Hold Your Nose: Here's An Old Short Story

Dear Readers,
Sometimes I am proud of my writing. Other times I cringe when I post something, unsure of how it will be received. This time out, however, I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that all of you will be appalled at what I offer here. This is a short story I wrote circa 1985, back in my very early twenties. This is the point in most writers’ lives when they are so confident that they believe that anything they produce in the form of the written word is simply wonderful and cannot be criticized. I remember working on this piece and thinking I was clever.

Two days ago, I found this story in an old notebook, read it again, and had the same reaction one has when they find a dead rat in their garbage can. With all of that said, I feel I have enough equity built up with my audience that even if I toss a stink bomb at them every once in a while some of them might actually return after the smoke clears and I hang out a few air fresheners in the form of decent posts. So now, without any further ado, here’s the dead rat I created back when I was a mere lad of just past legal drinking age.

-Mr. Grudge


The Concrete That Binds
Or: Tip-Toe through the Rip-Tide
(Copyright 1985 M.J. Kannengieser)


Alger’s murder was, of course, inevitable, and yet sickening to the many who knew him. There are some who did celebrate; but, most accepted the idea that it wasn’t his fault. Oh, Alger presented himself as a pillar of the community having finished a mail order course to become a fully certified Notary Public (though the authority vested in him made him drunk with power).

Never the less, nobody questioned why a sixteen year old high-schooler would have met with such a gruesome end.

Some would have guessed that he was shot. Former parents of his (Alger was passed from foster family to foster family, until he was ultimately taken into the care of a family of ferrets), were hell bent on seeking vengeance on him and would storm into Alger’s room at night and riddle the place with gun fire.

All of this started when Alger was small, perhaps two years old, and as a result he never learned to walk as he was constantly pressing his body against the floor and scurrying about to dodge the bullets (hence, how he met the ferrets).

Alger’s many parents were not overreacting, though they completely misunderstood poor Alger. You see, he was never given proper religious instruction; and, he merely saw murder and extortion as a means of getting close to those he loved, and not as mortal sin. Quite frankly, he thought they should simply drop the matter and get over it already.

Fortunately, Alger was never charged with any homicide, thanks to his high school principal (a closet pedophile), who graciously took the rap for him in exchange for Alger’s Polaroid’s (Oh, how Alger loved to spy!).

They way Alger died was officially a mystery until the medical examiner was able to chisel his way through to his body.

Alger had been scampering along the sidewalk one day (about ankle high) along with the ferrets when he plunged into a plot of wet cement. This particular concrete was the quick drying variety and he was became stuck right away. Certainly, the ferrets were unable to drag him out, so the plopped a straw into his mouth (the only visible part of his body) and continued to feed him Cool Whip and pistachio nuts (Alger’s favorite).

Eventually, Alger’s tremendous weight gain required a larger cement block. A local, shady contractor obliged the ferret’s appeal for help; but the ferrets, being nasty little rodents, had no money. When the contractor, eyeing Mrs. Ferret, suggested that there were “other ways” they could “pay” him, they flew into a rage, attacked the contractor, and gnawed his heels out. Fearing for his life, the contractor fled, tippy-toed, back to his office. There he enlisted the aid of his very large sons to exact his revenge on the ferrets by hurling Alger into the ocean.

Later that evening when the tide went out, the ferrets ran to the shore and found Alger in the shallow water blowing S.O.S. bubbles through his straw. As the ferrets struggled futilely to drag Alger out of the surf, Alger gave up, and he offered his last breath by whistling “Shave and a Haircut”.

The ferrets called the police who immediately tossed them into a sack and took them to the dog pound. There, they were placed into a cage with a large, German Shepard and eaten.

Eventually, Alger’s body was discovered again after several bathers at the beach dived into the surf and then floated lifelessly to the surface. This caused a spectacular news event and a police investigation.

A local contractor won the bid to haul out the concrete block which was killing off beach goers. In front of scores of news cameras, he hobbled directly to the spot near underwater slab of cement. A reporter became suspicious.

“But how did you know to look there?” he asked. All the contractor could do was stammer aloud and teeter-totter back and forth on his tip-toes.

At the police station, the contractor admitted to dumping the cement there after cops threatened to prosecute him under the a sub-section of federal RICO statutes, which, in a nutshell states “Anyone in the construction industry has be guilty of something” The contractor turned state’s evidence against his sons and then entered the Federal Witness Protection Program, where he was fitted with artificial heels so he wouldn’t stick out in a crowd when he walked.

The Medical Examiner was allowed to chisel into the cement block after paying $100 to Local 306 Jack Hammer Operators Union, for a temporary union card that gave him permission to do so without fear of having his knee caps broken.

They found Alger at the center of the slab, clutching what at first glimpse, they thought was a suicide note. A specialist (actually a janitor at the morgue, the Medical Examiner forgot his glasses) determined it was in fact a Polaroid of the contractor and Mrs. Ferret in bed together the night before his heels were chewed off. Go figure.

For Alger, an epitaph:

For Ferrets of Love
And contractors of doom
To whom insoles mean embarrassing gloom
For him, Alger never did walk
Entombed in sidewalk, the world did gawk
At the bottom of the sea,
Among raw sewage and waste
With a few final bubbles, the end did haste

The End

Okay Readers, I won't blame you if you run away and don't come back. But, please, please don't go! I'll make it up to you. I promise!

Sheltered Harbor

My hometown is located on the south shore of Long Island, New York. The Merrick Indians named the area “Copiague,” which literally means “sheltered harbor.” Early settlers adopted the name for their village, and today Copiague is a hamlet within the Town of Babylon.

South of Merrick Road, which separates Deauville Estates, where I was raised, from the rest of the town, lies the Great South Bay.

The homes there sit along canals that lead to this majestic body of water, which afforded a living to generations of hardy baymen who harvested its depths for clams, crabs, eels, and other sea life. The dwindling bounty culled from the bay still feeds Long Island and New York City, but that lifestyle is dying.

So, too, are people like me whose lives are inexorably tied to the waters surrounding Long Island.

There is a saying: “You know you’re from Long Island when you’ve gone clamming at least once in your life.”

That is certainly true for me.

Many of my friends owned clam boats. These were long, flat vessels with small cabins and just enough space for a person to squeeze inside and operate the steering wheel. Long clam rakes were tethered to the deck, and the bay became your home for the day.

There’s something supernatural about breathing in the sea air, sipping a can of Coca-Cola fished from the bottom of an ice-filled Styrofoam cooler, and enjoying the view of the looming Robert Moses Causeway Bridge.

A powerful spell cast by the briny bay water draws a person back to its shores throughout life to relive those quiet memories.

From my childhood home, one could hear the braying of motorboats racing along the coastline during the summer. The salty bay breeze wafted gently into the neighborhood and teased the olfactory nerves of bored schoolchildren yearning for the beach.

The beaches of Long Island, stretches of sandy Heaven along the south shore, remain burned into my memory, like sun on skin, with affection.

In my formative years, I was accustomed to carefree days swimming in the surf. My skin was tan, my hair bleached blond, and my muscles toned from swimming for daylong stretches among the seaweed and horseshoe crabs.

My home now is on the opposite end of the Island’s spectrum.

My children are being raised in rocky, hilly terrain alien to my oceanic origins on the south shore. The Long Island Sound’s whisper is too gentle to compel many more than a handful of seafarers to its banks in comparison with the mighty Atlantic, and its beauty demands a harsher aesthetic, adapted to stony ridges and sloping seaboards.

Long Island is, by geological definition, a terminal moraine, leftover scraps from a glacier in the shape of a fish.

At the top is the heavier material: boulders and sloughed-off bits of mountains.

What remains at the bottom is pulverized, softer earth and sand, pushed ahead as if swept by a broom.

There is much more to the difference between the north and south shores of Long Island.

There is also a class difference unique to the separate and unequal suburban towns on opposite sides of the Long Island Expressway.

The north is wealthier, its towns rich from higher taxes and a perceived elite class of citizens. My original home on the south shore is composed mostly of blue-collar working families, with school systems straining under the weight of too many students and not enough revenue.

Many families, with both mother and father working, have to rent rooms in their homes or create apartments within their dwellings to take on tenants and help pay the mortgage and taxes.

My roots are there.

The return visits I make to my father’s home stir my senses and cause my skin to prickle with the residual anticipation of returning to the shoreline.

My wife grew up much as I did.

Summers at the seaside with her family provided her with memories parallel to mine. We often share stories while driving around the omnipotent water towers at Robert Moses State Park and Jones Beach, remembering our respective awe at riding over the long Robert Moses bridge and the joy of body surfing in foamy waves with sand in our bathing suits.

Our own children are denied such a life.

We bring them to the beach, but their enjoyment is not the same.

It is as if we have taken them to an amusement park, its rides being the waves and its games the sand and seashells. Eventually, those attractions lose their luster to the video games and computers waiting back at home.

There is no kinship between my children and the water.

The Great South Bay and the sparkling Atlantic have no secrets to tell these outsiders.

One has to reside along the edges, the sinewy strips of sand and shells, and listen from birth.

There is a promise, a covenant, between those who are enchanted and the ocean.

It is a code.

A lifestyle.

And its bond exists forever.

Long Island Great South Bay bayman north shore south shore terminal moraine fish clams clam boat beach Robert Moses Copiague New York