Dan Ryan's SmallStories

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The Shanghai Redundancy—A Small Film Treatment

A Swedish friend of mine in Shanghai asked me to write a treatment for a short film he wants to make. This strange, disconnected story is what I came up with. Maybe there is the premise, minus the obvious violence, for a good TV series in here. Who knows?

The Giants game was on TV. They were playing Atlanta in the San Francisco home opener. I had had a long, shitty week, so I didn’t want anyone, or anything, disturbing me or the game, or stopping me from putting my fingerprints on the pint of Asahi Super Dry resting on a coaster on the arm of my Adirondack chair.

I was home and safe, and it was baseball season, and I…….

……saw the room…..fill with light….felt the light….

…..explode into my eyes.

And there I was again. I even knew I was on the same bench. Before my vision cleared, a process which seemed to average about two minutes, I could feel with my right hand the ten notches I had cut with my knife into the edge of the bench from previous trips. I reckon it had been several months since the first notch, because it and the second were feeling a bit worn and smooth from other people sitting on this exact spot. I guessed.

After taking the moments I needed for my eyes to clear and adjust, I looked around to confirm what I already knew:

I was in Shanghai. Again. Seated on a wooden bench along The Bund, at night under a very starry sky. Well, as starry as the ambient light from this insane bottle-rocket of a burg would allow. And by looking at the stars I could tell that, as usual, I had arrived at about 2 o’clock in the morning. Hey, after this many involuntary teleports I had decided after the first two trips that I had better know my stars in this hemisphere for reference.

Also as usual, there were a lot of people out along The Bund. I sat there for a moment looking them over, scanning them, seeing if I recognized anyone from my previous trips. Luckily, I did not. That would make things easier. And there were, as usual, no signs from anyone walking within ten yards of me that they had seen me appear from nowhere in the spot I now occupied. Like the actual teleportation process and the reasons behind it, I had not figured that part out yet. Maybe it was some naturally occurring thing. I don’t know.

I always tell myself I will figure this out later. But I haven’t yet.

Maybe I won’t.

Since it was two o’clock Sunday morning, it was always two o’clock Sunday morning, the people along The Bund were the young, late-night party crowd. Younger than me, and too tired, drunk, self-absorbed or all three to really notice a large, older gweilo hanging out on their periphery. That was fine. I wasn’t interested in them anyway. After ten trips, I had learned that these youngsters weren’t the sources I needed. So I stood up and started scanning the crowd for the older, wealthier type of source which would have what I needed to get home.

Surprisingly, it didn’t take me that long this time. Previous trips had taken me as long as ten minutes to spot a sufficient source. This time, thirty seconds. And he was alone, which was good. No fancy hired girl with him to get in the way. I didn’t like doing more damage than was absolutely necessary.

I think he was looking for a girl, though, because he was walking off The Bund, away from the Huang Pu and towards Guang Dong Road. I knew from my sixth trip there were a couple of side streets there where gentlemen could procure a lively girl if they had the discretion and the cash. Which meant my source must have had the cash.

This was good, too.

I checked my jacket pockets just out of habit, to make sure I had the things I needed. I was always teleported from home, and I always wore this jacket when I was there. Even when I slept. The second trip made me realize I had to do this. So:

I had my wallet, but only about 100 bucks U.S., and the very, very convincing fake California driver’s license. And I had an equally exquisite and fake U.S. passport. These, plus the renminbi I got off the source, would get me a ticket back to San Francisco, through immigration and onto the plane.  I always had to fly back.

And I had my knife, of course. The same knife, every time. A cheap but very sharp carbon steel job I could get easily and anonymously in San Francisco Chinatown whenever I needed, since I always left the knife behind.

So, with the source still in my sight, I was ready.

He did, in fact, go down Guang Dong Road, towards the second side street. I followed him to the dark entrance of that street, but stopped at the corner after he went around it. I had become good at this, but still had to be careful.

So I slowly peered around the corner, and saw him immediately about twenty yards away. This side street was dark, very few street lights were on. And he was alone, in his expensive party suit, thumbing through the wallet he must have had in his breast pocket. He had, I just noticed, a couple of gold rings on each of his hands. His wallet looked fat. I had chosen my source very wisely this time. Between the rings and the wallet, this source had to have at least the 14,000 renminbi I would need to get home.

So, it was time.

I got out my knife, and rounded the corner to the darkened side street, pretending to be a bit drunk. More of a safe amusement and less of a threat that way, even for a big gweilo like me. It always worked.

He wouldn’t see it coming, and I promised myself he’d feel no pain. I made the same promise about the ten sources I had used before this one, and I was pretty sure I had made good on it. The Shanghai cops might have an alert or a sheet out on me by now, but I really didn’t care.

I was always careful. And being in Shanghai was never my fault anyway! What the hell was I supposed to do?

I had to get home.

No Comments by Dan Ryan on April 25, 2010
filed in The Shanghai Redundancy

The Gentleman At The Back Door—A Small Gothic

 

“Mistah Kurtz—He dead. But don’t bury him too deep; he get mad.”

I had to give a presentation in the morning, but it was 1 a.m. and it still wasn’t finished. But I was so damned tired that I couldn’t think straight. So I figured I would hit the rack for five hours, and get up at six to finish my work before presenting it at 9 a.m.

She was already in bed, thankfully. She was going before the tenure committee tomorrow morning at ten, after teaching a required sophomore prerequisite in Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. If I hadn’t forced her to finalize the publishing folio and chronology she had to present to the tenure committee, I would not have been able to force her to go to bed at 11. Instead of being sound asleep and gently snoring, she’d be up and an exhausted, fidgeting bundle of nerves like me.

I kidded myself that being eighty percent done at 1 a.m. had me prepared to finish the remaining 20 percent in record time before I had to give the presentation. I could probably get it done. It was on Japanese consumer product markets, my area of expertise, and the remaining work to be done was some last-round text editing and tweaking certain graphs and charts. Sounds pedestrian as hell, I know, but our entire Japanese marketing strategy for the coming fiscal year was riding on my analyses and recommendations. I had so far put in twenty hours’ work on something that would take twenty minutes to present.

“Fuck it,” I thought. “I’m tired, and the pile of papers on the kitchen table can wait for a few hours.”

So I went to bed, and fell into a sleep of mundane dreams.

Lots of numbers and faces and questions in Japanese were spinning around the back of my skull and taking turns shooting to the front and into my retinas when I woke up feeling thirsty as hell. My watch said it was 3:05 a.m. My throat said I was parched and needed water.

Good timing for the cat, too. He was at the back door of the bedroom, a large sliding glass door, padding at it with his paw because he wanted to go out. I slid the door open to let him out, about six inches or so, and left it open so he could come back in when he wanted to without causing a ruckus. I also left it open so some of the warm night air could filter into the bedroom. It displaced the exhaled carbon dioxide which typically gave she and I musty morning breath during colder months.

After the cat made his exit, he stopped few feet from the back door and started grooming himself in the nearly-full moonlight. Little bastard could have done that inside. Whatever. I went into the bathroom and got my water, after brushing my teeth, something I had forgotten to do earlier.

Good.

Back to bed. I could still get almost three more hours. I exited our bathroom and walked past the glass back door in the dark towards her gentle snoring.

This is when I saw him.

I knew what he was immediately, of course; but that didn’t stop the sudden presence of a rather large, dark figure just outside my back door from almost generating a very loud man-scream from my mouth. I mean, seriously, he could have been a burglar, a tree trunk or the Jupiter monolith and I would have been frightened. Anybody would have been. There have been deep, dark nights when a cloud blotting out the light of a bright moon has unnerved me.

This was different. Clouds pass. I didn’t know if he would. I am glad I didn’t scream, though. I didn’t want her to wake up. She had to deal with his kind the last time this happened, and she told me the day after she never wanted to do it again. This had been about seven years ago, when I had been away on business that particular night. She told me the story of her fright and the cajoling, the imploring, the verbal trickery the last one had tried to gain entrance to our house.

I had listened to her carefully then, and had thought about her encounter many times since. She solved the problem by fainting from fear and exhaustion shortly before dawn.

Looking through the glass of my sliding bedroom door, at him, his darkness, I was determined not to make the mistakes she had. This was dicey, but not entirely life-threatening (even though the door was open for the cat). In an instant, I decided how to proceed. I kept my eyes on him as I grabbed my bathrobe and put it on. I put my slippers on too, then walked to my door and stood, staring at him through the glass and trying not to blink.

“Good evening, Master Vampire,” I said, very softly, almost a whisper.

For a moment, he didn’t respond. His face was emotionless, his eyes wide, until I spoke. Then his eyes narrowed, but his wide, thin-lipped mouth started forming a smile.

“Good evening, and thank you,” he said, also very softly. “You honor me by addressing me by that title.”

It was my turn to smile.

“We may as well be polite about this, Master Vampire,” I said. “You’re out there, and I’m in here, and I think I know what you want. But there’s no point in us being uncivilized even though I plan to deny your desires.”

“You,” he said, “I don’t know you, but have you done this before? Dealt with….my kind?”

“No,” I said, “I haven’t. I was away on business the last time the migration brought your people this close to San Francisco. But you honor me by asking the question.”

“Ahh, the migration,” he said.

“Yes. Some people look forward to it. I find it curious.”

“We….I can’t say much,” he said, “It is a private matter we don’t explain to your people.”

“Why?”

“Vulnerability,” he said, “Suffice to say, not all of us migrate every year. And of those who do in a given year, many routes are taken.”

“I see,” I said.

“I myself have not been this close to San Francisco in nearly a century,” he said.

While we spoke, I could still hear her gently snoring in our bed. And I was glad of this. I don’t think waking up to the sight of me having a casual chat with a vampire through an open glass door would do much to advance her career tomorrow.

And even though things were going well, I was starting to worry. As we spoke, the vampire’s smile stayed constant, but his eyes started to wander. Then I realized after his last statement, his eyes were staring at her. The hair on the back of my neck stood up a little. I also looked at her, then turned my gaze back to him.

He was staring at me, and I was startled again.

His smile was gone, and his eyes were wide, fully open, unnaturally large. Black pupils the size of dimes were circled by crimson red irises that seemed to glow. I could see no white in his eyes the way I would have had I been looking at one of my own people. The white I could see were the fangs now draped over his bottom lip. They were very bright and each about an inch long.

There were now thoughts in my head that I didn’t create. He was projecting at me in some way. The dreams I had had of Japanese questions and business meetings were bloodied by additional images of swords, flying limbs, and salarymen drinking blood from coffee cups.

I didn’t like where this was going now.

“It would be quite lovely if you would let me in,” he said, “I am very old and I am very hungry.”

“I can’t DO that, Master Vampire,” I said.

“I need…things from her. From you,” he said.

I don’t know if I heard these words or if he forced the thought of them into my head. They made me want to scream loud enough to split the moon and drink a lake of the blood of newborn children.

And then, faster than I could see, his arm was through the opening of my door all the way up to his shoulder. His long, pale fingers flailed and clawed in empty air just to the right of my head. I thought he was going to grab my skull and crush it.

And I think I almost fainted.

I shuffled a couple of steps back in an instinctive effort to block the sight of my sleeping wife from his eyes. And the effort had to be enormous, I realized. I could barely move, and that should not have been happening. My arms, my whole upper body, felt so heavy. I knew he was doing it, suppressing my adrenaline, and probably keeping her in a deep sleep. Even though we spoke at a hushed volume, his lunge at the door and my stepping back had made noises which normally would have woken her up.

If I let him in now, I realized, she would remain asleep and feel nothing as he fed upon the life within her. I was actually grateful at the thought of that. I also thought I felt more tired and hopeless than I recalled ever feeling. Maybe I should just let him in. Maybe I should. Should I?

No. This was still my goddamned house, and the rules were the rules. Then something else occurred to me.

“Master Vampire,” I said, choking it out really. “Master Vampire, I can’t get to the door. Let me go. You know and I know it’s the only way, the only…..civilized way.”

Even if I wanted to let him in, all the crippling rage and want and hunger he was throwing into my mind would keep me from it. Did he also read minds? Could he know my thoughts? He must have been able to, at least to a small degree.

Because suddenly, I was free. I could move. My head was clearing. I started to see only with my eyes again, not the mental images of slashed mortal bellies turned into soup bowls full of warm blood. The lingering image of an old man full of centuries of want using his elongated teeth to chew the fat and marrow from my wife’s flesh and bones diminished in urgency and vividness.

We could talk once again. He had more control over himself, and less over me, once again. I knew I would get through this night, and wake up with her. Once again.

He had lowered his arm, but it was still through the door opening up to his shoulder. Collected, I walked the few short steps to him and gently put both my hands on his arm. Then I raised his forearm, bent it at the elbow, and very gingerly pushed his arm through the open door until it touched his torso. There was no malice in my actions, for I felt none for him.

I felt pity.

He looked old, beaten. After I let go of his arm, I got my first real chance to look at him in whole. He must have been a good-looking man once, a man with a face that naturally wanted to smile. I think perhaps he had even been a kind-looking man. The years, a century at least, of hunting, migrating, feeding and wanting must have worn him into the beautifully-preserved but harsh and cruel-looking thing I now saw. The black suit and tie he wore were impeccable, garments which might have come from the finest dry-cleaning service that very day. But the styling of his clothes was old, fifty years I guessed. The suit was too new for him to have died in it, but it was old enough to tell me that he had not updated his wardrobe from the clothes of new victims in a very long time.

“I like your suit, Master Vampire,” I let slip, actually meaning to keep the statement in my thoughts.

“Thank you,” he said, “You are the first person in a very long time to have lived long enough to notice.”

“I can’t let you in, Master Vampire,” I said.

“I know,” he said, “There was a time when my abilities would have allowed me to change your thoughts to my will the way your idol youth change programs with those remote television control devices. We would not be having this conversation, much as I am warming to your company, if you will pardon the phrase.

“But I don’t have the strength anymore,” he said, “My days, rather my nights, are far harder than they used to be. I had hoped to find rejuvenation here, with you and your wife. But, well……”

“It was not to be?” I asked.

“Not to be,” he said.

“Perhaps you can find others, some who would take your gift willingly and become the children you need to help you go on,” I said.

Some of my people welcomed the vampires during the migration. People who were old, or terminally ill, or tired of their family obligations.  And it wasn’t illegal either, as long as you had your estate or legal affairs in order. Or had no home or family, and nothing to lose or be taken from you. I had a second cousin who went with the vampires ten years ago. I have not seen him since, but he does send a lovely card at Christmas and on my birthday every year. He seems happy.

I continued speaking: “In fact, I have a second cousin who is with your people n…”

“I know,” the vampire interrupted, “How do you think I came to be here on this night in the first place?”

“Oh,” is all I could say.

“Yes, ‘oh’,” he said.

Just then, I noticed my cat purring and rubbing against the vampire’s legs. He noticed too, as if he hadn’t been any more aware of the cat than I had been. The cat was doing figure eights around and in between the vampire’s legs, getting grey and white fur on the fabric of his fine suit pants. Unfazed, the vampire looked down, smiled widely, bent over and picked my cat up. Then he lifted the cat up to his chest, close to his face, and my cat purred louder and started licking the vampire’s nose and cheeks. I could not help but smile almost as widely as the vampire was.

“My people have always loved cats and dogs,” the vampire said.

“I know,” I said, “But you can’t keep them as pets?”

“No,” he said, “Even though their blood is of no use to us, we can’t give them the attention they need due to the travel requirements of our nutritional needs.

“I do miss having a cat, though,” he said.

It was all but over, and I knew the risk was gone, so I quietly opened the sliding glass door a couple of feet and reached my arms towards the cat in the vampire’s arms.

“Do you mind, Master Vampire?” I asked, “It would save me the trouble of collecting him in the morning if he were to decide not to come straight home.”

“Of course,” he said, gently handing my cat over to me. “Thank you for letting me hold him.”

“Of course, Master Vampire,” I said.

“And I should be going. I have to find suitably dark accommodations so that I may rest before moving on tomorrow night,” he said.

“I also have an important day tomorrow, Master Vampire,” I said, “And so does my wife. Tenure committee in the morning. Later, in the morning I mean.”

“Ahh,” he said, “Well, perhaps I am quite glad this did not work out after all. My people often forget the important events in the everyday lives of your people. It is a hazard we sometimes cannot help.”

“I understand,” I said, “Despite some discomfort and tension, I am glad we got to have this chat, Master Vampire.”

“As am I. It has been many years since, well, it has been many years.”

“Will you be alright?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, “But I thank you for asking. I think I will press on to San Diego. The consistent warmth and the sea air hold an appeal for me suddenly.”

“Yes. It’s nice down there. I wish you luck,” I said.

“Thank you.”

And then he was gone. Almost faster than my eye could see, he made a slight shrug with his shoulders then shot straight up in the air. My eyes tracked him for perhaps two or three seconds, but then I lost his flight path in the glow of light coming from the moon.

“Perhaps he’s launched himself right at and into the moon,” I thought.

Perhaps, perhaps. I took a moment to wonder.

But it was very late, and I was even more tired than before. I walked out of the bedroom and into our kitchen, the cat still in my arms. In the kitchen, I put the cat down in front of his food bowl to encourage him to eat. I put a fresh bowl of water down for him too.

When I got back to the bedroom, she was still quietly snoring. My watch said 3:34. Just enough sleeping time left to be functional until lunch time. With luck. The sliding glass door was still open, so I went over and closed it. I locked it too.

Then I crawled back into bed and feel asleep.

And I don’t think I dreamed, but I don’t think I didn’t.

No Comments by Dan Ryan on February 6, 2010
filed in The Gentleman at the Back Door

Red City—A Small Love Story

‘Red City’ is a strange visual love story I designed and composed many years ago when I lived in Japan. It is about longing and breaking free of constraints. I hope you enjoy it. The introductory video is by my friend Vincent Corlaix and is a first attempt at animating my story.

No Comments by Dan Ryan on February 3, 2010
filed in Red City

Henry’s Jug Of The Last—A Small Goodbye

(dedicated to Ralph H.)

Henry liked his scotch very much. I had beer.

Henry said he was giving it all up for a very good woman, whom he had only met six months ago. He said he had to for her, and that the long nights and cement-nail hangovers were killing him anyway.

But it made perfect sense to all of us that he would want to have a party. Hell, most nights we drank with Henry was a party. That was part of the problem, and part of the reason we loved him so much. We were sad, but we understood his reasons. Most of us approved.

So, one final time we would gather and drink to Henry, and drink to the woman, and drink to happiness. If we didn’t feel happy, we would fake it for Henry. I was somewhere in between, like a cat on a fence separating two yards, each with an angry dog in it.

I had my own problems.

When I say most of us, the ‘us’ was only six guys. The youngest of us had known Henry for ten years, the rest of us longer, and had hired him to work in various capacities many, many times. We all lived in Brisbane, just outside San Francisco, and the six of ‘us’ owned or ran various businesses in construction, auto repair, heavy printing, things like that.

I think I was the first of us to hire Henry, in 1989, to do one day’s labor helping me clean out a garage attached to my house in which I was setting up my first photography studio. Yeah, I guess I have always been the artsy one in our group. Still take some shit for that. Anyway, I didn’t seek Henry out. I met him when he walked up to my garage as I was starting the clearing-out project and offered his services for as long as I needed.

He scared me a little at first, or his appearance did. I learned this later, but when he worked or was looking for work, he always wore the same oil-stained Giants ball cap and 49ers stadium coat. From working on cars, he said when I asked. But until you got him to smile, which became quite often once you were his friend, his face was in a perpetual scowl. Like he wanted to punch something, or you. And he had the bumpy nose and vein-streaked cheeks of a long-time whiskey drinker. Henry was also about ten years older than me, and typically had a three or four day growth on his face. Frankly, to a guy in his late 20s, Henry looked like a sour mess that first day I met him.

But we negotiated a fee, and after the first hour watching him work beside me I knew he was going to do whatever reasonable thing I asked of him and do it very well. In twenty years of friendship and jobs of ‘various capacities’, Henry’s ability to do things very well never wavered. That and the whiskey were the two greatest constants in his life.

And this is how our group started. Henry worked for me, I recommended him to a pal, who referred him to another pal, and so on. Six of us all connected by the nexus of Henry, who worked for us in various capacities when we needed him. His one certifiable skill, for which he had received formal training, was in auto mechanics. So this is what he did for Bill, and most of the time. But sometimes things were slow at Bill’s shop, so Henry would seek out me and the other four, and usually exactly when we needed an extra hand for a day or a week. When Henry wasn’t around, we often discussed how uncanny his timing was when coming to us to offer extra help.

The other things we discussed about Henry were his background and the booze, and how the two were intertwined. He’d been a AAA ballplayer once, in his early 20s, and married. Happily, Henry said, to a wonderful gal (his words). And he had just about been good enough to get called up to the majors. This basic framework, Henry volunteered freely. In generalities, he warmed when he spoke of it.

But when you asked him for the details, about what happened with the woman and getting called up to the majors, his smile slowly closed and the typical working scowl returned to his face. And he would take a huge gulp of whatever well scotch he happened to be drinking. If you let him sit in silence after this, that silence could last a very long time. It didn’t mean that he was mad, just that he was thinking on the questions about his life and why he didn’t answer them. We had been friends for about two years before he told me this was what he did during his scotch-sipping silence.

Sometimes, the silence would last so long you knew Henry had forgotten you were there. He’d just sip his scotch, gulping it sometimes, and stare at whatever football or baseball game happened to be on the television in the bar. It was easy to sit next to him and do the same. Sometimes me or some of the other fellows or all of us would sit seven across the bar, watching TV and drinking in silence because one of us had gotten Henry thinking about questions he did not want to answer.

I wasn’t going to let that happen tonight.

No silence, no uncomfortable questions; just the company of men who would always be friends even though one had found a love that made him decide to make some changes in his life. Apparently.

In advance, Henry told me he wasn’t going to drink well scotch this night. He had asked me to procure for him, at a cost for which I would be reimbursed, a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue. This was to be his ‘jug of the last’, as he called it. The term had something to do with a practice on his long-dead father’s Irish side of the family. What it amounted to was making your last booze your best booze, a drink you were not only willing but proud to share. Not the normal stuff you drank every day, or something some slob acquaintance from your wife’s office brought to a summer block-party cookout. No, it had to be booze of such superior quality that its cost or rarity made all the other liquor of its like seem common, and therefore unappealing. I told Henry I saw the logic in it, but that I also thought it sounded like some bullshit Irish mind trick.

He said it was, and therein lay its power and magic.

I hated it when he pulled that shit on me, but it was his party so I didn’t argue this time.

Another requirement for Henry at his party was that he dress in his finest clothes. And I don’t mean the nicely-tailored grey or black utility suit which all seven of us owned and had seen each other wear at various weddings and funerals over the last twenty years. For this Henry dressed in something special: a deep blood-crimson, almost black, wool gabardine gentleman’s suit which Henry said his great-grandfather had made by the finest tailor in Dublin around the first year or two of the 20th century. None of us even knew he owned such a suit, and hardly expected to see him in it since he didn’t mention any dress code for his special night. We were all in jeans or khakis and button-down or polo collars. Bill and I wore sport coats. Nothing fancy.

Not like Henry, who walked into the bar through the double front doors in his blood-crimson Victorian suit like had he passed through a membrane from another reality and was slumming in ours.

He was stunning, really. Not just for Henry, for anyone. And it didn’t look like a costume or a get-up. Henry looked like he dressed that way for every special occasion, perhaps even for every day. I don’t know if he had practiced for this night or if he had just been hiding this naturally dignified way of carrying himself all this time. Or maybe after twenty years of seeing him almost exclusively in his motor oil-stained ball cap and stadium coat we just hadn’t noticed.

I hated that possibility, and myself for not looking closely enough at my friend to see the effortless grace and superior confidence I was seeing now. These things had to have always been there. Bill had been saying for years what a natural, effortless and efficient auto mechanic Henry was. The best he’d ever seen. Everything Henry did for us he did effortlessly, efficiently. Confidently. Like a man who could wear a blood-crimson, hand-tailored Victorian suit into a bar with The Pogues, Metallica and most of the country Top 40 on the jukebox.

How do you expect to happily help a man drink away his old life so that he can start a new one when you suddenly realize you’ve been taking him for granted for twenty fucking years?

Since we hadn’t made any special arrangements for privacy in the bar, all the regulars could see Henry and our group. So after we six greeted Henry with hugs and handshakes I determined the best way to compensate for the shame I was feeling was to crack open Henry’s bottle of Blue and pour him his first drink. I knew the scotch was going to be my present to Henry. I promised myself I’d bite either of his hands that offered me payment for it.

And so we toasted Henry, with him holding his first scotch and the rest of us with our favorites in hand and raised. We had our usual rear corner of the bar staked out, but the other regulars and their friends also toasted Henry loudly enough to make him smile at the gratifying background noise they made.

Bill made the actual toast, which was to Henry, his lady Till (short for Matilda, who waited for Henry at home), and to Henry’s sober life of happiness with her and all the good things that would come of it. I followed up by telling Henry that we would miss him at our gatherings at the bar three nights a week, but he was setting a fine example for the rest of us. I also said it was a rare and wise man who knew when to make an important change in his life before making that change was no longer an option. Henry clapped me on the back for that, and for a second I thought the look in his eyes showed not only appreciation but an understanding that I may have said that last part as much for myself as for him.

And from there on into the night, which proved to be a long, happy one. I am glad Henry told me shortly after the toast that Till would either be waiting up for him or asleep, depending upon when he got home. I would have worried about making him go home as early as possible had he not said this. Henry said he explained to Till, and she understood, that this was his last night of being someone who was with her, but not hers. Henry said Till viewed this night as Henry’s divorce from the long years of drink, and the fuzzy head and horrible hangovers he let himself feel when he wasn’t working. Henry also told me he had perhaps been a good man for me, Bill, and the others, but he had not always been a good man for himself. As I said, this was early in the evening, and in private so the others wouldn’t have to be worried or concerned.

So we had drinks and told stories, of Henry the man in the Victorian suit. One story I told was how I thought that Henry, for a few months before we actually met, was the one vagrant homeless guy in Brisbane. As I told this story, the contrast between how Henry looked before me and the grubby, sour way he had usually looked for twenty years really struck me. And the others too, I think. But we all laughed when Bill asked Henry what he would be wearing tomorrow and Henry said Till had bought him a new Giants cap and a new 49ers stadium coat to wear every day.

Then Bill told the story about how Henry had taken Bill’s side in this very bar against about eight Oakland bikers who tried to accost a lady Bill had been with one evening. I hadn’t been there that night, but a Brisbane cop who was a friend told me privately the day after that when police arrived, Henry was between Bill and the bikers with a broken beer bottle in one hand and a huge, scary grin on his face. My cop friend told me the bikers looked scared. No one was taken into custody, and no charges were filed, but the part that made everyone laugh is that Bill’s lady met up with one of the bikers many hours later and went home with him.

We told stories like that for hours, while Henry drank his Blue and smiled warmly upon us like we were jesters of his court.  I didn’t feel like he was looking down on us; it was more like he felt for us a kindly love for keeping him amused. But it was Henry who, surprisingly, brought things to a more civilized end than we were expecting. By two a.m. he had put away two-thirds of his bottle of Blue. I saw him look at it, and then look around the bar. I think I saw the same thing he did: that we were the last customers in the place. I also realized I was very, very drunk. I was very, very thankful tomorrow was a Sunday.

And so Henry said to all of us that it was time to wrap things up. Bill and I each asked him if he wanted us to walk him home. Henry said no, that he had spoken to the bartender who agreed to let Henry have a couple more drinks by himself and then lock the place up when he left. Henry had a key because another of his ‘various capacities’ was working as the after-hours janitor on weekends for the bar, even though he had this night off.

It was settled, so we all said very fond farewells to Henry in his Victorian suit and made our ways out of the bar. I remember smiling as I left, seeing Henry sitting back down on his barstool and pouring himself another glass of scotch. By himself, and not knowing I was looking, he still looked like a king.

It was afternoon the next day when the pounding on my door woke me up. I knew it was afternoon because of the angle of the sun through my bedroom window. When I opened my front door my friend the cop was there, and he asked me if I know about Henry. I told him he was the first person I had seen or talked to all day. He looked down at his shoes, then raised his head and looked me straight in the eye with a very sad face and told me:

When Henry didn’t come home last night, Till called the police and asked them to find him, to see if he was safe. The cops knew he had to be somewhere between the bar and his home five blocks away, so they started looking at the bar. They found him almost immediately. The cop told me every door to the place had been locked except the one in the very back used for small deliveries.

When they went inside, they found Henry slumped over the bar, dead. In front of him were two empty bottles, one of Johnny Walker Blue, and another of Johnny Walker Black. On the bar between the two bottles was a three-by-three black and white photo of a pretty young brunette woman and a little boy who looked about three. My cop friend told me “Sarasota, 1982” was written on the back of the photo in faded pencil. He said “I still miss you” was written on the front of the photo in what looked like very recent black ball-point ink. And Henry was still in his fine, antique, authentic Victorian suit when they found him.

The cops suspect, of course, that alcohol poisoning will prove to be the cause of Henry’s death.

I know better.

Whatever happened to the pretty woman and the child in the photo caused Henry’s death. Whatever happened to them, or between them and Henry. I wish I knew, and I know that I never will. But we buried Henry in his suit, with the photo in his breast pocket.

And I haven’t had a drink since.

1 Comment by Dan Ryan on January 21, 2010
filed in Henry's Jug Of The Last

The Pen—A Small Caper

There it was, like it was left for me to find.

I wasn’t expecting the bright glint of steel when I shined my desk lamp into the bottom of a file cabinet drawer. I was getting rid of the desk, and I thought I had cleaned out the file cabinet side last week

But there the damn thing was.

And I have to admit it spooked me a little.

Okay, a lot. I hadn’t seen the pen in at least fifteen years. I thought I had gotten rid of it, and really, even now, have no idea how it had gotten into the bottom of the file drawer.

The pen had been nice when it was new. Not fancy, but nice. It was stainless steel, with lines etched along the slim barrel. It also had that blank, smooth space where you could have your son or daughter’s name and high-school graduation date engraved to give them in that boxed set with the matching mechanical pencil. The company that made it started with the letter ‘C’ and always stamped that name into the base of the pen’s pocket clip.

This pen, however, had no personalized engraving. My life would have been a lot easier if it had been, considering what happened all those years ago after I found it.

It was in a puddle of rain next to my car one afternoon in 1993. It had just rained hard, but the sun came quickly out from behind the clouds that day. And so strong sunshine shone on the pen, the glint off its steel barrel caught my eye, and there it was. It was in a puddle formed in a small pothole, and I suspect if the sun had not come out I would never have seen the pen at all.

It was late on a Friday afternoon, before a three-day holiday weekend. Mine was one of three cars still in my office parking lot. The other cars belonged to people I worked with who also had to stay late, but both were parked at least 25 yards from mine.

So, as I picked up the pen I knew whoever had dropped it was long gone and wouldn’t be back until Tuesday, if they even worked in my building at all. As I said, it wasn’t personalized, so I slipped the pen into my inside suit jacket pocket thinking I had a nice little souvenir-good-omen to start the long weekend.

I threw my briefcase and suit coat onto the back seat of my car, then slipped into the driver’s seat and strapped myself in for the commute home. I hoped traffic wouldn’t be too bad going north, but if it was I would just deal with it because I had her to see when I got home. And I was looking forward to that. So I jabbed my keys into the ignition and started up the car.

But it wouldn’t start. I tried again. I could hear the ignition start to catch this time, but the car quickly died. Pissed off but feeling optimistic, I tried a third time and the engine turned over almost immediately, like it usually did. Looking back now, I probably should have given things some more thought, but I just wanted to get to home. So I made the short drive from my office to The 101 North onramp and her.

In those days, my office was in Mountain View, a Silicon Valley town about 40 miles south of San Francisco. I lived in a quiet little town just outside the San Francisco city limits, so with decent traffic and speed conditions my commute was usually about 45 minutes. Today, it was faster. As I had hoped, there were fewer cars on The 101 this late on a holiday Friday, so I was able to get door-to-door from the office to my home in half an hour.

That made me pretty happy, despite my lingering annoyance at how my car had had trouble starting up. Would have to talk to the father-in-law, a former auto shop teacher, about that. And about how the engine seemed to seize a little bit while passing San Francisco Airport.

Well, that bullshit could wait until tomorrow. The car was older, an ’84 Chevy Citation, and probably needed its annual tune-up and fluid change. My father-in-law had the maintenance log, so he would tell me.

Then, as I parked at the curb in front of my house I smiled that inside it there were some cold beers and a beautiful woman. So I shut off my engine, grabbed my things from the back seat, and locked the car. As usual, I wasn’t more than six or seven steps away from the Chevy when my rather large orange and white tabby came from the bushes to greet me. He was rubbing against my legs and purring, making walking a bit of a chore, but it did make me smile again. And then I looked up to see her waving from our open front door.

And that’s the last thing I clearly remember for awhile.

Because then the Chevy exploded.

I woke up in the intensive care unit at the main Kaiser Hospital in San Francisco three days later.  It would be several months before I could go back to work. I ‘officially’ woke up after three days, but I spent two days after that slipping in and out of consciousness. When my waking moments were in the day, I usually saw my wife’s worried face looking over me, and I could smell the light scent of her tuberose perfume. In the night, I usually saw a nurse standing over me or looking at the vital signs monitor next to my bed.

When I slept, I remember dreaming about flying. I never had flying dreams before, not even as a kid, and they were quite wonderful. There’s a movie with an English actor who plays a repressed bureaucrat who dreams of flying in a shining suit of armor and giant white wings to find his true love in the clouds. My dreams were like that.

Other times awake, an anxious-looking plain-clothes detective was there. His first name was Sam, and he was with the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office. Sam was quite young for a detective. He asked me questions about my exploding car. I told him about finding the pen, and how my car had acted up and I hadn’t seen anyone around my car that entire Friday. He asked about old enemies with grudges and my possible involvement with something illegal that went wrong, and other things he had to ask because that’s what detective school graduates do. I told him I’d only been a private investigator for a year right after college. Not enough time to acquire enemies who made car bombs. I had been a technology writer and journalist for years. Gates and Jobs did not want me dead, I was pretty sure.

I don’t remember feeling much pain, although I received a major concussion, a broken eye socket, five broken ribs, and second-degree burns over most of my back and buttocks. The skeletal injuries were from me flying across my street and landing in a steep driveway which I rolled down, crashing face-first into a thick tree.

I only cried when my wife told me the rather large orange and white tabby hadn’t survived the blast. He succumbed to explosion burns the day I woke up in intensive care. Nothing could be done. I still miss that damned cat, all these years later.

Still, I was lucky. We were lucky. Our house was okay, except for some blown-out windows.  Our insurance would pay for those, our neighbor’s busted windows, and my new car. The remains of the Chevy were impounded for evidence, then taken to a scrap yard. My personal effects, including the pen, were returned to me in one of those plastic zippered bags the day I was released from the hospital fifteen days after the explosion. The desk I am removing now had been new then, but I don’t remember putting the pen in any of its drawers. But I’d had a lot of morphine in the hospital and some lovely hydrocodone pills to ease my pain during home convalescence.

So I was a little loopy for a couple of months after my Chevy exploded.  To help me get through, my wife got us a new orange and white cat. A girl this time. She lived to be 14, only dying last year of natural causes, very loved and very happy.

As I healed and got stronger, I thought about the pen and the explosion as I did chores around the house most days. I became pretty sure that whoever wired the bomb to my car dropped the pen by accident. Whoever did it was goddamn lucky it bore no engraving or fingerprints. The cops had the same pen theory.  Sam told me this a month after I’d been home. But there was no concrete connection, nothing to help the police. No evidence to make any arrests in the case.

No bomb signature stuff.

Nothing.

Open case.

And WHY my car?

But the day I went back to work, just under three months after the explosion, I saw the strangest thing: I saw my car.

The Chevy, the one that blew up.

It looked so much like my ex-car that I briefly considered I was having some kind of PTSD-induced hallucination. I had my first cellular phone in those days, so I almost called my wife to have her come take me home. But I didn’t, because I wanted a closer look. I needed to know I was fully healed, and something about my explosion was really nagging now. Hard.

As I approached the Chevy, I saw that it was real, and nearly, no, almost perfectly identical to my dead car. Same model, same year, same trim, same paint, same hubcaps. When I got still closer to it, I looked inside. Yes, this Chevy had the same upholstery, same dash, same factory radio. Same everything, except the personal items in the back and passenger seats. Jesus Christ, the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up now, and I was getting very, very fucking pissed off.

I was pretty sure the bomber blew up the right car, just owned by the wrong person.

And when I saw whose name was on the reserved parking sign, I was sure of it.

A couple of days before my car exploded, I heard a rumor that a very successful and high-priced criminal defense attorney had moved into offices in our building. The rumor was he had to skip out of his fancy digs in San Francisco out of fear for his life from a wealthy sociopath drug dealer client who this attorney could not get acquitted. The attorney, the rumor said, moved down the peninsula to keep an almost invisible profile while still practicing law. I figured it was the usual office gossip, to which I paid little attention. In my office, we all had a lot of work to do that week before the holiday weekend.

I guess things had cooled down for the attorney, if he thought it was okay to have his name put on a private parking spot. I was going to be late for my first day back, but I didn’t care. I stormed into my office building lobby and looked for the attorney’s suite number on the wall directory. I wanted a word with this attorney, to thank him for the bomb wired to my car, for almost getting me killed.

For killing my cat.

The sign outside the glass-doored suite said the attorney’s hours were 8:30 to 12:45. It was just after 8, and the front of the office suite was dark. But I could see light coming from a door behind what looked like a very large reception desk. I figured the attorney had come in early or something. He could probably hear me if I knocked loudly, which I did several times, receiving no response.

So I tried the door.

Surprisingly, it opened. I figured in an open office building, entering the unlocked door to a business wasn’t committing any crime, so I went in. I was fuming. I wanted to yell at this guy.

I called out his name, said I needed to speak with him. NOW.

No answer. No sound. If no one was there, why was the office light on?

I moved closer to the open office door. The light from it made it easier for me to get around the large reception desk as I got deeper into the suite.

I was just about to place my hand on the office door to go inside, when I suddenly realized I didn’t have the pen with me. I wished I had had the pen with me, to show the attorney as I vented my rage at him. But how could I know things would play out this way this morning?

I couldn’t.

So I opened the office door anyway and walked inside, ready to yell.

I could have yelled at the top of my lungs, and he wouldn’t have heard me. Not one damn word. And he didn’t need to see my pen to know what it looked like, because he already had an identical one of his own.

The attorney’s pen was sitting in another puddle, of his own blood apparently. And this puddle was coming from where the attorney’s neck and head were bent over the edge of a very large executive desk. I could see his dead face. There was what looked like a barbed garrote around the man’s neck, cinched up at the base of his skull. Pretty grisly. I almost threw up. But I didn’t because I realized I was really seeing.

See, the blood was really dark, looked sticky, and you could smell what I assume was decomposition starting to occur. But except for being in a puddle of drying blood, the pen was pristine. Nothing on it, no drops of blood, shiny clean. It was a calling card of some kind, had to be. The attorney’s murderer must have ripped the man’s throat open, waited for him to bleed to death, then carefully placed the pen in the blood.

I’m guessing that my pen had been for the attorney to see before his own Chevy blew up, maybe on the seat or the dashboard. Perhaps the bomber had been rushed, because I don’t think my car had been broken into to wire the bomb. But I think about it some times.

I still had Sam’s card in my wallet from my hospital stay, so I pulled it out and dialed him from the reception desk phone. I didn’t touch anything in the attorney’s office, but I figured leaving a few fingerprints on the reception-area light switch and phone wouldn’t hurt anything or make me a suspect. Probably should have used a hanky, but I didn’t have one.  There was a box of tissue on the receptionist’s desk, but I didn’t give a shit anyway.

Because the next call I made was to my office. I explained to my secretary that something had suddenly come up related to my exploding car and that I would be in the next day to resume my job. She asked me if I could tell her what was happening, and I told her she would know all about it in five minutes when the police arrived in our building lobby. Then I hung up the phone.

In the quiet minutes before the police did arrive, I thought about the pen, the car, the bomb and the attorney. Then it happened, and I really couldn’t help myself. I started laughing, hard, long, until tears streamed down my face and I had to steal a tissue from the receptionist’s desk to dry those tears.

The pen? I might let you have it if you really want it.

But the laughter I keep for myself.

1 Comment by Dan Ryan on January 21, 2010
filed in The Pen

Kamiya Bar—A Small Story

The Old Man and The Lady

The old timers had been going there for over one hundred years, and I was finally back after more than twenty.

It was Kamiya Bar, in the Asakusa part of Tokyo, and it was the oldest western-style bar in the city. Western as in high ceilings, with wood-veneer wall panels, chrome light fixtures and those patterned tin ceiling tiles you see in old saloons in Tombstone, Arizona or Virginia City, Nevada.

But I don’t mean it also had brass spittoons and buffalo horns on the walls. Kamiya Bar is western in contrast to the small izakayas and tatami-mat sake parlors scattered all throughout Tokyo.  The main drinking room is more like a European beer hall, with elongated tables often shared by strangers. Condiment stations and menu holders are placed on the tables the way they would be in a typical American diner. Everyone wears Western clothing, and foreigners are not only a common sight, the Japanese welcome them quite warmly.

Sometimes in unexpected ways.

I had been dreaming of returning to Tokyo for many years. I was a bachelor here, fresh out of university, working for an American company for two years.  During the course of our relationship I had told my wife many stories of the happiness and wonder I had found here. So we had decided, six months before this day, to pool our resources and use her frequent-flier miles to take a grand 11-day trip to Tokyo and my old haunts. Which included, of course, Kamiya Bar.

And, actually, this was our second visit to the place. We had come to Asakusa a few days before to see the temple and do some shopping. My wife was utterly charmed with Asakusa and its more traditional appearance and overall feel.  Before leaving Asakusa that day, I wanted to show her Kamiya Bar, where we had many drinks and several plates of excellent fried potatoes. Most of the food in the drinking rooms is western-style.  Most of the drinks are large mugs of Asahi Beer and denki bran, a luscious, fragrant brandy made and served exclusively by the bar.

On our first visit, my wife and I had a smaller table to ourselves along the wall of the main drinking room. This visit, I wanted to go to the bar before she was done with her shopping. When I got there, the place was very crowded and I ended up sitting at a table in the smaller front drinking room with an elderly Japanese man. Our table touched another where a middle-aged Japanese couple were seated.

At first I thought all three of them were together, from the way they were talking and being friendly to each other. Empty food plates on the seam between the two tables made it look like these had been shared.  Because of my perception, I used my poor Japanese to defer to the elderly man when asking if I could sit at his table with all three people.

It turned out the middle-aged couple spoke some English.  So while the old man waved me to a chair without batting an eye, he spoke through the middle-aged lady who told me I was welcome to sit with them.  There were many empty beer mugs and denki bran glasses on the tables, and I have often wondered since how much of a factor they played in the wonderful hour which was to come.

When you first enter Kamiya Bar, you have to buy drink tickets at the front counter before taking a seat. In addition to the shopping bags which were now tucked behind my chair, I had tickets for two large beers and two denki brans, which I placed on the table in front of me.  That’s how it works: the waitress comes by, takes the tickets you’ve put out, and then comes back with your drinks. For subsequent rounds, you just put your cash yen on the table, and the waitress replaces the drinks you’ve had with fresh ones.

I had just gotten my beer and brandy when the middle-aged couple asked me some of the standard questions. Where was I from? How did I like Japan? I told them that I used to come to Kamiya Bar when I was a young man many years ago, and this made them delightfully surprised. The old man asked the lady what I had said, and when she told him he nodded approvingly at me and raised his glass to the one I had just picked up. When out glasses clinked, we drank and he nodded again.  Then he put another bite of fried potato and croquette into his mouth.

For the next few minutes, the middle-aged couple and I talked, with the lady translating for the old man and I when we had questions for each other. Although far better than my Japanese, her English was not that great, but here is what I learned:

The couple were married, but lived separately during most of the month because he had to stay in a company dorm for his job in Tokyo. The lady and their children stayed at the family home far outside the city.  The couple and the old man did not know each other, had only met that very afternoon at the tables we now occupied. I had thought the old man was a father or elderly uncle, but the lady said no.  And the old man was a veteran of World War II, had served the emperor.

By this time my wife had arrived, and I tucked her packages and shopping bags behind my chair with mine. In busted English and broken Japanese, my wife, the married couple and the old man managed to introduce themselves. The lady and I further summarized for my wife the conversation she had missed before arriving. My wife was very taken by the fact that the old man had served in the war.

She asked the lady what the old man had done in the war, something she and I both wanted to know. The lady asked the old man, but he apparently wanted to dodge the question. I watched him as he spoke, and he didn’t show any shame or embarrassment that I could see. He acted like a man who had happier things on his mind and didn’t want anything but light-hearted talk to carry our little drinking session forward. Through the lady he said, while smiling, that he preferred not to say. That settled it for me.

Then the waitress happened by and the old man ordered another round of beer and brandy for our group. The drinks arrived a minute later, and he pushed his pile of cash yen towards the waitress. I motioned for my cash, to place it with the old man’s, but he gently patted my hand down and away from his money. He was buying, and that settled that for us.

As we reached for our drinks, my wife asked the lady to tell the old man that her father had served in the U.S. Army during the war. It hadn’t occurred to me to mention that, but it did not surprise me that my wife did. After the lady spoke to the old man, he looked at my wife and seemed to beam at her. A very warm look. He then touched glasses with my wife as he had with me earlier, and toasted the rest of the table. He noticed that I was looking at his fried potato and croquette and offered me his plate. I was so full of beer by then I had no room for his kind offer. He smiled at this after the lady passed it on to him.

And as we had asked him, the old man asked my wife what her father had done in the war. Through the lady, my wife said her father had been an airplane mechanic but that he really didn’t like to talk about his role in the war very much either. The old man nodded and smiled at this. And perhaps it was the beer, but I suddenly noticed, except for the almond eyes and the lack of a mustache, my wife and I could have been sitting at this table with her father. Both men were the same age, about the same build, and favored long-sleeved dress shirts with sweater vests. At least that is what our Japanese old man was wearing, along with a grey wool driving cap.

And again maybe it was the beer and brandy but for the rest of our little drinking session I could sense real warmth between my wife and the old man. He bought another round of drinks for the table, and another plate of croquette which I agreed to share with him. He seemed pleased that no one had to suggest I put tonkatsu sauce on my food. Upon noticing, I asked the lady to tell the old man that all properly-trained gaijin know the value of tonkatsu sauce on croquette. The lady, her husband and the old man got a chuckle out of this. It made me happy to make them happy.

By this time about an hour had passed, and the old man announced that he had to go home and get some sleep. He had to spend the day with his grandchildren tomorrow. It was only six in the evening, but he got up and reached for the grey suit coat on the back of his chair. He had one arm into one sleeve, and seemed to be struggling with the rest of the process, when my wife quickly reached up and helped him into the suit coat. When the old man reached for his overcoat, my wife stood and helped him on with that.

For her help, the old man bowed to my wife and reached his hands to shake hers. My wife took the old man’s hands into both of hers and kissed them as the old man bowed a little extra bow to her. The kiss ended quickly, and my wife looked up smiling at the old man. He in turn was smiling at me as we reached out with single hands and shook. He had one of the most confident grips I have ever felt.

The drinking session had ended.

The middle-aged couple said they had to go as well. My wife and I were bone-tired and a bit tipsy. We decided to leave Kamiya Bar and head back to our vacation rental across town in Nakano to regroup before planning the rest of our evening.  We ended up staying in, having a snack dinner from the local combini and good beer and sake from a store called Life. We didn’t regret staying in, for we still had a few nights left in Tokyo. And one night out in Tokyo can often be worth two or three in any major western city.

But we didn’t go back to Kamiya Bar, though we talked about it. Even if we had, there probably would have been little chance of seeing the old man or the middle-aged couple again. I did give the couple our address and phone number with instructions to call us and stay with us if they travel to the States. But it has been almost two years now and my wife and I have not heard from them.  That’s okay. We are already talking about going back to Tokyo next year, this time with a promise from me that we will make proper plans in advance to take an overnight trip to a ryokan in Kyoto. I intend to make good on that promise.

But I have thought often about the old man since we returned from that trip, and I think of the bond he and my wife seemed instantly to share. I found it beautiful, but still don’t quite understand it. But I have never been a daughter, or the child of a war veteran, so perhaps real comprehension of this will always elude me.

But from my point of view it doesn’t matter, because I know this:

I don’t care what the old man did in the war, if he was a medic, a cook, a commando, or a pilot who strafed Pearl Harbor. For a short time he was our benefactor and our friend. And he was Japanese and we were Americans and it was Kamiya Bar.

4 Comments by Dan Ryan on January 21, 2010
filed in Kamiya Bar

SmallStories–An Introduction

I have wanted to do this for a long time. If I had started trying to be a writer of fiction twenty years ago, I would have failed because I did not have the experiences I believe one needs from life to tell a good story. At least not the kind of stories I want to tell to you. Surely, there are have always been gifted youngsters right out of college or university who have always been able to sit in a room and craft beautiful tales out of circumstances created entirely in their minds. I have never possessed such gifts. And I have never had the patience to write a story and attempt to get it published in the traditional submission-and-rejection manner, even in this age of the internet and email.

I want to tell you my stories my way. So I offer you this, SmallStories, an outlet, ego trip, and, perhaps, a refuge for stories crafted from all the ideas and observations that have been rattling around in my head for the last twenty years.

Not all of my stories will be happy, nor all of them sad. They will reflect experiences I have had and people I have met, and will come in the order in which my brain decides to concentrate on them and my fingers to write them. There will be some bad words and some uncomfortable ideas. But I have faith in your ability to enjoy my stories, just as I finally have faith in my ability to write them.

Welcome, and enjoy—Dan Ryan

4 Comments by Dan Ryan on January 21, 2010
filed in Introduction--About