartoons where the polar bears

safeguard the balloons through times

of trial and error, error, error, error.

 

She can do most of those things

in the real world. Even with the dizziness.

 

But not the cartoons.

Not until grandma and grandpa

get tired of The Three Stooges.

 

 

 

 

 

A Private Collector Named Saint

 

When you realized he had as many gumball machines

as he did old newspapers

from the one in his dead wife’s hometown

that her own father started to celebrate her,

you begin to get a sense of just how weird

things are always going to be around here.

 

What are you going to do?

It’s not like you’re built to be homeless anymore.

 

You had to go and turn 40,

and then stay married for 20 years,

and then watch someone else

just finish watching her die,

because you smoked two cigarettes

instead of one.

 

And then you had to casually

realize that the two of you

forgot to make a life

with room enough for other people.

 

You just didn’t think about it at the time.

 

So if you don’t have any friends or family

beyond an aging uncle

who’s in a situation similar to yours,

you do the best with whatever’s left

after you decide that while you’re not suicidal,

you aren’t really all that into living either.

 

You’d love a little control right now.

You’d love to organize those newspapers,

or fix one of Uncle Howe’s twenty-two blenders,

or take the ashes of your wife

to the part of the Pacific Ocean

where the flat earth theorists claim

it all comes to a screeching end.

 

You’d love a lot of things,

and that would probably start

with one fucking elevator

that actually fucking works

in your Uncle Howe’s apartment building.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Solving the Mysteries of Life

 

It wasn’t forty by any means,

but he had to guess it was at least

twenty days and twenty-two nights

of getting lost in the anxiety

anyone can reasonably get

from a movie theater with no air conditioning,

in August,

and it was a war movie

about a particularly stressful war.

 

He could only speak for his lifetime,

and it was nonetheless impossible

to watch the movie and concentrate on it

at the same time. He had to watch everyone else

in the theater. The sounds from the projection room

without actually looking up to it. The pattern of the seats,

completely lost to time these days. Then the movie,

which had a plot, and death in the quality of something

that sets the tone for the complete atmospheric package

of everything and everything getting closer and closer

to the local coast. It was a lot of fire and a grinding,

muddy, perpetually shimmering sense of dread and madness.

 

And he felt like the movie went on for at least hours,

even when the credits rolled,

and that was very clearly not the actual case. An anti-war movie,

at least, maybe, it was in fact over in a little under two hours.

 

Not a lot improved,

when he left the theater with his friend,

and they talked about the movie

because that’s just what you do,

because it was still August. The days were still long,

and it didn’t seem like there was ever going to be a point

where time would move the way it seemed to cooperate

with everyone else. It didn’t, in reality,

but it felt like that for a very long time.

 

He finds different examples of this same discrepancy,

but it’s not as selfish

as it used to be. Good form, sir. This is what it means

to be incrementally better until you’re dead

and no one particularly noticed.

 

This is the support system

for why he hasn’t seen that movie since,

and he’s glad to think about that

and remember the movie theater

was eaten by performance artists

who had no more worlds to conquer.

 

Even though the war

is more or less still going on. Breathing a deeper appreciation

for chemicals every day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Magic Man, May 1988

 

Your wife and son won’t be home

from the city of tomorrow (today)

until tomorrow afternoon,

but your girlfriend has already painted

the front porch with bullets,

and then the living room with enough

of yours, hers, and Chubby Fred’s blood

to create what Pat Sajak would call

the new aesthetic.

 

Thank god he still has a talk show.

 

Not that it really helps right now.

You think about your son,

and you wonder if arthritis is going to make it hard

to keep digging these lonely, erratic women

out from under the crossword puzzle books

and adult magazines that are really just an exercise

in testing a man’s goddamn patience.

 

You are easily distracted.

A pretty man who can pick and choose

the shaken spinsters who used to be able to pick and choose

any number of living rooms of peaceful refugees

of that trouble in the 60s.

 

You are completely out of time,

even if your wife and son won’t be home

for a number of hours that will come and go

like the bigots racing in and out of Montreal.

 

Nicki isn’t straight enough to choose

between Quebec French and Vengeful English,

but she can probably fire the gun again.

 

You work through the pain in your hands.

Enough to shove her down the halfway point

of the stairs. That should slow her down for a little while.

 

You don’t know how you’re not hearing sirens.

 

On the other hand,

at this point,

most of your neighbors

are probably hoping this whole thing

just works itself out.

 

One way or another.

 

You sit down on the stairs.

You breathe so hard, your fingernails hurt.

 

Nicki rolls onto her back,

and calls your wife a whore.

You have no idea why.

 

Nicki was something in 1983.

 

The last six years have been hard on everybody.

 

Especially his son.

And Nicki’s son.

 

Everyone’s kids seem to be struggling right now.

Gabriel Ricard writes, edits, and occasionally acts. He writes a monthly column called Captain Canada’s Movie Rodeo at Drunk Monkeys, as well as a monthly called Make the Case with Cultured Vultures. 

His 2015 poetry collection Clouds of Hungry Dogs is available from Kleft Jaw Press, while his 2017 novel Bondage Night is available through Moran Press. Recent releases include A Ludicrous Split (Alien Buddha Press/Split chapbook with Kevin Ridgeway) and Love and Quarters (Moran Press). 

His newest book, the short story collection The Oddities on Saturday Night, is available now from Moran Press. A new horror fiction collection entitled Benny the Haunted Toymaker is his newest book. His next book will A Ludicrous Split 2 with Kevin Ridgeway.

He is also a writer and performer with Belligerent Prom Queen Productions, currently working on a follow-up to their 2016 immersive theater show Starman Homecoming. His movie podcast The Hounds of Horror, co-hosted with an actual man from Florida named Chris Bryant, is currently in its second season.

Gabriel currently lives on Long Island with his wife, four crazed ferrets, and an inability to stop ordering delivery. He watches way too many movies, spent tens of thousands of miles on Greyhound, and has somehow also worked (or tried to) in fields such as radio, theater, and standup.

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