Johnny stepped off the plane and breathed that sweet Burbank smog. He took a big whiff, just filling his nostrils. A loud, long exhale, poooooooof. “Finally back home,” as he shuffled along with his rolling suitcase. He’d been chatting with some woman in a plane about some such nonsense. His job or something. Making bullshit speak just to pass the time, and make a pass at her. She was this real leggy blonde, a beaut from San Francisco catching a connecting flight in Chicago. She wasn’t lipstick lovely, more of a ponytail pretty, soft eyes and small lips. She wrote in a journal, which had immediately aroused his curiosity.

“You’re a writer?”

“Ha. Never. I like to read though. You?”

“Well. No. I mean, I write sometimes. Poems, back when I was in school I guess.”

“Yea. I like poems, they really make you think. Little puzzles. Poem puzzles!” And she thought this was hilarious. Well, hilarious would have been an overstatement. “Why do you ask?”

“I just saw you writing there and it made me wonder. I’m observant I guess.”

She sat back in her chair and shut her book. “You’re not reading over my shoulder are you?” It was hard to judge whether her eyes were serious.

“I- no.. No never. How could you accuse me of such a thing?” Johnny looked her in the eyes and ran his fingers through his hair until he got to the top of his dome where he scratched his head with his finger tips. A stewardess came by and dropped off a drink. She had reddish brown hair, and blue eyes.

“Here’s your coke.” She smiled at him and handed Johnny’s neighbor a plastic cup filled with ice water. Johnny nodded to the stewardess and snapped the top of his coke can.

“It’s my journal. I’ve kept one since I was five. This is my 37th journal.” She placed her hand on the cover and tapped her fingers over the leather. “I write about things I see, or put newspaper clippings in. Some times I just put pictures in there. And I travel a lot too, so that helps.”

“I don’t like to fly. It’s one of those uncomfortable necessities of life.” Johnny scrunched his toes together inside his shoes. “You can’t just get up and walk around. Going to the restroom doesn’t even feel right. Plus, what if this thing goes down? I’ll just suck down oxygen with the rest of these people until we crash.”

“You’re a real optimist. I bet you are fascinating at parties.” She smiled at this and Johnny snickered.

“Sure. I wouldn’t know. I’m often too busy being the drunken asshole in the corner.” He tried this out on her and waited for a response.

Her eyes widened and she sank back into her chair, but the change of expression lasted not even a second. “You sound like my husband.” Johnny cringed and hoped she didn’t see it. “He was one of those guys, a lot like you I’m sure. A real dickhead at parties. The kind of guy that downs a twelve pack, jumps in the pool, flirts with every woman he sees and drinks another twelve pack. When I first met him I thought he was disgusting.”

Johnny cracked one finger, and grinned. He shifted his gaze out the window and watched the landscape below. “The thing I hate most about a plane is the sound. You hear those engines, that high pitched whine of theirs. I wonder how people do flights to China from here, or any other country for that matter. 16 hour flights with that as my white noise?”
“Yea, but then you figure that it becomes white noise after a while. If you’re tired enough, you’ll sleep through an avalanche.” She glanced into the aisle and sipped at her water.


One night, Johnny lay awake in an apartment he rented with a not-friend, sleeping with a curvy woman pressed against him. He ran his fingers through her orange blonde hair and rubbed her head.

Outside a motor revved, tires screeched and seven shots were fired. They left a loud lingering warped echo. Another seven shots, more tires screeching. Sirens far off, and people screaming. It sounded like it was happening just outside of Johnny’s window.
He nudged his leg with his toe and cleared his throat. He shut his eyes and tried to sleep, but the tires kept him awake.

Jagged Storytelling

For a long time he just sat there listening to her breathe and watching her chest and stomach expand and contract with her rhythm. He looked at her wrist, at her medical bracelet, at the bruises and thought briefly about putting his hand on hers. When he reached his fingers out into the sterile air he withdrew with a sharp inhale. She jumped to his surprise.

“You.” There was strain in her voice, it made her sound soft and broken. Her vocal chords jittered her words into the room, the sound a pitiful weeping that resonated in Johnny’s ears only barely. He strained to hear her and turned to face her after a moment.

“Belinda, wait. I don’t want you to think--” There really wasn’t anything to follow that up with, they were only floating words. In that moment Johnny couldn’t even really figure out what he had been doing there. That whole morning had made zero sense.

“You. You pulled me out?” He furled his hands over his knees, the polyester not really soaking up the sweat from his clammy hands. Johnny sat back in his chair and threw his glance to the ceiling. Listlessly Doctors were being paged and nurses power walked in and out of various bedrooms lining the long hallway near the nurse’s station.

“I did. There were others, another man shattered the window, started to put a whole in it, I just finished his handy work.”

“I saw you Johnny. In that moment when I hit the ground, everything was so loud, the grinding metal and there was glass everywhere, but I saw you…”

“Yea. I saw you too. Only I didn’t know it was really you until I got to your car. Until after I had taken the picture… After I had laid you out on the sidewalk actually.”

“I was so scared. I had no idea why you were pulling me out. I kept asking you what you were doing. When you didn’t hear me and started talking over me, I just lost my patience with you. Those people out there, did they know who you were? Did you tell them?”

“Why should I care what they think?”

“How did I look?”

“Scared.” They looked at each other for what seemed like hours. She licked her lips and broke their stare. “Should I not have grabbed you?”

“It’s not that. It’s just, why you?” She clenched her hands as much as she could and held weakly to the blanket over her body.

“Right place right time?” He smiled and tried to snicker, but she didn’t find him funny. “Fate? Small city? I mean Jesus, I was on my way to work.” He folded his hands over themselves and rubbed his left thumb over the skin of his right thumb.

“I’m thankful. I really am. I need you to leave though.”

Johnny stood up. “Belinda I’m sorry.”

“I just need you to go. Thank you Johnny, but your work is done now. I’ll be fine and so will you. Good bye.” Johnny stood at the front of her bed for a long time staring at her. He wanted her eyes, wanted her to look him in his own and repeat her request. His body, wide and tall, challenged her, but she did not respond.


When Johnny was a kid, he used to have a film camera. It started with a disposable. He was in a drugstore and they had these tiny disposables sitting on a rack for $1.85 a piece. Johnny pleaded with his mother until she caved and bought him one. Of course it had no features to speak of and the flash was barely workable, but Johnny took every picture that camera had to offer by dinner time that day. The strangest thing to his mother was the fact that he never shot people. Johnny’s father knew thing zero about photography but if his son wanted to learn it, damn it he’d buy a book and give it a shot too.

Sometimes on weekends Johnny’s father would take him on trips to the mountains, or around the city. This was when the subway hadn’t really been finalized yet and the city ran on bus lines and taxi cabs. Johnny’s dad bought a 35mm camera and made a deal with Johnny. For every A on every test, his father would buy him a canister of film and help Johnny take the photos he loved shooting.

Johnny shot old, obese ladies wading in Malibu waters; he shot kids building sand castles on Manhattan beach banks; he shot the tall buildings that made up Hollywood Boulevard; he shot the street performers balancing plates on their noses and palms on the pier of Santa Monica; he shot the San Fernando Valley from a noon vigil atop a view point in Topanga Canyon… Through the lens of a camera Johnny learned to love the city of Los Angeles.

When Johnny hit high school, he already had a significant portfolio built up and it wasn’t hard to get recognized at school art shows and amongst friends. A photographer rarely has a problem with ladies and Johnny bagged more than his fair share. Promiscuity and under aged drinking with hopeful soon-to-be art school dropouts. It didn’t hurt that he was a thin, toned young man with a snappy tongue either.

Johnny’s father divorced his mother, but the two remained friends. It never reached a severe point of separation, and Johnny never witnessed them fight, they were simply no longer married. Johnny’s father remarried, and Johnny’s mother moved to Stockton. Johnny grew through his adolescence in the care of his father. He would visit his mother a few times a year, but they spoke frequently via telephone. Johnny would talk with her about his school, and his girl problems and she would gently usher him on from afar.

Johnny’s stepmother once threw a coffee pot at his face and hit him right on the side of his cheek. The two rarely got along, and Johnny had a tendency to mouth off whenever he was told something. Later in life Johnny would decide that he had it coming, and forgive his stepmother for this, even though it hurt like hell.

Johnny’s father liked to play billiards. Johnny would go with his dad to pool halls all over the San Fernando Valley, and even into the city where age permissible. Johnny learned to shoot pool and did a science project involving lasers, smoke and mirrors, which illustrated the trajectory of a cue ball and explained techniques like putting English on the ball in an accurate physics related way.


The night of the party for Johnny in honor of Belinda’s shot becoming Time’s cover, Johnny stood before his framed, enlarged copy of the shot and stared at Belinda. As the night grew and things got loopier, Johnny’s eyes couldn’t meet Belinda’s terrified stare. In the coming days, Johnny would leave a copy of that issue open to the story on his coffee table. At night, when he would grow listless of prime time programming, he would read that story.

“Belinda Price, age 28, was pulled from an overturned vehicle by several men and the photographer whose picture is featured on the cover. Belinda was rushed to the emergency room where she was stabilized and released the subsequent day. Onlookers were amazed that she didn’t suffer broken bones, ‘You could see her car. It like flipped right over a few cars and landed with a metal grinding crash that was so loud. I’ve never heard anything like that in my life.’

Belinda still drives the 101 on an almost daily basis. ‘That’s Los Angeles traffic, these things happen. You just never think they’ll happen to you. It’s weird, one minute you’re flipping radio stations, the next minute you look out your side window and the world has turned crazy. I’m lucky to be alive.’”

The tanker had jackknifed and fell over. The grinding against the freeway concrete caused a small gash in the side of the tank spilling fuel all over the concrete. Belinda’s car stopped about two car lengths ahead of the spinning truck. The driver of the truck was obliterated in the explosion, the cab completely charred and melted. In total Belinda’s car spent an estimated three and a half seconds in the air before landing, rolling twice and sliding about ten feet from where Johnny’s car had been stopped. Though Johnny’s mind felt exhausted and the day seemed to lag for hours, the entire ordeal only lasted about 45 minutes before the paramedics came and carted Belinda off.

Johnny chased the ambulance in his car when he told a sherriff’s officer that he was involved with that woman. Johnny knew how to cause a scene, and rather than dealing with a raving lunatic, the officer let Johnny drive off. “My car can make it officer, look at it.” The truth was that anyone standing on that freeway that day would have been surprised at the near immaculate presentation of Johnny’s hatchback.

It became habitual to reflect on that day after coming home from that snake called 101.


“Johnny, do you take this woman to be your wife so help you god?” They will be married in Los Angeles, a large Church in Encino; a place called St. Cyril’s. The father marrying them will be an Irish Catholic, and when he takes their hands in his own Johnny will cringe at the priest’s soft, freezing cold hands.

After a 7 hour plane ride, Johnny will carry Belinda over the threshold and into their hotel room. They will stay in a Manhattan high rise because both of them love New York. While Johnny watches New York walk around below him he will smile to himself about his bride and his life. “We are going to go back home and get a roomy place, somewhere we can do more than just exist.”


Johnny considered himself moved in to the apartment in North Hollywood after his cat was allowed to scamper free of its carrier and around the studio. Johnny delicately placed his camera and film on the top shelf of a bookcase he bought from Ikea, and ate take out Chinese food with laquered chopsticks.