Farewell TransmissionBy Yuu Ikeda
B, C, D,
B, C, D,
B, C, D,
B, C, D,
＿where is the start?
＿where is the next stage?
＿where is the end?
___
Yuu Ikeda (she/they) is a Japan based poet, writer. She writes poetry on her website. Her latest poetry chapbook “Phantasmal Flowers in The Eden Where Only I Know” was published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press. One of her big dreams is to write while traveling around the world. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram: @yuunnnn77
By Dylan Smith
Today I lit a candle in my apartment before I poured my coffee. This wavering flame takes me back, like way back up that spiraling path to my shack where there was no electricity or running water. Mountain birds lift into the mountain air in my head—hang high above Art’s barn, and shit into the blue mountain air in my head. I found this candlestick in the scrap pile at the dump. Alma loved it. A flowery brass ornamental-looking thing which lifts my daily flame up way above my desk, about midway up my window pane, and until this candle melts down and away and the sky alights again all yellow pink blue gray, my morning flame wavers like the sail of a boat by itself on the water. Everybody outside seems so alone. Above the flame I see cranes and the circles made by birds and the arches of bridges made of steel and massive yellow rock, and on top of most of those buildings across the river I see wooden towers that look like big beautiful barrels of whiskey. Or maybe beer. Art once told me the city’s water towers are all made of redwood trees and cedar—and the one thing nobody down there seems to wonder much about is what happens to all the bags of trash we drag out onto the street. I watch tug boats haul proper mountains of it north to God knows where, pushing whole landscapes of trash past my solitary flame as it wavers like a sail alone on the water. I bet Art would know where they take it. Art loved trash. Probably to some landfill out in New Jersey.
The spiritual path I shaped for myself upstate is that of the outlaw or the sailor, the path of the hippie cowboy saint. It is the poet’s path—no, it is the sober poet’s path, by which I mean to suggest that poems are dangerous and holy and rare. This is the kind of thing my half-brother Chris would probably scoff at. Poems being holy and dangerous—pssh—Chris would roll those explosive blue eyes and spit. But Art and I did a lot of dangerous work together. A lot of wobbly wooden ladders in bad weather. A lot of icy roads, downed wires—a lot of charred black trees felled drunk after wild summer fires.
And all of that felt safe compared to the traumatic childhood secrets I uncovered in my poems about Chris.
This night last year Alma taught me there was once an order to the blossom of flowers in spring. I told her flowers were still sort of new to me. Chris and I grew up in the desert. I never knew they bloomed in order.
“But not anymore,” Alma said. “Not with the warming earth. Now everything just flowers all at once.”
Alma had hiked up the muddy path to my shack with this basket full of shack warming gifts: a bouquet of bright spring flowers, a box of homemade candles, some food—but the main thing was she brought up this battery powered radio. Said she worried I’d become some sort of weirdo hermit way up there alone in her woods. This was toward the end of May, and Alma had been hard at work all day in her garden. I remember dried mud on the knees of her jeans, a hole in her big green shirt. Chris had only been gone a few weeks. Alma didn’t seem so alone.
I’d left my big book of etymologies open to the V’s on my desk. Had just looked up the the word veil, I remember—which comes from the Latin root vela, meaning candle in Spanish, but in Latin it means sail.
Alma leaned over the book for a while, then shifted some poems around.
“I wonder if revenge works,” Alma said.
I thought to myself, Haha. Uh-oh.
I stood beside her at my desk. Poems and drawings all over. Alma pointed to the word vengeance in the book. I could smell summer in her hair.
“It does,” I said. “I heard revenge works great.”
“Does it? Who told you. I’m talking about even in the long run.”
“Me too, look—my book says it means to set something free. I’ll bet you revenge works great in the long run.”
I turned the radio on to static.
Felt my heart beat.
Turned the dial, found a song.
Alma and I wrapped ourselves in blankets and went out to eat on my deck. Scooched our lawn chairs close. The food was soup kept hot in a blue thermos. This wonderful whiskey-voiced crooner croaked out a song about the wind—and after that, someone predicted another thunderstorm was coming. Days and days of rain. Alma looked out. Steam swirled up from her bowl. I felt doubtful about the storm. I told her Art’s radio had predicted it would come earlier that afternoon. We’d rushed around all day to beat it, and then it never came.
Slowly though, the mid-spring air shifted. You could feel it. A summer-warm wind sort of swirled down through the trees and sounded like a channel of water in the branches above my shack, which is when things weirdly deepened, and a darkness rose up through the black blue green of the neighboring mountains to the east of us.
Imagine the wind sort of wafting in through my shack, turning the pages of my book.
Beware. Betrayal. Haha. Bible and Berth and Beauty, and Chris.
I remember the guilt and fear I felt come alive with the changing light. Elbow to elbow with Alma on my deck. I’d recently lent Chris my Volvo—had helped him pack it full of clothes and books to be taken back down to the city. He was supposed to bring it right back up, but never did. I pictured Chris’s blue-eyed violence. Knew exactly what he’d do if he could see Alma and me, and as the trunks of all my favorite trees began to blacken, I thought about the things Art had told me at work that day, and about how all afternoon we had been in such a hurry to beat the rain.
The Glasshouse was this empty mansion at the top of the hill above my shack. Art’s main client owned it. Some billionaire who rarely if ever came up from the city. I remember tens of thousands of little yellow flowers blooming like bright candles on the roadside, and how all along that long gravel drive we’d leveled little hills and holes in the road, holes in the road formed by ice heaves. Red shovels. Red rakes. Art found a water bottle under one of the yellow bushes, he was always finding trash, and somehow the unopened bottle was half-empty.
“Half-full, Sunshine,” Art corrected me.
The bottle got him going on about permeability again. About how everything has it—like even plastic bottles—and once the ice heaves had been leveled and the bed of the truck was empty of gravel again, Art and I flew back down the mountain for some beers. It was rare to see Art in such a hurry. Outside the barn I looked up the hill to where Alma worked in her garden. Art filled the cooler with beers and I lifted the generator into the bed of his truck. The generator ran on gasoline, so I lifted two red five gallon containers up into the truck bed too. A hawk hung in high, hay-colored circles up high above the barn, then the thunderclouds rolled in.
I made a big whistle. Waved up to Alma on the hill.
Alma turned, laughed. Made a big wave back down to me.
Art said the plan was to replace the tractor’s rusted power steering piston. We’d abandoned the tractor below the Glasshouse all winter, in a dark hollow in the woods below the pond. A culvert had clogged but the tractor broke down mid-job. Art pulled his truck up onto the green grass growing beside the pond below the mansion. A handful of goldfinches lifted out from the flowers and reeds. A quick break in the clouds. Green water sparkled. Outside the truck Art opened one beer, then reached into the cooler for another—but I said no thanks. Surprised us both.
“Suit yourself, Sunshine.”
West of the pond was the orchard where Art and I had just pruned a bunch of trees. A dozen red empire apples rose and reached in three rows of three. I loved pruning apple trees. The way Art taught me to prune was, you think of the branches of the apple trees as pipes. “It’s all about directing the flow,” Art told me. He added an extra syllable to the word water. “Imagine your tree is a house. You design the flow of the plumbing in the house. It’s a series of decisions about the pipes. You direct the flow. The shape of the tree. It’s about designing the flow of your worter.”
My shack had no bathroom, no toilet or pipes or sink. I got my water from a nearby spring and broke into the Glasshouse every Saturday night to wash my dirty work clothes and to shower.
Thunder rolled above the mansion, and in a hurry I hauled the generator down the muddy hill through the woods. The tractor looked like a big green horse injured down there in the mud. I set the generator beside it. Hiked back up for the air compressor. Art had brought down the gasoline and some tools and when I got back, he’d put down some flattened cardboard boxes. He knelt there next to the rusted piston with his beer.
And soon our working movements would merge, the tasks at hand fluid and familiar and mechanic.
I used the generator to power the air compressor, and filled up the flat tires with air while Art unwrapped the new piston—I reattached and jumped the dead battery, while Art jacked the tractor up—and together on our backs we fought to remove the rusted piston, two wrenches wrapped around the part as we took turns torquing at it, and torquing, and torquing at it—but the rust had blurred and merged the line between the tractor arm and the part.
Thunderclouds darkened close and low, and a great big thunder clap rippled down the mountain.
Art opened the second beer, the third beer.
“Speaking of rust,” Art said. “I just read about this new type of battery.”
“What does battery have to do with rust?”
“To supplement with solar and wind. A rust battery. Like instead of lithium.”
“You’re saying rust, Art. Like the rust that ruined this piston. Like the rust that’s ruined your truck.”
“Right. Rust. Picture iron pellets. Now expose those pellets to oxygen. Rust could generate your energy. Your electrons. You reverse the rust back to iron pellets to eat the oxygen—and that’s what gives your battery its charge. Green energy stored by way of rust.”
“That makes very little sense to me.”
“Yeah. Well I knew this one guy who worked with lithium. A battery recycling factory in the city. You had to worry about your lead. The lead dust settled on your clothes. Settled in your hair. You take off your street clothes when you get into work. You put on your hazmat suit and you shower before lunch to get the lead dust off your skin. Off your hair. The factory gives a bonus if the lead in your blood stays at the regular levels. The goal is to keep the lead dust off your sandwich. It’s a liability. You’re in there for a test every six weeks. This guy I knew only got the bonus once. Fifteen hundred dollars. But of course you get fired eventually for having bad levels. You get lazy about it I guess. Like with anything.”
Art stood. Finished his beer. Hiked up to the truck for more.
Nothing but bird song now, the silence leveling and sudden.
Art hiked back down quick. Arms full. Knees wide and in a hurry.
“Because with lithium you can store your energy for five hours—or for six hours when a storm shuts down the grid. But the point is that your generation doesn’t believe in God anymore. Or in free will either. You have no faith. No belief in your power to change the course of things. Take the old hay farmers for instance. What you probably don’t understand is that decomposition is a chemical process. You can’t rush hay. Compost generates heat. So it’s all about the moisture content of your harvest. It’s about human timing and science and faith and worter. You can’t rush these things. Fear is stupid. You have to take everything that happens as it comes.”
“We’re not hay farmers though, Art. What are you trying to tell me.”
“That if you take your bales to the barn too early you don’t give it time to dry.”
“But we don’t do hay. You said nobody’s done hay in the barn for thirty years.”
“It takes six weeks. Your moisture content’s got to get below twenty percent. You can’t rush it. Because if the moisture content is bad your bales will decompose and smolder and soon your farm is up in flames again and the barn is burning because you didn’t have faith or slow down enough to just listen. Fear is useless and stupid. You have to have faith, Sunshine. Faith in anything. It’s all about discovery and achieving the balance. Because if somebody your age could just learn to harvest green energy from something as simple as rust. Your solar energy would store for five days—for six days. You’d have green energy stored off the grid for a week.”
And with our next effort with the wrenches, Art and I removed the rusted piston.
The new part installed easily as Art downed the fourth beer, the fifth beer. The diesel fuel I poured into the tank was blue, and then the tractor came alive. Blue black smoke whirled out from a vertical pipe, then cleared. Art mounted the tractor as if it were a healthy horse. I followed him down the mountain, listening to the radio in his rust tortured truck, and later that night in my shack Alma said:
“First it would be the crocus and the snowdrop. Forsythia. Hyacinths. Then the tulips, and then the magnolia trees would go blooming, and the irises—and then it would be the bleeding hearts.”
Inside my shack and out of the rain, Alma built a fire.
Last big storm of spring. Our radio predicted days and days of total rain.
“Looks like I’m stuck with you,” Alma said. “Shipwrecked up here in your cabin.”
I lit ten thousand tiny candles and man—I couldn’t believe my luck. Thunderclouds boomed bright blue black pink and I fiddled around with the radio some more. Found the classical station. Alma’s eyes burned like perfect fires. We stood side by side before the stove, our shadows swaying against the ancient wood. We laughed. I read her some Chris poems. We danced. Alma put out a bucket to collect the rain and we drank from it all sloppy and splish-splashy, our dirty clothes drenched wet. The rain had become a column of water against the mountainside, against my life, and it would go on and on like that all night.
Embers of the lightning struck black locust tree radiated white heat.
A kind of veil had been lifted, and I saw Alma in new crystal colors.
We laid down before the embers. Now there was no going back.
But I wasn’t afraid of anything.
Not the past, not the future. Not Chris.
I told Alma I believed in God.
Dylan Smith is looking for a job if anyone knows of any jobs in Brooklyn.
this land belonged to the
lenape, the Susquehannock,
the massawomeck — long
before you were born.
and they had names for water:
moi, oneega, o:ne:ka’. names for
mountain and for mud. they spoke
a polysynthetic syntax, now frag
-mented, not unlike their people.
but language, like the dinosaurs —
like parents — can become extinct,
can leave traces: the not-quite
noumena, the narrows, a word
water- wind-gap carved through
tuscarora quartzite, proving
presence with absence.
these same landscapes made
you. this mid-atlantic geography
of arundale clay and Gettysburg
shale — of fossilized stone of
star-tooth sauropod — built up
your bones. a bloodline more
ancient than the old line. for
you are of the sisku hanne, a
slow-moving muddy river
swirling with alluvium. you are of the floodplains embracing
a drowned river valley.
you are of the youghiogheny, an
affluent river flowing in a contrary direction. you are carving a waterline
of transgressions, with more twists and turns than an oxbow — and i’m
wading through your brackish waters, swept along the rapids toward a watershed-sink where everything you
touch inevitably meets its end.
and when you open your lips to speak, it’s with a tangled tongue heavy with words that spill like streams from your deepwater delta mouth.
***
The line “you are carving a waterline of transgressions” is adapted from the poem “exhibits from The American Water Museum” by Natalie Diaz.
___
Natalye Childress is a writer, an editor, and author of The Aftermath of Forever (Microcosm Publishing). She lives in Berlin, Germany. Find her at natalye.com or @deutschbitte.
By Dylan Smith
This day last year a bird shit on my desk. I wish somebody—well wait, I wish Alma alone had been there to see it. This beautiful blue mountain bird shit in through the window of my shack and splat all over my hand, like directly onto my desk. The bird looked all rainbowy, Alma, you would have loved it. Picture a quick translucent smear against the spring blue sky, or like a whirl of blue oil in even bluer water. I’d just started work on this new poetry book. Had been calling it my Crayon Book. It was my therapist’s idea for me to use crayons, it would become a book of poems about my half-brother Chris. I called it my Chris Book sometimes, sometimes just my Art Book, but Crayon Barn Chris became a tentative title, you’ll see why. Later at work I told Art about the shit and he said all mountain birds upstate are holy, especially the blue ones. What an omen! I wanted so badly to believe it. To believe in Art. He said bird shit brings about good luck—and so on this day last year holy shit, a bluebird blessed my poetry book. It was dawn when it happened. My windows were open to the blue green woods of Alma’s world and man, I was so in love with her, I was thrumming in awe all wide-eyed and open—I was totally alive. I wiped the blessing off my hand and onto my dirty blue work jeans, smiling. The bird had even sung its little blue song as it blessed me. I laughed and laughed and laughed. Hahaha! Good morning, Chris!
I’ve been thinking about the sky a lot. Have been wondering what the hell it is. I don’t live in the mountains anymore, I left that shack in Alma’s woods for what is probably the last cheap room in Red Hook ever. You can smell the contaminated water through the wall. My apartment’s porthole window looks out at those blue and red cranes lifting trash and red crates out from boats about the bay, where the city’s canals and rivers dump waste out into the sea and to me those cranes look mostly like strangely drawn crayon horses. Like horses a kid would scribble on a wall. I’ve been thinking about the sky because half my view out this window looks out above the city with all its rolling blue gray mystery in spring, and I’ve been wondering what is going on up there exactly, like way up beyond the cranes and towers and clouds where I’ve come to think of the sky as just the deepest, bluest type of water.
My therapist’s name upstate was Diane. Alma found her for me. Diane specialized in art therapy for kids which meant for me she was cheap, and it was Diane’s idea for me to use my crayon drawings for my poems, or as the raw materials for my book. Draw what you feel and describe what you see, Diane said. Fucking genius. I was thirty-two at the time but Diane treated me like a kid. I loved it. For nearly two years I horsed around making poems about my kid art all monastic in this shack above Alma in the woods, but now I’m thirty-three and alone and acting like an adult again in the city. I wish I had those crayons here now and a strong good stack of that red construction paper like the stuff that bluebird shit all over. I’d draw you a diagram if I did. Or like a map of Alma’s world in the mountains upstate as I saw it in my window in her woods. First I’d draw for you a blue crayon mountain with like this chaotic red spiraling thing at its center for Art’s barn, then I’d draw you tens of thousands of greening crayon trees, and all those cleared thawing crayon fields of hay and the blue yellow crayon birds, pink red dots for new spring flowers, this golden line here will be Alma in her garden and last I’d draw for you the low yellow farmhouse Alma inherited up there on the hill.
Beyond Alma’s land was the reservoir and a little beyond that was the dump. Alma made a lot of art. Inside her blue electric car she had this tangle of translucent fishing line we found which hung from her rearview mirror and hovered there all balled up perfect like a kind of sculpture. The way it held the light. It was so Alma. Even before she caught Chris cheating and cast him out of her farmhouse forever, Alma and I would go on these dump runs together every Sunday. They became our weekly adventure. Chris was big on shrinking our carbon footprint so as a house we didn’t make a lot of waste, only what we could stuff into the trunk Alma’s electric car, but usually we came back to the farmhouse with more random dump junk than when we left.
This one Sunday at the dump Alma found a backpack full of pigments by the scrap metal pile. The baggies looked full of rainbowy drugs. Next to the pigments I opened a box full of empty metal frames. The baggies had been labeled with these wonderful names and I told Alma my favorite color was Meadow Green. Back at the farmhouse Alma glued Meadow Green into a frame and glued a magnet to the back of it and hung it on the fridge for me. No larger than a tarot card. A piece of art.
A week later Chris asked, “What the hell is this?”
“A landscape painting,” Alma said. “Meadow Green. Look close—you have to squint.”
And Art is like Alma’s uncle. She says he’s always just kind of been around. Art’s barn is full of tools and things, a lot of spare parts, mostly trash. I loved it in there. It felt like a big red boat. Century old chestnut. Cathedral ceilings. Two of every tool—Art’s Ark. I worked for him for three good years doing handyman work out of the barn and for about half that time I lived in Alma’s farmhouse, in the renovated attic room above her and my half-brother Chris. They’d been engaged to be married for like ever. The deal was that if I helped Chris renovate Alma’s house I could sleep on a mat in their attic for free. The floorboards up there had these wide spaces between them you could almost fit your fingers through, and at night Alma’s bedside light rose up to me in soft dusty rays. It’s important you know I fell in love with her immediately. Felt like hell about that for a while. I lived up there in hell for a whole year and a half before they broke up, before I hiked up to live in my shack in Alma’s woods. The sounds of their most intimate moments rose up to me in that room and unconsciously I overheard every argument, every groan whisper secret moan, every perilous fight. Chris had this electric keyboard down there too, right below the thin metal air vent slats that opened between our rooms, and every night after dinner drunk Chris went to work on his scales with bricks for fists, or practiced like the same song over and over and over again, which for a year and a half was the Star Spangled Banner. It drove Alma fucking wild. You could tell.
After the renovation I had to find a job, Chris said. Now I had to pay him rent on the room. So I went to work for Uncle Art. Met him before the barn every morning for three years. A lot of the time we just drank beer and drove around the reservoir together in his van. Art took me under his wing. Funny how things work out. I am half Art’s age exactly. We kind of became best friends. Best job I ever had. Hahaha. Thanks a lot, Chris.
Alma told me the reason why morning birds sing is to let their lovers know they survived the night. This day last year it was spring and my art shack window was open to the songs of sparrows and redstarts—of gray catbirds and brown-headed cowbirds and yellow warblers and wrens, and of red-eyed vireos and yellow-bellied flycatchers and cardinals, and robins—and way down below in the trees above Alma’s garden, you could hear a whole chorus of waxwings singing. I am sober now. Have been contemplating the word serenity a lot. Sober people love to use it. Back in college Chris gave me this big book of etymologies for my 21st birthday, Word Roots, it’s open to the S’s on my desk. The book says serene comes from the Latin word serēnus, meaning calm weather, but now I’m flipping way back to the B’s.
The word book comes from the Old English bēce meaning beech, like the tree.
Word roots. Tree books. Hell—I even stopped drinking light beer.
And Art’s eyes are the color of cool water. A wild man. Blue splashes. A real woodsman. Situations arose for Art with the weather, our work shifting day to day and with the seasons like in spring for instance, your favorite red maple might fall onto a car or like onto your fence. After the storm you’d call up Art and his apprentice that’s me, we’ll come help you clean it up. In winter we plowed your driveway, patched holes your drywall, replaced dead outlets and all the leaky pipes inside your house and did firewood in the fall, renovated barns and attics and basements and redid decks and in the summertime we would mow your lawn if you wanted. But now it’s spring again. Art will plant your flowers, prune your trees. He taught me everything I know about the stars and mountains, the rocks and water and wait—World is a wild word.
Comes from werald which is Dutch, like Art’s barn.
All broken up into parts you get wer meaning man and ald meaning age, but all alone al means to grow or to nourish.
Like Alma.
Alma’s world was what I pushed my windows open to, my heart and eyes and my books. But Art’s brought me closer to that red spiraling shape at the center of things. God, maybe. How the seasons turn in narrow spirals up, and it also seems that way with death. An inch worm becomes the robin’s beak that eats it, is what I mean. Grief makes this shape. I mean loss is even in the word blossom.
Now imagine Art with an armful of flowers. Isn’t that nice. This day last year that blue bird blessed my book and about an hour later Art hiked up to my shack like that, with an armful of lilac branches.
“Here Sunshine. Thought these might brighten up your life.”
Chris was gone. Bluebirds sang. I felt free.
It was Sunday, usually our one day off, but Art said thunderstorms the night before had created a bunch of emergency work. The church basement had flooded again, Art said. High winds had ruined some trees. Art arranged the lilac branches while I looked around for my boots. Found them among green bottles. Tied them up nice and tight. Thanks for the flowers, Old Man. Let’s go.
I remember an unrooted yellow birch on a nearby farm and some red work horses black with spring mud. I remember a rock oak limb in the road Art cleared, and the yellow green wisps of a willow tree drug down below the footbridge flooded high with muddy water from the creek. Then we went into town. I remember the smell of rain-soaked oak silt, my boots all full of fragrant shavings, swelling, and I remember the rhythm of our saws on fallen trees outside the church and the holy rhythmic hum of Art’s sump pump in the basement tumbling splash splash splash while above us all these saints in stained glass were shining, and how after work we drank a thousand or so beers in the parking lot together laughing at the state of Art’s rust-tortured truck. Stories about horse barns, barn fires, green bottles gleaming as they lifted toward the light.
Late spring is the best time of year in those mountains. Warmish days, coolish nights. Cool enough to still build a fire in your shack. The last thing we did was clean up Alma’s lightning struck black locust tree. Art told me I could take some home to burn, but he wanted to save the rest of it for fence posts. He said locust doesn’t rot. Maybe a new garden gate for Alma.
Between the barn and Alma’s farmhouse on the hill the low field sloped down and opened into pastures. Art drove us down through the fields to the tree. The bark of a black locust tree furls deeply inward and feels cold and tough to the touch like rock. I remember an evening star, probably Jupiter, silver sliver of moon in the blue. Art stared up at the tree. The locust had split way up high and splintered out where it was struck, a silhouette of wild scribbles against the settled evening blue. An elemental thing. Like something out of the tarot.
The design of the saw sort of settles into your hands. I remember it getting dark and I remember being drunk and thinking about the root system of the tree in the earth down below me, how its roots reach as far as its canopy of branches. Art taught me that. The leafless branches of the locust tree rose in strange tangles, wiggling up and out like weird inverted roots. Art said that when the tree was struck three years ago the sap turned to steam in an instant. The expanded air exploded, Art said, wrecking a lot of the east side of the tree. What stood was dead but fifty feet tall, the trunk two feet wide. Art confirmed the tree was dead for me. The farm truck idled in the grass behind us.
I cut the truck engine. Lowered the tailgate. Took a seat.
“What would Art do?”
“Well Sunshine it’s pretty straightforward. You have the weight of the split to your advantage leaning west. I wouldn’t worry about going back the wrong way toward the fence or footbridge or the creek. The trunk should be full. Not hollow like the maple trees you’ve seen. I’d make my hinge regular at the waist going west. Plain angles. Like this.”
Art took a seat beside me on the tailgate. With a carpenter’s pencil he drew this diagram for me on a piece of wood. It’s supposed to show how a tree is felled. The pencil looked like a big orange crayon in his hand and I laughed. He had a beer in his lap. We always had beers in our laps. Art’s crayon was the same color as the saw:
And after the locust tree had been felled and bucked and loaded into the bed of the truck, a light went on in Alma’s farmhouse. Art opened two more beers with the blue handle of his knife. Handed me mine. We cheersed. The absence of the locust tree had become a strange sort of presence in the pasture now.
“Want to know what’s weird about lightning?”
“Sure, Art.”
“All it is is static. Like this static shock between the sky and the earth. Imagine you’re rubbing your socks on the carpet. That’s what’s so weird about the thunder too. The molecules from the lightning bolt come and go so quick. What you hear is molecules collapsing into the space that’s left. That’s the thunder clap.”
Alma’s silhouette appeared in a farmhouse window. The stars did like the opposite of dissolving and I felt the revolving energy of night twist, or kind of spin, and Art sat on the stump of the lightning struck black locust tree.
I said, “That’s crazy.”
“No Sunshine. No it’s not. Nothing’s all that crazy. You just have to take everything that happen as it comes. You’re not paying anything attention. That’s the thing about your generation. Nobody’s ever looking up.”
Alma turned off her light. Went to bed. Time passed and a year later I’m sitting here all alone above Red Hook and there is shit all over my hand. Seabirds scream in circles around cranes lifting trash out of the water in my window—the word time stems from tīd, meaning tide—and the morning after I felled the lightning struck black locust tree I woke spiritually polluted. I remember it. I woke alone sick blood red without Alma, but now I’m getting better. I am. The sky opens to the sun every morning and so does my heart, so do my eyes, my poems, my books. I am building my own little world. I guess that’s all this is. All art ever wants to be. Whatever. Today I am alive. Hahaha. Tralala—today I am singing.
Good morning, Alma. I am totally alive. God. I love you.
Dylan Smith is looking for a job if anyone knows of any jobs in Brooklyn.
By Wallace Barker
Levantate Campesino
zocalo draped in colored
flags and flashing
christmas lights
nativity feels near
emaciated beggars
we had mole three ways
and chapulines with pico
wide pedestrian boulevards
are a relief after narrow
sidewalks and coughing engines
i want to buy a t-shirt that
says “¡levantate campesino!”
but i am not a campesino
and my support for their struggle
seems theoretical at best
a wildman covered in grime
walks past us in the plaza
he is naked from the waist down
a tiny old woman sleeps
on the sidewalk within
a barrier of plastic bottles
a makeshift wall for her protection
***
Dios Nunca Muere
we walked down steep concrete
steps to playa carrizalillo
at the bottom were men in fatigues
carrying machine guns
the beach was hot and crowded
only shade from umbrellas
above greasy plastic chairs
we found a narrow dirt path
leading over beach rock to
a small cove shaded by palm trees
two young men with bleached hair
sat on a towel lightly kissing
i felt we were intruding but we snorkeled
and observed the tropical fish
i hit my knee on some rough coral
emerged with blood running down my leg
we took a whale watching tour
on a boat called “angelmar”
and found a pod of humpback whales
including two young calves
when they breached the surface
a fleet of tourist boats rushed over
we watched the whale flukes emerge
then disappear beneath dark waves
el capitan told us the fluke means
they are diving deep and unlikely
to resurface in such a crowded area
dolphins escorted our boat to shore
we walked across
playa manzanilla
to our rental house
we swam in the pool
just us this time
just our little family
***
Mazunte
clean light over the ocean
mesmerizing the violent surf
conjugating spanish verbs
sometimes current events
sneak into my consciousness
with the balcony doors open
i heard voices from the beach
in the morning we will return home
if god grants safe passage
we will leave the man who carries
a bucket around the tourbus parking lot
sits on the bucket to polish hubcaps
while the drivers read papers
the beach dogs skinny but
happy in a languorous way
they splash in the surf
scaring the gulls who peck sand
i wont sleep with the beach voices tonight
___
Wallace Barker lives in Austin, Texas. His most recent book “Collected Poems 2009-2022” is available from Maximus Books. His debut poetry collection “La Serenissima” is available from Gob Pile Press. More of his work can be found at wallacebarker.com
By Leila Register
There’s a lot of pressure on this thing to be no junk. That’s why I called it No Junk. That’s how life works. You name something the ideal name and it just happens that way for you. I feel terrible. I feel in trouble. I keep saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. Keep messing up facts in public. Last night I was at a table with strangers. One man wore a suit. I told him he looked like the movie The Graduate. He said his mom recently died and then I felt bad about what I said about the suit. There we all were. His mom and the suit and The Graduate. I asked him questions about his life. He said he wants to write but can’t. I said what happens when you try. He said I just get stuck. Today was supposed to be scattered storms but I look up and see the tree in front of my window and above it the blue sky and below that some leaves that look more yellow than green because of how the sun works. I read a lot of things everyday. I don’t mean books. I mean the internet where people share their ideas and worldview and images and sounds and terrible events. I also read stories but I have trouble finishing those. Sometimes the stories are on a website that is so ugly and depressing. Sometimes the lines are arranged in a way that makes the whole thing feel cheap and bad. Sometimes the words are broken up by a square advertisement on the right side of the screen. Sometimes the square advertisement is flashing. Sometimes whoever made the website decided to get creative with fonts. Sometimes all of this is happening at once and it makes me sink into an awful sadness. It makes me ask why am I doing this. Sometimes I read a story and I get to sentence three or four or five and I have to stop because things aren’t moving in a way I like. It’s hard to describe what it means for things to move in a way I like. It’s easier to describe what I don’t like. I don’t like when someone in a story does something “exasperatedly.” I don’t like when someone in a story tucks their hair behind their ear or giggles or “smiles sheepishly.” I don’t like the phrase “nothing special, really.” I know these are things people say and do in life and in the world but when someone does them in a story or essay it sounds fake and embarrassing. What does sheepish mean? Why would someone smile that way? I can’t imagine it. I don’t like anything I can’t picture or imagine.
___
Leila Register is a designer based in New York. On her desk is a framed print of a speech bubble that says “As If I Wasn’t Embarrassed Enough.” Her writing has appeared in Hobart, Rejection Letters, and Maudlin House.
By Jack B. Bedell
****
Swamp Thing Dives into Psalm 69
Quicksand under me, swamp water over me;
I am going down for the third time
Daily, this is the dilemma I face—sink in the mess pulling at my feet here, in the evil and strife I face every day—or scream for help from a god that only wants me to learn to swim on my own. The fact of the matter is I am sinking either way. The swamp loves a fight as much as it loves a secret, so that’s no answer. Evil is a fire ant bed with too many mounds to burn. There is no help anywhere close enough to get to me in time to save me, so where is salvation in this swamp? For me? For what’s left of this land? Scream all you want. Flail. Turn onto your back and roll out of this trouble. It’s on you. Us. It always was. No pretty song can change that simple fact. No curse, that truth.
****
Swamp Thing Loses His Sense of Bearing
One thing’s certain. If you sit on this shore long enough, you’ll think about time. It’s unavoidable. The water comes in, goes out. Takes what it wants. Comes back for more. Sunlight, moonlight. Breeze, heat. Pelicans hovering over the barrier island offshore dance this dance, too. Even though their island’s completely rebuilt with barges of sand, they continue this cycle of sharing the space they’re given, like they know the water will rise again in time—is rising—to take it all back. Watching them glide overhead like this, it’s too easy to lose any sense of being on shore, or on anything, to feel the gulf swell until you are standing underneath a whole new ocean, the birds’ bellies riding its gentle waves.
****
Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s work has appeared in HAD, Heavy Feather, Pidgeonholes, The Shore, Moist, Autofocus, EcoTheo, The Hopper, Terrain, and other journals. He’s also had pieces included in Best Microfiction and Best Spiritual Literature. His latest collection is Against the Woods’ Dark Trunks (Mercer University Press, 2022). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019.
By Sy Holmes
My car was a beat-up 2000 BMW that I got from my buddy TJ, who bought it from his buddy down in Dallas who had gotten it from someone else who had probably stolen it. He gave it to me, along with a couple tools, a pair of boxing gloves, and a set of Texas plates registered to a Prius “in case I had to handle business.” I got it for a song for him to get back to Houston. It had a white rattle-can paint job that was flaking off and showing silver in places, the oil was self-changing, and the seats got scorching hot. I loved it, even though my girlfriend told me it made me look like a failed molly dealer. It overheated one night in September for no apparent reason.
I went back in the morning and limped it over to the closest thing I have to a mechanic, my buddy Gage, who had full use of his landlady’s garage while she was away in Florida. We took a look at it, checked the codes, and decided we didn’t know shit so we should probably order the most likely parts and see what happened. In return, I reassured Gage’s girlfriend that the headache she had probably wasn’t brain cancer, my area of amateur expertise.
Two weeks later, I had a thermostat and water pump waiting for me at home. We popped the hood, changed the parts, and started to put it all together again, only to realize that one of the tensioner mounts on the serpentine belt had sheared off the engine block itself. This meant that we would have had to take the engine out, do some welding beyond Gage’s skill level, and trust the rest to Jesus.
“If we pull some real fuck-your-cousin engineering, we might be able to find someone to fabricate a new mount, reroute the cable, and stick it someplace else,” Gage told me, as I tried to overcome my sadness with a sandwich. I didn’t know. It seemed beyond both our ability and inclination.
Over the next few days, I scoured central Montana Craigslist for any suitable vehicle. Broke down enough to be affordable, but not too broke down. I finally found a late-’90s Ram that looked promising. Gage was out of town, so I called my friend Skycrane to help me look it over as a sort of combination mechanic and attorney. We showed up to test it out, and the steering was a bit wonky, but it drove. I said I would take it.
Once the price was settled, I had to figure out how I was going to pay the owner, since I realized I hadn’t had a checkbook in a good two years. Because I’m a dumbass, half of my life has been consumed by finding sketchy ways to do legit things. I suggested a couple different ways, which made me feel like a scammer, before we settled on PayPal. I didn’t need to worry, though, because when I met him to sign the title over, he told me that if I stole some government plates I could probably pass myself off as a federal employee and go where I wanted, since it seemed like to him the whole government drove white Rams. He might have been joking.
By the time that was settled, Gage’s landlady was back from Florida, and I had to find a way to offload the BMW. I put it online as a parts car and promptly got offered loot like a sketchy Mossberg rifle, an ancient Honda Civic with anime stickers all over the outside, and a couple gold chains. Anything but cash, which was what I needed. Finally, a guy from up near Fort Benton came down with his wife, who he told me over and over was “sickly,” and bought it. We pushed it out of the garage into the snow and up to his trailer, which had a frayed Harbor Freight winch that may as well have had an OSHA VIOLATION sticker on it.. I sat in the driver’s seat and steered as he pulled it up the equally-sketchy ramps he had brought, and looked at the gray sky that stretched over the plains. I pictured myself ascending, Grease-like, into the heavens above the river, entering the DIY gates of redneck valhalla in my broke-down chariot. Then it was on the trailer and off to a fitful retirement in a front yard. On the way home, my radio got stuck on the Christian channel and I listened to how God wouldn’t let the devil touch you if you just had faith. I don’t know about all that. Maybe he could stop the devil from fucking with my cars.
****
Sy Holmes is a writer from western North Carolina. He currently lives in central Montana with other people’s dogs.” Thanks again!
By Mike Andrelczyk
***
The Logrollers
The two of them are always there – eternally
In my mind balancing on a spinning log beneath their wooden shoes
Rolling on the river
Wearing green caps with feathers in them
Spinning their log
As I:
Season an omelette with fennel, dill and sage
Type the words “fresh heist”
Waive all inspections
Piss blood
Hit a ping-pong ball into the net after a thrilling 8-minute volley
Try to sleep
Leaf through an outdoor magazine
Call my dad
They keep spinning on the log with their funny little green hats
***
Tahiti 2134
aurora borealis but you have to listen to a car insurance ad to see it
the ghost of the gecko pasted to the anthurium
barking dog sample sneakers with flame resistant tongues
the translucent blue hockey player in the sea
of hovering hibiscus blooms
I’m gluing my disastrous shoe again
I’m wearing wraparound shades on an aluminum hydrofoil
I’m tranced-out and sweating bullets in the tranquilizer garden
as the fire ants swarm my strawberry-shaped wound
***
Soap Bubbles
I’m doing the dishes and I feel great
because you’re describing a meme you saw
and you just did that laugh style
I really love
***
Secret Poem (100 mph)
I saw a yellow gibbous moon on two legs sprinting between dark
hillocks
I saw a pigeon-colored crescent moon tripping down a spiral staircase
I wrote a secret poem called “100 mph”
It goes:
The sky has never been
Bigger and more meaningful
I am crying and driving
100 mph
And I’ll never be able to tell you about this
***
Cornflower
Speedwalking through the graveyard
into the cornfield and then crossing
the highway without watching the traffic
looking up at the chinook
forgetting to update
speedwalking through another graveyard
mumbling to myself “I don’t give a fuck”
stopping at the garden to register the blue and to scan a cornflower
always talking to myself
and maybe to you too
—-
Mike Andrelczyk is the author of four collections of poetry, including “!!!” with Ghost City Press. He lives in Pennsylvania. On Twitter @MikeAndrelczyk and Instagram mike_andrelczyk.
By Jessica Dawn
All the TikToks they sent in the group chat talked about hyperfixation, about all the things to hyperfixate on like games and fun facts and books and history.
“I think these are all just about spending too much time on TikTok,” I texted a friend.
“Do you wear your watch anymore?” my mom asked. She bought it so I could see that my heart was beating fine, that I was sleeping okay, that all the graphs looked the way they should so my body must be working right.
“Sometimes,” I lied. The last time I wore it was weeks before, back when I couldn’t stop watching my heart rate, couldn’t look away from it rising and falling. Kept trying to figure out how the numbers compared to the day before, to the week before, to an average healthy person, to an average unhealthy person. Which one was I closest to, how far away was I from normal, how far away from normal could I get before it was dangerous, how far away from normal could I get before I died.
People started noticing. Looked like I was bored, I guess, distracted.
“Are you waiting for something?” my coworker asked as I checked my watch again. “No,” I lied, but I was waiting for it to happen, stroke or heart attack maybe, whatever was going to kill me, sure to arrive any second.
“When someone asks me how my hyperfixation from three weeks ago is going but I’m already four crafts past that” the meme said, and in the group chat they could all relate.
“How often do you think about dying?” my therapist asks.
“I don’t know if I ever stop thinking about it,” I tell him.
Too fast a heart rate can mean a heart attack. Too slow a heart rate can mean a heart attack. That’s what the internet told me, anyway. I looked it up again, all the links already purple. Clicked them again because maybe this time I could find the thing that would let me relax, see the note that said “look Jessica, you’re okay” that I missed before.
“Me talking about my latest hyperfixation to anyone who will listen,” the meme says, picture of Charlie Kelly waving his arms in front of a wall plastered with papers, all of them connected with red string.
I googled chest pain and arm tingling.
blood clot symptoms
blood clot leg pain
what does pulmonary embolism feel like
symptoms pulmonary embolism
lips numb
lips numb stroke
heart palpitations
heart palpitations dizzy
heart palpitations dizzy fatigue
how to prevent blood clot
how to prevent stroke
how to know if I’m dying
how to know when I’ll die
“I think we should take your phone out of the equation when you’re starting to spin,” my therapist says. “Put it out of reach. How does that sound?”
“That sounds good,” I say even though it sounds terrible. If my brain does not want it, it is probably the right thing.
I have a recording of myself to listen to when the feeling hits, when I want to start looking things up, when I want answers that are not out there to find. One little voice recorder lives on my coffee table, another gets carried around with me. Recorders because I can’t use my phone for this, because my phone is part of the problem. Because what I need is to hear myself say that it’s fine not to know, that I can’t know everything, because what I need is nowhere on the internet.
“It’s okay to feel uncertain, it’s okay to be anxious about it,” the recording starts. The rest is just for me.
“Are hyperfixation and obsession different things?” I asked the group chat. No one knew, no one could answer.
“My dad died of a pulmonary embolism,” I tell my therapist.
“Well, no wonder you’re afraid,” he says.
The recordings are just one part. We are doing ERP, which stands for exposure and response prevention, which means that sometimes we talk about dying and I cry. “There’s so many things I wouldn’t get to see if I die now, like my nieces and nephew growing up,” I tell my therapist.
“That’s the thing about being dead, though,” he says. “You won’t know what you’re missing. You’ll be gone.”
Maybe hyperfixation is just about crafts. A lot of the memes are about crafts.
I’ve been checking the ages in obituaries, in the articles they write when someone famous dies. Sometimes the age is in the headline, which is weird but maybe part of why it’s news. Sometimes I have to click the link, scroll until I find it, but it’s always in there somewhere. Don’t know exactly what number I’m looking for, just that numbers close to my age feel bad, and smaller than my age feel worse.
There is a part of my brain that wants to collect all these ages and causes of death into a spreadsheet, wants to graph them, and see the ages where the dots cluster like this will tell me something about myself. Doesn’t matter that it only comes from articles that I see on Twitter or that all kinds of numbers and graphs about death are already out there, and I just need to look up the right combination of words to see them. No, if I make the graphs, they will tell me something different, a statistical version of reading tarot cards, doing my own astrological chart, using data to divine how many years I have left.
If I’m being honest, I figured I’d always get a say in how and when I go. I am surprised to learn that might not be true, that there are other ways I could die, that I do not have the control I want.
“What scares you the most about dying?” my therapist asks.
It’s the negative space, not what will happen but what won’t. Feelings left unspoken, things left undone.
It’s not what others will remember but that they won’t remember at all. Books never published, nothing of me left behind.
It’s time spent in the wrong ways, ways I’ll never get to make up.
“I feel like I have to hurry up and do things while I have a chance.”
“Sounds like a lot of pressure to put on yourself,” my therapist says.
––
Jessica Dawn lives on an island in the San Francisco Bay with a failed farm dog. She writes fiction and non-fiction, she is querying her first novel, she is trying her best. Her work is in HAD, Rejection Letters, Autofocus, Pidgeonholes, and more. Find her on Twitter @JuskaJames
By Jack B. Bedell
“A problem is something which I meet, which I find completely before me, but which I can therefore lay siege to and reduce. But a mystery is something in which I am myself involved, and it can therefore only be thought of as a sphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning and initial validity.” —Gabriel Marcel
I have no doubt. That day in the lab that turned me into this, that took Linda away and forced me out into this swamp, caused many problems. But I, myself, what I am, is not a problem. I’ve read enough Marcel to know a problem is something independent of yourself you run across in this world, something that can be solved with actions or tactics, or that can be totally abandoned and left for someone else to fix. What I am, because it cannot be separated from me, is a mystery to be puzzled over, possibly even be understood given enough time and acceptance. Oil spills are a problem. Resource depletion is a problem. Even this coast disappearing daily has a remedy somewhere one of us can find. What I am, though, what I am on my way to becoming, will always glow as a reflection right on the edge of the horizon. And should I finally face it one day on my wanderings around this place, there won’t be a damn thing I can do about it. Other than recognize it for what it is.
––
Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s work has appeared in HAD, Heavy Feather, Pidgeonholes, The Shore, Moist, and other journals. He has also had work included in Best Microfiction and Best Spiritual Literature. His latest collection is Against the Woods’ Dark Trunks (Mercer University Press, 2022). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019.
By Kate Oden
Today my boyfriend pulls up in the red mustang with the leaky soft-top. Other days, he’s arrived in a bronze Town & Country van, a Dodge Durango camouflaged with rust, a Ram truck crested with a rack of lights. What must the neighbors think – the Russian couple next door I never see: Do they look down at us from their green ranch on a grassy rise? Judging by the cars in my driveway, I could have four boyfriends. And that’s not counting the local foot-traffic.
I know they’ve divorced in the modified white cape, catty-corner. I saw him on Bumble years ago; I swiped right, which means “yes.” He’s an economist with silver-dollar eyes, cheekbones that sling a smile before it even happens. We didn’t match – he was correct, of course, not to swipe right on me. Imagine dating someone within hearing distance of your ex. Sometimes I see him walking down our street, striding behind his ice-cream belly. I remember when he had an operation and was on summer-vacation time, years ago, how they both came out of that cape that binds a hillock of tall ostrich ferns. They sat on the stairs, wanting to chat – the kids were gone at camp. “We feel like we’re back in college. We sleep til nine.”
Now I hear her chipping away at the driveway ice all winter: chit, chit, chit. She’s beautiful, cold blue eyes and black hair. She has a beautiful name I’ve never heard on anyone else. She once told me her mother had a badger living beneath her house. A badger or some beary mammal, pulling up in the driveway like slightly sleazy cars, seeking heat.
Every time I put the recycling out or shovel the driveway, I wonder if the cars passing have seen me many times before and asked themselves why my partner doesn’t share the duty.
Signs of divorce:
1. The sudden appearance of more cars in the driveway
2. One person doing all the outdoor chores
3. Sometimes a dog disappears, or appears
4. Sometimes newspapers pile up when someone like me vacates the house for the weekend – every weekend.
Sometimes I wonder if neighbors even overhear the phone conversations I have in the yard. They wouldn’t even have to decipher the words, just my tone, to sense that I was flirting with someone new. It’s amazing what we reveal to the curious.
All of my daughter’s friends are children of divorce. Well, Emma is the exception that proves the rule. All these households split and drooping their thread-bare connections across town, across state lines, a web of spray-confetti relationships. I feel sorry these kids have formed a de facto support group for torn households. Sorry and grateful.
It almost seems like for every intact household there’s another of divorce. We play Red Rover with our houses. There’s the jogging family who moved out of the modern behemoth up the street into a cedar-sided home vacated by a divorced couple. Red Rover, Red Rover… Where does ice-cream belly live? Does he rent from the divorcee I know on Park Street?
I’ve never been married, but I’ve done the traditional, marriage “thing” (if there is such a thing): lived in a home with a partner for years and raised a child, rescued pets, started home-improvement projects we never finished. I never wanted to make it official with marriage, though. There wasn’t enough there, there. Then I met someone divorced twice before who doesn’t want to risk a third time and of course I want to wed him, joke about it every day. The joking makes the angst funny, puts a leopard-print speedo on the elephant in the room. We’re both post-split; he sees little reason in marriage now, whereas I see more reason than ever.
Of course it could be, as my friend in Nevada says, we’re just not made for marriage. Maybe certain hearts have smaller tanks, hearts that need to fuel up at every fresh pump. I don’t mean affairs or cheating, necessarily, but the restless searching for more. The American disease. I am constantly asking my partner for commitment even as I am new to the idea, myself. I am constantly making dinner for a love that might not ever come over. There is a wonderful way that I don’t take my boyfriend for granted, however. He is no more tethered to me than the vermilion maple leaves settled in my driveway. Our relationship is built on choice, a certain wind that put us where we are and keeps us there only more or less.
The divorcee with the beautiful name used to have a barking hound and a sassy pug. She works at the retirement home. I’d like to give her a ride in the red truck, maybe the mustang top-down on a nice day. We are both more likely to forget when recycling day is, in the absence of another remembering head. But aren’t the leaves that blow here lovely.
––
Kate Oden is a German translator and ghostwriter. She lives in New Hampshire in a household with slightly more animals than humans.
By Dustin Strickler
I am a mobility practitioner whose passion is to improve the wellbeing of others. I spent the past 15 years researching movement by studying Applied Functional Science with the Gray Institute. The inspiration for my artwork comes from my interest in the human condition, observing and blending the worlds of music, movies, sports, and notable personalities around Lititz, PA.
My work is a blend of pen and ink, markers, colored pencil, and acrylic paint. There are underlying meanings deep within each piece of my artwork that tell a story. In some cases, my artwork is a tribute to those people, places, and poodles that I love. At other times, it’s my reflection on the injustices that I wake up every day to do battle against.
The Justice League is based on the 1970s Super Friends animated TV series that I watched as a child. Depicted is a Justice League comic book of friends and acquaintances who I feel live up to the opening theme of this program “Their mission is to fight injustice, to right that which is wrong, and to serve all mankind.”
Each person represented here depicts the concept of “Super Friends” because each in his own way contributes to the well-being of others within the community that I grew up in.
Stay tuned to learn who and why my Justice League kicks so much ass.
––
Dustin Strickler, Artist
2022 Original 10×16
Pen and Ink, Copic Marker, Acrylic, and Colored Pencil
Carson Illustration Board
By Alan ten-Hoeve
Matt’s fat, pimply ass slid out of his pants as he searched for the smoked cigarettes his older sister buried behind the garage.
“Ain’t no way The Rockers could beat The Hart Foundation in a real fight. No way!”
“I dunno, man. They’re pretty fast.”
Matt rose hiking the back of his cutoffs with one hand, holding a squashed orange and black curl of a thing with the other. Held it out like he’d just found a ten-dollar bill. A trace of Liz’s lipstick stained the filter.
“Don’t matter. They fly around too much.” He stuck the crushed cig in his mouth. “When’s the last time you seen someone jump off a top rope during a real fight?”
The match caught on the fourth try. Matt pushed out his lips. Eyes crossed as he tried to line the match up to the remains of the cigarette. The flame touched Matt’s nose. He flinched, corrected the distance and the blacked end chuffed back to life. Matt shook out the match before it reached his fingers, inhaled a long drag, then doubled over coughing.
I took the butt. There was hardly anything left. Just a little ring of crinkled dirty-white paper before the filter started. I put it to my lips anyway, tried to imagine it was like kissing Liz, but Matt had soaked it with his spit. I dropped it back in the weeds where it belonged.
Matt wiped the drool from his lips. “What the fuck, that’s still good.”
He pinched the butt before I could step on it. Puffed like he was giving it little fish-kisses. The ember went down to the filter. It sizzled and smelled like burning plastic. Matt doubled over in another coughing fit. I almost didn’t hear Jimmy dragging the heels of his combat boots up the driveway.
Jimmy was the biggest kid in the seventh grade. He’d been left back twice and was one suspension away from permanent expulsion. It was only a matter of time. Everyone knew he’d started the dumpster fire behind the courtyard, and all the kids in town were afraid of him, even high schoolers. A good guy to have on your side, but not always good to have around.
“Better put your dicks away, girls. Though I’d probably need a microscope to see them anyway.” Jimmy cracked up.
Matt offered him the fried butt.
“Get the fuck outta here.” Jimmy pulled out a full softpack of his mother’s Dorals from the cargo pocket of his camo pants. The gold foil crown on the pack flashed sun “Swiped them before I left.”
Matt dropped the charred filter, toed it under the dirt, and reached for the pack. Jimmy pulled it away.
“Uh-uh, not so fast! First I wanna see.”
We spent the next half hour in Matt’s garage, leering at nudie magazines his dad kept hidden in a broken minifridge blocked by his rusty tool chest.
“This is a treasure trove of fine trim,” Jimmy turned a magazine sideways, cocking his head at the same time so whatever he was looking at was still right-side up for him. “Huge fuckin’ titties, a natural redhead. Fuuuck! I might have to whip it out right here and take care of things.”
Matt peeked over a magazine with a french word on the cover. “Don’t get your jizz on my dad’s shit.”
Most kids wouldn’t dare tell Jimmy what to do with his jizz, but Matt’s dad, a former golden gloves boxer who could rip a telephone book in half, was someone even Jimmy wouldn’t cross.
Jimmy laughed. “Y’know I’m just playin’. I gotta fuckin hog anyway. I wouldn’t want to scare you.”
Jimmy tossed the magazine down, took out the pack of Dorals, shook one out.
“Not in here,” Matt said. “My dad’ll beat my ass.”
Jimmy had a plastic Bic lighter with a peeling American flag on it. He lit one cigarette after another as we walked around town, smoked them halfway down, then passed it. “You guys see wrestling last night?”
Matt took the cigarette and pointed the cherry at me. “This guy thinks The Rockers could take the Hart Foundation in a real fight.“ He took a big drag, coughed, and passed me the butt.
“That ain’t what I fuckin’ said.”
Jimmy made a face. “Who gives a shit? Ultimate Warrior would kick all their asses in less than a minute.”
There’s no arguing with idiocy, but I hadn’t learned that yet. “No way. He’s got too many muscles. He can’t hardly move around the ring.”
Jimmy poked a new Doral in the corner of his mouth and flicked his Bic. “That’s cuz he don’t have to. He’d fuck anybody up if he wanted.” He pushed his palms up and down over his head like he was doing Warrior’s gorilla press slam. Dark yellow ovals with rusty centers stained the pitts of his white t-shirt.
I let it drop, took the cigarette and puffed, trying to remember how many that made. I was lightheaded. My chest hurt. It felt like my mind wasn’t connected to my body. Arms and legs moved all by themselves. Carrying me down the Boulevard. So many cracks in the sidewalk.
We followed Jimmy into Krauzser’s where he stole a bag of beef jerky, then turned up a side street. Everyone was quiet as they ate. I was thirsty and wished Jimmy would’ve stolen a soda too. After a few blocks, Jimmy slowed. A familiar look on his face. He stopped in front of a house, jerked his chin at it.
“Let’s do that one.”
Jimmy’s favorite activity was ringing people’s doorbells and running away. Ring and Run, he called it. Harmless fun.
Only once did we have any trouble. We hit too close to Matt’s home. Rang one of his neighbor’s houses. A geographical error. Matt didn’t want to do it but Jimmy had a way of phrasing things that made it hard to say no. “C’mon, don’t be a gay pussy.”
As soon as Matt pushed the bell he vaulted over the railing. There weren’t any bushes or cars close enough to hide behind so we followed him around the side of the house, running as fast as we could. When we got into the backyard we froze. The whole family was in the middle of a barbecue. For about three dumb seconds we all stared at each other, blinking, mouths hung open. We ran off but it was too late. Matt’s dad gave him a good one for that. Not for what he did. For getting caught. After that we learned our lesson, and agreed on some rules, like not hitting houses within a three block radius of our homes.
I tossed my cigarette as Jimmy walked toward the house all nonchalant. When Matt and I gave him the clear sign he went up the stoop, rang the bell. We hid behind a parked car as a bent old man answered the door. He looked up and down the street.
“Hello?” He had a shaky old man voice. “Who’s there?”
We slapped our hands over our mouths so we didn’t laugh too loud.
As the man went back inside, Jimmy mimicked him, “Hello? Hello?” and all 3 of us broke up.
After Jimmy it was Matt’s turn, then mine. That was the order. Sometimes we’d get a dud but with it being a Sunday most everyone was home. One guy got so mad he came out of his house and walked up and down the sidewalk cursing for like five minutes. He passed the hedges we were hiding behind twice but eventually gave up. We hit a few rich houses. Girls we had crushes on. The convent where the nuns lived.
The fun started to fizzle about an hour or so later. My head hurt from all the cigarettes and my legs were tired from running. We came up to a two-story house with peeling paint. We’d walked by the place many times in the past but deemed it too risky to hit. To get to the doorbell, you had to enter a screened-in porch, and there was a BEWARE OF DOG sign taped on the screen door.
Jimmy handed me the jerky, flicked his chin. “Let’s do this one.”
I paused mid-bite and looked at him like he was crazy. “You’re kiddin’, right?”
“C’mon! I’ve seen the lady who lives here.” Jimmy held his hands out from his chest and made a pinching gesture. “Big tits, no bra. She’s not as hot as Valerie Francesca but I wouldn’t kick her out of bed.”
“There’s a fuckin’ dog sign right there. Breaks our number two rule.”
Jimmy waved his hand at it. “That’s just to scare off burglars. Ring and run.”
“Harmless fun,”Matt finished.
When I didn’t say anything Jimmy got annoyed. His face darkened and he got up close. His large body blocked out the sun. “Don’t be a gay pussy.”
I turned my face from Jimmy’s bad breath. “I’m not a gay pussy. I just don’t wanna do this anymore.”
“I don’t wanna do this anymore.” Jimmy mimicked me in a high-pitched girly voice and gave Matt an elbow. I could feel my face get hot. I wanted to hit him but I knew he’d kick my ass.
“Yeah, c’mon, just once more,” Matt added. “Don’t be a wuss.”
Two against one.
I folded the bag of jerky into my back pocket and stared at the house. “I don’t know—the porch—I don’t think I can open and close the door fast enough to get away.”
“That all?” Jimmy said. “I’ll hold the door open so you can just run out. Easy.”
I looked at Matt.
He smiled around a cigarette. “Just this last one.”
I snatched the cigarette from Matt’s mouth. Took a long, slow drag, inhaled deeply, then tossed it on the sidewalk. Matt quickly picked it up and gave it his fish kisses.
My head throbbed. I wanted this to be done. “Alright, fine. Let’s get this over with.”
“Yeah, that’s what I like to hear.” Jimmy grabbed me in a bear hug from the side, lifted me up, and humped me like a dog.
I climbed the crumbling front steps, wondering if I’d be able to clear them in one jump when it was time to flee. As I reached for the screen door I hoped it would be locked.
It wasn’t.
The spring groaned a little. I looked back over my shoulder. Matt was on the sidewalk, one foot in front of the other, ready to run. Jimmy had come up the steps behind me. He took the door handle.
“Be quick.”
There was a ratty couch inside the porch. Old shoes and yard stuff littered the floor. Recycling bins overflowed with beer cans. The air smelled sour and musty. From where I stood, the front door looked about a mile away. My mouth was dry. The aftertaste of too many cigarettes mixed with jerky stung my throat.
Jimmy pushed me. “Go on!”
I gave him the finger and took a step forward. Floorboards creaked. Sweat broke out on my forehead. Halfway inside I leaned toward the door, stretched my arm out as far as I could without getting too close, and pressed the bell.
I prayed that the thing was broken, that it wouldn’t work, but I could feel the electrical pulse hum under my fingertip. In the tense silence a bell chimed inside the house.
A dog barked and all the hair on my body stood up. I whipped around to bolt out the screen door only to see it slap closed. Jimmy was on the other side holding it shut. Below his evil eyes a huge grin split his face in half. I could hear the dog snarling on the other side of the door.
“What the fuck are you doing let me out!”
Matt was still on the sidewalk. Panic on his face. He glanced up and down the street. “Jimmy, what are you doing, we gotta run!”
I put my palms on the door frame and pushed but Jimmy pushed back against it, leaning all his weight on the other side. Laughing. He lifted his head, about to say something, then his evil eyes went wide. Without a word he let go, sprang down the steps, and took off with Matt trailing behind.
“Who the fuck’re you?!”
I spun around and saw an enormous man standing in the doorway, holding one of the biggest dogs I’d ever seen by the collar. “I said, the fuck’re you?!” He looked around the porch. “Tryna steal my shit?”
I glanced at all the trash on the porch, wondering if he was joking. Before I could think of an excuse, he reached out with his free hand and grabbed the sleeve of my shirt. I turned away, heard a ripping sound, and pushed on the screen door. It was jammed. The dog barked viciously, pulling at its collar.
Without thinking, I jumped through the steel mesh, tripped and tumbled down the front steps, and ran as fast as I could down the street. The dog’s paws galloped on the sidewalk behind me. A low, sustained growl rose from between a set of viselike jaws full of teeth the size of kitchen knives.
I pulled the bag of jerky out of my pocket and let it fall to the ground. The galloping and growling stopped. I could hear the man yelling something about calling the cops.
When I caught up with Matt and Jimmy they were standing on the brown lawn of Jimmy’s crumbling apartment complex. “What the fuck was that?”
“I swear, I didn’t know he was going to do that,” Matt said. He was bent over, hands on knees, trying to catch his breath.
Jimmy had an amused sneer on his face. “It was just a joke. You better relax yoursel—”
My fist crashed into Jimmy’s face. Pain and wetness on my knuckles. He staggered back then balanced. His lip was split. He wiped it with his hand and stared at the blood. Then at me. “I’m gonna fuckin’ kill you.”
Jimmy charged low and tackled me to the ground. I felt like I’d been hit by a rhino. The wind left me like a departed spirit. I saw the sky, big and taunting in its blueness, then a salvo of softball-sized fists rained down on me. I tried to cover up but Jimmy was quick for a big kid. His knuckles found their way through. My face and head went numb from the blows. Colors flashed across my vision. A strange taste filled my mouth.
I could hear Matt screaming in the background but was unable to make out what he was saying. In an act of desperation, I blindly thrust my arm up and felt my knuckles connected with something pointy and hard. Jimmy went limp, slid to the side, and clutched his chin.
I rolled over, jumped on top of Jimmy, and swung wildly. I didn’t care what I was hitting. He covered his face, but after a few stiff shots his arms fell. Something crunched. The sight of blood spurting from his nose fuelled my rage. It was like I’d left my body and something else was controlling it.
Jimmy lifted his knee into my tailbone. A shockwave of pain shot up my back. My limbs tingled and went numb. Jimmy heaved me off. We tumbled over and over. When we stopped, Jimmy was on top of me again. He drove another fist into my face. I tried to lift my arms but they wouldn’t work.
Then the blows ceased and a high-pitched screech broke through the haze. Matt had two handfuls of Jimmy’s greasy hair, pulling him off. And another sound cut through the frenzy. A voice.
“One on one, Matt! One on one!”
Everyone froze. Jimmy’s mom leaned her bulk in the doorway of the apartment building. She calmly sucked on a cigarette as if she was just watching something on TV. Massive breasts strained at her shirt. She blew out a plume of smoke.
“One on one, Matt. You gay pussy.” Jimmy’s little sister Katie peaked around her mother’s hip.
The fight went out of us. Jimmy and I got to our feet. His face was bloody and swollen. The skin around his eyes turning purple. I couldn’t see my face, but it felt the way Jimmy’s looked.
“See you at school tomorrow?” I said.
Jimmy rubbed his side. “Yeah, see ya.”
Without another word, Matt and I walked away. Jimmy went into his building. His mom stood there watching us until we turned out of sight.
I touched my head and face and winced. Hills of pain rising all over my skull. “I feel like I was hit by a car.”
Matt was suppressing a smile.
“Glad you think this is funny.”
“You shoulda jumped off the top rope.”
I started to laugh, but it hurt too much.
Matt held out the soft pack of Dorals. “Jimmy dropped ‘um when you were fighting.”
I poked one between my swollen lips and winced.
––
Alan ten-Hoeve wrote Notes from a Wood-Paneled Basement (Gob Pile Press). @alantenhoeve on twitter and ig.
Jason Sebastion Russo interviews Bill Whitten.
JSR: I had a first draft of questions for you about our mutual friend OD’ing in your band’s hotel room one long ago evening at SXSW, but I felt it was too salacious, even though it ends with me walking past the hotel gym at dawn and seeing you lifting weights in a black t-shirt and pair of jeans. I was still wet from having given our friend (no Narcan in those days) an ice-cold shower. I also had a couple of false starts about seeing you play guitar with Shady at the Knitting Factory (where we were pointed out to each other but not introduced, and you told Grasshopper I looked like a “young Kerouac” much to my great pride). I also wrote the story of Grand Mal playing at the Rhinecliff Hotel—which ended with you rolling around that filthy all-ages room without a shirt, and passing out at my and the late John DeVries’ couch in Poughkeepsie. But these questions were all starting to head into Hubert Selby territory; debauchery, treachery, substance abuse etc. etc. Should we pursue such a line of discussion?
BW: I feel somewhat queasy directly discussing (without the screens of fiction or abstraction) tales of past depravity. It’s probably best to take the Wittgensteinian approach: What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence.
JSR: Fair enough. Ludwig missed his calling, imho. What is a central metaphor in your life? I’m obsessed with the image of a plant slowly growing toward a window, for example.
BW: Waking up drunk in an enormous, empty, windowless, dark, locked room in a stranger’s house. After a period of time (hours? days? who knows?) finally escaping. Penniless, walking for miles trying to find to my way home, vowing to change my ways, to begin again…
`
JSR: Word, or amen, to that. Do you have a common, almost trite, saying that you’ve thought to yourself most of your life? For example, I have been saying, “live by the sword, die by the sword” to myself my entire life. And/or, “garbage in, garbage, out.” Direct quotes from my father’s childhood in the Bronx. You?
BW: Again and again, the words of Divine come into my brain: Kill everyone, kill everyone right now.
JSR: An enduring, undeniable platform. We both lived in the same Brooklyn building for years, yet I was surprised that as soon as you left NYC, you immediately started writing and singing about exile. I get it now that I spend 80% of my time in central New York. I assume the shift in locale impacted your creative life. Can you describe how?
BW: Being something of a pessimist, I expected, from the moment of my arrival in New York (America’s insane asylum) in 1990, delivered from a Peter Pan bus into its cold, dingy glitter and trash-strewn streets and neighborhoods, that my stay would be short-lived. Back then (maybe now?), it was a city of fugitives, of pilgrims – men and women like me – on the run from their families, from themselves, from their origins. I navigated it according to maps I’d brought with me, drawn by its victims and castoffs. I was fascinated with both the strange, vacant-faced men crouched in dark doorways and the glamorous youth who arrived en masse from every corner of the world to take part in the vast, industrial form of human sacrifice known as the ‘arts scene’.
I have notes from the first party I ever went to in the City:
How to pay attention to her words when the muscles jumping in her jaw, the blue veins pulsing beneath her eyes were all clearly visible beneath her starveling’s translucent skin. She ran her hands through her hair, touched her nose, her ears. “I’ve become (mumble) fixated on the (mumble) fact that a kind of apocalyptic menace follows me around (mumble), the City is on the verge of destruction, I can feel it.”
I moved constantly from neighborhood to neighborhood, borough to borough, always in search of a cheap apartment. Whenever I found one, there would be constant rumors among the tenants about imminent eviction, about the landlord’s desire to sell the building to speculators. Expulsion from NYC was always inevitable.
In 2018, as I stood on the stoop of my apartment in Brooklyn for the last time, I wondered what real difference would there be between NYC and a city in the Midwest. No matter where you go everyone is glued to their phones (an apparatus designed to enslave it users). The restaurants serve the same food, the same coffee. The men have the same haircuts. True, the people are more beautiful in NYC… but the world has been flattened and everyone on it made the same.
In any case, my only plausible claim to exile is from the bookstores of NYC (currently as close to extinction as the Yangtze Finless Porpoise); my true homeland. How great it was going from bookstore to bookstore like a pub-crawl and discovering Roberto Calasso, Jacques Ellul, Bruce Chatwin, Mavis Gallant etc etc. Of course, there are a handful of bookstores where I live now but none pass my personal test (a pretty low standard) of what makes a halfway decent bookshop – i.e. it must carry titles by Marguerite Duras and Giorgio Agamben…
Finally, circling back to your question, leaving NYC has had no impact on my creative life. I continue to pursue a bad idea (a life devoted to making art) stubbornly and against all reason.
JSR: What percentage of the world is evil?
BW: An ever-growing percentage. But, I believe in apocatastasis i.e. universal salvation, which means that when we die we all go to heaven. So evil is of less importance if we all will spend eternity in paradise.
JSR: Can people change?
BW: People’s actions can change, which is all that matters.
JSR: Well said. What percent of your personality can you choose?
BW: The easy way out is to proclaim that humans are purely determined by exterior forces i.e. people are social constructions, and their personalities are fungible. But if you’ve ever witnessed the birth of a child, you know that they come equipped with an already existing personality or what people used to call a “soul”. So the correct answer is zero.
JSR: I helped you move out. You were the only friend that showed up to move me into my first NYC apartment. We were an excellent moving team, in fact, and did a ton of moving gigs together; always glad to combine working out with making rent. Why pay for a gym when you can get paid to be a mover? Bonus: being a furniture mover is one of the best ways to get to know the five boroughs of NYC.
I spent a lot of time on your stoop before it became my stoop too. Before I finagled my way into the top-floor apartment of our building—no small task—thanks in part to you and Parker Kindred (one of the best drummers alive, who’s played with everyone from Lou Reed to Jeff Buckley to Cass McCombs etc). Something Parker probably regretted when I added to the guitar overdubbing, kick drum sampling, bass rehearsals competing in the hallway, the first time I dropped an amplified bass guitar on my floor/his ceiling. Ours was the kind of building that a body dropping past the window would have been noteworthy but not that shocking.
Our stoop was one of those easy-to-mythologize places like a Sesame Street set or Scorsese b-roll. During that very specific era of Brooklyn, at the decline of its vitality, in the heart of doomed Williamsburg. Thanks to our sweet landlady’s charity, we got a front seat to Rome’s burning. (“How will they be able to afford milk?” was how she explained keeping her tenant’s rent at one-third neighborhood’s market value.) We stocked the building with bandmates and friends, all of us touring and recording as the music industry turned to dust beneath us. Thank God you guys got me in. I was indeed running from the Minotaur, having just been evicted from my tiny basement apartment around the corner, in a building sold to developers by the owner’s son. Developers that turned it into a condo overnight. I was only homeless for a month before you and Parker convinced our landlady that I was good people… you threw a rope and hauled me up to safety.
I think some of my favorite stoop moments were your and Ken Griffin’s (Rollerskate Skinny, Favourite Sons, August Wells) endless debates. We’d gather around like Athenians and discuss books, film, music, television, romance, drugs, religion, politics, metaphysics. Everyone in our building was or had been in a band that I’d been a fan of prior, and it was nice to be amongst musicians that didn’t only want to talk about guitar pedals. So, here is my question: did our tight-knit cadre of NYC friends/reprobates impact your creative life in any way? Other than the obvious fact that you were constantly luring us to your living room to track vocals or guitars.
BW: More than one woman commented that our building resembled a barracks, or a halfway house for aging rock musicians or some kind of disreputable all-male commune. Of course, for me, my fellow ‘inmates’ were an enormous influence. Yes, I did get everyone (including yourself) in the building to play and sing on my albums Clandestine Songs and Burn My Letters. Collaborating with friends is an incredibly intimate, somewhat risky venture that requires trust and generosity. As the lockdown taught the world, interacting regularly with friends is indispensable and beneficial to the body and soul. I learned a lot from everyone and miss them all. Not a day goes by that I don’t wish I could sit down and have a cup of coffee with one of you guys. It goes without saying that texting and emailing and zooming are not in any way commensurate with in-person interaction.
JSR: Why do you get out of bed in the morning?
BW: To drink coffee, read, write, plot.
JSR: Is everything singular or plural?
BW: To believe everything is singular, you’d have to be a Spinozaist (a Pantheist) and believe God was/is everything; trees, dirt, air etc. Against this idea of a monad as the totality of all things, there is the transcendent, for example, Christ (a being not part of our material world) exploding out of eternity, desacralizing the world, ending animism. I prefer the latter to the former. Lately I’ve been thinking that interdimensional Ufo’s rising out of the ocean/descending from the stars and acting as divine intercessors to prevent nuclear war…could fulfill a similar function.
JSR: Would you choose to live again without knowing you were given a choice, if you had the choice?
BW: Yes. The prime directive of every living creature is to persist by any means necessary.
JSR: Is belief in God a choice?
BW: Not when someone is pointing a gun at you or punching you in the head or you’re suspended in that prolonged interval of time called a car crash. In those situations, appeals to god come forth unbidden from one’s lips. You realize (and then if you survive, forget) you’ve always been a believer.
JSR: Which percentage of utility have you lost from the internet?
BW: In 2023, everyone is brain-damaged. Paul Virilio was often attacked for being too pessimistic or even reactionary when he detailed, way back in the ‘90s and early ‘oughts, all the damage that technology – by marooning in us in an eternal present – had rendered upon our senses. In America, 54% of the population now reads below the 6th-grade level. We can’t see, think, remember, move, write, or talk as we once did. And we’re all under 24/7 surveillance.
JSR: Is it safe to say music was your primary pursuit at the beginning of your creative life? Why or how did it surpass writing? And where is that balance now? Do you feel the same amount of excitement about both? Does one eclipse the other?
BW: I wrote when I was a kid and hid my stories in my underwear drawer. But writing was always unsatisfying and deeply shameful. I didn’t really want anyone to know my thoughts. I picked up a guitar pretty late, around age 23 or 24, driven to provide accompaniment to the songs that were (are) banging around in my head. Kandinsky described the compulsion to create an ‘inner necessity’, which sounds right to me. Whether I write or play music on any given day is dictated by the fact that I live in a small house with my family. Making music is noisy and disruptive, while typing into a 2008 Macbook is not. In some ways, these activities seem pretty much the same to me – they involve the constant erasure of bad ideas.
JSR: Can you describe the very early years when you were forming St. Johnny, and you were roommates with Dave Baker and bandmates withHartford Grasshopper? The stories I’ve heard remind me of living with John Devries in Poughkeepsie, where I apprenticed under Agitpop and Cellophane, incubated Hopewell, and got involved with Mercury Rev., which is to say, total chaos. What pushed you forward? How did you escape the chaos and make it to the big city? Music?
BW: Growing up, the key idea I learned from books, magazines, film was that all the best musicians and writers were insane, and they lived as outcasts on the margins of society. When I developed an ambition to be a rock musician, the first thing I did was try to become like the people I’d read about. As if a curse had been placed on me, I took Johnny Thunders as my role model. Naturally, I tried to find others who had similar interests. I moved to the nearest city – Hartford. I put an ad in a local ‘arts’ newspaper – “William Burroughs-style bassist wanted”. Grasshopper answered. He was working as a court reporter in Hartford and divided his time between there and Upstate New York, where he and the other members of Mercury Rev were working on Yerself is Steam. He played bass for a while in a nascent version of St. Johnny before disappearing (I learned of his departure from the note he left under the windshield wipers of my Chevy Nova) to go on tour with the Flaming Lips as their ‘lighting and explosives’ technician. Unlike myself, he was a college graduate and had a greater knowledge of music, film, and literature than I did, and his influence on me was not trivial. He eventually moved to NYC, I followed not long after, eventually landing in an apartment in Carroll Gardens with his bandmate Dave Baker. In those days (early 1990s), I was a terrible roommate. Evidence of this can be found written on the inside back cover of one of the books (Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty) I purchased around that time: 1) A man can never really know a woman, he can only pursue her indefinitely. 2) My musical instruments are razorblades that leave wounds on my body. 3) These wounds are the aesthetic models for my music. 4) My music is filled with hidden holes. 5) Things left out (the holes) are as important as what remains.
Bolano wrote in Savage Detectives: We were spectral figures, on whom you wouldn’t dwell at length without turning away. It is a nice description of my friends and I at that time…
JSR: That reminds me. I found your copy of Bolano’s Distant Star when I moved, I swore to return it, and one day I will. Glad you mention those holes; that’s a good way to describe a distinction I loosely subscribe to, that there are two kinds of creative people: negators and cheerleaders. Both are generative, though negators rely more on preventing or removing what doesn’t work. Discernment is central to the process. I’m married to an incredible negator that makes a fine film editor as a result, and I usually partner up with them creatively when I partner up at all. I require them to sift through the sheer amount of crap that I, a cheerleader, am always swept up in. I used to outsource a lot of my discernment to you, arriving in your kitchen stoked on a dozen ideas about all manner of everything, and you’d weigh in, reliably. It’s the case with many negators that they would never make or release anything if they didn’t work with a cheerleader. So, both sides of the coin have their merits. My creative relationship with Justin (younger brother and frontperson to the very amazing Silent League) is emblematic of my theory. He kept me in check, and I made sure he released things and had content to play with. I’m using some hyperbole here to make a point because of course he generates content on his own, and I am able to cut things. It’s more of an orientation than a hard and fast rule. Would you say your aesthetic sensibility relies on discernment?
BW: I’ve never been smart enough to have an aesthetic. My goal is usually: try to create something that does not make me ashamed or want to blow my brains out after playback or re-reading.
JSR: Has having a family changed or cemented your worldview?
BW: Christopher Lasch once said: a parent looks at the world and all its events in the darkest possible light. Deep pessimism and rage are feelings I experience every day. I’ve never known a more sinister time than the time we live in now.
JSR: Another important marker, I think, is when I started hearing barroom piano bounce off the wall of the building behind ours. Instead of electric guitars. It provided a soundtrack to the building’s bathrooms, all situated in the back of our apartments. You serenaded us all. Happily, you bequeathed that creaky old thing to Chuck Davis and me, and I’m staring at it while I type this. It’s the sound of your William Carlos Whitten records, some of the finest rock music ever made, in my opinion, ragged, dignified, and mastered to perfection by our old pal Dave Fridmann. A perfect third act to your musical legacy.
BW: In 2008, someone from Our Lady of Mt. Carmel on N.8th Street left a perfectly good upright piano on the curb. Incredibly, our mutual friends Kenneth Zoran Curwood and Adam Marnie put it on a pair of skateboards and wheeled it four blocks to my apartment. Luckily I lived on the first floor. I’m an autodidact in all things and thus completely self-taught when it comes to the piano, and naturally, play it all wrong like an aphasic chimpanzee. To me, my piano is the black monolith at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey. When someone who can actually play a piano comes over to my house and unleashes all the magic stored within it – it’s always leaves me stunned, amazed. As a side note, I’ve always had ambivalent relationships with musical instruments. My piano has never been tuned, I’ve only ever owned cheap, barely functional guitars. All my gear – recording devices, pre-amps, guitar amps, and effects, the computer I’m writing on now – are usually half broken and on their last legs.
JSR: You and I subscribe to the same school when it comes to gear. My guitar tone depends on what pedals are discarded or forgotten by other players in the rehearsal space. The people that can afford really nice guitars are generally not the people who create music. But beyond all that, crappy gear is a form of limitation. Of boundaries. Which, as I get older, I realize is one of the most important aspects of the creative process.
I remember being handed a leaflet or missalette at a St. Johnny show- maybe at the Mercury Lounge or the old Knitting Factory- that was kind of a zine of your writing, which read like William Burroughs in my memory. Did they pre-date the band? Had you always been writing them? Care to describe what you were writing back then?
BW: I don’t remember, lol, and I regret the enormous influence William Burroughs (a pedophile and murderer) had on my life. I should have been reading Proust or Leopardi! The Beat Generation was a psyop! What a waste! Haha!
JSR: The Beat Generation is basically a dorm room poster at this point. Speaking of psyops…do you think the post-Nirvana-1990s indie rock explosion, which we were both part of, was a psyop?
BW: If it was a psyop, what would the goal have been? To transform (in tandem with other cultural engineering projects) the population of the West into solipsistic, nihilistic, porn-addicted drug-takers, incapable of reading a book or watching a film in its entirety, compelled to stare helplessly at electronic devices 20 hours a day while fulfilling their role as the world’s consumer of last resort? Is there a clear trajectory from Kurt Cobain to the Strokes to Occupy Wall Street…and then…to Bernie Sanders and AOC advocating for vax mandates and nuclear war with Russia? Was/is Williamsburg, Brooklyn a CIA outpost, a Bermuda Triangle of transhumanist-mind-control-pseudo-left-lifestyle politics?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯…
Bill Whitten has written a book called BRUTES and recorded many albums.
By Josh Boardman
Now I will prove the nonexistence of God. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not an atheist. I believe in His nonexistence. The language is better you see. I believe in gravity the same way. Relational nonexistence.
This is a good road to go fast down. The boy who lived down the street had stolen his dad’s pickup and I thought this was a brilliant thing to push. The engine growled down the straightaway and before spitting onto the main road my grandparents’ subdivision abruptly doglegged around a blue spruce. The tree drifted leftwise behind the windshield. The passenger window crumpled against the ground. Pineneedles partied into the cab.
The spruce caught our fall. Climbing out the driver’s side window I didn’t remember going over. The last five minutes of my life blurred like a long exposure. Sticky dripped down the tips of my fingers. A hollowness opened inside of me as if I had undergone some violent transformation, a paradigm shift, the way zealots describe epiphany. The other boy will be crying. Holy.
Last week I talked to my mother on the phone. We do this as she gets older—always me placing the call on my way between this errand and that. Last week I was talking to her about I don’t know what (a book? a cactus? wildlife she sees outside?) when she said it’s been too hard—she wouldn’t want to live her life a second time.
A little failure before moving on to other topics. A failure of eternal return.
Maybe we were talking about the book I’m writing. A novel about my brother’s death and our grief after his passing. I’ve worked a year and a half always fearing that it may be too revealing of her as a person—she was my first reader. Unrelated conversation—she told me she wouldn’t have made it through that trying time if not for God. This has become a refrain.
I wonder if she would still cling to God if she hadn’t lost so much. Meanwhile I wonder if my dismissal of her belief is a surer way of forgetting my own hardship.
I turned 33 this year. The age Jesus was crucified. All dwellers in heaven remain 33 years old. Dante wrote 33 cantos to Paradise. Both of the previous entries in the Divine Comedy comprise 34 because they are unheavenly—I have such a small window.
I haven’t gotten very far into the Bible yet but my mother is overjoyed. She shipped a fauxleather New Catholic Edition, the language updated for modern comprehension. When Rachel steals Laban’s household gods and hides them in her saddlebags she declines to climb down because she “is having [her] periods.”
King James—“the custom of women is upon me.”
I am asked to choose between vernacular and poetry. Even Dante brought dowdy Italian to a work of heaven and hell. Like a visit from Aunt Flo. I’m not sure if the Hebrew is euphemistic or not—I assume it is.
I am incapable of choosing between two opposites. Periods or the custom. Hard life or easy. Belief or disbelief. I feel helpless in their binary glare.
My father changed religions as often as his father changed hats. We’ll get to my father in a minute. But first—
Hats.
People don’t wear hats anymore. Men will wear them once they start to bald but I’m not talking about that. Pick up a book written in the 50s and try to picture the hats so frequently invoked. Imagine the skittering things, pregnant with present nonexistence.
My grandfather (one of those who used to wear hats) died mere months after my grandma. A sixpack nightly in the interim. Maybe he went to church. I doubt it. He died and we cleared out his estate ourselves.
I was between highschool and college. I had just been released from the hospital. I consumed a cocktail of drugs every morning that set my stomach in motion. Atavan. Zoloft. Willing or unwilling. Nexium. Lithium. Another psychoactive I can’t remember. Healthy or unhealthy. A real disembodied fusion on opposites.
I worked my way through my grandfather’s bookshelves to the bedroom closet with my mother. The spare room where I spent every summer growing up. She was mouthing prayers as we reached the door. I stopped with my hand on the knob, noticing.
What are you saying?
I didn’t know what we had to be afraid of. I didn’t know my grandfather and my father and I all share the same indecision about the most important aspects of our lives.
We opened up the closet door—O God my mother moaned—
A wall of hatboxes toppled across the floor.
Panamas boaters stetsons fedoras ushankas ballcaps newsboys westerns buckets porkpies homburgs stormy kromers sunhats beanies bowlers/derbies ascots watchcaps berets tam-o-shanters visors deerstalkers tophats watersports floppies balaclavas trappers raccoontails bretons stingybrims campaigns gamblers mariners stovepipes 5-panels 8-pieces mortarboards a party hat fascinators cloches cocktail scarves pillboxes—
My father is a man of religious excess. Before I was born it was evangelical (my older brother calls it not pleasant). Most lately Catholic—though he has been characteristically unimpressed with the infallibility of the Pope. He recently pivoted to a radical sect known as the Society of Saint Pius X. When I was young I walked in on him (shame in my guts blush high on my cheeks) meditating.
As many hats as my grandfather hoarded my father gathered religions. The same ambivalence of faith swapped one denomination for another. A man who owns many hats believes in the efficacy of none. I never would’ve made it through that trying time if not for x.
Why do we Americans have such incapacity for suffering? I catch cold and I’m incapacitated for days. Fog rolls down on my mind. Once I stood for something but I no longer do—I chase anything for relief. I buy a watch imported from Switzerland. A pair of Italian leather shoes. A hunting jacket that’s dear. If I were of my grandfather’s generation I would visit the haberdashery to procure a hatbox of my own. A sniffle can be dangerous if you have a little money in your pocket.
When I was young and stupid I called myself an atheist. Even then I was more decisive than I am today. God, Abraham’s original beard, who crackles in the embers of a neverconsumed shrub. If I couldn’t hear His voice then He didn’t exist for me. If I wasn’t one of His Chosen People any belief at all was impossible.
Come closer now prodigal atheists—hear my whisper. I don’t want to convince you of the floating presence of a cartoon beard. An image of the Higher has no use when so concrete. I want you to discern your belief as clearly as a Christian’s. A little closer sweet mouse . . . let’s keep this between us. I don’t want to disgrace God and my country. You know I love them so.
God has grown weak. We are so removed from the tribesmen of Abraham that He no longer approaches us in the robes of three men to warn us of our safety. “God is dead. We have killed him”— and his absence we plated in 24 karats. The cross of history bends towards belief. You can’t disbelieve something that exists nakedly before your very eyes—and the value of currency is as invisible as gravity or God.
Nonexistence hangs heavy. Without privation there is nothing. My mother knows the weight of what’s gone—we learned the hard way. Hard life makes believers of us all.
My father thought my grandparents’ house would never sell for its unseemliness, so he tore up every tree in the yard. The white pine in the center of the front—yanked. The skinny spruce at the foot of the driveway—timber. The rosebush in the elbow between the front door and my window—everything must go.
Blue spruce on the corner of the lot. Maybe it was town ordinance but treecutters had shimmied the middle branches off so passing cars could see through. The remaining branches formed a skirt that is still dented from where it caught me as a child. In her pinecone paunch a marble rabbit crouched beside a tortoise. A fox leered down the seat that separated them.
No metaphor. No religious conversation. When my father finished clearing the estate a large stump was left and that was all.
Like the children’s book the treestump invites me to rest. I am not an old man but I need its generosity. God’s voice does not whisper through the leaves nor croak from vernal pools. It does not echo in the hollow between my eardrums. We are too distant for that.
I sit and look at my hands. They appear before me as two strange worms affixed to my body. They wriggle without permission. They clench in defense from me. I look past the foreign body I see the ravine I see the martyr trees I see the leaves of the branches of the trees. Nothing moves. Breath picks up but the world stands still.
In a single moment I float again in the blurred memory before the tree caught my fall. A woman rushes to the road and hovers around the wreck as we climb free. I do not recognize her at first—she resembles my mother only she is so much younger. There is no birdsong nor wind nor hum from the highway. Normal neighborhood sounds fold up into the skirt of the tree that’s gone.
The woman’s tears are hysterical—that’s the first thing I hear. They mingle with the machinery of the world and then life crashes back in. Blood flows down my hands a ringing splits my ears that lets me know I have returned. My mother looks like herself again—her fists beat my chest and exhort me Don’t. You. Ever. Ever. Do. That. Ever. Again.
I have felt the suck of the void. I have leavened in its peace. The lightest wind brushes me aside. The basest inconvenience. My suffering is too great! God no longer warns us of our fathers—the hats they wore, the trees they tore up.
Everything shimmers. Nothing doesn’t hurt. There is God and He is not for us.
****
Josh Boardman is from Michigan. He is the author of the chapbook Plantain (West Vine Press, 2018) and conducted the Latin translation project We, Romans (2015). His stories have appeared in journals such as New York Tyrant, Catapult, and Dandruff Magazine. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he is working on his first novel and a collection of stories about his hometown.
By Graham Irvin
An old friend of mine sold pills and snorted heroin and worked third shift at a warehouse in Salisbury. He was an okay guy. He was always around to party. And he was pretty good at skateboarding too.
When we first met he’d just started dating this girl and was in love with her. When she was in the same room as him she sat in his lap. When she was gone he talked about her constantly. He wanted to do everything with her. He wanted to experience the outer limits of pleasure. He told me, “She put her pinky in my butt man. She was just down there playing around and it happened. And I liked it.” It surprised me. I’ll be honest. Everything else about him made me believe he wouldn’t want a pinky anywhere near his butt. He seemed like a guy who would hate the idea of a pinky in his butt. Plus he ended by saying, “I’m not gay or nothing though,” which made it all the more surprising that he told me at all. But I was happy. He was experiencing new things in life. Romantically. It seemed structurally important to him at the time. It helped him grow.
His girlfriend cheated on him not long after that. Maybe with his roommate. I don’t remember. Once his roommate told me, before my friend found out his girl cheated on him, “Dude she was flirting with me hard when we were alone the other day. She was touching my chest and playing with my hair. It was wild.” That roommate lied a lot though. It’s hard to know what’s true. Part of me thinks the roommate just wanted people to think he could take my friend’s girl if he really tried. It was important people knew she chose the other guy only because he wasn’t interested.
She did cheat on my friend though. I know for sure that happened because the next week he threw a big party and got super fucked up. He took his pills and snorted his heroin and took off his shift at the warehouse in Salisbury and funneled beer after beer after beer.
That’s another thing that surprised me about my friend. He only drank beer with a beer funnel. He hated the taste of beer so bad he wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. Everything about a guy who sells pills and snorts heroin would make me believe he enjoyed the taste of beer. Or at least tolerated the taste of beer. I guess what I mean is he wasn’t picky about taking pills or snorting heroin so why would he need a special tool to make sure he didn’t throw up his beer?
At the party after he got super fucked up he disappeared to his room and came back with a gun. A Glock 43 9mm. He started waving it around. Showing it to people. Putting it to his head. “Cheat on this,” he said a few times with the gun pointed at the door. As if she was on the way. He even called and put her on speakerphone. He pointed the gun at the phone. He told her to come over but someone yelled, “No.”
Everyone had had enough. His roommate took the phone and ended the call. He took my friend aside and said, “She’s not worth it, dude. Don’t let her get to you like this. Just take the gun back to your room and go to sleep.” So my friend went back to his room and put the Glock 43 9mm under his pillow. And then he took another pill. Then he snorted some more heroin. And funneled a beer. The party continued.
I couldn’t say where that guy is now. That wasn’t the last time I saw him. A few months later we did coke together and he kickflipped a 5 stair at the high school near his house. I still have the video on my phone. But it’s been at least 6 years since I’ve seen him. I always liked his roommate more.
My friend with the Glock 43 9mm who sold pills and snorted heroin also had a twin brother. His brother always joked about being the more attractive twin, which pissed my friend off, but I couldn’t really tell the difference. That was probably the joke. The brother was somewhat better with women than my friend. He was a father and, though they’d divorced a year after getting married, the mother of his child was both attractive and interesting and faithful before their split.
My friend’s brother didn’t sell pills or own a gun because, during the time I knew him, he was trying to be a good father. The mother of his kid had full custody because even though he didn’t sell pills or own a gun he did occasionally use heroin. And he shot up too. Which, though it might not seem like it, is a lot more serious in the heroin user community. Shooting heroin is serious shit. And the last time he shot up he passed out while in his car. Which rolled into another car. And the other car was a cop. My friend’s brother went to jail for a bit and decided he’d just snort heroin but in the eyes of the court that didn’t make him a better father.
He was at the party too. The one his brother threw to get over his girlfriend. He drank some beers, normally, and took some pills and snorted some heroin but when the Glock 43 9mm came out he said something like, “hey man you know I’m on parole.”
Last I heard his ex-wife was remarried and had another baby. His daughter would be about 10 and, whether he was still fighting for it, he did not have shared custody of her.
But, like I said before, nothing bad happened with the gun. I’m sure if I saw him again, if he remembered me, if he’s even still alive, we could recall happily that night. The night the gun came out. Because hey, at least no one got shot. That’s got to be worth something.
Right?
try this next time
you’re at a bar
tell a joke
to the person
closest to you
and if they don’t laugh
tell them
“I have a gun”
if the person
at the bar
still doesn’t laugh
tell them
“I’m on heroin”
if the person
at the bar
still isn’t laughing
lean real close
and say
“my gf put her pinky
“in my butt”
*****
Graham Irvin lives in Philadelphia. Some of his writing has been in Joyland, The Nervous Breakdown, and Misery Tourism. His book Liver Mush was published by Back Patio Press.
By Sam Berman
A normal sized rabbit gave birth to a 100-foot rabbit off Palomino Avenue. The rabbit did not come out that size. It came out little, pink and soft like something out of a magic kit. It was later the rabbit grew ten feet a week for ten weeks and then stopped growing. Naturally, the German shepherds in the neighborhood were concerned. As were the pit bulls, the border collies, and the little dog that belonged to the cop’s girlfriend down the street, Chewy, who had lost a paw when the lady’s boyfriend before the cop backed his motorcycle down their long, turning driveway and ran it over.
Your dog had recently passed so you didn’t mind the rabbit so much.
Your wife and kids felt different.
“It could kill us,” your wife said while she scrolled on her phone.
“So could a killer,” you said, in that dickish way you tended to offer up.
The rabbit, you thought, was cool. Was exciting. And your wife had slept with Jesse Fali, who she knew from doing A Raisin in the Sun at summer stock in the Berkshires, and Jesse wrote scripts for zombie show where the real monsters ended up being the humans all along––so, yes, in a way––in your little-bit-of-a-dickish way, you liked that your wife was scared of the 100-rabbit off Palomino Avenue.
Your daughter though—the one you really understand–you hate that she hated the rabbit. Even though it really wasn’t the sight of the rabbit. No. It was…well, she couldn’t stand the extra noise. She hated extra noise, loud noise, any noise. And that summer was already so loud.
With the wailing of the good and bad summer bugs.
The motorcycles popping off Hudson Street.
And the rabbit: with his deep breaths on those hot, cloudless days. Certainly, even you could admit that his sneezes were unpleasant. All those different types of 100-foot rabbit sneezes: the sneezes like a flood siren; the sneezes like the sudden of a bullwhip; and that sneeze, once, so loud, you feared the earth finally cracked and broke open, and you were too late to save your family from the ground widening below them.
–
Before the rabbit you had a simple thing going. Once: a bumble bee landed on your daughter’s birthday cake. Always: your foot doctor had elegant handwriting. And from time-to-time: there was lightning you could smell through the screen window. Having once lived as badly as you once lived, you began to take such delight in your new and unspectacular life. Being boring felt so good to you; paying the hundred and twenty-nine dollars a month so that your kids could enjoy Menard’s effortless green grass; all the cable channels you never even clicked on; and DraftKings loaded onto your cellphone so you could bet college football with your brother every Saturday.
In the early mornings–before you left for work and before your wife slept with Jesse Fali– she would kiss your forehead. “Come home rich or don’t come home at all,” she’d say with her soft, sleepy laugh. And you’d always hated that joke so much. You had. Because you never really did feel like quite enough. Or you felt like she felt like she deserved a good deal more than you. And it didn’t help that before the twins were born your wife had left you a letter in the bathroom that either a friend, or a lover, or her sister had insisted she write. The letter explained that you were a good man, but not a man of consequence in the ways that really mattered. And that you could not excite her in ways she really wanted to be excited. And that you could not look at her in the ways she dreamt of being looked at–you could not see her how she needed to be seen.
But then you had the girls
And your wife didn’t leave.
And you two never spoke about the letter.
And so soon later the girls had turned ten: and you were watching them try on different styles of swimsuits in the basement in an attempt to create some type of water scene.
They told you they were making a mermaid movie.
Having just seen a mermaid movie themselves the night prior.
They offered: that mermaid movies were the future of movies, and you needed to watch them make their movie because you’d seen movies and understand how they were supposed to look.
“Watch,” they kept telling you. “Watch us.”
Their beach towels unfurled in separate corners of the basement.
Their big pillows taped with magazine covers like shark fins.
“Ten more minutes,” you’d told them. “Then it’s sleep.”
But the girls didn’t listen. Because no one ever listened; the shoe-worn carpet in the living room was proof of that. You would not un-often curse yourself for not having the big men that came in to refinish the fireplace remove their shoes before working. You’d asked them politely once or twice to remove their boots, and once or twice they had over the course of that week. But then they didn’t. They stopped. You didn’t ask again because you just wanted the men to go. So, there was a track, thinned like the path of well-used hiking trail. The worn nylon carpet proof like a boot against your throat, that you weren’t the kind of man that other men had interest in listening to.
–
The building was only a half mile away so you and the girls would walk over. It was one of your grand, splendid plans: to teach them something about civil service. About the love of thy neighbor. On the walk you’d ask the girls questions about their friends and their school and their futures. And before long the three of you would be in front of the brick building with the gray sign and the almost-yellow letters that read: Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired.
***
Because you understood the magic of an empty interstate: in the winter you’d take your breaks at Southland Oasis, a doughnut shop above the snowy highway. You would drink your coffee with Hari, whose chewed-up work pants made a funny sound as he talked about the president, about NATO forces and kill squads, and then bemoaned the immiseration of the middle class and explained that taxes–property and income–in other countries would be an act of war! A call to arms! The final treason of a failing democracy.
In truth, Hari had been your sponsor during the tough years. And he’d gotten you this job that wasn’t great but was still a job. And you had love for Hari, because even though he primarily only talked to you about his talk-radio insanities, that didn’t change the fact that the night you were in that parking garage off Lawrence, your kit fully loaded, your arm tied off and your main-vein purple and begging for some action, it was Hari you called. Hari. And it was Hari who came down and took you to the diner across from the post office. He told you the government was subsidizing the growth of Hormone imbalanced eggs. Which made you laugh right then so loud that you didn’t even notice he was crushing your kit with his boot under the table.
So.
It was Hari who kept you laughing long enough to keep you alive.
“The end of Babylon,” Hari would say, a semitruck passing underfoot.
“Maybe,” you’d say. “Maybe…But, then what is it we’re doing…working at the toll booths?”
“Not work,” Hari would reply, thinking, blinking, gulping. “We’re in the first wave, buddy.”
***
When the rabbit first grew tall, the news cameras came. As did the government scientists with their walkie talkies, their calipers, their shiny tranquilizer guns with exacting red dots that glowed on top of their barrels. They did not shoot the rabbit, electing to instead bring in a crane and build the scaffolding right there in the middle of the lawn.
They shined floodlights in the rabbit’s eyes.
They shooed away chimney bats that had snuck in beneath the rabbit’s big ears.
They found and then brought in a stethoscope the size of a dinnerplate and listened to the thrum of his big rabbit heart.
Of course, some people came and prayed.
It only made sense that the rabbit must be God.
At the very least a godsend.
After a year or so, the rabbit no longer seemed to be a cool thing. At first, you liked that the rabbit struck fear in your wife–who’d slept with Jesse Fali, and who needed to be punished–but after a string of panic attacks for which you had to take her to the emergency room at Saint Joseph’s, you were past the retribution phase of her infidelity, now there was only the painful part; the part where maybe-it-was-a-little-bit-your-fault part.
The meaty part.
Everything about the 100-foot rabbit became quite a nuisance: the sight of the rabbit, the thought of the rabbit, the rabbit’s sneezes that rattled the wine glasses. Everything. All of it. You
were over it. He was now just some big dumb thing that kept the girls awake. And–and! Another thing you hadn’t anticipated was how the 100-foot rabbit had invited the hopeful: arriving with their prayer beads and wax candles bearing the image of Saint Guadalupe. You hated how crowded the block had become, all with people all waiting for the rabbit to do something. To reveal some 100-foot rabbit revelation: a mass healing, or a mass punishment. With their wheelchairs leaving tracks across your lawn. And your garbage bin already full of used medical supplies––evidence that the sick that had begun squatting in your alleyway, your bushes––as you struggled to find a resting spot for your empty milk jug amongst the overfilled colostomy bags, needle plungers, and adult diapers side-spun into neat bushels. Up against a single trash bin you saw a prosthetic leg with the sock and sneaker still on the foot. There were faded stickers lining the thigh of the leg, mostly of breweries and alehouses from a town outside of Dallas. Whoever’s leg it was had come a long way; a long to see a rabbit. It went on this way for many more months, almost a year.
But in the end the rabbit did nothing.
No healing. No, he only blinked.
–
Berkshire Hathaway bought the rabbit, okay.
And no one was allowed to touch or look or speak to the rabbit. There was a sign. Motion lights. Security cameras just in case the high school kids came by with their spray-paint.
***
Now, even though it’s forbidden to deviate from the planned route, when you and the girls volunteer to walk the blind, you will sometimes walk whatever student you are assigned to that day to the corner opposite the 100-foot rabbit. Young or old, you have the girls take them by the hand as you explain the rabbit’s eyes are black like river stones. Like whirlpools at midnight. And then you tell your student that the rabbit never really moves. You tell him he just stands like an uninterested goliath, the sun and wind and birds taking turns moving over him. You say, “You’re really not missing a single thing with this fucker. Not a thing.” You explain that all he does is just stand, pretty much still unless he’s sneezing, and that all the people that come to watch him do the same thing: they stand, pretty much still behind the wire fence that Berkshire Hathaway has installed and watch him. You offer the insight that, “Maybe the rabbit is more a statue… a totem. Maybe one day he’ll just kill us all.” And then you go on to explain to your student about your wife–and how you still, unfortunately, love her. And how she wakes up crying from the middle of her dreams and tells you that in the dream, which is actually more of a nightmare, that the rabbit has turned on her, on you, on the kind and simple denizens of your town.
Then you ask the blind student––while your daughters practice their somersaults on the lawn behind you––really, what kind of God would ultimately betray us? Not that you believe in God, but if there is one–what the heck? This is how he spends his time? Just asking the questions makes you wonder why you no longer get asked to play harmonica with Victor’s band at The Catbird on Fridays? Did you do something?
Did you bother someone? You tell your student, “Shot glasses had been broken at The Catbird. Pool cues had been spun and snapped and guitar players’ girlfriends had stormed out raging and tearful. It was The Catbird. A rock-n-roll club, man. Antics were part of the job description!”
Your student holds his hands over his eyes and lets out a huffing noise.
You continue: “Really, what had I done?”
“I don’t know man,” says your student. “I wasn’t there.”
“Am I that truly unlovable to this big fucking world?”
You both stand in silence, the sun beating down on your bare necks.
High above the shambling oak trees, the rabbit looms like some wonderous bug from a prehistoric or alien world. He blinks and you can see a quiver between his eyes like the way the daughter you know best sometimes quivers between her eyes before she starts crying. Behind the rabbit there are still no clouds, but two gentle contrails where the Air Force pilots had been just a few minutes before. Your student sighs once more. Once more. Then Your daughters yell, “Look at these,” And then tumble forward into a small clearing, laying on their backs as their dizziness subsides.
“Maybe the rabbit is here for blood,” says your student, wiping sweat from his chin. “To dwell is so pointless. But now I’m hot and I’m tired, man. I just want to get back. Walk me half-way, okay man? I’ll go the rest of the way on my own.”
******
Sam Berman is a short story writer who lives in Chicago and works at Lake Front Medical with Nancy & Andrew & Reuben. They are terrific coworkers. He has had his work published in Maudlin House, The Masters Review, D.F.L. Lit, Hobart, Illuminations, The Fourth River, Smokelong Quarterly, and recently won Forever Magazine’s Unconventional Love Stories competition. He was selected as runner-up in The Kenyon Review’s 2022 Non-Fiction Competition as well as short listed for the 2022 Halifax Ranch prize and the ILS Fiction Prize. He has forthcoming work in Expat Press, Craft Magazine and Rejection Letters, among others.
By Aaron Burch, D.T. Robbins, and Kevin Maloney
I. LOVE IS A LIFE TAKER
I knew soon as I saw him this guy was going to give me trouble. Same as I knew soon as X told me about James at work they were going to have an affair; same as I knew my dad would be of no help when I called for advice but I did anyway, if only so I could feel mad at him instead of myself; same as I knew soon as the guy at REI started answering my questions about which tent was best I’d buy whichever one he recommended, same as I knew I’d never take that tent out of its box but I liked the idea of myself as a guy who threw a tent into his trunk and set out on an adventure and I was toying with the idea of becoming different ideas of myself; same as I knew it was a bad idea to go to that ATM back near the bathrooms and withdraw as much it would let me, same as I knew I would lose it all same as I’d lost everything I’d walked into the casino with but, fuck it, why give up on letting things go now; same as I knew soon as I saw this bar from the road that nothing good could come from stopping here, same I knew they’d have my heartsongs on the jukebox, and that was what I needed — not a new tent, not some emotional fatherly advice, not one more turn as shooter while everyone around the table cheered me on, but a little time in a dive bar in a town I’d never been in finding new ways to lose things I didn’t know I had.
I ordered a bourbon and coke, threw it back like it was a shot, set the glass down on the counter like placing a baby bird back in the nest it fell out of. Ordered another, carried it with me to the juke.
He was already there, like waiting for me. And he was first, fine, whatever. It’s true. No big deal. I just wanted to queue up something next, before anyone else got in line or he loaded up a whole night’s worth. It’s happened before. Next thing you know, it’s last call and you never even got your songs, just threw away more money at problems that never went away. So, sure, I looked over his shoulder, but I wasn’t trying to monitor his choices or anything. I didn’t give a shit what he played, but I was curious. Couldn’t help myself. Curiosity killed the growing pile of bad ideas, I guess.
This guy turned around, saw me spying.
“You have a problem, shithead?”
“I’ve got lots of problems,” I said. I wasn’t trying to be clever. It just came out. I think I’d been needing to hear myself say it out loud. For someone else to hear me say it. To make my confession.
“This will help you feel better,” the guy said, and gave me the most sincere, genuine smile I could remember being on the receiving end of. It broke my heart.
I looked at the juke, and at the very instant I saw that he’d cued up “Scar Tissue,” I heard him say, “People can say whatever they want, but John Frusciante is the heart and soul of the Chili Peppers.”
Jesus goddam fuckin’ shit. A Frusciante guy?
II. THE FRUSCIANTE GUY
I was sitting at the bar, drinking my third or fourth pint since the doctors pumped the Vicodin and Smirnoff out of my stomach. I’d just gotten out of the hospital. Technically, I wasn’t discharged. My right arm still had a plastic tube coming out of it. It was dribbling blood all over the counter. It didn’t matter. The patron to my left kept flicking a cigarette lighter under his knuckle hair, and the bartender, from what I’d overheard, had a warrant out for his arrest for armed robbery. This was the kind of establishment where a little blood on the counter was expected.
I noticed a jukebox in the corner and recalled an article I’d read recently while doing a stint in Washoe County Penitentiary. It was about the healing power of music. A team of sadists masquerading as scientist had cut the arms and legs off a hundred innocent geckos, then measured their ability to regenerate limbs while listening to Mozart. Their conclusion was that Mozart helped. The scientists received an award. Not a word about the havoc they’d wreaked on those terrified amphibians.
I needed something like that. Not Mozart, but the Red Hot Chili Peppers. In particular, the song where Anthony Kiedis sings about living under a bridge shooting heroin all day, then gets an idea and puts a sock on his penis and becomes a millionaire with a house in Malibu and six model girlfriends. I wondered if something like that could happen to me.
I walked over to the jukebox and was fishing around in my hospital gown, hoping to find some money, when a guy in a Seattle Mariners cap walked up behind me and breathed down my exposed neck like he was going to goose me or jam a knife into my kidney.
I spun around and said, “You gotta problem, shithead?”
“I have a lot of problems,” he said, wiping his nose.
I laughed. He was clean-shaven and wearing Blundstones. He had all his teeth. The only problem he had was deciding whether to spend his ill-gotten tech money on cryptocurrency or at an all-inclusive eco-resort in Papua New Guinea.
“Well, this’ll make you feel better,” I said and queued up “Scar Tissue” on the Wurlitzer. I stood back triumphantly, but I hadn’t put any money in it. The machine only responded to capitalist contributions.
I tried to explain my situation… about Mozart and geckos and John Frusciante, who spent a decade shooting heroin and talking to ghosts, then got sober and recorded the greatest album of all time.
Seattle wasn’t listening. He pushed past me, dropped a quarter in the jukebox, and pressed a series of buttons that summoned “Say It Ain’t So” by Weezer.
There have been many terrible songs written by many terrible bands since man first banged two stones together and called it music, but somehow this Bitcoin bro picked the worst one.
Bad feelings seized me. I remembered the hospital giving me medicine that was supposed to make me sleepy, but I was seized by a tremendous energy. I grabbed an empty bottle off a nearby table and cracked it over Seattle’s head.
Instead of falling to the floor like a regular person, he just stood there staring at me, trying to fathom what had happened. He opened his mouth to say something as blood ran into his eye.
“You cock-rock motherfucker,” he whispered and took a swing.
It was the strangest thing. I dodged his punch, but the drugs I was on made it so that only my mind moved to the left, while my body remained in place. My face took the full force of the punch. I watched myself fall to the floor.
Seattle started dancing. He was completely insane. Maybe he had real problems after all.
III. Imprints of Others
After too much codeine, the original owner of the bar fell asleep at the wheel and barreled into a center divider. When his wife signed the bar over to me, she lamented he was unconscious as the flames ate him away. Some women want you to die twice. Some men deserve it. If you ask my ex, she’d concur I was one of them. Long story short, I steer clear of Jacksonville.
These days, the bar is a mural of hopelessness. From the cigarette ash and spilt beer on the counter to the sawdust and dried blood on the floor, this pocket universe is a meat grinder. Yet, desperate souls flood this place every night aiming to untether themselves from fear and insecurity and other lower vibrations and touch something eternal. Not a church or a synagogue or the YMCA. Here. A bar that hasn’t changed the urinal cakes in…who knows how long.
Take these two incandescent assholes for example.
I watched the redhead in the hospital gown spill bare-assed through the doors. He clambered up the barstool and asked for a craft beer. I said we have one IPA. He wanted a taster. It missed his mouth entirely, trickled down his chin like a child at a water fountain. He ordered two pints. He had no money, but I’m the patron saint of the downtrodden. For the next hour or so, he conversed solely with the demons in his mind.
When Mr. Seattle walked through the doors, he looked both ways like he was crossing the fucking road. He ordered a bourbon and coke. No lime. I left two in a shot glass anyhow. When life loses its flavor, I guess it doesn’t matter, does it?
They waltzed around the jukebox, squaring one another up. Under the neon glow of the Bud Light sign, I guessed the redhead was either smiling or baring teeth. Mr. Seattle dropped a quarter in, and some song started playing. I don’t much hear the music anymore. Everything outside of Molina and Hank sounds like broken bottles and muffled sobbing.
A bottle rained down over someone’s head and another person’s fist cracked across the other person’s face. The redhead crumbled like a paper man. Mr. Seattle stood triumphant until a shard of glass went into his calve. He watched blood seep through his khakis like it was happening to someone else. He slunk onto the redhead. They rolled around on the ground like two virgins fucking for the first time.
Mr. Seattle screamed, “You ruined everything!”
The redhead went, “I am the eater of worlds!”
Mr. Seattle yanked what looked to be an IV tube out of the redhead’s arm. Blood sprayed like a geyser. The redhead laughed, maniacal and free. Mr. Seattle got blood in his eye, which accelerated his pure fucking rage. His arms became windmills, missing most of the shots but landing a few that made the redhead go cross-eyed. Still, the redhead seemed to be enjoying himself—ass hanging out, covered in blood and beer, shouting about doing heroin under a bridge. The rest of the bar, its beautiful spectators of brave men who put a single arm out in front of the women for a feigned sense of protection, nodded their heads from the fight to me, the fight to me, the fight to me. I can never have my own problems. Everyone else has to lump their fucking issues in too.
I grabbed them by their clothes and met their eyes. The redhead was dazed. Mr. Seattle blubbered.
“Take this shit outside,” I said, “and work it out. Or don’t fucking come back.”
As I locked the front door at closing, they were sat on the curb outside, sharing a forty and a pack of smokes.
A bar is least lonely when there’s no one in it but you. There are imprints of others who were there before. Memories. Good, evil, human. At some point these memories transmogrify into one being. One ghost. I’ve been riding with the ghost. I’ve been doing whatever he told me.
*******
Aaron Burch, D.T. Robbins, and Kevin Maloney’s collective top three favorite books of the last year are (in alphabetical order) Birds Aren’t Real, The Red-Headed Pilgrim, and Year of the Buffalo.
By Mike Wheaton
Today, as always, I passed the Walmart, Sam’s Club, Lowe’s, Chipotle, and Starbucks just before turning into the parking lot of my one-building community college campus. It’s in a part of Orlando called Lake Nona™. The trademark symbol is real. If I kept driving, I’d pass the high school next to a middle school next to an elementary school next to a Publix shopping center. Hitting a third straight red light, I stuck my hand out the window and wondered if writing a book about my inescapable consumer semi-reality might be my ticket to another school back up north with old buildings and historical plaques next to the doorways.
I’m taking a break from grading in my office on campus now. I made my first-year writing students take a position on the packet of questionable discourse I provided about how—or to what extent, if any—addictive social media use on smartphones plays a role in mental health. Most of their theses so far claim that, basically, the role is huge and the effect is bad. Even with sources to use, as their papers go on, the evidence is mostly anecdotal: it hurts when they share and don’t get many likes, or when others share something and do get hundreds of likes, or when they compare themselves to the curated surface life of the people in posts with hundreds of likes, or those whose numbers extend into the thousands. They feel worse still when they post more in attempt to make up for the disparity and get fewer likes than before in return.
My office on campus has a window. I used to be a substitute teacher, and somehow my much better job is still not enough for me. I sit in my swivel chair with this document on the screen and I’m looking outside at the Applebee’s—oh wait, that’s a Chili’s—and I’m remembering the time I took over a seventh-grade English class for three weeks twelve years ago. This was home in Jersey, before I moved again to Florida. Middle schoolers didn’t have social media accounts then. One day the lesson plan prompted me to teach a short story about kids during the Civil War who pretended to be older so they could fight for their side. They were seeking glory, the idea of which had been propagandized on both sides. The students had trouble understanding this. Why would they sign up to die like that?
I said, Let’s do a poll. How many of you want to be famous one day? Every damn hand in the room shot up. Now keep your hand up if you believe you will become famous. The hands didn’t budge, fingers reaching to the ceiling.
Out the window of my office, I can’t quite see the manmade lake from which this part of the city took its trademark. They’re building a fresh Holiday Inn in my sightline. Now I’m thinking about the class period earlier in the semester before the discourse packet, when I asked for how many students is their smartphone the last thing they see before they sleep and the first thing they see when they wake. Every damn hand in the room shot up.
In this same class, when I asked the students to fill out a form about the credibility and usefulness of a source, a quarter of the students wrote down the number of views a video had on YouTube or the number of shares it received on Twitter. I didn’t even take off points. I get the confusion. I make my little note in the feedback. I know how students can be about their grades. The numbers, more than anything, matter. The numbers, they’re told, are revealing to people with powerful opinions. They don’t matter, except of course they do, because a while ago people decided they did, and it’s probably too late to change since it’s easier to try getting the right numbers or settle into whatever other people believe the numbers do reveal about you.
My phone buzzes face-down on my desk. Little Apple logo shining at me. I flip it—a screen of notifications: missed FaceTime, Amazon receipt in my Gmail, new Bank of America offer, a few likes on Twitter, someone going live on Instagram, a prompt for food from Uber Eats, an episode of Filmspotting for download, a trade in my ESPN fantasy league. I’m struck for a moment by how much my phone screen looks like Lake Nona™, or how much Lake Nona™ looks like my phone screen. All the squares of logos. Disney World, after all, is only fifteen miles west. But I remember, too, years ago when Amy and I rented a room in the lower east side of Manhattan for three weeks. One night, a local told us that decades ago this part of the city was littered with needles on the streets and creeps walking in the shadows, and now cleaned up and sold off, it’s a tourist town. I mean, we were vacationing there. He kind of missed the needles.
Years later, Amy and I bought a single-family pitch-roofed ranch in a part of Orlando with streets that wind through tunnels of live oaks. It predates Disney and affordable AC. When we first drove through, looking for a home, Amy said, I love it. It’s so Old Florida. Each neighborhood in the suburb looked as if preserved from the late 1950’s. The super-highways rumbled farther up the main roads. I liked the area too. It did seem more authentic, but in the context of this sprawl, it was just another brand to choose.
Class in five. I’m not prepared. I can’t write a book about the inescapability of consumer semi-reality anyway without misplacing value on the number of people who, if they don’t buy it, at least know I did. And what to say about the fact really? Congrats, there is quite possibly no such thing as history except what sold. Go for the glory. Quantify me. Inflate my grade.
*******
Michael Wheaton’s writing has appeared in Essay Daily, DIAGRAM, Bending Genres, Rejection Letters, HAD, and other online journals. He edits Autofocusand hosts its podcast, The Lives of Writers. Find links and more at mwheaton.net.