Month: October 2015

Bully’s Eye

~ bethbishopwrites ~ Leave a comment

I am being bullied at work by a senior professor.

I am not the only one.

I am the only one who is ready to take it to the next level and have a discussion with the dean about stopping it.

This means that I will either become a hero, and the bully will really,truly, and absolutely despise me, or I will be treated like a hysterical, crazy woman to be burned at the stake. Well, I suppose they might just tell me to thicken my skin. They also might tell me to get a lawyer and sue the bully. In any case, I’ll have a huge target on my back (or head), and in any case, I don’t see it ending well.

Still, someone has to do it. Someone has to make it stop because the behavior is prolific and grossly unfair.

One Percent Other: The Duke of Hazards

~ bethbishopwrites ~ Leave a comment

From the first time someone paid Brazen to jump off the roof of the elementary school, he knew he wanted to be a stunt man.  He had no sense of self-preservation.  Anyone who hung out with him could attest to it.

In a school that was 49% white, 50% black, and 1% other, Brazen was one of the few in the “other” category.  He was unusual to look at, having inherited his Iranian father’s skin tone and coarse black hair as well as his ginger mother’s summer blue eyes.  His mid-teen growth spurt left him with awkward long legs and arms.  When he wasn’t in school or up to no good, he was running, knees and elbows pumping, and a foot-long braided rattail flailing behind him.

Brazen loved to do stuff no one else would dare, and he would do almost anything for almost nothing.  His toady and his best friend watched him eat twenty cockroaches, the big kind, for fifty bucks.  Any given weekday, he could be found taking money from other kids in exchange for an exhibition better suited to a sideshow than lunchroom entertainment. He always gave his audience what they wanted, and he craved the attention, which made him perfect for Ms. Cornell’s drama class.

When he wasn’t running lines or painting sets, Brazen passed the time walking across the auditorium on his hands, trying to see how many folding chairs he could jump, or just sitting in a circle of mostly girls and telling stories of the many and varied ways he’d broken bones.

They sat rapt, and he told the story well, despite the inevitable cracks that come with a boy’s changing voice.  “So three summers ago, my mom was dropping me off at the skate park every morning, at like nine, before she took my sister to band camp.  G-Man’s dad has a pick-up, so he brought the ramp.  P-Dawg has a friggin’ six foot half-pipe at his house, but my mom won’t let me go over there anymore since we got caught smoking, so we were at the damned park everyday.”

“Brazen, don’t cuss at school,” Ms. Cornell called.

“Sorry,” he sang back and looked at Toady.   Dropping his voice, he said, “You know she’s pregnant?”  The kids in the circle turned to look as Ms. Cornell, a tight-bodied, smoking hot redhead, as she gave stage directions.  The other kids whispered that they heard she got knocked up by a twenty-two year old, and she would be thirty in a few months.  “Yeah, well, if it’s true, then she’s a MILF for sure.”

“Ew,” Rasia, a pretty, light-skinned black girl who Brazen hoped to get to second base with, said.  “Tell us about the skateboard.”

Brazen looked at her, cocked his head, and gave her his best pirate smile.  “If it pleases m’lady.”  He batted his eyelashes at her.  “Yeah, so we did tricks all day, and we got bored real quick, but it was like an hour before my mom was supposed to get me.  So, we set the ramp up near some cars in the parking lot, and I hung out by the red light.”  Brazen paused to let the suspense build.  “So, this guy in a truck drives by, and I grabbed his bumper, staying low so he wouldn’t see me in his mirrors.  When I got near the ramp, G-Man yelled at me to let go, and I like swerved over,” his hand shot out toward the girl next to him, “so I could hit the ramp.”

“Man, it was wicked,” Toady said.

Brazen grinned at him.  “I hit the ramp solid.”  The fingers of his right hand swooped across the palm of his left.  “I caught some serious air.  I even made it over the car, but when I landed, I shattered both tibias.  My fucking knee caps—”

“Brazen!”

“Sorry, sorry!”  Brazen bumped the edges of his palms against the middles of his shins.  “My knee caps were down here.  G-Man had his cell phone.  I thought my mom would kill me.”

Eyes wide with sympathy, Rasia said, “I can’t believe you can still walk.”

After soaking up as much attention as he could, Brazen ran through his lines, which he’d already memorized, and then counted down the seconds until the bell rang.  He visited his locker, and then visited Rasia’s locker where he was rewarded with a kiss for his heroic feat and recovery and a hand slap for trying to cop a feel.

When Brazen walked out the front doors of the building, he felt as though his day had been fairly productive.  Then, he saw Ms. Cornell cranking her car.  Tossing his books aside, he ran and leapt onto the hood just as she backed out of her spot.  When she realized she had a fourteen-year-old boy clinging to her car, she slammed on the brakes, which sent him slamming into her windshield.

“Get the fuck off my car you crazy child,” Ms. Cornell shouted through the glass.

Brazen just smiled.  “You shouldn’t cuss at school, Ms. Cornell.  Give me a ride home?”

Ms. Cornell rolled down her window.  “No.  Your mom is probably already here, so go on and get off.”

“Okay, I’ll get off,” he said as he scooted over to the driver’s side of the car and stuck one foot on the ground.  “I get off to you all the time.”

Ms. Cornell frowned.  “That is just,” she shook her head, “go on.”

After blowing her a kiss, Brazen did just that.  On his way to his mother’s van, he accepted a congratulatory high five from a boy two years older than him and decided that his day turned out far better than he could’ve hoped.

I Learned A Lot About Myself From A Dead Guy

~ bethbishopwrites ~ Leave a comment

As I teacher, I try to learn from my experiences.  At times, the lessons are so blatant that I take immediate pause and think, “This is a teaching moment.  What have I learned here?”

For example, when you’re fourteen and walking down The Strip in Panama City Beach, you don’t hitchhike, no matter how sore your feet are, especially when the offer is from a carload of forty-something, mostly toothless men in a rusted-out Ford Crown Vic.  You absolutely do not trust your brother when he tells you to stick the end of the radio adapter plug to your tongue right after he’s plugged it in the wall, and you don’t let yourself be alone in the same room with a man that you know beats his girlfriend (because you might do something rash like stab him with your pocket bottle opener).

However, other times, the lesson is more subtle, something you come to hours, days, or years after the event.  With that in mind…

Several years ago, I lived in an upstairs apartment of a large complex. On a Sunday, around three in the afternoon, and as per my weekly routine, Fluffy and I were writing our grocery list to head out for our weekly run. He grabbed our bags; I grabbed my purse.  When I opened the door, I heard: “Oh God.  Oh, dear sweet Jesus.  Oh, somebody help me.  Jesus help me.  I think he’s dead.  He’s dead!”

I’m a moderately friendly neighbor.  I don’t always know names, but I know faces.  I wave or speak, pet dogs, and gripe about the weather, so I knew this voice.  It was my redheaded diagonally downstairs neighbor.  She was outside going into hysterics.  I sighed and looked out around the complex.  No one, and I mean no one was outside on this beautiful sunny Sunday.  No kids, no adults, no college kids.  No one.

To Fluffy, I said, “No one else is going to help her.”  He shrugged, and we went downstairs.

When she saw us, she grabbed my arm and begged us for help.  “I’ve already called my brother. I’m on the phone with 911.”  When Red gave me her cell phone, the operator asked me to go inside and check the body of her boyfriend.

That is when I saw my first dead person who wasn’t all prettied up in a casket.

He was face-down on the carpet in the nebulous “no-room” space between the kitchen, dining area, and living area.  His arm was outstretched with a piece of hard candy, a pink Jolly Rancher, just beyond his fingertips.  Their golden retriever mix was going ape shit, racing around the room, barking at us, at her, at the dead boyfriend.  The operator told me to have her put the dog in another room and then roll him over for further assessment.

When Red grabbed his arm, she squealed and began hyperventilating.  Fluffy, cool and calm as always, bent down and helped her heave her boyfriend – a heavyset man – onto his back.  He was purple, swollen, bloated, and leaky.  Red squealed again and jumped back.

To the operator, I said, “Ma’am, he’s purple.  It looks like he’s been dead a while.”

She said, “I can talk you through CPR.”

My automatic response was, “No!”  The guy was purple.  His lips were blue and swollen.  All of him was swollen.

Fluffy knows CPR, but when I asked if he would do it, he shook his head at me.  “I’m sorry, but this guy is dead dead.  I’m not doing CPR on him.”

At this point, Red launched into full panic mode.  She was too upset to try, not that I think she would’ve.  I walked back outside, still on her phone, and I heard the sirens of the ambulance.  Moments before it arrived, her brother did.  I gladly handed him the phone, got myself and Fluffy into my car, and drove to the grocery store.  In the parking lot of Publix, the adrenaline wore off.  I had the shakes for a solid half hour.

Later, we returned to the complex to find it crawling with police, paramedics, and gawkers.  People were actually sitting outside their apartments in lawn chairs watching all the goings-on.  “Where were they when she was screaming for help?” I asked.  “No one to be seen for miles until all the lights and sirens come.”  I was as sick and disgusted by the living as I was by the dead guy.

Red was out on her porch with her mother and brother, and she got up to thank us for trying to help and trying to calm her down.  “They said he died while I was at work, probably not long after I left.  We were going to get married this summer.”  I gave her a hug.

While unloading groceries, I said to Fluffy, “Just so you know, I’m going to be clingy for the next few days.”

The next morning, as I was getting ready for work, the lesson came to me: when someone is screaming for help, I will try to help…to an extent.  I could never give CPR to a complete stranger.  I just don’t have it in me to do something like that for the corpse of someone I don’t love.  I feel a little bad about that, but now I know.

What A Surprise

~ bethbishopwrites ~ Leave a comment

For the last two months, things have been a little…weird with the publisher of my Camellia books, and now I know why. The former CEO sold the company. The messages we are getting from the new owners are very encouraging, and it looks like Eternal Press and Damnation Books will now be imprints of a larger publishing company that will provide a much wider range of genres, including erotic adult color books (meow). They even plan to make an imprint for YA, which will be good for FAIREST. They plan to increase the marketing budget, so sales should be a boost. That will make everyone happy, and the new owners hope that, by changing the name and breathing some good will into the current authors, they can change the current feelings that authors have about Damnation/Eternal Press.

You see, if you Google either of those companies, you will find as many blurbs from authors who have copyright issues as you will promo announcements. I can’t speak to this, as none of my contracts have run out yet. I can say that the former CEO treated me and my projects with utmost respect and attention. She was always very kind, helpful, and patient with me, and I wish her the very best in whatever she goes on to do. I believe this is not the case with every author who writes for those companies, but again, my experience has been very positive.

Sometimes, you inherit problems from your predecessor that never go away. Maybe you end up being part of the problem or your life gets too out of control to properly do your job. This is when you bow out, which is what the CEO did. Still, it was a shock. None of the authors knew this was coming until it was here. For the sake of my books, my contracted but as yet unpublished books, and all the other authors, I hope the new owners stay true to their promises. For a change of pace, I will try to be optimistic about it.