“My cock.”

            “Excuse me?” Joan Ford asked. She crossed her legs underneath the table at the front of the seminar room.

            Roberto Alfonzo felt his face get a bit flush; he didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or to laugh.

            “My cock,” the young man said again. “That’s what I’m working on, my cock.” He leaned back and ran his hands across his perfect Vandyke, looking to Roberto more like a model in a Tommy Hilfiger ad than a writer.

            “A stream of consciousness vignette of a day in my life,” he continued, “told from the perspective of my cock.” The class was silent.

            “It’s quite a story, really. I’m hoping to break the barriers that have constrained my fiction behind a façade of pre-millennial suburban dysfunction.”

            Roberto shifted slightly in his chair and looked around the room. No one else seemed particularly uncomfortable; two people were taking notes.

            Was this a bad idea?

            Roberto saw the advertisement in the back of Writer’s Monthly, which he’d picked up at the Seven-Eleven on his lunch break about three months ago. It was a quiet day so he went back to the lumberyard and sat in the back of the saw shed, on a sawed-off tree log that the workers used as a seat, flipping through the pages and sipping Yoo-hoo. The ad was for a writing contest: first prize for the five winners was participation in a six-week workshop taught by Joan Ford, the now-famous author of First Flood, a bestselling novel that was turned into the highest-grossing movie in Hollywood last year. Roberto wanted to do something again; he wanted to do something with his mind. It was a year now since he dropped out of college. He rolled the magazine up and put it in his back pocket. It was five o’clock, time to let the dogs out—the Rotweillers that patrolled the yard at night—and go home to his mother and father and dinner.

Eventually he did enter the competition, wrote a story about his grandfather in Venezuela, about how when his grandfather was a child he found a baby goat that the family let him keep as a pet. Except it wasn’t a goat at all, as it turns out; it was a ram, and when it came to maturity it grew horns and started butting everyone in the village. So his grandfather gave it up. A simple story, really.

            The woman sitting across from cock-man spoke next. She was gruff and heavy-set, with short-cropped hair and a thick British accent.

            “I’m working on a story about Sri Lanka, you know. About an Australian diplomat and her adventures in Sri Lanka and the surrounding islands. I’m really interested in the lingering effects of British colonialism on places like Sri Lanka—the way it has affected the natives, as well as the British who continue to live there. Kind of a travelogue, really—hopefully with a bit of sex mixed in just for the fun of it.”  The class laughed.  

            Roberto didn’t know much about Sri Lanka, except that it was an island off of India. Africa? Whatever.  He’d never even been to Venezuela, although his family went to Florida once. And to New Jersey—well the malls there, anyway. Other than that, he’d lived his entire life on the Lower Eastside, until his father moved the family seven years ago to Staten Island.

            The woman on Roberto’s right spoke next. She was young and sexy and seemed to be chewing gum as she spoke.

            “My story is about young female magazine writer who takes a house in the Hamptons between two powerful publishers, both of whom she’s slept with.” Roberto heard her snap her gum ever-so-slightly as she finished her sentence.

            “You know, it’s all about the plight of single women, late twenties and early thirties, trying to make a living and find a man in nineties New York.”   She smiled to the class and leaned back in her chair. Roberto suddenly realized that the woman wasn’t as young as he thought.

            “And you?” Joan Ford asked. She was now looking at Roberto. She had a bright face and wore what seemed to be a man’s dress shirt, with starched collar turned up and wide purple stripes. Roberto leaned forward and put his hands together; he felt a splinter in his callused right index finger—he’d been meaning to take that out with a utility blade before he left for Manhattan. The creosote in the pressure-treated wood made his finger blow up into a white, blistery balloon.

            He stuttered and furrowed his brow.

            “H-Hi,” he said, “My name’s Roberto Alfonzo, and I thought I’d write a series of stories based on my grandfather—you know, when he first came to this country, to the Lower Eastside, from Venezuela.” 

            He paused, then added: “As told from the perspective of his cock, as he travels through Sri Lanka banging a famous magazine publisher!”

            Okay, he didn’t really say that. But he was thinking it. Instead he let his voice trail off and the rest of the class just sat there looking at him.

            “And that’s it, really…” he said and his voice trailed off again.

            “Oh, right,” said Joan Ford, “the grandfather story. Very… sweet.”

            The next morning at eight, Roberto was back in the lumberyard thinking he made a mistake. None of the other students even said a word to him or acknowledged his presence as the class broke up—indeed, publisher-fucker and cock-man were standing on either side of him as he sat in his little chair, talking over him as if he weren’t even there. When they finally moved, he grabbed his coat quickly and slid out the door. On the ferry ride home, he didn’t even open his marble composition book; instead, he balled up his jacket behind his head and went to sleep on the bench.

            Despite it being almost summer, it was a chilly morning in the lumberyard, and as Roberto walked across the yard to the insulation shed he put his leather gloves on his hands, for warmth as much as protection. He stopped first to check the scar on his index finger where he’d finally cut it open and pulled out the creosote splinter. Healing nicely. He heard Frank the delivery driver yelling from the other end of the yard through his missing front teeth, drunk already, yelling in his slurry German accent: “Youse fallas ‘ad better ‘ave loaded me up, see, ‘cause I’ll slice my throat with my fingernail afore you get me to do it myself!”  Jesus, what a fuckin’ moron, Roberto thought. Let Tommy and Harry deal with him.

            Roberto was headed to the bins on the other side of the insulation shed, where the Douglas fir two-by-twelve’s were kept. A whole skid of sixteen-footers had been delivered yesterday and had to be slid, one by one, into the bins. A hundred boards in all—more, if you counted the old boards that had to be taken out first to make way.

            This was Roberto’s favorite assignment, since he got to be alone behind the insulation shed at the far edge of the yard. And once you got into a rhythm, the work wasn’t even that hard—although on a cold day it took a while for the muscles to warm up. Being alone back there gave him time to think, and this morning he was thinking mostly about his writing class. He remembered the sense of privilege, the sense of pride he’d felt when he’d been accepted into the workshop. Writer’s Monthly! Joan Ford! First Flood!  He’d actually be around these people! It was a sense of accomplishment he hadn’t felt since he left college. Not that his family understood. His father just glanced at the letter when he showed it at dinner and said “You sure it don’t cost anything? Sometimes they lure you in, then they try to sell you something,” while his sister, baby-in-arms, chimed in “When you get so good at English, anyway?” Only his mother really congratulated him, making a big show of it, coming around the table to hug him, saying: “My star. Maybe now you become a lawyer, make me proud.” It was something, anyway.

            At least that’s what he thought then; he wasn’t so sure now. Sri Lanka? The Hamptons? Where would he come up with stories like that, hustling boards in a lumberyard all day, surrounded by drunken illiterates? What would he write: “Tales of the Menlo Park Mall?” He was flinging two-by-twelve’s so hard now that they were bouncing off the rear of the bin with a crash, moisture flying from between the boards as Roberto slid each one on the back of the board before it.

            He realized that he hadn’t felt this despondent since he decided to leave college a year ago, after only two semesters, announcing it at the dinner table in front of his parents, Uncle Tino and his then-pregnant sister. It was summer and the tuition at St. John’s was due, but the gas in the house had been turned off, turned off because the bill hadn’t been paid for six months. They were living all summer like that, his mother cooking on a Coleman propane stove sitting on top of the oven, all of them bathing in two inches of water that they heated in the basement in two large coffee urns and lugged up the stairs to the bathroom.

            “I’m dropping out,” Roberto said across the table, to silence. “I’ll stay at the lumberyard for a year, then decide what to do.”

            “Berto, no,” his mother said, “you promised me you’d be a businessman, un abogado…”

            His father kept eating as the rest of the table leapt into argument.

            Uncle Tino chimed in: “So, what? You want to work manual labor all you life, wind up like me? Carlos, talk to the boy…”

            His sister said, “ I don’ see why he gets to go to college at all when I don’t.”

            “My abogado…”

            “C’mon kid, think about what you’re doing with your life.”

            Suddenly his father slammed his glass down on the table with a thump; milk flew halfway across the tablecloth and everyone shut up. His father stood up and pointed across the table at Roberto. In Spanish, he said: “Sin un diploma, tu tienes que comprobar que eres inteligente. Con un diploma, ellos tienen que comprobar que eres tonto.”

(Which means, approximately: “Without a degree, you have to prove you’re smart. With a degree, they have to prove you’re dumb.”)

And then he sat down and continued his dinner in silence.

            The truth was, Roberto’s father was always making pronouncements like this, and no one ever listened to him. They didn’t have the money—that was the bottom line. Roberto left St. John’s, used the money he’d saved to pay off the gas bill, and he’d been at the lumberyard ever since.

            By ten o’clock he finished the skid of two-by-twelve’s and came out from behind the insulation shed to get a cup of coffee. He saw Harry Stone standing there, rubbing his chin, staring over at the sand bin. The lumberyard sold sand by the cubic yard—either delivered or poured into a customer’s truck with a big yellow payloader that sat next to the bin like a rusty dinosaur.

            Harry Stone was short and old and misshapen, wrinkled like a catchers mitt, his body bent and tangled from a lifetime of manual labor—first on the tugs in New York harbor, then, for the better part of the past decade, in the lumberyard. Though anglo, his skin was darker than Roberto’s, but loose and leathery all over his body—like it might fall off at any moment. He had a serious limp and his bony elbows seemed to sprout out of his forearms in the wrong direction, as if he were about to grow a new set of hands halfway up each arm. A perpetual cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth, and one eye was almost totally shut. He looked like a cross between Popeye and The Frog, from the old Courageous Cat cartoons.

            He growled when he spoke, and after some sentences twitched noticeably and made a hissing sound: “Isssssss…” After a while, you just got used to it.

            Out of the corner of his good eye, he saw Roberto walking across the yard.

            “Hey, Robby, c’mere. Isssssss…”

            Roberto walked over and Harry pointed to the sand.

            “Robby, you see anything different about the sand?”

            “Different?”

            “The color...”

            Roberto looked again. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah, it’s, like, more yellow. Where’d it all come from, anyway? That bin was empty yesterday.”

            Harry turned, disgusted, and waved away the sight of the new sand. He hissed. “Ahhhh, that ain’t real sand. Willie’s fightin’ with the Mezzacappa Brothers, that’s what. Isssssss… That’s why we got that cheap sand in there, he went to another supplier. Fuckin’ guy’s so cheap, he’d sell his mother cat litter and call it sand. Isssssss…”

            “You mean that ain’t real sand?”

            Harry looked up at him, squinted in the sunlight and adjusted his baseball cap.

            “Listen Robby, let me tell you something. The last time Willie was fightin’ with the Mezzacappas was probably five years ago, and there was barely sand in there at all. Isssssss…Barely a yard of it, if that. So one day I get an order for a yard of sand and I go into Willie and I says: ‘Hey, Willie, there ain’t no yard of sand in there!’

            “So he looks up from his desk and he says: ‘Dig deeper, lad. Dig deeper!’

            “So I come back out, and just like he told me, I dig as deep as I can. Then I pour the sand into the truck and I head out to the customer’s house. Isssssss…

            “Well, it turns out that about a year or two before that one of the dogs died, see, and Willie buried him under the sand bin. Isssssss…So I get to the customer, I open the gate and lift the bed of the truck to pour the sand, and what pops out but the dead dog’s skeleton, standing straight up there in the middle of the pile of sand in the guy’s driveway. Isssssss…

            “So after I lower the bed, he comes around the side of the truck, screaming. He says to me: ‘Hey, there’s a dead dog in my sand. Isssssss…’

            “As I drive off, I say to the guy: ‘Don’t worry ‘bout it. No extra charge.’” As Harry’s said this, he pantomimed driving off in the truck, waving to the irate customer in the side view mirror. Then he hissed one more time, turned and limped away toward the forklift, saying to Roberto over his shoulder: “Damned if I ever want to go through that again…”

            Roberto never knew whether to believe one of Harry’s tales, but as he watched the old man limp across the yard, this aching, hissing wreck of a man, he thought about the stories that must be draped across the years of his gnarled, grinding life, and what kind of books and movies they would have made if Harry had the opportunity to put them down on paper. He smiled, suddenly, for the first time all day, and went inside to if there were any other skids of lumber to put away.