August 2001 | back-issues, fiction
by Jerry Vilhotti, from his collection of literary precis
([email]vilhotti [at] peoplepc [dot] com[/email])
When Tom was searching for Christ in Northshredder New York, where he and his third wife, a Boston “blue blood person”, had spent a year at [i]The Society of Followers[/i] to get rid of the dirt they felt within themselves which was making the dark shadow on their souls grow, he reasoned that indeed Christ had feigned a limp, something like the one he had due to the polio that had ravaged his baby body to leave its affect on a twisted shrunken leg with a million pimples to colonize the upper area which would be a mark he would carry with him for the rest of his life and actually capture great heaps of pity from those who could not tolerate deformity, escaped to Rome where He settled down with a woman who resembled Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Anne Bancroft and Verna Lissi all at the same time and had sixteen children with the four of them just as the church fathers were killing His brothers and sisters and all of His other Relatives to begin their new better religion on the shoulders of other religions which stood on yet others, that would garner billions and billions of dollars from those who felt guilt at having thrown stones at innocence and as Tom was being taken to a place of “rest” by four large attendants – he emitted an agonizing scream that could almost be heard in the land He had walked: speaking of love along with all the other prophets, drowning in tears at all the hate still existing there, representatives of all the other religions that had attempted to lead human kind into a semblance of compassion – with all their sincere efforts eaten by sham.
July 2001 | back-issues, fiction, Jack Swenson
Doc came prepared. He was wearing a parka and a heavy sweater when he got off the airplane. He had two big carry on bags and a huge duffle. Why did you bring all this stuff? I asked him. Doc looked puzzled. I left half of it at home, he said.
The next morning, we got up early and drove up to the property that Jake and I owned in the foothills of the Sierras. Our cabin was on the edge of the forest high above a lake. From the deck, we had a panoramic view oft he lake and the surrounding hills.
I had borrowed Jake’s truck so that I could transport several four by eight foot siding panels to replace the ones on the north end of the cabin that the porcupines had chewed up. Doc asked what porcupines found that was good to eat in wood siding, and I said it was the glue.
We worked all afternoon getting the old siding off and the new panels up. When we finished, it was getting dark. We drove into town and had dinner, and when we came out of the restaurant, it was raining. We got in the truck and headed back to the cabin, and up the grade a few hundred yards the rain had turned to snow. A mile or so out of town, the Highway Patrol had set up a road block. They weren’t letting anybody go through. I stopped and talked to one of the troopers. I told him where the cabin was. We had to go back and shut off the water or the pipes would freeze, I said. The trooper didn’t like it, but he moved one of the saw horses aside so we could pass.
It was snowing hard, but it wasn’t cold, and the snow flakes melted as they hit the surface of the highway. At the roadhouse, five miles north of town, I turned onto a gravel road. At the end of the road, by the lake, I parked the truck. The logging trail that led up the hill past the cabin was a crease in a blanket of snow.
When we got to the cabin, I was muddy and wet. Doc peeled off his rubber boots. He was wearing heavy woolen sox. He was wearing long underwear, too. I could see the hems of the white leggings when he turned up his cuffs to pull up his sox.
Doc built a fire in the Franklin stove while I changed clothes. When I came downstairs, he was making coffee. He pulled a chair up to the fire and put his big feet on the bricks in front of the stove.
I brought a chair over and sat down. I told Doc that there was a bottle of brandy in one of the cupboards in the kitchen. Doc got the bottle and poured some of the brandy into his coffee cup. The brandy smelled like apples and cough syrup.
I went into the kitchen to get the coffee pot. I put the pot on top of the Franklin stove and sat down again. I picked up my coffee cup and held it in front of me with both hands.
It’s cold in here, Doc said.
Fifty degrees, I said. I had looked at the thermometer on the wall by the door when I was in the kitchen.
It’ll warm up, Doc said. This old stove throws a lot of heat.
I shuddered. I hate cold weather, I said.
You have to dress for it, Doc said.
Doc took a sip of his coffee. You look better, Doc said. You’ve got some color in your cheeks. When we got stuck, you were shaking when you got back in the truck.
I should have let you push, I said.
It’s stress, Doc said. You get beat up, and after a while, your body quits. You feel like you don’t have any skin.
Doc wanted to talk. He talked and I listened. I wasn’t listening carefully, though, because after a while, Doc asked me what I was thinking.
I smiled. I was thinking about Mona, I said.
Forget about Mona, Doc said. Put her out of your mind.
No, it’s okay, I said. I told you what she said, that she liked me better when I was drinking. Well, that’s the way I feel, too. I liked her better when I was drinking.
Mona’s a twit, Doc said.
Mona’s Mona, I said.
Let’s talk about something else, Doc said.
What do you want to talk about? I asked.
Tell me about the meetings.
I told Doc what the meetings were like. People sit around and talk, I said, and then everybody stands up, holds hands, and says the Lord’s Prayer.
Is it boring? Doc asked.
Sometimes, I said. Some people don’t know when to shut up.
What about the women? Doc asked. I’ve heard that there are a lot of good looking women in AA.
I told Doc that you got a little bit of everything in AA.
Doc sighed. He didn’t say anything for a while. I didn’t say anything, either. Doc looked as if he had something on his mind. Finally, he spit it out.
I’ve been thinking that maybe I should quit, too, he said.
Drinking? I asked.
Yes, Doc said.
I was surprised. Why would you want to do that? I asked.
I think I’m an alcoholic, Doc said.
I asked Doc what made him think he was an alcoholic, and he said that when he started drinking, he couldn’t stop.
Look, Doc said, we don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to.
I said it was all right, that I didn’t mind. I told Doc that sometimes I thought that talking about not drinking was almost as much fun as drinking.
Doc said he thought he would be a good alcoholic. He smoked cigarettes, he liked coffee, and he didn’t like to do what he was told.
I asked Doc how he knew so much about AA, and he said that half his friends were in some kind of program.
An hour later, Doc was telling war stories. The bottle of brandy, half full to begin with, was nearly empty. Doc was telling about the time that he and Ed had picked up a girl in a bar in Minneapolis. I had heard the story before. I got up and wandered around the room while Doc talked.
Doc had put some books on a table in one corner, and I picked them up and looked at the titles. One was a book about geology, and the other was about the first world war.
I went over to a window and looked out. The snow was coming down every which way, like confetti, as if someone were tearing pieces out of the sky.
So then I asked her to do something else, Doc said, and she said, ‘Oh, no. I’m saving that for my husband.’ She was going to be married in two or three weeks!
Doc laughed and laughed.
I told Doc that I was going to bed. Doc looked at his watch. What time is it getting to be? he asked.
Upstairs in the loft, I lay on my back and watched the shadows cast by the fire on the angled ceiling. I wondered if I would be able to sleep. If not, I would lie there and rest. Before, I had worried about not sleeping. Then I had learned that the way to fight it was to stop fighting.
I shut my eyes and listened to Doc downstairs poking at the fire.
July 2001 | back-issues, fiction, Jack Swenson
Wanda here. I’m the director of Social Services at the Lutheran Home. I do a little bit of everything around here. I’m the chief cook and bottle washer, so to speak. Mainly I’m in charge of patient welfare. I see to it that the gals get new undies when they need them and that the guys get to the grocery store when they run out of oatmeal or prunes. It’s a good job. Busy, busy. But that’s the way I like it. And George and Ida are good people to work for.
If you have to be in a nursing home, this is a good place to be. Nobody volunteers to get in here, I suppose, but we take good care of the residents. We go the extra mile. The food is good, and we give the seniors lots to do. There’s something going on all the time. Talks, music, Bible study, exercise classes, bingo. Nobody gets a chance to sit around feeling sorry for himself.
Did I see trouble coming when Mack and Archie moved in? No, I didn’t. Mack was okay until Archie showed up. Mack got along with people, and he didn’t complain. It was the two of them together that caused the problem. They egged each other on.
Oh, Mack had an eye for the ladies, so I should have seen that coming, I suppose. But when he started mooning over Rose, it seemed innocent enough.
About the other, I didn’t have a clue.
Mack was popular with the other residents, especially the ladies. He was a tall, lanky fellow with a full head of white hair. “The Silver Fox” was a nickname that one of the women gave him. They didn’t call him that to his face, of course. Archie was tall and bony, all arms and legs. He had kind of a gloomy personality, whereas Mack was more upbeat. Archie got along well with the others, too, once he settled in. Both of them liked to talk, and they were both good listeners.
Mack and Archie hit it off right away. After a few weeks, they were the best of friends. Every day they would have coffee together in the afternoon, and they’d sit for hours in the day room arguing about politics and talking about the old days.
When Rose moved in, and Mack started acting like a love-sick teenager, I thought it would put a crimp in their friendship, but Archie seemed amused by his friend’s behavior. If anybody asked, he’d just shrug and explain that Mack was “twitterpated.”
It’s my fault that the two old boys got in trouble, I suppose. One of the other residents, Otto, came into my office one day. He wanted to have a party, and he wondered if the staff would help him set it up. I asked him what the occasion was, and he said he had won some money. “Oh, yeah?” I said. “How much?” “Two thousand dollars,” Otto said. I whistled. “That’s a lot of money,” I said. Otto nodded. He was all excited. “I won it betting on the horses,” he said. Otto said that Archie had made the bet for him.
When I talked to Archie, he was perfectly honest about it. Yes, he made the bet. He made bets for a lot of the residents, he said. Mack was helping him. Mack collected the money, and Archie called in the bets. A friend of his in Minneapolis made the actual wagers. Or if the race was in another state, he’d call another friend who lived in Reno, and he would buy the tickets at a sports book.
Then it hit me. I had been wondering why the residents had taken such a sudden interest in football! In the past, during football season, three or four of the men might sit in the day room and stare at the TV during the Vikings game, but this year there were fifteen or twenty people in there every Sunday. They were a noisy bunch, too! One day the weekend charge nurse had to go in there and tell them to pipe down.
We all thought it was pretty funny. The staff, that is. All of those old Norwegians and Swedes suddenly becoming football fans!
Silly me.
I asked Archie if they were betting on football, too, and he said yes. Football, basketball, hockey. Whatever anybody wanted to bet on.
Well, I had to tell Ida about it because I knew that if George found out that there was gambling going on in his nursing home, I’d be in trouble–we’d all be in trouble. Ida, George’s wife, is a very sweet lady. When I finished telling Ida the tale, she clapped her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing.
Ida had to tell George, though. I could see her point. If the state got wind of what was going on, they could close the place down. And it would be bad for business if people in town found out. Very bad.
So George had a talk with Archie and Mack, and the upshot of that was that the two old men had to move out. Archie went back to California, and Mack moved into one of the new apartments down by the river.
I had a talk with Mack before he left, and he didn’t seem too upset. “Hey,” he said. “We’re lucky. We’re walking out of here. Most people leave this place in a box.”
I told Mack that it was none of my business, but I was curious how they got started betting in the first place.
It grew out of an idea that Archie had, Mack said. One day Archie said that some of them ought to get together and bet on which one would live the longest. They could all throw some money in the pot and buy a bottle of good booze, and the last one to go would get to drink it.
The idea just took off from there, Mack said. They started talking about how they used to bet on the horses, and on football and basketball games, when they were younger, and one day they said, why not? So they asked around to see if there was any interest, and there was, so Archie made the call to his friends, and they were in business.
Some of the folks around here were pretty down in the mouth when Mack and Archie left. Mack stops by to have coffee with his old friends every once in a while, and he always gets a big welcome.
Yesterday I got a card in the mail from Mack. It was in a fancy envelope, and I knew right away what it was. It was a wedding invitation. Mack and Rose were getting married the week after Christmas. Mack had written in black ink at the bottom of the card, “Honeymoon in Vegas. Tell the boys.”
June 2001 | back-issues, fiction
a novel excerpt by Jeffrey Allen Walker
([email]jallenwalker [at] netscape [dot] net[/email])
MY APARTMENT’S MAGIC WINDOW (WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 1994)
Please let this be the last day. Let me get hit by a bus or shot or vaporized. Just don’t let me have to come back here again. When I was a planner in Minneapolis I wrote a couple of articles that were published in some trade magazines and had a few guest columnist pieces in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, we called it the Strib. I never complained about seeing my name in print, but I wanted more. I wanted to write a great novel that criticized the American way of life and moral system. But in order to write, I had to understand. What better way to understand than to participate? But being an active member cuts down on writing time. It’s a very mild catch-22. No bloodshed. Nobody’s feet get cold. Nobody’s guts spill out. As a result of internal debate between going out to experience and staying in to write, I did nothing except write a few guest columnist pieces for the Strib. No great novel, no critical acclaim.
I spent a lot of time in my new apartment on State Road doing nothing. Sometimes I wrote letters I never meant to send. Sometimes I began writing stories about my friends. Mostly I thought.
My apartment was quite charming for the decor I chose. I brought my guitar and milk crates which held the archaeological treasures of my college years. My parents gave me the guitar when I was seventeen. I salvaged the milk crates from the basement of my home. They were the only effects preserved from my marriage. I sold all the furniture and paintings and appliances and donated the casual clothes. I kept pictures of Dayona and our children, but I hardly looked at them anymore. I viewed their leaving as a chance for me to start over again. I kept the milk crates and the albums and books because they were points of light along the path of my life.
Everybody walks a path and when we get lost we look behind us and see those shiny rocks that glimmer like little lights along the path we walked. Sometimes we retrace our steps to a place that is familiar and comfortable and create another path. Sometimes we just turn around and keep trudging through. I wasn’t particularly happy with the course my life took my last few years of college or after I moved to Minneapolis. I felt I sold myself short on the entertainment and austere aspects of life. I devoted my prime party years to getting the good job, making the good money and having the nice stuff. So I back stepped and made a new path.
In between my graduation and marrying Dayona I forgot about the time in life that’s meant for screwing around. Just hanging out and looking at sunsets and drinking beer and maybe going to work with a hangover. I had a kick-ass stereo system hooked up to a 46″ television that I watched on my gorgeous teal, tope and mauve sectional couch which I placed under my modern Scandinavian design floor lamp which was right beside some painting by a funky up-and-coming artist I don’t remember. Everything in my first apartment in Minneapolis was smooth. Simple lines, soft, pastel colors. Like a scene from Miami Vice. All the latest and hippest CDs and albums (before albums disappeared and made a small comeback). I was ghetto-city highbrow. But I never just sat around with friends and listened to records. Everything was important.
The colonial house Dayona and I shared on Dupont South was equally impressive. Large picture windows. A bay window in the master bedroom. Lots of closet space. A skylight in the attic. Bright yellow and burnt orange walls. A big house with a front porch. Every room was big. Dayona loved it. I loved it. We loved it in every room the first week after we moved in. We made the walls sweat.
My current digs were a little more common. Two 10′ x 10′ bedrooms. A 12′ by 14′ living room. The bathroom may have been 4′ x 5′. The bathtub big enough for one. It was situated in a small complex of eight-unit apartment buildings just south of I-480 in Parma. From my living room window I saw the neon pink glow of a furniture store sign. When the noise from the street calmed down enough I could hear the attendant at the gas station tell customers their pumps were ready to use. Go ahead, pump three. Everything was the common color of the middle-class apartment. The walls were eggshell. The hollow particle board door was eggshell. The trim was eggshell. The carpet was renter-brown. I could hear the buses squeal to a stop in front of my new home. Home? This wasn’t my home. This was where I stayed. I felt more at home crashed on the couch of a stranger’s apartment after a big college party.
The few things I did buy didn’t make it feel much like home. Plates, silverware, a small floor lamp for the living room and a futon to sleep on. That was it. No fancy paintings, no expansive music collection. I was mostly devoting myself to becoming a better version of what I was before. I often sat in front of the window and watched the traffic zip by. I bought a small TV after the second week so I wouldn’t miss Homicide. But most nights I preferred to watch traffic rather than television. I became bored with the selection of comedy shows and dramas. Bullshit dramas that purported to be realistic but couldn’t say fuck or shit. Why go for reality on television? Isn’t it supposed to be an escape? I worked with a Sipowicz-like guy in Minneapolis. I dated a Roseanne-like girl in college. I wanted something to take me away. I watched Homicide because after reading the book I was fascinated by the characters and the setting. I also liked it because there weren’t any pretty-boys or supermodels in the cast. I almost moved to Baltimore because of that show.
Sometimes I found myself awake at four in the morning. On those occasions when it was impossible to return to sleep I sat by the front window and wondered where everyone was going at such late hours. I tried to imagine their lives. Were they going to work? Were they returning from a lover’s bed? Which ones were running from the law? Which ones were running from bad memories? I watched the early drivers gently swerve down the road. I watched the six-in-the-morning crowd struggle their way to soccer practices and store openings and shift changes.
In the morning darkness the street was black except where decorated by the white dashed lines and the yellow stripes that divided the center lane. It almost seemed to glow a florescent gold under the amber streetlights. On this morning I awoke early and stayed in front of the window while time crashed into itself causing the past and future to merge for what seemed like hours. With my eyes closed I watched the sky turn from its silent blue into rose into mauve into day-blue. I felt the first rays of the sun caress my face and I dreamed I was whole again. I dreamed my boys were tugging on my pant legs and wanting to do pull-ups on my arms. I felt Dayona’s breath on the back of my neck. I could smell her perfume. I could hear her describe true happiness. Jordan and Lewis spoke to me, Lewis was speaking! He told me he loved me and couldn’t wait to hold my hand and wrestle with me like Jordan could. My family danced and played with me. They comforted me against the harsh winds of reality. I could feel the light brush of Dayona’s hand on my cheek wiping away my tears.
I opened my eyes and stared into forever. In this world, I hoped one of those cars whizzing past my small, typical apartment would sound like her car. I listened, hoping that one of the people departing the bus would have her laugh. But nobody laughed when getting off the bus. The only voices were the gas station attendants’ and they didn’t laugh.
It had been over a month and I still hadn’t hung anything on the walls. No artwork whatsoever. Not even a poster of my favorite athlete. My bright orange and red milk crates were the only furniture in the living room. I sat on the floor and used them for a table when I ate and for a desk when I wrote. The television sat on another stack of crates. There was one column by the window facing the street. That was it. A stark, empty apartment lived in by a man who wanted to recreate his past. I put a small photograph of Dayona and the boys on the refrigerator.
I had hundreds of pictures of the three and four of us, but this picture, taken the first day that Lewis was home from the hospital, captured everything that was right with my life. Jordan, excited over this wrinkled creature that looked distantly familiar, held his brother’s hands in between his lips. It was very hot that day so Jordan had decided he wanted to be topless. His bone thin arms and huge head glistened with summer sweat as he stared at this new…thing…with total fascination. Dayona was wearing a loose-fitting tank top so she could easily feed Lewis. Her breasts were looking damn good. Her shoulders and arms were well defined. Her hair was cut short and framed her face with flat baby-hair curls. Lewis had finished feeding a few minutes earlier and let out a huge milk-free burp. Jordan was surprised at the volume coming from such a small toy. Dayona’s family was visiting and her brother was lucky enough to catch the four of us in a moment of pure hysteria. Dayona: mouth open wide, eyes shut tight, anybody looking at the picture can virtually hear the laughter; Lewis: happy old man face after releasing the pressure in his belly; Jordan: glistening chocolate-brown alien eating his brother’s hands with a look of disgusted wonder. Me: nibbling on Dayona’s ear. It was the first picture of my family. Of Dayona’s family. Of Jordan’s family. Of Lewis’ family.
If I had one thousand pictures before Lewis was born, and one thousand pictures after Lewis was born, none of them could compare to the first picture of the four of us in our home. To look at my place one would think I had been single all my life. No one would have thought I produced anything as wonderful as one little man or inspired a woman to dream beyond her boundaries.
June 2001 | back-issues, fiction
a novel excerpt by Aidan Baker
([email]aidanbaker [at] hotmail [dot] com[/email])
My CD collection is like a calendar of boyfriends. It’s not very extensive, my CD collection — ergo, my love life, obviously, hasn’t been very extensive…
Every time I go over to my CD holder to put some music on, I’m confronted by this array of albums, songs, digitized sounds, that are, yes, mine, but all reminiscent of some man, some boy who used to be part of my life. Not even boyfriends, lovers, in some cases — just some guy I had a crush on.
I remember reading something recently about the brain and smell: When your brain records a smell, it records everything else along with it — a record of your surroundings, your actions, your companions. When you smell that smell again, whatever that smell may be, all the other recorded information comes flooding back along with the olfactory memory. I think it’s the same with aural memories. With music.
I’ve been listening to the radio mostly, lately. Talk radio.
Leaving work this evening I felt…I don’t know…blah. My feet ached, my head ached — not quite a headache; more a sort of sitting-there-behind-my-eyes pain, too unassertive to decide whether it was going to be a full-fledged headache or not.
Work and been…work…what else…
The apartment is empty, of course, when I return — how could I expect it to be otherwise? It’s just sometimes I find myself imagining there’ll be someone there waiting for me, some surprise…a fairy fucking godmother…
In the doorway I kick off my shoes, let my bag drop, regardless of breakables, toss of my jacket — actually strip right down to just underwear, right there in the hallway, leave my clothes in a heap on the floor. I wander into the kitchen and peer into the fridge hoping something demanding to be eaten will leap out at me. Nothing does, but I remove a bowl of leftover pasta salad because I should really have some nourishment. As an afterthought, I grab a half-empty — or half-full, depending — bottle of wine. Wander into the living room; flop onto couch; fork food into mouth; chew mechanically; difficulty swallowing; wash down lump of food with wine…
I need some company, some sound in the silent apartment, some music. Sitting there on the couch, the dish of pasta cold against my bare skin, I stare across the room at my CD rack. I want some music but I’m incapable of choosing something, choosing anything. Stases.
Sometimes it seems that I don’t really own any CD simply because I like the music. Simply for me. Demographically, I suppose I should listen to Sarah McLachlan or The Cranberries — ‘alt-fem-rock,’ or however you want to categorize it (because everything needs categorization…) — but I’m not too fond of that kind of music. It may be partially due to an old boyfriend of mine, Aaron, who was so scathing of that kind of music. He called it ‘gen-x-adult-contemporary,’ which always seemed like an oxymoron to me. Because I can never think of gen-x-ers as adults in the first place…
Maybe I should give up on music all together.
Maybe I should sit here nearly naked in the dark and get drunk(er) on wine.
Maybe I should
…
But they’re not all unpleasant, musical memories. Sometimes it’s nice to revel in nostalgia (sometimes). To put on U2 and remember David…or Led Zeppelin and Andy…or…
RONNY/METALLICA
Ronny was a tech-student. I wasn’t. It was like Romeo & Juliet. Except he probably had no idea who Romeo and Juliet were. He was beautiful. He reminded me of James Dean, except Ronny really did fit the bill of rebel-without-a-clue. He always talked about buying a motorcycle — once he was old enough to get his license, once he had enough money…It would’ve been the crowning touch for his image. I wonder if he ever managed to get one. He’s probably unhappily married now, with a brood of dirty little kids giving him as much hell as he gave his folks. Doubt he remembers me. The relationship, such as it was, didn’t last very long. A month, maybe. Which, for fifteen, is long enough, I suppose.
His hands always smelt of metals, of machines, of time spent handling drill-presses and grease-guns in the technical wing of the school. The only class we had together was gym — and even then we weren’t really together since it wasn’t co-ed. I’d watch him from our side of the gymnasium as he sweated through a game of floor hockey or dodge ball or whatever. He never looked at me. Or never let on he was looking at me. Because he must have at some point, looked at me, to have realized I existed…
Other than that one hour, we never saw each other during the day. We didn’t spend our lunchhours together. I suppose because we were both a little embarrassed of each other. Of course, our respective circles of friends knew about us, but it just wasn’t’ comfortable, me hanging out with his buddies, or him with my girlfriends. I mean, they were all tech-heads and we were, well, nerds, basically.
At the end of the day, I’d wait for him at the doors of the tech-wing, standing there with my knapsack loaded with books and homework, and he’d come sauntering along empty-handed in his tight, grubby jeans and faded t-shirt and he was just so gorgeous.
“Hey, babe,” he’d grunt and I’d immediately go all gushy inside. He was so guttural. “You coming over today?” he’d ask, snaking an arm around me.
“No, I can’t today,” I’d squeak. “I’ve got music lessons.”
“Shitty,” he’d mutter and nuzzle my neck and I’d get all hot and bothered, his sweet breath melting against my skin, and my music lesson would be absolute torture because I’d still be feeling his soft breath against my neck while trying to get the accidentals correct in a descending melodic minor scale or something and my teacher would get all annoyed because I wasn’t concentrating…
Or:
“I don’t have to be home till dinner.”
“Cool. C’mon,” and he’d wrap his calloused fingers around my sweaty hand and lead me breathless back to his house. His dad was hardly ever around and his mother seemed to work constantly. His younger sisters he’d just scowl at and tell them not to bug us lest he decapitate their barbie dolls. We’d go down to his room in the basement and make out while Metallica blasted from his dinky tape player. He made a tape for me of his favourite tunes, which I wore out listening to after he dumped me. In a fit of nostalgia, several years later, I gave in and bought one of their albums.
Metallica formed in 1981 in San Francisco and released their first album, Kill ‘Em All, in 1983. The album revolutionized heavy metal, paring away the sonic clich�s, focusing on velocity and power, giving birth to ‘speed metal’: really fast guitar and drums, jarring stop/starts, rapid time changes. Rhythm over melody. Good music for venting aggression. Perfect for adolescents…
Metallica have achieved mainstream commercial success in recent years — not without alienating much of their established fanbase — having pursued a more ‘alternative’ direction in both their music and their image (they cut off all their hair (long locks being Samsonesquely prized in the metal scene) and pierced their lips and various other body parts). I doubt Ronny would still like them. I remember him saying they’d lost it after their original bass player, Cliff Burton, died in 1986 in a bus crash while they were on tour in Sweden. Ronny never thought much of Burton’s replacement, Jason Newstead.
There were several Metallica posters, all pre-Newstead, on Ronny’s walls. This was the extent of the decoration in his bedroom. The dirty clothes, clean clothes, car magazines, music magazines, dishes, half-buried school books, and other unidentifiable debris layering the floor could hardly be considered decoration. There was only a single, small window looking out onto the alleyway between his and the neighbour’s house. It was always dim in his bedroom. It smelled of boy.
While James Hetfield howled through ‘Blitzkrieg’ or ‘Am I Evil’, Ronny and I would make out until our lips were bruised and tender and our necks were red and inflamed with hickeys. I let Ronny go so far as to removed my shirt and bra — he liked sucking my nipples; I got hickeys there, too — and I let him touch me through my pants, but it never went any further than that. I’m not entirely sure what it was held me back. We were only fifteen. He never really pressured me, though, which, particularly in retrospect, puzzles me. Maybe Ronny was as virginal, as nervous about it, as I was. However much he tried to project otherwise. Sometimes I regret that I didn’t let him, make him go further…
MARK/MILES DAVIS
Why do people feel the need to screw to soft, gentle music? Make-out music? Why is Barry White so successful? I lost my virginity to Miles Davis and, sure, his music can be pretty intense, but sometimes I wish I’d lost my virginity to something like Metallica.
Of course, I mean I lost my virginity when a Miles Davis album was playing.
A friend of mine once told me about someone she knew who lost her virginity, in the back of a van, to the singer of the thrash metal band Dirty Rotten Imbeciles. I suppose it’s not something she’s likely to forget…
Mark was a jazz fan. He liked to think he was a jazz musician too — he played the alto saxophone — but he wasn’t really that good. Competent, but competency doesn’t get you far in the jazz-world. I guess he was aware of it and compensated by garnering all the jazz trivia he could. He could name any song from the first few notes, tell you who was playing what, when and where and by whom it was recorded, and pretty much anything else you could think to ask about a tune, including what the musicians had for lunch after the session.
I thought Mark was cool. Very jazzy-cool, cool-jazz. His passion intrigued me. I met him in first-year university when I was desperately trying to lose my virginity. I don’t know quite how I ended up escaping high school intact — my inexperience nagged at me. I know some people think all a woman has to do is bend over to find someone to fuck her, but there has to be something there, some attraction, some connection.
We were in a jazz history course together. I don’t know why Mark was taking a jazz history course since he already knew everything. We listened to Thelonious Monk one day. He hadn’t exactly been well-received by the class, most of the class cringing and covering their ears.
When the class ended and people started filtering out, griping about how awful Monk’s music was, Mark stayed sitting, watching the other students leave with an expression of disbelief, perhaps even horror, on his face.
“What’s wrong with all these people?” he asked, as he got to his feet, shaking his head. Presumably the query was rhetorical, but I replied anyway;
“It is pretty discordant.”
“But that’s the beauty of his music. His melodic, his rhythmic discordance.”
“Rhythmic discordance?”
“Yeah. That’s how I think of it. Rhythmic discordance. And then there’s the whole issue as to whether he’s doing it intentionally. Or can he not help playing out of time? He’s fascinating. Why can’t they see that?”
He picked up speed as we left the classroom, ranting and gesticulating as we strolled through the halls of the music building. He despaired at peoples’ closed minds and how nobody really listened to music anymore.
Outside, on the steps, he paused and asked me, as if just suddenly realizing I might have an opinion; “What did you think of Monk?”
“I liked him,” I answered quickly.
Mark smiled, as if in relief.
I added; “But then I know next to nothing about jazz.”
He took the bait: “Well, let me teach you.”
He did teach me. How to distinguish styles, recognize players, tell whether something was improvised, tell whether someone was playing a fleugelhorn or a trumpet…Reams of trivia. I could name, for instance, all the players on Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue (Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderly (alto sax), John Coltrane (tenor sax), Wyn Kelly (piano), Bill Evans (piano), Paul Chambers (bass), and James Cobb(drums)), the so-called definitive album of the ‘cool jazz’ genre, which was playing when I finally managed to get Mark interested in what I had to offer that a stereo system couldn’t.
I guess I got a little fixated with Mark, fixated with the idea that he’d be ‘the one’. I certainly liked him and I think he did like me. We had good conversations and enjoyed doing things together — except sex; there just wasn’t really any physical chemistry between us. I guess I wasn’t what he wanted. Maybe he didn’t find me sexually attractive. Maybe he didn’t find girls sexually attractive — in which case, I might’ve turned him off women completely.
Not that I raped him. I wouldn’t be capable of it — physically or mentally. But I guess I did force him into something he didn’t really want to do. And once in, I think he just wanted to get out, so the whole experience was over before I knew it — before I could get anything out of it besides discomfort. He came — he did ejaculate — inside me, that I know, even if only because the condom was full of semen when he pulled it off. And once he had it off, he got his clothes on and was out of my room pretty quickly.
You’d think I wouldn’t be able to stand listening to Miles anymore.
AARON/THE LEGENDARY PINK DOTS
Formed in 1980 in Amsterdam by two ex-pat Brits, Edward Ka-Spel and Phil Knights (aka ‘The Silver Man’), this prolific, variously membered ensemble produces spacey, gloomy, psychedelic pop music with a classical sensibility, a convoluted mythology, found-sound sampling, and stylistic hybridization and experimentation. Ka-Spel’s lyrics — focused on doom, gloom, violence, apocalypse — are poetic, disturbing, surreal.
The Pink Dots were one of Aaron’s favourite groups. He gave me The Golden Age for my birthday — that album specifically because there’s a song on it called ‘Lisa’s Separation’:
“She covered up the mirror, hid his photo in the drawer. The sketches that he made for her were ripped up and rolling across the floor. All memories and promises and plans they’d made were scratched or burned as Lisa laid her head down for the night. There’s no escape, there’s no remission…”*
Lyrically, The Golden Age is something of a concept drama about a psychopath stalking his former lover, a model or an actress who taunts him: “she teases from the T.V. — spreads her legs in magazines. She steams his collar, she dust his shelf, she cuts his hair. She’s never there…” (from the song ‘Maniac’). It’s an interesting album, quite creepy, eerie…
Aaron used to write poems that he said were about me. He fancied himself a ‘conceptual artist’. I’m not entirely sure what he meant by that. He did a little bit of everything; some writing, some painting, some music. I met him in a Russian Literature class. “The Russians have soul,” he said. “Everyone else is just so full of shit.” My father loathed him — not that he said so, in so many words — it was the lack of words that really indicated his dislike. I took Aaron home for Thanksgiving one year, I’m not entirely sure why; to prove I could snare an interesting man? He wasn’t of course the ideal nice young man that my mother was always inquiring after.
I did like him. I’d be kidding myself if I said it was really, truly, true love. I think. The sex was good; we did it at the drop of a hat. Picking his brain was fruitful, if only because he’d come up with something so skewed it could almost be considered profound.
“You need to broaden your cultural horizons,” he told me, on my birthday, as I tore the wrapping paper from The Golden Age.
“Thank you,” I said, in all sincerity, slipping off my chair and onto his lap.
“Hang on; there’s more,” and he produced an envelope within which I found tickets to a Pink Dots’ show.
The concert was unlike anything I’d ever been to before. I felt so conspicuously normal; normal clothes, normal hair, normal self…I don’t know if I’d ever seen so many different colours of hair before. The Dots attracted a diverse crowd. There were a few people dressed like me, who could have passed for normal (and they didn’t seem too worried about fitting in). The majority seemed to be gothic types; dyed black hair, billowy black clothes, white pancake makeup — vampire chic — though within that majority, was a minority of people dressed pretty much the same, only colourful; Aaron referred to them as ‘fairy-goths’. I noticed his eyes kept straying to one such woman with rainbow coloured dreadlocks — she was encased in skin-tight leather, nothing left to the imagination, curves accentuated, flaunted…
The opening act was a sword-swallower. He started with a couple small knives — held for him by a lithe, be-pierced, bejewelled assistant — and progressed through to a blade that must have been three feet in length. It seemed to me that I could almost see the shape of it within him, the imprint of it through his bare torso. I remember wanting to touch him, trace that sword shape through his skin, see if I could feel the metal within.
For his finale, he swallowed a light-sabre — a device he had rigged up to glow like the swords in Star Wars: The club lights dimmed and the shaft cast a neon blue light across the faces of the crowd, the sweaty skin of the sword-swallower…I hoped, as the man leaned back his head and the tip of the sabre disappeared into his mouth, that it would light him up from the inside — like fingers in a flashlight — blue glowing through his torso…his flesh…but it didn’t…the club just went dark…
Aaron and I made plans for when we finished school. We were to graduate at the same time. I was going to do a couple more courses afterwards, business courses, to supplement my Liberal Arts degree, and go about securing myself a job. He was going out west for a summer job, then planned to come back east and be creative, do his art. He said he wanted to be with me, he wanted us to be together. I guess I wanted it too.
Graduation came and went and we had a bittersweet evening of goodbyes and tender sex, then he went out west. I never heard from him since.
*Play It Again Sam Records USA/Wax Trax Records, Chicago, IL: 1988.
June 2001 | back-issues, fiction
a storella by Jerry Vilhotti
([email]vilhotti [at] peoplepc [dot] com[/email])
“Why Biagi? Where do you go?” his wife said totally confused by his behavior since his father died.
He couldn’t say. In his mind as vivid as the color of her blue eyes, he could see himself again crossing the German school yard, where no longer a kindergarten existed, shooting from the hip and behind the wall of his aim staggered a “nazi” clutching at his throat as if a raw clam were crawling up through his mouth.
“B”, as his close friends called him, took up his jacket as if it were a rifle and left. He was all ready late for his date which was his seventh in just two weeks. He had a lot of catching up to do since his long walk from Northern Africa to Germany.
“Biagi could I …” his father began to say but stopped seeing his son’s eyes like the black steel of a gun barrel looking through him unlike his own eyes that were puffed up and blotched with red from his constant crying over his wife’s death whom he had often told smilingly: “Just going out for some strange piece of ass!” …. He tried again only this time looking down, “Would it be OK If I came to live with your family. I’ll sleep in the cellar. Your dear mother’s ghost haunts me in the old house.”
B looked at this old man nearing retirement – this viscous man who had tied him and his younger brother to pipes deep underneath their South Bronx tenement after beating them with a strap – and then let them remain bound in the dark cellar occupied by rats walking in the night.
His father’s bald head glistened just like the church dome in the small Italian town they had captured. He looked at him with deep contempt; recalling after a compassionate neighbor had called the cops their beatings did not stop as the cops winking and whispering told the beater that to keep shit off the streets were making their jobs easier and making all the “big sirs” happy the streets were clean.
He looked into his father’s beady eyes that would get smaller and smaller the more he drank and said: “Only our dog sleeps in the cellar!” ….
B drove carefully through the Burywater slum in a town where many crosses stood atop churches like middle fingers jabbing the sky with all its discrimination and hate for foreigners and all the other “different people” wondering what had all his fighting been about and then he castigated himself for having said those biting words to his father. Couldn’t a simple no have been enough? he thought and then he spoke aloud to the windshield words he should have used instead : “Papa, we can’t have you stay with us. There’s just enough room for my wife and our two kids.” Then taking a turn by “Deadmanslake” seeing the dark waters made him remember all the hours of darkness in a cellar and he shouted: “No! No, I’m worried you’ll try to get my American-Polish wife again – like you tried when I was over there fighting for the big lady chained in the harbor! Remember Papa how you and Mama got that citation from the president telling all about my bravery and two wounds and the two purple hearts I earned for a country that taught me to be a good citizen and just enough to hold a gun? Remember how Mama would go every day to the Red Cross trying to find out where I was for three months and they told her for a small donation they would try to find out from the president who took over for FDR why I was missing and instead that guy was planning on sending more sacrificial lambs to some place called Korea in the near future and instead of going with Mama you sneaked of to go see Dora and asked her if you could drink up all her body juices. She threw up as she was throwing you out of our place. Do You remember?” ….
B gripped the steering wheel tighter as he could see himself ripping the cross from the young German girl’s neck and then spitting in her face – that could have been his father’s face.
Biagi stopped the car; opened the door nonchalantly; making it obvious he was looking at the woman’s gorgeous legs. She jumped in; folded herself into the seat as she gave him a pretty smile. He kissed her face that could have been his wife’s ….
