We're All In This Together (2009) - Plot & Excerpts
"I can't work, I can't sleep," I said. "If I was an essay I would have no thesis, no conclusion. I'd fail a student for producing something like me." I used to be a history teacher. I was crying. I had an image of a parade, one of those ragged, snaking affairs that trickles through brick-hearted middle American towns on the Fourth of July: starting with the fire trucks and the police cars and the harvest float with the pretty girls wearing costume shop overalls and chewing on big pieces of straw; and then come the war veterans in their pressed blues and top-down convertibles, and the pomp of the high school marching bands in their white boots and spangles, trombones stabbing and batons twirling; but after that the procession begins to grow uneasy, because the labor guys are next, strutting and drinking from paper bags, trying to knock off each other's mesh baseball caps, throwing pennies at the ass of the fat boy with the bass drum at the back of the band; and following them are the doom-faced Little Leaguers with their stirrups yanked up to their knees, and the tiny, dazed ballerinas; and their parents keep pace, shoving down the crowded sidewalk like federal agents in an action movie, snapping pictures and occasionally leaping into the street to grab someone's shoulder and give it a firm shake of warning; and finally it dwindles to a freak show of uninvited tagalongs, halfway house loonies signed out for the afternoon and waving around their ice cream cones, street kids throwing snapdragons and shouldering into parked cars to set off the alarms, and, worst of all, the disciples of the local religious sect, dressed in black ties and handing out intricate diagrams of the secret universe that lies beneath our own, like the table beneath the cloth; and at the parade's end, there stumbles a filthy busker, crowing "Love Me Do," over and over again, up and down every street; all of these poor people, growing blisters and getting sunburned, acting as if they were actually going to someplace, and not just to the last stop sign in town.
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