Greg Ames

I Feel Free

McSweeney's 21

I’d been dating Karen for two weeks, maybe three, when she told me an ex-lover was stalking her. “Relentlessly,” she said. They’d broken up over a year ago, she insisted, but Trang just couldn’t take a hint. He followed her everywhere, threatened her with a bowie knife, and had even kicked another man repeatedly in the mouth with his combat boots. Major reconstructive surgery. “He’s huge,” she said. “And crazy.”

Defiance

The Sun Magazine, August 2003

In the YMCA sauna, Bill Drucker, a pharmacist, was holding forth on the subject of mutual funds, pros and cons, when the door banged open and an icy blast of air slapped everybody’s cheeks and chests. Pontius Pilate strode in, his wool robes shushing against his naked hairy ankles. “Hello, boys,” he said. Father Delmont, who was seated next to me, cinched his soggy white towel at his waist and scurried out of the sauna. Pilate insinuated himself between Drucker and me on the wooden bench and tapped my knee with his white-taped fingers. “I have been looking for you,” he said. “We’re on at three, my friend.”

Physical Discipline

Open City 17

In the winter of 1983, when I was twelve years old, my older sister Cathy carried a ventriloquist’s dummy with her wherever she went. The dummy’s name was Marilyn, and at first nobody had the heart to tell Cathy that Marilyn was not really a dummy, but was in fact a charred strip of bark from our fireplace. But what could we do? Cathy skated freely on the frozen pond of her imagination, and as she wasn’t hurting anybody but herself, we generally ignored her eccentricities. She had just turned thirteen. Every night she slept with this burnt, splintered wood in her narrow bed, she snuggled with it on the sofa after school while she watched soap operas and sit-coms, and she left big black streaks across everything she touched, from the refrigerator door to my previously white gerbils. Mr. Barker, Cathy’s homeroom teacher, was concerned. The school psychologist, Nancy Palermo, asked my father if we had recently lost any family members to a house blaze or a fiery car crash. My father answered in the negative. Ms. Palermo wanted to see Cathy three times a week after school for private consultations.

Buffalo Lockjaw

Winner of the 2009 NAIBA Book of the Year Award

I park my rental car outside the Elms and sit without moving, hands resting on the steering wheel, for almost twenty minutes. I'm listening to a CD I made six years ago. In my early twenties I wanted to document the story of my hometown the way Studs Terkel had tackled labor in America, but I abandoned the project, like everything else I ever started, about halfway through.

For two years I carried a digital voice recorder in the back pocket of my jeans. Calling myself an urban ethnographer, I conducted over a hundred interviews with drunks in dive bars, blue-collar kids who grew up near Buffalo's abandoned factories, artists and musicians and athletes who would never become famous and an array of local jokers and knuckleheads. I was not interested in hearing from the winners, I thought. At that time I had a pretty loose definition of what winning meant, but I'm sure it involved easy wealth and unwarranted prestige. I was a reverse snob. (More at buffalolockjaw.com)