Procession

We were notified of Jake’s impending deployment during the busy, gray stretch between Thanksgiving and Christmas. How shocked was Jake when he received the news?  He sent out a text message blast to all of the contacts in his cell phone, stating:I’m going to Iraq in March. Getting drunk tonight. Come out if you want.

The usual channels were alerted, and we assembled at the Hunky Dory Pub. The bar was a cozy iPod dive that rocked eclectic after the happy hour regulars cleared and took their Steve Miller Band with them. Jake came in alone and stuck out in his blue polo work shirt and apron. He flung the apron in a corner, accepted a shot, and declared, “Well, this fucking sucks.”

After a cheers to fucking sucking, we talked around the implications of his orders and calculated the sting of life’s latest sucker punch. We’d been on a hot streak. We were in our late twenties and it seemed like we all were getting married and buying homes and/or building careers and contacts. Jake’s news was the underbelly of all of our options and a grim reminder of just how much control we lacked outside of the reception halls.

He operated the pub like a console: ordering drinks, requesting songs, cracking jokes, rebuking insults, extinguishing cigarettes all with the fluid motion of the rehearsed. Similarly our reactions felt preordained and sequenced. Of course he was still Jake, still familiar all the way down to the dark stout at the bottom of his pint glass, but he was weighted by oncoming history. We spoke of his future as though it were an affliction—an illness both unknowable and tragic—and we searched his face for fever and his eyes for fear. He belched wetly and dispelled the growing cloud of nostalgia. When we left Hunky Dory, we were far away from March.

On Christmas night, we got together as we usually did. We regrouped from the stresses of the season with freshly acquired DVDs and gifts of red wine to watch and consume in a living room. Low key. His roommate got a text from Jake, who was noticeably absent from the festivities.

“Says he’s staying at his dad’s place across town. Says he’s kind of freaking out.”

We sighed. It had hit him. Who wouldn’t crumble under the oppression of a holiday like Christmas knowing what he knew, that maybe this family Christmas was possibly his last? We marked his absence by trying to find acceptance of his situation.

We sat with our arms draped over our spouses and significant others, reminding each other that while Jake was an unrepentant bachelor, that man still sought love with the romantic’s zeal. Searching for the one, having a good time doing it. He bounced from one low-level job to another, scrambling to pay the rent from month to month. We theorized that the deployment was the answer to some of these problems, a just-so-crazy-it-might-work scheme to start fresh and get called a hero in the process. Despite the suspicion that the Army had snatched a promising young man for fodder in a phony war, we understood Jake had willingly signed up for this eight years ago and spent the last four outside of any military commitments. The situation’s resemblance to an acquired disease broke down when we suggested that this experience might actually be good for him.

After the New Year, time went elastic as Jake worked and we worked and kept our lives afloat as responsibility necessitated. Though we kept his nearing departure in our minds, the early darkness and cold temperatures of winter kept all of us separate save for the most deliberate of planning. When we’d see Jake, the setting was usually innocuous and our conversations mundane and weightless—status updates. He’d make mention of the loose ends he was tying up: what he was going to do with his possessions, who’d be taking care of his dog, where his car would be parked for the duration. Words he used were measured, his plans logical and thoughtful.

It wasn’t until very late at night, after all the videogames had been played and the liquor swilled, when we reverted to the feral approximates of our college selves and stood on freezing porches or decks and smoked furiously. We asked him lurid questions.

“What’d it be like to kill somebody?”

“Probably not fun. No sense in worrying about it till it happens,” he said.

“What’s it like to get shot at?”

“What the hell do you think it feels like to get shot at? It’s loud and not fun,” he said.

“What’s the shitting arrangement like over there?”

“Fucking sucks,” he said.

We’d shake our heads, laugh and caricature the bloody thoughts because we were agreeable people and unaccustomed to the flexible morals that official enlistment demands. Despite the thousands we’d killed in games and the dozens of hours we spent watching zombie apocalypse movies, we never considered living on the other side. Now here was Jake, coiling himself up, readying to fight in a war we’d already seen depicted in movies. Jake looked at us sideways and called us pussies, but we weren’t pussies. At worst, we were liars skirting the edge of the abyss, and we drank more to keep our bravado up.

March arrived exactly when it meant to. We stayed close to Jake during his last week among our number. The weather was pleasantly deceptive and the days were 72-degree beauties. As we gathered firewood, card tables, and chairs for Jake’s final, final going-away party, he was disassembling his belongings and jamming them into room-specific boxes for storage. We helped when he requested, but he was content to do the packing on his own. We stacked the boxes in his roommate’s living room, and they remained there all through the party that night, silent monoliths that obstructed flow and socialization.

We stayed outside by the fire. The warmth of the afternoon had given way to a chilly evening. We were fascinated by the flame and tossed our bottle caps and cellophane wrappers into the blaze. We poked at it with long sticks and crushed the starter logs into embers. We fueled it with more kindling and alternated our fronts and backs to the heat. Huddled as we were, there was always a conversation to join.

We started off quiet and reflective, talking. Then, as more and more of us arrived and we continued to drink, the texture of the party ripped open. We competed for volume and clarity. A stereo was turned on but we couldn’t hear the words, just dull bass vibrating the ground. Beer bottles went crashing into the fire. We spoke louder. We split into pockets of three and four.

Jake was not interested in playing the role of sequestered godfather who waits for us to pay our respects. He was there in the middle of the madness, a diplomat and common thread. A host.

“So you’re leaving when?”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “It’s a bitch.”

“How long are you gonna be gone for?”

“A year. Unless I go career. I might go career.”

“We could shoot you in the foot!”

“I’d shoot you in the face,” he said.

If this was the wake, we had forgotten to inform the corpse. Jake mingled with every group. He provided every told story with current commentary. Not a privilege of the dead. He peeled us off our groups one by one and we shook his hand and clapped his back and embraced him and kissed him and cried with him and told him to be safe. Be safe.

In the morning, Jake woke us from our hangovers with a series of blasts from the horn of an enormous Ryder truck. We sat up coughing and rubbing our eyes. We squinted as he threw the front door open and drenched us in radiant sunlight.

“Moving time. Since there’s a lot of us here, I was thinking we could form a chain, FEMA-style, to get all these boxes in the truck,” he said.

We got up and took our time doing it. Shifting from reckless abandon to grunt-force labor is never an easy transition. Jake busied himself with possibly overlooked details. We drank some water and brewed some coffee and got sick in the bathroom. He grabbed a large box and hefted it on his shoulder. He looked us over and saw we had our motor skills back.

“All right, let’s do this. I hate moving,” he said.

“Technically, you’re not moving. This stuff is going into storage.”

“Yeah. It fucking sucks. C’mon,” he said.

We went outside, stood a few paces apart, and formed a conveyor. We exchanged boxes out the front door, down the porch steps, over the lawn, and up the ramp into the truck. The pace was steady, and we were mostly laughing as we worked even though our hands grew sore and dusty. Jake arranged the boxes in the truck like lines in Tetris.

“Last one,” said someone by the door.

“Incoming,” said a person on the lawn.

“Finito,” Jake said.

As the boxes stopped coming, the chain broke apart incrementally and walked away rubbing arm muscles and drinking from bottles of water. Lots of sighs, pushed breaths. Jake shoved the last box into the truck. He hopped down from the bed, raised the ramp, and slammed the shutter down.

“Thanks for the help,” he said. “We’re gonna head down to the storage facility and transfer all this stuff in there. I don’t really have room in the truck, so if you guys could all just follow me individually, that’d be cool.”

He climbed behind the wheel of the truck. It started with an empty growl. He honked the horn a couple of times and edged the behemoth out of the driveway and into the street. He pulled away slowly and turned a corner out of sight. The rest of us looked at each other as if to say, “That’s that; let’s get going.” We went to our cars and put on our seat belts. We followed each other through the neighborhood and downtown. To the unfamiliar eye, our convoy would look like a funeral procession, but to us that observation would’ve been exclusive, wrong, and morbidly self indulgent.

My Man Skip

Skip was my former pot dealer. He’s dead now, casualty of an evening shootout with police forces less than 200 yards from his suburban house.

Skip liked to talk to me. Anybody who’s bought pot illegally (which is everybody I know) discovers that in addition to the illicit transaction taking place, there may be involved a period of polite subservience, bonding,  in order to obtain the sought substance. I’d bend the knee and dutifully listen to Skip’s monologues because his environment was so threatening.

At Skip’s home, I’d ring the bell and after a second, he’d holler for me to come in.  I’d open the door despite the drooling pit bull and bulldog raring and clawing at the glass storm door. “Nice doggies,” I’d soothe his nipping hellhounds as they sniffed at my balls. Skip would beckon me to his kitchen or his bedroom and I’d sit across from the heavyset man with a chinstrap beard and shorn head.

He kept ounces of pot in mason jars and he’d set the containers before me so he could name the various strains he had available that week. As a smoker, I’m seasoned but as a connoisseur I’m a dirt roach neophyte (If it’s green, smoke it and see). I’d ask him to hook me up with whatever blitzed him the most and he would assemble a mélange baggie, the suicide option that resulted in dizzying highs and substantial headaches.

If we were in his bedroom, he would have You Tube open on his PC.    He’d ask if I’d seen this video about honey badger and oh shit, you gotta see this. I’d wear the bemused smile of feigned interest and effuse when it seemed appropriate.

I tend to play along with the guy with a bunch of guns. Skip was a firearm enthusiast if there ever was one. Here was one former felon who sloughed the shackles of federal law for he so loved his weapons. Opposite his computer screen on a table was a disassembled AR-15 and various rounds of ammo, strewn like a kid who was building a Lego tower but got distracted midway.

He offered for me to touch and admire his functional guns. I’m not a gun guy because I’m also not a guy who stands too close to high altitude ledges.

While he would weigh out my order, we’d smoke a little bit and Skip would espouse conspiracy. Some, I could appreciate. Illuminati-like overlords pulling the strings is a good one because I enjoy how it totally overestimates human competence. Others, like the gov setting up straw men tax foils went over my head and I also just didn’t give a shit about financial scandal. He’d give me free legal advice regarding the handling of cops and fourth amendment procedures (basically, you tell a cop “No. I don’t consent to ‘whatever.’ Yeah right. Don’t tase me.). He’d dial up vids featuring Russian FPS controlling machine gun mounted drones with an ipad and he’d forlornly warn, “This shit is coming. And when it does you know what to do,” he’d pat the presumed holster under his armpit.

Meanwhile, I would nod. Nod at crazy and maintain eye contact and hope that crazy dosen’ t believe you are condescending to them. The problem with US drug laws is that it puts nonviolent waster voidoids like me right in the jaws of pro criminals like Skipper. He and I had virtually no association other than the drug dealer/drug abuser symbiotic relationship. Pot isn’t a gateway drug. It’s just the gateway to shady motherfuckers who have embraced outlaw status and will sell you pills that’ll make you feel drunk.

The process of obtaining my meager supply of marijuana was needlessly drawn out and colored by the personality of Skip. I utilized his services for nearly six months. He maintained his connect and despite my uneasiness around his deadly peripherals, I continued to return to his guard dog survivalist compound located in the placid incorporated township of Redacted.

The second to last time I saw Skip, he instructed me to meet him in the parking lot of a grocery store a mile from his house. I waited for him in my car, eyeing my phone and scanning for police. He pulls over in his white Saab. He nodded at me and I got in his car. We U-turned out of the parking lot in the direction of his house. He explained that with all the motherfuckers rolling through lately, this way is just better. Hey, I’m all for discretion. He clicks the button of his automatic garage door opener. It shuddered upward and he parked us in.

Inside, the routine was basically the same. I pushed his beasts down and kneaded their sweaty haunches. Skip tells me he’s in the middle of Glenn Beck’s book. Though I’m impressed he’s reading a ‘book’ It occurs to me that I would buy weed from a Nazi. I’m seeing a man unhinged.

Skip was feeding his crazy with a continuous news cycle. His theories were encouraged by the restless internet, each rabbit hole leading to another, larger hole, until he got way down in the six mile borehole of despair. He dreamt of cultivating fields of weed in the rural country, maybe leader of a righteous militia or sponsoring one. He believed they were coming for us and for an hour, I went along with it because I wanted to get home with my weed so I could listen progressive British ambient-step on weed.

As he drove me back to my car, we talked about David Koresh. Mainly, because he referenced a Waco if police happened to interfere with him. I asked him if he remembered the Branch Davidians because I remembered vividly the standoff that took place. It had been on Channel One in school and we were about the same age. He frowned grimly and said, “I fucking remember that bullshit. That same shit is happening now. The shit is coming down.”

He took me back to my car in the grocer’s parking lot and I drove away, relieved. Over the months, Skip had said unsettling things to me but most of it, to my ears, fell in the camp of bullshit. Skip was full of machismo and shit talk because he was an expert. Experts spend a lot of time explaining shit to people who don’t understand and sometimes gross hypotheticals are required to illustrate a point. Despite his cache of undoubtedly illegal weaponry, I honestly felt that Skipper was a mostly harmless drug baron protecting his supply by deterrence, real and assumed.

I had become weary of it if not wary. I wanted another connect to come along, something easier and less charged by dangerous association. Once Skip escorted me to his home because he feared that the traffic around his place might be incriminating, I felt I was treading close to a line that could have disastrous consequences for myself. I told all my friends how nuts my pot dealer was. We’d shake our heads and smoke and acknowledge how fucked up some people are.

I never had a personal epiphany regarding Skipper and how I was to disassociate myself from his services because this was the last time I saw Skip:

http://youtu.be/JJ5gb2bpAyc

Skip loved dashboard cams.

A man?

How would they say I wasn’t a man?

I’ve got a truck, two sports cars, plasma tv, and an ulcer.  I’ve got ED, two mistresses, a cooler full of Coors, and satellite service.  I’ve got sons who toss footballs, girls taking penalty kicks, nephews hitting homeruns, and gymnast nieces. I’ve got the jobs: CEO to trashman, plumber,paper distributor, East Coast representative.  I went to school. Ivy  League. commuter/community hell, school of hardknocks.

I’ve been Serpico, Scarface, I’ve been a dirty Rat. I’ve got friends in crawlspaces.  I kick it NASCAR, in sports bars, in sauna rooms, and studio apartments.  I subscribe to Sports Illustrated, GQ, Time, and People, too. I practice religion, Christian Man.  Real man as I do love Jesus.  But if I’m reincarnated, I’ll bring my 40 virgins back to name them under the sun.

I’m a man. I like country, rocknroll, R&B.  I beat up homos with my boots, defend chicks with my fists, protect my mama from sidewalk and wise cracks.  I’ve goneto war, put copier #2 back on-line, fought the good fight, cold-called every cold case and squared off with wevery hard case, how could they say I’m not a man?

I’m a stuck man. Looking at blinking cursors, blank page to infinity, empty ideas and dead ends, careless start stops and restoration.  From film to nation public radiom from television to word.  I’ve looked in the bedroom, living room, rumpus room, under the couch, in the mattress, under the pillow, six feet under.

 

 

Pam Regenerated

 

In the translucent egg of Womb II, Pam wakes up disoriented and presses her hand to the curvy shell of her encapsulation.  It feels cool to the touch and stretched thin, like a wine glass made of Saran-Wrap.  It could even be a candy-shell, which, she thinks, would be quite fitting.  She blinks at her fingertips, nails adorned with the alternating orange and black of a Halloween-inspired nail polish.  Was I at a party last night, she thinks?

The room beyond the egg is very enticing to Pam.  The walls and furniture appear to be upholstered in ultra-suede and electronic lights dance in knotted ropes around what would very much resemble a basement if it weren’t for the port hole window affixed directly to the ceiling.  The window is currently framing a heartbreakingly beautiful vista of the Oort Cloud. She’s never seen anything like it.  It’s like a bisection of a celestial fireworks finale, a time lapse snapshot of the infinite.

She becomes very aware of her torso and legs as in she notices them for the first time.  Like her body has recently played a quick disappearing act, a now you see me now you don’t.   Unauthorized leave, Pam is fairly sure of.  She opts not to dwell on it.  Further observation reveals that the coloration of her fingernails is the complement to her costume not out of place with the kooky striped socks and a fearsome black of a witches cloak wrapped around her neck.  I am the Space Hag, she thinks.

No worries, though.  Oddly clothed and ready to be hatched, Pam sits up and clutches a small deck broom no doubt an accessory of her Halloween get-up.  She pokes at the roof of the egg and the broom handle juts right through the surface.   Air feels to be punched down her throat as a quick equalization of pressure pops the egg and Pam clasps her knees coughing and choking. 

A moment passes and she returns to a more regular state.  She tries to speak but it doesn’t feel like her vocal chords are getting any traction.  Words are made of ice and air and slip down her throat.  She doesn’t like this, feels panicky.  She stands up.

The room is cool but not cold.  It has the ambience of an over air-conditioned rumpus room circa late twentieth-century.  To boot, there is a reel-to-reel audio recorder atop a box speaker conspicuously in the corner.  It’s plugged into a wall outlet.  It is the only prop in the room aside from a couch and love seat.  She approaches the device.  There is a row of buttons.  She depresses the green “play” button.

A voice emits from the speaker first syrupy slow and then as the reels catch, Pam hears her own voice say, “Relax Pam.  Why don’t you sit on one those comfy couches for a moment?”

Pam holds her broom defensively to her chest.  She opens her mouth, remembers, and closes it.  She backs away from the audio device and takes steps toward the black velveteen couch behind her. The reels of the tape machine spin impassively.  If I sit down and that thing talks to me, she thinks, I can be calmly assured of my complete mental breakdown.  And then I’ll just hop on my broom and fly off into that constellation out there.

She sits.

“Good, thanks, hon.  You’re not crazy.”

Pam silent screams.

“No, you’re not,” the recording continues.  “True, at this precise moment you are flailing around this lavishly padded cell dressed as the witch you went dressed as for at a 1974 Halloween party at Nate Robiskies .  And at this precise, very second you’re slapping your head. STOP!  Stop hitting your head.”

Pam rushes up to the tape recorder and waves her fingers over the buttons.  She presses her thumb down on the black “Stop” button and the spools stop spinning.  Silence.  Her own heartbeat.  Her blood circulating her body.  She looks up at the window.  She can only see the fixed impassivity of the universe.  Her face creases and she wants to cry because she’s sure no one knows she’s here in Womb II.

Helplessly, she presses the play button.

“Thanks for coming to your senses.  Things will catch up, you’ll see.  This was the first set we could realize.”

Pam wipes her eyes with back of her hand.  A dark slash of mascara comes off on her wrist.  She really is in full Halloween garb.  She wonders why at the precise moment she feels like she is losing her mind, the tape recorder insists on playing back cryptic reassurances that only enhance her sense of discombobulation.

“They found an old photo, probably the earliest photo of you they could recover.  Wait there.  Watch the wall above the tape recorder.”

Pam looks up.  A brilliant dash of pixilated configuration and a high-contrast poster reproduction of Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy coalesces above the reel-to-reel.

“Oh yes.  Here it comes.  It’s all about the details.”

A stubby table topped with bowls of potato chips and Bavarian style pretzels materializes in front of Pam’s knees.  And then, looking down she see the angular, bony hand of Nate Robiskie on her knee and the air saturates with the smell of cigarette smoke and popcorn.  Now sound, voices, laughter, music: Ringo Starr “You’re Sixteen, You’re Beautiful, and You’re Mine.”  This teenage boy next to her leans back, pulls the plastic painted visage of Woody the Woodpecker off his face, leans in and kisses her.

Pam’s mouth is engulfed by the irregularly brushed, orange soda coated mouth of Nathan Robiskie.  She gags as his floppy, adolescent tongue plunges through her lips and into the pocket of her cheek.  She flinches away from him.  He snaps his mouth shut and wipes a trail of saliva from his chin.  He grins in accomplishment.  Pam punches him on the head, crushing the cartoon mask.  It dangles from his ear by a tattered piece of elastic and he gazes at her wide-eyed and betrayed. 

Behind him, Pam can literally see the atmosphere fill the room.  She feels the previously unnoticeable persistence of dust particles filling the divots of her pores.  She swallows and feels a clump of phlegm slide down her gullet and she coughs.  She coughs and gags.  She realizes she’s issuing a continuous screech from her open mouth.  Nate scrambles off the couch away from her.  Within the breath, her scream reduces to a howl to the final plain pitch of the voice that had just emanated with such high fidelity from Nate’s kickass stereo system. 

             She hears a voice, disembodied from somewhere above.  The voice is not frightening, it’s the curt command of Nate’s mother ordering her son to turn on the lights in the basement.  Rows of fluorescent tubes flicker and illuminate above her and she realizes for the first time that there are other costumed kids around her in various stages of teenage lust and public dry-humping.  She remembers the party so clearly now.  This was a gross party.  She realized these people weren’t friends of hers.  She was fundamentally altered in her approach to social circles and it was probably a key realization in her experience.

However, that perspective was exactly what was so troubling about this living replica of Nate Robiskie’s 1974 Halloween party.  She could see all the events of her life spilled before her in her mind, from the car ride back from Nate’s in which she prays her father doesn’t smell Nate’s orange doused breath on her own.  To the stringent removal of the fingernail paint before she goes to bed. To the writing of a blurb about the evening in her red and white spackled comp notebook. 

There is no point in living the same moment twice.  The realization makes her feel cheap and used.  If she were to saunter back to the reel-to-reel and hit “play” and leave the tape running, would she spend the rest of her second life pantomiming the motions of a life so clearly captured and accurately rendered as her own was presently?

She looks at the stars beyond Nate Robiskie’s basement ceiling, the other anomaly in the reconstruction of Womb II.  The view of the heavens is so pretty and so full of opportunity for one who breathes in eons and exhales epochs. 

There is another button on the reel-to-reel, the alluring red of the “Record” button.  What does ‘record’ do, she wonders.  Starts me at black?  Re-writes the whole thing, perhaps.  She can ‘pause’.  Stay here in the ultra-lounge of limbo, out of sorts and agitated in the stillness of indecision but what an enjoyable view.  Or she could Hit play, relive it, her life, from a silly moment as arbitrary as her original birthday. 

Dissatisfied with her boyfriend, unpleased with her costume, consumed with a desire for control she presses “Record” on the obsolete reel-to-reel playback device and watches the porthole window as the universes rips open before her in an blanket of ink blackness and her final thought before her first thought was that she couldn’t be bothered with a mystery that had been solved, perhaps in this next life she can be a French maid.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

Mint Soap

Mint Soap

Television is false and the air is clean. Not during television, not then, then when the air was thick with old smoke and an afternoon’s worth of exhalations. Now, they breathe fresh reception, wet clean, and ten degrees cooler after the showers.
They’re walking
He goes: “Don’t take this the wrong way—“
She cuts: “Go ahead…”
And he goes: “but, I think I’ve got a better idea of who you are now. Seeing where you’re from. This sounds weird… but you’re humble, you know. Not like meek or anything. Just, if I hadn’t seen it for myself, I wouldn’t of got it.”
She looks pensive, troubled, even, until crinkles squint her eyes and she decides it was probably a really nice thing to say.

Pete, born Pythagoras, learned about girls from casual rereads of Judy Blume books. Holy roller Margaret taught him the female rite to womanhood was three drops in cotton undies. Just as Long As We’re Together impressed that a good girl likes a “hunk”, but only for the bragging rights to her friends. He got his first erection from Forever, and then quickly decided that Sheila the Great would be less bitchy with a good boffing. Maybe it would come for her in high school, but he grew up too fast and didn’t stick around to see if she ever got some.

She watched the screen and twirled his hair while he slept. She was too drunk to laugh at the show, and a little miffed at her passed out friend, but still in love enough to savor the feel of his hair on her fingers. Boys aren’t supposed to have soft hair. A boys hair is always much too short or dirty to ever feel velveteen. Boys have callused hands, or it seems it should be this way, but now most boys’ hands are soft from cradling controllers and mice. Girls have soft, clean hair, and soft, perfumed skin. Girls don’t even poop like boys do. They leave behind little trace, just lingering puffs of talcum powder.
Commercial break comes and she fast forwards the VHS, pokes Pete in the face and goes: “Babee.”
He stirs and goes:” -mmggngm-?”
She says: “Why are you always sleeping? Get up. Let’s go to bed.”
He’s drunk: “I always let you sleep. You’re beautiful when you sleep.”
He opens one eye and looks at her. “I’ll go with you but you have to carry me up the stairs.”
“Who’s going to carry me? I’ll be asleep before this show is over.”
“Sorry, love, it wasn’t meant to be.”
She smiles because he is always wrong.

This one girl Pete was with was never wrong. Even when she was in error was she ever mistaken. Pete hadn’t been around long, but he knew enough to accept that men are always wrong. He was always wrong. Pride is an easy thing to walk away from when you just don’t give a fuck.
This girl. She was always right. Her opinion, her explanations, her recalling of last night’s party was exactamundo every time. Naturally, they communicated through argument, which he almost always conceded. Naturally, it ended when she walked away from her pride…

Beverly, born Renee, moved to Reno in a Chevrolet. She sold her car to frequent the bar and gambled her money away. But there was more to it…

He was well schooled in the alabaster cookie and the evidence of the Plexi Elixir Elastic Rag. Sometimes he snogged the dog and ditched high school. He skipped the last semester of his senior year altogether. Once, he was video taped in a liaison with the pooch but it was all staged. Quote the mock cop, “People are sick. I’m gonna go home and not be able to eat my dinner cause that boy in there comed all over a dog!”

Pete kissed her lips. He lingered and in time they widened and then he moved to her neck. She had spearmint skin, washed in clean frost. He gasped, licked his teeth, licked her lips, and indulged the scent. Kissed her ears and her eyes…

Theory:
The problem with eternity is that humans are always waiting for the end. Shapeless, endless, formless: these are unfathomable ideas, but they sure sound good. Humans wait for the bell to ring, for the baby to be born, for the movie to end, for the commercial to break to come, for five o clock, for midnight, for 4:20, for Christmas, for death. They know death doesn’t end, though, and that’s a real problem. Every sure thing seems to end, to be replaced with new combinations and new configurations. Resolutions.
Movies will never get any better, just the pairing of the actors.

Carbonation sounds like miniature rain. There’s the windowpane. The season of thaw. Aluminum bound cans of land slide. Stilted mobile homes held above the slope. Wisped high hats close and the showers cease…

They’re walking
He goes: “Are you cold?”
She shakes her head, throws her afghan scarf about her neck a second time.
“You’re fucking crazy. We’re gonna get pneumonia.”
And she goes: “Don’t run. We’re gonna keep walking in the rain.”
He shakes, so damp, so wet, but he can’t cut cause she won’t let go of his hand.

She wore a white mink stole. Like lonely prey, a vogue aggravate. She became the bride of one shrewd mogul, a well-aware, polite predator. She believed the statements he makes: Faith within the signature and the pen.
She amused herself with society. She stepped on crushed rose petals in the avenue and kissed the fingers of hopeful ingénue. And for her, he purchased Broadway and paid for the stage. She tempts them with auctioned auditions.

Kyle went to war and this may or may not have been intercepted by the enemy:

Melodies from domestic birds suburban
Mingle with Morse code, I’m subterranean.
By sea, by air, by land
Goodbye Homeland.
Goodbye mother and
Father, wrote a letter to you
My best work ever, still subject to censor:

The remains of my skeleton crew delight in returning to the fold, but our mending is incomplete. The courage grew and our morale dropped, that much I knew, our pride was exceptional and reckless. We went into town and gang banged a Jew with respectful ferocity. We left him some cash on the table and considered ourselves generous with favor…

She and Pete shared a shower. The water was hot and the basin was filling rapidly. He slid a palm along her stomach and she grasped his cock and looked him in the eye. Their tongues tasted each other and water ran through the secondary gaps. He washed her hair, and was careful not to let shampoo drip into her eyes. She did his hair and then they exfoliated their faces. They changed position for the rinse and poured liquid soap between their bodies. They rubbed the scent in, and she declared, “I’ve got the cleanest breasts in town!” They shut off the water, grinned, ran to the bedroom and got all dirty again.

Such evidence is all around us. It hovers in the mist like an aerosol, so somewhere in the cloud the clues are water-soluble.
Such evidence is all around as it hides in the background like a camouflage. Kyle’s weary in the sands, but courage comes before morale. Pete caught a visitor in the mirror, away and over the shoulder. Beverly made an unlikely arrival, a silent slight encounter.
Such evidence is all around, brushing past the wind chimes and scratching at the chimney. But the noise drenched commentators, they assure us.
A trickle of condensation rolls from the cloud down to the flue. So somewhere in the cellar, civilians stumble over the moral and base survival on grim aptitude.
But back Home:
An intimate intruder invites you to dinner and helps himself to your claimed portions. And all the while you nervously smile while he lavishes recollections.
Pay attention to the evidence. It mingles in the haze where the stalks are bent. Hope that with the day, something like the sun will make the menace shrink, evaporate.

“Do you know what I would find really sexy?”
“What?”
“Um. I don’t know if I should tell you…”
“I’ll do anything but take a shit on your feet.”
“Damn…”

He wants to give up. The strain, the stress of the job, but mostly it’s the acid indigestion. For days he’s lived on pepperoni and Pepcid. He feels the age in his feet and longs for a marshy garden. He makes little yellow labels and now realizes that the number of the beast is not 666, but 3×5. He walks all day long so he can come home to rest to do it all over again, a junkie with no serenity. What does he think of while working but the time when he will come home and think of nothing? But when he gets home that emptiness has a time limit, too. It once was all senseless. But, then, he finally found someone who would ask, “How was your day?” And he keeps going…

A cross between John Waters and Clive Barker, rangers of obscurity, a fairy tale:

At the end of the film they ate the evil villain, a feast of the queen and her wicked dominion. The women were men and the men were scarcely women, for gender failed to matter while they devoured the kingdom. The peasants pulsed and swelled in enormous proportion, a mockery of the stunning growth population.
In triumph, they decided to consume the neighboring town and they plucked up their castle and wore it for a crown. They challenged a noble land with Roman brethren where the men were men and clearly the women were with them.
Quiet yet stubborn yet determined, they stacked the townsfolk and tied them. In the hills, they fight, the cities. Tax free and saturated fat, but beware the resistance. A fist of one hundred men felled the fat kingdom. Then the victors marched on until exhaustion. And they shuddered apart and lost their momentum.

“Sir, how much is this?”
The raccoon-eyed man places a copy of the Grease soundtrack on the camera display.
Pete looks at the price sticker that’s squarely obscuring Olivia Newton-John’s face and goes, “It’s 19.99.”
“I would like to buy it.” Eventually he says that, or Pete understands that. It comes out more like “Ahwoul…liketa– by tiss…?”
“Okay.” Pete scans the barcode and goes, “It’s 21.19 with tax.”
“Ohm..” And the short man reaches into his Velcro wallet and lays folded dollars on the glass.
Pete hesitates. This has happened before.
“Um, sir. That’s not enough. You’re going to need…” and he trails off, stumbling over the rudimentary math, “like 13 more dollars.” Instinctively he knows that’s wrong, but he is sure it won’t matter.
“Oumm…” and the very young old man looks confused and pulls out more crumpled dollars. Three more. “Iss thissenuff?”
“No, sir. I don’t think you have enough money for this cd. But I’ll put it back for you.” The man, clearly afflicted with Down Syndrome slowly turns and walks back to the cd browser.
A few months before, a little black man with Down Syndrome came in and tried to buy a boombox with eight bucks. As Pete patiently explained in very general terms that he didn’t think the gentleman had enough money to buy anything in the Target electronics department. That man didn’t give up, bringing other stereos and walkmans to Pete for price checks. He kept asking, “When arya’ll goin to have more sales? Wal-Mart has more sales than Target.” And Pete could only shrugg and respond with apology.
As the Grease fan walks back up to the counter, clutching a new disc, with a desirable gleam in his blank eyes, Pete makes a quick exit to the Team Leader’s office. He checks his email for no new messages and feels like an insensitive asshole. Pete doesn’t understand the concept of money, either.

God, Guns, and Gasoline. This is the title of a CD by the Swedish industrial band Cat Rapes Dog, an act that Isolation Tank catalog describes as “Depeche Mode with fangs”.
Every time she tries to download illegal music, this is the first thing that always pops into her mind. This band and this CD. It’s lodged in her brain at the forefront of her memory access. When she’s stumped and needs new music, she cannot escape the title of this record although it’s been over seven years since she’s even heard it. And then, in fact, the cd fucking sucked.
But there it is. Staring at the blank search field, desperate for the music that will help her get away and get high better, it swims to the surface.
God, Guns, and Gasoline.

And so it goes,
Most girls will lose their baby fat and become voluptuous vixens. They like to flaunt their fleshy fullness in fast fashions.
Except for her, the femme felony, buried in folds of fabric to mask her insecurity. Surely, there can be another way, the way of the waif, to waste away, to understate.
Weight.
But wait.

Kyle went to war and this may or may not have been intercepted by the enemy:

My Boy,
You could live forever (if you wanted to).
You could love any woman you choose (and she will love you).
You could be a saint or a liar.
You could be the faint or the fire.

He and Kyle decided that they could fly.
Their hangar was Jack’s bedroom with the green dinosaurs painted on the wall and scattered Monopoly money on the floor. The runway was polished hardwood of the hallway corridor and the landing strip was the floral upholstery of Kyle’s mom’s sofa.
They tied capes of towels and He-Man sheets to each other, twisting up the ends real good so they didn’t fall off.
The pre-flight taken care of, they perched at Kyle’s doorjamb and looked at the couch with grim determination. Kyle went first because it was his house. It was the responsibility of the waiting flyer to count him down: Three…two…two and a half…one…BLAST OFF!!” and Kyle sprinted down the hallway his arms extended like Superman and the He-Man cape billowing behind him, making the sputtering sounds of a raspberry/jet turbine. Kyle slowed two feet before the couch, leapt up to the arm. Kyle gathered balance for the all-important lift-off, bent his knees and jumped.
Then, Kyle soared above the couch in true flight. Jack always went headfirst, fearless, navigating his dive so he almost reached the other edge of the sofa. Then Kyle came crashing down onto the cushions and the couch squeaked and he rolled off onto the floor and shouted, “Didja see that?!”
The other boy didn’t answer because he was already on his way down the hall, pumping his arms, running fast, ignoring superhero form. He sprang forward early and pushed off the arm of the couch harder than he ever had, achieving maximum altitude. He was flying.
This was the moment, better than a thousand tire swing pushes, better than one hundred circus nights. This was his time with no hands to aid or halt. Just him…in the air…in flight.
But something was off. He saw it in the speed of the couch dashing past his stomach. He saw it in the way the floor and ceiling flipped positions. He saw it briefly in Kyle’s eyes as he slammed into the armoire where Kyle’s mom kept plates etched with intricate blue and white designs.
From his back, he saw the discs teeter and fall off the shelves. There was the terrible sound of breaking glass and he pulled his arms over his face.
Kyle,wide eyed, said “You’re in trouble!!” and ran to get his mom who was watching TV. in the basement.
Pete sat up and and shook the crash from his body. Looking out the picture window he heard incredulous shouts from Kyle’s crazy mom. The sky was blue and there wasn’t a cloud in it, except for the faint white vapor trail of some airplane.

Carlos came in to the room speaking his mind. Beverly barely heard, she’d been fast asleep in her recliner. He’d been disturbed about some rumors he had heard. So she looked at him, yawned, and said, “Well, what is it, then?”
Carlos gave her a paper printed with a telephone number. Beverly sighed, sleepy eyed, and indulged him awhile longer. Carlos cried, “You could’ve tried to hide it a little better!” And she replied, “Why should I? You would’ve found out sooner or later…”
“I thought we had a deal! I thought we made a resolution!”
She thought she had been forced to that solution.
She said, “I know you’ve got some great ambitions, but be patient, and sleep with me a little longer…”
Then Carlos said to Beverly, “Baby, we’ve got a problem. I’ve just heard something that makes me sick.”
“Just what is it you’re trying to say?”
“I wanna hear your side of things, but I think I know everything.”

“Plagiarize me. Now.”

She bites her lower lip as she studies the text. Pete dares to admire the sighs of her breaths. Then, unclasping a pair of barrettes- the room furnace clicks-the squeak of a single spring- an ignored telephone ring. What book is this?
They experiment, conduct, and illustrate the passages. They invent, inscribe, in script the pages. They engrave an excursion in the manuscript of perversion. Performing deductions on the gymnastics of deduction.

Stalking the trails of the midnight viper, five o clock shadows, seven A.M. dispositions. She’s so sleepy, but the next one might hit, and she will be rich and can leave forever to some sunny clime like New Zealand, or Cairo, or Manila. But the electric snake elongates longer than ever as she pushes in the later hours. A quarter becomes a dollar, a dollar becomes a fin, and a fin to ten, ten to a bill and it’s her last bill. She hit up an ATM to score some reserve cash but drunkenly hit the wrong button, took $100 over $20. That’s the rent she dips into, but there’s a good chance. It’s all about odds in Nevada. The odds slide and swell, the closest thing to an ocean this barren desert has to offer. She wades into deeper waters, unaware of the lunar shift that slowly envelops her liquid asset.

Pete had a Kevin Bacon separation.
Kevin Bacon was in Animal House (as Chip Diller) with Karen Allen who was in Raiders of The Lost Ark with Pete’s dad, Pete Sr.. Dad to Pete made three separations, which wasn’t bad at all. Pete’s dad played the third Nazi from the left during the scene of the opening of said Ark. His face didn’t melt off with the cyclonic bolts of God’s wrath, but his penitent kneel made him an Oscar worthy extra.

When they won the war, the party in the desert was spectacular. Thousands of cheering, battle weary soldiers were quenching their desert thirsts with a thousand cases of Coors light. They strung 60-watt bulbs from tarp to tarp and widened the mouths of the latrines. They turned the giant speakerboxes from the prisoners of war and blasted themselves with the J. Geils Band and Aerosmith.
Alone in the sands, not another champion for 350 kilometers, they waved their flags and took shots and shots into a starless sky. Inside the tents were sweaty American boys, the joydrunk defenders of democracy. They drank until 0100 hours and bullshitted drunkenly to each other until dawn.
As the sun first puckered its nuclear lips, pools of sweat were already collecting in Kyle’s gas mask. He was hungover and breathing purified air on a bleary eyed lookout for dune coons. He drove the Hummer at a loping 75 mph. Thurston, the fag, puked over the side and was bitchslapped by Murray.

Utah 2 (The Quickening)

Bored alcoholics and misogynists had overrun the home. They smoked 100 length cigarettes and bitched about bitches. They had squatter’s rights thru the rent of one friend who swung the porch door wide for company. The house was an inheritance and the guy who grew up there was getting fed up with the noise, the fights, the smells, and spills of his over invited friends.
One afternoon as Pete was slowly passing his prime, he flew to the desert, plucked a flower and planted her in his home. It was a sudden and dodgy move, interfering with his gluttonous roommates “par-lay” agenda (“Par-lay” as in Par-tay. For shizzle, my nizzle). She settled in very quickly but since the roommate was scared and irritated with girls, he said very little about the shared space. It was summed up to all of the roommate’s friends during a Jack charged game of hearts: “If it bleeds, it leaves…”
And the ice got thicker. Having taken their shares of continental breakfasts, Pete and his flower still needed to use the house refrigerator and washing machine. His roommate was kind and funny on his own, but when in his preferred group he grew bored, vulgar. And with each beer that tweaked up the volume on his thick 220 lb larynx, he grew bold.
Once he smashed a beer bottle at the feet of Pete’s flower, and she cowered in the car. Pete was fuming, but he let himself be rationalized by his roommate’s compromises. He was sorry, but she should still be paying rent, but since the place was Pete’s, well, what fucking difference does it make anyway, man?
It was clear. The found an apartment, waited a couple of months for it to be built and moved away.
But before they moved to Sebring Forests, they found respite in Utah 2, a nook in the kitchen where the parties never touched. If all great parties eventually ended up in the kitchen, they forged a quick barrier, which no greasy headed drunk boy would cross. Here they smoked cigarettes, popped popcorn and participated by enforced socialization, as well as a desire to know where that crash came from. They lived inside their inside joke, free from the hulking fury of Pete’s twisted roommate. But his glares still smeared their shield, and his accusatory laughter resonated in their space, annoying and sad.

Yard Sale

Yard Sale

by

Eric Stuteville

A few hours after daybreak and the blacktop street in front of the two-story house on 4999 Roselawn Avenue already  sizzles with a rude awakening of June sunshine and humidity. The colored balloons tied to the mailbox hover listlessly in the still haze of the morning and the poster board Yard Sale sign below flaps forward, it’s scotch taped binds corrupted by the damp evaporation of early dew.

Megan Pampf wipes her face with a tattered paper towel.  She wads it up and tosses it into the tiny wastebasket she’s put under the card table she sits at.  She just got back from the bank and placed the $100 in change in her aluminum cashbox and now considers herself ready for business.  She was up at 6:15 unfolding card tables and lugging boxes of her ex-husband’s books and CD’s out into the neatly trimmed front yard.  She’d needed to shoo away a couple of early birds who were quite obviously unimpressed with Megan’s whole operation.  One of the old biddies Megan waved off had given her a stare and said, “Shameful.  Just shameful,” to which Megan, mostly distracted by sorting a box of winter clothes, had happily chirped, “No, no!  Please come back at nine!”

She sips her coffee and wonders when her son Iver’s going to wake up and help her lug her ex’s free weight set out.  She thinks back to last summer when Iver was eleven and up and at em early in the morning with a smile on his face and sadly thinks what a difference a year makes.  Iver hardly came out of his bedroom anymore.  And when he did it was only to stare vacantly at the computer and eat her food.    She curses Iver’s dad and blames him for her son’s rapid exploration of depression and embrace of apathy.  Getting rid of Bruce’s old crap would do a lot to help him, she thinks.  We can get rid of these constant reminders and move on.

Megan cracks her fingers and fans her face.  Customers arrive.  An old boat length Buick pulls up to the curb.  An aged couple marked by huge wrap-around  BlueBlockers over their eyes creak out of the vehicle and shuffle their way to the wares.  A thirty-something woman pushing a stroller along the sidewalk looks over the tables and the racks of clothing (as well stocked with some of Megan’s old garments).  She waves at Megan and approaches the hangers, browsing.

She hears the front door of the house slam.  Good, she thinks, Iver’s up.  Her son steps out into the sun.  He looks up and scrunches his face at the sky.  The bright light roasts the surface of his black jeans and t-shirt.  He jams one iPod headphone into an ear and lets the other dangle limply on his chest.  He walks over to his mom and she hears the scraping sound of unintelligible rap hissing from the speaker.  He sits down in a metal folding chair beside her and yawns.  Spreads his legs.  He looks just like his dad, Bruce.

“I’m glad you’re up,” Megan says.

“Yeah.  I’m up.  I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

She looks at Iver.  She can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic or not.  Another bit of fallout from Bruce’s departure, she figures.  Add passive aggressiveness, mood-swings, and outright rudeness to the litany of changes to occur in the Pampf household over the past year.  She tries not to be bothered by him. She knows that the kid misses his dad and is acting out, but she doesn’t know where the line between emotional reaction and burgeoning hooliganism is drawn.

“I was hoping for more people,” Megan says.  “Did you hang up all those signs I told you to make?”

“Yeah, Mom,” Iver says.  He says it in a way that makes it sound like ‘Yeah, bitch.’  “I made them all up on the computer and I hung a bunch of em up last night. “

“Well, good.  I hope we get a crowd.   Maybe we can make some money.  If we make enough, maybe we can go to the water park in Atlanta.”  She smiles at him.

“Why?  So the black kids can beat me up and take my money?”

Megan grabs his shoulder sharply.  “That’s your dad talking and your dad can be a goddam fool sometimes.  We don’t talk like that.  Not in this house.”

“Whatever.”

“Well, you tell me.  You’ve already got every game in the world.  I’m just trying to make sure you have a good summer.”

“I would’ve had a better summer with Dad.”

“Can we not do this here?”  Megan asks.

The woman with the stroller stands nearby and gives Megan a commiserating smile.  It just comes off pitying.  She looks at some exercise DVD’s.  “We’ve got work out equipment in the garage, too, if you want to see it.”  The woman shakes her head and pets her baby’s hair.  Megan remembers when Iver was little and sweet like that.    “My son was supposed to bring it out here.”

Iver glares at Megan.

“I can’t believe you’re just going to sell all his old stuff.”

Then like a cloud blotting out the sun, the idyllic shimmer of happy homespun commerce darkens as everyone on Roselawn Avenue feels the ground vibrate.  Everyone at the yard sale hears the Seville long before they see it.  The deep wub-wub of subsonic bass shakes every window and awakens every car alarm along the street.  Megan cranes her neck to see the car cruise down the road and stop in front of her house.  She puts her hands on her hips and gapes openly as the car stops and the dazzling rims gyrate with no indication of halt or retreat.

The car is a purple ragtop stuffed with four young men.  They all wear sunglasses and only one wears a shirt.  The ornate and lurid tattoos scrawled about their muscled arms and chests ward off the specter of sunburn. The men all look angry and serious.  Except for the one who’s grinning and staring right at Megan.  The sun glares off the gold-encrusted grille of his jackal’s grin.  The car is turned off.  The street goes quiet, buffered only by ubiquitous lawnmowers and chanting cicadas as the crew steps across the road.

Iver stands up next to Megan.  He turns off the iPod and shoves it down his pants.  He cocks his head toward the hard looking dudes mashing his mom’s geraniums and the corner of his lip curls up in anticipation.  Megan can’t decide whether to keep standing in order to assist these, ahem, patrons or to sit down in order to appear collected and unafraid- the exact opposite of how she feels.  The older couple shuffle back to their car, trundling away like tiny insignificant insects.

“We here, bitch!  We here so what the fuck’re you gonna do about that?”

The screaming man is going right at Megan.  He advances up her walkway, peppering his steps with further “huhs” and “wassups” pointing and working himself up.  The other guys break away from him and start tearing up the merchandise she’s laid out to sell.  Megan looks helplessly around at her neighbor’s windows, hoping that somebody sees this invasion, this attack, and calls the cops.

“What are you doing?  Stop!  Stop!”  Megan yells.

“No niggas on ya yard?  Know nigga’s money spend, right?  Y’all!  Fuck this bitch!”

They’re flipping over tables and crushing small collectibles, bending eating utensils and breaking porcelain plates.  The man with the gold grille walks over to the table and grabs the cashbox.  Megan instinctively grabs the box and the man’s wrist.   The man flings his hand back with the cashbox gripped tightly.  He drags Megan forward.  The man whips the box around and crashes the drawer against her head.  It bursts open with a clang, showering her bloodied temple with silvery nickels and tattered bills.

Iver moans instinctively.  The man looks at the boy, daring him to challenge him.  His nostrils flare.  Iver puts his hands up.

“I’m just a kid.”

“You want me to kill this bitch?”

“No.”
He laughs at Iver as the kid slinks down to the grass.

“Gets the fuck outta here!”

The crew backs off the lawn.  The woman with the stroller moves her body from over the child in the seat.  She trots away across the yards, heedless of any sidewalk, the stroller bouncing wildly.  They jump in the car, laughing and whooping.  The stereo blares as the car fires up and peels away from the house, befouling the stolid air with rubber fumes and exhaust.

Iver bends over his mother.   Tears drip from his face.  She rolls over on her back.

There’s a small stream of blood issuing from her skull.  She groans.

“Oh mom, I’m so sorry,” he cries.

She puts her hand to her head.  She blinks her eyes.  She’s concussed, dazed.

The neighbors are stepping out of their homes, rubbernecking and sticking phones to their ears.  Leslie Grable from the house next door waddles over to Iver and Megan.

“Oh I saw everything!  Everything!  What happened?  Oh do you need an ambulance?  Iver, they didn’t hurt you did they?  Go inside and call an ambulance for your mom.”

Iver backs away and runs into the house.  He gets Megan’s purse off the kitchen table and rifles through it.  Inside, he finds her Blackberry and uses it to call 911.  He tells the operator their address and tells her that his mom got hit with a metal box.  And they were just here, the bad guys, and to hurry.  The operator tells him an ambulance has been dispatched and the police notified.  He thanks her.

Iver freezes for a moment.  His fingers creep toward his mouth and he nibbles the end of his thumbnail.  He stares at the computer in the corner of the living room.  Its screen is off and the light of the modem blinks intermittently as if issuing snores.  Instead of going back outside to comfort his mother, he goes through the garage door.  He presses the button on the wall and the heavy mechanical gears of the garage door slowly open.

Mrs. Grable, cradling Megan, hollers at Iver who sails past them both on his 10-speed.

“Where do you think you’re going, huh?  Get back here with your momma!”

He speeds around the neighborhood, his legs pistons on the peddles.  He stands up and coasts to the end of the block.  He sees one of the signs he hung up for his Mom’s stupid yard sale, one of the eye-catching pink ones stapled to the light post.  He bounces off his bike and it crashes into heap.  He rips the sign off the post and shoves it in his back pocket.  He tilts his head to hear for sirens.  Sweat drips into his eye and stings.

He clambers back on his bike and canvasses the neighborhood for all of the signs he hung up.  He knows he doesn’t have time to take down the ones he plastered all over Millue Boulevard and why, why, why did he have to put one in Wal-Mart?  It had seemed like such a great idea, so funny.  The kind of thing his dad would get a real kick out of.  A driver in a car sees him messing with a sign and honks at him repeatedly.

He hears the ambulance a block away.  He takes all of the pink printed adverts from his pockets and files them down the grates of a storm drain.  Iver climbs back on his bike and rides home.

Megan, tended to by kneeling paramedics, is strapped to a stretcher and ramped into the ambulance.  Megan is conscious.  She’s confused as to where her son’s been the last few minutes, but the incidence of being jumped by four angry black men in her front yard has put most occurrences into question.  She sees her sons eyes, ringed with tears and sweat and dark with concern.  She thinks things can’t get any worse for the boy.  Somehow all of this hurt is the doing of her ex.

Iver stands next to Mrs. Grable.  She looks down at him.

“I don’t know where you think you was going, but you’re gonna be in a heap of trouble when she wakes up.  Now, come on now.  I’m gonna take you to the hospital.  Your daddy’s gonna take care of you till your momma gets better,” Mrs. Grable says.

He steps over the shambles of his front lawn and the broken remnants of his family’s consumption strewn about the grass like so many chopped blades.  He wants to pick up everything that’s been wrecked and clean it up.  Mow the lawn and then rake it.  Replant it.  He opens the door and sits in Mrs. Grable’s car.

Mrs. Grable listens to talk radio and drives slow.  She turns off of Roselawn down the twisty turns of Murry Lane.  Hangs a right and hits the busy intersection of Murry and Millue Boulevard and Iver spies another sign, out of reach and irretrievable.  At the stoplight, Mrs. Grable sees it and groans.

“Now that is truly in the worst possible taste.  Sad there’s still people that think like that.”

The sign:

SATURDAY!

JUNE 11!

ONE DAY ONLY!

SALE! SALE! SALE!

CDS, DVDS, CLOTHING!

4799 ROSELAWN AVENUE!

(whites only)

Joppa Road

Joppa Road

By

Eric Stuteville

I come up on a hurt man fallen to the side of Old Joppa road.  I craned my neck over the passenger side as I passed his body to see. All he was wearing was blue jeans cinched by a black belt.  No shirt, no shoes.  He was sprawled belly flat with his eyes closed.

I pulled over a few yards in front of the man and stopped.  I got out of the security truck and shown my flashlight down the road.  I was way the hell there out in Airport country.  I hadn’t seen anyone else in an hour.  I zipped up my parka and hollered to the man.

“Hey there, buddy.  Can you get up?  Can you hear me?” 

I assumed he’d been hit by a car, victim of kids racing the lengthy roads adjacent to the corn fields that used to be kept around here.  Since all the homes had been bought up, there wasn’t any need for traffic.  The flatlands were a haven for wasted time.

I gritted my teeth as I neared him, anticipating his injuries. 

He wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t good, either   I knelt down and looked him over andI saw scratches and blood around the crown of his head, like he went down head first on the pavement. 

I jostled his shoulder.  My breaths were coming out of my mouth in heavy clouds of steam.  When he exhaled, it was in shallow rasps through his nose.  I thought it was his lung.

“Alright.  I’m gonna try and flip you over.  It’s gonna help you breathe easy.”

I reached down to him and when I pulled him back I saw the blood on the rocks even before I got him totally turned around.  I flinched.  I couldn’t help it.

“Aw, what in the hell happened to you?”

His chest was sliced  up like ribbons.  If the cuts didn’t run deep it mattered little but there were so many slashed into him, hundreds.  Down around his stomach, there looked to be circles or maybe even letters carved along his belly.  I couldn’t discern what may have been etched into him.  The meaning was lost on me as if the artist, frustrated, had scrapped the entire red canvas.

Though, he was untouched above the neck, aside from the injuries likely sustained in his fall.  I noticed his protruding adams apple bob in his throat. His lips parted and blood drooled out the corner of his mouth.

“I think you’re coming around.  Look, I gonna call us an ambulance out here.  You just, ah, just take it easy.  We got people coming for you.”

I slid my flashlight back into my belt and jogged back over to the truck.  I sat inside the cab and bent over to the CB console.  I untangled the radio’s cord.

I said into it, “Dispatch, this is Indy 6. Do you copy?”

Hissing feedback shot back at me.  I frowned at the Tandy CB unit that didn’t really work at all.  I blew into the receiver.

“I’m out here by 650 East and Old Joppa road.  I’ve got a downed male needing emergency assistance.  We need an ambulance and police.  Real police.”

The radio issued no reply.  I gazed out the windshield to the eastern horizon and watched the landing beacons blink dumbly back at me.

I jiggled the squawk button on the receiver.  Nothing.

“Radio Shack crap,” I said to no one else.

Rarely did I even need to use the radio, these parts were so deserted. I had no incidents and I was seldom needed.  My job consisted of patrolling these back roads to run off kids smoking dope.  After an Air Force jet crashed into the Ramada Inn last year, the airport snatched up all the western territory, looking now to expand into the rural outskirts and away from the sprawl of the suburbs.  Airport Security had me working overnight, third shift as custodian to a vast vacant lot.

I didn’t carry a sidearm. I wished I had one. I wasn’t issued a weapon by the Airport as protocol dictated that in the event of a “situation” I was to relay the description of events to the appropriate authorities.  I could pull a speeder over and issue him a citation to be filed with the police at a later date.  If I spotted a drunken hot rodder, I was to try to obtain his tag numbers and call someone with a V6.

Still, I didn’t know if that man was bleeding to death or not.  I couldn’t leave him by the side of the road.  It was the middle of the night and freezing.  I backed up a little closer to where he was splayed.  I intended to lower the bed’s gate and lug his limp body up and into the back of my truck.

I got out and walked back to him.

“Okay, buddy, I’m try gonna get you out of here and to a hospital. If you could find it in you to wake up so we can get you up in this cab, I’d surely appreciate it.”

It was then his eyes fluttered open.  He blinked a few times and his pupils shot back and forth in his eye sockets.  He inhaled and coughed wetly.  He rolled to his side and spat out a gob of blood phlegm.

“Oh hell.  There here is.  Oh boy. Can you get up?”

He attempted to lean forward. I grabbed his arm and pulled him upright and sitting.

“I thought you’d been done in by a car, but then I seen all those cuts on your chest,” I said.

He lowered his chin.  His hands trembled inches above his mutilated chest.

 “It was hell.  Oh Joppa, we brought Hell to Earth.”

Overhead, the sky screamed the scouring thrust of a DC-9.  I looked up at the plane making its descent.  Far in the distance, I marked the floating headlights of vehicle rolling down 600 West, a mile away.

He saw my eyes avert his and he twisted himself to see what I could see.

He muttered something.

“What’d you say?” I shouted over the noise of the plane.

“It’s them,” he said, louder.   “Help me up.” 

He clasped my forearm with his other hand and I helped him get to his feet. He separated himself from my aid and shuffled toward the truck.

“Ok, yeah.  Um.  Great. Let’s go,” I said.

I got in my driver’s side and leaning over, popped open his door.  He slunk around and slithered himself in the seat.

“You want me to turn up the heat in here?” I asked him as I put the car in gear.  “Or will that exacerbate your cuts?  Aw Jesus, but it is cold out here.”

He hitched his shoulders up.  I looked at his face.  His eyes were beady and furtive.  His lips were curled into a sneer of pain.  His nose and chin were pointy.  His face looked liked the knife he likely used on his red, raw throat stubble.

“You are the good Samaritan,” he croaked.

“Remains to be seen.  What I was wondering was how in the hell you ended up out here?”

In my mirror, I could see the car turn onto Joppa Road behind us.  The vehicle’s headlights pulse flared as the driver switched on the high beams.

“You needn’t worry about them.  They’ve got nothing to do with us.  What’s your name?

“Which one?”

The man grimaced and looked back every so many seconds.

“I’m Chuck,” I said.  “I’m just gonna go ahead and take you on back to the airport now.”

The approaching car slowed as they neared us but made no obvious attempt to stop as they passed by.  Eyeing a busted tail light on the black Caddie, I put the truck in gear and started to drive. 

The man cocked his eye at me.  His agony was replaced with something like amusement.

 “Chuck?  As in Charles?” He asked.

I took his question to be a good sign.  “That’s what my license says.” 

“Did you know that Charlie Manson was born and raised not five miles from here?”  He asked.

“As a matter of fact, I do.  Everybody around here knows that.”

 “The Reverend Jim Jones came up around here, too.  There’s something evil about these fields. ”

 “You saying that those are like who done you like this?  Some kind of cultists get you all cut up and dump you in the middle of nowhere?  Is that what happened to you?”

“Not cultists.  It was the Quakers.”

I took a second to glance away from the road and at him.

“The oatmeal guys?”

“Forget it.”

“What? You mean to tell me you were attacked at knifepoint by those peaceful folks with that Friends church over there in Valley Mills?  For Christ’s sake, they were conscientious objectors.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you.  They’re more powerful than anyone knows.  These are their lands.”

“No.  This is Airport property.”

“Haven’t you seen the church with no door?”  He pointed his finger.

“See, there it is.”

I looked through the windshield at the landscape in his view.  He was correct.  Standing in the deserted field next to the ruin of a flattened homestead was a four walled cabin with no apparent means of entry.

“Don’t take me back there,” he said.

I sped up the truck as we passed by.  He was right.  I hadn’t ever seen this structure.  Then, the black Cadillac emerged from the side.  It angled toward us and charged across the open terrain.  The man yelped as I pressed harder on the accelerator. 

We were approaching a crossroads, a stark ninety degree turn that was characteristic of the rural grid.  I turned off Joppa Road because I could cut over to 1400 North and still get back to the airport. 

“It’s too late.  They’ve got us.”

The Caddie barreled onto the road and chased after us.  The road ahead was straight and clear of obstacle.  He would over take us.

Instead, he pulled up on the tail and rammed the truck.  The high steel fender obliterated my tail lights and flung us forwards.  My passenger smacked his face onto the dashboard from the impact.

I swerved the steering wheel.  I found it incredibly hard to try to maneuver at the speed we were racing at.  My knuckles popped as I held steady to prevent the truck from toppling over.

“I have to stop.  He’s gonna run me right off the road.”

“Don’t do it.”

I slowed my truck and lifted the right turn signal.  I braked and the car behind rolled in front of us and stopped.

The doors Cadillac opened.  Three ski masked men stepped out into the road. They were wearing button down white dress shirts and black pants.  Two figures dashed toward the passenger side of my truck, immediately making for my passenger.  They flung the door opened and he cried out.

“No.  He’s hurt so bad, don’t take him.”

They wrestled his body from seat and slung his flailing body between.  His struck out in defense but his blows landed like ineffectual flies on the wrapped thickness of his assailants coats.  They jerked him along, his feet dragging on the rocks on the side of the road.  They opened the trunk of the caddy and stuffed the man inside even as he whimpered.

The third figure approached my window. He was a big guy.  I was frozen.  He carried was holding a hunting knife. 

“Go ahead and roll down your window,” he said.

I put my hands up into his view.  Then, I reached and eased the window crank down.

“You ain’t a cop, are you?”

“No, sir.  Airport Security.  I completely unarmed.”

Silence between us.

“Alright, what’s your name?”

“Uh.  Charlie.”

He stood like a stone before me. All I could see were his eyes and the breath from his facemask.  He was deciding something.

“Then you go on get the hell out of here.  You saw nothing.”

When the car had travelled far enough into the distance that I could no longer see the glow of lights, I drove out of the desolate land, a place only fit for runways and renegade Quakers.  I made my way to the airport to pass on what had transpired.

Bisection: Dean Blunt/Dirty Beaches

DEAN BLUNT: THE REDEEMER

DIRTY BEACHES DRIFTERS/LOVE IS THE DEVIL

Bisection

Back when I had unspooled audio tape draped on my ceiling and walls, I had the kind of time afforded to one who could spend the time hanging tape as decor.  What appeal did the intestine links of Kris Kross singles flapping lazily in the smoke ring breeze have, what did it signify to me?  Splayed against a white wall, the tendrils sorta resembled A snapshot of static drawn in through the antenna of my color tv. If I held a cigarette to the end of the tether, the cellophane would ignite and burn up to the ceiling as a fuse.  WARNING:DO NOT TRY WITH VHS TAPE.  Don’t try with any tape.

I could really listen to a record then.  Or cassette.  Really dig into the thing, live in it.  Memorize the lyrics.  Act out the lyrics.  Yes, this is something to do. the Fuckin Wall Side A Side B one tape.  Ignoring the robotic arms of the boxy three disc CD Changer because I only had a dub.  First world problem.  I’d sit rapt and listen to the whole damn thing after school, the sunlight draining from the room as I descended deep into the thin ice and fascist wormfood of rock star hell.  The anguish I can’t even fuck these groupies cause I’;m so high, you can lip synch that and rock back and forth like the frantic rocking of a Pink Floyd mental patient or how Scott Weiland went fetal clutchy fists during Creep Unplugged.  But the big moment, of course, was “the Trial.”  When I listened to the trial I had to stub out my cigarette because my vigorous gesturing and quasi Kabuki choreography was liable to come into contact with the aforementioned tape and burn my mom’s house down.  I’d seen the cartoon, too, so I knew how to impersonate Roger Water’s little kinks.  I could put a hand on my hip playing the spurned ex-wife because Roger was doing the heavy lifting by singing like a chick.  Then the sneering headmaster, wasted potential crazee, the final admonishment of a defecating judge, man that shit had some life to it!  TEAR DOWN THE WALL!

I’m pretty dense, too.  I couldn’t figure out if he commits suicide or just accepts the crazy.  Ambiguous.  Better listen to it again. And that loop continued for a couple of months when I fake played my Squire to Portrait of an American Family and so on into oblivion.

I feel like Dean Blunt (THE REDEEMER) might have little moments like this too, before the skills and talents fully manifested or the expressive mode was unknowable at the time.  Blunt has progressed through a recent succession of records each with a different flirtation of style in the sphere of electronic dub.  The first record I heard was BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL.  The tracks are named numerically and the cover art is the logo of EBONY magazine.  Pitchfork named “2” best new music and it’s the track that I dig the most, too.  At 2:14 it flirts with my definition of even being a song (my metric is the length of “I, Me, Mine “from Beatles Anthology Three).  It sounds cheap to describe Inga Copeland’s  singing as “druggy” or “syrupy” but that’s where it lumbers in that semi-conscious prom queen kind of way.

On THE NARCISSIST II ,which may be one of my favorite album titles ever, cause it’s only slightly more clever than a debut act releasing GREATEST HITS (cause what’s better than being a narcissist? Being 2 of em.) Dean Blunt gives into narcissism and sings.  He can’t really do it, but that’s never stopped anyone and shouldn’t.  Here he conducts scotchguard one-acts THE POD style, distorted shrieks and pouty laments behind a crusty distorted effect.  It’s the kind of chronological and free edited  sound of tapes left on to brap or for delay experiments to write themselves.

Now his new one, THE REDEEMER, is Blunt having the confidence of a real narcissist adds the grandiose treatment, sound movie Pink Floyd/Roger Waters style.  His vocals come through clearer, reminiscent of Rog but still distorted and disaffected like David Thrussel of Snog.  The beats are incredible when present, satisfying like early DJ Shadow and groove is fantastic and he fucks with harp glissando and piano solo for flourish. This does feel like Blunt’s widest palette. He plays the joke a little on the nose withthe angelic simulated by organ chorals, but when there’s a spiritual dude like D’EON already laying down that kind of thing, it plays a little light, especially for a record you’re not sure is LAUGHING AT YOU.The album art depicts hands folded in prayer, but it doesn’t feel like redemption and smacks of esigesis  Like with THE NARCISSIST II, it kind of feels like he’s mocking me and making good shit at the same time. And someone would only call it shit because it feels so unfinished and that kind of verbal barb would be just the kind of thing to provoke a reticent man to peek over the edge.  Blunt throws in the vocal samples (confused woman leaving a rambling message, ocean waves(I picture the low sine of a west coast gangster contemplating the water), New Year’s Eve and the bells.  There’s a movie for this somewhere like My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult or an art(y) film like THE WALL.  The actual REDEEMER is Joanne Robertson’s vocal on the straightforward  “Imperial Gold” but even this recalls the pastoral folk of “Nobody Home.”  THE WALL references probably aren’t fair, but the thing feels like the vibe that record pulled off: Ego run amok surrounded by devil womens and just get me a fucking Steinway so I can write this songsuite already.  I always liked how Floyd’s “Nobody Home” ends with an unfinished lyric, but it was a song by my definition.  Blunt’s are short scribbles that I think will become way more interesting in extrapolated context like punctuating two unconnected strands, a rapskit between a random playlist that spit out Norman Greenbaum and is queuing up Slowdive.

Which, incidentally, came to mind as I was listening to “I dream in neon” on Dirty Beaches double DRIFTERS/LOVE IS THE DEVIL, the flatulent groove of “Spirit in the Sky” (and since I’m an atheist I like to imagine a Space Bus kinda like the Winnebago but trailing rainbow vapor trails like Magical Mystery Tour goin up to the spirit in the sky where I wanna go when I die) mixed with the dirge guitar of SOUVLAKI.  Eno produced a song on that Slowdive record, and Dirty Beaches definitely dig some Eno  My first hint?  They have the fucking word “Beach” in their name which everyone knows is Eno’s natural habitat when the cycle completes reverts into landcrab abyss mode (read your appendices).  “Casino Lisboa” is Alan Vega on MY LIFE WITH THE BUSH OF GHOSTS which is as awesome as it sounds.  The washing machine pulse propels DRIFTERS with the kind of clenched teeth rigidity that Suicide records invoke, but fortunately Frippertronics are allowed to unfold over the mire and consistently burrow themselves into bubbling volcanic pools or insect infested cessbogs.  The Tension relents somehere around LOVE IS THE DEVIL but where the split is located is not entirely clear.  Probably right around “Greyhound at Night” where despondent saxophones honk over a Phil Collins-esque cymbol meditation.  I like“This is not my City”’s Lesliespun koifish piano splashes that reside in what Lester Bang’s called the (in reference to ENO) “Still waters that don’t necessarily run deep” which is pretty okay criticism for when these kinds of pieces veer too far to the cinematic/ passive .

Further tape manipulation is explored, but in the touch and go manner afforded the time to listen to these records, to really get inside them. It works as a synthesis of Eno’s DISCREET MUSIC, in which summation is ok.  Ambient records, beside falling asleep to, by definition aren’t supposed to have the buzz of a DRIFTER and singletracks shouldn’t have to be listened to for 135 minutes in order to grasp them.  Mostly these pieces work because Dirty Beaches don’t seem to be directing a movie in the same fashion that Dean Blunt is.  This plays more like a Jonny Greenwood soundtrack.

The thing about The WALL, is that for all its glut and righteousness and disco appropriation (YES, another brick in the wall pt.2 sounds like a fucking disco song), it was largely built of song type songs.

THE WALL worked consistently for fans because they could act out those silly dramatic scenes whilst wearing a cape in under the Xmas lights of their bedrooms (there were dozens of us).

Blunt works largely with the literal but he’s too obtuse or stubborn or smart to let us in on the joke.

Beaches, when not cutting you in the subway, are drawing silent silver planes in their faraway Mosquito Coast brewer’s lagoon.

Bi-Section Daft Punk/MajicalCloudz

BiSection

Eric Stuteville

May 22 2013

Daft Punk: RANDOM ACCESS MEMORIES

Majical Cloudz: IMPERSONATOR

As recording and production technology has evolved, simplified, and cheapened, the ability to create compelling electronic music has become entirely feasible to the bedroom (broke) artist.  Writing electronic dance music is probably a more democratic endeavor than most music creation as the composition of a piece is not necessarily limited to any instrumental virtuosity (save for the manipulation of a given piece of software).  The only limitations reside in the power and features of the computing and the good taste and talents of the writer.

Thousands of burgeoning bedroom DJ’s were alerted to this musical entry-point via Daft Punk’s classic HOMEWORK.  The title states without ambiguity where the heart of even a major work could be accomplished.  Listeners were provided with a roadmap of influences dear to Daft Punk in the track “Teachers,” suggesting that if one were to investigate these personal heroes, charting Daft Punk’s sound and style would be pretty straightforward. Except it wasn’t.  Daft Punk wasn’t an amalgamation, a mishmash of their forebears.  Their embrace of the cold, mathematical Kraftwerkian aspects of their work rested uneasily with the bouncy superficiality of disco/house, but that tension produced some of the grooviest tracks the late 20^th century could come up with.

RANDOM ACCESS MEMORIES could not have been created in the bedroom.  Instead of typing a playlist into the expressive SimpleText, Daft Punk went ahead and gathered up all of the “teachers” and friends they could find and invited them to play live on the record.  “Give Life Back to Music” is the opening cut and lays out the thesis:  The robots despair that Music is dehumanized and soulless.  How can we help music find it’s heart and way back to the body?  Give it back to the people.

Granted, after years of success, the people that Daft Punk encounter are decidedly more human than human. Their availability must’ve spurred the queries:  Why sample an AOR artist like Barry Manilow when you can actually have real life insipid songwriter Paul Williams (“Rainy Days and Mondays”) on your record?  Why sample a Chic riff when you can have the real Nile Rodgers play rhythm guitar?  A falsetto like Pharell William’s is a nice analogue for the ubiquitous vocoder and Panda Bear ably serves as a proxy for Brian Wilson’s vocal runs, samples cannot suffice when the originals are avaliable.  Disco and soundtrack legend Giorgio Moroder is misappropriated a 1:30 of spoken word time to narrate his eponymous tribute song, but Giorgio’s monologue is probably the least interesting contribution he could’ve made to the record.  Children’s choir?  Yes, bring in the children’s choir! Schlock. Production excesses and a more is more sheen seems to keep the plebeians behind the velvet rope.  It’s all very beautiful and bright but I feel nothing, a plastic smile.   Life was not given back to music.

I’m reminded of Bowie’s take on Warhol, “Dress my friends up just for show/See them as they really are,” when hearing the Strokes Julian Casablancas unrecognizably processed croon and how Daft Punk seem to work against the concept of collaboration.  While the music is as inoffensive and pristine an electronic album can be (and it is.  Every sound has been mixed to utter perfection.  Machines don’t make mistakes), the utilization of specialized and high profile guest stars just to be relegated to unrecognizable, Daft Punkian caricatures is more than a little perverse.

Devon Welsh of Majical Cloudz  is an artist hitting his stride, and Majical Cloudz second LP IMPERSONATOR is as confident a musical statement as HOMEWORK ever was.  It’s the kind of record that likely couldn’t have been made without the efforts of a  younger, riskier robots on HOMEWORK. The onus to assemble a band is lifted for the musician Without the benefit (?) of an endless bankroll, Welsh relies on the atmosphere of Matt Otto and conceit that the his voice, without liberal amounts of processing, is a compelling and expressive instrument all on his own.  Welsh’s vocals recall John Cale and Andrew Bird, the National.  Lyrics, minimal in execution, evoke existential ennui, the mire of ability dashed by procrastination and the thousand other things.  The delivery is more wry than sad and his voice, that wonderful rich tone, reminds me that problems don’t get solved just by throwing heaps of money at them.  We see Welsh at the dawn of his powers whereas Daft Punk is trying to reassert theirs.  As any human could tell you, aging is just part of the natural process.

Ironically, there’s probably as much Rhodes assisted balladeering present on IMPERSONATOR as RAM, but Welsh is obviously reaching for places deeper than getting’ lucky or losin’ yourself to dance.  Without the explicit declaration, Welsh uses organic instruments that are lightly processed. While the tunes aren’t concerned with BPM, the desire to connect with the audience is very palpable.  The electronic atmospherics and percussive pulses that comprise Cloudz sonic palette makes IMPERSONATOR  a very introspective record, a fabled bedroom record constructed with more ideas and fewer engineers.

Daft Punk seem to want it all:  The headphone record that is indispensible to clublife henceforth.  They have the budget to achieve this lofty goal and the accompanying light show will render the science behind the sound indistinguishable from magic.  Welsh, seems to just want the ONE: One listener, one single soul to connect to and get it, less a mission than an invitation.  As Majical Cloudz audience grows, I’m hoping Welsh remembers what is to be human after all, relying less on homage and montage to voice his otherwise singular ideas.