Photo credit: kpishdadi The voice, I thought, would get me girls. It didn’t. After my first girlfriend, Dee, there wasn’t a second one until after high school, until I was well into college. I was missing something, an essential part of manliness, which I could…
John Sheppard
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John Sheppard served four years in the United States Army as an Illustrator (MOS 81E). He was honorably discharged after Gulf War I. He went on to receive an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Florida, where he studied under Padgett Powell, Marjorie Sandor and Harry Crews. He has worked as a grill cook, web site designer, junk mail writer, small town newspaper editor and civil servant. He lives in Chicago.
John Sheppard
1 Min Read
If you grew up in the Tampa Bay area in the 1970’s, as I did, we had our own version of Krusty the Clown: Doctor Paul Bearer, a chain-smoking cadaver with a glass-eye that pointed the wrong way (and nearly popped out of his head),…
John Sheppard
6 Min Read
In first grade, while doing a Svengoolie impression in the mirror in the bathroom, I was discovered by a teacher who moonlighted as an actor at the Robert Young Repertory Theater, a leftover from when Smithville was a resort town, a place where Chicagoans would…
John Sheppard
5 Min Read
My father didn’t like kiddie movies, but he, having been informed by our mother that he needed to bond with the boys, would take us out on occasion. He took a two-week vacation from the post office every summer and tried out the fatherly…
John Sheppard
6 Min Read
While I was attending New College during my freshman year, I took a political science course taught by President Carter’s former speechwriter. This was only a couple of years after the Carter Administration, and many Democrats were handwringing over What Went Wrong. The speechwriter told…
John Sheppard
16 Min Read
1 While I was cleaning my apartment recently, I picked my grandfather’s accordion up and played it for a while. I have no idea what I’m doing—I’m not musical—but it makes wonderful sounds. It’s a pleasant way to spend an hour. My grandfather’s family came…
John Sheppard
9 Min Read
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 When my name was called, sitting there at the VA hospital, I stood up, thanked the Jesus-loving Vietnam vet for his time and his service, and went with the attendant to examining room A, where I was…
John Sheppard
5 Min Read
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 When I was a teenager, I worked at a Pizza Hut. My last manager there told me I was going to go to hell. I was a senior at a Catholic high school. He was very solemn when he…
John Sheppard
9 Min Read
Part 1 here Part 2 here My turn came to get on an airliner, a Northwest Orient 747. The commercial crew was gone, replaced by Air Force reservists. We had to lug our brand-new issue over with us, rifles and body armor and Alice packs…
John Sheppard
10 Min Read
See part 1 here. My sister and I used to spend summers with my grandparents, my mother’s parents, at their teeny-tiny apartment in Nalcrest, Florida. Nalcrest is the retirement village of the National Association of Letter Carriers, the postal union. Nalcrest is shaped like a…
John Sheppard
9 Min Read
After I’d left my wife, after I’d been fired, again, I sat alone in my apartment drinking fruit punch-flavored Kool Aid generously laced with gin. I stared out the window. Out there was Bradenton, Florida, and the heat index, and savage, lumbering alligators unafraid of…
John Sheppard
11 Min Read
Billy sat in his cloister trying very hard not to hear his mother’s screams. It was impossible. He had work to do, spreadsheets to fill out before Monday morning, or he wouldn’t get paid and if he didn’t get paid, his mother would have to…
John Sheppard
8 Min Read
Editor’s Note: This novel excerpt first appeared here March 11, 2012.
Picture this: A pair of jump-boots, spray-painted silver, tied together by the laces and tossed up to a power-line umbilicaled to my barracks. Short-timer!
After my honorable discharge, my DD-214 in hand, I walked outside the out-processing barracks and whooped and spun my class A jacket round my head.
Shit, yeah.
I wasn’t really happy. But sometimes you have to celebrate no matter how you feel.
An old-man colonel noticed me and tsked.
In the out-processing barracks, I was issued a new military ID, one identifying me as TDRL, so I wasn’t out of the Army. Not completely.
They wouldn’t bring me back. I would disappear, I’d decided–naively as it turned out. I threw away the plane ticket that would have jetted me back to my home of record, Sarasota, Florida, put on my civvies and walked off post, heading away from official Washington, and Fort Myer and the big depressing cemetery, down Columbia Pike, just another suburban street in suburban Virginia, my duffel bag slung over my shoulder.
Somewhere near Bailey’s Crossroads, a van honked at me and pulled over. I hopped in.
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