William Males

The Ticket Lady version 26 July, 2008

2008-02-06T06:51:00.000-08:00

The Ticket Lady

I was whored to my father, not in the flesh, but in soul and pocketbook. Neither of us wanted it that way, but that’s the way it was: Whored to his money which was bigger than mine, to his ideas that were more rooted, to his country’s concepts meaning war in Vietnam. So I was figuring on selling the car he’d given me, walking out on the shrink he’d paid for, and tearing up the letter from his draft board that I kept in the pocket of his field jacket I wore as a charm.

“Where you want to go?” said the ticket lady at Will Rogers World Airport. Her words were almost lost in the prairie emptiness. Something the glass building put me in mind of the clay bareness of a farmyard. With country deference, I moved as close to her as I could, with the high desk still between us. There were no other customers. She was an older ticket lady, surely over thirty, and had wrinkles starting around her eyes.

“Would you like to keep me?” I asked.

She pouted and blew the hair from her eyes. She looked at me as if to say “What?” but didn’t say it, so I didn’t answer.

They grew alfalfa along their air strip and a truck had dropped a couple of bales outside the front. This dusted the asphalt green in one spot. I turned in that direction, but was really looking at my own reflection in the windows.

“I wouldn’t want to keep you,” she said behind my back. When I turned, I saw she had softened her stance to help me see the fullness of her bosom. Her secret softness belied the strictness of her uniform with its pillbox hat. Her mouth was unpainted and she talked with a satisfied voice, drumming the counter with nails that were trim but not lacquered.

My father told me to choose the satisfied ones. Frustrated ones would never be satisfied, he said. Why did I keep referring to him! Would my life be a footnote to his?

“I’d take it as a favor,” I said, “and I come cheap. I could help out around the house.”

She smiled. “What can you do around the house?”

“I can mow the lawn. I can vacuum but I don’t like it.”

“Do you like to mow the lawn?”

“Not really.”

“What else can you do?”

“I can water the flowers if you tell me how much.”

“How much would you want?”

“How much what? Oh just room and board and gas.”

“Do you have a car?”

“Figuring on selling it, for the ticket.”

She looked away. “Ever been with a woman?”

“I haven’t been inside much.”

“I see.” She straightened up and cleared her throat. “Well I don’t know, I have two cats.”

“I had a hand-me-down Indian paint, after my brother.”

“Did you feed it?”

“Yes ma´m.”

“Water it?”

“Yes.”

She stretched across the counter and pulled my hand to her. Her grip was stronger than you’d think. I let my hand go. She opened it out, inspected it, its cuticles, its knuckles. “When do you need my decision?”

“Well, it would be good to know pretty quick. Then I wouldn’t have to buy a plane ticket or even sell the car.”

“Are you circumcised?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Do your own laundry?”

“I’m a quick learner.”

“Wipe off the ring in the bathtub?”

“What ring?”

“Smoke?”

“No ma’am.”

She was a gypsy with my hand. She looked it all over, pushed on it. Then she closed it up and gave it back.

“You’ll make a good hand, wherever” she said, “but I can’t keep you. Where do you want your ticket to?”

The FBI Man (excerpt)

2007-11-27T13:44:00.000-08:00

Mom was still a naive brag machine in the spring of ´68 when the FBI man visited her. I had dropped out of Yale at Christmastime of ´67, making pronouncements. Amazing how impotent my statements were.

Up until this time, I had been Mom’s underpinning. Now that I was gone she lacked a foothold. She harkened back to the boy I had been as a way of getting out of bed in the mornings.

“And dependable as the day is long.” Mom sang ‘dependable’. “One time his Daddy took him to the show over at Sayre . . .”

“Ma’am, I’m not . . .”

“And turned out the show was closed. But little Bill waited.”

“Do you know where he might be?”

“It was always easy to find him. Where ever you put him he’d be there.”

“Where he is now?”

“What has he done?”

“Please Ma’am. You must understand I wouldn’t be bothering you if I didn’t have to.”

“He was always a good boy.”

“Ma’am, we’re looking for him now. For his own good. Can we sit down?”

“You don’t know where he is?”

“We can sit right here. Put everything down now, just sit.”

Her arms were full of scrapbooks to show the FBI man. She always kept scrapbooks.

...

Here in the house where I grew up there was only the smell of Mom’s wall-to-wall carpet. As a child I used to put my head down close to breathe it in.

With all that carpet, sounds were dampened and the furniture didn’t squeak ; if it did, the squeaks were drowned in the stuffing. Mom and the FBI man made no noise as they sat down and they kept quiet, as if waiting for sounds to catch up. The air conditioner held its breath.

The FBI did not smoke. Even back then, when people smoked, there was something particularly conscientious about this agent.

“He was in the 4-H, the scouts . . .”

“I know Ma’am. I also have a mother.”

Mom, in her kitchen, around the same time the FBI man came for a visit.

William Males - Publications

2007-02-23T10:09:00.000-08:00

BBC World Service
1997 Bridge Day
1994 At the Dentist’s
1991 A Story from the Night Side

Winner: International Capoliveri Haiku Contest 2008

(Prize: a week on Elba for two)

http://www.giorgioweiss.it/node/249

Narrative
Readers’ Narratives 2007 Office of the American Consulate

Readers’ Narratives 2010 Stockholm Airport: April 1969

http://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/fall-2010/stockholm-airport

Stand
Vol. 7, No. 4, 2008 The Last Time I Saw Theo van Biels
Vol. 39, No. 4, 1998 Little Guys
Vol. 38, No. 3, 1997 Yearlings
Vol. 35, No. 3, 1994 At the Dentist’s

Modern Haiku,

2009, microverse

"quiet darkness . . . "

"stone on mossy stone . . ."

Fri Haiku
9 poems 2008, 15 poems 2009, 19 poems 2010

http://web.mac.com/larsga/Fri_Haiku/Fri_Haiku.html

(Also in annual anthology.)

Pif
1999 The Dog House
1997 Formation

Swink
Fall 2008 The Taxi Driver

http://www.swinkmag.com/newswink/williammales.html

and also:

An Incomplete History of Roger Mills County
2007 The FBI Man

The Bennington College Writing Seminars Alumni Chapbook Series 1999
Things I Don't Remember

Broomweed Journal
Vol. 1, No. 2, 2005 How I Learned to Walk the Baby
Vol. 1, No. 1, 2004 Snot Nora, Hertzel and Me, Mrs. Pomfret, Miss Bashum, Touch Typing, Sally Polly's Party, Aviva Goacres, The Pool Hall

Cyber Collaboration: Writings from the Bennington Collective
2004 The Ticket Lady

Deadsnake Apotheosis
Vol.1, Issue 1, 1998 At the People's Dental Station

Other work published in Sweden

Ars longa (Chapbook anthology)
2004 Easter Dinner, Hur det var att ligga vid Yale 1966

Haiku förvandlingar (Anthology, Swedish Haiku Society)
2004 3 poems

Möten med Sverige (Anthology from EN BOK FÖR ALLA)
1997 Tidigt en morgon

Livsbilder (Anthology from EN BOK FÖR ALLA)
1996 Min pilgrimsfärd, Eos

Svarfångat (Dalaröster VII, Anthology, Dalarnas författarförbund)
2007 Four poems

William Males - A Short Biography

2007-02-22T08:22:00.000-08:00

William Lowell Males was born in 1946 on the wide open prairies of Oklahoma. A serial dodger, Males abandoned the prairie and promise of filling his father’s banking shoes for the prestige of Yale. A columnist for the Yale Daily News, he quit before finishing his senior year to travel in Europe and avoid the draft. On the insistence of his parents, he reluctantly returned to the US to join the Army, receiving training as a medic in Washington, DC. Protesting American involvement in the Vietnam War, Males deserted his post.

William Males moved to Sweden, where he worked briefly at "The Center," a gathering place for American deserters and draft dodgers. He later studied medicine at the University of Gothenburg, but dropped out after three years. Somewhere along the line, Males got married, had three children, and abandoned ship. At least we can say he was consistent.

In 1980, William Males and his second wife bought an old school house in the Swedish outback, converting it into an artist's retreat. Holding an MFA from the low-residency Writing Seminars at Bennington College, Males has been teaching creative writing at the University of Gavle for the past ten years, and has had the honor of having his works published with BBC's World Service, Stand, and Narrative Magazine.

A doting grandfather trying to come to terms with a maverick past, William Males is currently writing his memoir, A Good Boy -- My Military History, loosely based on his life on the prairie, his life in Sweden, and the tangled tumbleweed of memory that rolls between.