Mark’s band plays every weekend for a few hundred bucks and a few dozen people. It doesn’t take much to get me included on the band’s tab, so I still go see them when I can. I drink too much and listen to him sing about sex he doesn’t have. Not with me, anyways. It’s all “Talk Dirty To Me” and “Cherry Pie” and the like. When those songs were written, we were both still playing “doctor” as a matter of adolescent curiosity, a decade and a half from ending up in strange places, strange positions: my bra caught on a guitar stand, the legs of our jeans wrapped up in seatbelts. He’s all dolled-up on stage, gyrating with a microphone stand between his legs. The crowd is almost twice our age. I get really drunk.
The kids are five and three. They’re at my mother’s house eating popsicles instead of taking naps, which is the opposite of what I’d asked her to do. My mother is worn down cosmetically but still mostly functional, tall and strong, a rail of a woman in all aspects. She watches the kids partly out of love but mostly out of spite. She hates Mark quietly, the way Midwestern moms do, digging herself in and asking questions she knows she won’t like the answers to. It happened right away, the first time they met. For some teenage girls, that’s reason enough to marry anyone.
Mark and I don’t sleep together anymore, literally or figuratively. Women look at him like he’s a god. And I’ll say it: he looks good. No shirt, leather pants, shaved chest with baby oil and the bright lights burning it up. He’s trim and he’s tan and he’s as close to 1987 as any Friday night is going to get. Later, after the show, a taxi brings him home and deposits him inside the front door, where he collapses onto the couch and remains until Sunday afternoon. That night he’ll fall asleep in a desk chair, the next night watching a movie on the floor in the living room. There have been occasions when I’ll touch him on accident while I’m setting dinner on the table. My chest against his shoulder or two knuckles rubbing quickly. It shakes me. That night, every night, I sprawl out on our queen-size bed, sometimes like I’m being drawn and quartered, almost able to touch a corner each with my feet and hands.
By the time I get back from dropping the kids off at their grandmother’s house, Mark’s already been picked up to go help the rest of the band load gear. It’s never for very long, but the times when Mark has a show are the only times I’m alone in the house. I unlock the backdoor, call a taxi and put on a dress. It doesn’t take me long to get ready because Mark takes my make-up with him so he can be the big glam-rock star. That’s fine. I’m even lighter without it, one less thing to carry around. I leave the house with no keys, no billfold, no anything. Empty hands and pockets. It’s the only way. I come back heavy, sound overflowing from my ears, from my pores. When I wake up the next afternoon, Mark is still sleeping, destroying pillows with sweat and mascara. I don’t tiptoe, don’t close doors lightly. Until he wakes up, I’m the only one who hears the dull pang ringing in our heads.
The Replacements were a band from Minnesota. They have a bunch of great songs and one of the most annoying fanbases this side of the Dave Matthews Band--I was once called a "fair-weather fan" because I said I don't like much of the earlier punk stuff (I've got Tim and Pleased to Meet Me on vinyl, fucker!). There's a lot that could be said about them, but here's the short of it: drunk, clever, mild success, wearing Tom Petty's wife's clothes, drunk, broken up, Paul Westerberg plays too much acoustic guitar, quasi-reunion that nobody really gives a shit about, still drunk and kind of clever.
Katie Ferring is a writer from Dubuque, Iowa. She should really consider going by Kathryn, as the extra classiness might help combat all the time she spends eating pizza while not wearing pants. She really likes Morrissey and other gay men. One time, she saw my KISS tribute band play and said, "Yeah, that was pretty funny, I guess," not realizing that it wasn't supposed to be a joke. Katie recently graduated from the University of Iowa with an English degree, so look for her writings somewhere in the future.
I am a man who no man can break by sword or fist or lance!
Pride cometh, whispered Myrrdin.
I am a tree now.
Older than my rings will tell you for I count my age in the burdens I’ve carried not in the seasons passed.
I hate backhoes.
I was the man who no man could break, but who was broken nonetheless. Aisling Aine – the seasons still sing her name – was my love and my love was found hanging in the damp and mist on the morning of the Day Without Name.
Who could neglect a creature so?
Pain and the chill, ice in my heart, my heart to hers, dank and cold.
Finton the Fearless pressed into the bark. I don’t want to feel.
Chain saws, I also rank as obnoxious.
I really despise the sonuvabitch in the wife beater t-shirt. It’s not that he hits little Aggie. That would be too easy. For that I would sick my Sciuridae army upon him. Gnaw and feast, my little brothers would.
But he doesn’t hit.
I hit once. I struck so hard three men fell at one blow and Myrrdin said, will you be my champion?
But, Finton said, I have no use for titles or gold or glory now, stupid mage.
You have use for me, said Myrrdin. This I can end.
The manchild’s sin isn’t violence, it’s indifference. There is nothing so cruel as to ignore a love given so genuinely. It is the worst form of torture.
But I can end the agony, whispered Myrrdin.
How? asked he who once was Finton and fearless.
Take the cup for me. Protect it. Hide the prize in the world unknown and I will set you free.
Little Aggie should be set free. Not so little anymore. A score and two, I reckon. Just yesterday it seemed she was feral and wiry, innocent bare limbs scrambling over my bark to ascend, to hide away behind my ramparts, and imagine herself the queen in a land I used to know.
I would protect her.
Silly, silly, Finton, whispers the bird, the flying jackass. The mage said you wouldn’t feel. He never said you’d forget.
You have champions, said I. You have the Table and the Sword.
No more, hissed Myrrdin. Once, and perhaps again. But no more.
He wept.
I drank his ambrosia.
I crossed into lands not seen by my kind in millennia. I slew men of every color and tongue and dined on bear and dragon. Legend would’ve been my name but secrecy was my cloak.
It’s why he chose me: not for skill with the blade, but because I wanted to be forgotten.
Through the great untouched forests I walked: my mission, my salve; my burden, my salvation.
So I thought.
Bury it deep, Myrrdin said. Give it back to the soil and let the land thank us both.
It took my torment away and bade me stand watch in return.
No more.
Sub-division or strip mall? I care not.
Tell Myrrdin I’m coming.
Will he let you into the sky when you fall, asks the flying jackass.
Tell him the cup is still safe, deep in the Jersey earth, the best and most beautiful in the world. No one will seek it under a new Best Buy.
Come then, says the bird. We’re all waiting.
Smoke and oil. I wish the men who finally spill my sap were better. Have the decency to use a fucking axe.
The chain cuts my skin and Finton the Tree is not afraid.
The backhoe rears and lunges. Finton the Tree laughs.
Guided By Voices is a band from Ohio. In singer Robert Pollard's quest to create the perfect pop song, he's churned out hundreds of songs with dozens of line-ups. If you want to give a record collector a boner, ask him about his GBV 7" collection.
Mike Sweeney is a writer from New Jersey. Writing his bio became impossible when Google searches for "Mike Sweeney writer" came up with 172,000 websites dedicated to some schmuck who writes for Conan O'Brien. No matter. The real Mike Sweeney likes to write absurd things, and he's rather good at it. In fact, his sort story "The Werebear Who Wished To Come In From the Rain" closes out The 2010 Jersey Devil Press Anthology, a fine book full of other OBCBYL alumni and yours truly. That means you should purchase it immediately. In my mind, Mike hangs out with Danzig, Balls Mahoney, and Kevin Smith all the time, which is the only way to make him cooler than he already is.
My brother Donny was lazy enough that I didn’t necessarily feel bad for him when he went into a coma. I felt bad that he wrecked his car and almost killed someone and almost died himself, but I couldn’t muster more than a shrug when his list of responsibilities shrunk down to the fairly manageable task of “keep breathing.” And even that was mostly involuntary.
Now that I say it, I think it’s kind of unfair to say that he was lazy. It’s more accurate to say that he found a lot of peace in the absence of motion. He wasn’t particularly fond of that shit inside lava lamps or skateboarding or waterfalls and he most definitely preferred to sit himself down in a chair and find new ways to limit his blinking.
He was in for over four years, a time that spanned both his eighteenth and his twenty-first birthdays. Our family spent a lot of time deciding if it was in bad taste to throw his parties right in his hospital room while he just laid there hooked up to all the beeping machines. My sister argued that nobody wants a party while they have a catheter in. It was a solid point. We had cake but drew the line at hats.
When Donny got back into the world, he seemed depressed, which manifested itself in the opposite way it would in anyone else. He started coaching flag football and dancing with girls at bars. He got married and hated it and then got remarried and hated it again. It seemed like every year he’d move to a different town, dragging his stuff behind him in a trailer, doing anything but remaining still. At our father’s wake, we played catch-up and talked about the coma. He was quiet and minimal and I saw little flashes of the way he used to be—slight head nods instead of waves, the faintest rise and fall of his chest.
“Look at him,” he said, pointing to dad. “Is that how still I was?”
“Almost. You just looked like you were sleeping. Dad looks dead,” I told him.
“Dad is dead.”
It’s easy to think that only the obvious things should get talked about, stories about dad and all that, but there’s only so much that can be said. Sooner or later, everything resolves to banality. So, there we were, talking about how Donny misses the coma, how he knew he’d never get that still again.
“I had it. I had it all in there.” He didn’t sigh. “Who cares if people thought I was missing out? All I ever wanted to be was numb.”
I still lived in town, so Donny stayed at my place that night. It was July and just starting to get sticky at night. A thunderstorm woke me up. I went down to the kitchen to get a drink of water and when I passed through the living room, Donny was on the couch, legs out and arms folded across his stomach, the same way dad was laid out in his casket. I held the side of my head over his mouth and felt warm air rush into my ear. I looked at him for a full minute, two minutes. Three four five. I’d spend hours doing this when he was in the coma, just watching him, waiting for him to come out of it.
I thought about raising my hand up to strike him, slam down on his thigh with the bottom of my fist like a club. I wanted to get him up and tell him that he’s finally doing the right thing, that he needs the flag football and the loveless marriage, that if he’s not moving he’s dead in the water, like any other shark. I dumped my glass of water over his head and as soon as his eyes opened I began to pummel him, closed fists to his forehead. Knock out that frontal lobe. When I stopped, we were both where we wanted to be.
Bruce Springsteen is a songwriter from New Jersey. He is best known for trying too hard and singing about girls named Mary. The song "Vigilante Man" was actually written and performed by Woody Guthrie like, a thousand years ago. (There is no evidence that the Dangerous Toys song "Sportin' A Woody" is about him, but I still think it is.) Someone on the internet said that the song is based on The Grapes of Wrath, which I never finished because it was stolen from my car. Who steals Steinbeck paperbacks? Seriously, dickhead, you're an asshole.
Mike Sweeney is a writer from New Jersey. Writing his bio became impossible when Google searches for "Mike Sweeney writer" came up with 172,000 websites dedicated to some schmuck who writes for Conan O'Brien. No matter. The real Mike Sweeney likes to write absurd things, and he's rather good at it. In fact, his short story "The Werebear Who Wished To Come In From the Rain" closes out The 2010 Jersey Devil Press Anthology, a fine book full of other OBCBYL alumni and yours truly. That means you should purchase it immediately. In my mind, Mike hangs out with Danzig, Balls Mahoney, and Kevin Smith all the time, which is the only way to make him cooler than he already is.
Stephen Schwegler is a writer from New Jersey who started taking himself too fast too seriously. The goddamn guy had over half a dozen publications and a full-length book released in 2010! A machine, I tells ya. He likes to play video games and he has a short beard that's rather handsome on him. Buy his book, the absurd short story collection Perhaps., so he has money to travel the world and make a stop in Wisconsin where I'll get him the best milkshake he's ever had (assuming he's not vegan) and we can chew the fat about Y: The Last Man and why introducing the CDC as a hideout in episode five of The Walking Dead is a complete load of horseshit. Stephen also helps out the goofballs over at Jersey Devil Press, so go visit them and read around and be refreshed by the concept of a few people having a hedstrong-yet-open idea of what they think is good writing and publishing the good stuff.
