MAD PRIDE

The doctor’s office was on the other side of town in a wooded area with a creek coming down from the hills, its banks covered with weeping willows and a deep brushy undergrowth. I marveled at this jungle through the window of my father’s old Dodge as we pulled into the lot by the creek just as his cell phone rang. I knew it was mom as he started shouting and I could hear my mother’s voice over the line. She believed my episodes were normal growing pains and I shouldn’t be labeled crazy by some shrink. That’s why she’d refused to join us at the psychiatrist’s office.

Hearing this boring argument start again I slipped out of the car and wandered off into the woods. The brushy shrubs and low branches of the trees muted the sound of my father’s voice as I wandered along a thin animal trail through the understory that swallowed me as easily as a liana-draped jungle might swallow a soldier on patrol or an adventurer in search of lost treasure. I moved among the close-shadowed greenery of the drooping willow tree forest and felt the ground soften with thick green moss as my sneakers sank into the spongy green carpet, the air cooler down here, the sounds of the city falling away, and it felt like the creatures of my imagination started to fade too and grow dimmer, the voices less insistent.

Suddenly a bright red cardinal broke from a low limb and swept past my face, its startled expression as wonderstruck as mine. I followed the bird in its erratic flight down the pathway and heard a soft gurgle of a stream as the ground grew muddy and sucked at my shoes. Looking down I realized with a start that my foot was inside the deepened cavity left by a large animal that must have just preceded me down the trail. Stooping, I examined the prints and saw the outline of hooves, deeper set in the front than in the back, as if the creature had run on it toes.

Moving on I came against a high wall of rushes by the water’s edge, impenetrable and unimaginably high. The tall fronds rasped back and forth from the overhead wind making a rough whispering sound while swaying like a curtain. It reminded me of the opening act of the Nutcracker ballet that I’d seen last winter, the part when the music grows and the lights come up and the curtains rise, the stage hands hidden from sight pulling the screen up to reveal the Christmas Party as the audience sighs in anticipation.

Looking down at the base of the hedge, I noticed a slight vertical crease in the vegetation, almost imperceptible except for where a brown bit of earth turned upwards as if a large creature had passed through. Slipping sideways into this gap, I forced my body through and surprisingly found a wider trail on the other side. This path curved to the right around a bend and towards a glint of bright sunshine, which illuminated the shifting reeds into a shimmering wall of gold. It’s like Aladdin’s cave, I remember thinking, rustling my hands along the fronds of the towering plants.

Walking farther in, I turned a bend and startled hundreds of redwing blackbirds that lifted in flight to flit about my head raucously complaining while the females hunkered down on their nests in the soft earth trying to be as inconspicuous as a black bird can be on a yellow marsh. In a few places, recently fledged chicks scurried about on the ground mimicking their fathers who flew about in crazy patterns amidst the reeds, banking upwards and sideways at times to disappear through breaks in the foliage.

I giggled at their random energy and cacophonous screeching. It reminded me of a busy subway station I’d been in with Dad, the birds commuters racing for a train in the brush. I expected a collision at any moment, a crash of feathers and loose fluff. On a whim, I reached up and tried to touch a passing bird, my hand a Gulliver mitt amongst their feathery Lilliputian bodies. And that’s when the birds froze in midair!

Startled, I stepped back and gazed at a bird suspended directly in front of my face. It looked like a piece in a child’s mobile suspended above a crib. I tentatively reached out, fingers trembling and gently pushed its lowered wing. The bird pivoted like a gyroscope and slowly revolved as if it was attached to an invisible wire running up into the overhead branches. Looking at my feet, I noticed dozens of baby birds on the ground also immobilized in mid-step, one pair squabbling with open beaks joined, others above me hanging sideways on tall fronds like porcelain dolls in a museum. I laughed nervously as if a Mummers show were about to begin, the avian actors awaiting instructions from some unseen conductor.

Then I heard my name called, “Peter!” Called from afar in a deep cavernous voice. Startled I thought it was the hooved creature calling me from the riverside.

“Peter!” it called again now more insistently as I moved towards the water. But then just as I reached the fringe of pussy willows along the marsh’s edge whose pods exhaled swarms of powdery pollen into the wind on the water, I felt a hand drop on my shoulder, which made me shriek in terror.

I spun around and saw my father before me.

“Peter,” he cried, his face contorted with rage, hollow eyes and jagged teeth, lips curled back in anger, his words distant as if echoing from the end of a canyon or through a hollow paper tube. “What in God's name are you doing down here?” he cried. “And look at your shoes, they’re covered with mud, and your face, it’s scratched to pieces. What made you wander so close to the river? Don't you know they're wild dogs down here, coyotes too! They could eat you for lunch."

***

Then I heard my name called again, “Peter!” Called from afar and pulling me back from my daydream reverie and the memory that dissipated like silver bubbles.

“Peter!” it called more insistently. “Peter, we’ll be late for the party."

I looked up from the paragraph I’d just written before I dozed off, as my wife, Jeanne, entered and stood over me with her hands cocked on her hips impatiently. She was dressed in a gown, a silver lamé dress that clung to her curving figure like flowing metal, impossibly tall high heels on her feet and her long blonde hair now lofted above her head in an impossible coif that defied gravity.

“I'm sorry,” I said shaking my head, “What party?"

“Don't tell me you forgot?"

“Oh! The book party, right?” I sputtered.

“No, Peter,” she said laughing. “It’s called a Pre-Production Party in the movie business. I swear, if it weren’t for me, you'd never come up for air unless I took your computer away."

“I'm sorry, I’m working on the first draft of the screenplay for my book and lost track.”

“That's OK, chowder-head. I've placed your new suit and shirt on the bed. Now go on and change before the limo arrives,” she said roughing my hair and pulling me up from the desk. I nodded and shuffled into the bedroom to pull off my sweats. Jeanne followed and sat in the chair before a vanity, brushing foundation on her cheeks before the mirror.

“How’s the rewrite going," she asked.

I stopped with my pants halfway up trying to put the scene back in the forefront of my mind. "I’m not sure yet,” I said looking into the mirror over her shoulder, my face annealed into an amusing brew of cross-features as I thought with furrowed brow, bitten lips and eyebrows clenched in concentration.

“It's changing from the original idea in the book,” I said with honest perplexity. “I have this brief scene stuck in my head about my first visit to a psychiatrist’s office that’s not in the novel. I feel it’s important to the story line but I’m not sure how or why it fits into the plot. I just need to keep at it, I guess, to see where it comes out."

“Well, don’t get too invested. The basic storyline to your bestseller, “Mad Pride,” is already in the novel. Your readers won’t be too thrilled if you go and change the plot in the movie version.”

“I won’t! It’s the core theme, as you know. I gave up medication when I joined Mad Pride, which started out as a mental health movement like the gay pride movement.

“I know,” she said with forbearance as she recited a few lines from my book. “All we nuts and psychos came out of the closet to reclaim our place in society. Refusing all those nineteenth century treatments like electroshock therapy and hydrotherapy that morphed into mind-numbing medications and behavioral modifications in the twentieth century.”

“That’s right, my darling. But isn’t that why you love me so? For all my psychoses and unpredictability.”

“Well, yes! But that doesn’t give you license to go crazy in public. So be nice tonight. This screenplay is going to buy us a beachfront house in the Hamptons.”

I smirked at her and stuck my tongue out in defiance. “I am the author!” I said in mock hauteur. “I can do anything I want.”

***

Later that night after being dragged around the Crystal Room at the Hotel Plaza for an insufferable hour of chatter, I finally convinced Jeanne to leave so I could get back to work. The scene that had bothered me kept bubbling up just beneath the surface but would not come out. Finally, I laid down on the couch and dozed off, hoping that my subconscious would fill in the details.

I was a boy again sitting in the psychiatrist’s waiting room in an oversized chair quietly staring at my shoe tips suspended in the air. I felt confused emotions covering me like a hot cloth, red and black, anger and worrisome. Looking beyond my feet I sensed a movement beneath the chair, a small thing really, hardly anything at all, but something. Slowly spreading my dangling feet apart, I noticed a panoramic design in the large Oriental rug that ran across the waiting room floor. There was a gray elephant rearing on its hind legs while a man in a long white robe wearing a red turban sat in a little house upon its back, struggling to stay on, as he thrust a long spear downwards at a tiger charging from a wall of high grass by a river.

Opening my feet wider, I saw a hunting scene widen across the floor. There were tiny men with long shields beating the tall grasses, driving the tiger out of its hiding place into the upraised spear of the hunter. Swinging my feet under me slowly onto the chair, so as not to disturb my dad, who’d picked up a magazine and was lost in its pages, I swiveled about and dropped onto my stomach to look down upon the rug with my chin planted securely between my hands. Beyond the hunt scene, a blue and yellow river was embroidered that rolled through tiny villages draped upon a snow-capped mountain, the towns filled with tiny woven people all frozen in place. Suddenly I felt more that saw a movement below me and looked down.

All four of the elephant’s feet were now firmly planted on the ground and the tiger impaled upon the long hunter’s spear. Gasping, I swiveled and sat back up in shock as the receptionist called my name and father lifted me off the chair and carried me towards an open door on the far side of the waiting room.

“Hello,” I heard someone say as the office door closed behind us and my view of the rug over my father’s shoulder suddenly snapped out of sight. Turning around, I squinted at a shadowed figure framed by the light coming in from a wide picture window that undulated in green reflected slivers through a large fish tank.

“My name is Dr. Nikolai Khachaturian. It’s a pleasure to meet you, young man,” the doctor said as he kneeled on one knee and offering me an outstretched hand.

I took his hand and smiled, a warm hand, soft and relaxed. The doctor’s face came into view at this level. He wore a thin black mustache that struck out like toothpicks between a bulbous nose and above full lips. Two bushy eyebrows creased the doctor’s forehead converging like a furry bridge between his two brown eyes.

“You are Peter, are you not?” the doctor asked.

“Yes,” I answered in a whispered voice.

“Doctor, I’m so glad you could see us on such short notice,” my father said.

“No problem, I had a sudden cancellation. It happens!’ he said and shrugged as he motioned us both over to sit at a low round table surrounded by tiny chairs.

“How does this work?” my father asked. “We’re not the kind to seek help outside the family with our problems.”

“It pretty straightforward. We talk, have a few tests, some discussion with you and Peter, then Pete and me alone. Then I can get a sense of what we’re dealing with.”

“OK, shoot!” father said

“Peter, do you know why you’re here?” the doctor asked.

Sliding into a seat between the two men I looked down at the spread of children’s books and soft toy animals that covered the table and whispered, “To get a shot?”

“No, no shots,” the doctor laughed. “I’m not that kind of doctor.

“What kind?”

“Why I guess you could call me the talking doctor.”

“Talking doctor?” I repeated.

“Yes, I talk to young boys like you about what’s bothering them. Sometimes it helps to talk things out.”

“I like to talk.”

“What do like to talk about?” the doctor asked in a low soft voice.

“I don’t know,” I whispered looking askance at father.

“OK,” he said. “What if I choose something from the table and you talk about it.” The doctor brushed his fingers across the books, pushed some blocks out of the way, then moved to a mound of soft toys and grabbed a fuzzy gray elephant and handed it to me, “What about this?”

I flushed with excitement and seized the toy from the doctor’s hand. “How did he get out of the rug?” I cried.

“Get out of the rug?”

“Yes, the rug. There’s an elephant in the rug out there, he wasn’t scared of the tiger. Why didn’t he run away?”

“Ah, you mean the Maharajah’s elephant and the tiger hunt on the rug in my waiting room.”

“Yes!” Why did the man on the elephant kill the tiger?”

“It’s a hunt scene from India. My parents brought that rug over from Armenia when they came to live here years ago. I remember having that same thought when I was your age and it was in the living room of our house. My parents hung it on the wall like a painting for years but it got so old and shabby that I brought it here and placed it on the floor.”

“The mountain, the rivers, the villages with little people running around, the boats fishing and the sea that moves like wind in the woods. That’s all there too,” I said.

“Yes,” the doctor laughed, “That’s all there too. It’s a small world woven together by colored threads to make a story.”

“What in the hell does this have to do with his hyperactivity?” my father asked.

The doctor looked at my dad, his expression neutral but I could see his tightened lips and bushy eyebrows creasing.

“The boy is perceptive, Mr. Geoffrey. He’s obviously a close observer of his surroundings as you might tell from his detailed description of my rug, which he saw but for a minute.”

“So, what does that have to do with anything? Big deal, the kid remembers things.”

“There are genetic or neurological pathologies where a child’s hypersensitivity to his surroundings might make him overly responsive or hyperactive, sometimes fearful, but there are degrees. He might just be an overly curious and bright child with too little, or too much, stimulus in his world. I can’t separate out which until we talk and make some connections.”

“Can’t you just give him some of those pills the kids are all taking these days in school? Seems like a waste of time to talk to him when all he needs is a good tranquilizer.”

“That’s not how it works, sir,” the Doc said with a dismissive shake of his head. “We don’t willy-nilly push pills at kids anymore because they act up at home or in school. Admittedly there are some cognitive and deep-seated biological diagnoses that justify medication but until I rule out other behavioral and environmental conditions in his world, and see what’s really going on inside his head, medicating him would be a shotgun approach at best with no guarantee of success.”

“Seems like a lot of nonsense, you ask me,” my dad said sitting back in his chair with a huff.

“Well, you obviously care about your son. That why you brought him to me. So why don’t you let me talk to him alone for a few minutes. Perhaps I can get a better sense of what’s bothering him.”

“Alright, time to have a little chat with the doc, Pete. I’ll be right outside if you need me.”

After the door closed, Dr. Khachaturian looked down and noticed that the stuffed elephant I held was pulled apart, its green cottony stuffing covering my lap, the shredded toy limp in my hands like a deflated balloon.

“Did our conversation make you upset, Peter?”

“No,” I replied as my fingers still picked at the elephant.

“Ok, perhaps we can do something different,” he said. “Do you like fish?”

“I like sharks; they eat fish.”

“I have some small shark-fish in my aquarium, would you like to look,” he said gesturing at the large tank by the window.

“That’s too small for a shark. Sharks are big.”

“Yes, that true. These aren’t real sharks but freshwater fish that look like sharks. Come, I’ll show you.”

I followed the doctor to the tank where a dozen fish circled around. On the bottom near the gravel bed was a tiny silver shark with black on its back, belly, and tail fins.

“It’s called a Bala Shark but it’s really a minnow like the ones you see in park ponds,” he said.

The aquarium loomed above me, its pump softly thrumming, bubbles rising from the gravel bed creating a silver wall that shimmered behind the fish that moved slowly like slumbering whales in the green water. I reached up and felt the glass, smooth and cool, pulled my hand back and rubbed the fingers together, felt the dampness as if water in the tank was leaking through. I couldn’t look away from the tank. I heard a gurgling sound inside that grew louder.

“That gigantic fish with the bubble eyes in there, he's in charge,” I said pointing. “The littler fish ate their babies so the shark couldn't get them. I can hear the babies in their bellies crying to get out.” I looked up at the doctor who had a quizzical look on his face, his eyes almost crossed in concentration, “What are those lumps moving on the glass?” I asked.

“Those are snails. They live in little shell houses they carry on their backs for protection from the Bala Sharks. They’re the cleaning ladies in my tank. They eat the green stuff on the glass, plants called algae."

“The snails are singing, I can hear them,” I said. “They’re singing “Ee! Ee! Ee!” which I mimicked with a loud ear-splitting shriek.

“It’s because they’re scared of the shark might eat them. They want to go home but it’s too cold and dark in the closet, so they came here to sunbathe.”

“What closet?”

“The little closet under the sink where daddy made me a nest.”

“And what do you do in this closet, Peter?”

“I watch TV.”

“You have TV under the sink.”

“No, the TVs in my head.”

“What kind of TV shows do you watch?”

“All kinds!”

“Do these shows have good guys and bad guys?”

“Sure. The good guys are the winning team, soldiers, policemen, superheroes like Spiderman and the Hulk. The bad guys are monsters; man-monkeys that scream and throw shit at me, bad guy teams with soldiers like on TV but with real guns that make you explode, giant owls, my father, the teacher I had in 2nd grade, spitting snakes, lightning bolts, thunder….,

And that’s when I collapsed onto the floor, shaking and incoherent.

From far away I saw Doctor Khachaturian reach out and touch me on the shoulder with a calming pat. He was talking but no words got out.

“Peter!” I finally heard him say as he eased me up. “Peter, take slow breaths. Its aright, I’m here to help. Peter!” he added with a shake and I stopped, my eyes slowly focusing on the doctor’s face.

“Here, sit down while I talk to your father about some medicine that might make you feel better.”

***

I awoke with a startled jump as if I’d fallen from a great height. I was no longer on the couch but standing on our apartment balcony overlooking Central Park. The Zoo was just on the other side of the street. Behind the huge sycamore trees that swayed in the breeze I heard a lion roar and a screeching from the peacocks that wandered the grounds. I thought about the dream, the memory, and the realization that my malady was both mental sickness and parental neglect. No wrong word! Parental disgust at a strange child who saw things others couldn’t see. Misconceived ideas of punishment. A bad roll of the dice and, yes, schizophrenic tendencies ignored for too long.

Looking down the side of side of the building I could see the doorman open a cab door and then turn to light a cigarette after the passengers entered the lobby. He suddenly looked up at me and squinted past the leather visor of his cap and the gold braid of the epaulets of his great coast shoulders seemed to sparkle like water on a koi pond. He suddenly flicked his cigarette and walked to the building and grabbed a cornice and began to climb like a spider his eyes never leaving mine, hand over hand as his eyes sparkled and his face shivered like quicksilver.

***

There is a distinct smell to an emergency room, part iodine, part human sweat, feral and animalistic like pheromones of fear and adrenaline in a fur-covered creature unsure of its balance on the edge of a cliff. I awoke to this smell and more, the crisp carbohydrate odor of a freshly starched nurse uniform, the ever-present astringent odor of ammonia in the disinfecting floor cleaner, the open scabs of a wound nearby, the cloying apple juice fragrance of someone’s abandoned dinner tray.

My heightened synesthetic senses turned the smells into sounds and the sounds into colors. The clanging of gurney wheels wobbling down the hallway were purple. The scrape of a nurse’s chair as she jumped up to answer a code bell, orange. A green penumbra grew beneath my closed eyelids as the muffled sounds of a dozen conversations went on near and far throughout the ward like the rustling of leaves. Then a faucet turned on in a nearby sink became the spring rain in a forest, gold; the slithering of creek water across a riffle of rocks turned translucent silver.

Slowly, dreamlike, one voice resolved into scarlet.

It was Jeanne’s soprano, her sibilant voice whispering in a one-sided conversation, nearby yet muffled as if she was in a cavern filled with slick clay and reverberating stalactites.

“I know but it’s too soon to tell,” she said into her cell phone. The answering voice at the other end of the line was unhearable yet distinct in my quasi-dreaming state.

I thought it said, “Cut the umbilical, serve him up like a cuticle to be snipped.”

Jeanne replied, “It came on so quickly and he’s so much stronger than me. All I could do was hold on. Mom, I have to go, I think he’s waking up.”

I felt something grasp my hand, soft and hard, resolving into long fingers, warm palms, tracing across his wrist, stroking my forearm, and the voice coming for me through my ears, “Peter, are you awake? Can you open your eyes?”

I did and saw Jeanne’s face hovering over me. I was in a curtained ER cubicle surrounded by electrical equipment, wires and tubes were attached to my body like the arms of an octopus pushing someone else’s blood into my veins, the cardiac monitor sensing discrete packets of electricity emanating from my heart.

“Peter?”

“Schizophrenia!” I said aloud.

The word slipped into my head like a snake emerging from its hole. I knew the diffuse symptoms of the disease, the psychosis, the cognitive collapse, the emotional emptiness and the withdrawal. I knew the familiar hallucinations but the details were fuzzy. I looked at my wife and tried to talk but my tongue wouldn’t cooperate, it felt like weights hung upon every syllable.

“Wah habbened?”

“You had a psychotic episode, dear. Quite a bad one.”

“Hurt anyone? Hurt myself?”

“No, no one was hurt. But you scared the hell out of me. “You were on the balcony babbling incoherently. You tried to climb over the railing and I couldn’t stop you.”

“You pilled me?”

“I had to Peter! It was terrifying. So, I forced a Thorazine tablet into your mouth.”

“Thorazine? No wonder I feel like shit. You know I can’t stand to be medicated.”

“I’m sorry but it was all I could think of at the moment. Did anything happen to bring it on? You were sitting out there sleeping peacefully and then you were so agitated. Did you see something in the park that upset you?”

I shook my head but then remembered the doorman for a moment and then he was gone. Vague images of circling sharks crested a bit beneath the waves of the sedative that resolved into a small boy standing in front of an aquarium. Then something clearer arrived, the pages I’d been writing on, the words moving like worms across a manuscript with my name on it.

“It was the screenplay.”

“The screenplay? What about it?”

I shook my head and rotated my neck, trying to dispel the drug’s effect and get a cleaner image of my emotions. “I remembered something about my father and tried to add it to the screenplay. It was disorienting, like reading my diary in Spanish, the translating put me above my own mind, watching the words come out like distorted fetuses, tiny ideas flitting from one syntax to another.”

“Oh!” she said uncertainly. “But why would your reaction be to jump off the balcony. Disorientation I can understand but suicide?”

“Suicide? Who said anything about suicide? I was hallucinating obviously but non-destructive.”

Jeanne laughed bitterly. “Are you kidding me? It took all my strength to keep you on that balcony. If you weren’t trying to kill yourself then what were you doing?’

Then I remembered the doorman and his impossible journey up the side of the building. And my desire to join him. Meet him halfway down and commune in some spidery arachnid tongue.

“Maybe I thought I was a spider and could scud across Central Park on a silken thread,” I said.

“You think that’s funny, Peter,” she cried.

“No, not funny, darling, but therapeutic,” I said apologetically. “I remembered something I must have buried from years ago. My father taking me to see my first psychiatrist. I got up and tried to write it all down but it must have gone sideways.”

“Still doesn’t explain what you were doing out on that balcony.”

“I don’t know. Without my meds, I hear chapters coming and let my episodes go their own way when they arrive. It’s like I’m on a tour bus and I can’t get off. It’s best to ride it out to the end of the line and take pictures of the scenery when it flashes by. That’s where I get a lot of ideas for my stories.”

“Well, this idea almost killed you,” she said sobbing as she dropped her head into her hands.

I reached out and stroked her hand, “I’m sorry, honey. Maybe you’re right.”

“So, you’ll go back on the medication and keep your symptoms in check?”

I pulled my hand away and looked at her in shock. “No, of course not. That’s not what I meant. We should just take precautions. You know, move to the first floor, nut-proof the apartment so I don’t play with knives when I’m off to La-La-Land.”

Jeanne stared at me for a moment without answering then shook her head and got up and left the room.

“Jeanne, wait!” I called and tried to get out of bed. But my feet wouldn’t cooperate as I slid to the floor. I saw her legs moving away from underneath the bed frame, retreating down the corridor and past the nurse’s station.

I shouted, “Jeanne!” but that only brought a nurse who managed to lift and place me back in the bed as I saw my wife get on the elevator.

“Are you alright, Mr. Geoffrey?” the nurse asked as she tucked the sheets around me and smoothed the pillow. “You need to be careful and stay in bed until the medication wears off.”

“And how soon will that be? When can I be released?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s up to the Doctor, Mr. Geoffrey. But there’s no rush. You’ve had a nervous breakdown and we can’t let you go until you’re well enough to take care of yourself.”

I laughed and said aloud, “I like that phrase, a nervous breakdown, the good old way of describing mental illness. Makes it sound so natural. Like an overworked muscle.”

The nurse smiled indulgently and left the room. I thought about the rug, the aquarium, the snails, and my father with the head of a shark in one breathless image, which was quickly supplanted by another image of Doctor Khachaturian handing me on of his magic pills. It kind of made sense now.

I smiled at the thought and said aloud, “The snails are singing, I can hear them. They’re singing “Ee! Ee! Ee!” which I mimicked in a loud ear-splitting shriek that reverberated off the ceiling and down the hallway and throughout the ward, which sent the nurses running towards my bed like a school of hungry sharks.

Thomas Belton is an author with extensive publications in fiction, poetry, non-fiction, magazine feature writing, science writing, and journalism. He is a marine biologist, an environmental scientist, and a public health official for the State of New Jersey. His professional memoir, “Protecting New Jersey’s Environment: From Cancer Alley to the New Garden State” (Rutgers University Press) won “Best Book in Science Writing for the General Public” by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.
https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/protecting-new-jersey-s-environment/9780813548876 In addition, he has published many short stories including for the journals NonBinary Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Fterota Logia, Mystery Magazine, Mystery Tribune, Constellations, South Shore Review, The Satirist, Adelaide, Meet Me at 19th Street, Cicada and Art News. His short story “Seneca Village Arises,” (Meet Me @ 19th Street Journal) was awarded “Best First Chapter” in the journal’s 2021 contest for a Young Adult novel opening dealing with racial inequality, https://www.archstreetpress.org/2020/12/28/the-bargemans-daughter-seneca-village-arises/ In addition, his short story “Murder at the Trocadero” won the “Writers Digest Writing Contest Popular Fiction Award” for Mystery/Crime (2017).