Stories Archives - Jerry Kurtz

The Spy Niki Club

In fourth grade I organized the “Spy Niki Club.” The most reliable members were my friends but it had the advantage of other alliances against a common enemy, that it was possible for non-friends to join and discover they had less reason for mutual hostility than had been believed. Dodger fans predominated over Giant fans. A couple of Yankee fans — considered a foreign culture — were tolerated. All members were male, a bias no one thought of. Girls didn’t spy on boys, anyway. Well, how would anyone know?

The duties of Club members were to move around the concrete schoolyard during lunch recess, observe Niki and report to other members about her whereabouts and activities. We’d meet excitedly at the cornerstone — it was a granite block that said “1928” — and confer, I’d talk into my hand like highway police into a microphone on television (or Sky King!):

“Goldman to Taqi, Goldman to Navarro, over.” “Come in, Goldman.” “We read you. Over.”

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Love Highway

I was following down the highway after my dream-love at ninety-five miles an hour. She and I were the two fastest cars on the road. I was at the wheel of an air-conditioned 1971 Ford Galaxie (at that time the suburban car par excellence), she was in a black Chevrolet pickup, 1970, the make embossed and then painted in large white letters on the tailgate; she kept the window open all the way to blow a sultry wind through pale-blonde hair. I had not yet seen her face and I was having a hard time keeping up.

I blasted the radio as loud as it would go over the air-conditioning. KCRQ San Diego, having played off American and British hits and totaled consecutive telephone-preference victories for each, was plumping down the swollen fruit of its British Invasion Weekend, driving toward Number One in the standings.

Down — below the ocean
That’s where — I want to be, want to be
Down — below the ocean
That’s where — I want to be, she may be

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Birds

A cat peers through the banister-barred window and with the deadsureness that can’t afford a mistake turns to check the other direction. Bessie replaces a blue ceramic sugar bowl on the table and begins to examine another item. Though the owner has tired of watching her Bessie has been trained to touch with care, with respect, even when she has contempt for the work itself. She is courteous but admires nothing. In the Museum of Modern Art many of these items would have impressed her but Mexico is not the handicraft Meccashe was led to expect. She leaves, nodding to the proprietor, guiding her cloth shoulder-purse so that it doesn’t come in contact with the door. It is the last of the artisan-retail stores in town. It is her last day in Mexico.

Twenty yards in front of her something vaguely unpleasant is dumped from an upper window. Bessie is something of/rather an artist. She does not actually sketch any more because her mother is an artist too and their relationship is tense as it is. Besides, everybody wants to be a great artist and it is hopeless to try. She does, however, retain strong likes and dislikes about the art of other people and, indeed, these preferences grow powerful as the likelihood she herself will create or express something grows remote. “Gobs and globules of glass,” she said once about a candlestick, “contradict the essential value of the medium.” Drinking glasses she has seen made by simple artisans outside Guadalajara, in Tlaquepaque, the kind with hundreds of tiny bubbles and imperfections and that cost six times as much in elegant San Francisco stores, delight her. “The bubbles make you see what’s so special and wonderful about glass,” she has said. She admires the slightly unconventional, the painting of Robert Natkin for example.
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