Tricky Rick by Michael Czyzniejewski

I was at Tricky Rick’s house after school because my mom had a PTA meeting. While Tricky Rick’s mom took a bath, we poked around her closet and found a big box from Girl Scout cookies that didn’t hold Girl Scout cookies. Inside was a stack of dirty magazines and some video tapes that didn’t have labels on them. Tricky Rick hadn’t seen this stuff before, I guessed, the way his eyes almost popped out when he opened the flaps. I wanted to just go back to playing Super Smash Bros., get out of his mom’s room before she found us. Tricky Rick wasn’t leaving. He opened one of the magazines and flipped through, revealing naked women on just about every page. In the middle there was a spread featuring a redhead. At first she was in a business suit and glasses, behind a desk. On the following pages, she had on one fewer piece of clothing in each picture. The last two pages, she was naked, showing herself from the front and back, her big boobs and big butt and the place with the triangle of dark hair. Tricky Rick fingered that part, sniffed his finger, then stuck it under my nose. I pushed it away, not sure what I was smelling, but I didn’t like it. In the last picture, the woman was on her desk with her legs spread, and it looked like something inside her was coming out of her, like when I sliced my finger on that soup can and needed stitches. The woman’s glasses stayed on the whole time, and she was always looking directly into the camera, looking right at me.

The only naked woman I’d ever seen before was my mom. These were different, better, not my mom. But I really wanted to get out of that bedroom. Tricky Rick handed me the magazine and dug through the box, to the VHS tapes underneath. That’s when we heard his mom calling our names, her voice getting closer. Tricky Rick pulled me deeper into the closet and put his finger to his lips. From where we were standing, we could see the front part of the bedroom. Tricky Rick’s mom came in, peeked around, and shut the door. Then she dropped her big bath robe—she was naked except for a towel wrapped around her head. She walked up to a long mirror in the corner. We could see her butt facing us and her front in the mirror. She scratched at something under one of her arms, which was hairy. Tricky Rick’s mom took the towel off her head and rubbed her hair. She didn’t have big boobs like the redhead in the magazine—hers were small and pointed in different directions—but they still shook around as she dried herself. I didn’t want to get caught, but I couldn’t stop watching her, how all her parts moved. Tricky Rick was reaching down to the front of his pants and rubbing himself really hard, like he was mad at his zipper. I looked back to the room and his mom was gone, but I could hear her opening drawers. A minute later, she walked out of the room, fully dressed, and called our names as she went down the stairs. 

Tricky Rick grabbed a new magazine and shoved it into his pants, covering up with his T-shirt. He pointed to the door, but I didn’t want to go first. He pushed past me and looked in the hallway, then signaled for me to follow. We ran into his room and shut ourselves in. Tricky Rick put the dirty book between his mattress and box spring and pulled out his radio-controlled car set from his closet, handed me a controller, ordering me to play. A second after we got the cars going, his mom knocked then came right in. She said, “There you guys are, playing like good boys!” She told me my mom would be here in ten minutes, that we should finish our race. She wore a green sweatshirt that said Mizzou in puffy white letters, but all I could see were her boobs bouncing as she dried her hair with her towel. 

When my mom came, we stood by Tricky Rick’s front door for almost half an hour while the moms talked. Tricky Rick’s mom told my mom what Tricky Rick and I had been doing all evening (video games, race cars), what she was making for dinner (Frito pie), and how Tricky Rick said he wanted to come over to my house some time. Tricky Rick was playing games on the couch again and looked up when his mom said that. I could tell he was staring at my mom’s boobs, which were in a white blouse and bigger than his mom’s, like the woman in the dirty book. My mom also wore glasses.

“That would rule,” Tricky Rick yelled out. I heard his Luigi die in his game. 

Tricky Rick’s mom asked about my dad, and my mom said that he’d gotten our latest care package, the fishing magazines and the Twizzlers. My mom got serious and asked about Tricky Rick’s dad. Tricky Rick’s mom started to cry, said there was still no word.

“Four months,” Tricky Rick’s mom said. “Nothing.”

My mom had told me to never bring up Tricky Rick’s dad unless Tricky Rick or his mom brought him up first. Then I was supposed to say something nice, tell them that they’ll probably find him soon. I was not supposed to talk about my own dad, who was OK and coming home in less than a month.

My mom hugged Tricky Rick’s mom, then pushed me to hug her as well, my face against the Mizzou sweatshirt. We hugged for too long, then my mom told Tricky Rick’s mom she’d call her, that we’d be delighted to have Tricky Rick over (she called him Ricky—only kids called Tricky Rick Tricky Rick). Tricky Rick’s mom said that would be great and wiped her tears in her sweatshirt, exposing her tummy. I was staring at her Y-shaped belly button when my mom pulled me out the door.

On the way home, Mom asked if I liked Tricky Rick. I told her he was weird, and she said that was because he hadn’t had a dad around. She said he would come over and play at our house, maybe even stay the night—his mom needed a break. I told my mom that he probably wouldn’t want to spend the night, that we didn’t have as many games as he did. My mom accused me of jockeying for new game system, said I was taking advantage of a kid whose dad was probably dead in a desert somewhere. She said I’d have Tricky Rick over, be nice to him, and he would stay the night. 

I said that sounded fine.

 “That’s better,” she said. That’s my little man.”

~

Tricky Rick, compared to me, was kind of popular. Most of the cool boys were the athletes, the ones who played football and basketball. My mom wouldn’t let me play football, just like Tricky Rick’s mom wouldn’t let him. We were both allowed to ride the bench in sixth-grade basketball, however. I was terrible—I couldn’t dribble and could barely get my shot over the rim. Tricky Rick was worse, the team’s token fat kid and goofball. He just spazzed out in practice, running into the other players like a pinball, laughing the whole time. The coach would make him take laps for not being serious. He didn’t care, as long as the cool guys laughed. During the games, he did this crazy dance he called The Tricky Rick where he would lift his shirt and shake his flabby body all over the place for minutes at a time—without a shirt, he kind of looked like his mom, drying her hair in the mirror. The cheerleaders—the cool, pretty girls in our class—were right next to him and they would cheer and laugh, chanting, “Tricky Rick! Tricky Rick! Do The Tricky Rick!” It seemed to actually work: We won all our games after Tricky Rick debuted The Tricky Rick.

One night, after we took our league title, Tricky Rick’s grandparents had us over for a party in their basement. His grandfather was the mayor, and they had the biggest house in town. All the players and cheerleaders were invited, the only party I ever went to in grade school. Me and the other benchwarmers sat on a couch on one side of the basement while the starters and the cheerleaders played pool and hung out by the bar, sipping Dr. Peppers and eyeing the booze. Tricky Rick sat with us—that’s where the cookies and nachos were. When nobody was paying attention to him, he yelled out that it was Tricky Rick time. He stood on the back of the couch, right above our heads, and did The Tricky Rick. The cool kids came over and egged him on. When they got bored and turned around to shoot more pool, Tricky Rick pulled down his pants and danced in his underwear. The girls were grossed out by his dirty tighty-whities and walked away. That’s when Tricky Rick did something I didn’t think even Tricky Rick would do: He pulled out his thing and started to pee on the wall behind the couch. This scared away the girls for good, but the cool guys thought it was awesome, especially when Tricky Rick tried to write his name—he got as far as the C when he ran out of pee. Then Tricky Rick got dressed and was invited over to shoot pool. One of the cool boys asked if he would get in trouble, his pee all over the wall and the couch, and Tricky Rick replied, “Don’t worry. Grams’ll clean it up.” 

~

The day after I went to Tricky Rick’s house, my mom informed me Tricky Rick was coming for a sleepover that Friday night. I’d been hoping she’d forgot about Tricky Rick, but I should have known better. Once my mom got an idea in her head, she didn’t let it go. This one time, she heard a woman on the radio mention how many vitamins were in parsley, and ever since then, there’s always a little piece of parsley on my dinner plate. If we had hamburgers: parsley. If we had meatloaf: parsley. Chicken legs: parsley. If we ordered a pizza, she’d make me eat a sprig of parsley—that’s how parsley is measured, I learned, in sprigs—before I could eat a slice. With Tricky Rick, my mom was convinced that me having a friend was good for me, and it probably was. I just didn’t want it to be Tricky Rick. 

My mom spent the rest of the week planning. She told me the exact time the pizza would be delivered and what time she’d have to call to make that happen. She set our bedtime at midnight, an hour past my normal weekend bedtime, but winked at me, saying who knows what we’d do once she was asleep. She described games, how we’d each carry as many cotton balls on a spoon as we could, racing to the kitchen and back. We’d compete to see how many marshmallows we could shove in our mouths without barfing. She actually bought a big poster of a donkey with matching paper tails. My mom was not only trying to force a friend on me, but wanted us both to be four years old. I wasn’t sure what was worse, her overmomming or the thought of Tricky Rick in my house all night, staring at her chest and rubbing at his jeans.

~

Usually, I couldn’t wait until the weekend, when I could sleep in, watch TV, and talk to my dad on Saturday morning. That week, Tricky Rick Week, I wished Friday would just bleed right into Monday. Instead, time blew by. Before I knew it, my mom was picking me up from school on Friday, and we were going gift-bag shopping. I asked her what that meant, and she said that we had to make a little bag for Tricky Rick to take home with him after the sleepover, filled with candy and toys. I wanted to tell my mom to just go buy him a dirty book but didn’t.

Tricky Rick’s mom dropped him off twenty minutes early on Friday night, while my mom was vacuuming. For some reason, she thought the house had to be spotless when Tricky Rick came over, like he wasn’t just some stupid kid. My mom thought Tricky Rick’s mom would walk him to the door so they could talk, but Tricky Rick’s mom was already gone by the time Tricky Rick rang our doorbell. My mom apologized for having to finish vacuuming, then having to take a quick shower. Tricky Rick said she shouldn’t worry and thanked her for inviting him into her home. 

As soon as my mom put the vacuum away and went into the bathroom, Tricky Rick ran down our hallway, looking in all the rooms. When he found the one that was my parents’, he signaled for me to follow him, and he went inside. I didn’t want to go in my mom’s room—I wasn’t allowed—but Tricky Rick was inside, and I had to make sure he didn’t steal anything. When I got there, he was looking under the bed. He said he checked the closet and there wasn’t anything. He opened all my mom’s drawers. Then he went to her nightstand and opened the cabinet underneath. He pulled out what looked like a long candle and a bottle of some kind of oil.

“You know what this is for?” he said.

I didn’t know. “That’s my mom’s.”

“It sure is,” Tricky Rick said, and laughed. He smelled the candle and then put it back in my mom’s nightstand with the oil. 

Tricky Rick and I were in the living room, playing Xbox, when my mom got out of the shower. Tricky Rick had kept one eye on the hallway the whole time. When the door clicked open, he watched as my mom walked from the bathroom to her bedroom. She was fully dressed already—Tricky Rick must have been waiting for a bath robe because when he saw my mom with clothes on, he said, “Shit.”

~

My mom ordered the pizza at the exact time she’d said she would order the pizza, and it came at the exact time she’d thought it would. We were not allowed to eat pizza in the living room, so we had to stop playing and go to the dining room table. My mom put my sprig of parsley on my plate and offered one to Tricky Rick, who took it and ate it up, asking for a second. When my mom turned her back, Tricky Rick put the parsley under his nose like Hitler, raised his arm in a Nazi salute, then dropped the parsley under the table.

At eight, Mom announced it was game time. Tricky Rick didn’t know what was coming and seemed eager, like we were going to do something that wasn’t what we were about to do. First was the cotton ball game, which my mom explained with excruciating detail. Before she could finish, Tricky Rick grabbed a spoon, stuck it in the bag, and pulled out most of the cotton balls, stuck together in a clump. He then walked to the kitchen and back without dropping one.

“Wow, Ricky. You’re great at this game!” my mom said.

“Thanks,” Tricky Rick said. He dropped the cotton balls back in the bag and handed me the spoon.

I dug the spoon into the bag and dug out a few cotton balls. The clump had fallen apart. I tried walking with three measly cotton balls, but dropped them after the first step. 

“I think we have a winner,” my mom said, and congratulated Tricky Rick with a mini-Snickers bar.

“Can I eat it now?” Tricky Rick asked. 

“By all means, Ricky,” my mom said.

Tricky Rick unwrapped and ate the candy, popped in his mouth, and my mom took the wrapper and put it in her pocket. Tricky Rick excused himself, said he had to go to the bathroom.

“Are you having a good time?” my mom whispered to me when he was gone. She was smiling like I hadn’t seen her smile since my dad had been deployed. “Ricky looks like he’s having a good time.”

“It’s OK,” I said. I looked at the bag of candy, the pile of game supplies on the bureau by the door. “Are you sure he has to stay over?”

My mom softly slapped me on the leg. “Of course he has to stay over! His mom told me she’s going to dinner and a movie, treating herself. You know, she hasn’t had it easy. I don’t understand why you’re acting like this.”

At that, I saw Tricky Rick standing behind my mom, holding up one of her bras, the neon pink one I’d seen in the laundry. He held it over his T-shirt, where his boobs were, though the bra was too big for him. I tried to shake my head, tell him No, put that down, asshole, but he looked at me, winked, then ran his fingertips across the ends of the bra cups and licked his lips. He fixed his eyes on my mom, who was still lecturing me about how great Tricky Rick was, how I was lucky to be his best friend. I didn’t know if I wanted her to turn around and see Tricky Rick or if I didn’t.

Tricky Rick solved that dilemma when he announced, “Mrs. Pappenfus, what’s this for?” He was still holding the bra up in front of him

My mom turned around, and even though I couldn’t see her face, I assumed she was turning red. As she went over to Tricky Rick, I was thinking to myself, This is it! 

“Where did you get that, Ricky?” my mom said, snatching the bra out of his hands. “That’s personal.”

Tricky Rick did not back down. “I went to dry my hands after I washed them, but instead of a towel, I found this. What’s it for, Mrs. Pappenfus?”

My mom’s demeanor did a one-eighty. At first, she’d looked embarrassed and almost-mad, then became not-mad and precious. She said, “It’s called a brassiere, Rick. Or a ‘bra.’ It’s a type of underwear women wear, on top instead of on our bottoms.” Then my mom actually reached around her back and fastened the pink bra over her shirt. She pulled the straps on over her shoulders and said, “See? It fits like this, only underneath.”

 “I see,” Tricky Rick said, and in his boldest move yet, took a step toward my mom, reached up his hand. “May I touch it?”

I stood up at that point and took a step toward them, ready to do what, I don’t know. Luckily, my mom said, “No, Rick. That’s for Sgt. Pappenfus.” 

Tricky Rick said he understood, that he wouldn’t want to see it, anyway. He said he wasn’t interested in girls, which were yucky. My mom said that he might change his mind one day. 

Just when I thought we could move on to playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, Tricky Rick asked my mom one more question. He wanted to know how long it had been since my dad had gotten to see the bra, and if she thought he’d ever get to see it again.

 My mom’s whole demeanor changed again, like somebody kicked her in the stomach. She told Tricky Rick that was none of his business and went into the kitchen, taking off the pink bra along the way.

I wanted to punch Tricky Rick in the face, especially when he reached down into his pants and pulled out a second bra of my mom’s, a black one. I tried to reach for it, but he shoved me and held the bra high so I couldn’t reach it. 

“She won’t miss this,” he told me. He brought it up to his face and licked at the lace inside a cup. Then he shoved it back into his pants and said, “I’ll bet there’s a matching pair of panties. My mission tonight is to complete the set.”

~

Right before my dad left for his tour, he gave me a pretty standard you’re-the-man-of-the-house-while-I’m-gone speech. He said for the next twelve months, I’d have to keep an eye on the place, do my chores and a lot of his, too. He reminded me where all the emergency phone numbers were written down. He showed me how to use a toothpick to pop the lock on the bathroom door if it got stuck. He described where the back door key was hidden in the yard, under the Blessed Virgin statue in the garden. He showed me how to shave. We got haircuts.

My father also told me to be good to my mom, that this was going to be hard for her, his leaving. She and I would need each other, he explained. I should talk to her at least once a day. I should sit up straight and look right at her, never rolling my eyes or acting like I wanted her to stop talking. I should ask her how things were going, ask her, constantly, if I could help her with anything. At least once a day, I should tell her that she looked pretty or her hair was nice or she was wearing shoes or clothes that looked cool. He made me promise I would, had me repeat it all back to him.

The last thing my father told me was to do him a special favor: to keep an eye out for guys coming around the house. He wasn’t talking about the mailman or Uncle Dan but guys I didn’t know, guys who were already there when I came home from school, guys who stayed the night. When I asked him if he meant I should make sure Mom was faithful to him, he changed the subject, reminded me where the spare key was. He said he was kidding about that last thing. He ran his hand through my hair and then me and my mom drove him to the high school, where his unit was meeting their bus for deployment. We had long good-byes—all the soldiers did—and as he climbed up the stairs, my father told me, “Remember what I said: You’re the man of the house.”

That was the last time I ever saw my father.

~

My mom never had us play any of her party games after Tricky Rick asked her about my dad. She let me have some of the root beer she’d had delivered with the pizza for Tricky Rick—I never got to drink pop, not ever. After dinner, she took our plates and tossed them in the sink—one of them broke, but she left it all to clean up later. She let us play video games for the rest of the night. She spent a lot of time in her room, and when she did come out, it was to go to the bathroom or to take a couple of pills from the pill drawer. She didn’t even say hi to us or ask how we were doing.

By ten o’clock, Tricky Rick and I had eaten all the candy, all the leftover pizza, and two bags of microwave popcorn. If Tricky Rick was amped up normally, filling him with sugar and caffeine turned him into a monster. He played Xbox standing up, right in front of the TV, clicking the buttons like he was trying to break the controller, yelling at whatever we were trying to kill. Once, when he screamed Damn it! my mom came out of her room and asked if we were OK. When Tricky Rick apologized for saying damn, she told us she might fall asleep, that we shouldn’t stay up too late.

At one in the morning, Tricky Rick tried making a frozen pizza in the oven, but when he couldn’t figure out how, he hid it in the bottom of our garbage, eating the cold pepperoni and some of the cheese. He did another lap around the house, going into my room for the first time. He took one step inside, looked around, then came back out. 

“Your room is pretty shitty, Dustin,” he said. “Why don’t you have more toys?”

“I have enough,” I said. 

“Whatever,” he said and shut my door.

Across the hall was my mom’s room. Her door was shut. She was probably asleep. She probably was crying, too, after what Tricky Rick had said to her. I was thinking then I should have gone to her, remembering what my dad had told me, instead of staying in the living room with Tricky Rick and playing games. I could still do it, knock on her door, check on her. Before we knew it, though, we’d be up and Tricky Rick’s mom would come. I’d talk to my dad then, I reasoned, and my mom and I would have a good Saturday. I just hoped my dad didn’t ask if I was keeping my promise to look out for her. I almost hoped he would forget to call in the morning.

Tricky Rick told me to shut off the light in the hallway. When I asked why, he shook his fist at me. Tricky Rick then tried to open my mom’s door, slowly turning the handle.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“I told you I had a mission,” he said. “There’s a pair of black underpants that wants to be reunited with its bra brother.”

Tricky Rick started to tip-toe into the room—he was planning to go through my mom’s drawers with her in there, asleep. She might have been up and crying. She might have even been naked. 

I grabbed Tricky Rick and pulled him back into the hall. 

“Stay out of my mom’s room,” I whispered.

Tricky Rick snorted and pulled away from me, easing back toward the void of the bedroom.

I pulled at him again, this time harder.

“Cut it out, fucker,” he said in a harsh whisper. “I’m not going to tell you again.”

“I’ll tell your mom,” I said. “As soon as she gets here. I’ll tell her about the dirty books, too.”

Tricky Rick looked me up and down. “You were in the closet, too,” he said.

Tricky Rick again tried to get into my mom’s room, pushing me harder, into the opposite wall.

“I’d tell your dad,” I said to him, this time louder. “Only he’s probably dead.”

Tricky Rick grabbed me by the collar, pushed into my neck. “What did you just say?”

“Your dad—he’s probably dead,” I choked, doubling down.

Tricky Rick backed off, looking at me with a mix of shock and utter despair.

“Dustin?” my mom said at that moment from inside her room. “Is that you out there? Do you boys need anything?”

I stuck my head in the doorway and told my mom it was Tricky Rick, that he thought her room was the bathroom, that he felt bad for opening her door. She said goodnight, and I said goodnight back. I could’ve gone in to see if she was OK, but for some reason, I didn’t. I didn’t know what I would say to make her feel better. Instead, I closed her door.

Out in the living room, Tricky Rick was already inside his sleeping bag, pretending to be asleep. I told him I knew he was still awake, but he kept it up, even making a snoring noise. I told him I knew he was faking.

“So what if I am?” 

I didn’t answer but crawled inside my bag. 

After a few minutes, Tricky Rick said, “You’re right, you know. My dad’s probably dead. Or worse, he’s a prisoner. You know what they do to prisoners of war?”

I told him I didn’t.

“They make them wish they were dead,” Tricky Rick said. Then he said he wanted to go to sleep for real. Then he really did fall asleep. 

It took me over an hour to get there myself—I kept looking at the clock on the wall, listening to it tick. Eventually I got up and went to my bed. I fell asleep right away, Tricky Rick in my living room, nobody between him and my mom.

~

I woke the next morning to hear Tricky Rick and his mom talking to my mom in the kitchen. I found them all having breakfast, toaster waffles and sausage links, two things we’d never had for breakfast until that morning. 

“If it isn’t Mr. Sleepyhead,” Mom said.

“They were probably up all night,” Tricky Rick’s mom said. “I’m surprised they ever went to bed.”

I sat down in the fourth seat at the table, and before I knew it, a pile of waffles bathed in syrup and butter was in front of me. Tricky Rick’s plate was empty, licked clean. His mom had half her waffles left, so Tricky Rick reached over and forked the pieces into his mouth, grabbing them one at a time as if he wasn’t going to eat them all.

I ate my waffles slowly, sick from all the candy and pop and pizza we’d had the night before. My mom sat down with some toast and coffee, opposite Tricky Rick’s mom. My mom seemed to be over what’d happened the night before, laughing and talking with Tricky Rick’s mom like nothing had happened. Tricky Rick didn’t seem to be sad anymore, either. When he was done with his mom’s waffles, he started to eye mine, making me eat faster, despite my nausea. I would have eaten a thousand waffles if it meant Tricky Rick couldn’t have even one more bite.

My mom and Tricky Rick’s mom finished their coffee and stood up together, signaling it was time for Tricky Rick to leave. I felt bad for him, especially after telling him his dad was dead, but I still wanted him out of the house. I never wanted him to come back, never wanted to go to his house. If it meant I could look at him for one less minute, I’d quit basketball, too. As far as I knew, he had my mom’s bra tucked away somewhere, probably in his pants, right up against his thing. If our moms weren’t there, I’d tackle him and punch him in his face until he handed it over. 

Tricky Rick left unscathed, gift bag in hand, and when he was in the front seat of his mom’s car, he smiled at me. I gave him the finger, not caring if his mom or my mom saw (they didn’t). Tricky Rick was gone, and I wouldn’t have to think about him until Monday at school.

It was the day for my dad to call. I thought about telling him about what Tricky Rick had done—what he’d said, how he had one of mom’s bras—but that would mean I’d failed. My dad would have wanted me to stop it all before it happened, do the thing where I beat Tricky Rick bloody until he learned some manners. The fact that I hadn’t, and this rich little fat kid had some of my mom’s underwear, meant I should ask him how he was doing, tell him I couldn’t wait for him to come home. 

I asked my mom how long it would be before my dad called and she laughed. She pointed at the digital clock on the oven, which said 11:34—I’d slept right through my dad’s assigned time, right through his call. When she saw me looking sad, my mom said, “Don’t worry, Dustin. He never called. Probably out on a mission. It worked out, because that’s when Tricky Rick’s mom showed up. It would have been awkward, her there with him on the phone, Ricky’s dad still missing.”

I nodded. That would have been weird, but I wanted to talk to my dad. He’d missed his call before, twice, once when the lines were down and once when he was “indisposed,” my mom explained to me. Both times, he called later that night, just to let us know he was OK. I spent the rest of that Saturday waiting for that call, rethinking what I’d say, tell him what had happened with Tricky Rick. When he asked what I’d done about it, I’d lie. I’d tell him I’d taken care of it, that Tricky Rick would never disrespect my mom, or him, ever again. He’d tell me, “Good job, son,” and before I knew it, he’d be home.  

Michael Czyzniejewski is the author of three collections of stories, I Will Love You for the Rest of My Life: Breakup Stories (Curbside Splendor, 2015); Chicago Stories: 40 Dramatic Fictions (Curbside Splendor, 2012); and Elephants in Our Bedroom: Stories (Dzanc, 2009). He teaches at Missouri State University, where he is Editor of Moon City Press and Moon City Review. In 2009, he was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

17 September 2021