B-side / collage + text: 

I was in a few photoshoots like this, some became display ads, there was one with me and my cousin Heather and Mom twice posed for the cover of a calendar, you were photographed golfing on a Fathers Day card, your father too, as Santa Clause on a bunch of Christmas cards. Some of the photographs were just a goof. There are contact sheets of me jumping up like a pogo stick and laughing, a pudgy kid in shorts and blue striped tube socks, I’m sure they never did anything with those. The guy that took the pictures was Frank Tropeano, he was a photographer at AG, we rarely said American Greetings, it was always AG, I remember him, his face mostly, smiling, he was tall, fit, as Italian looking as his name. I don’t remember the woman in the middle with the harpoon and I don’t remember the woman on the end with the knife, but I do remember the woman with the gun, that was Pam, I had a crush on her when I was a boy, she was pretty and fun, but really pretty. I thought it was so cool visiting you at work, seeing all the cubicles filled with illustrations and art supplies, a corporation buzzing with creativity, everyone making and taking pictures, and it all spilling over everywhere like a vast cutting room floor, seeing all the adults getting paid at their real jobs to do things children do, drawing and coloring and making cartoony pictures of things. There’s another campy photograph like this with you and Pam and two other women, you’re a golfer and they’re posed around you, seductively with drinks. Whenever I see this now I see the future un-lived, the past as present, you and the women you worked with, reclined on blank white paper in warm corduroy browns and pale pinstripes and dark leather, the day flowing by wavelike, your hair already turning gray, anchored there in that place with those people, the unseen drama, there’s not much left of any of it now, just what I spilled out here like the guts of you, all the photographs, paper clippings, cartoon illustrations, joke cards and holiday greeting cards, the display ads and store designs and posters, you were so young, younger than I knew you were, its a photograph you weren’t supposed to be in, your boss was, he was too busy, or he wasn’t there, you all hear it without listening, the sounds of a stapler stapling, a razor trimming, a sheet torn off a roll, a machine turning off and on, the scratching of pens and pencils, the skid and slippery slide of a colored marker, talking, laughter, the whir of a fan, a blowing vent, carpet scuffing, neon buzzing, the shudder clicking, Frank tells Pam to raise her arm up a little, Mike asks Frank if this is okay, Frank says, Yeah, thats good, everyone’s eyes on me says Frank, eyes on me.