What Has It Got In Its Pocketses? B-B-B-Bye-Bye. Take Us to Your Sofa.
Photo by Mekuria Getinet on UnsplashLamb: A novel in snapshots is the heartbreaking coming-of-age tale of two queer boys in the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic.
Get the ebook free - today through Friday on AmazonI was reading this book during my lunch break at the office and ended up sobbing. That’s how good and heart-wrenching it is. - A.Y.
Lamb is a gut-punch of a novel—raw, lyrical, and devastating in all the ways that matter. Troy Ford writes with the kind of emotional precision that leaves you breathless, weaving a story that’s as much about silence and survival as it is about pain and identity. - M.F.
Ford’s prose is electric, and feels so timeless and yet so positioned in a moment and place in time. - S.A.
Messy, Silly, Sad, Joyful, Terrifying, Ridiculous Life!A series of reminiscences, reflections, notes, and ideas of a chronically anxious late-blooming author and expat living in Spain.
What Has It Got In Its Pocketses?Looking back it's clear I had a problem with jewels when I was just four or five and our little friend Kim down the street showed me the diamonds her mom had given her. They were sparkling and beautiful, not real and white but better, plastic, more like the gems the dwarves were mining in Snow White, heigh ho, and I wanted them so badly, enough to grab a few (she had so many, she should share, it was my birthday, precious, and they'd never be missed.) My mom discovered these and when asked I said they'd been given. She was obviously suspicious but didn’t inquire further, one of many big gaps in parenting that would bite me in the ass years later. Then there was the box of costume jewelry on a visit to our older friend Bridget's house. I returned to this treasure again and again in the loft of the garage to gaze, covet, and touch, until it was understood that little Troy had an unhealthy fixation on jewels and the box was hidden for the rest of our stay. Bridget died in a car accident when she was 18, missed a freeway exit, swerved and flipped her convertible. Her mother clung to me at the funeral for an uncomfortably long time, my covetousness forgiven, probably forgotten, but I couldn't help but think while ensconced in her awkward embrace, Where are those jewels now?
B-B-B-Bye-ByeOne of my fondest early memories is singing “Cecilia” in the car off the Simon & Garfunkel 8-track with our parents, not that we understood a word of Cecilia’s shenanigans, but they were such great harmonizers, weren’t they? We also had “The Graduate” soundtrack, and coo, coo, ca-choo, you did have such a lovely leg, Mrs. Robinson, perhaps a little too lovely for an impressionable young queer with access to his sister’s knee-high patent pleather red boots. Chunky little heel, not too high, could dance around with no wobbles and a towel draped over my head à la Cher hair to “S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y Night” and “B-B-B-Benny & the Jets” (“…she’s got electric boobs, her mom has two”—I still have a bad ear for lyrics) and the Cruella DeVille song. The thrill of it all. My sister didn’t much like my incessant absconding with her boots, and neither did my parents the first time they caught me and realized they had capital-T-rouble on their hands. 1974. The day the music died, bye-bye Miss American Pie.
Take Us to Your SofaContact is made, the flying saucers have landed. World leaders array themselves in sashes and medals and half-circles round and about the gleaming silver salver-shaped crafts. Ramps extend, portals retract, and out from the depths of the interstellar transports the visitors spring and prance to greet us. The world over, we watch with our children and pets the televised broadcast of First Contact. “Welcome?” we cry out, astonished—for the aliens are pitbulls—we turn to our dogs, they raise their paws in unison and wink. They’ve been here all along, watching, adoring, sleeping in our beds, demanding belly rubs.
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