Breakin' the Law

A. The following shall be unlawful:

i. To conceal, carry or use an unregistered instrument of extreme rocking power for the purpose of harassment, humiliation, intimidation, alteration either physical (i.e. transmutation) or mental (i.e. persuasion), of persons square or otherwise.
ii. Any and all rebellion and/or awesomeness that could upset the public decency or otherwise be detrimental to the faint of heart or conformist of action & mindset.
iii. To use in combination leather jackets, electric guitars, & excessive make-up in a non-stage setting.
iv. The commandeering and/or reclamation of one’s own musical recording from a place of business without proper transaction.

-VA State Code 1984, 32.5-48.

I mean, I understand where you guys are coming from, about the obligation. Believe me, I fully understand about the obligation. But that’s just it: we didn’t used to care about that kind of thing. Not at all, not at all.

Do you still care about the makeup and the wigs and the angry faces and the leather jackets? Do you? Do you ever wonder what it might feel like wearing white? Or, or dropping the whole “Pilgrim thing” altogether? Okay, bad joke. I’m sorry. It’s just a weird time.

My point is, we used to really relish the whole experience. And I don’t anymore, and I don’t think you do either.

It’s always the same entrance. Dave, you approach cattycorner to Jeff and I while Jeff drops me off and I jump out of the car. No, I don’t think switching off will help. We’re beyond that now. We come in, we do the point, I with my finger and you with your guitars, all phallic imagery of course, big deal, and the teller looks shocked.

He’s faking it. There, I said it.

Because our grimaces used to be expressions of pure adolescent anxiety and rage, our swaggers intimidating, our forms towering. What do we give off now? Weariness and confusion. Oh, I’ll have to pick up the laundry later. I need to get my prescription refilled. People can tell, I’m sure.
Those tellers don’t care about what we do there. They’ve been drilled about it and I honestly think they look forward to it. They all do. They get to keep their jobs. It’s not anyone’s fault if the bank get robbed, if Wachovia or Bank of America loses somebody’s money. They’re doing everything they’re supposed to do, and they learn a thing or two in the process. Nobody gets hurt, nor should they. Maybe some businessman gets his glasses broken. That’s not enough for me, but I’m also not willing to go any farther. Well I don’t know what the solution is, but just hear me out, okay?

So Jeff and Dave, you’re howling and wailing and maybe even arpeggiating, doing slides and utilizing the whammy bar and really just letting everyone have it. Tim’s drums are all set up, he’s thrashing.

And I’m yelling—melodically, of course—at everyone’s who’s down on the ground. I’ve always done that, and I feel bad about it every time. I don’t have anything against those people. They writhe and squirm and put their hands over their ears—I think they’re the only ones who aren’t having fun. Do you remember the woman who sued us for damages to her ear canal? The only legal action that’s ever been brought against us. My worst fear as far as these people are concerned is that I’m not even threatening to them anymore. That they can see how exhausted I really am, and how ambivalent.

And maybe that’s what really upsets me. That this routine we’ve worked out now involves the very people we were supposed to be rebelling against. I mean this guy has grown up on whatever of our recordings he could get his hands on, right, he’s heard all the stories, maybe even gone to police academy just for this chance to see us one day. He knows we tour America all the time. Maybe the bank manager one night took him to the vault, got the record out and played it on the gold record player and they drank from a bottle of bourbon, broke into an arrhythmic, ecstatic dance briefly then had a semi-deep conversation about, I dunno, women or something, and that was the best night of both of their lives. He could be a huge fan. You ever think of that?

And finally we get to the safe and there isn’t even a spark, let alone an explosion, when it opens. You simply draw your instruments towards you, Jeff, Dave, strum a barred G major, maybe do a hammer-on, but purely for show, and the thing opens. Well I know that’s how it works. I can’t stop thinking about how it works. Because I literally don’t do anything else. Maybe you’re content with that but I’m not.

The song is always about what we do. Robbin’ a bank, robbin’ a bank, y’know. Takin’ that gold, takin’ that gold. You ever think about writing a song about something else? Love, or, I dunno, having another thing coming?

No, I’m not quitting. What would I do if I quit? I didn’t finish university, I have almost no job experience. I’d end up in some ice cream store or something.

I open the bars with my hands, roar, and like clockwork the cop ceases to be angry and looks like he’s filled with admiration. I look down and, oh, there’s a gold record with our name and track listings on it. A record of songs about using songs about breaking into a bank to break into a bank and steal that record that has those songs on it. I thrust the framed gold disc out against everyone, and you guys rock some more and we make our escape—as always, no one seems to have been alerted to the robbery, nor will any cops be waiting at the next logical bank for us to appear—and the security guard on duty has now been blessed with a flat, no-string guitar straight from the source of our collective industrial angst, which of course comes through the security camera, through the screen he was watching which is now playing those silly neon-filtered polarized videos of us performing, and he’s puffing his lips out and chugging along like a teenager, pretending to play.

But what does he do after that? Make a record? I don’t think so. He still can’t play. He sees our poses, but it’s not like we’ve given him music lessons or something. No, he just keeps listening to some pirated album of ours, maybe it’s even someone else’s but mislabeled, and he keeps going in to work every day, having his coffee, sleeping anyway, anticipating our next convenient appearance. And the president of the bank still gets an unbelievable bonus every year, and we make a new record and that record goes back into the vaults and we have to go back overseas, drive around, and get every record of ours in the most towering, bombastic manner possible, give some out to some people, over and over until we die. What’s the point? What do we do this for, if it’s not even fun?

I don’t even care about the records anymore. Is it selfish of me that I don’t care if I or anyone else hears another of our songs ever again? Another power chord again, for that matter, or snare hit? Do we really need all these gold records? I have one, I gave one to my mum, what else? We certainly don’t have to hit every bank in the United States for one, for Chrissake. At least agree with me there. Anyone?

“Good afternoon, would you like to try one of our specials today, they’re up on the board: The Chunksplivo has banana nut fudge—”
“Uh, no, heh-heh, okay, lemme get—”
“—raspberries and cream, almonds…”
“Lemme get a sundae with gummy bears, extra fudge.”
“Of course, sir. Thank you.”
“And make it quick, alright? Last time it was all runny and I couldn’t even eat it. I remember it was you back there because you kept running around shaking your fist and grimacing at all of the equipment.”
“Yes, sir, I remember that. Let me just put in the order…” I reach down underneath the countertop and pick up Dave’s guitar. My hands form an E major and I strum it with such force as to knock the customer across the room, through the window, his cargo-pants-and-t-shirt-clad-pear-shaped body shattering the glass and cocooning itself in a huge sign that reads “Come in and Beat the Heat,” and blood soaks through the lime green construction paper that holds him there for just a moment, then snaps off and drops him onto the sidewalk, and perhaps he feels for a moment some perfect sensation of peace, even enlightenment, as he succumbs, some glorious simultaneous warming and cooling in the back of his corpus callosum, filling him with the absolute pure knowledge that everything is going to be alright, and maybe he even feels this sensation for eternity; but more likely he spends the rest of existence trapped in a car driving in an eternal rush hour where he has to pee but can’t and his foot’s asleep and he’s stuck on the phone with someone who’s arguing a point that he the customer knows to be untrue, but he can’t prove it, and he has this funny taste in his mouth.

Winter 2009

Legend Entertainment Presents: June Hammerz Does Reno

June Hammerz was thirteen when her Memmy told her, girl, (back then she was just li’l Jinny Hammersteen, [Jewish white trash, I know]): Learn to flail your bones, and learn to jerk your guts, and keep your integument unclogged from chicken fat and Italian food and worry.

Jinny had to drop out of school on account of her kid sister Janet developed a brain-wasting disorder where she needed a massive plastic and metal system of tubes arranged inside a box like a large cheap teevee box constructed around her head, impossibly big for her malnourished Achondroplastic frame, which when it really got to hummin’ would drown out the sound of the teacher in the classroom and any other student who wanted to contribute, entirely defeating any chance of classroom discussion, not to mention the gargantuan Bakelite structure that constituted her upper third blocked out the view of anyone sitting behind her. So then by then Jinny was sixteen, consensual in the exurbs of Reno (where the Hammersteens resided,) and her nutritional deprivation and engorged breasts and clitoris (arguably more fortunate side effects of the same condition [Talcott’s Encephalitis I think it was called] that her sis suffered from growing up near a Kepone plant) made her eligible for employment at Legend, the biggest brothel with the most shareholders in Reno and its surrounding area. She submitted a resume, (all for the sake of her sister, y’understand,) and at her interview, so I’m told, tied into a bow with her tongue not just a cherry stem, but also an entire pineapple, a whole Toy Poodle, and a human penis.

She said I can suck a dick, and I can use a rammer, I can rim and swallow, too. I’ll do anyone you hire me to (I also have Excel spreadsheet experience and a little Dreamweaver, ‘as right.)

Needless to say she got the job, and everything went just fine for the newly-christened June Hammerz and her grotesque half-machine kin for several decades. Janet went to Harvard, and June went on to star in a number of Legend’s independently-produced pictures: Runnin’ Train; Nailed!; Jack Hoff 8: Jack Hoff in the City; and Hammerz, Swinger (she was the most proud of that last one.) She spent all of her money that didn’t go to Janet’s increasingly efficient artificial brains on surgically augmenting her own already nonorganically-enhanced assets.

Well one day Boss Lady had some bad news for June: that the June Hammerz sex doll that’d been selling so well, modeled in every way after June down to the insides, recordings of her own trademark moan and shouts of encouragement, and the capacity to secrete a lotion with the exact same consistency and rate of outpour as June’s own juices, was to replace June herself at the Legend ranch. June recalled at that moment, (for the first time in years), an irrational fear (irrational at the time, y’understand) she’d had of same thing happening to her as a child, that her favorite doll Choo-Choo would one day be her, in her place, her bed, that her mommy would come home one day from shoplifting and feed Choo-Choo the tongues meant for June. June protested:

I can work some beads, and I can hurl a snowball six foot, I can squirt and finger, too. I can go through the motions of lesbianism with Oscarworthy persuasion! ‘Sides, I’m supportin’ my sister, who’s now getting her PhD in nanobiology at NYU.

But Boss Lady was firm, and they decided to settle the matter in a fuck-off between June and her unliving counterpart. The matter would be broadcast on Pay-Per-View across the country, and the winning sex machine would stay in the same position at Legend.

June was surprised to see the human care the doll afforded the customers: while June’s gestures of consolation to an unexpectedly sobbing client seemed feigned, the doll’s were genuine. An overweight customer would complain, in the middle of a long session, he was hungry, and the doll had had the foresight to acquire a McDonald’s bag before he’d arrive. Stood in line, ordered, and everything. Juney doll was pretty good at Wii Bowling, but also not unbeatable, whereas the real June was so catastrophically bad at the sport that it was only depressing to play with her. The doll’s favorite character on Entourage was Turtle, but June saw herself as an E, which is lame.

Aside from these emotional and mental elements, there was the obvious matter of physical exertion. June could fuck a lotta dudes for a long time consecutively, but when her chest began to heave in a way that suggested a coming heart attack more strongly than it did a normal ripping bodice, and her face was red like Elmo’s or your dad’s, not rouge, and a mix of sweat and cum pinched at her face like spirit gum, and her throat muscles started to erode so that her voice was too hoarse to audibly participate like she used to and she’d almost at one point accidentally loogeyed right in a customer’s face, I swear it, her doll self could simply be hosed off and would continue to play the same tapes of June’s Best Moans. And while June would have to take a break to douche, her doll self had something like a spit valve in a saxophone that could just be opened and emptied any time. June was in trouble.

June’s Second Life avatar materialized the next morning on the banks of the Amargosa River, where the Hammersteens would decades ago bring a blanket and a basket of fried gizzards Sundays. The ripples in the water curled herky-jerky and arythmically now. June’s childhood friend Paul Antwerp stood six feet away, curly-haired and bunchily-attired even in virtual reality.

Paul put to her: in the future when our sex drives are chemically subdued and we only have to come to impregnate, and even then most people will grow their babies in tubes with combinations of genes, will paying for sex be more legal or less legal, does June think?

“I can’t do it,” June said. “I can’t get up out of bed today to go to work.”

“Luckily, June, you don’t have to.”

And so June decided she would go down going down, and die with these words on her lips:

I can jack a John, and I can fluff and heave, and I’ve had two ribs removed. I’ll do anyone you hire me to.

It was not woman nor machine that decided the end of the contest, but time: the contest had been held in the same beds in the same room throughout, (which I s’pose is only fair,) and the floor collapsed under June’s 1,869th customer, and doll-June’s 1,868th, on account of the force of their doing it. Everyone in the room, johns, bystanders, camera-operators, a family act waiting to audition, fell through and were killed by breakin’ their necks, third degree burns from when Juney-doll exploded, and flyin’ doll parts and camera parts and the blood and the lube and the gears, a world of gaudy plastic smelly fun imploding. They say June and #1,869 were still in the act of coitus when a load-bearin’ wall fell on them and crushed their bones.

And the rubble that remains of Legend ranch was tied up in lawsuits for years and years to come, involving the Hammersteens (Janet was six months into law school, so she needed the money, even after her bets on her sister had paid off,) the motion picture company, an insurance agency, and the architect built the place. And now when someone walks by that spot out in Reno, they’ll say:

Yonder lies some dead prostitutes, I guess, Lord, Lord.

Spring 2010

Love Story

The day I proposed to her was the day after the day I realized I can’t keep continuing to claim, “Oh I don’t want a relationship right now.” It was the day I realized girls only hook up randomly with guys of a certain height. I’d love to have tons of anonymous sex, but I’ve never had any anonymous sex because if you’re my height or shorter, or maybe even like a few inches taller than me, girls have to be in love with you before they sleep with you. Somewhere in Nevada there’s an ancient statue of unknown origin, like Easter Island, except it looks more like a Bob’s Big Boy-type character I think, a potbellied, smiling lad, extending his arm at about 6’2”, and underneath the arm it says in every human language that has ever existed or ever will exist, “You Must Be This Tall to be a Sexually Promiscuous Man.”

I wish I had known about that statue before I got these three tattoos.

Not to say I don’t love her. I do, but that’s not really that important. I also love strawberry-rhubarb pie and Mortal Kombat and the band Journey and my borderline-autistic friend Matthew Elmer who may or may not have recently tried to burn my and Chloe’s apartment down after an argument over preferred cereal brands.

The important thing is I need her to make informed decisions about my life, and to show me how to do basic things.

Here’s why-- let me put it this way: parents, if right now, you’re thinking about raising your kids as like a reaction to the hard times you yourself have had, like because you had to learn to fend for yourself, you want your kids to never have to worry about anything?

Please don’t do it that way.

That’s how my parents did it and it’s absolutely not worth it for kids like me, just because of the number of times your kid will end up embarrassing himself or herself at 7-11 having a credit card and actually not knowing how it works, like handing the card to the man behind the counter, and he’ll point to the credit card machine your kid is supposed to swipe the cards through, and your kid’ll be like, “No, you don’t understand, I want to pay for something with my credit card, I’m not interested in whatever that little screen with the shallow vertical little trench on the side there is,” and the man behind the counter will be like, “Swipe it through, please,” and your kid will be like, “No, you idiot, I’m trying to pay for this bag of Extreme Sour Gummies and these cigars with a credit card, so please take the card and do whatever it is you do with the card to make the money thing happen.”

Or the time where your little darling will have to ask his or her college roommate, as I have had to, not only how to boil water on the stove, but how to tell when the water is boiling.

And don’t even get me started on the food poisoning. You can’t convince me that a destitute child in Africa or West Virginia would envy the amount of food poisoning I’ve accidentally induced on myself and guests of my apartment before I moved in with her.

Parents basically have to make a choice on the day their kid is born: do they want to teach their kid about money and food and clothes, or do they want their kid to end up in the hospital getting his stomach pumped at 23 because he tried to make a bagel.

So that’s why I wanted to marry her, that and the whole sex / statue thing.

Summer 2011

Elegy for Li'l Chicken Wing

Amanda says, well, she got a large cup of soda thrown at her last night. She amends this claim: someone threw a large cup of soda, brown, either Pepsi or Diet Pepsi or Dr. Pepper or Diet Dr. Pepper, she didn’t like smell her clothes when she got home, she just changed them, someone threw it and it landed on her and on the desk and on the phone. She was getting ready to leave the chain movie theater she and five men manage (“Bowtie Cinemas: Movie-Going the Way It Used to Be, Only Better” in Richmond, VA) and she suddenly heard someone very angry behind her screaming, “You just called the wrong man’s girlfriend a bitch!” She turned around and saw a livid man.
Amanda and I are on my couch and outside the summer sky is pregnant and dark for 8 pm, looming. What had happened, apparently, was, this woman, real ghetto type, cut in the ticket line in front of these two white guys, very affluent-looking, like lawyers or golfers. Amanda referred to them as “golfers” the rest of the story. Apparently the golfers called the ghetto woman a “rude bitch” when she cut in line in front of them while her man was getting popcorn. Amanda didn’t specify if the man was like a big Michael Clark Duncan type, like I immediately pictured when Amanda quoted, “You just called the wrong man’s girlfriend a bitch!” or if he was what you might picture when you heard her later describe them as a “ghetto couple,” i.e. maybe skinny, not tall, cornrows with perhaps beads or some shit, oversized polo that has the effect of actually making him look smaller but you assume he’s wearing it to look bigger, barely visible tattoos commemorating nicknames of the deceased: R.I.P. Li’l Chicken Wing. Someone who looks like this, I imagine, would also yell his line at a higher, less effectively intimidating pitch. By the time Amanda said “ghetto couple” and I had two distinctly different images in my mind, one of a little guy and one of a big guy, she had reached an emotional point in the story and her face was contorted in a way I’d only seen clearly like one other time in months of dating her, her normally round face almost becoming rectangular, her mouth contorted trapezoidal, and her breathing was shorter and her talking faster, so I couldn’t interrupt and ask what the man looked like, except how emotional she got made me think more Michael Clark Duncan.

The woman cut in line, the golfers called the woman a bitch, the woman’s man informed the two fellows they had made a mistake. The man threw I think a few concessions to make his point, but one was a cup and it landed on Amanda, spraying her with soda, and none of the security cameras’ angles could adequately determine if the man intentionally threw the cup at her, or only in her general direction without aiming, and she couldn’t tell, either. At this point Amanda called 9-1-1, while at the same time the golfers were making her mad by telling her to call 9-1-1. They, like, started saying it just after she started to dial. She became convinced, in her panic, that the phone had just become broken from its contact with so much sticky liquid. She admitted maybe subconsciously she was just trying to find an excuse to leave the area, because it later turned out the phone worked fine. She called 9-1-1 in the back office and they asked her to describe everybody involved. When she came back out the golfers complained they felt they were being ignored. They accused her of not doing her job. They said, “You’re not the one with soda all over you,” which was obviously not true. She stormed out. She expressed to me regret over her unprofessionalism but also felt the corporation was responsible to some degree for not preparing her for this kind of violence. She also expressed anger towards the golfers, who presumably because of their position in life went around calling people bitches all the time without consequence. The golfers had tried to portray themselves as victims because they were being yelled at and having concessions thrown near them, but they were clearly themselves rude, and her storming out had only further enabled them in their mindset.

As a white person I feel about equidistant from what I imagine the culture from which the golfers come as the culture I imagine the ghetto couple to come from, but I’ve known a lot of white people who have implied to me they didn’t use racial slurs in public for fear of getting stabbed. As in, “Don’t say that in this neighborhood—you’ll get stabbed!” As opposed to, “Don’t say that; it would hurt the feelings of a black person if he or she overheard you, and how would you feel if someone called you etc. etc.” It’s very common. Of course if you’re with a friend it’s better to warn him or her in a hyperbolic way that places the blame on some exterior unseen attacker so as to make you appear nonjudgmental, but how hard is it to say, “Dude, that’s fucked up?” rather than express the concern that because black people are stabbers, they will stab your friend if he offends them? So then obviously a guy flipping out like the ghetto man did, and throwing a cup, exacerbates that mentality, but maybe he doesn’t know about this pervasive fear of stabbing, or its status among so many white people as privately oft-spoken reason to avoid public use of “n”-words, or maybe he just didn’t think about that kind of thing when two golf-dressing-ass crackers called his girl a demeaning name in public. “Movie-Going the Way It Used to Be, Only Better.”

In the middle of the night I find myself conscious, and find that Amanda is, too, and she says something, and I have to push my body up with my elbows to get my ear close to her mouth, and I say, “What?” and she says, “I told you a storm was brewing,” but the weird thing is it still hasn’t started to rain yet.

Summer 2011

Dam

Today I went on a bike ride of moderate length, which I’ve been doing. I do it to lose some weight, but I’m aware of how sort of ridiculous and self-indulgent it sounds for me to tell you I went on a bike ride today, a ride unprompted by anything but self-discipline and nice weather. Or more accurately, it would at least sound self-indulgent to me, if someone like me told me about just going for a good old ride on his bike today. But I have been riding my bike around and it turns out it’s really fun and you can see some pretty interesting things.

For example, the first interesting thing I saw on my ride today was a historical marker in the business district, which I stopped to read. The sign commemorated Fort Monroe, where captain Black Hawk of the Sauk had been transferred after being captured and imprisoned for his involvement in a conflict against U.S. soldiers in 1832, which particular group of soldiers happened to include both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. Apparently Andrew Jackson decreed part of his punishment would involve being forced to walk around in European clothes, for the purpose of humiliating Black Hawk.

I went over the Manchester bridge and saw the dam and the big factory with the words “SOUTHERN STATES” written huge across it in a way I can’t imagine how it was done, and the combination of the intimidatingly-adorned factory and the dam and the brown rapidly-forward-pushing river beneath presented the thought of Man and God working together in uneasy peace to be absolutely terrifying, the Fear of God and the Fear of Man combined.

Anyway, at the end of the bridge I saw a gravel path I’d never seen before, a hard downward right to the underneath-area of the bridge and beyond, and I decided to go down the path. At the start of it was a brown sign depicting a happy cartoon man about to plunge fork and knife into a trout, which trout had no plate underneath it and took up the cartoon man’s whole dinner table for some reason. The cartoon had a red circle and “/” through it--despite the cartoon man’s happiness at his endeavor, the sign warned “Do NOT Eat BIG CATFISH or EELS, or CARP caught here. PCB & Mercury Contamination!” PCB is a toxic organic compound once used in industrial coolants and insulating fluids, and in plasticizers for household items. Congress banned it in 1979.

The path ran up to the dam, and behind the hill connected to the dam was a brook, the babbling of which seemed unnatural, as if something was thrashing down there, but I couldn’t tell exactly what through my prescription sunglasses from the top of the dam. I walked my bike down the hill and left it on the ground before the point where the grass drops off and the ground gets soggy.

When I got to the brook some geese honked and a heron booked it. The thing thrashing was one of a group of fish of I don’t know what kind. It seemed a whole school of them, with some big catfish there, too, had gotten caught up in a little half-assed dam of rocks, which dam had either occurred naturally or been built by an intelligent animal or animals or a rather inept human, it was anyone’s guess. This was not a school but a traffic jam—every kind of fish in this brook felt the water must surely be better on the other side and that they had to get there. The smaller fish were throwing themselves across desperately and getting stuck between rocks where there wasn’t enough water, and the big catfish were just sort of swimming around, coolly but perhaps impatiently, with the other fish. I don’t know if this dam’s impediment to the various fish was new or if they’d been trying to get through for a long time, but some of them were really jammed up in these rocks, just flapping around, barely getting enough oxygen. A couple had died. I thought it was bold of them to be trying so hard to get to the other side—what did they need, in terms of survival, that the other side offered that the shady and, from my perspective in between, diminishing side from whence they came couldn’t offer? Why did they risk death at the hands of herons and non-sign-heeding humans (I’m thinking the trapped fish might have been carp) to get there? Had they no fear of humans, because the humans always heeded the signs? That is, were they so toxic as to be completely free? Was it that freedom that made them so suicidally bold, or just the force of the impulse to cross over?

It is not my experience that humans heed signs.

Recently I spoke with my sister about our parents’ generation’s idea of ecology, how interventional and stereotypically American it was—like it was our job to save all the animals, even to keep the birds of the air fed with birdseed from Southern States. The Marshall Plan version of ecology. I ignored having made those statements and started pulling on the trapped fish. I had to sort of pinch their wildly vacillating fins, then quickly toss them to one side or the other, indiscriminately, depending on what was easier in the infinitesimal moment of deciding where to throw. Most of them, when I touched them, freaked out and struggled more, and I had to really pinch down hard. Some of them, when they got back in the water, floated sideways for a second, as if stunned.

Once I had thrown all the fish either back into their school or across the rocks, I walked away. When I turned my head, the school’s collective push for movement across the rocks had increased fervently. There was no point. I got my bike and started walking it back up towards the man-made dam. A black family was there now walking around, and a father and son were fishing in the river, and a businessman was taking a walk on his lunch break.

I decided not to advise any of the people I saw to check out the crazy fish action down by the brook, much as I kind of wanted to.

Spring 2011

Horny Draculas #1

Thomas Gael Jones, conceived some time after the singer of same name’s post-“Unusual” success to two parents with, like everyone else, near-pervasive access to radio, music-related television, etc., as in what I’m trying to say is there was no excuse for them to name him that, pedaled furiously up the sidewalk next to Meadow St. on a tiny black bike with wide thick tires, past stalled traffic, wearing baggy jeans, a belt with a bottle opener on it, and a poorly-dried, therefore slightly musty black hoodie, the hood of which he wore over his head despite the dry weather. He had re-shaved his head about two weeks ago, and a substantial fuzz had grown back by now underneath that hood. His eyes were blue and his expression was perpetually toddlerish and pouty. He wore very big headphones, also black, with torn nylon covering that exposed styrofoam. The backpack he wore contained his laminated, lanyard-attached university ID card; a condom whose package has suffered enough friction in that backpack over time for its label to now be completely erased; several notebooks full of notes on economics, advertising theory, ideas for inventions, drawings of logos or of Stewie; a wallet containing six maxed credit cards and forty business cards he had taken to his boss to get made, which boss made them at Kinko’s; half of a grilled chicken sandwich from a sports bar he had gone to for lunch; pictures of bearded men drinking 40’s exuberantly, or of local churches; depictions of himself, made on the computer and printed out, wherein he gradually morphed into a bear or an Indian chief. His stance was like that of a male gorilla, fists clutching handlebars under silver knees. His sagging legs pumped furiously and caused his whole body to bob. In a few minutes he would be late to his interview with a very professional Floridian Celtic Ska band, who wore only the most expensive casual-wear. The interview was for the school internet radio station, www.ac-eadrgefh.team, or “The Lowdown,” of which he was general manager.
How he peddled with equine fury to the dream of the oblivion of contemporary FM radio, of being a Tom and a Dave and a Sam and a Pete and a Jim and a Steven, depending on what county you’re in, passively spinning late-‘70’s hits stitched together from the corpses of early-‘70’s hits, all the guitars crunchy and sparse and major-Penatonic, all the drums reverberating like an Autistic kid with an uncanny capacity for rhythmically banging a wooden toilet lid up and down, singers whining languidly about little girls and pretty mommas and gallow’s poles and trains and wise men and kings and the road.
Turn off all the lights in your little soul and go home. Only our dreams can shock us now.

Spring 2010

Horny Draculas #2

Dinner with Dr. Roman and his new intern and Olivia from accounting and with Dr. Roman’s living experiment, who wasted no time in telling us about his new job, where he worked from home and apparently made up to $73/hr doing entry-level data entry, which human science project accompanied a stupefyingly attractive young woman whose name I also did not catch, and also with a strangely suave and mysterious but inhumanly small brown wrinkly bald man, at a restaurant whose name was a portmanteau of “fusion” and “unusual.” The Dr. wore a big brown robe for some reason. The aforementioned babe wore an apparently thin, white lacey négligée and equally white boots, and it was clearly impossible for any part of that négligée to be touching the bottom of the seat with her when she sat down. She began twirling a nasal spray tube, small and blue and curved on top, between her fingertips. The tiny man posited: “Have you ever noticed how every high school in our American South has as its mascot a Rebel or a Confederate soldier of some kind? It is as though, because energy cannot be created or destroyed, the South must continue to fight itself, sometimes even on its own very same battlefields, not in grey cotton but gold and velvet nylon and lamé.” The Dr.’s bespectacled gaze did not leave the very attractive young woman twirling the little container. Dr. suddenly began to seethe and fume. “Is that my nasal spray?” I could smell his breath and know the effect of nasal-to-throat drip, like he had just eaten a wet dog as an appetizer, or more likely at this restaurant, wet dog meatballs on Pad Thai. She said nothing, but lifted her knees above the table, the top of her white boots just peeking out like twin degenerate dwarf dawns, and placed the container under the table. The aforementioned portmanteau was “UnFusual.” The special was tempura ‘n’ onion rings. The man who worked from home was talking to a waitress about the various minor setbacks of working from home. “I feel as though I am atrophying,” he said. “Dudes try to shock you by saying they long for oblivion, but of course there is a middle ground between awareness and oblivion, much more comfortable, that is clearly the better goal.” The negligeed woman’s apparent pawing at herself under the table with the other hand and her seemingly genuine initial grunt of pain let us know she was serious about what she was doing, although not why she was doing it, except that data-entry man is pretty much like Rick James at this point. Her skin was describable as “banana-like.” The intern got up and left, abandoning a full plate of malt liquor-sautéed caviar. The data-enterer’s date sucked a breath in quickly, bit her lip, and even tossed her head back. I suspect that night contributed a great deal to why I’m here and how I broke down, something to do with someone else’s sexual fantasy presenting itself in a poutine sushi restaurant and proving to be sad and gross in real life and also reminiscent of the train-running scene from Saturday Night Fever, and afterwards, I admit, collapsing and exploding back into a sexual fantasy again.

Spring 2011