Wonderment Just Might Make You Hope

12 Apr

All of the faces on money look sad. I think people are too busy working for it or spending it to notice, but they all seem kind of miserable. Hamilton’s eyes radiate pain, like his dog died or his girlfriend just left him. Lincoln seems weary and disappointed. Washington has this look like he just let out a mournful sigh. Maybe he’s thinking about all of the slaves that he owned.

I never knew that Washington owned slaves until Doug, this guy that I work with, told me. He said that Washington treated them like shit and didn’t free them when he was supposed to. At first I didn’t really believe him, because I’d never heard any of that before, and he’s like thirty and still works in a restaurant. But then I asked Mr. Hanson, my History teacher, and he said that it was a different time and blah blah blah, but at the end of the day, he didn’t say that Doug was wrong. So this big hero who’s on money and carved into rocks and all that was a complete dick, and everyone knows it, but they go along with it, anyway.

Turns out Doug’s right about a lot of other things, too. He hates conservatives, but he doesn’t like Bill Clinton, either. He says Clinton bombed an aspirin factory and killed a bunch of innocent people, and cheated on his wife. When I told my dad about all of this, he said nobody was perfect, and that we voted Democrat, because the alternative was worse, and long story short, Doug was right and my dad votes for a guy who bombs factories and cheats on his wife.

We work at Wings & Things on Belmont Street, in a shopping plaza between a movie theater and a Starbucks. It’s a sports bar that’s as big as a warehouse and is always about ten degrees colder than it needs to be. I work after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays until ten, and on Saturdays from five until midnight. Doug works every night except Sunday, all the way up to closing time. I usually work the wing station or the fryers. Doug’s always on the grill. He has a long goatee and listens to music where the lead singers just scream. During breaks he sits on milk crates out back, smoking and reading science fiction books. He always smells like dishwater and cigarettes.

Tonight’s the last Saturday of the month, which means that the regular manager has the night off, and so Doug is in charge. I like these shifts because he lets me cut corners and usually lets me leave early, which means I get to see ‘Saturday Night Live’ from the beginning. Plus, it’s usually when he tells me about things like Washington’s slaves or how the war on drugs is an excuse to put poor people in jail. When the regular manager is around he laughs at what Doug says and calls him Carl Marks, so he doesn’t talk as much.

‘Minor, I’m ready for three fries and a shroom,’ he says, wiping his brow with his forearm, the burgers on the grill sounding like tires going through a puddle as he flips them. Doug calls me ‘Minor’, but I don’t really mind, because he treats me like more of an adult than anybody. He’ll buy me cigarettes, if I ask him, and tells me about all the things nobody else does. And one time, when I came into the back office, he tossed a condom at me and said ‘Keep your tool cool.’ I know it was just a joke, but he wouldn’t have made it if he thought I was just a kid.

‘Got it,’ I say, lifting up the breaded mushrooms that bobble around the crackling grease pool like misshapen lottery balls. We dart around to the hiss of fryers and the chirp of timers while Ozzy Osbourne sings about going insane. Everyone always talks about kitchen jobs like they’re for idiots, but they can be pretty hard sometimes. Each ticket has a bunch of different things on it, and they all need to be cooked and organized and go out in order, as fast as possible. Sometimes they don’t stop coming in for an hour or two. I bet if all of those people who talk about it like it’s so easy had to do it, they’d screw up every once in a while, too.

My favorite part about Doug being in charge is that he’ll let you make whatever food that you want. Once dinner rush has died down, I always make a Caesar salad with chicken and bring it over to Megan, who works at the movie theater, because I like her and that’s what she orders whenever she comes in. I try to make it perfect, just like it is on the menu photo, and Phil, one of the other cooks, always makes fun of me.

‘Is that for your girlfriend?’ he always says, but he’ll say it in a mean way, as if having a girlfriend or wanting one is supposed to be embarrassing.

‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ I always say, like I’m angry, even though I kind of want her to be.

‘Shut the fuck up, Phil,’ Doug always says. ‘When’s the last time you got any?’ Phil usually stops talking then, just like Doug does when the manager calls him Carl Marks.

I think about Megan all the time, but for some reason I can never quite remember what she looks like, and so it’s always a bit of a surprise when I first see her. At the movie theater, she has to wear this stupid puffy white shirt with a vest and a bowtie and put her hair up, but she still always looks so pretty it makes me feel like I’m going over the crest of a rollercoaster.

‘You have no idea how much I love you right now,’ she says when she sees me carrying the salad, the steam from the chicken frosting the lid. The movie theater is as drafty as Wings & Things, and there’s a big poster of Brad Pitt holding up a bar of soap and staring down at us. ‘If you didn’t bring this, my dinner would’ve been popcorn and gummy bears.’

I don’t say anything, my brain still stuck back in the first part. I know she didn’t really mean it, but she said it, and when a girl you like says those words, even if they’re kidding, it still feels nice. But then she added ‘right now’, which means that she doesn’t at other times, and I keep thinking stuff like that for a while and just smiling like an idiot until she snaps me out of it.

‘Busy tonight?’

‘A little bit’, I say, looking at the teardrop swirls in the maroon and green carpet. ‘But there’s no football or boxing, so I’ll probably get out early. You?’

‘I get out at eleven fifteen, right after the last movie starts.’

‘That’s cool,’ I say, shifting my weight from foot to foot. Whenever I’m around Megan, I suddenly become aware of things I never normally notice, like how I’m standing, or what I’m doing with my hands. ‘I’ll probably just go home and watch ‘Saturday Night Live’. The guy from ‘The X-Files’ is on.’

‘I’ve never seen that show.’

‘’Saturday Night Live’?’

‘No, ‘The X-Files’. Is it scary?’

‘Not really. It’s mostly about the FBI and aliens.’

‘Do you believe in aliens?’

‘I don’t know. Everybody lies about everything else, so probably.’

Just then her boss walks by, and she straightens her back and stops leaning on the counter. He looks at us for a second before walking off.

“Well, thanks for the salad,’ she says.

‘Sure, no problem.’

We’re not very busy for the rest of the night. Doug and Phil play a game where they try to fling onion slices onto a pair of tongs, and I get most of the dishes done. A little after ten, Doug has me clean all of the boxes out of the cooler and freezer, and together we take all of the trash out back.

‘You smoke weed yet, Minor?’ he asks with a cocked eyebrow, lighting the little white twig his lips are clamped around.

‘Yeah,’ I say, though I only did once with my friend Dan and his older sister, and I don’t think I did it right, because I didn’t feel anything. He takes a big puff and hands it to me.

‘Don’t tell anyone,’ he says with a wheeze, glancing around the back lot as he exhales. ‘How’d it go with Caesar Salad Girl?’

‘I dunno. We talked about ‘The X-Files’. She said she got off at eleven fifteen.’

‘Did you ask her out?’

‘No.’

‘You should ask her out.’

‘You think?’ I take too big of a puff and end up coughing and hacking until my eyes water.

‘Maybe not when you’re stoned,’ he says with a laugh, plucking the joint from my fingers. ‘But, yeah. Unless you’re content with just bringing her salads once a month. You just got your paycheck, right? What better way to spend your hard-earned money than on a girl you like?’ He takes a drag and stares off at the lights from the grocery store before starting to toss bags of trash into the dumpster. “Gotta have a reason for doing this shit, right, Minor?’

He lets me go home after we finish up trash. I’m feeling a bit loopy, and miss the first bus because I’m just sort of watching the trees swirl. I don’t get to see the first part of ‘Saturday Night Live’, but they do a ‘Celebrity Jeopardy’ and the guy from ‘The X-Files’ is so funny that I spit up soda through my nose. While the music guest is playing, I lay two week’s pay on my bed in a row, looking at all of the sad faces. My dad says that I should save my hard-earned money. Doug thinks I should spend it on Megan. I know people like my dad or Mr. Hanson probably think that Doug is an idiot, and maybe they’re right, but I think I’m going to go with him on this one.

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Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You

11 Apr

We sip whiskey and lemonade from mason jars, the room silent save for the rhythmic crackle of a finished record looping in the air. Neither of us bothers to change it. Sarah is wearing an old concert t-shirt of mine, staring out the circle window with her knees tucked up under her chin. This is the part where I begin to feel bad.

I like Sarah because I don’t like Sarah. I mean, I like her, but I don’t think of her when I listen to Phil Collins records. I don’t daydream about her, or empty the ashtrays before she comes over, and I’ve never wondered if she’s having sex when she doesn’t answer my call. I don’t second guess myself around her, she doesn’t make me want to be a better person, and if she fell out of my life tomorrow, I don’t think it would bother me all that much in the long run. I’ve always assumed the feeling is mutual.

She doesn’t own a car, often adds ‘dude’ or ‘man’ to the end of sentences, and keeps a flask of Evan Williams in her purse. If karaoke presents itself, she will almost always sing a Go-Go’s song, and ‘Gates of Steel’ by Devo is usually her jukebox leadoff. She wears Doc Martens with sundresses, dances like a character in a John Hughes movie, and the bottoms of her feet are always caked with dirt. Her perfume smells like mothballs; the only other time I’ve come across it is on elderly women.

She clerked for a law firm downtown for a year or so after college – owning exactly five appropriate outfit combinations that hung on a clothes rack with wheels she’d found near a strip mall dumpster – but quit last summer after selling a few paintings. Now she bartends at Crane’s. Outside of trivial details, I’m not really sure I know all that much about her.

We have breakfast during lunchtime most days, at the diner up the hill from my apartment, but we usually only talk about the night before or the day ahead, sometimes about the other people around us. Every once in a while we’ll make plans to see a movie or a show, but more often than not we just run into each other at the bar, or I call her when I’m feeling lonely. Although lately I’m starting to find myself lonelier when I’m with her than when I’m alone.

‘You ever get the feeling that you’re never going to grow up?’ she asks, hugging her knees. ‘Like, you’ll grow older or wiser, but on some level you’ll always be a step behind?’

‘I think everyone feels that way sometimes.’

‘I feel that way all the time’ she says with a sigh, running a finger over the tips of her bangs and taking a pull from her drink. ‘I thought someday I’d get to some, I don’t know, place…not where I had everything figured out or anything. But that I’d have my shit together a bit.’

‘For what it’s worth, I think you’ve got your shit together.’

‘Thanks’ she says, laughing through her nose. I can’t tell if she’s bemused or flattered. She gets up slowly, like a waking cat, and lumbers across the room toward the record player. ‘So what’s going on with us?’ she asks, flicking through the stacks before fishing out Transformer. ‘Not that anything has to be going on with us. Or not be going on.’ She fumbles with the record a bit before sliding it on and dropping the needle. Nestling back into her chair, she finally faces me, and I’ve always known that her eyes were blue, but it feels like I’m noticing it for the first time.

‘I don’t know…I like spending time with you.’

‘But we’re not dating, right?’ Her head is down, but her eyes are peering up at me. ‘I mean, it’s OK if we don’t date. I’m not even saying that I want to. I just…’ She trails off, rolling her eyes at herself and fidgeting in her chair, where she now sits yoga style. ‘Sorry, man.’

‘No, it’s fine. I, uh…I don’t know. I mean, I like you. You’re a great girl. It’s just…it’s kind of hard to explain, but it has nothing to do-’

‘Don’t.’ Her lips are so close to her jar that her voice is a muffled echo. She takes a gulp, shaking her head with a slight grin. ‘I’d rather you tell me that I’m ugly or a drunk than hear ‘it’s not you, it’s me.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘It’s always a lie.’ She swipes a strand of hair behind her ear as she gets up again, grabbing my jar and setting it next to hers on the wooden cable spool table, halving the remnants of her flask between them. ‘Even when there’s some truth to it.’

‘Well, I certainly don’t think you’re ugly,’ I say as she hands me back my jar. ‘And I find your alcoholism endearing.’ She punches me in the arm, her tongue poking through a gritted grin. ‘But seriously…I didn’t know that’s something you wanted.’

‘Like I said, I don’t know that it is. I just…’ She stamps her foot a bit, and her shoulders slump like a losing fighter hearing the decision. ‘I’ve been in a bit of a crisis mode lately…trying to come up with some sort of plan and organize my life.’ She says ‘plan’ and ‘organize my life’ as if they were alien and disdainful concepts. ‘I signed up for OK Cupid and went on a terrible date.’

‘And so dating me is the fallback after strike one on OK Cupid?’ We both laugh a little and dart our eyes every which way but toward each other.

‘I didn’t mean it like that, dude.’

‘Nah, it’s OK…in a way, that’s kind of why we’re both here, right?’ She doesn’t answer, her eyes still fixed to the ground, and so I stand up and hug her, the type where you eventually realize how long you’ve been holding each other, but still don’t let go. We stand that way for a minute or so, Lou Reed’s stilted verses taking over for the lack of conversation, and for once I don’t think about what the person I’d rather be holding is up to.

‘I’m sorry, man,’ she says, her speech stunted a bit due to her chin resting on my shoulder.

‘Don’t be.’

‘You want to watch one?’ she asks, pulling back from the embrace, but still holding me by the elbows. We’ve been watching Cheers chronologically on Netflix.

‘Sure.’ She playfully scratches my elbows, kisses me, and gives me another lengthy hug before we saunter over to the couch. We’re up to the one where Christopher Lloyd shows up and wants to paint Diane, but Sarah falls asleep long before the melancholy clarinet and piano duet signals the episode’s end. I glance over at her dormant body slumped against my shoulder and kiss her forehead. I think we both wish that we were someone else, but it’s nice to have her around, and the fact that she wants to be here reassures me that it’s not so bad.

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Dancing In The Dark

28 Oct

Seventh grade has been a complete mess. Everyone goes through rough patches, I suppose. Even cool people. Look at Bob Dylan. He’s pretty much the coolest, and even he had that period where he painted his face like a mime. I’ll bet people made fun of him, too, otherwise he probably would’ve just kept on with it forever. I never knew my clothes or hair were stupid until people made fun of me for it. At some point, someone must’ve said to him ‘Hey, Bob, you look like a faggot.’ That’s what Rick Huntington said to me when I wore my dad’s leather jacket.

I was trying to look like Bruce Springsteen on the ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ album cover. He looks tough, and he’s sneering and he seemed like someone Jenny Parker might like. But it turns out she likes guys who wear Abercrombie clothes, like Rick, and he called me a faggot, and I didn’t really feel like Bruce Springsteen on the album cover, so I tossed the jacket back in the storage room and got a job to save up for some Abercrombie clothes.

I wash dishes on the weekends at Mazarra’s near the mall. Mr. Mazarra is a friend of my grandfather’s, and he pays me twenty dollars in cash at the end of every shift. The dish tank is like a hundred degrees, and it makes your skin wrinkled and spongy. There’s usually four of us back there – me, Ramon and Luis, who don’t speak much English, and Monte, who has Down syndrome and only works until seven. There’s another guy, Wayne, but we’re not allowed to work together because he went to prison for touching kids.

It can get kind of boring because there’s no one to talk to. Sometimes Ramon and Luis will teach me dirty words in Spanish, but most of the time I just sing songs in my head. There’s that one R.E.M. song, ‘Stand’ – I like to sing that but change the words to be about what I’m doing, so in my head I’ll go ‘Stand in the place where you work, now clean forks’, and stuff like that. It helps pass the time.

When I’m not in school or at work, I like to sit in the basement and listen to my dad’s records. There are loads of them in the storage room, packed away in wooden crates, all dog-eared and faded. At first I used to play them based on what the covers looked like – I listened to Pink Floyd for the first time because they had the man shaking hands with the other man who was on fire, and the Rolling Stones because they had the real zipper on the cover and Billy Joel because he always looks sad and lonely on all of his album covers, and I feel that way a lot.

I don’t ever remember meeting my dad. Mom says I did, but he left when I was little to live with some other lady in California. I’ve never been to California, but everyone’s always singing about it, so there’s got to be something to it. One day I want to go out there and find him and talk about records. Maybe he could help me sort some of this stuff out. Mom’s great and all, but she’s not really much help. She just sits on the couch after work watching T.V. and sometimes she cries, and if I tell her about any of my problems she tells me how great I am, which I don’t really believe, because no one else seems to think so.

I’m kind of like Simon. He sings a song about how he’s alone and he doesn’t need any friends, and he seems like he’s doing OK, so maybe it will work out. He has his poetry and books, and I’m kind of like that with my dad’s records. He’s also kind of short and puny looking and has a dumb haircut, so we have a lot in common. Except that Simon probably doesn’t get a million boners and zits and I bet his voice doesn’t crack all of the time. And he says he doesn’t have friends, but then what’s Garfunkel? If he ever got too lonely he could always just call up and say ‘Hey, it’s Simon, want to write a song?’ I don’t have anyone like Garfunkel.

Tonight is our school’s Spring Dance. I didn’t want to go, because I went to the winter one and the music was crap and I just stood by the punch bowl the whole time. No one wanted to dance with me, and after a while I just waited outside the gym until my mom came to pick me up. But she says she always had fun at school dances and made friends and that I should go. Plus, I got an Abercrombie shirt last week. It was $60, which adds up to three shifts in the dish tank. Mom said that was ridiculous, and that no one should pay that much for a shirt, but when I told her that the dance was coming up and everybody wore them, she paid for half of it. She told me to save the rest and maybe use some to buy a girl ice cream after the dance. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that girls don’t like me, so I just said that I might. She’s always sad, and it would probably make her sadder to find out that I’m not as handsome as she thinks I am.

After I get out of the shower, I put on my Abercrombie shirt and try to style my hair all sorts of different ways. I make it like Sting’s, all pointy and messy, but I figure that Rick Huntington would make fun of that, so I try Rod Stewart hair, but that ends up looking just like Sting, and so I try to comb it down like the Beatles, but it’s not long enough, and even if it was Rick would probably make fun of that, too. He’s been on my case all year, ever since I wore the leather jacket. Whenever we pass in the hallways he does this thing where he jerks forward like he’s going to lunge at me, but he doesn’t, and when I flinch he laughs and knocks my books on the floor. Sometimes I really wish I was a tough fighter like Elton John or Mick Jagger, so I could just pop him square in the nose and tell him to leave me alone.

I end up doing my hair like I always do, and my mom says that I look really handsome. On the way there she asks me if there’s any girls I was thinking of dancing with, and I say maybe Jenny Parker, because the idea of me dancing with a girl seems to make her happy. She says that if Jenny and I wanted to get ice cream after the dance she could take us and even wait out in the car until we were done. I know she’s just trying to be a good mom, but it makes me want to cry because the idea seems so nice, and it will never happen in a million years.

Little circles of light bounce around the dark gym, and there are a few green and white streamers taped up in the doorway. A few girls are out in front of the DJ booth that’s set up under the basketball hoop, but they’re just kind of swaying, not really dancing. Everyone else is leaning against the walls or standing near the refreshments table.

I don’t really know what to do or who to talk to, so I duck into the bathroom for a minute, even though I don’t need to go. After that, I sort of take a lap and wind up at the DJ booth. The guy has big hoop earrings and when I ask him to play Fleetwood Mac he laughs a little. He says junior high kids don’t want to dance to Fleetwood Mac, but I tell him that I’m a junior high kid, and I dance to them all the time. He laughs again and says he’ll see what he can do. I head over to get some punch, where I run into Jenny. She has on a blueberry dress and heels with straps and her hair is swooped up. She looks really pretty.

‘How are you?’ she asks with the same chirpy sing-song voice she uses when she cheers at the football games.

‘I’m fine. You?’

‘Glad not to be in science class,’ she says, emphasizing the word ‘science’ as if it were our little secret.

‘Yeah,’ I say, and then it gets quiet for a minute.

‘I really love Third Eye Blind,’ she says, pointing towards the ceiling.

‘They’re great,’ I say, though I don’t know who Third Eye Blind is. It gets quiet again, and I start to think about the idea of dancing and ice cream and how happy my mom would be. ‘Hey, um, I asked the DJ to play a song, and he said that he would if I got people to dance to it, so maybe you could help me get some people?’

‘Sure. What song?’

‘Yeah, what song?’ Rick says as he bumps his shoulder into mine from behind.

‘Rick,’ she says with gritted teeth, stamping her foot and narrowing her eyes.

‘What? I’m just playin’, he says with a smirk, putting his arm around her shoulder. I start to walk away but Jenny follows me and grabs my wrist.

‘We’ll dance to your song, OK? Just tell me when it comes on and we’ll get people out there.’

It takes about four or five more songs, but when I hear the first few piano bars, I signal to her, and she grabs two of her friends’ hands and a bunch of others follow. At first when the song kicks up, everyone is jumping around and hollering, but when it starts to settle in people just kind of sway a little and don’t seem so excited anymore.

‘What the fuck is this?’ Rick asks with a crinkled face.

‘Fleetwood Mac.’

‘Who?’

‘Fleetwood Mac,” I say again, this time looking at the floor, a film of heat covering my face.

‘More like Fagwood Mac,’ he says with a laugh. ‘You can’t dance to this shit.’

He walks off and most everyone follows him. Jenny stands around for a second, and it looks like she might say something, but her friend pulls her away. After a minute or so the DJ changes to a different song and looks at me with a shrug. I get another cup of punch, and Mr. Michaels, my English teacher, says that he likes Fleetwood Mac, so we talk for a minute. He tells me I should listen to them before they had Stevie Nicks. I tell him I will, though I don’t know which one Stevie Nicks is. I hope he’s not the singer, as I like him, and the girl, Lindsey. They sound nice together.

The next song is a slow dance one – Janet Jackson, I think – and when it starts the bouncing lights settle into a steady carousel around the room. Everyone partners up except for a few of us, but I’m the only one who doesn’t have friends around they can pretend to talk to. Jenny dances with Rick, and puts her head on his shoulder while I stand against the wall, wishing that I hadn’t spent so much on a stupid shirt.

I wait until the dance is over before leaving, wanting my mom to think that I had a good time. As I’m walking past the line of idling cars Jenny calls out to me from behind, wobbling in her heels as she tries to catch up to me.

‘I’m really sorry,’ she says with a frown. ‘Rick is a jerk, and that was mean. I should’ve danced with you.’

‘It’s OK.’

‘I like that song,’ she says, swiping a strand of hair behind her ear. ‘They played it when the president got elected. He played saxophone.’

‘Yeah, he did.’

‘Seriously, though, I’m really sorry. I promise to make it up to you some time.’

‘Well, um, if you want, we could go get ice cream? My mom can take us. She’ll wait in the car. I can pay for it.’

‘Oh,’ she says, her eyes falling to the sidewalk. ‘I, um, we’re actually going to hang out in Rick’s friend’s basement. He lives down the street.’

‘Oh, yeah, no, that’s OK.’

‘Maybe another time?’ she asks, returning to her cheerleader voice but still frowning.

‘Yeah, sure. I’d like that.’ She kisses me on the cheek and my guts stretch and twist like boiling silly putty. She smells like green soap and perfume. I feel a little like Bruce Springsteen.

‘Bye.’

‘Bye.’

‘Was that Jenny Parker?’ my mom asks when I get into the car. I can’t remember the last time I saw her smile so wide, her cheeks bunching against her eyelids.

‘Yeah.’

‘Does she want to go for ice cream?’

‘She can’t. Her mom says she has to go home. But we might go, another time.’ She puts a hand on my knee, shaking it a little. ‘Can we please just go home?’

I’m not dumb enough to think that the kiss meant anything. I know she’s into guys like Rick who play football, and she just felt bad for me. But it made me feel nice, and maybe she could end up like a Garfunkel, and that would be a good start.

When we get back my mom turns on the T.V., curling up on the couch, and I head down to the basement and listen to songs about California.

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The Boy Is A Boy And The Fish Is A Fish

24 Oct

Ernest Hemingway sucks. People talk about how great he is, but I bet they’re just saying it ’cause that’s what they were taught. We had to read The Sun Also Rises in Mr. Hartley’s English class, and it’s boring as hell – the guy is depressed and he just drinks and never says anything about it. If I wanted that, I’d go talk to my asshole dad. The guy in the book is miserable because he’s in love with some slut but he can’t get it up after getting shot in Vietnam. I mean, that could be an interesting story, right? But the guy never says anything. What’s the point of writing a book about being sad if you never talk about being sad? I don’t get it.

My band, Anal Skull Fuckers, Inc., we say what we feel. We have a song called ‘Fuck George Bush’ and we come right out with it – we say that he sucks and he makes us mad. If Hemingway wrote a book called ‘Fuck George Bush’ it would probably be all about how the beer was cold or the sun was hot or how he had a headache. All of our songs are under two minutes, so we get straight to the point. And people really like us. Last summer we played a show in Pittsburgh and like a hundred kids showed up. The owner thought we were so good that he invited us back to play this summer, and we also booked a show in Buffalo and another in Cincinnati, so we lined them all up together and called it the Three Holes Tour (get it?).

Anyway, at the end of the year we had to write a paper on Hemingway, and so I told Mr. Hartley what’s what. I said that the book was stupid, and that Hemingway was a pussy who was too afraid to say anything, even when he blew his brains out. We had to cite other works, so I said that the book was as lame as his other one, The Old Man in the Sea, which we had to read the year before in Mrs. Donnelly’s class. I also said that Henry Rollins was much better than Ernest Hemingway, and we should read him instead, because he knew the world was shit, too, but he had the balls to say it.

I got an F, which meant that I failed the class and had to go to summer school, which meant I couldn’t go on the Three Holes Tour. If it were up to me I would’ve just quit school and gone on the tour, because the band was what I’m going to do for a living, anyway, but my mom said I had to stay in school until I was at least 18, which didn’t happen until August. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the band replaced me. They said it wasn’t fair to cancel the tour just because I was stuck in summer school, so they got this kid from the skate park, Stinkfinger Steve, to replace me. Me! The one who booked the shows in the first place! The one who wrote ‘Fuck George Bush’!

So I had to wake up early every morning and sit in a hot classroom that smelled like disinfectant while everyone else got drunk at the skate park and my band went on tour without me. All the English teachers must have had enough sense to go on vacation, because the class was taught by one of the gym teachers, Mr. Jensen. He favored the jocks, and was always showing off his college championship ring, even though he was only a punter. He called me ‘Johnny Rotten’ all the  time, but it wasn’t in a complimentary way.

‘How do you get through metal detectors at the airport, Rotten?’ he’d ask with a smirk and all of the jocks would laugh.

One night I got a call from Tom, and he said that someone from Morbid Records was at the Buffalo show, and offered to print a seven inch for us. But not for us. For them and Stinkfinger Steve.  He said that they’d been writing some songs while they were on the road, and were thinking of changing the band’s name to Satan’s Foreskin. I could hear a bunch of people in the background yelling and laughing. They sounded drunk. I just hung up the phone. If Ernest Hemingway’s band ditched him, he’d probably just sit in a cafe and talk about wine.

I went to the skate park. Roland was there, drinking tall cans of Steel Reserve under the ring of the spotlight. He was skinny and weird looking and only had seven fingers, ’cause his mom drank a bunch when she was pregnant. He had lots of squiggly homemade Nazi tattoos and could always score beer or pot or coke. I told him about the band, and about summer school, and he took me back to his mom’s place, which was above the bar that she worked at. It smelled like cat poop and garbage and everything was covered in cigarette ash. He gave me a tall can and pinched some coke from his mom’s room and said it would make me feel better.

It did, for awhile, but then I started to get panicky and my insides pulsed like a Joy Division bass line. I couldn’t stop smoking cigarettes, even though they were making me nauseous, and Roland wouldn’t stop talking about how much he hated Jews and blacks. The rabbit ears on his TV were wrapped in foil, and the horror movie we were watching came in fuzzy. I drank one more beer and went home.

The front door was locked, and my mom was out at the bar, so I had to crawl in through the kitchen window. I took my songwriting notebook and ripped it to shreds and threw away all of the tapes we’d recorded and hurled my bass out the window. Then I stole my mom’s wine and took all of the pills in the bathroom. Probably about seventy or eighty of them.

I woke up in the hospital. They made me drink black sludge and I threw up for a few hours, and once I was feeling better they moved me to another wing on a different floor, where the crazy people are. I’ve been here two weeks now. Doctors ask me questions all day, but I really don’t want to talk about the band, because if I talk about it, I think about it, and nothing hurts more than having to think about it here, where bug eyed crazies shuffle around and drool all over their green gowns. So I just shrug and say that the world is shit.

Fuck Ernest Hemingway.

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Looking For Love In The Hall Of Mirrors

11 Oct

I don’t like her as much on Friday nights. She dresses fancier, and puts on too much makeup, and laughs too hard at things I know she doesn’t think are funny. Her hair is puffier and her voice is tuned up an octave, as if she were reading the news or selling something on a shopping network. She dances to songs I know she thinks are terrible, slinking her body around to imply a sexuality I know she doesn’t possess, walking a constant plank in shoes I know she’s not comfortable in. She’s nice to people I know she doesn’t like, and ignores people that I know she likes, and performs for an audience that I know she abhors.

I like her more on nights like last Monday. We sat in the corner booth at Mac’s, the half dozen other patrons lined up at the bar, necks craned, hypnotized by the game. Her hair was pulled back into a simple ponytail, no doubt tied shortly before leaving to meet me with the absent minded swiftness all women had, a simple act that always seemed to catch my eye, their fingers working like a guitarist during a solo. She wore a gray hooded sweatshirt, the sleeves bunched up at her elbows, and apologized in the event that she smelled (she hadn’t showered after the gym).

We filled glasses from a scuffed plastic pitcher of Natural Light and she played Billy Joel on the jukebox. The cracks that had begun to spread prematurely under her eyes weren’t caulked with makeup, and her lashes were like pencil lines, void of the goop that made them look like spider legs. She made self-deprecating jokes, but not the ones she makes on Fridays, the put-on kind that made her sound cool in a backhanded way, and somewhere during her third beer she started talking about exes, but not in the weary, jaded way she does on Fridays. Her stories and recollections informed a little on how the pigtailed third grader with braces had come to be in front of me, no less bewildered and afraid. On Fridays she acts as if she were born into the world as a 24-year old seen-it-all sexpot beyond the silliness of love, gin and tonic in hand.

When I went to the bathroom she had written me a note on my drink napkin, capping it off with a crude cartoon heart, an act that her Friday counterpart would react to with an eye roll and a fabricated gag, a finger pointed in her mouth.

“OK,” she had said towards the tail end of our second pitcher, clasping my wrist, trying for the second time to recompose herself from the type of laughter that induces voluntary face twitches. “You can’t tell anyone…so growing up, Melanie’s dad had this camcorder, one of those, like, heavy, clunky ones. And we used to decorate her basement with all of these gold streamers and strip lighting we’d found, and then we’d record ourselves lip syncing to ABBA songs.”

“That’s awesome!”

“No, it’s not,” she said, her voice muffled by the cotton sleeve she’d buried her face in. She sat there motionless for a moment before breaking back out into fits of laughter. When she raised her head she was sniffling and had to wipe her eyes with her sleeves. “We couldn’t sing, and we’d put on her mom’s makeup … we bought one of those, like, rhinestone applicator things and just covered a bunch of t-shirts. It was an unfinished basement … there was choreography … I need to go home and burn those tapes.” She laughed again, but this time more in control, putting a hand to her chin and shaking her head. It looked as if she was figuring something out about herself.

On our way back to her place, we locked arms, skipping and high kicking in near-unison down the street, oblivious to passersby as we belted out Scandinavian pop songs with all we could muster.

“WATERLOO! COULDN’T ESCAPE IF I WANTED TO! WATERLOO!”

Lying in bed that night, the beer-soaked breeze from her nostrils rustling my chest hair, I felt like I knew her, and we slipped our fingers together, and when I kissed her forehead it didn’t taste like makeup. On Fridays, I find myself licking my lips trying to get the chalky taste out of my mouth, and I’m not so sure.

On Fridays, amongst the crowd, she swats my hand away when I try to hold hers.

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In The Air There’s After Shave Lotion

15 Apr

You sent your kid here to get an education, and, boy, are they ever getting one. Your daughters are learning about laxative cycles, how to time them right so the body doesn’t become immune to them, and to drink lots of water with their meal – it fills the stomach up faster, makes the food easier to get up and not taste so much like bile. Your sons are learning just how much grain alcohol to put in the punch to get the girls incapacitated but keep them from the emergency room, what to say in order to linger after carrying her mumbling, lifeless bodies into her room, how much is costs t0 have Planned Parenthood tidy up the aftermath.

Many will walk out with an uncredited minor in pharmacology. If your family physician hasn’t already slapped them with a prescription back in middle school at the first site of restlessness, they’re learning about Addies. First as a study aid, then as a party aid. After awhile, they’re learning to empty the RX capsules and crush the little wax pellets to get around the time release. Dextroamphetamine, amphetamine, hydrocodone, oxycodone, benzodiazepine – they’ll know the going street rates and how much you can drink on them before blacking out by the time they’re sophomores.

They learn quickly which bars serve unders, which sorority is the easiest, which fraternities have been slipping GHB into drinks, who’s got the best coke. They figure out a few tricks – washing the X’s off their hands, carrying a flask, memorizing the astrological signs on their fake I.D.’s, how to spot herpes, what to say to the doctors to get bumped up to fifteen milligrams, which gas station caffeine pill gets you through when the script runs out early. When funds begins to dwindle near the end of the semester, they’ll learn to fleece their books for alcohol money, like junkies at a scrapyard. And like junkies, they learn every which way to make it hit a little harder – beer bongs and gravity bongs and keys carved into beer cans. The odds are staggeringly high they will learn all too well about the interest rates not mentioned by the loan sharks offering pizza and t-shirts, or about what withdrawl feels like, or the pullout method as a form of birth control, or the habits of the crab louse, or which HPV types cause warts, or that no doesn’t always mean no.

Your daughters will be taught that they were asking for it – what with the short skirt and the drinking. Your sons will be reassured of the same, told that bitches do this sort of thing all the time, make up lies to cover up their indiscretions, offered up a steady stream of alibis to refute the girl’s story. They’ll all become more comfortable with its inevitability, slowly but surely, until it reaches various degrees of acceptance. There are rules here, after all — if she doesn’t have the capacity to slur a protestation loudly or forcefully enough, then it wasn’t rape rape.

Thursdays kick off the weekend in this town, but Friday still holds it’s traditional place as the steam whistle to signal freedom and abandon, where the real learning takes place. The bustle begins a little after dinner — trips to the liquor store, across the state line to pick up kegs and moonshine, to the apartments of grass dealers slinging Kermit green chronic for fifty an eighth (seventy-five to unwitting freshmen), to dorm pharmacies to get a slice of Adderall re-ups and dentist office Vicodin. They’ll return home to shower and get ready, everyone chatting about frat parties, house parties, their buddy’s bands playing, while they have a few drinks and put together song mixes for the pregame, where they will get themselves drunk and stoned enough to go out and get drunk and stoned.

By the time the carnival spills out into the streets and up the hill to the bars, most of them have drank away the better part of their common sense, what remains easily talked out of by slurring sycophants. Your credit card pays for their shots and five-liquor concoctions, served in plastic, as none of them appear to have learned how to handle glassware. They have learned how to play the game, live within the tribe, and they do it well. Your daughters know that your sons want vacant, seductive promiscuity, and they deliver, their Friday night banter more hollow than a porno, their bodies toned and tanned and on display. They need but sixty seconds of flirtation to get your sons to put it on your tab. Your sons see this willingness to appease, and the game is played, liquoring them up on your dime, every word not a line of communication, but an angle or a pitch, just waiting for a chance to strike. Sons use daughters, daughters use sons. Everyone has an ulterior motive out here, and everybody knows it.

Come closing time, the main drag of red brick is littered with trash and vomit and broken bottles as police lights flicker everywhere, tending to bloodied fight victims, freshmen passed out in the bushes, acts of mindless vandalism. Glassy-eyed drunks, separated from their pack, rendered incapable of rational thought by Jagermeister, lurch through the dark alleyways like vacant zombies, driven only by a search for food, alcohol, sex and sleeping arrangements. Girls sit slumped against trees in sundresses, holding their shoes, weeping aloud with no regard to the public as their carefully applied make-up streams down their face. Couples engage in white-hot screaming arguments that ring out across blocks. It’s as noisy and messy and drug-fueled as any forgotten ghetto. And you pay five figures a year to send them here.

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It’s Time I Had Some Time Alone

12 Feb

‘I don’t think I believe in any of this anymore’ I say, looking out the window, as we pass a cluster of three fast food restaurants, an oil change place, a check cashing center, a grocery store and a Wal-Mart.

‘Don’t believe in what?’ she asks, shifting into second.

‘Any of it. I don’t want to be a part of our society anymore. I’d rather go insane living outside of it than go insane living in it…look at them…they all look so miserable.’

‘Maybe you’re just miserable. You sound like a teenager.’

‘Good…that’s about when it started going downhill, anyway. I didn’t want to be a so-called ‘responsible member of society’ then and I sure as hell don’t want to now.’

‘So what do you want?’

This empire to meet it’s fate and collapse on itself, weighed down by it’s decadence and false idols, like the Egyptians and Romans before us. To go backwards, so far back that we’re operating under a barter system and waiting weeks and months to hear back from drifting lovers, so far devolved and detached that our society actually fosters the discovery of the self, if that’s possible. To run off into the woods before their jaws get any more of my soul’s marrow. Everyone to strip naked in the streets and fuck indiscriminately like the dogs that we are. To fall in love every single day with someone new who will eventually fade into oblivion, a myth passed down from lie to lie, selected pieces of their fabled soul swirling with my own for the rest of whatever existence I envision next. Something enduring.

‘A slice and a beer sounds good right about now.’

‘This place hasn’t changed since high school,’ she says, shaking cheese onto her sweating golden pizza. The slick tablecloths are checkered red-and-white. The same short-haired Italian woman wearing an apron looks on from behind the counter, smiling whenever our eyes meet. ‘So you never answered my question.’

‘What’s that?’

‘What do you want to do…in life?’

‘I told you…living the dream as we speak.’ I hoist up my limping slice and flash a smile.

‘Be serious for just one second.’

‘I don’t know…does it really matter?’

‘Listen to yourself.’

‘Seriously…what happens when your tits start to sag? What if the Fed went broke tomorrow and money became nothing but kindling and toilet paper? Who would you be and what would you want then?’

‘That’s a cop out.’

‘So is letting the world make a whore out of me’ I say, tipping back the last foamy remnants, twirling the empty and looking at her through it with one eye, her face warped and green through its lens.

I want to kick back my chair and run. Run from everything — her, the old Italian woman, the banks, the cops, the phone lines, the houses, the cars, the shopping plazas, the corporations, the mom-and pop shops, the debts, the credits, the network news, the clothes, the make-up, the perfume, the bad acting, the good acting, the notions of romance and lust, the cartoon hearts, the aspirations to be sitcom characters, the adjective ‘hot’, the office parks, the penthouses, the crack dens, the cannibalism, the greed, the envy, the hatred, the whole fucking charade. I’ll take my chances out in the wild, thank you very much. At least out there they flash their teeth and growl before they jump for the throat. Just run, man, run.

Instead, I slide my only wrinkled dollar into the jukebox and play Katrina & The Waves, like I used to back in high school, and coax her into dancing about the empty place, gyrating and and leaping around as if we felt like Katrina sang, as if the Italian woman weren’t rolling her eyes, as if we were in love, as if nothing else mattered but right here, in this very moment. As if everything we knew about the world could end right now, and it would be alright.

As the manic song tails off, she draws herself so close that I can taste her breath, butting her forehead to mine.

‘Don’t let them do this to you.’

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