The Prince of Staten Island and Other Stories

An anthology of a dozen stories:

The TEN LOST TRIBES OF EUPHORIC SHORES IS fable of urban apocalypse. The mayor leans on the police, forcing them to ignore the home invasions that plague the 400 families of the gated retirement community of Euphoric Shores. The hoods say the geezers got bank, but got no flex, and they ain’t strapped. The neighborhood is on its own and confronts the problem in clever ways.

EROTIC SHOCK: Nixon is out. The reign of the old men is over. Conway has survived his years of smuggling out of Cuba, sells his plane, and returns home. The singles bar is born. The top tease at an escort service moves in with Conway. The real fireworks begin when they reunite after a breakup, and she brings a Viking princess to share the fun.

PRINCE OF STATEN ISLAND: Charlie Newton has sworn to de-fang, de-claw, and neuter Wall Street. On the last day of his life, at the corner of Battery Place and Greenwich Street, Charlie’s I-Phone rang. “This is Bruce Duncan, your astronomer. I am heading for higher ground in case of a large wave. I tasked the Consell telescope to observe the sky directly overhead with a diameter of two hundred miles at an elevation of ninety miles. Majorca is one degree of latitude south of New York. Their computer sent it a minute ago. The object appears to be twenty yards wide. The distance between Majorca and New York is 3,800 miles. At 20,000 miles per hour, and minus the two minutes since it was photographed, that puts it nine and a half minutes away. With a mass fifteen per-cent of the Tunguska event in 1908, this means a blast radius of six miles. It will come down somewhere along a line between Spain and Chicago. Good Luck, Mr. Newton.”

DOUBLE DOUBLE TOIL AND TROUBLE: Frances Kemble enlists the aid of glamorous television psychologist Dr. Anita Karvakian to expose a presidential candidate in the ambush journalism of a television interview. Frances contemplated the injury of lies. She remembered the jellyfish-sting of their betrayal. The lie was a family with many sons. Frances ran their names. There were weasel-words—the Swiss Army knives of lying. There were spins—the quick coats of paint. There was boilerplate—the unpruned thicket where lies hid like leopards. There was hyperbole—the vine wrapped around the living truth. There was silence—the family ghost. There was sham, phoniness, fakery, duplicity, insincerity, hypocrisy, unctuousness, quackery, humbug, and bluff. There was pretension, perversion, distortion, exaggeration, equivocation, dissimulation, and cant. Frances thought of the Eskimos, who needed 32 different names for snow.

Another among the three stories of Conway, OF WINDAGE AND DEAD RECKONING: Conway is a smuggler in the Caribbean and the Florida Straits, flying a twin-engine Navajo. As the islands string out farther south, civilization grows weary, and the towns become simple. The farther he flew from the American mainland, the wider the stretches of blue water became, and more clear became the problem of survival. Conway sometimes refuels his white, twin-engine Navajo at lonely Duncan Town. The sky behind him glows with first light. Conway rises up from the airstrip, flying low and flat out, at two hundred and twenty-five knots. He turns west north-west up the Nicholas Channel, hugging the color change, in the low light, at the west edge of blue water. Alongside Cuban airspace, Conway switches off his collision lights, to fly dark. Always, Conway dreams of the forbidden string of islands off his port side—from Neuvitas in the south to Bacunayagua in the north. Above his left shoulder, Conway watches for the lights of Migs, rising up to shoot him down.

and more....