An Excerpt from “Street Hassle”
Street Hassle, Marc Salazar’s forthcoming novel and thesis-in-progress at Amherst College, is told through a narrator’s flawed recollection of the past and damaged perception of the present. It traces his attempts to reconcile the sacred with the profane, the world of dreams with the banality of everyday life. Alongside this runs the story of his former patrol partner from his time as a police officer in Los Angeles. The partner’s life, in hindsight, begins to blur with the narrator’s own despite at first seeming starkly opposed. The narrator must then wonder whether there was ever a difference in the first place.
call me ishmael
“Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation!”
long warm spanish nights
“I couldn’t have been made for anything but this even if just the sensation of pencil in hand is like a pacifier for my baby soft soul. It’s how I fall in love with a perfect stranger whose every blank I fill in with the fairy dust and hot glue of my imagination. The rest of the work is done by the mole at the top of her left cheek and the tickle of her hair brushing up on my shoulder and her breath on my neck when she leans over to whisper a question.”
black and blue
Still though, he aches and remembers the senses of his youth and hers, the physical ugly gorgeous passion and spontaneity of it; the luxury of being alone, the thing that makes two people their own that disappears with each passing year of togetherness that leads to a bond that doesn’t require niceties and compliments to the point that those things feel like luxuries when they do occur. Togetherness that makes them one, that is beyond the senses.
As featured in Terror House Magazine…
on creativity
It comes out more in the winter when its grey outside. In a rural town that smells like rotting wood or a liquor store in the suburbs at two in the morning. When you see yourself buzzed in the bathroom mirror and like the way you look, and walk out with more attitude than when you walked in.
pink skies
Coffee and dessert and laughing, smiling, joking. Wanting her only to associate me with good things. We watched a Christmas movie back at the room and drank Colorado whiskey. We fell asleep with the blinds up and the city lights coming through the window.