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Issue 4 Issue 4 Fiction

MIDLIFE HARD-ON

By Jon Doughboy

I did four pull-ups in the park and my arms are about to fall off. I’m in decent shape, or so I thought. Three days a week I do a little exercise routine in my basement. Body weight stuff like push-ups and squats. A few dumbbell exercises. I jog when the mood and motivation strike. But pull-ups are another story. Hefting the big hunk of aging meat that is me—my shoulders feel swollen. Like I’ve just been inoculated. But against what? 

I jog to my girlfriend’s parents’ house in the less affluent part of an affluent New Jersey suburb, wheezing past lush, diligently-watered yards and professional-trimmed hedges. The odd raised ranch. My triceps are burning. Cape Cods. My shins are aching too. Stone Victorians. Even my forearms are tight. New bright white farmhouse McMansions with mass-produced timber—ooh, look at the grain! Feels like we’re in Jackson Hole, honey! My girlfriend and company are travelling as a family to the Canary Islands. I declined their invitation. The bill was a bit steep for me, the itinerary a bit tedious, the concept of family a bit strained, so I’m here housesitting. A neighbor walks up with two red mums. “For Nicole. I know she loves mums. I had a funeral last week. A wedding tomorrow. That’s life, right? But they’re with us, aren’t they?” she says, pointing to the sky and then resting her hand on her heart. “My grandfather fell off his motorcycle at 80. Then he developed kidney issues. But he fought, you know? Just like my uncle. We took him off dialysis and he lasted weeks like that. We thought he’d die in days. But life, you know? It wants what it wants.” She goes on like this for a while. Life and death. Funerals and weddings. I get an erection but lean against the door in such a way that she doesn’t notice. This is my midlife crisis, I guess. I can’t afford a Porsche or hair transplants or a mistress so I’m not complaining. Though they happen sometimes at random, without a stimulus. I’ll be cooking oatmeal or aerating the lawn or sitting in traffic listening to a podcast about the Hanseatic League and boing—my cock is practically erupting through my pants. The neighbor leaves eventually. I masturbate quickly in the bathroom. I have to remember to water the mums. 

I meet my childhood friend later for beers. I tell him about my aching shoulders, my midlife erections. He’s married now. Has one kid with a second on the way. They’d been trying for almost two years with joyless, scheduled intercourse. He’d go out to Long Island for work—he’s an electrician in a tiny union and is sometimes the only guy on-site, wiring new supermarkets or big-box stores—and he used FetLife to find all these kinky women. One could only get off when he fisted her while wearing his wedding ring. He said, “I tried to take my ring off once because I felt guilty, you know. I’m not a monster. I felt terrible. But she froze up when I tried to. Stiff as a corpse. So I left it on. But I always wondered what would happen if my ring got lost in there. If I’d need to take her to the hospital. Or rent a metal detector or tie a magnet to a dildo or something.”

“My girlfriend has been very horny lately,” I say. “Some hormonal change. Perimenopause maybe. Not that she didn’t have a sex drive before but now every time we have sex, she wants to have more sex right after. And I tell her I’m old. That she needs to think about the refractory period. Then she takes my soft cock in her mouth just licking it, playing around, and I’m sort of embarrassed it’s soft but also flattered that she wants me or it or us so much and like fifteen minutes later we’re fucking again. I came three times in an hour. I haven’t done that since I was a teenager in heat.”

“Well, I say enjoy it while you can, man. Because we don’t really have sex anymore. It’s just work and parenting and on Sundays I watch football and fuck around on the guitar all day. Lots of Black Sabbath. The riff master.”

He shows me some videos of guitar prodigies on YouTube. Loads of fancy finger work. But the music sounds busy to me. Like they’re playing way too many notes.  

The next day I meet my mom and my sister at a Chinese place for lunch. Mom points to the kitchen and says, “Look, they’ve got actual Chinese people cooking. That’s a good sign. On Queens Boulevard we used to get all-you-can-eat Chinese food for two dollars. Piles of egg rolls. Buckets of lo mein. Now dumplings cost ten bucks. Ten bucks! What happened to this country, huh?”

My sister is telling me war stories from the psyche ward where she works. “The schizophrenic patients aren’t that bad. It’s the bipolar ones you have to watch out for because they get manic. And the drug addicts. They’re disgusting. They’re all criminals with bedbugs and scabies. And so entitled. One of them refused to eat the food in the cafeteria and was screaming ‘my insurance pays for this shit’ meanwhile their insurance is Medicaid so actually my tax dollars pay for it, bitch.”

“Did you say that?” I ask. I admire my sister. She’s very strong. Until she isn’t. Then she’s staying in another psyche ward in another county for a week or two. Meds. Sleep. Repeat.

“No.”

“Ten bucks for dumplings! Dumplings!” My mother says.

My sister goes on: “But one time we had this real piece of shit patient who had cancer and he beat cancer but was back in the ward for something else, it’s a revolving door of nutjobs, and he was screaming, calling all the nurses cunts and saying he had AIDS and trying to spit on us and when we finally restrained him I whispered into his ear, ‘I hope your cancer comes back and kills you’ and you can bet your ass we were cackling about that on our smoke break.”

My mother calls the waiter over. She doesn’t have time for menus and likes the—any—attention. “Do you have a shrimp dish?”

The waiter, a young Asian kid, says, “Yes, many shrimp dishes.”

“With garlic?”

“We have shrimp with garlic sauce.”

And I get an erection. In this dumpy Chinese place while my sister is telling me psyche ward drama and my mother is nagging the waiter about the size of shrimp. Are they big shrimp? Are they prawns? How many shrimp come with the dish?

We order. I excuse myself to masturbate in the filthy bathroom by the fire exit at the end of the hall. There’s no soap so I use the hand sanitizer on the sink. There are dark fingerprints smudged on the wall. When I return to the table, the food is already there. 

“These aren’t prawns,” my mother says, examining a shrimp she’s skewered with a chopstick.

“Did I tell you about the Bulimic girl who was really sweet and read my tarot but had the bones of an old lady because of her eating disorder? She was like sixteen or something but with 80-year-old bones.”

“Ten bucks for dumplings. Unbelievable,” my mother says.

I sit down and take a sip of Coke. My chicken smells like rancid fry oil. My shoulders still hurt.

The next morning the landscapers wake me up. Watering, mowing, seeding. Mornings in the suburbs are noisy with hired labor keeping yards tidy and clean. I lie in my girlfriend’s childhood bed wondering if she lost her virginity in it. If she had her first orgasm in it. Wondering how close the Canary Islands are to Africa. Wondering, remembering. Annalise. A Peruvian pre-law student who was volunteering at the library with me to teach new immigrants how to read. I was there for court-mandated community service. She was there to pad her resume. Afterwards, we’d fuck in my Ford Explorer under a huge, half-dead Catalpa tree at the back of the parking lot. She’s a lawyer now in North Carolina. Practicing law. What am I practicing now? Life? Except you don’t get a free trial. Or maybe you do. I should listen to the podcast I downloaded about karma. I go to the bathroom. I jerk off. I hope the landscapers watered the mums.

Two days later my shoulders and back are less tight. I jog to the park again. Step past the mums, across the tended yard and past the various architectural styles of the affluent houses. I do three pull-ups, four, five. I’m hanging from the bar. I have an erection. My abs are tight, my shoulders. I want to be young again, fucking in the back of a beat-up SUV and thinking about my future. I want dumplings that don’t cost ten bucks. I want money. I want to be on a Spanish beach with my horny girlfriend. I want to have a kid, to teach my kid how to master riffs. I want to be twenty pounds lighter, twenty years younger, twenty times stronger, smarter, better. I want. I don’t want to want. 

But life, you know?

Jon Doughboy is a recovering “literary fiction” writer who now produces “prose entertainments” to pass the time, available for the amusement of none and all @doughboywrites

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Across the Wire Vol. 4

The Dunes

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By Jon Doughboy

The Oregon Coast in the year 2000. The dunes of a new millennium. In the backseat a younger he, high-school dropout, hitchhiking in search of adventure, seeking a sense of purpose, a coherent self, a fine young woman to write poems to and ogle with soulful, sensitive anguish. To worship. The northwest coast of conifer-studded sand, an alien land to the eyes of an east coast teen, child of highways and denuded hills, medians hosting deciduous trees in their death throes, blighted chestnuts and scraggly sumacs adorned with assorted trash. Sprawling condo developments sliding into polluted rivers. George Washington crossed here, no, there, well, also, probably here and don’t forget there. 

NIN is playing. NIN was playing, then. Is playing, now, again, a twenty-three-year-old memory. The girl behind the wheel is singing along and staring in the rearview mirror, locking eyes with him, with the he of then, and singing “I want to fuck you like an animal.” It’s intoxicating, was intoxicating. He was scared. Horny. Aglow in the eyes of someone’s desire. Here is the hangover, still, residual radiation at age forty. But he didn’t like NIN because his friend’s older brother and schizoid drug dealer used to blast them out of waist-high speakers and they had to creep past his room as kids, tiptoeing cartoon spies hung on tenterhooks by his random acts of terror, until they were old enough to creep into the brother’s room to buy an overpriced eighth or take a hit from the gravity bong in a gray mop bucket in the corner, the plastic jug bobbing in it like a maimed apple. 

“I wanna feel you from the inside,” she’s singing, his ride, the owner of the Astrovan, vehicle of choice for rubber tramps and kidnappers alike, trailing rust and coolant and cigarette butts along the Oregon Coast. How did he end up here? Bus from Connecticut to Chicago. Rideshare from Chicago to Billings. Hitching onward from there to Idaho. Three more rides, more drugs, more propositions, to Seattle, then south, some college kids, an old trucker who was obsessed with the lizardmen lying in conspiratorial caves across the southwest on the brink of a mass invasion. Where are these dunes, he’s wondering, was wondering, and the dunes were more than dunes, they were freedom, proof, despite his doubtful parents and even more doubtful teachers, that he could manage himself, handle the world, grab it by the balls and not get shaken loose like stray and feeble lint clinging to its sex-slicked pubic hairs. 

“I want to fuck you like an animal” and he wondered and wonders what it would have felt like, fucking her, being fucked by her. She was thick and young but older than him, nearing twenty so to a sixteen-year-old, mature, experienced. Worldwise, sexwise. Where are these dunes? But her friend in the passenger seat is the one he was attracted to, desirous of. Eighteen, maybe. A fellow dropout, beautiful brown filthy hair, that hippie bounce, crown of leaves and grit and glitter. 

Beyond the dunes, the sea. The Pacific Ocean. He’s never seen it before. Where do the currents lead? How far Hawaii, Japan? What’s beyond beyond? Is Bobby Darin alive and kicking, crooning there?

He’s looking—was looking, the younger him—out the windows, searching for the dunes, avoiding the confident and penetrating glare of the driver. Too much energy, too many hormones, the rush of uncertainty, youth, hope, angsty wonder. He wants to fuck! He wants to feel! Inside, outside. Like a man, an animal, like the ocean eroding the shore. He’s floating above the van—him, the one he’s become, middle-aged, sluggishly juggling debts and regrets—breathing in its fumes, white coolant and burned oil smog billowing out of a pitted muffler, the smoke of a thousand spit-soaked roaches, patchouli, peanut butter, Old English-soaked upholstery. The other, younger him, is restless in the backseat, nervous, looking for the dunes he cannot see, though from these heights, from the bird’s eye of time, they’re clear as day to the older one, undulating beige waves breaking on pine and spruce reefs. His younger self can’t hear the elder version’s urgent croaking. It’s muffled by the passing years. No matter how loud his older self yells. No matter how important or timely his advice. Time is a vacuum. Time is a room, a cell silent save for the click of the door as it locks behind you. Time is and was and will be. 

NIN is blasting. The dunes are coming up. The dunes are here and gone. The lizardmen — who knows? — are thriving in their caves. The sixteen-year-old he is driven on, fueled by lust and pride and fear. The forty-year-old version drifts after him, an irrelevant flutter, weightless as a dream, howling mute warnings from a possible future. Somewhere, somewhen, beyond.

Jon Doughboy is a janitor at the Hrabal School of Embodied Poetics in Prague. Watch him pull some palavers out of the trash @doughboywrites

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Issue 2 Issue 2 Non-Fiction

RESPONSES TO BOOKMARKED TWEETS FROM MASTERPIECES OF JAPAN

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By Jon Doughboy

Responses to Bookmarked Tweets from Masterpieces of Japan

Jon Doughboy

Sailing Boats Forenoon, by Yoshida Hiroshi, 1926

My friend told me junk rigs were easy to repair and therefore the superior sailboat set-up. He told me a lot of things. Had me read up on all sorts of boats, on maritime law and aerodynamics, devouring memoirs from solo-sailors adventuring across the world. Off Craigslist we bought a twenty-two-foot Tanzer, a sloop rig, its sail blown out. We happened upon another old sail crammed into a dumpster by the marina and cut strips from it to reinforce our own. I remember my friend’s bald head turning red in the sun as we sat there sewing in the cockpit, eating cold empanadas, taking sips of rum, and talking about our first trip to the San Juan Islands. We sold the boat a year later and we’re no longer friends. Owning a boat is hard. So is keeping a friend.

Hinuma, Hiroura, Mito, by Kawase Hasui, 1946

I ran through a marsh like this in Sterling Forest, stomping on skunk cabbage, boots soggy with Superfund slush. My myopic sister mistook a black bear cub for a Labrador and bolted past me. We had Labs as kids. Street scroungers. I watched them tear a racoon in half once, its guts raining brown-red across the backward on a gray Jersey summer day. Hasui’s marsh is green, cool and clean in the bright moonlight.  

Fowls, by Ito Jakuchu, 1794

Black ink like the Berkshire woods the night I decapitated my first duck for dinner. A clean cut with a hatchet deep in the log we set up as an improvised butchering table. The duck’s bill kept opening and closing even after I’d beheaded it. The old farmhand took pity on me and hurled the head into the woods then helped me pluck the body. But I thought about that head in the woods all night. How long it kept going. Opening and closing in the dark.

Morning at Aonuma Pond in Urabandai, by Kawase Hasui, 1949

The rule of thirds: the mountain reflected in the pond, a traditional Japanese house in the trees, mountains and sky behind it. Rainbow Lake in the Adirondacks. French-Algerian ex-soldiers turned chefs making a venison stew in the 50s for my father, my father as a kid, so just a kid because he wasn’t yet my father. He said he went to a Halloween party once near there and the host had somehow mounted giant jack-o’-lanterns in the trees to guide the guests. The guest list for his memorial was short. Immediate family, estranged, dumping ashes in the lake.

Shore of Lake Chuzenji, by Takahashi  Shotei, late 19th– early 20th century

Light shining through rice paper windows. A boat resting on the shore. A full moon reflecting enough light for the people to walk by like when I was camping and I turned off my headlamp and the night came into dim focus and from the shore I saw my friend’s wife bathing nude in Waptus Lake. She was beautiful, is beautiful. But stiff, too. Arrogant. Occasionally, even mean. My friend asked me to help him build her a flamenco platform in their basement so she could dance at home but we couldn’t get it level so she shot us a dirty look and left. We sat on the new plywood floor, unlevel but sturdy, and watched the making of Top Gun on YouTube, huddled around an ancient laptop and drinking cheap beers. Her legs looked like they were made of pearl in the water that night. Via LinkedIn I found out they got divorced. I never did get to see her dance.

Sunset by Kasamatsu Shiro, 1919

The roofs are half in shadow, half in sun, like the roofs of Nice from the tiny balcony where I sat with a girlfriend after we spent the whole morning fucking on an old squeaky twin bed and eating fruit and cheese and looking through a fat used copy of the Lonely Planet. It was hard to feel lonely then, at that age, with her, in the sun. Hard to imagine what loneliness could be.

Hori River, Obama, by Kawase Hasui, early autumn 1920

The river is low where it meets the sea and two black birds soar low above it. My uncle hated Obama. He’s in Florida, I think. Outside of Jacksonville. No one’s heard from him. He went blind in one eye from some sort of blockage. Coupled with his drinking, he’s caused a car accident or two. When my parents kicked me out, he bought me my first tv in my first apartment and helped me set it up. It had a built-in VHS player. We watched Red Dawn and ate Wendy’s Spicy Chicken Sandwiches and cried when Charlie Sheen died. I miss him. My uncle, that is. I have no strong feelings about Charlie Sheen or Obama.

Night Scene of Mabashi, near Tokyo, by Takahashi Shotei, ca. 1936

A child with a low-hanging lantern leads a woman along the shore in a blue night. Your parents lead you then you lead them but I don’t have any kids so I hope the underpaid nurse’s aide is gentle when she leads me to the piss and bleach-scented senility waiting out there for me. I visited Tokyo once. It was big, busy but lonely. 

Great Lantern at Asakusa Temple, by Tsuchiya Koitsu, 1934

A woman and a child beneath a great lantern. My older sister and I beneath the giant whale at the Museum of Natural History. She was and is a good big sister. A social worker in a mountain town. Last year I visited her and we did hikes and took pictures at different summits and went out for ice cream afterwards. An obese woman in an idling Suburban yelled after her kids to get her the biggest one they had and my sister said, “disgusting.” And I said, “I think you’re a bit fatphobic.” She said, firmly, “yes, I am. I don’t like fat people.” When we went inside, I ordered a small not because I’m fat or I don’t like ice cream. But I could tell my sister was suffering from something and though I don’t believe in happiness, I’m in no rush to make anyone’s life less bearable, especially someone I love. 

Seta Bridge, by Yoshida Hiroshi, 1933

As a kid I was scared of bridges, the Tappan Zee in particular. The height, maybe, or the movement. I walked across the Bear Mountain Bridge after not having eaten for two days because I miscalculated my food supplies while hiking a section of the Appalachian Trail. The last thing I had was a can of smoked oysters. I didn’t like canned fish then and could still taste the briny stink of them when I called my father from a payphone and asked him to pick me up. In a park on the Hudson, we ate Italian heroes he’d brought along. It’s been a long time since I was scared of bridges but I’m not sure who I’d call now if I wound up starving and exhausted stranded on one. Maybe it was the reflections beneath them that frightened me in the first place? The trembling inversion of the world. I don’t hike much anymore. And the Tappan Zee is called the Cuomo Bridge now, for what it’s worth.

Hayama of Iyo, by Kawase Hasui, 1934

The sun sets on two men in the cockpit of a docked sailboat. An island in the distance rises like a camel’s hump out of a pink-gray sea. When I took the ferry from Spain to Morocco, I watched Muslim men pray five times facing Mecca, bowing, pressing their heads to the deck. I’m fascinated by this faith—by any faith—and the big black stone there, the black blood beneath it which makes the region so important to the world. The pirates in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. I want to pray to someone for something but don’t have the words, don’t know which way to face. A series of narrow boards connect the sailboat, and the men on it, to the obscured shore.

Jon Doughboy is a cosmetologist at the Wing Biddlebaum Salon in Winesburg, Ohio. Stop in for a grotesque manicure @doughboywrites

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Across The Wire Vol. 2

His Heart is Like an Open Turnpike

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By Jon Doughboy

Chris Christie gifts Zelensky handwritten lyrics to Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life” as “inspiration” while inhaling cold borsht at a state dinner surrounded by dour looking-icon paintings of the geniuses of Slavic history framed in glitzy gold, then burrows inward and downward, like the history of 20th century literature, entering the maze-like intestines of memory, wading through layer after layer of performed selves—the attack dog attorney, the lobbyist, the Governor, the scandal-maker shutting down bridges to crush disobedient mayors and making unapologetic rogue picnic trips to shut-down beaches, Romney’s potential bestie, Trump’s plus-sized lapdog, a would-be sportscaster, and the current long-shot candidate campaigning to become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee—Christie is inhaling borsht but yearning in his heart of hearts, brain of brains, gut of guts, for a deep-fried ripper from Rutt’s Hutt, the snap of the crispy hot dog skin, the sun bouncing off dilapidated guardrails and the hot and cracked Clifton pavement, the cool yellow relish, the onion ring grease soaking through the paper plate, the ice bobbing in the red birch beer, and he travels under the Hudson of memory via the ARC Tunnel he aborted but which lives forever in his imagined accomplishments and he’s suddenly a giant, Gargantua astride the Garden State, and he’s bellowing across this armpit of America that he knows and loves and hates and lives and breathes, “It’s my life, it’s now or never,” and who does this Zelensky think he is? Has he ever even heard of Rutt’s? Has he ever swum naked across the Passaic? Has he ever crushed the throats of the Hudson County political bosses? Has he ever won an eating contest against the entire Genovese crime family? “My heart is like an open highway,” he’s singing and all his Jersey brethren join in, a chorus to their beloved big man, from their cars stuck in the Holland Tunnel and idling on the turnpike and speeding on the shoulder of the parkway, and a charm of goldfinches roosts in his cavernous nostrils and violets bloom out of his ears, “Better stand tall when they’re calling you out,” and it’s raining fat beefsteak tomatoes and assorted bagels, “Don’t bend, don’t break, baby, don’t back down,” and with his massive, life-giving hands, he is sowing liberty and prosperity from the Tri-State Rock to Cape May Point, the Delaware River rushing along to his right, the Atlantic eating into the sandy shores on his left, as he marches towards D.C., towards relevancy, the presidency, his destiny—“Mr. Christie, sir, about NATO, as I was saying, are you aware that a single F-16 could…” and the ripper is once again cold beet soup and Bon Jovi isn’t playing and Trenton is 4,700 miles away and Chris isn’t an attorney or a governor or a giant, he’s just a man sweating into his dark suit and getting pricked by his American flag lapel pin under the judgmental eyes of icons he doesn’t recognize, talking about military tactics he doesn’t understand, and singing softly to himself, “I just want to live while I’m alive.”


Jon Doughboy is New Jersey’s Poet Laureate currently completing a writing residency at the Walt Whitman Travel Plaza on the southbound side of the turnpike. Watch him relish his rippers @doughboywrites