Creative Nonfiction: Selections From JH Lucas

My Brother’s Container

My brother exists in two places. One: a box, in a bag, in my mother’s closet, to keep him safe from the cats. The other: a small steel vial, the size of a stack of pennies, that sometimes hangs around my neck. Also safe from cats, since I have no cats.

In the few pictures I have from our childhood, my little brother is always smiling. Always. He has strawberry blond hair and green eyes that you can hardly see because he’s smiling so much that his eyes are like squinty commas in his chubby little face. The kid was so cute I could hardly stand it. Nobody could.

As a kid, I was no slouch in the cute department either. I remember once when our mom took us to an advertising agency that was having open calls for a local ad campaign. We must have been especially desperate that month. The ad agency was conveniently located in a third-rate strip-mall. We met the ad guy, who only seemed marginally predatory, and I smiled my biggest smile for Kentucky Fried Chicken, conveniently located next door. Now they call it KFC but back then fast food wasn’t in such a hurry so they spelled the whole thing out.

The marginally predatory ad guy had me stand at the counter, a kid cheerfully receiving food from an overzealous cashier. It wasn’t food, really, just the packaging; empty, iconic, greaseless. The teenager playing the cashier had remarkably perfect skin for a fried chicken slinger. She reached out toward me with a bucket of Kentucky Fried Air. I smiled my best smile and ca-click went the camera. The photographer had her change up to a 6-piece-nothing box and ca-click we had another one. A vacant Coca-Cola cup, ca-click. A cardboard tray of shellacked dinner rolls, ca-click. Then he got to my favorite item on the menu – mashed potatoes and gravy! – but before the lidded cup of emptiness got the ca-click the photographer saw something. His finger froze on the shutter button.

“What is it?” the ad guy asked.

The photographer couldn’t speak. He just pointed.

My little brother was sitting in a booth beside my mom. Sunlight beamed through the window behind him and framed his cherubic golden locks in a perfect halo. As if God had cooked him up just for that Kentucky Fried Chicken ad, finger-lickin’ good.

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and that was the end of my modeling gig. They swapped in my brother and retook everything, ca-click, ca-click, ca-click. I can still see him in my mind, clear as day, from my spot sulking in the booth, his smile beaming like the sun itself. He was glorious. I wish I could say he went on to become a world-famous model and lived happily ever after on deep-fried royalties.

Our mom was the one who found him. At the end of a long trail of domestic misadventures, he was living in the woods, illegally, in a plywood playhouse built for children we never knew. A fairy tale gone wrong. She went to pick him up for his weekly grocery/beer run. She knocked on the plywood door. No answer. Called his name. No answer. She gripped the handle of the locked door and pulled for all she was worth. And then she saw her youngest son. Her beautiful boy. The one who once shined like the sun. Curled up on the floor, frozen in misery. She called 911. Then she fell into a deep, dark hole.

I flew out to North Carolina the next day. I did what I could to comfort my mom, then went to the playhouse where my brother had died to clean it out, in case the police came. There were packages of over-the-counter medicines everywhere. Pain remedies in pills and patches and powders, all around his sleeping bag. A nest of pain. My brother died in pain, alone, reaching out to no one. It broke my heart.

But there were good things there, too. Our collection of well-worn comic books. The brand new TV and gaming console that I got Amazon to deliver to a playhouse in the woods. He even had my first book, tucked in a milk crate among spy novels and sci-fi. I was always with him, somehow. Not in a way that was really useful, but still: there. And a shoebox full of trinkets. Treasures, really, to him. A Zippo lighter. A belt buckle. A shot glass with his initials. A small replica of Thor’s hammer – Thor was his hero, especially when he got fat in Avengers: Endgame. And a small steel vial, about the size of a stack of pennies.

It had a screw-off lid with a loop to hang from a chain. What could be inside? Drugs? For all his challenges, to my knowledge, drugs (aside from the over-the-counter variety) weren’t one of them. He was always happy-ish enough with beer and cigarettes and No-Doze. But at the end, after the alcohol and cigarettes and depression and COVID and just dumb luck crushed him flat, did he give in and go for harder stuff? If he did, I wouldn’t judge him. If getting high helped him deal with those dark and final days, I’d be happy for him. At least he went without pain. One last party. I unscrewed the lid.

It was empty. We would never know.

I got a teaspoon of my brother’s ashes and put them inside. When I got back to San Francisco, I threaded a chain through the loop in the vial that contains my brother. I wear it sometimes and I tell myself that, at the final bitter end of his often bitter journey, my little brother got high as fuck and floated off with Thor to that chicken-flavored Valhalla in the sky. It’s a vision I hold in my mind every time I put him around my neck. I don’t think he would mind.

 

 

Five Seconds

I read somewhere that fish have a five-second memory. Try to imagine that: One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi, five– Wait, are we swimming to Mississippi?

My son has pet fish but they’re assholes. It started with a beta fish, then a sucker fish, four little fish, and a glass catfish. You could see its tiny fish heart, pumping a teardrop’s worth of blood through its clear body. There was also an African Dwarf Frog, but he’s not a fish, and definitely not an asshole. Bob the Frog. Then Bob the Frog II, when the first one died. Almost everything did, in that tank of death. One by one the fish picked each other off, nibbling away at fins and extremities, then nibbling away at Bob. The final survivors: two of the little bastards. They’re all that’s left of the OG Assholes Fish Crew. 

They probably don’t remember any of that. In their little fish minds, they’ve always had the tank to themselves. Then every five seconds a tiny frog pokes his head out of the Spongebob pineapple house and they’re like Who’s that? What does he taste like?

Bob the Frog II doesn’t forget though. He knows to hide in the pineapple. He times his appearances between the gaps in their memory. The mustachioed philosopher and TV hero Ted Lasso said Be a goldfish for the benefits of memory loss but I say be like Bob: Do your thing, but always keep an eye out for assholes.

A few years ago we went camping at our favorite lake. We’ve been going for 20 years with a bunch of friends, all sworn to secrecy about the name of the lake and its location. What happens at ____ Lake stays at ____ Lake. But now we’re all too busy or too old or too sick of each other for camping anymore so I guess I can tell you about this haunted lake.

Letts Lake is a spring-fed lake about four hours north of San Francisco. One of those lakes in a lemonade commercial: crystal clear water surrounded by lush green trees and a rope swing for backflips, if you’re so inclined and/or drunk enough. Home to osprey, herons, ducks, even a family of otters. And fish. Lots of fish. Mostly lake trout, stocked and fed with pellets by the park rangers. Their diet may also be supplemented by nibbling at the submerged bones of the Letts brothers.

Jack and Dave Lett came to this wilderness in 1855 and named it Letts Valley, laying claim to that part of the Mendocino mountain range and its associated fish and birds and otters and whatnot. But two decades later some serious shit went down: 

The brothers were killed in 1877, at the site of the present campgrounds, in an attempt to prevent squatters from settling on their land. 

That’s what the plaque says so it must be true. We always thought the place was haunted, which made for great ghost stories around the campfire. This provided a restless night of entertainment, as every forest sound was surely the ghost of a murdered brother.

Last time we went to Letts Lake my son tried fishing for the first time. Like me, he’s vegetarian but we occasionally eat fish, so technically pescatarian. But that just sounds fussy, and we’re known to eat all sorts of garbage, as long as there isn’t meat in it. Garbageatarian. But I digress. Come on, don’t be the goldfish... 

We didn’t have a fishing license. I told him if a ranger comes by, drop the pole and walk away. So in addition to teaching him how to fish I was teaching him how to do crimes and lie. The life lessons he was getting were numerous and flawed. Who cares, we weren’t keeping the fish, just catch-and-release. Which should probably be called maim-and-release, because honestly, it's pretty sick…

Some fish is just swimming by, minding his own fish business, when he sees a tasty treat. He goes for it and YOW! a sharp pain as YIKES! he gets pulled out of the water, the only place he can breathe. That would be like you’re walking down the street when somebody offers you free ice cream, then they pull you into the ice cream truck and wrap your head in a plastic bag, and just as you’re blacking out they say Look, it’s so beautiful! before taking off the bag and throwing you back out into the street.

What was I talking about again? Oh yeah. One summer the lake was so full of fish, and they were so fat, you could see them from up on the hill. I was standing up there in the 90° shade of a pinyon tree with my friend Ben. He was smoking a joint and I was day-drinking, and we two Fathers-of-the-Year watched our kids try to drown each other while the fat-ass fish just sat there in the water.

“The fish aren’t even moving,” Ben said.

“Why don’t you go down there and catch me one?” I said.

He said he was too stoned. He said fishing and drinking, that’s a thing, so any fishing was my responsibility. I said I’d go catch one, with my bare hands. He didn’t believe it was possible. As I walked down the hill he took side bets with the kids about how many times Drunkles McFisherman would fall on his ass in the water, trying to catch a fish. 

But I was drunk enough to outsmart a fish. I waded into the cool water. I stood there in my drunken stupor, loving life and giving children the finger. The fat-ass fish loitered around my legs like they were drunk too. I lowered my hands into the water.

“Who’s ready to die?” I asked.

They hadn’t done anything to me. I would announce my intentions, like an honorable drunk, and take my chances. People could laugh at me all they wanted, and call me Drunkles, and Negligent Parent, but they couldn’t call me a fish fibber.

“It will be a quick death,” I promised. “Like the Letts brothers.”

All of a sudden, a fish swam right into my hands! A big fat one, of keeping size. I scooped it up and threw it onto the rocky shore. The kids were shocked. I told them to go get me a knife. The other fish, seeing that I was true to my word, swam closer to me. Pick me, pick me they said, as they swam into my hands, I have had a sweet life and I’m ready to end it all. One by one I did their gruesome bidding, and soon there were five fat fish lying dead on the shore. A small child ran through the woods waving a butcher knife.

My wife was skeptical of the fish’s condition. They were sick, no way could I catch healthy fish with my bare hands. She didn’t believe in my psychic fishing abilities. Neither did Ben or our other friends. They belittled the miracle of Drunkles McJesus, who flung fish on the shore to feed the dubious multitudes.

“I’m definitely not eating that,” the adults said.

“More for us,” the kids said, and I was on their side.

The children squealed in horrible glee as I beheaded the fish on a stump and gutted them, casting their entrails back into the lake that loved them. No doubt their former neighbors feasted upon their guts and got even fatter. For, as I said, fish are assholes.  

They are also delicious. I fried them up in a cast iron skillet and the kids and I ate those fat suicidal fish with a side of wonder, as the adults looked on in envy, having already forgotten they had witnessed a miracle.

 

 

A Life Of Crime, Three Times

There are times in every man’s life when a desperate need arises, or an irresistible opportunity presents itself, and a criminal solution comes quickly and sometimes violently to mind. I bet even the Pope sometimes fantasizes about rounding up a gang of hard-knuckle Bishops, gunning the Popemobile, and knocking off a bank in Rome. I am no better.

I can confess to at least three times when I could have ended up in prison eating homemade pudding out of a bag. Times I came dangerously close to graduating from the petty crimes we all commit (jaywalking, public intoxication, coffee badging at work) to the crimes that rip the fabric of our society (grand larceny, murder, fornicating with houseplants). So yes, I have criminal fantasies. I am not proud. But I’m not disappointed, either.

The first time I considered a life of crime was when I was 21. I was really into punk rock back then, my head shaved and my beer cheap, and I had left sleepy North Carolina for a rad life in San Francisco. But after a few months of odd jobs, painting apartments for $5/hour and donating too many pints of blood, I finally broke down and committed the crime of selling out: I signed up at a temp agency.

Apparently, going to art school made me uniquely qualified to operate a copy machine. The job was at the Federal Reserve Bank. I had to sign a bunch of government forms and pee in a cup. They ran a background check. I didn’t have much background so there wasn’t much to check. But clearance was critical, since I’d be copying secret forms. I wasn’t even allowed to look at the forms, just the cover sheet that specified how many copies, on what color paper: green, blue, or top-secret pink! I made it three days before I looked at what I was copying. 

Let’s say it was an accident. Let’s say I dropped them on the floor and the pink papers just exposed themselves, like a drunk uncle. Let’s not blame the victim here.

What was I copying? Bank security audits. Details of what was working and what wasn’t. A vault that doesn’t lock in Cleveland. A back door that won’t latch in Philadelphia. A security camera that fails in Kansas City. And the motherlode: a trifecta – camera fail, door fail, vault fail – in Atlanta. Someone with a van could just drive up to the bank at night, fill the van with money and scram. And I knew just the someone.

I had an old friend back in NC called Biscuit who had a van and a flexible sense of morality. I’d give him the bank address and all he’d have to do is fill the van with cash and send half to me. No door lock to keep him out, no vault to stop him, no camera to record it. And whatever reports were filed would come through me at the Federal Reserve. All it would take is some White-Out (or maybe Pink-Out). Nobody would ever know. It was perfect.

But I never did it. For all my punk rock Damn the Man! talk, talk was cheap but I was cheaper. It could cost me my job, although that’s a very un-punk thing to say. And Biscuit had a big mouth. His loose talk could be dismissed as bullshit, but once he pimped out his van and started wearing decent clothes, people would start to wonder, and he’d get pinched. So before he could give me up, I gave up that life of crime.

The second time I considered a life of crime was when I was crazy-angry at my girlfriend. Let’s just say I got sick of her getting jacked-up and writing poetry, bleeding me dry for her rent and wine and cocaine and Sylvia Plath impressions. Oh, the terrible, terrible poetry. The poetry had to end.

The solution was simple. Halloween was coming up. All I’d have to do is take a steak knife, go outside, put on a hockey mask like Jason from Friday the 13th, then ring the doorbell. Trick-or-treat! She’d answer and Jason would do the thing that Jason does best. Then I’d come in, wash up, and call 9/11. It would be easy. Except the killing part. I’d still need to plunge the knife in. Multiple times, just to be sure. That would be difficult. And gross. So, regrettably, I had to abandon that life of crime too.

But it was the last opportunity that almost got me. 

We’d just had a baby and we needed more space and less rent and there was no energy for bad poetry. So we moved to a duplex in Oakland. One sunny day I was out washing our beater Honda Civic (to escape my family) and I stubbed my toe on something. A package about the size of a brick, wrapped in white butcher paper, with “DOG" written in Sharpie. Our neighbors had a penchant for cooking exotic foods that smelled like feet and we often wondered if cooking dogs was actually a thing. So when I saw the butcher’s package of dog meat I rang their bell, but nobody answered. Our duplex had a dumpster for the trash. Into the dumpster it went.

I drove off to speed-dry the car and when I got back there were cops everywhere. Not just the regular ‘roided-out Oakland’s finest, but two men in black suits as well. They were standing near a big black SUV, looking into a brown paper sack. One of them came over to talk to me.

“What are you doing here?” the man said.

“Living,” I said. “I live here.”

“Where have you been?”

“Washing my car. What’s going on?”

He looked at my car. I looked at my car. It was as clean as it was ever going to get.

“Have you seen anything unusual?”

“It’s Oakland.”

“Did you see anything unusually unusual? Before you went to wash your car?”

“There was some trash. By my car. I think it was meat, but I’m no expert.”

“Did it look like this?”

He reached into the sack and took out a package. About the size of a brick. Wrapped in white butcher paper. With “DOG” in Sharpie.

“We found this where your car used to be. What did you do with the rest?”

“I threw it away.”

The man in black looked at the dumpster. Then he snapped his fingers and a cop literally jumped into the dumpster. We stood there watching while the cop rummaged around, tossing every piece of garbage out of the dumpster.

“Don’t you guys have anything better to do than dumpster dive for dog meat?”

“It’s cocaine. We were chasing Dog’s gang. They ditched it out the window. Usually they go around a corner and someone jumps out to walk back for it.”

“Then maybe you should go bother him.”

The cop crawled out of the dumpster, empty-handed. The man in black scowled at me. His expression reminded me of the baby’s just before something explodes out the back-end.

“Can I go now?”

“We’ll be watching you.”

To see if I bought a new car, or flashy new clothes, jewelry, a boat, whatever. To see if I moved out of Oakland. Anything that might show that I had money, that I lied, that I had sold the missing cocaine. That I was the Biscuit. But instead I was a disappointment.

I’d honestly thought it was dog meat. My only crime was ignorance. For the next month or so I would see that SUV on our block, or up the block, or around the corner. Then, one day, the SUV was gone, and my life of crime gone with it. So I was never a drug dealer, never a bank robber, never a murderer. But not for lack of imagination. I am not proud. But I’m not disappointed either.

 

 

 

 

 

JH Lucas, born to a single mother and raised in a trailer park in North Carolina, achieved escape velocity through art and writing, moving all the way to Lisbon, Portugal. JH is currently completing a series of creative nonfiction stories exploring adversity, fate, luck, coincidence, and the cosmic unconscious, called “A Plate of Shrimp.”