RUSTY
Is it warm enough for you in here? Or are you young guys so used to sitting around in the nude that it doesn’t faze you? I stay bundled up these days like an old squaw woman and still get the shivers. I had a mouse in here yesterday, and even he was trembling it was so cold. Well, I can always turn up the heat if you need me to.
Did I tell you I got an invitation to my high school reunion? When I first took it out of the mailbox I threw it in the damn trash. Don’t ask me why I didn’t leave it in the trash. Don’t ask me why I fished it out and wiped off the coffee grounds and the jelly and the bacon grease and put it up on the bulletin board. Can you drop your left shoulder just a tad? And twist it forward slightly. Yes. Like that. That’s good.
When I was in high school, JFK had just become president, and I was a hundred and fifty-five pound freak with clown-red hair and freckles, six months from graduation and a summer away from college. Now, I’m beginning to feel as ancient as a character in the Old Testament. Bearded. Biblical. Dyspeptic. I got fat for a while, in my forties and into my fifties, but it was this killing disorder that made me skinny again. After high school and college I never had a nickname, but back then — when I couldn’t even imagine that my hair would ever be white — I was Rusty, well-liked, not prodigiously popular by any means, but known for my caricatures. A talent that on more than one occasion got me into the shit.
One day after social studies class, I went across the hall to the toilet. The teacher, Wendell Berger, was an overweight bachelor in his mid-thirties who lived with his mother. What a fucking cliché he was. A grown man wearing braces. The kind for your teeth, not the suspenders. When he peeled back his fat lips to smile, the metal caught the light like the grill of a Mack truck. Two tufts of hair crowned his round, bald head, and I can still draw his face and that snout of a nose with lightning speed. You could stare directly into the nostrils and count the hairs. He had a real weakness for the girls — not because they turned him on, I think — but because he wanted to be one of them. I may be queer, but I used to thank God that I hadn’t been born a girl. I wouldn’t have been able to endure the pain of childbirth. Giggling Grendel — that’s what I called him — piled his old Chrysler full of giggling girls and drove them to the football games in the neighboring towns. Grendel didn’t like me one whit. He wouldn’t call on me in class and didn’t cast me in any of the school plays. He directed, you see. I didn’t think about it then, but he could have been the one who wrote the graffiti in the bathroom stall across from his classroom: “Rusty sucks cock.”
At the time, I had no idea who had scrawled it, but they were sure onto me — though I’d never had a dick in my mouth at that point. It really didn’t upset me; it just made me wonder who disliked me so much that they would go to that much trouble to smear me.
Did I tell you they’ve already sent a follow-up postcard? I should just check the not-able-to-attend box and be done with it. I haven’t stayed in touch with anyone and have no friends left in that part of the country. My folks have been dead for eons. I went back once after I graduated — with Jimmy — and that was when we ran into Charlotte Blankenship and Culda Cousins. I’ll never understand why they chose such a suffocating place to live. There’s a time warp in small Midwestern towns. My classmates — all praying to Jesus — will have fat wallets with photos of their grandchildren that they can’t wait to drag out and exhibit to anyone who can stop stuffing their face with potatoes and ham long enough to look. That breeder mentality sticks in my craw. I should go just to tell them that I’ve had thousands of sexual partners. Pedophiles, rapists, convicts and male lovers — and none of them are left. AIDS took half and the others killed themselves with OxyContin and vodka. That would confirm all the sermons they heard at the Grace Methodist church on Water Street. Maybe I should take you with me back to the reunion. I’ll grow a beard and wear a black dress, and you can follow a few paces behind in a tank top and jeans, pulling my oxygen tank. I’ll take along a few snapshots of this canvas if I can finish it. I’ll bet the old gals will enjoy seeing your plump young cock.
I need to lie down for a few minutes. Take a break. I have a new robe someone gave me, in pity — as if I spend all my days in bed. I’ve never even taken it out of the box. It’s on top of my dresser if you want to put it on. I’ve been talking way too much. I’m out of breath.
It was my idea to put in the second oxygen tank, so I could come down here to the studio. Now, I can just reconnect the tubing — and paint. Of course I had to argue with the insurance company about the cost. Otherwise, we’d be stuck up in the bedroom gabbing or whatever and never get any work done. I pretty much have the run of the house, but it’s odd that I spend all my waking time either in this room or in the kitchen. I suppose I’m preparing for the confines of a coffin.
Charlotte Blankenship taught English. I drew her in class one day while she was going on ad nauseum about her favorite French writer, Flaubert. It seems like the day before yesterday. This was one of the classes where we weren’t put in alphabetical order and I sat at the back of the room by the windows. Jake Simmons sat across from me and passed me a note, goading me into drawing her. I started with her head, exaggerating her buck teeth and pin-curled hair. Because she wore frilly blouses I had her in a ruffled collar like Good Queen Bess. I hadn’t realized how much she looked like the Virgin Queen, though she wasn’t a virgin. She and Culda Cousins — the girls’ gym teacher — were lovers. Don’t you just adore alliterative names? They shared an apartment in town. I walked by Culda’s office one evening after school and saw her entertaining a group of girls. She was wearing a man’s dago T-shirt, her idea of haute couture, no doubt. Poor thing had no tits at all. But I guess that probably made her happy.
So I was shading in the cheekbones on my drawing of Blankenship when Jake, a real wise-ass, snatched it off my desk and passed it over to his right, and from there, it made its way around the room. I never did find out who signed my name or who left it on the floor. Blankenship saw it at her feet when the bell rang. I was almost over the threshold when she called my name. “Rusty, I have something to show you,” and I went to her desk and waited until everyone had left the room. After the place emptied out she closed the door. With the drawing clamped in her hand, she came over and held it in front of my face. “That’s not my writing,” I said. “No, but it’s your drawing,” she said. “Do those perms give you a headache?” I said, looking straight at her. And she slapped me. I mean the old dyke just hauled off and slapped me. I wish you could have seen the look on her face when I slapped her back. She was so shocked she fell back against her typewriter with her mouth hanging open and spittle running onto her chin. She rubbed her cheek and said, “Get the hell out of my classroom, you little faggot.”
Yes. She probably would lose her job for that, today — though I never told a soul. I’m afraid I need another break. There’s some Mexican beer in the fridge if you’re thirsty.
After Jimmy died, several women friends tried to fix me up with the most awful, pissy men. Sweet of them and of course they made the assumption that all gay men like each other on sight. I told them to cease and desist.
Did you move your leg? It’s shifted a bit. Try moving your foot back a tad so that your heel is resting against the other foot.
A little more.
You have such beautiful skin.
More.
Yes.
There.
For algebra, I had this positively ancient man — the oldest in our school — who smoked so many cigarettes down in the boiler room between classes that it made me gag when he came over to my desk to help with an equation. Mr. Thoreau. He should have been my English teacher with a name like that. In his class, once, I was working on this drawing of him. He had a remarkable, wrinkled face, folds of flesh hanging over his collar and I captured him in profile with his humped convex nose. He wore flowery ties, extra wide at a time when guys were wearing those skinny ties like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. I drew him with a gigantic tie blowing over his shoulder and made motion marks to indicate his speed and clouds of dust behind to show the dust he had kicked up. God, he moved so slowly, and what made this sketch particularly telling was that I had him in a turtle shell.
I smelled him before I heard him. Anything moving so slowly doesn’t make a lot of noise. He must have watched me draw for a minute or so before I looked up. And all he said was, “Did you solve the equation, Rusty?”
I tried to laugh it off, mostly telling myself that everybody gets parodied in life and that it wasn’t personal at all, because I really did like him and I went into his classroom after the school day ended to apologize. “Even presidents and kings get cartooned,” I said. But he kept erasing the blackboard, his back to me, not looking around at me. And I felt like crap.
Look. On the carpet behind you. The mouse. I saved his life twice yesterday. If Sparkle had seen him he’d be dead already. He sat in the kitchen cleaning his nasty tail, and I picked him up and put him behind the refrigerator. Then later, when I came back into the studio, here he was again. This time when I picked him up to save his life, he bit me. So much for karma or high intelligence. He’s a very cute grey mouse with such bright eyes. But saving mice is not easy. And I won’t help it again. As soon as it grows warmer he’ll go back outside where he belongs. Which reminds me: Are you still comfortable? It feels like it’s gotten a little cooler. I can adjust the thermostat. Or, I wonder, is the backyard even more fraught with unbelievable dangers than living with me and Sparkle?
After I got the invitation to the reunion, I went through my old yearbook, staring at each picture, reading through every bio. Could he have written: “Rusty sucks cock? Was he the one? Now that I’m such a dignified and upstanding senior citizen, I’m to receive the Spencer Prize this Friday at the Institute. Did I tell you? For my body of work. I love that expression: body of work. They have a retrospective of my Cock Collage Series. I hope I’m up to attending.
I’m so fucking old I see sex as a comedy of manners; I have for a long time. A couple of years ago I was nosing around one of the dirty bookstores on Halsted Street and looking at the cock rings and sex toys and I wandered into the back by the stalls. There was this huge, hairy bull of a man leaning back against the partition with his dick out and kneeling before him a scrawny blond giving him head, and I hear the bull say: “A little more lip on the tip.”
And that, as they say, inspired my Cock Collage Series, which also provided a good way to get rid of my porno collection.
But enough of me. Even I am sinking into that swamp of New Age self-referentiality that I so loathe in others. The endlessness of Me-Me-Me.
So, let’s talk about Tony Rugani.
I adored him. You remind me of him a little. I hesitate, in this my dotage, to go into much detail. With emphysema the real problem is the heart. Tony was our senior football star, an Italian in a sea of Germans, so you can imagine how exotic he was to me. I sat in Spanish class, so hard, looking at his ham hock thighs. I drew him with an apelike body, arms hung low, knuckles dragging, wearing his jersey with the number 16, but the face only appeared more enticing in caricature. No way could I make my idol unattractive. I sketched Tony with square, testosterone-filled jaws, a shading of five o’clock shadow, pouting lips and a black spit curl on his forehead, like Superman, or a rock star named Dwayne or Conway or Fabian. The same thing happened: Tommy Zimmerman snatched the drawing up the minute I finished. He passed it to Tony at the front of the room. Of course the minute the hour ended Tony intercepted me outside in the hall, and though I don’t remember what he said, I do remember him lifting me off the floor by the front of my shirt. What I think I said, following my usual disclaimer about how the rich and celebrated always get lampooned, with my feet barely touching the wooden floor, wearing the most engaging smile I could muster, was: “Screw you, Tony. I’m a skinny redhead and you look like Superman. What do you have to complain about?”
You moved your leg again. If it’s cramping, let’s take a breather, if you’ll pardon my pun.
I don’t know what you thought when you first met Jimmy, but I thought I was immune to the French-type until him. It was about the end of October and the cafes had put out their heat lamps and I was sitting close to the entrance of the Musee d’Orsay, sketching the Louvre just across the Seine, when he sat at the table next to me. It doesn’t get really cold in late autumn, but certainly chilly after the sun goes down. Now, I love the sharp noses and beautiful eyes of the French — even when they’re watery and red-rimmed, which they often are. In his face I saw all the seventeenth and eighteenth century portraits. The genes remain: French-on-French. The long, pointed noses with the biggest nostrils outside of sub-Saharan Africa. Big nostrils, twitching all the time. Cheeses, breads, coffees and sea critters keep those delightful French nostrils in a constant state of excitement.
I think of 1961 as the day before yesterday. They’ve built a new school since I graduated and I’m sure blackboards are a thing of the past in the new building. All that history wiped away, as easily as erasing a chalkboard. I can see Old Man Thoreau solving equations up there still. And wouldn’t it be wonderful if he exists in some parallel universe at that very board chalking the symbols, his back turned so that he doesn’t even know the classroom has emptied? He seemed really happy up there at that board. Chalk in one hand and a smoke in the other. A person would think that after smelling his breath like I did, I wouldn’t have taken up the habit. Pall Malls without filters. Perhaps if I’d only had French nostrils. And of course that’s absurd. When I was last in Paris they were smoking in all the restaurants. Thoreau ended up in a nursing home. Sad. No other way to call it.
At least I’ll croak right here in this dusty flat surrounded by my books and paintings. I did the self-portrait over the mantel a year before my diagnosis. I went to that stripper bar on Halsted Street one night, stayed till closing and drank shots with some pasty white hustler. I stuffed dollar bills in his G-string and ended up in bed. But not with him. With a fever for three days. My God, the way I carried on. What happened to the resilience of youth? I got out of bed and announced to no one in particular: “I’ve got to paint,” and that’s when I did the portrait of myself in a loin cloth, stretched out on a burial slab, oiled and anointed like Christ.
Certainly better than Wendell Berger, who got fatter and fatter. His career ended early, I heard, after something inappropriate happened with one of the girls he had in class. He had always tutored certain of his favorites at home, and in a mad moment one probably tore her clothes off while his catatonic mother sat in the front parlor and stared at nothing out on the lawn. Apparently the girl regretted her accusation later, recanted, you might say, but the school board by that time had made up their minds. And all because he wanted a body like hers rather than the one he had been given. Maybe he was a hermaphrodite. He certainly had breasts. He took off his jacket one hot spring day, before air conditioning you know, and the Dacron clung to breasts crowned with silver-dollar sized areolas. It’s a wonder he didn’t lactate. Even with the pig nose, he had the look of a woman.
But they’re all gone now. And I’m next. And that is all a great deal too much to think about. Where do you go these days, or am I too young to know?
So strange the way things work out. Jimmy had wanted to see the area of the country where I’d grown up so we rented car and drove back. Because he, as you know, had taken me to Versailles and introduced me to his mother one Sunday and she cooked a wonderful concoction — a mutton stew if I remember correctly, which I had always thought of as more an Irish dish — and she did it all while suffering from a horrific head cold. I can still see her in her faded-blue terry cloth robe, at work in her provincial kitchen to please her son. So, we were wandering around the first floor aisles of Kresges dime store, the forerunner of K-Mart, where I got my jeans for school at four dollars a pair. This was the first time I’d been back home in over fifteen years, and who should we run into but Charlotte Blankenship. By that time I had matured somewhat and gained perspective as to her relationship with Culda, which back in the sixties was pretty bold. Culda had given her an orchid corsage before the senior prom, and no one said a word when they slow-danced together. Have you ever seen that famous photograph of sailors dancing together on the deck of a battleship during World War II? I must find it in my library. Not now of course. But as to Charlotte and Culda I guess we had a Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell policy. I never heard any of the other students or citizenry expressing their disgust, except for my own mother. “Sick,” she said, when I laughed and told her that I thought they looked like Ma and Pa Kettle. But I’ll save my mother’s neuroses for another time. As I said, she’s long gone now. That day in Kresges I saw immediately that Culda had had a stroke: the left side of her face was slack and lifeless and she didn’t speak. Charlotte pushed her through the aisles and past counters in a wheel chair, and I went up to them, after gathering my nerve, to say Hello. Culda had never been pretty, but at least in my time of knowing her she had enjoyed good health and with the all the naiveté that goes with being young I had not until then appreciated the chilling differences brought about by the passage of time. Of course I myself have only more collapse to look forward to. Who said, While there is death, there is hope? Or is it a Sicilian proverb?
I introduced Jimmy as my boyfriend, that day in Kresges, and Charlotte seemed genuinely glad to see me. Almost hungry for someone to talk to. Back in class in the days and weeks that had followed our exchanged slaps I often caught her looking at me, and the anger in her eyes had completely vanished. After that I went out of my way to be respectful. And I certainly never drew her again.
Jimmy and Charlotte jabbered in French in the middle of the store and it was as if the Normans had invaded England. Back then the burg hadn’t seen many foreigners, and people stopped rifling through the stacks of Capri pants at the far end of the store to gape. Apparently the school had once had a Latin and a French program, not just the Spanish option I’d been given, and Charlotte had been in charge. From the moment Jimmy said, “Enchante. Comment vous?” she broke into a French monologue. It seems she and Culda had travelled to France almost every summer and had been to Versailles many times. Jimmy took to her at once, though he groused to me that she spoke French like a Quebecoise. I suppose that’s why he and I got along so well. Both of us were licensed complainers.
Take another break. I’ll put on some music. Something cheery: Rachmaninoff’s, Isle of the Dead.
In Kresges, Charlotte invited us to their apartment for dessert and coffee. She took wonderful care of Culda and I could see that it hadn’t been easy. Just getting her in and out of their van with that clunky wheelchair would have done me in. We hadn’t planned on staying more than an hour or so, but ended up chatting and exchanging stories for most of the evening. That’s when she told me about Tony Rugani.
Senior year, I heard — or rather overheard — Tommy Zimmerman and a couple of his hood friends gathered next to Tony’s locker. Hoods were shunned by the so-called popular kids because they didn’t play sports or join in the extracurricular activities, but instead sported ducktail haircuts. They wore pegged jeans, which had me hard in study hall, salivating over their calves. They laughed and shoved each other in that tiresome male bonding way that drove me insane, just like when they walked down the halls with their arms draped over each other’s shoulders. I heard some offhand reference to “goings on” in the fourth floor restroom at J. R. Brown’s Department Store. Then Tommy says in a low voice with a grin on his face, “Tony makes the queer stand in a shopping bag so if someone comes in it looks like there’s only one pair of legs in the stall.”
A collage of images flashed through my head. I couldn’t get a precise picture. Things often come to me like that. Not a landscape or a seascape, but a whole assortment of conflicting images. Who stood in the shopping bag? Which way did he face? What exactly went on? I thought about it for a few days and got so curious that I went to Brown’s one day after school. It was our second tallest building in the city, after the five-story Fletcher Office Building, and had children’s toys on four, so it was mostly women and kids up there. And they didn’t come in the men’s room, which was usually empty, and nothing seemed unusual about the place, just two stalls, neither of which was especially marked up with graffiti, and I decided instead to have a look at the model train set in the Toy Department nearby. They had a layout for the upcoming Christmas season.
I watched the steam locomotive make its way over the bridge, past the depot, and through the village. And periodically I glanced across the expanse of the fourth floor, toward the back, past the elevator at the corner entrance to the toilets, but after forty minutes or so when I took a final sweep of the train layout and noticed the bus depot again I decided I’d go down the street to the square to check out the porno in the real bus station.
The magazine section covered one entire corner of the bus depot and there was a taxi stand adjacent to it and a lunch counter next to the ticket window. The newsstand carried several pornographic magazines, which in those days meant no frontal nudes. No hard ons, not even any flaccid cock shots. But instead a breathtaking array of bare-chested boys with muscled bodies in posing straps using cheesy Grecian props like spears and shields with laurel wreaths on their heads and other such nonsense. It was damp and cold outside, the snow coming down harder, when I ducked into the place to get warm. I went right to the corner and pretended to look at the car magazines and even picked up an occasional Sporting News and Time, but what I really wanted to open up was a copy of The Young Physique. They’d all been encased in plastic to prevent just such a thing of course, being the repressed era of the 50s and 60s. A chatty girl from school, Lisa Burnside, came in with her mother and I managed small talk with them for a few minutes until they chose the magazines they wanted and left. Eventually, constantly checking the circular mirror in the corner of the ceiling to make sure I wasn’t being watched, I managed to slip a magazine with a sneering boy in sailor’s cap on the cover under my coat and secure it up under my arm. Then I picked up another copy of Motor Trend or something which I intended to pay for and went to the cashier. Walking with my one arm held against my body like Richard the Third to hold the magazine in place, my God all I needed was a hump, I paid and rushed outside. I could not wait to get home and into to my room to lock the door and whack off. You know how full of jism the high school years are. I mean Jimmy had long been past high school when we met but he was still several years younger than me, and he practically covered the walls and the ceiling with the stuff when we met.
After that afternoon I forgot about Brown’s restroom for a couple of weeks, until a few days before Christmas when I got all horny and decided to go up to the toy department and check things out one more time. I headed over to the train set, but stopped on the way to go through the model airplane and battleship kits. Hidden on the far side of the shelving, I glanced through a space in the boxes and that’s when I saw Tony Rugani come out of the elevator and go into the bathroom. And minutes later a heavyset, middle-aged man came out of the elevator after him and followed right into the toilets.
I barely moved, barely breathed, frozen in place with a kit box of the USS Missouri in my hands. I watched the second hand on the clock over the elevator sweep forward, and then the minutes too. Less than fifteen minutes had passed when the man came out and called for the elevator. He stared straight ahead. And when the bell sounded and the “down” arrow lit up and the operator pulled open the door the man got on and never once looked back. Not five minutes later Tony came out after him, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his coat and a knit cap pulled low over his forehead. Tony himself did look all around as if surveying the store to see who might be there, but I’m sure he didn’t see me. Although his eyes did focus on the area with the models for quite a little while, until the elevator arrived for him.
Do you mind if we call it a day for the time being? Put your clothes on, and we’ll go in the living room and natter for a while, as long as I can keep my energy level up. Then I’m going to need a nap. I do like the way your portrait is coming along, though. Jimmy would be pleased at the sight of his two last boyfriends getting on so amiably.
Get yourself another beer and grab one for me.
Charlotte told me that Tony had shot and killed his wife. I’ll hobble over to the davenport as my grandmother called it and plop on the floor next to you. His wife, his college sweetheart. And then he took his own life. There was all sorts of speculation, she said, as to the cause. When I crouch forward, I can breathe. I can breathe easier.
But you and I could make it up right now and probably come close to the truth. Whatever the truth is.
They had been married for five years and had no children, so I like to think that beefy Tony of gridiron fame had potency problems, or should I say impotency problems, at least in his marriage. I’m not making light of the situation, mind you, and thank God there were no children.
Charlotte moved to Florida and we kept up a correspondence by mail until she died at ninety-two. Long forgotten that time she started to slap me after class, her hand poised in midair, and me flailing at her and missing. I felt such joy finding her fat letters in the mailbox and recognizing the handwriting. That so far outweighs the discovery of today’s emails in my opinion. When Jimmy got sick she gave me great advice about caretaking, though of course that’s a skill and an aptitude that one either possesses or doesn’t.
I told Charlotte how devastating it had been to see the graffiti on the stall of the third-floor restroom that had labeled me a cocksucker. And it’s true that I had no appetite and actually lost weight, going down to a hundred and forty-five pounds. But I’m sure there were other factors at work as well. Things in life are multi-determined. Years of therapy taught me that. I asked Charlotte if she thought Wendell Berger could have been the culprit.
She thought he was definitely an odd duck, but found it implausible that he would risk his career attacking a student in writing.
It’s probably my narcissism at work. People behave the way they behave and make only slight adjustments depending upon their audience. I hadn’t given any thought to high school until the invitation. I haven’t thought a whit about my lifestyle since then either. It hasn’t been an issue. I have never let it bother me.
Throw me that afghan. Christ, it’s cold in here. I just spent five hundred fucking bucks to have this furnace worked on. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! You know there was a time when people knew what they were doing, but now there’s nothing but incompetence and stupidity, out there… No! I take that back, there are scammers and snake oil salesmen masquerading as professionals, but all they’re interested in is getting your money. Thank God, I’ll be gone soon. Now I’m really out of breath. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
Of course, Tony Rugani saw me that day on the fourth floor. I held a Boeing B-17 up as a shield. He stared hard at me and I stared right back. It felt like we were the only two people alive in the world at that moment and I will never forget the expression of longing and sorrow in his twisted smile when with the slightest of nods he pleaded for me to follow. My knees wobbled and my hands shook as I returned the model airplane kit carefully to its place on the shelf.
The way Tony looked at me. My God, those eyes. I didn’t even have to think about it.
With Wendell Berger and Charlotte Blankenship and Culda Cutler and Old Man Thoreau and Jake Simmons and Tommy Zimmerman and Lisa Burnside and the entire student body and everyone in the bus station and the damn town council all looking on, in the Toy Department of J.R. Brown’s Department Store, I found Tony Rugani waiting in the stall when I went into the bathroom and closed the door. I stepped in the shopping bag and took him in my mouth and neither of us said a word.
Oh look, there’s the mouse again. On the hearth, by the fireplace. It’s the first time I’ve seen him in the living room. And of course Sparkle is downstairs in the kitchen sleeping. I’ll be absolutely delighted when it finally warms up outside. At least there’s faint sunshine. I hope to enjoy at least one more summer. Wouldn’t it be a hoot if I did go to the reunion and stood up and announced. “All right, which of you cocksuckers wrote Rusty sucks cock on the bathroom stall across from Wendell Berger’s third period social studies class? It’s your last chance to come clean, because we’ll all be dead tomorrow.”
But I really must close the door on that chapter of my life. Are you ready for another beer?
Ronald Alexander has published four novels, most recently The War on Dogs in Venice Beach (Hollyridge Press). His stories have appeared in publications including The Huffington Post, The Los Angeles Review, Confrontation, and Chicago Tribune. His essay “Survivor’s Guilt ” was nominated by Chattahoochee Review for a Pushcart Prize. Alexander has an MFA in Fiction from Warren Wilson College and is currently an instructor at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. He is living in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico for a year, at work on a new novel.