Our Band Could Be Your Lit

In the Van: "This Illusion": A story based on "Feel" by Big Star

2011-11-07T11:09:00.000-08:00

This week's story is up over at Prime Number Magazine, a great little online journal that you should definitely flip through for awhile. The story is based on the song "Feel" by Big Star, one of my favorite bands. This is my first attempt at incorporating a female magician into one of my stories. I like her a lot, so maybe she'll be back.

Check it out!

Follow Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Twitter.

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

Updates and Downtime

2011-10-30T18:29:00.000-07:00

In the past two months, I've done 53 submissions, mostly flash fiction. Of the responses I've gotten so far, I've gotten 22 rejections, 6 acceptances, and 1 acceptance that had some conditions I didn't agree to, leading me to politely decline publication. Also, I had to make three retractions due to the rules of simultaneous submissions: if something get picked up, let the other journals know immediately so they don't waste time reading bullshit they can't have.

From work on this project, in addition to other writing I've been able to squeeze in when I can, I've amassed quite the backlog of work: 70+ pieces of flash fiction (of varying levels of quality, of course). I'm glad I'm finally getting an opportunity to spread it all around. With this deluge of good fortune, I'm anticipating the inevitable drought when all my quality work is (hopefully) snatched up and I'm back to square one.

For now, another week with no new story. I'll be back next week with something new. For now, check out the harvest . . .

And don't forget to submit your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit! Click here for details.

**********

"Always Say the Person's Name" is based on "Ode to Billie Joe" by Bobbie Gentry and was suggested by writer Jenny Diski, originally for OBCBYL story 013. It's up now in issue #31 of The Legendary. This is my big Amy Hempel rip off. Or at least as close as I'm going to get to one.

READ "ALWAYS SAY THE PERSON'S NAME" HERE!

The Legendary

**********

"Look At How Fast I Can Go Nowhere At All" is based on "Life Passed Me By" by Super Stereo and was suggested by Jersey Devil Press Assistant Editor Monica Rodriguez for OBCBYL story 027. It's up now on amphibi.us. I was totally lost on this story--the original draft was more of a shitty extended scene that didn't make much sense--until some veteran at work randomly told me the story of the USS Indianapolis. I went right home after work and came up with what is now the actual story.

READ "LOOK AT HOW FAST I CAN GO NOWHERE AT ALL" HERE!
amphibi.us

**********

A first sentence I wrote for 50-to-1--they only publish stories under fifty words or the first sentences of stories that don't exist--is up right here. I wrote the line a year or two ago as an exercise in a workshop and never really planned on writing the whole story. At least some good came from it.

READ THE FIRST LINE I WROTE AND SOMEONE PUBLISHED (REALLY?) HERE!

50-to-1

**********

"When There Is No Road" is based on "Rock N Roll" by Paleface and was suggested by Monica "Mo" Samalot of Paleface for OBCBYL story 019. It will be appearing in the next issue of Literary Fever, under the theme of "Fortune Favors the Bold." I love boxing stories, and they always turn out pretty well for me. Kristie at Literary Fever said they were missing "the fight" for this issue, and "When There Is No Road" totally did it for them.

Literary Fever

**********

"Layers" is based on "Undone (The Sweater Song)" by Weezer and was suggested by two girls in a young adult writing workshop I was moderating. It will be up as of December 5th on the short short section of the Fiction At Work website. I had the kids write to music they had never heard before, and in trying to get me back they picked out "the weirdest song" on one of their iPods. I've played this song in front of crowds more than they've heard it. I think I wrote the story in about fifteen minutes.

Fiction At Work

**********

"This Illusion" is based on "Feel" by Big Star. It will be appearing in the next update on issue 13 of Prime Number Magazine (Prime Decimal 13.2). This is the publication I'm most excited about, as I really dig a lot of the work PNM puts out, including this killer story by OBCBYL contributor Kevin Wilson.

READ "THIS ILLUSION" HERE!

Prime Number Magazine

**********

Follow Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Twitter.

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

"Magic In Reverse": A story based on "If You Love Someone, Set Them On Fire" by Dead Milkmen, as suggested by writer Danger_Slater (43/100)

2011-10-16T22:05:00.000-07:00

Magic In Reverse

Life had felt backwards for so long that when the police asked me to start at the beginning, I told them, “I set her dad on fire,” which was actually what I had just gotten done doing. The real first thing was sitting in Leah’s room, me naked and her in knee-length socks. She’d light my leg hair on fire and we’d watch it curl up from its ends in long strips all along the meat of my calf and shin. She liked the smell of atmosphere tangling with actuality, like old body wrestling new air. We’d try to save some of my leg for the next time, but after I’d go through and light up the static and fuzz of her socks, we’d move on, all the way up past my thigh. The knobs of my ankle and knee were ruby colored and pulsing with warm irritation. We stopped and looked down, one leg normal, the other smooth and dappled with black hairs pinpricking out of splotches of white and red skin. She begged me to do the light blonde hairs on her arms and then, after that, the almost invisible swatch of white hair on the small of her back. It all went up like magic in reverse: the poof, the sprinkle of dust. She laid me on my stomach and went down my shoulders and back where there was hardly anything to burn. She flipped me over, did my chest and armpits slowly so I felt the flush of heat go through me and then back again. She took off her socks and then spread her legs. The hair was trimmed but still feral and mostly untamed. As if painting with light breaths in winter, I took the flame and lapped away at it. We were hot to the touch and her bed was covered with tiny balls of ash. We went to the garage and found some oil rags and a tank of kerosene. We lit them on fire and let them slide down our chests quickly, the warmth like opening an oven and then closing it immediately. I tore a strip off one of the rags and tied it to her finger. Nobody did anything for a moment and then she tied a rag around each of her ankles and wrists. I lit the rag on her left wrist and then she touched it to the rag on her left ankle before bringing her feet and wrists together like closing a book. She ran out of the garage and into the front lawn. We still didn’t have clothes on. She did naked cartwheels and the flames made her look like a circle rolling around the yard. I stood on the front porch and sprayed kerosene onto the legs of the wicker furniture. It was then that her dad came out. He was the doctor who delivered me when I was born, and when he came at me with open arms, I could only remember the thing I surely couldn’t remember from my first seconds of life, his covered face and hands-on greeting that pulled me into the world. That was the real first thing. I loved him, and I flicked the lighter once, twice.

**********

Lyrics

The Dead Milkmen are a punk rock band from Philly. The are probably the silliest band to ever be named after something from a Toni Morrison book. I'm meeting Joe Jack Talcum next week, so that's pretty cool.

Danger_Slater is the world's most dangerous writer. Much like The Ultimate Warrior, he is from Parts Unknown. Much like Queen Latifah, he resides in New Jersey. Danger_Slater is an agent of the theater of the absurd. As a dude who really gets his rocks off writing and reading work in the style of traditional literary fiction from the 1970s and 1980s, I'm often completely lost when reading a Danger_Slater story. Sometimes there's a guy with a banana for a head and sometimes someone takes a shit that isn't actually their shit. (I'm proposing that last sentence for the official Danger_Slater biography to be released in fifty years or so.) You can buy his debut novel Love Me from Amazon and then head on over to Jersey Devil Press and tell them they did a wonderful job putting it out.

Follow Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Twitter.

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: Uhh, something.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

"Is That You John Wayne? Is This Me?": A story based on "It's a Long Road" by Dan Hill, as suggested by musician Topon Das of Fuck the Facts (42/100)

2011-10-06T09:49:00.000-07:00

Is That You John Wayne? Is This Me?

The tall girl with roses on her dress rubs a hand up the inside of Deacon’s thigh and grabs him firm in the crotch. She’s spilled peach schnapps down her chin and neck and breasts, where it’s dried in a narrow stream and soaked into the top hem of the mostly white dress. Instead of that, Deacon thinks about Vietnam and how he got drafted, how he didn’t pass the physical and isn’t actually going.

“The way having no arches works is that there’s a minor-but-ignorable discomfort when spending long stretches of time standing or walking,” the doctor told Deacon, “and the arrival of the overall pain is not unlike a hand grenade with a two decade waiting period.”

He’ll need a cane within five years, a wheelchair within ten. So, Deacon’s not going to Nam. The girl with roses on her dress has two friends, one tall and one short, who are drinking whiskey out of champagne flutes and trying to get Deacon to go take pictures of them playing dress-up back at the short one’s house. He’s going there.

The girls are college freshmen with undeclared majors. Deacon follows them outside and hails a cab. The women pile in first, followed by Deacon crunching in next to the tall one with the lilies on her dress. He wants to change out of his tux first but the girls tell him not to. When he goes to loosen his tie, Lilies takes his hand and puts his middle finger in her mouth, removing it slowly around the circle of her lips.

The girls are talking amongst themselves. Roses pulls out a joint and passes it to Shorty, who lights it up and drags deeply. Lilies is waiting for the joint, and in the meantime she massages the sides of her thighs with her thumbs and palms and manages to wiggle out of her panties. The other girls laugh and do the same.

The cab pulls up in front of Shorty’s house, a mile outside of downtown, a place where the protests have tapered to one woman with an acoustic guitar sitting on the curb and strumming the chords to “One Tin Soldier” and “Waist Deep In the Big Muddy.” Deacon pays the cab driver while the girls stumble to the house, lifting up each other’s skirts and laughing obnoxiously. As soon as they get in the door, Lilies kisses Roses on the cheek clumsily and then licks the side of her face. Roses takes two steps forward and shoves her hand up Shorty’s dress in slow motion and then shoves her entire hand in her mouth.

They throw Deacon a camera and take turns running in and out of Shorty’s room with different outfits on, none of which fit the two taller girls. Deacon snaps picture after picture and the girls mostly ignore him except for the few seconds they stop to strike a pose in front of him. They’ve given up on undergarments and come out of the room with a breast hanging out or their pubic hair puffing up from the top of unfastened polyester pants. After about twenty minutes of the girls rotating outfits and revolving around the camera like a cyclone, Deacon doesn’t even bother aiming his shots anymore. He holds the camera to his side with both hands and clicks the button as if he’s in the war.

“Let’s go kill someone,” Deacon says.

The girls have started drinking again, relentlessly and without purpose. Shorty is the first to say something, which is “Let’s fucking do it.” Everyone’s quiet for a second until Lilies pushes Roses and then laughs. They all start laughing and shoving one another, throwing fake punches and then real ones. Shorty takes a right hook to the eye and throws haymakers out like hummingbird wings until, within seconds, everyone but Deacon has a bloody nose. They won’t stop laughing.

They don’t call a cab this time, they just take off toward downtown, blood and booze staining their faces and clothes. Deacon’s left his cummerbund and tie and jacket back at the place, but he’s still wearing everything else, the long shirt with cufflinks and the suspenders. The cheap plastic shoes begin to hurt his feet halfway to the protests. The girls have formed a messy v-shape, Shorty flanked by Lilies and Roses, and they’re following Deacon toward the noise and light.

The first guy they see is a wannabe hippy whose aggression is real and far less rheumy than the actual passive hippies. The girls call him over and he walks right by Deacon. They walk fifty feet to get to a parking ramp and then start walking to the top level. Deacon’s far behind the girls and the fake hippy. Lilies is in front now, turning it into a game, telling the fake hippy to come get them if he thinks he can catch them. Deacon stops for a second to take off his shoes. He starts to rub his feet and by the time he meets back up with the group at the top of the parking ramp, Roses is already down on her knees in front of the fake hippy, unbuttoning his pants.

“Get the fuck out of here,” the fake hippy says to Deacon, loud enough to travel across the top level of the ramp and not much further. Lilies punches the fake hippy in the back of the head, which doesn’t do much of anything. When he turns around, Roses stands up and shoves the pointed heel of her shoe into the side of the man’s neck. The three women begin to pummel him. The shoe won’t fall out, but as the seal of skin around the leather begins to loosen, spurts of blood shoot out in two-foot arcs every second, keeping time.

Deacon turns and runs. The girls have forgotten about Deacon and would have forgotten about the war if they had ever considered it. Deacon runs and doesn’t stop, not when he begins to cry and not when he begins to vomit, letting loose with hot bile and wedding food all over his stomach and legs. He runs until his steps begin to falter, his non-existent arches burning up his heels and shins. He runs with no destination, with no possible end of the road.

**********

Lyrics

Dan Hill is a Canadian musician who has a bunch of albums, but who gives a shit because he wrote the theme song for the first Rambo movie, so nothing's going to be as badass as that. Also, he's not the Dan Hill who married Faith Hill before she got famous--that was some Nashville guy who people somehow manage to give less of a fuck about than the Rambo Dan Hill.

Topon Das is a Canadian musician who has a bunch of albums, and you should give a shit because grind is awesome. He plays guitar in the band Fuck the Facts, my personal favorite album of theirs being Disgorge Mexico, in which they keep a lot of the same baby-punching elements of grind/death and add some space to breathe. Then you get hammered in the balls again. Everyone wins. Also, he likes Secret Chiefs, so he's cool as hell in my book.

Follow Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Twitter.

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: a story based on "If You Love Someone, Set Them On Fire" by Dead Milkmen, as suggested by writer Danger_Slater.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

"To the Gills": A story based on "Terrapin" by Syd Barrett, as suggested by writer Misti Rainwater-Lites (41/100)

2011-09-25T17:35:00.000-07:00

To the Gills

I started thinking a lot about unrequited love not the summer my brother drowned, but ten years later, after I had just turned thirty and there wasn’t really much else going on to think about. In the time between, I tried to do everything right, but not for very long and not with a lot of gusto.

Duane was two years older than me and above all else I desired his looks—his jaw was squared off more than mine and it brought all the elements of his face together—and his girlfriend, Rose, who fell between us in age and had dated me for two weeks before deciding, finally, on Duane. I couldn’t fault him on matters of taste or turpitude, so I blamed no one and assumed myself to be all the better off for it. After the current grabbed him, I ended up transferring to a college in Utah. I never moved back even though I had exhausted my chances with most of the girls and all of the trout, and on occasion I felt as if I missed home. It’s possible that I didn’t, that I was just being sentimental for my own selfish needs. It was impossible to tell: any sort of longing manifested itself in my brother the same way one might see a dead-end from miles away and avoid the road altogether.

Still, there were deep, clear lakes spotting the upper peaks of the mountains and towering light-haired women of Northern European descent to keep me distracted. Often, it was enough, to simply not desire more than what was available. I could live for days off the brief, undivided attention of a waitress who would laugh when I intended her to, and then for a few days after that stand at the cusp of the Great Salt Lake, never quite feeling as if I’d given enough back, but content nonetheless.

It was without warning, then, that I tracked down Rose and decided to start pursuing her romantically. Soon, I had cashed in my vacation time to drive to Mississippi and turn something that was practically nothing into a large-scale bad idea—always considerably easier than the inverse.

* * *

In a way, we had been together twice already, albeit the second time was both brief and in a haze of crooked mourning. It didn’t take long for us to consider the feelings of the deceased, and soon we had thrown bags of wrenches into the cogs of what may have been working between us. It was better left as it was: the first time a hiccup and the second nothing more than a dozen or so underwater kisses at the public pool after it had closed.

Those times were spent mostly in various stages of nervous movement, sneaking over the fence and then, once in the water, pushing off opposing walls with our feet and almost chipping our teeth against one another when our faces met. When we were too tired to swim but not ready to leave, we’d sit silently together underneath the counter of the concession stand. What was there to say?

* * *

Toward the gray and uncertain third quarter of the drive to Mississippi I had a type of dedication to time-management that took precedence over my feelings. I didn’t want to cut my losses and spend three more days getting home—I was sick of biscuits and gravy, the minor variations on the thickness of sauce or lightness of biscuits, but always the same taste, more or less, no matter which roadside diner it was—so I drove on.

I made an appointment at the salon Rose worked at. No name, just a 3:00 who needed a haircut. I sat down in the chair and looked at her in the mirror while she threw a cape over me and made small talk.

“Do whatever you want,” I told her. “I need a new look.”

She was wearing sandals and shorts and she had the same legs I remember, tan and hard. Her upper body had changed a bit, as if she had put on weight and then lost it and now she was getting used to the unusual places it remained, under her arms and breasts and neck.

A few years ago, I started going by my middle name, Joseph, which is the name I gave her when she asked. She didn’t recognize me otherwise, and after awhile it got to a point where it would have been awkward to bring up history. It seemed perfectly moral to be both who I was and who I wasn’t completely not.

She had turned me back around so I was facing into the rest of the salon. “You don’t swim, by chance, do you?” I asked her. It was then that I think she figured it out. Not the half-truths of my plot, but the loose threads joining back together over large amounts of distance. She walked away slowly off to the side of me and went through a door, either outside or to the backroom. I spun around and looked in the mirror. With my hair half done, I looked like my brother. I took my fingers and slicked my hair back a bit, stubborn all over, and though it lay down for a second it soon began to rise to its ends.

It was getting dark early, and when I went outside and looked around I was washed over with the blue of the moon. Science dictates that the stars were sharp and shaking with energy, but when I looked at them they seemed as smooth and calm as still water.

**********

Lyrics

Syd Barrett is that crazy dude who Pink Floyd wrote a bunch of songs about. Some folks stand by Piper at the Gates of Dawn as the best Pink Floyd album. Even though I'm not one of them, I still call dibs on the name Rowdy Roddy Piper At the Gates of Dawn for my solo album.

Misti Rainwater-Lites is a wild Texan, sort of like Terry Funk meets Hope Dworaczyk. Her writing has appeared all over the damn place, and you can check out her videos on YouTube. (Might I suggest "Anal Lollipops" for y'all?) (And since it came up on the YouTube search, might I also suggest "Tampon Lilliopops" by Skinless for y'all?) Some of you might know her as the person behind the coolest pen-name ever: Roxi Xmas. Some of you might not. If so, you're fuckin' up. Do some Googling (and visit her blog, Chubacabra Disco).

Follow Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Twitter.

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: a story based on "It's a Long Road" by Dan Hill, as suggested by musician Topon Das of Fuck the Facts.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

"Drench Your Bad Ideas In Diesel Fuel": A story based on "Parting Words" by Backwoods Payback, as suggested by musician Mike Cummings (40/100)

2011-09-12T05:33:00.000-07:00

Drench Your Bad Ideas In Diesel Fuel

Light them up like the 5th of July. Fireworks. Half off. Put a roman candle in your mouth and repeat the worst things you’ve ever said. When you get to the end, start over.

Pull out a tooth—a canine from your bottom row—and stick a firecracker in there. Don’t light it. It’s stupid to light it. It’s something else entirely to lick the tip hanging near the end of your tongue, picking out the flavors, dividing them into categories. Phosphorus: chemical. Anticipation: criminal.

In the movies, Arnold or Sly drive the motorcycle out of the airplane while the fuselage explodes behind them. They land in the canopy of a redwood or the deep end of a swamp. When you take off, do it over open land, agoraphobia be damned.

Here’s what you do when you get motion sickness in a car: slow down or close your eyes or stop. When you’re nose-diving at a hundred-and-something feet-per-second on a third-hand Harley Davidson and you get motion sickness, rip the side-mirror off and bite down hard. It'll look like the glass is falling up. It won’t do anything to help you, but think of it: first the glory and then, the glory.

**********

[No Video]

[No Lyrics]

Backwoods Payback is a band from Pennsylvania who put out a demo called Whiskey and Arm Wrestling, so you already know they're cool as fuck. Their sound is one of fuzzed-out power, giant riffs and rhythms that sound like they're from, where else, the darkest parts of the deepest woods. Their new album, Momantha, sounds like someone filled a dumpster with peanut butter and Jim Beam and then plugged a Sunn head into it. Buy it or die.

Mike Cummings is the guitarist/vocalist for the band Backwoods Payback. He likes motorcycles and Black Flag and he has a Zakk Wylde guitar. Much like previous Small Stone contributor Gideon Smith, Mike is a writer himself, having put out the book Confessions of a Lackluster Performer, wherein he goes over the peaks and valleys of being in the underground music scene for the past couple of decades. Buy that, too.

(I'd like to extend a special thanks to Scott from Small Stone Recordings for hooking Mike up with this project. He runs a great label with some of the best heavy rock there's ever been. Without a lot of the bands on Small Stone, I wouldn't play the music I play or listen to the music I listen to. Thanks for everything, Scott.)

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: A story based on "Terrapin" by Syd Barrett, as suggested by writer Misti Rainwater-Lites.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

"Let's Go Shoot Her While She's Crying": A story based on "Black Coffee" by Sarah Vaughan, as suggested by writer Dena Rash Guzman (39/100)

2011-08-27T07:46:00.000-07:00

Let’s Go Shoot Her While She’s Crying

Back when my mother was still alive, I paid some homely intern to write me monthly e-mails detailing new feminist lit releases, which I would then forward to my curious mother under my own name. I saw the girl, Aimee, writing poetry in sea-foam colored ink on her lunch break one day and told her I needed help. Being a woman of youth, she asked why she should help me lie, and being a woman of middle-age, I tried explaining that my mother was a devoted second-waver who raised me to be more like the manager of a women’s independent bookstore and less like someone who produces soap operas.

A few minutes into my story, I realized that there’s no short way to tell it, that I was just retracing my entire life up to that point—it starts with marches and years later ends with me pleading to a burgeoning poetess near a pile of catered sandwiches. I just told her that there’s enough money in the plan for her to afford a new stocking cap or a real haircut, and to prove I was serious, I opened up her hand and set a fifty dollar bill in it.

“You think about it. I’ll be rearranging the fake plants on the set.”

It worked out well for a year or so until my mother had an aneurysm. The neighbors had seen her through the window, motionless on the living room floor, and called an ambulance out of procedural hope. With that, I had lost a mother, but not a friend or confidant, and while my grief certainly existed, it was of the mandatory sort, the self-fulfilling kind I absolutely had to have.

When Aimee sent me the latest reviews a few days later, I told her that her services were no longer needed. She figured it out and sent me an e-mail saying, simply, that she was sorry for my loss. I offered to pay her for the next several months to give her time to adjust to the decrease in income, but she never wrote back, never brought it up again when I saw her. It didn’t strike me until later on the set, when Blake smashed a vase of lilies against the ground for the fourth or fifth time, that I had perhaps displayed my personal grieving in the worst possible light.

* * *

Both on and off of the set, the main starlet is named Bailey, and both on and off the set she’s a sweet girl in her early twenties whose level of self-awareness is inconsistent and confusing. While there are murders and long lost twins to muddle up her life on the show, the biggest tragedy in her real life is that she’s pretty enough for daytime television but too plain for movies. She knows this. There’s always a new plan to fix her face: change her makeup so her cheekbones pop, add more distance between her eyes, increase the size of her nostrils. She’s dating a man who is slightly less glamorous than her, meaning that her list of worries doesn’t extend much beyond proper Photoshopping of her jaw-line-to-eye-socket ratio.

The slightly-less-glamorous boyfriend, Joey, is in a burgeoning band the crew assumed was just middling enough to be gaining ground commercially, so when a minor part for a coffee house musician came up, Bailey suggested her man and we accepted. Between takes the two of them sat on the floor near catering and he sang her songs. We were waiting for a hair metal ballad, but instead he began playing Beach Boys A-sides and old doo-wop tunes. I was skeptical—“Twenty bucks says ‘Living on a Prayer’ is next,” I told Benny the cameraman—even after everyone had already been convinced.

He comped us a dozen tickets to his band’s show that night. The next day, it was all anyone would talk about. “Where were you?” Bailey asked me during wardrobe.

I kept writing on my clipboard, blocking off scenes, considering the angles. “I was at home. I don’t really like live music.”

To be kind, I looked up at her as she adjusted herself, fitting her fingers under her bra and giving a slight twist to the left and then right. “I’ll bring you one of their albums, then, so you can listen at home.”

I never listened to it. I knew it wouldn’t be as satisfying as the songs he was playing the day before, a little corny but tender and, at the very least, earnest.

My husband left the week before and I had just started putting bells on the knob of the front door, just started sleeping on the floor in the hallway.

One time, Bailey walked onto the set wearing a dress so black it was almost purple. The lighting team groaned, dropped whispers down upon me.

* * *

Now I smoke cigarettes, which is what I was doing when I heard that Bailey was engaged to the musician. I dropped the cigarette on the ground and crushed it with the toe of my flat. “Fantastic. Let’s go shoot her while she’s crying.”

In the show, Bailey’s lover had decided to go back with his wife. She was supposed to be a wreck, drinking coffee at 2:00 AM because she can’t sleep or leave the house or do anything else. None of the shots looked right. We tried moving her around, changing the lighting, changing her outfit, giving her smelling salts to help her face puff up, but nothing worked. She was glowing, and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it.

The assistant producer leaned into me and said, “She needs to nail this right fucking now or I’m going to break someone’s head against the fake toilet on set nine.”

The director cut the scene and I walked over to Bailey, not saying anything, but taking the mug of coffee from her hand and resting it in mine. I hooked my thumb through the handle and set the cup on the tips of my fingers. With my legs crossed, I made sure my posture never faltered, never began to slope as I sat there staring at nothing particular off in the distance, broken and blatant with steam in my face.

I handed the mug back to her. “Like that,” I said.

**********

Lyrics

Sarah Vaughan was an American Jazz singer from New Jersey. I don't know much about her--I know--vocal jazz never hooked me--but she seems like all the other extremely talented people in the jazz world who led a tragic life we were all charmed and horrified by. I read a long essay on Anita O'Da y once, and she seemed to be the most sane out of all of them, and she was still batshit crazy. Still, that voice, those voices. Damn.

Dena Rash Guzman is the second in a trifecta of talented, cool-as-fuck knockouts to participate in OBCBYL this season. (Chloe Caldwell was the first, and Misti Rainwater-Lites is on deck in a couple weeks here.) Dena currently resides in Portland with her family and her dog. She's got a bunch of irons in a bunch of fires, so make sure you visit her at H.A.L. Literature (not music, but definitely rock & roll lit project out of Shanghai, for which Dena is the North American Managing Director) and Unshod Quills (an everywhere-all-the-time lit journal run by Dena). She's working on her manuscript(s), too. And she's a literary pin-up! That's it, I'm pulling a 1998 and telling people she's my internet girlfriend. Yell at her on Twitter and read everything she writes.

ALSO, in an OBCBYL first, Dena has also written a story about "Black Coffee." She did hers first, but I didn't read it until now, and it's pretty damn cool, so you should all hop over to Redneck Press with Fried Chicken and Coffee and check out Dena's story.

Follow Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Twitter.

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: a story based on "Parting Words" by Backwoods Payback, as suggested by musician Mike Cummings of Backwoods Payback.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

"Refund": A story based on "On To You" by The Constantines, as suggested by musician Kevin J. Frank of Haymarket Riot (38/100)

2011-08-21T15:47:00.000-07:00

Refund

It seems like there’s a fucked up kind of Stockholm Syndrome that makes strippers date bouncers. The six or seven times that Rob has seen it happen, the girl traps herself in the job and then, in an odd narcissistic projection, ends up with the person who ensures she maintains the basic right of not having a finger shoved in her ass during a moment of inattentiveness.

Rob’s strip club rule #1: Unless she gives the money back, assume she thinks you’re a prick.

The bouncers at Razzles are like anyone else in that they have their quirks and charms. Crusher is a germaphobe. Tank spends fifty bucks a week playing pinball. Rob told them he was jealous, that he wanted to date a stripped and have an American Gladiators nickname. They started calling him Ball-peen and, by the time he came back next week, they had convinced the new girl, Minnie, to go ice skating with him at the park. When Rob got there that week and the bouncers introduced them, he shook Minnie's hand and wasn’t too bad about eye contact. But as she was announced to the main stage, he dumped his beer out under the table and rushed out the front door with dollar bills still balled up in his fist.

* * *

Rachel—Minnie, at the club—is the sort of brunette who could turn Hugh Hefner against blondes and Rob’s a janitor at Riggston High School a few towns over. They’re drunk. It would be one thing if they had too much wine at dinner, but the truth is that they both had the same idea, the same nerves, and showed up already smelling like soda and whiskey, stumbling out of two different cabs at the same time. On the ice they look like two halves of the same bird, Rachel the graceful wings and Rob the awkward, dangling feet. It doesn’t take long for them to wear out, and they end up sitting on a bench after a few minutes. A group of men in dark Carhartt jackets are standing nearby looking at blueprints some of the time and Rachel most of the time. At one point, they begin laughing like dads on a sitcom, a slight leaning back of the head and a bouncing chuckle. Every time Rob tells a joke, he looks to Rachel’s mouth, hoping to see the giant ball of steam that covers her entire face when she laughs for real.

* * *

They’re in the bar of a Marriott near the ice rink, making sure they don’t end up sober. She orders shots of tequila. “I haven’t had shots since I was nineteen,” Rob tell her.

“How old are you?” She leans forward as if watching a scary movie, anticipating the worst: I’m thirty six or forty five or fifty two. I collect social security and am in immeasurable pain right now because I’m not sitting on my hemorrhoid donut.

He tells her that he’s twenty eight and she considers it while trying to look like she’s not considering it. It means she’s not as drunk as she’d like to be, and when she finally says, “Really?” it means that neither is Rob. They do the shots and then she goes, “I’m nineteen. But I’m old enough to know what you’re trying to do.”

Other than her looks, that statement is the only thing about her so far that’s really interested him. Now he’s the one leaning forward waiting for the punchline, the gunshot and camera zoom. “You’ve been trying really hard all night not to ask me about stripping so that when I bring it up we can talk about it all you want. And then!” She raises her finger in the air like an infomercial. “You can tell me you don’t care that I’m a stripper and I’ll feel great and you’ll be different than everyone else I’ve ever met and we’ll be happy. Right?”

She’s trying to catch him in a lie he never told, which leaves the same kind of smirk on her face, and, thus, reminds Rob of lies he actually has told. “Look,” he tell her. “After awhile, life becomes technical college. You can’t be anything you want to be. You can be, like, twenty things. That’s it.”

And with that she grew quiet, possibly considering what he had said, but more likely inherently understanding it and instead considering the loudest boys in the loudest clubs yelling up at her, her skin like diamonds under wet glass.

* * *

At the point between the end of the night and the start of the morning, they find themselves in a churchyard. The sun is coming up slowly behind one of them and then the other as they make opposing laps around the courtyard, their balance only slightly better than a half dozen odd hours ago on the ice. At the two points in the circle where they pass one another, Rachel talks about how it’s too much like a movie, too much like something else. Rob has his own reasons to run, but when she stops him and puts her hands on the lapels of his jacket, he sees no difference between right and right now.

**********

Lyrics

The Constantines are the most Canadian band ever other than The Weakerthans. They sort of remind me of Lucero when Lucero reminds me of The Replacements, so they pretty much kick ass. Steve Lambke has that Jawbreaker rasp in his voice and the songs are mighty tales of personal achievement/fuck-ups that never err on the side of sentimentality or whining. Features former members of the band Shoulder, who sometimes did err on the side of sentimentality, but still kicked plenty of ass.

Kevin J. Frank sings and plays guitar in Chicago's Haymarket Riot. In 2007, I saw the band in Dubuque, Iowa with Tornavalanche (same day I saw William Elliott Whitmore and met the girl I'd date fir the next couple of years). Personal attachment aside, they were really nice dudes and they kicked total ass. Their tunes are angular and frightening, the mood is as unstable and the beat is not. I don't know if this is the same Kevin J. Frank who played drums in Silvertide, but if it is, that's pretty cool too. (I liked that "Ain't Comin' Home" song!)

Follow Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Twitter.

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: A story based on "Black Coffee" by Sarah Vaughan, as suggested by writer Dena Rash Guzman.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

"B Sharp/C Flat": A story based on "Bicycle Bicycle, You Are My Bicycle" by Be Your Own Pet, as suggested by writer Kevin Wilson (37/100)

2011-08-01T08:34:00.000-07:00

B Sharp/C Flat

My son, Jonas, tells me he doesn’t want a bike for his tenth birthday. His brother and sister each got one when they turned ten and the surprise is gone, he argues. It’s smart and logical, a not-too-deceptive way of telling me that he wants something else, which he soon does, bringing up, of all things, piano lessons.

A trick I learned in the office is to be literally above someone when they’re speaking to you, and even though I feel a bit dirty about using it on my nine-year-old son, I wait for him to start talking and then find a reason to get up. I grab a bottle of water out of the fridge and then, not leaning against anything, look down at him looking up at me. He’ll look like his mother as he gets older—she has the strong jaw in the family, a charming sort of Gibraltar—but for now he looks like me at that age, thin, almost gaunt around his temples and cheeks, messy brown hair hanging over his ears. The frames of his glasses are sleek and modern but worn down at the temples from constant readjustment. I take the sheet of paper from his hand as he lifts it up to me. Half-hour piano lesson: $15. Hour piano lesson: $25.

I tell him I’ll think about it, but as soon as he goes away I think about my first bike instead, bent spokes, no consistent alignment, and broken fenders on both ends rattling against the tires. I press a finger against the backs of my ears and feel a phantom pain from decades ago, my glasses tied to my face with a rubberband so they wouldn’t go flying as I dodged branches in the forested hills. I knew I’d miss most of them, but not all of them. It’s a numbers game. I get it. Half-hour piano lesson: $15. Hour piano lesson: $25.

* * *

My wife, Brenda Day, has one of those names where everyone, even me, says both parts. When we first met, she couldn’t believe how much I used to get in trouble. It was mostly a product of boredom and youthful mischief, mostly minor league versions of big crimes: kidnapping and shaving neighborhood cats, lighting dog houses on fire, breaking into places and bending all the keys we could find with a pair of pliers. These things still come up every once in awhile, like when I tell her that a bike is better than piano lessons.

She asks me if I think a bike would make it easier for him ride around and spray rose gardens with bleach, which I don’t have much of a reply for. She tells me that he doesn’t want a bike. Don’t get him a bike. He wants piano lessons. “Come on, Brenda Day,” I say, but she keeps at it until I lose my train of thought and realize she’s standing where I was earlier on in the day and I’m sitting in a chair at the table. Brenda Day’s arms are crossed and she’s holding a mug of coffee in her left hand. I look down at my feet and then up at her. When I tell her I’ll call the music shop tomorrow, she says, “I know,” and comes over to kiss me on the top of my head, her hair falling down over my face so all I smell is sweat and lilacs, summer all the time.

* * *

Jonas has his birthday and his piano lessons and when he goes to bed that night I think I’ve never seen him more content. The kid doesn’t get happy, and I’ve certainly never seen him overjoyed. He’s satisfied with being satisfied. Brenda Day doesn’t think it’s a problem. “So what?” she says. “We’re supposed to be concerned because he can tell the difference between fun and success? Go to sleep.”

I go to sleep, and when I wake up a couple hours later, she’s still out cold. She turns the air conditioning on extra high so she has a reason to stay close to me, even in the sticky months, and when I wake up, her arms are wrapped loosely around my waist. I wriggle out and when her eyes flutter open, I see the glazed-over whites too tired to be offended. I tuck a firm body pillow in my place and get dressed.

The first thing I do after I grab the neighbor kid’s bike is tie a pillowcase onto each handle. Then I ride around collecting all the mirrored gazing balls in the neighborhood. I didn’t realize so many people had the stupid things. They don’t know that they’re only good for that small window of time when they’re shattering against the ground, shards of glass coming up from the concrete like underwater lightning. I climb on top of the school and throw off two and three at a time until I realize I’m running out. When I start to toss them one by one high into the air and watch them fall like a shooting star to the parking lot, I wait for the sound at the bottom, a sound that, by the time it reaches me, is not unlike the most delicate glissando of a piano’s highest sharps and flats.

**********

Lyrics

Be Your Own Pet was a garage-rock band from Nashville, TN. They were around for about four or five years before breaking up. In that time they put out a string of EPs and two full lengths, all of it pretty much the most fun nihilism ever. They sing about riding bikes and fucking shit up, for fuck's sake. That's pretty cool. Jemina Pearl is the scariest dream girl ever.

Kevin Wilson, while not the scariest dream girl ever, is still a pretty dreamy artist from Tennessee. His debut story collection, 2009's Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, is a combination of Rick Bass and Donald Barthelme's powerful absurdity. "Blowing Up on the Spot" is about a Scrabble factory, spontaneous combustion, a woman at a candy shop, and a pair of brothers--the youngest of which who won't stop trying to kill himself. More importantly, it's completely believable and endearing, the ways in which Wilson shows people at the end of their wits, and the situations we all know that come from being in such a position. He's got his first novel, The Family Fang, coming out this month, so pick it up. While you're waiting, check out some of the stories he's had published online. (I suggest “Blue-Suited Henchman, Kicked Into Shark Tank” over at SmokeLong Quarterly, who are awesome even if they've rejected me over a dozen times. Maybe that's why they're still awesome, actually.) (Also, looking through that list, I notice references to Lori Carlson, The Who, and others. KW was OBCBYL before there was OBCBYL. He's the Iggy Pop of lit. Sort of.) He blogs here.

Follow Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Twitter.

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: A story based on some song that's been suggested by musician Kevin J. Frank of Haymarket Riot.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

Sittin' In: "We Can’t Even Elegantly Bleed" by Melina Rutter, as based on the song "Failure" by Swans

2011-07-24T16:55:00.000-07:00

I've been on and off for the past month or so, but I've got an excuse. A few of them, in fact.

1) I'm editing and contributing to a local zine. It's called ruix. Saying that ruix is a monthly zine by a collective of Dubuque musicians and artists who share the common goal of promoting and sustaining local music, art, and literature gets you close to an explanation. Saying that ruix is for those looking to capture and consider original sounds that are bent, but pure, gets you even closer. The collective behind ruix has not gathered by chance. Its brain—its brawn, too, for that matter—is borne from the natural forward motion of the arts community, the progeny of community and imagination. Everything is happening now.

If it's local and original, we want. No cover bands, no arts and crafts fairs, no bullshit. This project is consuming my life right now, editing all of the content in addition to writing original articles, show reviews, blurbs on new albums, and other odds and ends. If I've done any writing lately, it's been for ruix, which you can find on Facebook or on the plain ol' world wide web.

2) I'm in two bands, both of which are in the process of recording albums. My main project in which I play guitar and do vocals, Legal Fingers, spent most of last week recording the drum tracks for our debut sleaze rock album, No Time For Tenderness. (Featuring the hit single "(I Just Wanna Get All Right) Tonite!")In addition to that, we're breaking in a new vocalist who is talented as all get-out (and a hot chick, to boot). I'm teaching her the old ones when we're not at practice working on new songs for her to sing, and I've written four songs in the past five weeks that I hope will all make the cut when it comes around to throw her into the full-band mix. I also play bass in a street punk band called Bucket House Hooligans. I joined the band a couple months ago, and I'm still getting a handle on the tunes, which I'll be recording here shortly for the band's debut album, Dubuque (That's not me in the video).

3) I'm running a six week YA writing workshop. I've done this every summer for the past three or four years, for all the reasons anyone cites in doing something like this: teaching kids not to be dickheads who suck at writing is a good way to give something back and keep up on the basics myself, in the process learning something, teaching something, and being looked up to as a mentor. Warm fuzzy whatevers all over the place. But, as much as I love them all, it takes time to figure out what we're going to talk about, what and how I want to explain my comments on their written work, and the hour round-trip commute (and hour and a half spent in the actual workshop). They're great and it's satisfying, but I'm on week six of six here, and I'm getting to be glad my English degree has nothing to do with traditional education.

This is in addition to thirty three hours a week working as a janitor, between four and eight hours a week as a door-guy at some music bars in town, and still trying to do cool shit like meet Hacksaw Jim Duggan (and Terry Funk!) in Waterloo, Iowa. That said, I hope to get back in the OBCBYL game full-fledged once the workshop and recording process are both over. The zine is still taking a lot of time, but once we get used to deadlines and figure out the best ways to work alone and with each other, things will smooth out. Until then, here's one of my absolute favorite stories that's been sent in to me, Melina Rutter's "We Can’t Even Elegantly Bleed."

**********

We Can’t Even Elegantly Bleed

We used to have to stand in rows while the nuns checked out our fingernails. There was a kid named Shane Braddock whose father was a miner in Wyoming, and his hands were clean, the cleanest. Every day we watched the nuns shine their approval all over him because of his clean, square-cut nails, his long, tanned hands. To us, it was the way he wore his jacket, too, the dark disconnection in his glance, the bump on his nose that made him look like he’d just come up from a fight. Their approval was endless, all-encompassing. It made everything about Shane Braddock enviable, no matter how amiss it was.

He saw his father only once that year, and when the time came around we knew, because he had his pockets full of gravel that he brought out in the yard, pointing at some near-invisible sparkling flecks. It was a warm, windy day, and we were all squinting and restless. “Gold,” he said. “It’s gold my father brought for me.”

The day Shane Braddock brought his so-called gold to school was the only day that year he was punished. When it came time for the inspection, his hands were smudged black, nails full of dirt. Some of us leaned forward in line to get a better look. “That gold is dirty stuff,” someone whispered and a few of us laughed.

But in truth we were undone that day. Shane Braddock with black hands, Shane after his once-a-year-father, Shane who had special rocks dug up from the earth, was more enviable than he’d been with the nuns’ approval all over him. We looked down at our own washed-quickly hands and saw our dishonor.

* * *

We were eleven that year and had stashes of shameful, beautiful things hidden wherever we could make them last longest. We’d stolen cigarettes from our older sisters, chewing tobacco from a cousin, small nips of whisky straight from the liquor cabinet, ink bottles from the counter at the art store, ten bucks from a drunk aunt’s wallet, the key to the basement, some poker chips, baseball cards, and always the magazines we weren’t supposed to know about, a few we’d found used in a dumpster behind someone’s building, and those we’d dug a hole for in the yard and buried. There was a girl on one page called Sweet Tooth Savannah and she was our chosen one, the girl we wanted most. She lay in a bathtub filled with licorice, her eyes sullen, breasts exposed, dark hair indistinguishable from all that candy. She had black licorice ropes wound between her fingers like snakes or jewelry.

* * *

We heard about the mine collapse on TV during dinner. We knew it was Shane Braddock’s father’s mine because one of our mothers took their dresses to Shane’s mother for alterations and it was certain, tragically, unbelievably; it was Shane’s father’s mine, yes.

Some of us were stupid enough to ask about gold.

The mine was called Freedom but it was a coalmine. A coalmine, and nine men were dead underground, their faces blackened like Shane Braddock’s hands the day he was punished.

We went to sleep feeling too full from our dinners, babyish, hemmed in. We wanted to climb out the window and run the seventeen blocks to where the Braddocks lived, near the train tracks and the highway, where we could sit in the warm, dusty night on the porch and share our sleeplessness. Instead we turned over and over in our beds, unsure of what we had lost.

* * *

Shane was not in school the next day and we circled his empty spaces hungrily, in packs. The closer we imagined ourselves into his life, the more adequate we became. We took turns collecting his schoolwork for him, hoping to bring it by his house ourselves, but it was always collected by some adult or another—“the neighborhood pulls together in times like these,” was how one of our mothers put it. After some weeks it became clear to us that Shane would not return. We were told the mother couldn’t afford the city anymore, much less the school, and had moved Shane and his two younger sisters back to Wyoming.

Years later, we’d still be in the old neighborhood, just blocks from the classroom where we were made to stand in rows, compare ourselves against each other. We hadn’t seen the Badlands, the Rockies, the Snake River. We knew there were Indians who lived on all this land farther back than we cared to envision, and we’d have told our well-schooled kids about their battles and horses and visions without ever having met one.

We saw Shane Braddock one day, coming down long and loose from the elevated tracks; we knew that look of his even with twenty-five years piled on it. He was more torn up than we were, pinched, lined, underfed. He rolled a cigarette as he walked. He moved outside of the city-rhythm, any native could see that. He was there, coming down the stairs, then stopping to look far down 125th street, and then he was almost gone, his back to us, moving into the crowd.

He had gone down with his father in some pit unknown to us, he had left us, his stolen pocket money, his Sweet Tooth Savannah, who was his as much as ours; he had faded into some margin of half-existence. “Gold my father brought me,” he had said, and we could laugh for days.

But there were our washed-quickly hands, again, and there was the certainty that it was we who had given in, we who had been tricked, strung along, and we watched him go—quick in his old canvas shoes, his cuffs falling past his fingertips—again.

**********

Lyrics

Swans are a band led by Michael Gira. Imagine the pants-shittingly downtrodden and tortured you've ever felt in your entire life. That's what listening to Swans is like. They're probably the best band I can hardly bring myself to listen to sometimes.

Melina Rutter is a slender girl in Germany who writes awesome stuff at bark (a culture, literature, and art blog) and her own personal blog, Invisible Adventure. She likes tattoos and good tunes. Born on Earth, dead on the moon.

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: A story based on "Bicycle Bicycle, You Are My Bicycle" by Be Your Own Pet, as suggested by writer Kevin Wilson. (For real this time, hopefully.)

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

"A Priest and a Rabbi Walk Into a Car Crash": A story based on "Love" by John Coltrane, as suggested by musician Steve Marion of Delicate Steve 36/100

2011-07-09T18:36:00.000-07:00

A Priest and a Rabbi Walk Into a Car Crash

When Father Garrison and Rabbi Kohn both stepped onto the accident scene at the same time, they were surprised to see each other, as though they'd walked not into chaos, but into the set-up for a joke. The cars had collided at their front corners and then slid around each other in such a way that their tail ends touched, like two people in the beginning stage of duel. Garrison and Kohn each had their instincts: the Father to the knocked-out mother and crying child in the station wagon and the Rabbi to the nervous and harrowed teen in the Saab. They thought nothing more or less of each other for this, and in the odd spaces that appear in times of disorder, were thankful for the efficiency of their reactions.

They'd met a few times before in passing, at interfaith events or conferences. After the accident, realizing their previous appointments were as good as cancelled, they decided to go to a nearby café and discuss the accident. Neither mentioned the ways in which they followed another instinct, to bond over grief and reflect on what is gained when nothing is lost.

* * *

Earlier in the day, before the accident and the café, a woman had come into the church and done a tarot reading for Father Garrison. He was in the confessional finishing up with one member of the congregation when the door opened and then immediately closed again.

“Touch the cards,” the voice said.

Father Garrison reached up and placed the tips of his fingers on the cards and then leaned over top of them to peer through the screen. A dark figure, like everyone else on the other side.

“These things usually start off with something along the lines of ‘forgive me father, for I have sinned’ and not a request to touch a deck of cards.” He had become more serious in these later years, for the first time feeling as if he were forced into the priesthood by his family and then, after time, by convenience.

The figure on the other side of the screen was still, but Father Garrison could hear shuffling and, on the small shelf reserved for the folded hands of kneeling confessors, the laying down of five cards. He sat back in his chair, curious.

* * *

Father Garrison came over to the table and lightly placed two cups of tea in front of him. “Rabbi Kohn, do you know much about tarot cards?”

“Is that what the disco singer says she’ll do on those late night infomercials?”

“Not exactly. A woman came in today for confessional and mentioned something about them.”

Rabbi Kohn nodded, but was obviously thinking about something else, already having passed off the situation as a non-sequitur, a way to not talk about the accident.

Father Garrison’s card in the first position was the Knight of Wands. “The horse is riding through the desert,” the figure said. “Constant movement is necessary so you are not burned on the hot sands. If you stop, you burn.” Her voice wasn’t that of an old crone or a young gypsy. She was as worn out and non-descript as a news anchor or a waitress in a big town. “The horse is moving to the left, the path of non-traditional thought.”

“Miss, this is an obvious fabrication, and I don’t feel it’s necessary to make a mockery of my life as I’ve lived it for our lord and savior Jesus Christ.” Father Garrison’s tone was level and stern, but he didn’t even bother to lean forward, a defeated edge in him that made the woman continue, unabated.

“Your card in the second position is what you cannot see: the Hierophant. You may be feeling a lack of respect for ceremony and the law, perhaps doubting your knowledge of tradition.” She drew for him the Ten of Cups in the third position, showing that he is able to do away with what he’s comfortable with. Then the Two of Swords in the fourth position, his inability to change intuition or rely on other senses, blind in his situation but unafraid and, in fact, centered.

Father Garrison moved his head from against the wall and took a slight glance through the screen. He quietly asked if they were finished, but he was ignored again. “Your last card in the last position is your overall outcome. The Fool.”

“Wait just a damn minute,” Father Garrison burst out under his breath. He did not realize until a long lull in conversation with Rabbi Kohn later on that he had swore in the house of the Lord.

“Now now, Father,” the figure said, for the first time sounding as if she were deviating from a script. “The Fool in the final position it not bad. Look forward to a new beginning of simplicity. A fresh start with a straightforward heart.”

Father Garrison stood up and then sat back down when the woman said, “Doesn’t that sound nice?”

* * *

“Do you remember why you became a rabbi?” Father Garrison asked Rabbi Kohn.

“Ah, boychick, what a heavy question!”

“I used to think so myself, but . . .”

“But?”

“But now I don’t.”

“Well, I mean, I had a good education as a young Jew in the Midwest, that was a good start. I learned early on that the Jewish peoples have a rich history, one of sorrow and longing and, above all, hope. I just wanted to learn and teach, be burrowed in so deep to that one thing that it surpasses faith and become knowledge.”

And like that it became quiet, God as uncomplicated and sensible an intangibility as love itself. Father Garrison sat back slowly and thought of the baby crying in the backseat of the car, pieces of the windshield shining like heaven in her hair.

**********

John Coltrane was a jazz musician who pretty much ruled. He made a tenor sax sound heavier than any metal band. He died of liver cancer at the age of 40. He also did a shitload of drugs and was sainted by the African Orthodox Church in 1982.

Steve Marion is the main creative force behind the band Delicate Steve. He likes doing yoga, which I tried to do once, but stopped after finding out it's more breathing exercises than Tae-bo. The new Delicate Steve album Wondervisions is cohesive not despite of its wandering, psych-melodies and soundscapes, but because of them. You can buy it here.

"Butterfly" from Wondervisions

"The Ballad of Speck and Pebble" from Wondervisions

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: A story based on "Bicycle Bicycle, You Are My Bicycle" by Be Your Own Pet, as suggested by writer Kevin Wilson.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

"Over, Easy": A story based on "Buriedfed" by Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson, as suggested by writer Chloe Caldwell (35/100)

2011-06-26T18:06:00.000-07:00

Over, Easy

In the gas station by the river, there’s a guy who works third shift and sees more dead people than most other folks do. The dead ones come in to buy Marlboros or a Pepsi from the soda fountain and they never want a receipt. It’s not fair to say that they’re alive when they come in, but obviously they’re not as dead as when they jump, gainers and swans and belly-flops from a few hundred feet up. Almost all of them do it into the water, but every once in awhile there’s someone who goes off into the rocks like a lawn dart and, then, at the bottom, like a Slinky.

The trend was comparable to layering Day-Glo socks or buying Spin Doctors albums. Embarrassing, but, hey, there it is, a good idea at the time. They found a guy at the top of the bridge who had gotten so drunk he passed out and choked on his own vomit. The clerk sold him the vodka a few hours earlier. Suicide hotlines say not to take any threat of self-harm lightly, but what was there to say? The clerk told him not to do it and the guy said, “Don’t you think I thought about that already?” They answer all questions with questions. That’s what answers have become at that point: more questions.

The next ones almost happened. Some guy shot his wife and felt terrible enough about it to tell everything to the random clerk, who would have recognized the wife as the woman who came in looking like a jumper, but ended up bailing on the plan after buying a bag of generic barbeque chips, eating half of them at the top of the bridge, and then walking home. It doesn’t matter what the clerk asked him, but here’s what the guy said back: Shouldn’t my aim be better? More questions. He bought a hot dog off the roller and started heading up the hill, where the cops cut him off about halfway up. He told them he didn’t care what happened and then he set his hot dog on the ground, kept calling to it like it was a real dog. “Not much for fetch. But stay? Hot damn.” The clerk got the confession and the police got the apathy. It’s how the Midwest works.

They took him to the jail before he could jump. His wife came to see him when she got out of the hospital. She was dirtier than he was and even more unimpressed with his aim. “Way to blow it, William Tell. All I wanted was to die.”

He said, “Didn’t William Tell hit his target?”

“Can’t I just die already?” she asked a guard at the jail. The guard gave a straight answer like the living are known to do, and told her, “No.”

The jumps petered out after a dozen more, but nobody really felt better. It just didn’t seem like a viable option to anyone anymore. The clerk was especially confused. All those last meals of Fun Dip and Funyuns. He began going home each night and eating baked potatoes slathered in butter with dollops of sour cream speckled considerably with salt and pepper. He grilled thick rib-eye steaks and New York strips and put bacon on almost everything, zested citrus fruit on everything else. It was so easy to do that one thing right, to lie down in a casket with your gut heavier than gravity.

Some girl came in sometime near the end of everything and bought a Whatchamacallit and a yo-yo. “Know any tricks?” the clerk asked her, pointing to the yo-yo, a Duncan Imperial Butterfly that had been sitting on the shelf for years.

Her eyes were puffy and red from crying and her cheekbone was swollen on the right side of her face. She had a hairline fracture around the base of her eye-socket. The doctor asked her where it hurt earlier on in the day and she pointed to her heart and said here. “Why would I buy a yo-yo at a gas station if I already knew enough about them to do tricks?” She dumped her change into the penny tray and walked out the door, winding the yo-yo tight with the smell of juniper and chocolate buzzing off her tongue.

**********

Lyrics

Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson is some dude from the Pacific Northwest who gets really fucked up and sings songs about how he gets really fucked up. He's apparently had a tough life, but I don't know the guy. I hope he's doing all right. He's got a couple albums out, with his eponymous debut being produced by some dude from Grizzly Bear (who, despite being a big deal to a lot of people I think are dickheads, are actually really awesome). He put out his second album in 2009, entitled Summer of Fear. It came out on Saddle Creek Records, the messageboard of which my friend Toots used to hang out on and argue about Bright Eyes with other girls in their mid-teens, providing yet another reason for me to seriously consider no longer being her friend.

Chloe Caldwell, much like a John Cheever story, is from a small town in upstate New York. Her musical crush is Will Sheff of Okkervil River. Her writing is often hyper-sexual and intense, and, if I can say so myself, she's quite the emotional little firecracker. Her first book, the essay collection Legs Get Led Astray, will be released in the spring of next year by Future Tense Books. In the meantime, you can keep up with her at her website and her weekly "Love & Music" column at The Faster Times. She ran the site Sleep.Snort.Fuck. where I had an essay accepted for publication around the time things fell apart over there. The archives are still up, though, so get reading. Chloe was really nice when I wrote to her, so I'm glad it wasn't in person, because girls make me nervous and I most likely wouldn't have had access to a chemistry notebook with which to cover up my unsightly erection. In our correspondence, I had to go back and delete the "DeVille" I kept compulsively writing after the "CC" I used to address her.

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: A story based on "Love" by John Coltrane, as suggested by musician Steve Marion of Delicate Steve.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

"A Painting of a Woman On a Motorcycle": A story based on "Shimmering Rain" by Gideon Smith & the Dixie Damned, as suggested by Gideon Smith (34/100)

2011-06-20T09:44:00.000-07:00

A Painting of a Woman on a Motorcycle

After three days of non-stop rain, a man showed up at my door trying to sell me a painting of a woman on a motorcycle. The painting was wrapped in a thick piece of clear plastic like an oversized sandwich bag. I could just make out the blues of the sky and the grays of the road.

The man himself stood no taller than five feet. His face was swollen to bursting, like a glove filled with turkey and dressing. He was balding, his head like an egg in a hula skirt, and for the first few minutes I was distracted by it, the way the rain sat there as if his skin had recently been sealed with wax. When I invited him in, he removed his jacket and gave it a shake above the rug he was standing on.

He was nervous and said little. After he finally rubbed the water from the top of his head, he repeated the act several more times as a matter of habit, looking around my sparsely decorated living room as if he were considering renting the place. I could understand why he felt sheepish and was unable to conceal it. There was only a couch and a folding chair to sit on. In the corner were two broken televisions stacked on top of one another. I unwrapped the painting and examined it in the light before propping it up against the televisions. I know nothing of art but everything of looking at something slowly. The woman’s eyes were slightly crossed and there was a lake in the background, far enough off that it was almost lost, a single swipe of the brush. I owned no other art at the time and hadn’t even really hung up anything on my walls since the centerfolds of my youth.

I paid a meager sum for the painting and sent the man on his way, both of us content. My head was burning, but not in any way I could help with medicine or rest. The woman on the motorcycle had never felt frustration. I could tell. It wasn’t the freedom of the road, the biker clichés. It was the way her knuckles, white at their centers, wrapped around the handles with the satisfaction of revenge. But her eyes! There was not the silence of precision. One eye refused to follow the other directly and the resulting clash made her face a mass of harsh, beautiful noise. I fell asleep in the folding chair that night wondering how heavy her love could be.

The man showed up again a few days later. It was still raining and we went through the same procedure as last time, he acted no less awkward and embarrassed for my living situation. By then I had started recreating the painting on the longest wall of my living room. If he noticed, he didn’t say anything. He needed the painting back. Apparently, there had been a misunderstanding. I made it clear that I didn’t comprehend, but that was all he said. Surely he didn’t work for a company selling individual paintings door to door. I was sure he’d sold the painting in haste, a painting that belonged to either him or someone he was momentarily upset with, and he was then trying to undo what he had done out of dissatisfaction.

I told him no. He didn’t beg or attempt to explain his situation. But he didn’t leave. I asked him if he’d like to help me finish the painting on the wall. At first he declined and said he’d watch me paint instead, but eventually he made his way over and began painting a tree in the far off corner. “I watched Bob Ross,” he said. “When I was younger.” I nodded and told him that he was doing good but that he must keep consulting the original. We painted through the night, the rhythms of the rain against the windows lulling our brushes into a sort of fluidity. In the morning we were finished and as I stood back to look at the finished product, I noticed that I had made her mouth open, not in a smile, but in a laugh. In the original it was closed. I looked at the pudgy salesman and told him to mix up white and blue with a drop of black. “Like this,” I said, dipping my pinky finger into the mixture and setting it down lightly on the wall, lifting up into a wisp on top of the dot. The rain came down on her like a marching band. Oh, how little she cared.

**********

[No Video]

[No Lyrics]

Gideon Smith and the Dixie Damned is a band from North Carolina, also known as "Horsemen Country" in the world of professional wrestling. Somewhere between the Allman Brothers and mid-period Corrosion of Conformity is Gideon Smith and the Dixie Damned, vocals and riffs both grizzled and authentic, unable to be spoken about without using the word "swagger."

Gideon Smith is the leading force behind Gideon Smith and the Dixie Damned. Not only is he a musician, but he's a writer, too, having released the book Way of the Outlaw Spirit. He's also done spoken word and poetry in the vein of a shamanistic southern gothic troubadour (so basically, he's badass across all mediums). From my personal dealings with him to everything I've read about him, Gideon is the coolest, most positive dude in the world. Rock and roll need more guys like him. Everything needs more guys like him. If he's ever in Southwest Wisconsin, I'll buy him a burger and let him crash on my couch. Buy his music through Small Stone Records here.

(I'd like to extend a special thanks to Scott from Small Stone Recordings for hooking Gideon up with this project. He runs a great label with some of the best heavy rock there's ever been. Without a lot of the bands on Small Stone, I wouldn't play the music I play or listen to the music I listen to. Thanks for everything, Scott.)

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: Still gathering responses from musicians and writers. Stay tuned.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

Sittin' In: "The Falling Trees" by Samuel Snoek-Brown, as based on the song "Get Back" by Laibach

2011-06-13T11:16:00.000-07:00

If a rough first draft that is halfway compiled into a single MSWord document constitutes as done, then the Our Band Could Be Your Lit book is done. I wrote the last three stories this past week: an 865 word story based on "Snow & Lights" by Explosions In the Sky, a 585 word story based on "Bostons" by Have Heart, and a 636 word story based on "This Charming Man" by The Smiths. I also went through and re-edited the original 33 stories in the project itself. In the meantime, I'm just waiting for comments back from Sam and Alice, my two man readers/unpaid editors, on the 22 supplementary stories, compiling a mock table of contents for the manuscript, and writing an introduction. I'm on the home stretch, though, and by mid-July, it should be done as it's going to be on my part.

For his last hurrah, I sent Sam the songs "Prince of the Rodeo" by Turbonegro, "Get Back" by Laibach, and "What's Up Doc? (Can We Rock?)" by Fu-Schnickens f/ Shaq. He enjoyed the Turbonegro song, but couldn't figure out how to write a story about rodeo as a metaphor for gay sex that wouldn't wind up sounding offensive. "I try not to write things that'll piss people off without some deeper purpose. (I don't mind pissing people off — I just need a good reason to do it.)" I was really hoping "What's Up Doc?" would have been the one, but I guess not. "And the other song featured Shaq rapping. Screw you for that one."

I should have known he'd go for Laibach. "I'm actually kind of a sucker for weird German industrial metal, and I love bizarre cover songs. You know I love Tori Amos's cover of Slayer's "Reign in Blood." This felt like doing the reverse. So it was fun." The story, too, is fun. I've known my fair share of guys obsessed with pure sound, so it hit close to home. I described it as John Cage's 4'33'' meets The Twilight Zone, a description I'll stand by.

Sam's done a great job babysitting OBCBYL, in addition to helping me edit all of the stories that appear with the OBCBYL tag. I'd feel bad making him do so much work for me, but he's a full-time writer, and for that luxury, he must be punished. Thanks, and play it again, Sam.

**********

The Falling Trees

While others were making clever overlays and mashups, he went in the opposite direction and extracted, subtracted. He said he was searching for the essence of the song, trying to strip it down to its heartbeat. He broke down all the frequencies in “Sympathy for the Devil” until he had just the bongos, and then he played them over and over. Listen to that, man, he’d say. There’s so much hope in that sound.

He started following people around with a digital recorder, stooped low with the mic to the ground, recording people’s footsteps. This is what life sounds like, he said. We’ve stepped away from ourselves and this is the sound of us returning.

But then the rhythms became too forceful, too periodic. For the true nature of sound, he would tell people, he needed the sound to be constant. Movement, yes, but movement without breaks, and so he turned all his radios and televisions to static and stared at them for hours, his ear against the speaker. Shhh, he’d say when people came into the room, and at first people thought he was silencing them even though they hadn’t spoken, but then they realized he was simply repeating what he heard.

Eventually he constructed a waterproof microphone case, from scratch, and he would walk to the river early in the morning to submerge it. If it had rained upstream he stayed home—there was too much noise in a hurried current, he’d say—but in dry periods he was down on the bank every day, squatting till his knees gave out with his arm held over the water, the microphone cord drifting like a fishing line.

He announced he had reached a discovery and would perform for the city. He wanted to share the pure nature of sound, the true music of the world itself. He took out full page ads in all the newspapers and magazines, he posted flyers on every telephone pole, slapped stickers on garbage bins and fire hydrants all over the city. Few people even knew what he’d been working on, that he even existed, and among those who did, most ignored him. But he had accrued a few dozen acolytes over the months, computer geeks and philosophy students and underground musicians, even one former Hare Krishna, and they helped him rent a small community theater and set up a stage. It would be him and nothing else. He said equipment would ruin the effect, that the truth of sound required only its own acoustics. They arranged the few dozen chairs in concentric semicircles so everyone could see.

On the ascribed night he stood on stage for four hours and did nothing. Someone coughed and was ushered hurriedly out of the room. Two people nodded off but did not snore. Several people looked at each other nervously but said nothing, worried they would miss it. And at the end of the four hours, he died on the stage.

They argued for weeks afterward about what the true nature of sound had been. Some said it was the silence of standing there. Others swore they’d been able to make out his breathing and it was his breath they’d come to hear. A small cluster of people insisted that it was the sound of his body hitting the stage that was the intended performance. Those who disagreed argued that he could have slumped on stage at the beginning, but the die-hards maintained that only his dead body could have produced the correct timbre.

But these were all just theories, and no one ever agreed to only one of them. Today, if you were to ask anyone present at the performance what the ultimate nature of sound was like, they would only stare at you. Some might move their lips as though trying to find words, but none of them would say a thing.

**********

Laibach is a band of Slovenians who look like the evil parts of American history books.

Samuel Snoek-Brown is Dutch or Scottish or something. His Beginner's Mind looks like the evil parts of American chemistry books.

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: I'm back, with nothing in mind. So look for that.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

Sittin' In: "Colony" by Samuel Snoek-Brown, as based on the song "Brave As a Noun" by Andrew Jackson Jihad

2011-06-05T19:26:00.000-07:00

For better or worse, Sam's run here at the forefront of Our Band Could Be Your Lit is coming to a close. For his penultimate performance, he's turned in "Colony." He had a lot to say about his choices this month, so let me just spew some copypasta all over this . . .

"I was listening to the sound bites in the Metavari tune and heard a deep, dense story in there about the collapse of blue-collar America and the slow decay of formerly great American cities, but also about the possibilities those cities still hold and the great promise of the middle class.

Seriously.

Which is why it wasn't coming together—it was TOO rich, and I wasn't going to be able to write the story I wanted to write in under 1,000 words and/or under a week. Maybe I never will—it's too big. But damn, I wanted to.

Anyway, so I tried the other track (Ed. note: "Jane Doe" by Converge) but it just never grabbed me (that style of music never does, really), and by the time I got to AJJ I knew I'd better like it. I actually freaking loved it. Totally checking out more of their stuff.

Plus, it helped that I'd been reading that photo blog about pretentious hipster schmucks all week, so when I got to the line about art I knew where I wanted to go with it. In fact, the story I wound up writing was as much about this blog post as about the song, because—and I'm not making this up—I was listening to the track while scrolling through the blog and I saw this post in the first minute of the tune.

So anyway, that's what all that was about.

Here's why I didn't like the story: I liked it too much. Or rather, every time I worked on it or reread it, I thought it was too fucking clever. I still do. I actually really enjoy the gimmick of this thing, but looking at it from the inside, I can't help but wonder if it's cheap. But hey, as long as you dig it, and maybe one or two other people, then cool. "

I do dig it! So, yes, all cool.

With any luck, the stories for the book will be done this week. I said last week that I hoped to have finished off three stories over the course of the week, and I ended up getting four done: a 418 word story named "God As a Jigsaw" based on ".001%" by eyehategod, a 750 word story named "This Illusion" based on "Feel" by Big Star, and two as-of-now-untitled stories, one an 843 word hockey story (sort of) based on "Crowded in the Wings" by The Jayhawks and the other a 353 word piece of meta-fiction based on "The Beginning and the End" by ISIS. I've got three left, and then it's back to the weekly grind right here. But until then, here's more Sam.

**********

Colony

The first one who turned up was some thick-chested guy in an open-collared shirt and khakis. He had a mustache black like the grip of a gun and an unmistakable aroma of cigarettes about him. I found him in the kitchen of the house I shared with my brother, my friend Jake, and my girlfriend. I went downstairs and there he was, sitting at our kitchen table, goddamn typewriter and everything, banging at the keys. Jake joked that he looked like Hemingway, but it wasn’t a fucking joke. This guy never said a word, just sat down there all goddamn morning typing away in the kitchen as if we weren’t even there. At least he made us all coffee.

Then Whitman showed up. He liked to sit in a wood deck chair and stare at the trees in the back, bleak in the late fall, the limbs creaking in the wind as gray and wiry as his beard. The Hemingway barely acknowledged him, but the Whitman sometimes sneaked a longing glance into the kitchen.

I thought someone was fucking with us, paying their buddies to put on thrift-store clothes and show up unannounced. My brother swore he knew nothing about it. I was a little annoyed because my girlfriend kept eying the Hemingway. He looked back at her infrequently, but enough.

Two days later, Gertrude Stein pushed through our front door. Squat, domineering, and, unlike the men, loud as hell. “The light in here is terrible the light is wan. The light is the light and needs to be lighter.” She pointed at a Vermeer print my girlfriend had hung over the couch, this big poster of a woman at a table in the sunlight. Stein pointed like she wanted to cut the thing, her finger sharp in the air. “You call this art?” she said.

I liked her immediately, but all of us were starting to freak out.

We had a meeting in the garage, where Jake discovered Kerouac sleeping in the back seat of his car, and we discussed what to do about all these writers. My brother looked over at Kerouac, sound asleep and smelling like fortified wine, and said, “I tried to kick some of them out, but Austen. She lit into me. It was so bad I got weak in the knees. I ain’t saying shit to anyone.” He ran a nervous hand through his hair. “And I am not pissing off Hemingway, man. You know what that guy is capable of?”

My girlfriend said, “I wouldn’t mind seeing you fight Hemingway.”

“Sell them,” someone said and we all yelped there in the garage. It wasn’t that we weren’t used to new voices by then, it was just rare that any of them talked to us. We crept around the back of Jake’s car and found Charles Dickens hunched on a milk crate, writing by candlelight on a stack of cardboard boxes. “Sorry,” he said. “Everywhere else was taken.”

He didn’t say much else, but we got the gist, and the other three loved the idea. So they put out ads, cleared furniture from the living room, roped off pathways like we lived in some royal manor. Come watch the authors at work, the ads said. Five dollars, and later fifteen dollars, a person. Jake moved his car out of the garage and set up tables, and sure enough, more authors came, men, women, men we’d never realized were women writing under a penname, people whose language we couldn’t speak. They rented a pavilion tent and set it up in the front yard, and more authors came.

I wanted to move out, but no one would let me. I even tried to break up with my girlfriend. She said, “What the hell is the matter with you? This is why we came here. We’ve finally got the company of writers and you just want to fucking run away.” I’m pretty sure she was sleeping with Hemingway by then.

They’d moved a bunch of the furniture into my room to clear more space for the writers and the tourists. The refrigerator was in there, the stove, both the washing machine and the dryer. A couple of hall tables. Even the other bedroom furniture. I had three beds to wake up in each morning and I couldn’t get out of any of them.

But today, I don’t know why, I’d had enough. The partying and drinking and vocalized philosophizing keep me up all night. I opened the window and started throwing out bedding, quilts floating like parachutes into the lawn, pillows sliding down the canvas slope of the pavilion tent. I disassembled each bed, even my own, and threw out all the pieces, and I tossed out all the artwork then leaned the mattresses against the wall. Out in the yard, Stein was eying the wrecked paintings then nodding approvingly up at my window. I threw my stereo at her, then I threw my brother’s television and all my girlfriend’s clothes. I shoved the appliances out into the hall and all afternoon I could hear my brother explaining, “Sorry folks, detour!” But I didn’t care. Fuck Hemingway.

I’ve cleared out everything and moved a mattress to cover the door. I had what I’d actually moved here for: an empty space, plenty of light, and a little quiet in which to write.

**********

Lyrics

Andrew Jackson Jihad is the best band in hardcore. Or, at least that's what the shirt I bought from them says. Their instrumentation--upright bass and acoustic guitar--doesn't necessarily bring to mind Gorilla Biscuits, but punk and hardcore and rock roll have always existed as the audible result of a certain kind of attitude. By these criteria, Andrew Jackson Jihad may just be the best band in hardcore.

Samuel Snoek-Brown has never been in a band, but he did buy a bass at one time with hopes of being Bobby Dall or, you know, whoever. He also refused to sing some Danzig with my band one time, though I know he could pull off a pretty mean "Blood and Tears." More time to focus on his writing, I guess, which can be read at his blog, Beginner's Mind.

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: Sam's last story, as he chooses between "Prince of the Rodeo" by Turbonegro, "Get Back" by Laibach, "What's Up Doc? (Can We Rock?)" by Fu-Schnickens f/ Shaq.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

Sittin' In: "The Voice You Throw, the Blow You Catch" by Samuel Snoek-Brown, as based on the song "Little Drunk Fists" by Slobberbone

2011-05-29T19:59:00.000-07:00

More from Sam, with my favorite story of his little series here. Slobberbone is such a cool band, possibly my favorite band at this point in time--summer jams abound! I tossed him "Rollerskate Skinny" by Old 97's and "V" by Golden Smog, making this an alt-country shoot-out. You can't pick wrong, really. I've actually based a recurring characters in my fiction off the woman in "V" already, so I was curious to see what Sam would come up with. That Old 97's song just rocks, and I think it's Rhett at his quirkiest (though lots of my friends hate the song). Sam says he picked Slobberbone as a shout out to Denton, TX (Sam's from Boerne, a scant 5.5 hour drive away, considering how big Texas is). He passed on "Rollerskate Skinny" because he "kept picturing Heather Graham in Boogie Nights, which is not a good thing." (The song was actually written about Winona Ryder.) He was all set on doing the Golden Smog song, but in talking to his wife, she mentioned something about a ventriloquist's dummy, which sent Sam back to Slobberbone. "That take on whose fists we're talking about was too cool an opportunity to pass up."

I made a bit more progress this week, despite too much time spent in book stores--I had a total of $120 spent at three different Half Price Books for their 20% off sale this Memorial Day weekend--and at shows. Both of those things rule--especially the extra James Leg show I caught on Thursday in Madison, WI and the beautiful country-tinged rocking pop of Chicago's Death Ships I was lucky enough to see in Iowa City, IA (first time I've seen them in three years, and the new songs are excellent). As far as finishing this goddamn manuscript goes, I'm two stories closer: a 1024 word story named "After I'd Read Raymond Carver" based on "A Little Longing Goes Away" by The Books (the extra words will surely get cut upon revision) and an 824 word story named "It's Been Far Too Long Since You Woke Up In Someone Else's Shoes" based on "Misunderstood" by Wilco. I'm at fifteen stories "finished"--four older ones are in various stages of revision--meaning I've got seven left. This week will be slower than normal, so I'm hoping to finish three stories instead of just two. All right, let's rock.

**********

The Voice You Throw, the Blow You Catch

Every new guy in the bar took a chance with LoAnn. From behind, she was a fox. The heart of her ass rested firm on the barstool, her body thick where it matters. The ventriloquist dummy never turned them off.

Some of the old boys might have warned the newcomers. Carlo, the bartender, could have waved them off or refused to let them buy her drinks. No one said anything. Almost everyone in there, even the married ones, had taken their lumps making passes at LoAnn, and it had become a right of passage. Any man who took his chance and still came back the next night, well, everyone knew he was one of them, that he would return every night thereafter to watch for the next poor idiot who caught sight of her.

The sad part of it was, the dummy actually lured some guys in. He was a conversation piece, or a gag. Even when he spoke out, defending LoAnn, it was a joke and a challenge. Some guys like to fight for a girl, and what a great story they’d have if they won her away from a dummy.

Sometimes, LoAnn seemed to invite it. She’d argue with the dummy and pretend to want to make him jealous. She’d hold the dummy away from her like she was leaning out of earshot and whisper. His little jaw would fall open then slam upward in an angry clap of wood. “She already has a drink, jack, and her free hand is in my pants” was a bar favorite. No one believed the few guys who said they saw her lips move.

Maybe two or three a month would make headway in the game against the dummy, and when they did, she’d slide from the barstool and saunter outside. She held the dummy behind her back, like he was following her, and this is when his voice became the loudest. “LoAnn, why’re you doing this?” Sometimes you could see her wrist flick and his head would turn to face the poor guy following them. His caterpillar eyebrows would dip in the middle, a perfect mockery of a scowl: “Who the fuck do you think you are, buddy?” And, “You’re gonna regret this, jack.”

Everyone in the bar stopped talking, stopped drinking even. Everyone scooted forward on their stools, in their booths. Carlo leaned over the bar.

* * *

The bruises were always small, and they never lasted more than a day or two. No one ever talked about what happened between the three of them—LoAnn, the guy, and the dummy—in the parking lot. Never. Most people assumed she used the dummy like a weapon, just went batshit and chased them out of her car with that dummy’s voice screaming from her lips.

For two years this happened. At least a couple hundred guys tried their luck. Several dozen got unlucky. But everyone came back for the show.

* * *

When LoAnn missed a few nights in a row, the bar grew restless with rumor. When she’d missed a whole week, the bar went silent. A handful of guys stopped coming around. But when LoAnn returned without the dummy, the whole damn town turned out to watch.

It took maybe two weeks before anyone had the nerve to approach her, simple questions from regulars, just some people wondering if she’s all right.

The only thing she would say was “usual” as she first slid onto her stool. Sometime during the third week, one of the former abused, rubbing his jaw where he remembered old bruises, crept over to her and leaned on the bar, a few feet away, and watched her. When she didn’t look at him he dipped his cheek down to the wood and peered up at her. He was far enough away from her that everyone heard him: “You’re looking a little lonely tonight, baby. Maybe we could try again?”

From the back, a snicker. Then a few more. Soon, the whole bar was laughing. LoAnn leaned over the straw in her vodka until the glass was empty, then she slipped outside. But she was back again the next night, pulling down five, six rounds in a night, getting drunker and drunker, and the jokes kept coming.

That happened five, maybe six times, before LoAnn stopped coming around. No one had seen her in months. But about a week after she left, her dummy turned up on the front stoop of the bar, propped against the door. That first night, the bartender brought him in and everyone gathered around him, a wide circle like they’d found a wounded dog and no one was sure what he’d do. Everyone spoke in whispers. They stood like that for who knows how long. The dummy lay in a pile on the floor, limbs twisted, his face a mess. A couple of the older jilted men finally stepped into the circle, bent like pallbearers, and lifted him to the bar. Carlo set him on the highest shelf, put a bottle in his hand. A man leaned over and shut the dummy’s mouth. Then, opened it.

**********

Lyrics

Slobberbone is a band from Texas. Right around the time Uncle Tupelo called it quits, Slobberbone came around to be the new kings of cow-punk. And thank fuck they did. It takes a special band--or person, like Warren Zevon--to make rock and roll fun without being pointless, funny without being stupid. I'm not saying throw away all your Drive-By Truckers albums, because they're great, too, but if you don't have any Slobberbone albums, you're doing yourself a disservice.

Samuel Snoek-Brown is a man from Texas. I could say nice things about him like I did Slobberbone, but I'll let him embarrass his own damn self, which he does on a regular basis over at his blog, Beginner's Mind.

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: More from Sam, as he chooses between "Brave As a Noun" by Andrew Jackson Jihad, "Jane Doe" by Converge, and "Kings Die Like Other Men" by Metavari.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

Sittin' In: "Sun-shy" by Samuel Snoek-Brown, as based on the song "Potted Plant" by Cast Spells

2011-05-22T18:59:00.000-07:00

Sam's back again this week with a song based on "Potted Plant" by Cast Spells. I had originally planned on writing a story based on this song myself, but I just couldn't come up with anything that worked. So, I pawned it off on Sam, who did a fairly admirable job (though I don't know how he came up with something so much darker than such a happy song). He passed the Zappa song, because he couldn't think of any way to do it that wasn't obvious and/or an insult to Zappa. ("He rules too hard to fuck up.") He says he really dug the Integrity tune, too, but the video got in his head and wouldn't let go enough for him to come up with his own story. Just as well, we get a neat little story here that reminds me, in some ways, of a distorted Barry Hannah story--"Eating Wife and Friends" from Airships, to be exact.

On my own literary front, I made a small amount of progress since the last post: a 545 word story named "Jests At Scars" based on "Hard-core Troubadour" by Steve Earle and a 985 word story named "Ritual" based on "The Druid" by Sleep. I've got nine stories left to write, and if my yet-to-fail writing process of 400 words of fiction a day leads me in the right path, I'll be done in about three weeks. I also took some time this past week to speak to a few high school classes about creative writing, in addition to the normal schedule of band practices and full-time employment. Plus I got to catch a few killer shows, most notably the post-metal band Northless from Milwaukee, WI and funky fuzz-piano killer James Leg from Port Arthur, TX. Read Sam's story and then check out both of those great, great bands.

**********

Sun-shy

No one knew the cult existed until their bodies were found. When we first opened the house, two of our crew vomited immediately, and that’s when they brought in the rubber suits and gas masks. We suited up and each took a spotlight, prowling the area as if it were the surface of the moon, our legs slow and heavy, the sound of our breathing loud in our ears.

At the time, we thought it strange that they’d starved to death, since we discovered the whole back half of the house had been turned into a giant grow room. They’d walled in the back porch and hung the room in black plastic; they’d boarded up the windows in the kitchen and dining room in addition to hanging heavy black drapes over them. A utility closet, a mudroom, and a bathroom were all wrapped in black and all the windows in each of these rooms were sealed off, no sun allowed.

The fluorescents swinging from the ceiling or leaning on poles near the plants gave off plenty of light. There were tomatoes growing in overturned barstools, cucumbers climbing the walls, bean sprouts in the sink and potatoes in the top-loading washing machine.

We stared at it all for a long while, moving among the rows and caressing the food through our gloves, careful of our boots among the strawberries and mint.

There were six men, four women, and seven children, we think. They’d all shrunk so much it was hard to tell the adults from the teenagers. The youngest was maybe six. Later, we’d talk about how it would have been possible to fit one of our gloved hands clear around the abdomen.

People think that was the hardest part, but then I tell them about what happened when we pulled them outside, the skin flaking and blackening in the sunlight, the hair evaporating in wisps like incense. Scared the hell out of all of us when the first one went, and by the third all of us were getting superstitious. Around the sixth or seventh body, we started experimenting: one bare foot out the front door and it turned black. The rest of the body was fine. Up to the knee, the same. And so on.

Someone cut a hole in the black draping and made a kind of sun-spotlight on the floor, and we covered and uncovered it until one of the bodies was spotted like a Dalmatian.

We had no idea at the time what important things we were discovering, though we might have guessed once we got back into the kitchen and dining room and porch, started pulling down the plastic from the windows and saw the green corn flare up like tiki torches, the mint go blue in flame, the tomatoes burst and the strawberries shrivel and blacken.

We salvaged what we could, covered everything again and spent hours picking the last good fruits, sifting the ashes and the muck for viable seeds. All part of the research. Everything into cold storage, a morgue for the food as well as the cult.

So this is how it started, how we first learned what the sun was preparing to do to all of us. How our own fields would burn half the year, how the rain would stop and our skin would dry and burnish. Umbrellas sold out, laws against window tinting disappeared, and soon we all lived indoors.

The sun-shy food would not take to sunlit soil. We began to starve.

To honor those people we found, who first hid themselves from the dangerous sun, we withdrew the seventeen corpses from the morgue and buried them in the indoor fields, in a special plot at the back, away from the food. And those bodies have sprouted. Zucchini, cabbage, wild onions, even an apple tree. They are flourishing in the warehouse field, and already they are beginning to spread, root systems and new sprouts shooting up past the cemetery fence, becoming the harvest they never had.

**********

Lyrics

Cast Spells is the newest project of David Davison of Maps & Atlases (and Hey!Tonal, who don't get talked about nearly as much, but are awesome as fuck). I had the pleasure of seeing him in a coffee shop in town, and I was taken with the conciseness of the songs, the way he was able to pack so much--melody, smart lyrics, hooks--into a two-minute song without making it sound like it was stuffed too full or, even worse, just an empty bundle of melody, smart lyrics, and hooks. Also, when I met him, we talked about David Lynch and Daryl Hannah movies, so he's a pretty cool dude outside of music, too.

Samuel Snoek-Brown constructs, but more often deconstructs, a bunch of stuff that exists mostly in his head. He has a website, including a blog, Beginner's Mind, where this all goes down.

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: More from Sam, as he chooses between some songs I haven't decided on yet.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

Sittin' In: "How Many Tylenol Does It Take To Kill Myself?" by Samuel Snoek-Brown, as based on the song "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" by Elton John

2011-05-15T15:19:00.000-07:00

I've got some big stuff brewing for Our Band Could Be Your Lit: a book. The idea was brought up around the same time that the idea for the project itself was invented, but more in a "Wouldn't that be rad if you this turned into a book?" Since then, I've pictured an Our Band Could Be Your Lit print version to be spread out over three volumes. Since the idea is to write one hundred short stories, the first volume would be the first third of those--thirty three stories--along with twenty two supplemental stories based on songs of my choosing. I've had someone at a small-but-dedicated publishing company solicit a manuscript from me, which means there has to be a manuscript to submit.

So, Samuel Snoek-Brown is one babysitting duty for the next month while I finish up a first draft of the manuscript. I'm sending him three songs each week and he's picking one of them to write a song about. This week he had a choice between "Limerick" by Bardo Pond, "Jack Pepsi" by TAD, and, the song he ended up choosing, "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" by Elton John. In his defense, he wanted to do "Limerick" but his ideas were too similar too his previous OBCBYL guest post, the story "Buzz" (As based on "Omens and Portents I - The Driver" by Earth). He also wanted to do the TAD song, but the narrative was already so complete. He thinks I set him up to do an Elton John song, but really, that song rules, so I don't feel bad at all. And you know what? The story he pulled from it is pretty great as well, so scroll down a bit and read it. I'll be back next week with more from Sam and an update on the manuscript. Let's rock.

**********

How Many Tylenol Does It Take To Kill Myself?

Does it make a difference if they’re children’s chewable? I have half a box of those, maybe a dozen of the adult kind. And another bottle of wine – I’m pouring the last of this one now. I say bottle. Does it matter that it’s actually a box?

She’s screaming again. She’s so damned small, the size of a carnival prize, but all those sounds she can make in the night, all that volume. Christ. Thirty minutes ago I went downstairs and unfolded the hide-a-bed, flipped the mattress up against her closed door, tried to stack the couch cushions after it but they kept falling down. I can still hear her.

If the police come, maybe they’ll find me in time. Maybe I’ll be curled up in a ball, a chrysalis in my own sweat and vomit. Pupating. Isn’t that the word? I don’t much like the image, wouldn’t want to be found that way. But it’s the only way I have left to be.

Barbara knew what she was doing. She got one look at our tiny daughter, a moment in the arms, and then she slipped away, peaceful as you please. Transformed and fluttering free from all this. I lose my wife but I still get the girl. It’s not a happy ending.

What in hell does she want? It sure isn’t sleep. I have nothing left to feed her. I changed her diaper an hour ago, and if she needs it changed again I’ll have to move the mattress from her door.

If I had beer instead of wine, maybe I’d have a clearer head.

It’s three AM. I shake the box and think I might have half the wine left. It won’t be enough. I could go outside and just leave her in that downstairs room, screaming till all her air is gone. I could just leave everything, tuck the box under my arm and swagger into the night, free as Barbara, fly away. But for a long time I can’t seem to stand up, my ass heavier than my legs. I lean over in my chair for fifteen, twenty minutes, all the blood in my face, until I manage to tilt forward far enough that I come up out of the chair and I’m standing, but I’m trapped in the middle of the room. I try to reach for the doorknob but my arms are heavier than my ass, too. I just stand there, the cries echoing and surrounding me, my body so dense I’ve achieved my own gravity, my heart the heaviest part of me and the air revolving with her voice. It’s the only sound I have left.

In the corner of my office I have a stereo, an old component system with stacks of black-and-chrome equipment. I grab one of Barbara’s cds from the wall and drop it in the disc tray. I can’t hear it eject or retract; I can only hear the cries. I turn up the volume. Now it’s four am. I can’t find the children’s Tylenol. I think I kicked them under the desk. There are maybe a dozen of the adult kind. I take four. I turn the music up. Louder, higher, play it again. Shuffle, repeat, that same chorus, over and over, and I can’t tell anymore which is his voice and which is hers.

**********

Lyrics

Elton John is a musician who really had his shit together in the first half of the 70s, but has now become known pretty much as a flamboyantly homosexual man who writes songs about Princess Diana, lions, and rock star assholes in Cameron Crowe films.

Samuel Snoek-Brown's scribblings, thought patterns, and flat-out scatterbrained ideas can be followed at his website, including his blog, Beginner's Mind.

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: More from Sam, as he chooses between "Potted Plant" by Cast Spells, "Broken Hearts Are For Assholes" by Frank Zappa, and "Micha (Those Who Fear Tomorrow)" by Integrity.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

"The Vikings": A story based on "Smoke On the Water" by Deep Purple, as suggested by musician Kristian Dunn of El Ten Eleven (33/100)

2011-05-08T19:35:00.000-07:00

The Vikings

Think of every dollar you’ll ever make in your entire life. That’s how much money Wade and Ricky spend a year on cigarettes and pills. The total sum of their worth doesn’t go up or down in any noticeable amount, it just fluctuates throughout the stock market like so many gallons of water in an ocean. My worth is countable. Theirs isn’t even tangible.

My job is to watch them and make sure they don’t die. The pay is mostly incentive based: for every day I work for Wade and Ricky and they don’t die, they’ll put five hundred dollars into a savings account.

“Think about it,” Wade said after he hired me for the personal assistant position I was expecting to do. “If everything goes smooth for six years, you’ll be a millionaire.”

Ricky set a revolver on my lap and put his hand on my shoulder. “Just don’t cash out early.” Nobody said anything. After a few moments, he reached down and picked the revolver back up, tucking it back into his pants.

They paid me to worry. I watched them take pills to wake up and then hours later take pills to fall asleep. They had a pill for every action and its opposite: to get an erection, to make it go down, to feel better, to feel worse.

I’ve been with them two years. Some nights I fall asleep thinking about the $300,000 I’ve already made, sitting there waiting for me. Some nights I fall asleep thinking about Ricky’s gun, warm and heavy on my thighs. Some nights I don’t fall asleep.

* * *

Wade and Ricky each took a handful of pills this morning. Now we’re in Switzerland.

The two of them have become increasingly concerned about their mortality, their place in history. “Lots of guys have lots of dough,” Wade told me on the jet. “It doesn’t make us special.” He and Ricky tried explaining their idea to me, something about a world record and a mobile home. I couldn’t understand it. Their sentences mashed together, with one finishing the other’s and while that person then continued on from a different but just as seemingly logical point, creating an odd web of parallel universe-styled conversations.

I checked their pulses, their blood pressures.

* * *

The rope holding the houseboat burned away to nothing. I jumped out onto the dock and the boat floated slowly off with the ebb of the water. We felt like Vikings, though we had lost nothing in the fire, sent no fallen comrade away.

We had gone over to the docks to talk to someone about mobile homes. The first three were empty. Ricky kicked the door in on the last one. He wrote out a check for a new door as we looked for a phone book. There were playing cards everywhere, some set up in the middle of a game, but mostly just dozens of decks stacked in corners and singles scattered on flat surfaces. In one of the cupboards, I found a tiny roulette wheel. I spun it and it was so smooth that it went around for almost a half a minute. I bet it all on red.

Ricky found a flare gun and shot it off. The bed caught on fire. Within a minute, the roof lit up. By then I had corralled them toward the door and out of it. “Wait here and write a check,” I said. I ripped the door off what little bit of hinge remained and then ran back inside. I started throwing piles of anything that wasn’t a bunch of goddamn playing cards out onto the dock, hoping I was saving irreplaceable items, heirlooms and school pictures from years ago. I planned on dropping the check and the things I could save off at a neighboring boat. When the smoke was getting too bad to breathe, I grabbed the pictures off the walls and from the countertops.

I looked at the roulette wheel before I jumped out the door. The ball was seated firmly in a red divot. “Lies,” I said. I jumped onto the dock and looked up at the smoke rising into the sky. It moved off in wisps, so many different shades and hues. The colors of a lifetime.

* * *

We’re at a hotel now. Wade and Ricky have given up the idea of the mobile home and taken more pills, another fistful each. At the front desk, they ask for more mattresses and pillows to be brought to the suite. Money takes care of the inconvenience. They line the walls with the mattresses. They order more lamps to the room and cover the bulbs with coffee filters they’ve colored with a red marker. The room looks like a photographer’s darkroom.

They invent their wrestling names and take turns slingshotting each other into the mattresses, bouncing off and then slamming one another onto the pillows on the floor. Ricky nails a powerslam, Wade hits a back body drop. I’m not amused, have, in fact, been unamused by these two for so long that I don’t remember what it’s like to be entertained.

They’re slowing down. Wade botches a simple hip toss and they both collapse. I check their pulses. Normal, all things considered. With no place to lie down, I sit in one of the large chairs in the room and put the footrest out. I lean the chair back and recline until I’m almost flat. Wade and Ricky are still breathing deeply into the pillows. I’m not tired. Part of my life is trapped in a bank account and part of my life is stuffed full of a few thousand milligrams of Xedafidamin and passed out on the ground. If I close my eyes, it’s all still there. It’s quiet for minutes. Then, in an even voice, I hear Ricky ask me if I remember that time, years ago, he says, when we burned down the ship. “No,” I say. “Tell me about it.”

**********

Lyrics

Deep Purple are playing at a state fair near you.

Kristian Dunn is the guitarist/bassist for the band El Ten Eleven. I think he suggested Deep Purple as a joke (I actually love Deep Purple), but he's a killer musician, so it's all right. If I could work a loop pedal half as well as him, I'd be in heaven. I still wouldn't be able to write songs as well as he does, but I'd have a foot up, at least.

"My Only Swerving" from the album El Ten Eleven

"I Like Van Halen Because My Sister Says They Are Cool" from the album These Promises Are Being Videotaped

"Indian Winter" from the album It's Still Like A Secret

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: I take a break from OBCBYL to finish a manuscript, but it keeps on rolling with guest posts by Samuel Snoek-Brown.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

"Flood": A story based on "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" by Bob Dylan, as suggested by musician Patrick Fleming of The Posion Control Center (32/100)

2011-05-01T16:50:00.000-07:00

Flood

After three consecutive summers of flooding, the river was finally tame. Those in charge of arranging public events decided in favor of a carnival. Signs were posted around town and advertisements were painted onto the sides of old vans parked in the lots of the pizza place, the gas station. Radio DJs plugged the event between songs. We showed up as a whole and tasted the river in our burgers, smelled it through the smoke.

I spent the day watching Suzie Witthall operate the kissing booth. She worked at the vitamin store and was recently divorced. Though shaped not unlike the other mothers of my youth—hips like parentheses, shoulders stressing into clavicles—she had a sheen of health and a gait that suggested damage. I had turned thirteen a few weeks prior and was uninterested in the girls my age. We were going to be in high school in a matter of months and they too would be reaching toward older loves, seniors and juniors with cars and part-time jobs and problems that seemed more real than those of boys.

Knowing all of this, I was not sorry for staring from a distance, a dollar in my pocket and no nerve to spend it.

* * *

The following year, the carnival was back again. I had volunteered to help sell raffle tickets. The men were belligerent by mid-afternoon. Everyone was sweating light beer faster than they could drink it. Anyone with sleeves on their shirt had dark, moist crescents curling up from under their armpits and spidering up their shoulder and chest.

The raffle had ended and many of the prizes remained unclaimed, the winners having either gone home early or shoved their tickets into their pocket and forgotten about it, not even bothering to check when the numbers were announced. I hadn’t thought about Suzie until I was walking the unclaimed prizes to a city van. I saw her leaning over her booth with all her weight on one foot, both elbows on the top of the little plywood surface separating her from the patrons. She looked like a pin-up girl and acted like a stunt double: always ready but bored between the action. A few people had slipped me some tips as a means of showing off, but again I watched Suzie from the sidelines wondering in units of time, not distance, how much I could get for ten dollars, for a million.

* * *

It flooded for the next five years. The carnival came back and I was living at home after my sophomore year in college. Suzie set the kissing booth back up, and I was old enough to understand what people had thought about her, had always thought about her.

I signed up for nothing and I had no duties or responsibilities of my own. I watched all day as men came up to her and demanded kisses that were slow and hard. They walked away, right past me, bragging to each other about slipping her tongue and pinching her nipple when she leaned over, neither of which were true from my vantage point.

And I had a good vantage point. I saw the reflection off her fingernails as she played solitaire, waiting for men to show up to her booth. She threw the cards she didn’t need on the ground and left them there, jacks and aces scattered by her feet. Her clothes were plain but her lipstick glowed like mercury. She reapplied it after every kiss, thick and almost melting, dripping in the heat like a thermometer cracked open and bleeding.

I waited for her to pack up, the grounds crew coming over to disassemble her modest booth, flatten the plywood and cart it off. Everyone left except me was picking up trash. I hopped on my bike and followed Suzie’s car from a safe distance, the breeze the night brought with it blowing against my face. I rode slowly down hills, leaning back and lightly holding down the brakes.

It was dark out by the time I got to Suzie’s house. There were no lights on anywhere in the neighborhood. My phone began to vibrate and I shut it off. I had married a girl in the fall and ended up divorced by the winter. Everything had moved beyond fast, at a speed that can only be described as sudden. Not just with the girl I had married, but the others, the ones I had wanted to marry and had settled for dating briefly, intensely, for a month, two months. Dozens more didn’t even last that long, a weekend at most. I laid my bike and body down at the gate in front of Suzie’s house. It was so dark I fell asleep with my eyes open, breathing out in rhythms foreign to my heart.

**********

[I couldn't find a video, unless you want
to see some dickhead covering it in their
mom and dad's living room (trust me, you
don't). Besides, if you have never heard Bob
Dylan you either don't give a shit or you
have no interest in music, in which case,
you're in the wrong place.]

Lyrics

Bob Dylan is the dad of that guy from the Wallflowers.

Patrick Fleming is one of the guitarist/vocalists for the Iowan band The Poison Control Center. The first time I saw them, Patrick did the splits for the majority of the first song, then did a solo on his back with his legs in the air. He then went out into the crowd, smoked someone's cigarette before putting it out, drank someone's beer before throwing it down, and then kissed this meathead dude right on the lips. It was rad as hell. Also, the band has a great combination of pop hooks and weirdo guitar freakouts. They're the band I'd listen to most if I took a bunch of pills and figured a Frank Zappa album might kill me. But, since I don't take pills, I'll have to settle for enjoying the band in an unaltered state of pop rock bliss. Flip through their discography page and pick something to buy!

"Make Love a Star"

"Torpedoes On Tuesday"

"Shot In the Face"

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: A story based on "Smoke On the Water" by Deep Purple, as suggested by musician Kristian Dunn of El Ten Eleven.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

"Things That Are Glacial, Things That Are Gone": A story based on Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber, as suggested by writer Stephanie Momot (31/100)

2011-04-24T18:48:00.000-07:00

Things That Are Glacial, Things That Are Gone

Someone mentions the end of the world, casually, as if it’s a television show or a sandwich. You think about buying a life insurance policy even though the only thing you can afford to do is die.

Everyone has said something about the end of the world, the unfortunate eventuality of it, except you. This is what camping is: drink near something that’s green and something that’s on fire and say absurdly plain things about nature and love and death. The only thing you can think to do is list contextually-accurate irrational fears you are currently harboring, mainly the one about how every living thing is in a constant state of expansion pulling so slowly and smoothly away from itself that we will become transparent and malleable to a point where identity is negligible, a matter of whose cells are tangled up in whoever else’s cells.

Instead of saying that, you take a breath and hold it. It knocks against your teeth before settling into your soft palate, next to the names of those you’ve licked tenderly on the stomach and thighs, the ones who had considered friction a good idea and threw box fans and box cutters, one and then the other, until problems were solved or replaced with bigger problems. Your tongue becomes restless and you think of mothers everywhere either naming sons or being buried by them. All three—the mothers and sons and dogs—end up in the earth beneath your feet. You decide: before the world ends, you will date an academic, a geologist with attractive ex-spouses and several pairs of eyeglasses. One night after a failed dinner party, you will ask if certain areas of the earth are called driftless because of something that has left or because of something that was never there. Wait, you’ll say, don’t tell me. You’ll pretend to think hard and then you’ll change the subject.

People aren’t talking about the end of the world anymore. Now people are talking about the beginning of the world. You’re still holding your breath. The buzzwords are the same as always—God, higher power, Darwin, creationism, monkeys—and boiled down to those essentials you realize that you are in the woods with people you don’t even like, the sort of people who give birth to twins and name one of them Denim and one of them Lace, the sort of people who squeeze toothpaste from the middle and consult Consumer Reports without feeling silly.

If you weren’t still holding your breath, you would look at the person directly across from you and tell her that you don’t even like her. Instead, you just look at the person directly across from you. You think of breathing out, that momentary light-headed feeling that happens before your blood falls back into place, moving down through your feet and toes, unaware of how hard and in what direction it pounds.

Now no one is saying anything.

**********

Samuel Barber was a composer. Now he's dead.

Stephanie Momot is a writer from Platteville, WI. I remember when she was 13 and got into an argument with me (I was 24) about how she read Little Women when she was 12 and thought it sucked. I thought she was a bit of a snot, but she turned out to be an all right kid and a hell of a dedicated reader/writer.

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: A story based on "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" by Bob Dylan, as suggested by musician Patrick Fleming of The Poison Control Center.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

"We Expected Angels": A story based on "Step Right Up" by The Constellations, as suggested by writer T.S. Mallow (30/100)

2011-04-10T18:10:00.000-07:00

We Expected Angels

Two shots of adrenaline straight into his heart and Benny’s back now, alive as ever. He plays piano once a week at any place that will have him, usually dives and usually a Monday or a Thursday, nights that last as long as the dead that they resemble. When he plays, he churns out Turkish ballads and instrumentals from porno flicks and pretty much anything else he wants.

“What’s it like to be dead?” someone asked him one night after his set.

“Death’s a black girl with blonde hair who lets you sleep at the bar,” he said.

There’s no evidence that Benny sleeps. He drinks twice as much and looks half as tired, but he’s never been caught passed out or asleep—just dead, once. Nobody knew what he meant. We expected bright lights. We expected angels. “Do you think that was heaven or do you think that was hell?” I asked.

“Dunno.” Benny picked the ice from his drink and used an index finger to drive it around in a figure-eight on the top of the table. “I don’t think it was either one, but then again, I didn’t see my tab in the morning, either.”

There are so many bars—clubs, lounges, taverns, pubs—that by the time Benny is kicked out of all of them he returns to an earlier one in the series to find that he has been forgiven for his outbursts, his incoherence, his ability to turn himself into a roadblock. When Benny himself moves, it’s always toward the same woman, the same type of woman, some girl with a loud dress, cocaine on her nose, and a mouth with too many teeth. The names are always short, one-syllable affairs, the only kind Benny has any time for: Gwens and Kims and Dawns.

His name has never been on a marquee, but he’s bigger than that too. The buzz of the lights is in his voice. When we see him downtown he’s already been kicked out of wherever he just was. “Listen,” he always says. “They’re playing my song.” I’ve heard him say that about “My Funny Valentine” and “Sympathy for the Devil.” He’s said it about hip hop songs and dance remixes. He’ll sing along no matter what it is and we’ll listen until we can’t anymore, until we have to give him some money and walk away, tell him to go get a sandwich at the gas station and a drink at a bar that hasn’t put him in the gutter yet, which is our way of saying, Benny, you’re breaking my fucking heart, man.

We’re at Deacon’s, a big shack with whiskey specials and a broken piano. When we walked in, Benny was already yelling at the waitresses and changing all the lyrics to find new ways to ask for free drinks. The only thing emptier than the bar is his tip jar. He’s sweating and teetering in his chair, the slickness of his fingers making smooth glissandos from the black keys to the white. I sit down and within seconds Benny’s eyes get a far-away look to them. He swallows a mouthful of air, cartoon-like, with his neck going forward and his face going back. His head hits the top of the piano. A chord so beautiful rings out that none of us move toward or away from him until it’s done.

**********

The Constellations is a band from Hotlanta. Their music sounds like a dozen girls in miniskirts puking up glitter. And they obviously think Tom Waits is cool, so they've pretty much got it all going for them. Check them out, because they seem like good, talented folks--maybe they've got some awesome stories about all the killer old school wrestling that the area has spawned throughout history. Or maybe not.

T.S. Mallow is a writer from Canada. She recently had her very first publication over at one of my favorite journals, the comely Jersey Devil Press. You can read her story "Seven of Swords" right here. It too is a piece of band-lit, as it's based on some lyrics from the Bruce Springsteen song "Wild Billy's Circus Story," in accordance with the rules of the ongoing JDP project Brilliant Disguise.

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: A story based on "Adagio for Strings" by Samuel Barber, as suggested by writer Stephanie Momot.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

"Signal": A story based on "Have a Cigar" by Pink Floyd, as suggested by writer Don Balch (29/100)

2011-03-20T21:30:00.000-07:00

Signal

I’m watching home videos from other people’s lives. I buy them in stacks at Goodwill outlets and thrift stores for fifty cents each, a dollar at most. It’s important that these people aren’t me and aren’t people I know, so I drive for miles sometimes to find the old videos of strangers. I watch Troy’s first day of school. I watch Tim & Judy’s wedding. I watch fifth grade band concerts, over and over again.

Tonight I watch Thanksgiving 1991. The tape starts with a close-up of a turkey and pans out to show the stuffing, the cranberries, the gravy and bread and mashed potatoes. The chairs and room are empty. The voice behind the camera is joyous in its clarity.

How are you? The jazz combo’s going great? Fantastic news.

So glad you could make it. Here, take this. I just got them imported. A man at work cuts me a deal. No, really, I insist. Smoke up after dinner.

I had a lot of fun at your play. Sold-out! Remarkable. Surely you'll get into any college you want.

He sets the camera on the counter and walks in front of it to continue talking, setting his hands on the backs of chairs and making small talk. He’s wearing a blue pinstripe blazer and khaki pants and his hair is combed neatly to the front, graying slightly. He lifts a glass and stands quietly at the head of the table.

I propose a toast. Here. To this.

The man sits down and dips a piece of bread into the gravy. He eats several plates of food and then leaves the room without shutting off the video camera. The radio plays in the background for the rest of the tape. The songs are indecipherable. Everything has been thinned from amp to album, album to radio, radio to camera, camera to television, television to ears. A signal so distant, its whimpers are pinpricks.

**********

Lyrics

Pink Floyd is a band you already know everything about. So, moving on.

Don Balch is the editor of the Echo Ink Review, a great little journal out of Kansas that publishes literary short fiction (including my short short story "Passenger Side" in their second issue) and critiques. Read what they've got and then send them something.

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: A story based on "Step Right Up" by The Constellations, as suggested by writer TS Mallow.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

"Sergei Avdeyev": A story based on "Traveller In Time" by Uriah Heep, as suggested by musician Mike Conte of Early Man (28/100)

2011-03-13T17:22:00.000-07:00

Sergei Avdeyev

I’m sitting in a tavern in Moscow drinking by myself when I look over and see Sergei Avdeyev doing the same. Folded neatly on the bar stool next to him is a silver and blue windbreaker. I’m unsure if it’s really him, but as I steal more glances his way, I notice an embroidered patch with the Russian space program logo sewn into the sleeve of the jacket. The sun is just starting to set and more people are filtering in. Still, the tavern is less than a quarter full. Sergei and I sit at the bar, two of only a half dozen people to do so. He’s sitting there, his face looking interested but his body looking bored, hunched over slightly and tinkering with his change. Every few drinks he rolls his sleeves up a bit further and smiles modestly, as if he has just thought of an extraordinary idea.

I’ve kept up on space the way most men keep up with sports or politics. During Sergei’s tenure as a cosmonaut he spent a little more than two years in space at about 17,000 miles an hour. He gathered enough speed over the course of enough time to move one-fiftieth of a second into the future.

I wave the bartender over. “Is that Sergei Avdeyev?” I ask.

“Yes, that is Sergei. He comes here often to drink beers. He is a very quiet, very smart man.”

“Do you think I could order him a drink?”

The bartender swipes his thick palm across the top of the bar before walking over to Sergei. Moments later, he’s back and telling me that Sergei appreciates my gesture, but he has drunk enough for the night. I look over to Sergei, who is still looking forward, still grinning mildly. All at once, it becomes important that I interact with him, and in my head his presence becomes a reason for celebration, the mild hysteria normally associated with seeing a rock star or an actor. “Ask him if he’d like to play darts with me,” I tell the bartender, who again brushes his hand across the bar and then knocks on it twice with his knuckles.

Sergei does not know any English, yet when he walks up to me from across the bar, already holding the darts, he lets me know his appreciation by extending his hand, which is solid and lean, as is everything about him.

I lose three games in a row. I aim for the bull’s-eye and hit it once. I’m gasping for technique, switching the fingers I throw with, shifting large handfuls of Russian coins from pocket to pocket trying to find a balance. Toward the end, when our scores are almost even, I keep busting, setting myself back again and again. Sergei throws with his engineer mind and his cosmonaut body: long, accurate tosses from his slender arm, sailing true and adding up to zero every time.

We shake hands again and head back to the bar. There is a brief interaction between the bartender and Sergei, and then Sergei removes his windbreaker from the stool, drapes it over his arm, and waves goodbye to me before leaving. When I order another beer, the bartender tells me that Sergei has bought me three of them, one for each loss in our series of darts. I drink them slowly, and by the time I’m on the last one, the tavern has filled out. People are packed six to a booth. All the stools at the bar are taken, people crammed between them trying to order, trying to carry on a conversation. I finish and make my way through the crowd and out the door. Instead of hailing a taxi, I run, weaving through the city. I go for a half hour without stopping, twisting through all the dark parts and picking up speed with every turn. My pockets are filled with Russian coins and I begin throwing them in the air, making it rain dull rubles for several yards.

This is how long a second lasts.

**********

Lyrics

Uriah Heep is a rock band from the UK. If you've ever played D&D, you probably already knew that.

Mike Conte is the singer/guitarist for heavy metal band Early Man. His riffs eat mall kids for breakfast. His vocals are in the tradition of Mille Petroza and Tom Gabriel Fischer getting singing lessons from Geoff Tate and Michael Kiske (when they had balls). Early Man play metal the way it's meant to be played: fast and dangerous. Go to their website and order all their stuff, unless you're a pussy.

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: A story based on "Have a Cigar" by Pink Floyd, as suggested by writer Don Balch.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

"Look At How Fast I Can Go Nowhere At All": A story based on "Life Passed Me By" by Super Stereo, as suggested by writer Monica Rodriguez (27/100)

2011-03-06T19:05:00.000-08:00

Look At How Fast I Can Go Nowhere At All

As if I were the pin in the hands of a clock, time has moved around me. I’m the last one left. I speak to the wives now, maybe a dozen of them in the whole country, driving for hours at a time just to put them at ease. The first thing they always say is some remark about how well I’ve stayed put together, how lucky I am to have mobility at my age. Like me, they were barely twenty years old when the USS Indianapolis sank and stopped everything, became the moment that defined what happened before it, the reason nothing happened after it. I don’t tell the story and they don’t ask me to, which is good, because I tell it coldly, as pure fact, straight numbers. There’s twelve: the number of minutes it took the ship to sink. There’s one thousand, one hundred and ninety-six: the number of men on the boat. There’s three hundred and sixteen: the number of men who managed to survive four days attached to a handful of lifeboats, fending off shark attacks, living without food or water. I mostly just listen. They tell me about their husbands. None of them have let it go. I get lonesome marriage proposals from a wife in Lawrence, Kansas, a wife in Ybor City, Florida. The one in Oklahoma City speaks feverish, rabid French to me. Two rest home attendants have to come in and calm her down. One tries to get her to breathe in a regular pattern while the other holds her hand and rubs gently between her shoulder blades. One time, as I’m leaving, I’m told that she’s never happier than after meeting with me, but the excitement puts too much strain on her heart. I’m not invited back, and I drive on to Cheyenne and Philipsburg and San Diego. I drive to July 30th, 1945 and everything I drink along the way smacks of saltwater. Every open mouth has five rows of teeth and a taste for blood.

**********

Lyrics

Super Stereo is a band from Tempe, Arizona. "Life Passed Me By" is perhaps the catchiest song I have ever hated. The girl in the music video is exceptionally adorable and the male lead singer in the band has really nice teeth.

Monica Rodriguez is from New Mexico, but currently living in New Jersey. She is the assistant editor and event director of Jersey Devil Press, along with her sweetheart, legendary badass Eirik Gumeny, whose name I can finally spell from memory. She is smaller than an elephant leg.

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: A story based on "Traveller In Time" by Uriah Heep, as suggested by musician Mike Conte of Early Man.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

Sittin' In: "How Do I Feel For Thee" by Victor David Giron, as based on the song "Courtship Dating" by Crystal Castles

2011-02-27T15:49:00.000-08:00

How Do I Feel For Thee

How do I feel for thee, you ask? You motherfucker. You son of a bitch. Look at my hands you prick. Look at them. And you smile, act all confused. What the fuck is the matter with you? No. I know, right? It’s supposed to be all good. You fuck me, I fuck you, you fuck someone else, but all that should matter now is how you feel for me, and how I feel for you. Because what you and I have together is supposed to be stronger than this, all this fucking, each other and others. That’s what you think, right? You say you want to participate in life with me, that these digressions are nothing more than that, that you would kill yourself for me. Well go ahead. Do it for me. Please. I hope you burn your hands for me, like I did for you, burn your head. I want to watch it. That would be smart of me. Come on. Let’s dance one last time. Let’s fuck one last time. Let’s embrace these pulsating lights we love. The gray. The black. The bass, bumping, the floor shaking, our skin, sweating, our minds throbbing. We made love to those beats. We timed our thrusts perfectly. That’s what you loved about me, you used to say, my rhythm, our synchronization, our fluidity. It was more beautiful than anything you’d ever experienced. You said that to me, panting like a little boy. Like the first time, right baby? The party on Irving Park. It was a cold night. It snowed like I’ve never seen it before. The city came to a stop. The Puerto Ricans were the first to be out shoveling and marking their spots. I saw you across the room, smoking and acting like you didn’t care. I wanted you right away. You knew I did. We danced, we were hot. I knew we were going to fuck that night. I wanted it. I knew you were going to cum inside me in that hallway, I didn’t care that others were watching. We were high, and in love right away. You said you’d never experienced anything like that. Neither had I. Let’s do it again baby. Just like that. Right now. Come on. Kiss me. I want to suck on your tongue. Lick my neck. Pull my hair. Bend me over. Come on. How do I feel for thee? That’s how I feel. What, why are you so worried now? Bring that smile back baby, make me feel diseased. You know you want it, more than I do. I’m ready to procreate, baby, with you. And then, do it for me, prove it to me, that you love me, like you said you would. Shed some skin. Stab yourself. Tear your hair out. I’ll help you. I want to see pain on your face, along with that wicked smile. Come on, please, don’t stop smiling.

The lights pulsated, gray, then black. Heads bobbed all around them. He left. Her eyes rolled back into her head.

**********

Lyrics

Crystal Castles are a Canadian band. Unlike fellow Canadian band Exciter, Crystal Castles sound like the music in a video game where ravers have to take a bunch of pills to save a shipment of glowsticks.

Victor David Giron is a writer who lives in Chicago, IL. He's the head honcho over at Curbside Splendor, an independent publishing company based out of Chicago that aims to publish solid writing, often with an urban tilt. He is the author of the coming-of-age novel Sophomoric Philosophy. Buy it. He's got a couple little kids who seem pretty rad and he likes The Sonics. No word yet on if he likes the restaurant Sonic.

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: A story based on "Life Passed Me By" by Super Stereo, as suggested by writer Monica Rodriguez.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

"Where Is Your H?": A story based on "Smile & Wave" by Headstones, as suggested by writer Tim Trenkle (26/100)

2011-02-20T18:19:00.000-08:00

Where Is Your H?

The poetry readings and the town’s fascination with the subsequent implosion of the Masteron’s marriage would have never happened if I wasn’t so bored, so uninterested in the town during the summer. The sexiest baristas had gone home to smaller cities with bigger names—Manitowish, Trempealeau, Oconomawac—and left me with the townies, nice girls who would go on to make thick-legged, weary ex-wives for mechanics and guitarists and dentists. Business dwindled down to a few regulars who wanted distractions more than hot coffee. I’d make fourteen dollars one day, twenty-three the next.

I wasn’t trying to facilitate the arts. I just wanted something to do. I expected five or six people to show up, and at first that’s what happened. The second week brought a dozen people. The numbers kept doubling. Within six weeks it was standing room only. I served coffee and cappuccino to housewives who read poems about their children and to misunderstood high schoolers who read poems about how nobody likes the same music as them. It was amusing enough, every bit the small delight I figured it would be. I don’t think anyone expected anything of merit or weight, but when we were presented with the public dissolution of love, we turned up in droves, parked our cars miles away if we had to, just for the chance to be able to walk to see it.

Sara Masterson was the one who asked me if she could start up the readings, and showed up to the first one with her husband, Billy. They accidentally did it all. He was much older than her and a PhD in something or another, both of which were obvious when they were together: Sara vibrant and high-voiced from speaking to fourth graders all day, Billy sitting down only when necessary and always wearing something made of corduroy. We had no idea how much they despised each other.

At the first reading, Sara read a poem where a woman was a guitar. It was strangled and it screamed and it was allowed none of the credit for the beauty that came from it. Billy read a poem where a man was living under ice, where every time he would speak his words would come out in a thick fog and crash down to the ground in front of him. I wasn’t particularly impressed with the work or the sophomoric controlling metaphors, but the Mastersons made it a point to leave early, hand-in-hand, and we all noticed. They returned next week, the crowd almost becoming a crowd. Sara’s poem depicted a gravestone that swallowed the intangible pieces of lovers. Billy’s poem had two owls, mated for life and miserable because of the tradition. They ran their throats raw and no one was fooled.

The end of summer saw the largest crowd yet. I opened up the area behind the counter to the more trustworthy customers just to make more room. Sara read first, a poem where a snake lived in a tube of wedding rings. We were silent. Billy stood up when she finished, not even bothering to walk up in front of everyone, and began reading a poem we couldn’t piece together, one on the history of the letter H. It started as a fence, he said, etched into walls of caves to represent a stop, a partition. He spoke of Sarah, wife of Abraham, mother of Isaac. Woman. Princess. Lady. He moved into his point: though often soundless and voiceless, the H’s absence proves an incompleteness. Everyone but Billy looked at Sara as she sat and listened. Billy mused on about the letter, wondering where the letter could be if it was missing. Buried in sand. Drowned in the ocean. Perhaps, he said, perhaps it was never lost. Perhaps it was never there. The grace and stature and the H itself: impossible. He sat and took Sara’s hand in his own. Yes, he said. Perhaps. The cappuccino machine made its usual sound, a long sigh, a queue of Hs anticipating release.

**********

Lyrics

Headstones, much like Exciter and The Tragically Hip, are a band from Canada.

Tim Trenkle is a writer and street-enthusiast from Dubuque, Iowa. His writing walks along the same dusty paths of Steinbeck, showing the tortured beauty of middle America. You can follow his writing on Twitter and at his own person Dubuque Street website. Aside from mine, Tim, on occasion, has the coolest handlebar mustache I've seen. And he likes Tom Waits! Tim's rad, so read his stuff.

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: A guest story from writer Victor David Giron of Curbside Splendor Publishing.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

In the Van: "Carbon": A story based on "Adam Raised A Cain" by Bruce Springsteen

2011-02-13T19:19:00.000-08:00

There's a story this week, but it's only tangentially related to the overall Our Band Could Be Your Lit Project. What's happening is that the good folks over at Jersey Devil Press have this new feature they're doing called Brilliant Disguise, in which a story is written about a couple lines from a Bruce Springsteen song. I'm rather outspoken on my thorough dislike of The Boss, but my overwhelming love for JDP trumps it, and my story, "Carbon," was accepted with smiles all around (I hope).

So, go to the Jersey Devil Press website and surf around for a bit. If you want to go right to my story, it's right here. I'm sending all the traffic their way, so if you want to read this one, you're going to have to venture into the digital Garden State.

(In the meantime, check out this live version of "Adam Raised A Cain." It's the only Springsteen song I like, so it made picking some lines from it easy. Keep your ears peeled for the lines, "He was standin' in the door, I was standin' in the rain / With the same hot blood burning in our veins.")

Lyrics

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: A story based on "Smile & Wave" by The Headstones, as suggested by writer Tim Trenkle.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

"Mythology": A story based on "Bullet and a Target" by Citizen Cope, as suggested by writer Keith Scribner (25/100)

2011-02-06T21:48:00.000-08:00

Mythology

Doug has learned to not believe much of what his father-in-law, Frank, says. Lori understands. Her father had certainly been in the Navy, but had never met the Dalai Lama. He had once stopped a man from mugging a woman on the street, but neither, let alone both, had been amputees. He’s never seen babies in a harness hanging from a clothesline and he’s never seen someone shoot up heroin at a rest stop in Montana.

Doug considered Frank to be semi-dangerous. “Lying is wrong,” he said after an instance long ago where Frank tried to convince them that he knows a man who receives a million-dollar check from the government each month “What if we get married and have kids someday? Do you want them to grow up without a grasp of reality?”

“What’s so great about reality?” she said. They were both nineteen and she was two months pregnant. She hadn’t told him yet and she was still slender through her stomach, her hips widening only internally.

“What do you mean? It’s reality. That’s what’s so great about it.”

She laced her arm through his as they walked to her car. “Is that factual?”

“Yes,” Doug said with urgency in his voice. “That’s factual.”

* * *

Lori’s mother has died in a number of ways: kidnapped by Russians, crushed in a bizarre reenactment of the Challenger explosion. “Cancer,” Lori told Doug when he asked what really happened.

“Oh, that’s terrible,” he said. “What kind, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Bavarian,” she said.

Doug bounced Allie on his knee as she sucked on a popsicle. He shook his head and thought of the injustices of the world, actual abductions and tragedies and cancers. Terror was everywhere all the time. He sighed and his daughter bounded toward Lori.

“One Frank is enough, Lori.”

“He likes you. Just let him like you,” she said “Everything’s going to be fine.” Lori winked at Allie, who started giggling. She handed her mother the popsicle and ran off to play in her room. Lori took a bite and offered the rest to Doug who said no and then, as Lori grinned and kept holding the popsicle in front of him, yes.

* * *

Rolling her leggings on slowly with the flats of her hands, Lori tries to politely listen to both Doug and her father. Frank is telling a story to the kids and Doug is attempting to speak over him and get the attention of anyone who cares, reciting what time they’ll be back and detailing each of the emergency phone numbers. The kids are yelling for him to be quiet. Allie’s asking Frank what he did after the beautiful woman trained the monkey to steal people’s wallets. Her younger brother is repeating the word “wallets” and nodding his head like Allie, and the youngest of all is sitting next to them with a pacifier in his mouth. He looks like Doug when he listens, eyes open and body still.

“Well,” Frank starts, leaning back into the couch. He’s old, the sort where he could tell someone he’s 80 or 100 or 200 years old and they wouldn’t doubt it for a second. “I didn’t do anything, kiddos. Your dad there did it all. Couldn’t believe it myself.”

Doug’s children turned around to look at him in the doorway. Their mouths were open slightly, even the littlest one, who had taken his binky out of his mouth to gape. “Wow,” Allie said. “Then what, dad?” Frank looked at Doug, waiting to hear the rest of the story. Doug saw himself becoming heroic, talking sense into monkeys, throwing himself in front of a firing squad so the beautiful woman can escape her fate and wait for him in America. The guns go off but, somehow, he survives.

***********

Lyrics

Citizen Cope needs a haircut.

Keith Scribner wrote the greatest story about a level I've ever read.

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: A story based on a couple lines from a Bruce Springsteen song, as part of the Jersey Devil Press project Beautiful Disguise.

Click the button below to submit this story to the StumbleUpon search engine.

"Plots": A story based on "Transatlantic Foe" by At the Drive-In, as suggested by Philip Chavez (24/100)

2011-01-30T21:31:00.000-08:00

Plots

Bobby Fischer and I were both 13 in 1956. The day he beat Donald Byrne in the “game of the century,” my mother bought me a chess board. She became obsessed with the game, staying up late into the night to read books on strategy and history. She saw potential in it, both for me and for America, and she was half right. Bobby went on to unseat the Soviet Union from their dominance in chess before I could.

I never amounted to much on the board—too much emphasis on spatial patterns that I couldn’t see, let alone memorize. Still, my mother’s focus was unstoppable. We played each other thousands of times, sitting at a card table in the living room with the television on mute and a record on the turntable. When Pet Sounds came out, she played it every night for the next six years while we sat there and moved pieces on the board, endlessly and, for me, aimlessly. I spent my teens and twenties absorbing brass instruments and surf guitar and not much else. My mother drank black Russians as if that was in itself a form of domination. She was sending the entire country down her throat. She learned how to speak Russian, and she would taunt me as we played. Her grin was wicked, her face twisted, Mona Lisa with an aneurysm.

After Bobby beat Boris Spassky for the World Championship in 1972., my mother abandoned hope for my chess career. The empire had fallen and, with America safe, she was content enough to die a few years later. I tried playing competitively for awhile in New York. I was a joke even on the amateur circuit, and the city scared me. Men in pinstripe suits smoked as a prime function of breathing and used the smoldering cherry at the tip of their fat cigars to light the cigarettes of the burlesque dancers that sat on their laps. Their breath was thick like blood and they laughed through sore throats.

I hopped a train headed home and when I got there I stayed there. I took a maintenance and custodial job at a zoo about an hour away from my house. On my lunch breaks I’d play chess with the other workers and usually lose. I met up with one of the girls who worked in the bird conservatory. She beat me every day for a week. At the end of our last game she said, “Why didn’t you move your king’s bishop sooner? You would have had me.” I told her I didn’t know. “You’re not picking this up too fast, are you?” she said and punched me lightly in the arm. When I walked her back to her station, I noticed that she had a faint smell of sweat and grain about her. She was twenty that summer and I was creeping through my mid-thirties. Bobby himself had turned into a memory after failing to defend his title in 1975, subsequently retiring from chess for decades. My mother missed all of this, her story with no ending.

I had only been in the conservatory at night to clean, with minimal lighting to see the floors. I had never been in the cages, but I could hear the birds. On that day, that open-ended day of walking the girl back to the conservatory, I could still hear the birds, over the crowd. They fluttered and called to one another. Their sounds were cacophonous but smooth. We reached the cages and I saw no colors, only the black birds, perched and ready to circle.

**********

Lyrics

At the Drive-In is a place where Bret Michaels wants you to talk dirty to him.

Philip Chavez is a left-handed bassist from Texas.

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: A story based on "Bullet and a Target" by Citizen Cope, as suggested by writer Keith Scribner.

"Quietly": A story based on "Little Mascara" by The Replacements, as suggested by writer Katie Ferring (23/100)

2011-01-23T20:27:00.000-08:00

Quietly

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.

**********

Lyrics

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.

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: Undecided. Send in some suggestions!

Sittin' In: "Finton the Fearless" by Mike Sweeney, as based on the song "I Am A Tree" by Guided By Voices

2011-01-16T21:11:00.000-08:00

Finton the Fearless

I am a man! cried Finton the Fearless.

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.

I aim for the manchild’s new Camaro.

I don’t hear the crash, don’t see where I land.

Up. The bird leads me home at last.

**********

Lyrics

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.

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: Undecided. Send in some suggestions!

"All I Ever Wanted To Be Was Numb": A story based on "Vigilante Man" by Bruce Springsteen, as suggested by writer Mike Sweeney (22/100)

2011-01-09T18:10:00.000-08:00

All I Ever Wanted To Be Was Numb

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.

**********

Lyrics

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.

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: Undecided. Send in some suggestions!

"Back and to the Left": A story based on "Brain of J" by Pearl Jam, as suggested by writer Stephen Schwegler (21/100)

2011-01-02T09:56:00.000-08:00

Back and to the Left

Aside from his relations with Marilyn Monroe and being the most powerful man in the United States for a little bit, JFK wasn’t the luckiest guy around. He was accident prone, more than anything. Still, he kept his humor. He’d call me a few times a year and say something like, “I just slammed my hand in a car door. First I get shot in the head and now this.”

But he’s dead now. For real this time.

A few months before that car ride in Dallas, John decided he didn’t want to be president anymore, which would have been a hassle in and of itself, but he also decided he didn’t want to be JFK anymore, either. There’s a paper-trail a few miles long hidden away somewhere, but after it was all said and done, we managed to relocate him to Florida with fewer than half a dozen people knowing about it. He loved Scrabble and was big into anagrams, so he took the name John Zing, which, combined with the words “faked tenderly,” have all the same letters as the name John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I can only imagine how long he thought about all this before he finally brought it up to me.

Part of this is a history lesson, and part of it is just history. The guy who got shot was an ex-marine who figured it was a service to the country to let JFK have his way. A little plastic surgery later and he looked good enough to be in public for a few minutes before we shot him. While Jackie was picking up what she thought was the top of her husband’s skull, her husband was getting some reconstructive surgery of his own, reshaping his chin, filing down his cheekbones, bending his nose around like silly putty.

Flash forward several decades and he dies of pneumonia. He was in his 90s. He had a pretty Cuban wife—his way of making up for the Bay of Pigs, I guess—and some kids. (He’d send me some pictures every once in a while. That jaw. Goddamn.) Everyone got what they wanted, really. Jackie became a symbol of feminine strength and didn’t have a philandering husband anymore. Lyndon Johnson swore in as president. John was free. This is all his rationalizing. He told me that even America got what it wanted: a tragedy to unite it. “Only when consumed with grief can people wrap their arms around one another and be complete,” he said. “Like fingers rolling into a fist.”

**********

Lyrics

Pearl Jam is a band from Seattle, WA that started taking themselves too seriously too fast. The band Bracket is probably best known for parodying the cover of the second Pearl Jam record, but beyond that they're not known for anything except arriving just a bit too early to the pop punk scene. Pearl Jam lead singer Eddie Vedder seems like he wants to come across as a street-wise Bono, but he comes across more like just plain old Bono. Still, those first two albums rule, and they have a smattering of killer jams throughout the rest of their career, so let Vedder pretend he's a philanthropic Kerouac for all I give a shit.

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.

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Contribute your own story to Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

Next week: A story based on "Vigilante Man" by Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, as suggested by writer Mike Sweeney.

"In the Kind of World Where We Belong": A story based on "Mike's Love Xexagon" by The Fall, as suggested by writer Thomas Cooper (20/100)

2010-11-07T20:03:00.000-08:00

In the Kind of World Where We Belong

I married Ed’s sister a couple of times and now he hates me. He’s a drummer, and when we play together, I have to stand next to him, in the back by the rest of the brass section. If his sister, Cheryl, is singing back up instead of lead, she has to stand next to him, too. He doesn’t like her, either, to be fair. There’s nothing he says one way or the other, no outbursts or sharp words, there’s just nothing. He became fed up with our problems long before Cheryl or I did.

The first time we got married, it was an accident, despite being a good lesson in just how legally binding the state of Tennessee considers drive-thru weddings to be, and the second time was on purpose and sober. Now, Cheryl won’t drink around me, do much of anything around me, and even though she doesn’t hate me as much as Ed does, she still hates me. Other than the repetition and hiccups, the way we got to this point is pretty commonplace: in love, out of love, finish. Cheryl, Ed, and I grew up together and I think we all have different ideas as to what that means we’re entitled to. I thought it meant that it was okay to marry Cheryl, Cheryl thought it meant that it was okay to divorce me, and Ed thought it meant that it was time to leave town.

But, Ed stayed in Nashville, worked at the same job he’s always worked at, lived in the same apartment he’s always lived in. We’re not in a band, really, but we fall into a lot of the same gigs, playing whatever we’re needed for: Latin dance music, small jazz groups, raucous Tejano funk. By the time the dollars trickle down to the musicians themselves, there’s enough for the essentials—food, instrument repairs, cocaine—and that’s it. It’s no way to live. Or die.

Some small label has commissioned us to be part of the backing band on a Beach Boys tribute album. The studio where we’re recording is nice, with beautiful, resonate wood all over the walls and a big open floor, large enough for a small orchestra. They sent the charts to us a couple of weeks beforehand and we’ve done our homework, just like everyone else in the band. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” is up first. Cheryl’s standing around a microphone with four other people, ready to sing her part of the harmonies. Ed’s seated behind his drums, eyes forward and ready to go. I’m on tuba and I don’t come in until about twenty seconds into the song.

Even though an instrumental version of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” was playing at the drive-thru chapel where Cheryl and I got married that first time, it’s our second marriage I think of when everyone starts playing. The way I stood there in my tux, ill-fitting as it was, and how Cheryl would gently sink her nails into the soft pink of my hand every time I’d fidget or try to readjust my jacket. The lights were dim, and I remember thinking how much brighter it was the first time, every bulb in the light-up Preacher Elvis looking about to burst. When twenty seconds have passed and I’ve counted all my rests, I inhale and begin to play. The horn fits onto the end of my lips like death. Ed’s eyes remain forward.

**********

Lyrics

The Fall is the name of whoever is currently playing music with Mark E. Smith. They have a thousand albums out and, one time, they made John Peel faint.

Thomas Cooper lives in New Orleans, so I hope he's into all the sweet sludge metal bands down there. He also writes awesome short fiction. Check out some links to some of his writing here (including the awesome "Scapegoat," which is how I found out about him). Cooper is also a musician and fan of William Gay, so you kind of have to like the guy. Seriously, though, he's one of the strongest voices in all of flash fiction, like if Grace Paley and Amy Hempel were not just dudes, but one dude with a hyper-focus problem, which is to say his stories are clever and wound tightly, with each sentence doing several things at once, transitioning from line to line while composing the guts of the story. Read him.

Next week: A story based on "Brain of J" by Pearl Jam, as suggested by writer Stephen Schwegler.

"When There Is No Road": A story based on "Rock N Roll" by Paleface, as suggested by musician Monica "Mo" Samalot of Paleface (19/100)

2010-10-31T19:08:00.000-07:00

When There Is No Road

Wednesday night at the Pine Box Social Club is karaoke with a live band. Thursday night is fight night. Hank’s vision flashes sometimes, but he still goes to both. He’s forty-six and too old for the circuit. His voice and his face go together well.

The locals know him. He sings “Street Fighting Man” and “Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting.” Anyone who wins a fight gets an open tab for a week. If Hank doesn’t win, people buy him drinks. The night pushes back and the songs get slower, “Fearless Heart” by Steve Earle and “Atlantic City” by Springsteen. The band has been around too long, as if they were found playing on the road one day and a bar was built around them.

* * *

Hank’s been worried about the flashes more and more lately. About a year ago some trucker from Maine was passing through for the night and decided to get in on the fights. He loaded his glove with some of the smooth, flat stones from the rock bed out front and when he landed a punch on Hank a minute into the first round, it only took one more a second later to end it.

The locals ran him out, nearly burned down his rig after he crawled into it and started it up, and when Hank came to, the flashes were worse. Instead of the light receding and then building back up a moment later, like an old television turned off and then back on quickly, the flashes came in short bursts of varying strengths, like sheets of rain.

* * *

Some Thursday nights, after all the fights are done, Hank will sit in his car just listening to the radio. There are times when he won’t leave the parking lot until the next morning. His car will idle all night and the owner will have to come out and give him a jump.

No station comes in clear enough anymore. Every rhythm section sounds like it’s in the breeze. Every song is a whisper, like a secret.

* * *

Boxers hit harder in autumn. Nobody’s proved it or even done a study on it, but watching Hank punch his way through November is different than watching him punch his way through April or July. There’s no season to the sport, but there is the inverse: here is a thing you cannot stop.

* * *

There are better singers in the world than Hank. There's even a better singer in the Pine Box Social Club on the live karaoke nights, and it’s a safe bet that there’s a better singer in every bar in every town. “You don’t need a good voice if you’ve got a good right hook,” Hank said once. He shrugged and some people in the bar began talking simple philosophy—each of our unique gifts. They had all seen Hank’s right hook and decided that it wasn’t developed so much as it was bestowed upon him.

For the first time in years, Hank didn’t show up to fight night. It was a few weeks ago and people were calling his house, trying to find him. Jim Mikinez was declared the most sober and put in charge of driving to Hank’s house to see if he was okay. The bartender gave him a bottle of Old Style for the drive.

Jim was back about an hour later. “Damnedest thing,” he said. “I go over to Hank’s place and he’s sitting in his car in his driveway, like he does here some nights, blasting his stereo.”

People did think it was the damnedest thing, and when Hank came back the next week, nobody mentioned it to him. Jim left a part out, though, in his telling of the story. It was the part that scared him, about how Hank had the windows down and the car in a full idle, revving the pedal along to the song. The car would rock a bit, and Jim knew it was in drive, not park. Hank’s foot was on both the gas and the brake. Jim watched until he couldn’t take it anymore, the thought of Hank letting go of either pedal, and the motion that would follow.

**********

Paleface is a band from North Carolina. Paleface is also the name of the tall, singing/guitaring man in the band. Mo the name of the short, singing drummer in the band. Their sound is fun and casual, enjoyable without being pointless. Daniel Johnston and Beck both like Paleface, and you should, too. They have a new album called One Big Party, featuring the song this story is based on and other sweet jams. Order it here.

Monica "Mo" Samalot is a drummer. She is quite nice, rather adorable, and a good musician. She is Puerto Rican, though she relocated to the USA in 1993. Because I don't know much about her, I will just say that 1993 was a great year for black metal.

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Next week: A story based on "Mike's Love Xexagon" by The Fall, as suggested by writer Thomas Cooper.

Sittin' In: "Double or Nothing" by Eirik Gumeny, as based on the song "Waiting For An Alibi" by Thin Lizzy

2010-10-24T08:45:00.000-07:00

Double or Nothing

Ramirez went down in the second. A couple times. He’s standing now, on the ropes, uncertain of his footing, of where he is, but he’s standing. The referee calls it anyway. TKO.

Shit.

The room erupts, four thousand people on their feet at once, spilling drinks and tossing fight cards, shouting and calling for blood.

I grab Maria’s hand and make a break for the exit.

* * *

Outside the casino, I light a cigarette mid-stride and start, quick, toward the St. James stairs. I can hear Maria behind me, the crowd pouring out of the casino behind her.

“Val,” she says. “Slow down, Val. What the hell’s going on?”

I can hear the staccato of her heels against the boardwalk. I’ve got nearly a foot on her; she’s practically jogging to keep up.

“Val!”

I ease up, just enough to let her know I heard, but I’m still moving. Her steps are staggered by vodka and vanity, like Morse code against the salt-stained wood. She’s sending me a message, a broken S.O.S.

I’m halfway to the stairs when she finally catches up. I feel her next to me, her hand warm against mine. I can’t keep myself from slowing.

“Val,” she says.

“Maria . . .” I say.

“Valentino!” says someone else.

Shit.

“Shit.”

I toss what’s left of the cigarette, grab Maria’s arm, and start sprinting.

“God damn it, Val,” she says. She’s furious, stumbling, but she’s running. Right now, that’s good enough.

We fly down the stairs, off the boardwalk and onto St. James. I turn sharp, barrel through the door of some dive bar and collide with a table. I kick it to the side.

“Jesus, Valentino,” says Maria. She’s on one bare foot, removing her shoe from the other.

“The back,” I say, nodding toward the kitchen door.

I can hear the fat man behind the bar shouting.

Maria throws her heels in his face.

* * *

“Valentino,” Maria says, her hand on my back. “Talk to me, God damn it.”

We’re eight blocks from the bar, in the parking deck beneath some boarded up motel. I’m bent at the waist, elbows on the hood of my car, sucking wind and seeing stars. I haven’t had to move like that in years.

“Valentino.”

“We gotta go, Maria,” I say, my chest heaving. I stand, eyes still swimming. “And then you’re not gonna want to be around me, not for a while.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Things – the fight – didn’t go the way they were supposed to. The way I said they would. And now I gotta get outta here.”

I hit the keychain in my pocket, unlock the doors.

“We gotta get outta here.”

I pull open the passenger side door.

“What did you do, Valentino?” she says, her voice cracking.

It’s not fear, though. And it’s not a question. It’s anger, accusation. She knows me too damn well.

“I fucked up, Maria. Took money from the wrong guys, told them to put it on an even worse fighter.”

There’s footsteps, echoing against the buildings across the street. Voices. They’re not happy.

Shit.

“Who is that?” she asks.

“No one you want to know,” I answer.

I hit the button for the trunk on the keychain, hear the thunk as it opens. I walk to Maria and take her hands in mine.

“I will never understand why a woman like you is wasting her time with me,” I say.

I kiss her hard. Then I give her the keys.

“You know what kind of shit is about to go down. I don’t want you here for it. I don’t want you to see it, and I don’t want them to see you. You need to run.”

“Val . . .”

“Go. You have to.”

I go to the trunk, lift the door all the way open. I stand, holding it with both hands, and take a deep breath.

“Maria,” I say, “I love you. When you’re around I’m a better person, smarter. I don’t do the kind of shit that gets me into situations like this. All I want is to be with you, a million miles from here, where tonight is nothing but a terrible memory.”

I grab the tire iron from inside the spare and step back.

“But I’ve got to get through this before I can forget it.”

Maria’s standing next to me.

“Maria . . .”

She reaches into the trunk and returns with an aluminum baseball bat.

“I love you, too, Val,” she says, resting the bat on her shoulder, “but I wish like fuck I didn’t.”

Shadows spill down the street, crawling across the opening of the parking deck. We can hear the voices distinctly now. They’re still not happy.

“I wish you didn’t either.”

I can’t keep myself from smiling.

**********

Lyrics

Thin Lizzy is the best band ever.

Eirik Gumeny is a writer from New Jersey. He runs Jersey Devil Press and knows what to do in Denver when you're dead. His book,Exponential Apocalypse, has bad words and pop culture references, which the 15-year-old in me cheers, and great writing, which the English major in me cheers. Place your orders along with the other book JDP released this year: the 2010 Jersey Devil Press Anthology, featuring almost two dozen stories in it, including one by yours truly and one by OBCBYL alumnus yt sumner. Get that one, too. Eirik's favorite pizza topping is victory.

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Next week: A story based on "Rock n Roll" by Paleface, as suggested by Mo from Paleface.

A Call For Guest Posts

2010-10-17T20:49:00.000-07:00

Starting in November of 2011, I'll be posting a new story every Wednesday from a guest writer. Submissions are open to everyone. Unfortunately, I will not be able to accept every story, but I will try to leave unique comments when responding with a rejection.

GUIDELINES

* Stories should not exceed 1000 words, not including the title (this makes a big difference sometimes, I know).

* Stories must be sent as an attachment (.doc preferred, but I won't snub my nose at .rtf or .docx). Please don't copy your work into the body of the e-mail. If sending more than one story, it doesn't matter if you attach two individual files or combine both stories into one document.

* I'm not too picky on the formatting of the story itself, but don't be a dickhead. Shoot for 12-point Times New Roman with 1" margins unless you have a really good reason not too. I can already tell you that your story does not look better in Comic Sans or Chiller. Also, I don't care if the body of the work is single-spaced with a line break between each paragraph or double spaced with a tab at the beginning of each paragraph, as long as it's readable.

* For the e-mail itself, format the subject line like this: SUBMISSION, YOUR NAME, TITLE OF STORY. (Ex: Submission, Samuel Snoek-Brown, "Orgasm In French"). I don't need a fancy cover letter or anything, but it'd be nice if you clued me in to some information that could be crucial--simultaneous submissions, a bio written in third person, which song your story is based on, etc.

* Simultaneous submissions are totally cool with me, just make sure you let me know right away if someone else has picked up the story. I'm going to try to respond withing a few weeks, but response time is usually much shorter than that. Please query if you don't here back within a month. I'm not interested in previously published work. (And, actually, I think it'd be kind of weird if you just already had a story sitting around that was based on one of the available songs.)

WHAT I LOOK FOR WHEN I READ A STORY FOR OUR BAND COULD BE YOUR LIT

I look for some sort of synchronicity between the story and the song, both lyrically and musically. Sometimes it manifests itself as a glorious retelling of the narrative and sometimes it's a left-field interpretation on some parallel plane of reality. Either one, or anything in between, is acceptable, as along as it's a good story. Let one medium twist itself into another and interpret the song as you see fit. There's that one quote abut how writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and maybe whoever said it is right, but writing through music is a different thing entirely. So do that, instead.

Please send one or two of your most realized, completed attempts at capturing one of the songs below.

Neko Case - This Tornado Loves You

Roky Erickson - Two Headed Dog (Red Temple Prayer)

Morphine - Cure For Pain

Lifter Puller - Sherman City

T. Rex - Life's a Gas

Prince - Pussy Control

Floor - Night Full of Kicks

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Moya

Sleep - Dopesmoker

Dinosaur Jr - Tarpit

~~Earth - Omens and Portents I - The Driver~~ (Taken by Samuel Snoek-Brown)

~~Thin Lizzy - Waiting For An Alibi~~ (Taken by Eirik Gumeny)

~~Guided By Voices - I Am A Tree~~ (Taken by Mike Sweeney)

~~Swans - Failure~~ (Taken by Melina Rutter)

As soon as someone does a story about one of the songs, I'll cross it off and add a new one (so check back every week). When the story goes up, I'll provide a link to it.

Send away, y'all: ryan.j.werner [at] gmail.com

Follow Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Twitter.

Become a fan of Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook.

"To Be the Sun": A story based on "Farmer In the City (Remembering Pasolini)" by Scott Walker, as suggested by musician Steven R. Smith (18/100)

2010-10-17T18:36:00.000-07:00

To Be the Sun

Gabe counted the ten-penny nails in his lower lip. There were two rows, like the base of a pyramid: eleven in a line and then, a bit further away from his teeth, ten more. He had woken up seated at his kitchen, his hands bound behind his back and his lower lip nailed to the edge of his giant oak table. The blinds and curtains were open, but the windows were closed. It was dark outside and the lights overhead were dimmed to a dull yellow.

“You’ll start to get some more feeling back in that lip as time moves on,” John said from behind Gabe.

Drool and blood were pooling together in Gabe’s mouth. He kept moving his tongue forward and pushing out loads of the whole mess, where they fell in long, shiny pillars that crawled downward onto the carpet.

“I’m not the brightest, and I can admit it,” John said. “But I do know what a premonition is. And, since you seem like a man refinement, is it fair to assume you know what that means, too?”

Gabe said nothing and John dropped a hammer onto the table. It landed within an inch of Gabe’s lip, and the tiny vibration cut into his mouth.

John pulled out a chair and sat next to Gabe. “Good. I had one of ‘em, once. It was after you killed my daughter.”

Gabe became omniscient. He knew the things he already knew, that nearly two decades ago he had helped two other men kill John’s daughter. He’d been consumed in a fit of restlessness. Extreme restlessness. Still, it was just a magnification of simple, ceaseless anxiety. And in his omniscience he learned new things. His current position—punishment—and what would come. More punishment. Heavy and soon.

“That premonition I had came after y’all killed her. I thought, ‘Hell, this thing came a bit late. All the bad stuff already happened.’ But then it got worse and worse and I figured that the premonition came just in time.” John cleared his throat. “I began to forget everything except that dream, that crazy dream where I see three guys beatin’ her. I couldn’t remember how to run the thresher. I couldn’t saddle a horse to save my life. There was just that dream.” He kicked his feet up on the table, and Gabe felt another vibration surge through his lip, regaining feeling faster now. He both smelled and saw the cow shit sitting thick and green in the treads of John’s boots.

“Farm’s gone now, like everything else. I like to think if I still had her, I’d still have the rest of it. I can’t prove that, though, you know? I can’t prove that you had anything to do with it, either. A dream don’t hold up in court,” John brought his feet down and stood up. “But I ain’t wrong.”

The kitchen lights were dimmed slowly down to nothing. Gabe remained silent. Within a moment John had taken out a large, wide buck knife and rolled the edge of the blade over Gabe’s lip. The sound was like that of a palm slowly gripping a moist sponge, coiling finger-by-finger into a fist. Gabe fell to the ground and began kicking his legs. He didn’t yell out, but he began to nosh his teeth and sputter out moist noises, producing tiny bubbles that ran down his face.

John watched him, would watch him and occasionally feel for a pulse until there wasn’t one. The bottom of John’s stomach was cold and he felt as if it were cavernous, completely empty and larger than his body would allow. He walked over to the window and looked through it for hours until the sun began to come up. It slipped in between the buildings, unlike on the farm, where it hit everything at once, like a new apocalypse every day. I’d switch you places in a heartbeat, John thought, looking at the rising sun. John began to think of the places it would light, the places it would pass over.

**********

Lyrics

Scott Walker is a crazy old genius from Ohio. In the 1960s, he was a part of the group The Walker Brothers. None of them were related or had the actual last name of Walker. They're probably best remembered for their version of the song "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine (Anymore)" but I think their best track is "The Electrician" from their 1978 reunion album Nite Flights. Scott put out four self-titled solo albums in the late 60s, each one showcasing his giant voice and, as time went on, his originality as a songwriter. After the completely-original Scott 4 was declared a commercial failure (and later praised as a masterpiece, as is usually the case), he lost whatever self-confidence he had gained and made a couple lackluster albums that were supposed to pander to the masses. Then he started taking about eleven years between albums. But goddamn, it's so worth it. 2017's gonna kick ass!

Steven R. Smith is a highly-prolific and inventive Californian that people sometimes refer to as "the ambient David Lee Roth." His music is occasionally like Jim O'Rourke and occasionally like Stars of the Lid, but more often than not his music is his own and, because of its emotional impact, it is ours, too. His album Cities is the audio equivalent of a Cormac McCarthy novel, the way violence sounds when it's slowed down enough to be beautiful. The rest of his catalog is as wonderfully thoughtful and apocalyptic, and you can order some stuff from it right here.

"Oriel" from 2002's Lineaments

"The Road" from 2009's Cities

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Next week: A story based on "Mike's Love Xexagon" by The Fall, as suggested by writer Thomas Cooper.

"Grace": A story based on "Code Blue" by TSOL, as suggested by writer Matt Baker (17/100)

2010-10-10T18:18:00.000-07:00

Grace

Most of the people who remembered Monica Kelly remembered her because she had two first names and she was dead. Will thought there was so much more to her than that, but the name and the death were the only things people ever brought up about her. Will himself remembered that her father had been the undertaker in town, running the funeral home out of the basement of his house, and that Monica looked like the people her father worked on. She wasn’t morbid or suicidal. She was just soft porcelain, shapely and white, calm as a coma.

When Will got the invitation to his ten year high school reunion, he contemplated not going, but he was more curious than spiteful. Monica Kelly had been gone for almost fourteen years and his Mohawk had been gone for about seven. All that was left was everything else.

Will had been at the reunion for over an hour and no one had recognized him yet. A few people walked by him and assumed he had shown up with his wife—the real old classmate of theirs—and had been left to fend for himself while she was away talking to old friends. He overheard one woman say to another something about that one girl who drowned freshman year, the one with the weird hillbilly-styled name, Mary Betty or something. They agreed it was a shame, a tragedy, even, and then kept eating chips and commenting on who had gotten fat, who had gotten fatter.

It had been years since Will had thought of Monica Kelly, and he hadn’t expected to hear her name that night. She came up again later on, an entire table of people trying to recall anything else about her. No one there had grown up with her. She was homeschooled until high school and even then was only with them for three months before she drowned, down in the deep, wide part of the Fever River, her ice skates sinking her to the bottom like a bullet. When Will first heard about it, he imagined her pirouetting like a drill.

The people at the table were all guessing wrong. Monica hadn’t been short by any means. She had been of average height, average weight. She had several different green shirts with the bottom hem colored in black marker. She slipped her shoes off in class and scratched the top of one foot with the bottom of another. These things were lost and Will wondered why. Had everyone done so many things before and after Monica Kelly’s death that they were able to squeeze her entire life into a non-sequitur? Will went over to the table with the yearbooks. He turned the pages of the book from his freshman year and found Monica’s picture, an inch by an inch with a timid, black and white smile in the center. He walked to the table with the people arguing, debating one inaccuracy against another, and then slammed the book down, his palm sticking to the open page.

“Monica Kelly smelled vaguely of formaldehyde and had such grace that you missed her completely,” Will said. The yearbook was splayed open on the table and Will remembered why he never bought one, from any year of high school, and looked around at the sallow eyes of the people around him, people he’s always known to have the worst qualities of both the hectic and the dull: disorganization with no eye for detail and nothing relevant to say. They turned to one another and asked loudly if the man in front of them was Will the Punk, Fuck-up Will. As they sat there figuring it out, Will walked away from them, the real corpses of his youth.

**********

Lyrics

TSOL are a punk rock band from Long Beach, California. In 1988, I bet a couple metal nerd started to get into punk because they saw Steven Adler wearing a TSOL shirt in the video for "Sweet Child O' Mine." Unfortunately, Izzy Stradlin was unable to bring back the vintage Rod Stewart haircut he was sporting in the same video. In a move that I thought only happened to Ratt, LA Guns, Faster Pussycat, and other bands of that style and era, there were once two different TSOLs playing shows at the same time (sometimes in the same cities). We can get two TSOLs but not one Misfits. I call bullshit on the universe.

Matt Baker is a writer from Kansas City who lives in Little Rock, Arkansas. He thinks the movie Repo Man is awesome and he saw Slayer a few times back in the late-80s/early-90s. He also likes Bill Hicks and Barry Hannah. As if you don't think he's exceptionally rad already, he's also a badass writer, and you can read his short short story "Frank"--which is how I found out about him--over at SmokelongQuarterly. He rarely does flash fiction, though, so you should also do yourself a favor and get his novel, Drag the Darkness Down. I'm guessing his height at about 6'2".

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Next week: A story based on "Farmer in the City (Remembering Pasolini)" by Scott Walker, as suggested by musician Steven R. Smith.

Sittin' In: "Buzz" by Samuel Snoek-Brown, as based on the song "Omens and Portents I - The Driver" by Earth

2010-10-03T12:29:00.000-07:00

It's only fitting that Sam Snoek-Brown stepped up to the plate to sit in on this week's OBCBYL, as I spent a fair amount of my time away from this project reading/editing/mocking/feedbacking the stories in a collection he recently finished. (Ten years of work, but a hell of an anthology so far and only getting better. Butthole Surfers fans, stay on the lookout.) He whipped up a killer little short short about Earth's "Omen's & Portents I - The Driver" and I did some Gordon Lish style heavy-editing to it--with Sam's consent, of course.

I'll be back next week with a story based on "Code Blue" by TSOL, but for now, enjoy Sam's story (and check out his blogs).

(Also, for anyone else interested, the list of songs featured in this post still stands if anyone would like to do a story for OBCBYL in the future. I'll always take time off if it shows up.)

**********

Buzz

There had been thunder, flat as a hand, driving in the storm behind Ray, and it had reminded him of earlier, the click and the pounce and the silence. He’d left shortly afterward and had been in the old Ford for some time, almost nine hours since, with the promise of Texas hills ahead of him.

He wasn’t sure he could sleep or if he deserved it anywhere except behind the wheel. When he saw a rest stop up ahead, he felt like he’d found a church. He didn’t need confession, he just needed sanctuary. For now, sleep. Forgiveness would come later or not at all.

He parked his car and dozed in a driving position, his head leaned back against the seat. When he woke, he did so in a flash, gripping the air with all fingers. He blinked and looked at his hands, remembering the way the white noise we all hear every day—the hum of lightbulbs and refrigerators—grew louder in his head, like a bright pang of reverb, and then snapped off in an echo.

A door opened and closed behind him. Ray sat up and cranked the car. The sun had just stuck up over the hills as the starter whined and quit. He scooted forward in his seat and turned the key again. Nothing else happened. He tried the radio. Static. Silence. Again.

He thought about the car that woke him, but when he turned in his seat to find it he saw it was a state trooper’s. He squinted his eyes and saw the seats were empty. He pulled on the door handle and eased out of his car, left his door open. Stubby cedar trees dropped down a slope behind the rest stop. A tangle of barbed wire outlined the woods.

“Can I help you?” the trooper asked from the restroom doorway, a paper towel still in his hands.
Ray swallowed and blurted out, “Battery’s dead.”

“Don’t you worry none,” the trooper said. “Got some cables, I’ll give you a jump.”

As they stood between the open hoods, the trooper’s engine running and Ray’s battery charging, the trooper said, “Arizona plates? You drive all this way by yourself?”

“My wife,” he said. He had left her on the floor, head broken and limp as a single plum in a plastic bag. Her neck turned purple before he even made it out the door. Ray felt, but did not hear, the slight crunch of her throat in his hands, like a beetle under his foot. “She’s back home.”

The trooper nodded, said, “Shoot, I wish sometimes I could get away myself.”

Ray’s stomach churned. Blood throbbed in his brain, bile jumped into his throat and burned. Sweat poured from his messy, oily hair and dripped all down his arms. When he opened his mouth, he vomited in a spray that splattered the trooper’s pants and car. Ray himself fell down alongside the vomit, and nearly beat it to the ground. The trooper jumped back and cussed, then said, “Listen, sir, no offense, but you been drinking?”

Ray coughed twice, gripped the trooper’s shoulder, and pulled himself up to his knees. “No sir, I’ve just been driving all night to get here.”

“Well, I feel a little woozy after a double night shift m’self. I guess that and the heat must of done it to you.”

Ray nodded along, anything to explain himself. The tropper insisted Ray not drive just yet and offered to take him the twenty miles into town and back. Ray was in no position to decline, though he tried faintly to do so.

As they stood there waiting for the battery to finish charging, Ray stared at the shotgun perched between the front two seats. The trooper spoke into the microphone clipped to his epaulette, and he was writing something, then he opened the back door for Ray.

They pulled out from the rest stop, the sky behind the car, back west, roiling dark and thick. Little flashes jumped in the clouds and the trooper said, “It’s something, ain’t it? It’s all one system, I think. Pretty sure it started east of California, just inside Arizona. You must of been just ahead of it the whole way.”

Ray thought of his wife eyes bulged in their sockets, the vessels an absurd red. The living room furniture lay in ruins around her. Two flies moving through the dust mites.

It was so silent then.

**********

Earth is a band that used to play really loud, heavy-as-fuck power drone music until guitarist/leader Dylan Carlson took too many drugs (and then stopped taking drugs). Then all the songs became like the background music to a western made in Hell. One time, while listening to Earth 2, I thought my brain stopped working. It was that awesome. This song is from the 2008 album The Bees Made Honey In the Lion's Skull, which I played one time for a girlfriend who said, five minutes into the first song, "So it's pretty much just this for 45 minutes?"

Samuel Snoek-Brown is a Texan living in the Middle East. He owns over 400 bolo-ties. He has been known to write short fiction, with his most well-known story being "Orgasm In French." He put out a poetry chapbook as an undergrad. I think one dude bought it (collector's item, bro). Due to "a few" streaks of grey in his hair, he refers to himself as "the Anderson Cooper of literary fiction." Here's a link to some of his stories, all of which should be required reading for any writer worth their weight in free trade coffee and black berets. He runs a blog about smiley faces and I'm pretty sure I saw him wearing a Rusted Root shirt once. Everything else about him is unknown.

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Next week: A story based on "Code Blue" by TSOL, as suggested by writer Matt Baker.

"What the River Drinks . . .": A story based on "Doing An Evil Deed Blues" by John Fahey, as suggested by musician Drew Bissell of Aseethe (16/100)

2010-09-26T16:51:00.000-07:00

What the River Drinks In Sun, It Spits In Bones

Moses figures there’ll be a next morning, because there’d been one every day thus far. He’ll be right, and on that next morning, the police will drag the lake and find him at the bottom with his tools in his pockets and a 12 foot boa around his neck. The kids will not stop playing nearby after he is found. Three boys will count the sunbeams on the water and argue over the numbers they come up with. A thousand. A million. Infinity. An old negro will tell them that it don't matter who's right and who's wrong, because no amount of sunbeams is gonna move that damn still water. The sheriff will tell them all to leave when he notices that the snake isn’t constricted and stuck, but, rather, tied in a knot. It’ll be an albino that’s even more pale than when people spotted it originally, whiter than a wedding dress and looking a whole goddamn lot like the snake the Keech boys had found dead near the lock and dam a few days ago. The sheriff will cross his arms and tell his deputy to quit taking notes, that a snake around a nigger’s neck is accident enough, knot or not. They’ll laugh about that for the rest of the day. Knot or not. They’ll go home to their wives and God and whiskey. Until then, until the next morning, Moses will be whistling, walking along by the river and saying Morning, morning to everyone he passes. The words will slip through his lips pained and quickly, like a tongue made of sandpaper, in such a way that everyone will swear that they hear his mantra as Moanin’, moanin’.

**********

John Fahey was a guitarist who played unaccompanied steel guitar licks and made it sound totally badass.

Drew Bissell is a bassist who likes to ask the question, "Are you sure that riff can't be slower?" when writing songs with his band Aseethe.

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Next week: A guest post from someone!

"Vandalism": A story based on "Only Shallow" by My Bloody Valentine, as suggested by writer Victor David Giron (15/100)

2010-09-19T16:48:00.000-07:00

Vandalism

Growing up Catholic meant that I learned context faster than most. Good sex was functional, bad sex was vandalism. I explained this to Sandi on our third or fourth date and she asked me about dancing.

“I’m pretty sure you’re thinking of Baptists. As far as I know, Catholics don’t have any rules regarding dancing.” I told her.

She jangled her bracelets, leftovers from her mother’s gypsy phase in the 70s. “Are you sure?”

“Not really,” I said and looked at the bracelets again. She wore them well, all the way up her forearm to the meat above her elbow. She was thick everywhere it mattered, but instead of finding a charming way to tell her that, I picked at my food for a minute and she did the same, bites the size of dimes as we watched each other on the sly. Slow sips of wine, pretending to be able to pick out the different flavors.

She went back to the sex thing. “What do you mean by vandalism?”

“Destruction with no motivation. Misuse of the body, depreciation of the soul.” The light didn’t hit her so much as meet her, glide across the top of her chest and lower neck. “Things like that,” I told her, hashing over the first time I heard such implications at mass and in bible studies. Some things we’ll believe forever just because we heard them first.

I start again. “There was a philosopher who rallied against people being the means to an end instead of the end itself, which is the exact opposite of Catholicism, I think.”

“Cunt.”

“No, it wasn’t Kant.”

"No,” she said, setting her wine glass down gingerly. “I’m saying the word ‘cunt.’ Can you say it?”

“You mean, am I spiritually allowed to say it? Sure. Cunt. I like big ol’ sloppy cunts.”

“You’re not the best Catholic I’ve ever met.”

“I doubt you’ve met any,” I told her as a joke, but we both became quiet as she thought about it. I had moved to the city a couple years ago with my faith already gone. The people I met seemed to never be born with it, which was fine but different. The sex thing was the weirdest to me, how open a topic it was. The first summer I was here I saw a man sitting down against a dumpster I normally jog past. When I slowed up to check on him and make sure he was all right—not passed out from the heat or anything—I saw he was holding his cock in his hand, a pile of semen on his shirt above his navel. Several flies had landed in it, their wings in a drastic flutter to help their legs get out. The man looked up at me and said, “Howdy.”

She was still thinking when I said, “No worse than Kerouac.”

“What?”

“I’m no worse a Catholic than Kerouac was, and even though he battled it in odd ways, he claimed to be a good little French-Catholic boy his whole life.”

“I never liked Kerouac.”

We were quiet until I said, “He’s a very male writer.” She’s smart and uninterested, like other girls I’d met in the city, but she had the good nature to roll with things for her own amusement, meaning, at that time, that she questioned me and Kerouac’s supposed denial of feminine adventure. I denied it on behalf of the both of us. Women are plenty adventurous. I just think Kerouac gets a bum wrap sometimes. He’s adventure, on the road and intelligent reverie and all that stuff, but he never gets credit for his lack of understanding and dislike of cruelty in his own life and work.

“To me, that’s the male of the 1950s, the perfect male who has taken up the option of spending his lifetime pondering the blatantly incomplete aspects of his being.” I notice that I’ve been holding my fork in the air this entire time, poised for the bite of steak at the end of it. I take the bite to shut myself up. She asks for the check.

I feel wrong, headstrong for no good reason. We go back to her place and she’s forgotten about it. When I’m taking off her clothes, I bring it back up. “I think I was wrong about that 1950’s male thing.”

“I don’t care.”

“Fine. But just so you know.”

“Thanks, but I still don’t care.”

The things that happen next happened next and then we laid ourselves there, deliberately, to prove we could have been elsewhere had we so chosen. The only thing left ahead was sleep. She went there and I didn’t. I straightened up next to her. The sheets and the pillows and the people on her bed were pressed fine and smooth. There was nothing in the world but surface: the buzz of flies, flesh and silk.

**********

Lyrics

My Bloody Valentine is a band from London, currently trying to shake off about twenty years of dust. They put out a shitpile of EPs and two full lengths. Enough stuff has been said about their 1991 album Loveless--regarding both the music and the folklore--that I don't feel the need to really say anything about it except I wish people would talk about it less and listen to it more. Bilinda Butcher's name reminds me of that Patton Oswalt bit where he talks about how "b" sounds are the fattest sounds a person can make.

Victor David Giron is a writer who lives in Chicago, IL. He's the head honcho over at Curbside Splendor, an independent publishing company based out of Chicago that aims to publish solid writing, often with an urban tilt. He is the author of the novel Sophomoric Philosophy, a book that has been called something by someone (No blurbs are out there yet, folks, which means you're just going to have to buy it when it comes out soon here and blurb it your own damn self). He's got a couple little kids who seem pretty rad and he likes The Sonics. No word yet on if he likes the restaurant Sonic.

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Next week: I haven't decided yet, but I'll probably do that soon.

"Rust": A story based on "Your Friend and Mine--Neil's Song" by Love, as suggested by musician Bob Bucko Jr (14/100)

2010-09-12T10:40:00.000-07:00

Rust

Neil was the strongest guy I knew, which was good, because it meant I didn’t have to be. There were plenty of other reasons to like him, but his strength was the thing everyone commented on. Even me, and I had known him since primary school, since the first time I saw him take a pencil, grip it with his teeth like a Spanish woman with a rose in her mouth, and then break it with his tongue.

That’s what I mean by strong: literal, physical power. Not that he wasn’t the other kind, too, the kind where he scared the world off him enough to make sure he moved with a kindly grace—because he was—but it was always just easier to get caught up in the fanfare of someone pushing a Volkswagen up an incline.

I’ve got 24-inch biceps. That’s pretty big. We’re talking Hulk Hogan big. Neil and I were great together at parties, doing the classic strongman pose with a woman sitting on each arm, the four of them looking like little girls on their first horse ride. The thing about Neil, though, is that he wasn’t big, and that threw people. I don’t just mean he wasn’t big compared to me. I mean that he wasn’t big. I’ve got an eight inch wrist and Neil looked like an accountant and I never beat him in arm wrestling.

The other thing about Neil is that he had the sort of problems that strength can’t fix. He self-destructed with women and had no skills that he was proud of, nothing that made him feel he was making anything better than how he found it. “Come into a bad situation and make it good. That’s what men do, right?” he said to me one night down in the rock quarry behind his folks’ place.

“I guess. Shit, I don’t know,” I told him.

We were especially restless that summer, both of us twenty and home from college for those few hot months, and to blow off steam we’d pick up the biggest rocks we could find in the quarry and see who could toss them the farthest.

Neil picked up a rock and balanced it on his shoulder. “Don’t you think that’s the real measure of a man? To buff out as much rust as he can before he’s gone?”

“I don’t think you buff rust out.”

“Well,” Neil paused and sent the rock flying through the air. “Count it off.”

I walked heel-to-toe from where Neil was standing to where the rock landed. Seventeen feet. When I turned around to tell him, he was gone. Probably to climb up one of the sides, I figured. I’d see him in a few minutes when he let off some steam, but I needed him to see me throw the rock, to verify who had the longest throw.

“Neil, come on down here you sonofabitch.”

“I can see just fine,” he yelled back. He was up on the ledge off to the side of me, lying on his back with his head hanging over the side. “Go on, toss already.”

I wondered how he got up there so fast. I thought of telling him that that’s what he was doing to make it all a bit better, moving with a stealth that left things so undisturbed that he became this ethereal slice of luck, a horseshoe that sits in your palm like the air. He would have waited for hours for me to toss the stone, the oddly shaped boulder it was, like a cloud come true, but I couldn’t say anything. I felt as if when Neil laid his head back over that ledge, that he turned the whole world upside down, like he was right-side-up and it was everything else, including me, that flipped.

When he died a few years later—some freak car accident that was as plain as any other bad news until it happened to me—I went to the funeral late. Not many people were left there and I got to walk right up to the casket. I remember thinking that it’s a big box, but I’m bigger. How the hell did Neil fit in there? How’d it take me until then to finally understand his strength, the mortician’s-measurements size of the guy a couple feet from my eyes? Nobody was looking, so I went over to the bottom corner of the casket and stuck my hand under the edge. Jesus, the things I’ve lifted. Boat engines, one in each hand. Old console record players. Fifty-five gallon drums of peanut oil. But I’ll be goddamned if that box moved an inch, a centimeter, not space enough for the thinnest light to sneak beneath it.

**********

Lyrics

Love were a band from L.A. that had about as many different members as Dokken, but were always led by Arthur Lee (though they would have been better if they had been led by Don Dokken). Their album Forever Changes is famous for being one of those records that hipsters and their parents can both enjoy unironically. Their name proves that the idea of someone trying to Google them 40 years later was not even a concern.

Bob Bucko Jr has been in a thousand bands you've never heard of. He used to play baseball and he loves the Harry Potter books. He's also one of my favorite guitarists, and he wrote one of my favorite songs ever. I've never heard anyone use the phrase "three-minute pop song" more than Bob. A true multi-genre embarrassment, I've heard him play doo-wop, Poison, jazz, bar rock, Captain Beefheart freakouts, and just about everything else. Also, he's always wanted to write a song called "Is My Pussy Man Enough For You?" but is yet to do so. I urge you all to steal this song title from him.

MySpace grab bag of songs

Nitetrotter solo guitar session

Always With the Don't Go EP

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Next week: A story based on "Only Shallow" by My Bloody Valentine, as suggested by writer Victor David Giron.

Sittin' In: "A Short Illness" by David Maizenberg, as based on the song "Good Fortune" by PJ Harvey

2010-09-05T17:57:00.000-07:00

If you want to be a jerk about it, you could say that I spent too much time reading comics and buying old Rod Stewart shirts on eBay, and when it came time to write this week's story, I let it slide because it was the one thing I had to do that required any actual thought. However, I encourage you to be civil and look at the facts: I worked an unusual number of hours (read: full time, like any other functioning member of society) this past week in addition to having to find time for music-related projects such as two band practices, two shows I rocked out front row at, and listening to the new albums by Heart, Accept, and Katy Perry (I'm not as surprised as I wish I was that Katy Perry's is the best of the lot).

Regardless, I wrote no story for this week. Not even a first draft. I listened to the song, got no ideas, and went back to not writing the story. I blame exhaustion. Luckily, in his attempts to help me out, my friend and fellow fiction nerd Samuel Snoek-Brown was soliciting this website out to some writers he knows. David Maizenberg thought he was taking the bait. Really, though, Dave is the one who reeled me in. He thought he was to write a story based on a song of his choosing. I blame Sam's explanation of the project, which is probably a verbatim copy of my explanation of the project. So, I blame me.

Write a story based on a song of his choosing is exactly what Dave did, and it turned out fantastic. I've been toying with the idea of having guest stories every once in awhile, though I was originally opposed to it. If the quality comes out like this every time, however, I don't see how I can stay in that frame of mind.

Enough blabbering. Here's Dave's story. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I do.

**********

A Short Illness
(Fiction inspired by PJ Harveyʼs song and video for “Good Fortune”, for Ryan Wernerʼs song-inspiration website project. August 2010)

When I found her, in winter, she was a beautiful, starving disaster. Bundled in throws and jackets, a kaleidoscope of bad choices and artistic fantasies. When she left me, in summer, she was a wraith, on a mission, sleek black, armored by my love, in the glow of the secrets I revealed to her. God knows how I worshiped that fickle witch. And now every night is a lonely fantasy. Visions of her naked writhing, her wide mouth, her whispered visions.

She was coming off some real bad luck that winter. Her appearance was unsettling. Beneath colorful thriftstore coats and shawls she wore draped over her boney clavicles an ancient cashmere cardigan, grey, the color of her disposition and the city’s winter-blasted sky. Her hair was a mousy brown, the tips blond and red from ancient dye jobs. Her hungry eyes stared out half-hidden behind her bangs.

She’d been on some complicated missions, and they’d all failed. She was of the surprised generation. The generation that discovered it didn’t really know what it wanted after all. Unmoored from traditions, betrayed by theories, left with nothing, the party had long ago stopped.

I stripped her down, unwrapped her identities, sat her on my bed, and performed a great and intricate magic show for her. I took my limbs apart, wrapped them in my lungs, tied the whole package with my ligaments, and gave it all to her: my secret wisdom, the key to my luck and prosperity.

Winter turned to spring and she became a new woman, her hair jet black, her gaze steady and vulpine. I introduced her to my friends, hoping they would tame her, but she insulted every one. They are simple people who just want to have a good time. They feared for my safety. Nobody knew what she wanted or what she would do to me. They suspected she was prone to random attacks. And she would never surrender the tasty discipline of her starvation fetish.

By summertime she was entirely new and ready for the next phase of her life. She no longer needed me, and she told me so directly. I could not respond at first. The air was hazy and tasted full of grit. Finally I burst out “I love you more than life itself!”

I regretted saying it the moment it left my mouth. How absurd and grandiose a statement. What could such a pronouncement possibly mean in our world? Such love would make any normal person uncomfortable. In her it brought forth venom. At first she looked appalled, but then all at once she smiled, knowing now she was free for sure. She went to the window to smoke, tap her high heeled boots against the wall, and prepare a few words to mark her exhuberant departure, complete with a handbag twirling, life resetting street celebration. I had given her my mojo and she gobbled it up! What an appetite she turned out to have! And now she was heading back out into the streets from which she came.

Its a pitch black night and the apartment is empty. I go to a bar and get too drunk to stand. As she dances past the window she sees me slipping, windmilling backwards, and then collapsing, knocking over a table and chair in my fall. As my faithful friends rush to help me she just walks past, knowing she cannot be seen in the darkness.

**********

Lyrics

PJ Harvey is a svelte musician from Corscombe, Dorset in South West England. She has worked solo, with the PJ Harvey Trio, and contributed to multiple songs on the Desert Sessions series.

David Maizenberg wrote stories and scripts back in the nineties. Thankfully heʼs been otherwise occupied since then. But every once in a while . . .

(Note: Dave wrote his own bio. PJ did not.)

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Next week: A story based on "Your Friend and Mine--Neil's Song" by Love, as suggested by musician Bob Bucko Jr. (For real this time.)

"Always Say the Person's Name": A story based on "Ode To Billie Joe" by Bobbi Gentry, as suggested by writer Jenny Diski (13/100)

2010-08-29T18:36:00.000-07:00

Always Say the Person's Name

I’m in a self-esteem workshop trying to—what else—feel better. I’ve been to a bunch, all over the place, and one thing they always do is hand out these half sheets of paper with two columns, ten questions each. Except they aren’t really questions, just the words “I am” and then a three-inch line for your answer. Twenty times. When someone shares their “I am” conclusions out loud, they end up explaining what they just summed up and people chime in with encouraging statements like “Fear is in all of us, but so is strength, Frank,” and “You know, Susan, big is beautiful.” You always say the person’s name when you give them encouragement.

Of course, the people in these workshops are never here because they have a problem with high self-esteem. It’s hard to imagine someone coming in and saying, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me—probably nothing—but I just feel so good at so many things.”

After the “I am” portion there are one-on-ones that take up the rest of the time. The “Six Minute Power-Up” is what they call it. Each person gets together with someone else for six minutes, and before rotating they just have a conversation about how a free throw is so easy but so unattainable or the way their cats look at them when sensing shame.

The woman running the workshop is shaped like a pill and wearing mostly denim. When it’s my turn she tells me about coming-of-age in Colorado, how she worked in the public relations department of a popular but morally bankrupt ski resort and had to overcome how she felt about spinning their problems. This takes less than two minutes, which is a third of our time spent together, something she has planned: always give away the bulk of your time.

“How are you?” she asks, and then pauses briefly before adding my name.

* * *

My “I am” list reads something like this: taller than most people, wearing expensive glasses, thirsty for something other than free coffee.

“I am never going to learn to sew properly,” one woman says, and then while everyone else is telling her that it’s a matter of practice, amongst other things (“And what does properly even mean?”), I’m sitting there thinking about how little I care about sewing and, everyone’s right, how easy it’d be to just practice if I did care. The thing I’d write down if I got the kind of serious everyone here wants is I am incapable of letting the right things go. I can never figure out the correlation, but whenever I think about writing that one down I always think about a girlfriend who made me spray her with a fire extinguisher. She told me that she loved the feel of it, and it was harmless as long as I wasn’t too close and she didn’t get it in her eyes or mouth. So, once a day we’d go into the garage where she’d strip down and spin while I sprayed her with a fire extinguisher for a few seconds. When I’d stop, she’d keep spinning, right into me so I’d have to catch her.

I tell all that to the pill-shaped woman. Her smile is unwavering. She scratches her jaw-line and starts telling me that we all sometimes harbor odd feelings of regret. Her eyes dart around the room, maybe for a clock but maybe just to think.

I can see that she’s struggling, so I go on to say that I always caught my girlfriend, but I always held on to the fire extinguisher, too. I ask her almost rhetorically if she thinks it’s possible to handle them both and for the next minute she tells me stock phrases, how material goods can’t take the place of human connection and how any bond is only the sum of the people in it. Then a bell dings and she moves on.

* * *

When we’re on the final round of the power-ups, I end up with a woman in her late forties. She says that she has trouble speaking to people because she’s afraid that anything she says will be seen as stupid. I’m gentle with her. I tell her the fire extinguisher story I told the moderator and this woman tells me that it’s just a matter of getting her back.

I don’t think that’s it. What if it’s not a matter of going back? What if it’s a matter of taking back? Of being able to get back? What if that’s impossible?

I only say that last part to her. She scrunches up her nose and then sets her face in a wise old way. “If it was impossible would you be telling me about it?”

What I tell her is “No.” What I write at the bottom of my paper is I am saying yes.

**********

Lyrics

Bobbie Gentry is an American singer/songwriter mainly known for the song that this story is based on. It seems like people were really latching on to that meandering, Bob Dylan story-song thing at the time (stuff like "Tangled Up In Blue" kind of pisses me off, but I was never a huge Dylan guy), but Gentry nails it. Just the perfect amount left unsaid. She put out a shitload of albums--fourteen between 1967 and 1971, four in 1971 alone--and singles in a short amount of time and then said "Fuck it" and quit show business in the late-70s. She was one of the first female country artists to write and perform her own material, which is impressive, considering a dude like Scott Walker was still mostly sucking from the Jacques Brel musical teet at the time. Also, she had big hair and was really adorable. Nobody's really heard shit from her since 1981, but, hey, here's to her.

Jenny Diski is a British writer who loves to smoke. She has about a dozen-and-a-half books in print, and while I'm sure they're all fantastic (her personal exploration of the sixties looks especially awesome), I've only had the pleasure of reading Stranger On A Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America with Interruptions. In it, she speaks humorously and honestly about America, riding the trains in search of nothing much and finding truth (and the truth about truth, in all its clichéd glory) without having to go much further than the smoking car on her train. The best parts of it, however, are the ones where she reflects on her past, her times spent in mental institutions and coming of age at a weird time in the world. As if there isn't a weird time to come of age in the world. I mean . . . you know what I mean. Buy the book here and read it. Jenny lives in Cambridge with The Poet, leading, I hope, a very pleasant life.

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Next week: A story based on "Your Friend and Mine--Neil's Song" by Love, as suggested by musician Bob Bucko Jr.

"Excuses": A story based on "No Love Lost" by Joy Division, as suggested by musician Aaron Beam of Red Fang (12/100)

2010-08-22T11:49:00.000-07:00

Excuses

The autumn I tried to start smiling with more teeth, I got caught stealing cigarettes from the gas station and then went on a big family revival kick, deciding that I needed to visit all of them, every aunt uncle and cousin I never see. It was a bust like it is anytime someone tries to do something like that, but I was so caught up in all of it that I ended up not shaving between Thanksgiving and a week into the new year. I was out of a job and the majority of my savings when I finally got around to shaving, so I had time to do it in stages over the course of several days: chinstrap beard, then chops and a goatee, then the Frank Zappa, etc. My only option for the last day seemed to be a Hitler mustache. So, I shaved it in and walked around my house with it for a day, forgetting I had it until catching my reflection in a window or mirror.

I left it for another day. That’s when I started acting like him. On purpose, of course. I was bored and kind of curious about how much it takes to get caught up in an idea, fake or not. It started with standing on a chair in my kitchen and yelling in German, which amounted to a lot of harsh vowels strung together with throat-clearing noises. It was nonsense, but in my head I was speaking of freedom and infestation, the things that hold my people back. I would move slowly around my room on my desk chair as if in my dictator’s car, saluting people who stand up for me, idolize me as a savior of their beliefs, a savior of their morality.

I left it for a while longer. As I became more removed from the initial shaving-in, I became more removed from being Hitler. I felt as if I had moved from being the man himself to being a look-alike, someone designed to throw his detractors off his trail. I was shaving daily but leaving the mustache, trimming around it. I still had it a week later, by which time I was just a loyal soldier, herding the people through the camps, standing in front of my bed with my chest puffed out, holding my mother’s old color-guard rifle and pretending to oversee the abuse of the prisoners. I was watching the rapes and beatings with pride, knowing that bringing the world back up from its forlorn condition involves a cure that must be achieved and instituted, country by country, starting with mine.

Days passed and I lost sight of Hitler completely. I went from the camps to the crowd, staring out my window at cars driving by and pretending Hitler was in one. I wouldn’t salute. I’d just stare, hopeful. It all trickled down though, and I ended up becoming myself one morning, some guy with a tiny square mustache looking into the mirror and wondering how and why it all felt so natural. The things that came out of me surely were not in me. That night, when I tilted my head under the light and picked up my can of shaving cream, I set it back down and walked away, slowly, with a stride that said, “I’m going nowhere.”

**********

Lyrics

Joy Division was a band. Then they weren't. Then (a version of) they were New Order, which played up every Joy Division fan's secret desire to dance and be sad all at the same time. Like INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence, Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis died from hanging himself. Unlike INXS, Joy Division didn't have a shitty reality show to find a new lead singer, though Rockstar: INXS runner-up Marty Casey pretty much kicked ass when I saw him singing with LA Guns on the back of a flatbed truck in the outfield of a softball field in Farley, Iowa.

Aaron Beam plays bass and does vocals in the band Red Fang. They are based in Portland, OR, but instead of holding that against them, I will instead say that they are an awesome band in a place I don't think I'd like very much. Red Fang's music is pummeling rock and roll. There's really no other way to say it, and you should order their album through Sargent House records, because Sargent House fucking rules. Aaron is actually a Midwest boy, much like myself. However, he's from Iowa instead of Wisconsin. Still, his music is a throwback to the days of bearded men playing giant riffs, so I will not hold that against him either. The Red Fang burger at Kuma's Corner had bacon on it, and though I am unsure of the other toppings, it looks delicious. I also find it highly unlikely that they are not named after the Native American football player Chief Xavier Downwind.

"Prehistoric Dog" from Red Fang.

"Sharks" from Red Fang.

"Reverse Thunder" from Red Fang.

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Next week: A story based on "Ode to Billy Joe" by Bobbie Gentry, as suggested by writer Jenny Diski.

"An Abridged History of Never Coming Back": A story based on "Pulaski Skyway" by Clutch, as suggested by writer Eirik Gumeny (11/100)

2010-08-15T20:21:00.000-07:00

An Abridged History of Never Coming Back

We’ve got a history of dock workers, and have for a long time in this country, which is probably why so many folks try to peg the origin of the disappearances in the early part of the 1900s. The main argument is between those who believe it all started at the beginning of the 1930s, when Frank Hague got into it with the labor unions during the construction of the skyway, and those who believe that it started when the Holland Tunnel between New York and New Jersey was being designed in 1919. All of these people are wrong.

Here’s how far back it goes. In 1021 AD. Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah took a donkey ride to the outskirts of Cairo for a little night meditation and when people went looking for him later on they found the donkey and some bloody clothes but no Al-Hakim. It’s true that people disappear all the time: kidnapping and runaways and mental cases who just wander away to nowhere with something resembling soap opera amnesia. But, what’s also true is that someone always chooses to make these things happen, whether it’s the individual in question or not. Sometimes it’s random, to prove that it can be done, that one person can take another person and not kill them so much as delete them, just remove them from whatever it was they were going to do for the rest of their life. More often than not, though, there’s a reason. Some might say that we hold grudges and drop bodies.

All of these people are right.

There were obviously lots of disappearances between Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah and the early 1900’s dock days, Edward V and The Roanoke Colonists and so on, but those latter glory days are the ones people are most interested in. Going into that century it seemed like the whole country was dancing on steel just because it was possible. There was so much of it. I can’t say the industrial advances didn’t have their logical perks, but the men who made them became invisible. The real middlemen, the men on the docks and the men building bridges, became invisible. To make up for it, they started their own variation on the nameless disappearance religion. It started from the bottom, the very bottom, the dwellers and, later, mole people, who made the city move simply by being the ruled class, by being the lowest level so nobody else had to. Once they were one, the stevedores and labor workers got in, maybe only twenty people all together to represent this larger faction. They abducted twenty-five year old Dorothy Arnold in 1910 because she was a bratty heiress to a perfume empire and a shithead boozer from Manhattan. They dug deeper and spread further, which isn’t to say they got smart. In 1914 two men in Santa Barbara, California made Idaho businessman F. Lewis Clark disappear because they thought he was “the man who went across the USA with that Indian broad.”

They went to the spine of it all in 1938 and flew Andrew Carnegie’s nephew and his plane into an uncharted area around Long Island. Then a few of those idiots tried to take credit for Amelia Earhart the year before. I helped build the Jersey Turnpike in the 50s, and even though they weren’t the brightest group, they got on track by the time I joined. I had a hand in a few of the big ones after that, namely Nelson Rockefeller’s son Michael and that son of a bitch Jimmy Hoffa. We didn’t have anything to do with D.B. Cooper, though he seemed like our sort of man. He had it all: everybody knows D.B. Cooper and nobody knows D.B. Cooper. He could have been another criminal, but he could have been like us, too, a guy who wanted to draw and erase certain lines between output and recognition. I’d love to meet him, assuming he’s still out there. He’d be about my age, which is to say that we’re both too old now to do any sort of disappearing other than the kind that comes naturally with getting old and fading, the kind where it just sort of happens, when the choice is finally no one’s.

**********

Lyrics

Clutch is a band from Germantown, Maryland. Singer Neil Fallon doesn't look anything like what I imagined him to look like before I actually saw him. The band added a full-time organist to their line-up as of their 2005 album Robot Hive/Exodus, making them the second coolest rock band ever with a permanent organ. I think their 2004 album Blast Tyrant is their best album, putting it in the running for one of the best riff rock albums of the decade. They've chilled out a lot in the past several years, and I heard all they do is sit around and smoke weed and talk about theological issues. Pure Rock Fury is their best-named and least-enjoyable album, which is kind of a bummer, but the least-enjoyable Clutch album is still way better than most bullshit out there. Maybe I've just got a soft-spot for bands whose songs can be learned within a month of picking up a guitar, but Clutch really are masters of the groove riff.

Eirik Gumeny is a writer from New Jersey. He is the head honcho at Jersey Devil Press, an underground journal of misfit writers who are too beautifully fucked up for anywhere else. Much like Neil Fallon, Eirik doesn't look how I thought he would. I expected a white dude with dreadlocks, fingerless gloves, and Hawaiian shirts (strikes one, two, and "get the fuck out of here" in my book). He has a book called Exponential Apocalypse that I've been meaning to order for a long time. You should all make an attempt to beat me to the punch, and place your orders. I bet it's as great as the other book JDP released this year: the 2010 Jersey Devil Press Anthology, featuring almost two dozen awesome stories in it, including one by yours truly and one by OBCBYL alumnus yt sumner. Get that one, too. Eirik also enjoys tacos. Probably.

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Next week: A story based on "No Love Lost" by Joy Division, as suggested by musician Aaron Beam of Red Fang.

"Love, I Guess": A story based on "Pyramid" by Andreas Vollenweider, as suggested by musician Ulrich Schnauss (10/100)

2010-08-08T17:09:00.000-07:00

Love, I Guess

Keri had moved out of our cabin in the fall, but I found out where she went to. Every once in awhile I’d pay the grocer’s boy in town fifty cents to call her up and just listen, write down everything she said. Which was this: Henry, I know it’s you and you need to stop calling me and figure out your life. Except the boy was thirteen and a terrible speller, so when I’d go into town to get supplies and pay him, he’d hand me the notepad paper he transcribed her words onto and it’d come out looking like Henree you aint never bin a god dam foole til now and I just need to see things you cant show me. I dont hate you but im gonna let the police no abowt this if I get won more call from you I sware to God. I’d thank him and give him his fifty cents.

“She sounded mad, Hank” he said to me once.

“You didn’t say anything, did you?”

“Nope. I just listened like you said.” He clicked the two quarters together. “Why you havin’ me do this, Hank?”

“Love, I guess.”

“Oh.”

“It’s,” I started and then stopped. “Go like this.” I held my arms out in front of me with my fingers pointed up, elbows bent at a ninety degree angle, and then tilted my hands towards each other at the same pace until the fingertips touched gently in the middle.

The boy copied me exact. “Like this?”

I took my pointer and middle fingers on each hand and walked both of them halfway up his slanted arms. “Like that.”

People in town started talking about how Keri got her pilot’s license in December. I kept watching for planes to fly over the farm. It was late April when one finally did, and I started making the shapes the next day, when the winter wheat was knee-high. I counted the rows and had my whole crop all drawn out on some graph paper. Every couple of nights I’d belt some tennis rackets to my feet and go make a big shape in the wheat. First it was something simple, just a circle or a triangle. Then I’d climb up on my roof to get an idea of how I did.

I wasn't great at first, but eventually I got better. And wild, too. I could make a horse. A guitar. A cowboy hat. I made a three-tiered cake over the course of an entire day, all by myself, rolling my feet like an ocean and flattening the wheat. I made angel wings. Medusa's head. I was crushing the crop with expectations, strapping leather to leather and trying to see how much more beautiful it all could be, each strand of wheat laid down flat and looking up as part of something larger than itself.

**********

Andreas Vollenweider is a Swiss harpist who, in my head, walks everywhere with his harp. He's really into non-violence and all that stuff, which makes total sense, because his music is so chilled out that I'd find it really hard to beat anyone's ass while listening to it. He worked with Carly Simon on some stuff, so we know her taste in musical collaborators is far superior than her taste in men.

Ulrich Schnauss ist sehr gut. He is an electronic musician from Germany. His music takes nods from shoegaze and all sorts of electronic/hip-hop stuff and just keeps layering it all together until there's some really gorgeous soundscape where there was previously only a smattering of noises. He's released music under his own name as well as various others such as View to the Future, Police In Cars With Headphones, Ethereal 77, and others. I can't say enough nice things about the guy. And he looks like a suave and less "I'm going to eat your children" Nick Cave. And his name is fun to say. Like I said, the dude's awesome. My personal favorite album of his is 2001's Far Away Trains Passing By, but you can't go wrong with any of his stuff. His record labels sued Guns N' Roses. It's hard to say Axl doesn't have shit like that coming to him."Knuddlemaus" is one of my favorite songs ever, which is something I know I say a lot, but it's always true.

"Knuddlemaus" from Far Away Trains Passing By

"Blumenthal" from A Strangely Isolated Place

"Never Be the Same" from Goodbye

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Next week: A story based on "Pulaski Skyway" by Clutch, as suggested by writer Eirik Gumeny.

"After I Threw the Ball At Thomas Hernandez and Before It Killed Him": A story based on "Jesus Christ" by Brand New, suggested by writer Adam Gallari

2010-08-01T10:23:00.000-07:00

After I Threw the Ball At Thomas Hernandez and Before It Killed Him

I can’t say it was an accident, but in my defense I can say that the last time I encountered Thomas Hernandez he stole home from me twice: once during the game and once after it. When he tried it again this time, he got caught in a pickle. Anne was in the stands, only slightly amused by the Mexican minor leagues but completely unable to escape the men who play in it. She still flew down for the occasional game, but to see Hernandez instead of me. When I started closing the gap between myself and the catcher, Hernandez pivoted between us and his helmet flew off. I saw Anne stand up for the first time ever at a game. Hernandez slid into home, and as the stitches rolled off the pads of my fingers I seemed to have all the time I wanted to justify it, to think about how everyone knows that my throws have been fast and sloppy as of late, how the coroner will place the pitch in the upper-eighties and everyone will rule it an accident while still thinking in the back of his head that I may have done it on purpose. They won’t know that they’re all right, that I had time to think about how I’ve earned my darkness and refused to believe that I have no brightness that needs suppressing, that I’ve thought about it all and decided that, yes, I deserve the best sleep that can be had by a man alone in bed.

**********

Lyrics

Brand New is a band from Long Island, New York. The reason I never listened to them is because some douchebag I knew in college really liked them, but it turns out they're pretty great, often spooky and finding new ways to bring rage to music aside from angst-metal. I'm kind of bummed that nobody makes happy metal anymore, but that's what the dollar section at record stores are for, I guess. Frontman Jesse Lacey, like J Mascis and that dude from MONO, plays Jazzmaster guitars, which is something you can't really argue with as a tonal weapon. I'm trying really hard to not make a joke about how the band has been around for ten years, thereby making them not-all-that-brand-new, but instead I'll just say that All Music called "Jude Law and a Semester Abroad" a "semi-hit," which is kind of a backhanded thing to say. "Yeah, people almost cared." What a bunch of dicks.

(I feel bad about that last bit. Sloan rocks)

Adam Gallari is a writer from Manhatten, but he's currently in the United Kingdom, growing his hair out and posing by fountains all day. His book We Are Never As Beautiful As We Are Now (published in April 2010 by Ampersand Books) has been described in all sorts of ways, but everyone seems to find a way to mention the words "muscular" and "masculinity" as well as some sideways reference to Richard Ford or Raymond Carver. I can see that, but the real appeal of his stories is that they have a sharp eye that zooms in on the right details of something that might otherwise seem anecdotal, as if the characters, if left alone without Gallari writing through them, would falter and stop halfway through trying to tell their own stories. He doesn't just know how to write things, he knows how to see them and make the reader see them. He also likes baseball a lot, and I can only hope he isn't a Yankees fan (or, even worse, a Cubs fan). His essays and fiction have appeared in The Quarterly Conversation, LIT, The Millions and others. He is currently working on a novel. Also, go Brewers.

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Next week: A story based on "Pyramid" by Andreas Vollenweider, as suggested by musician Ulrich Schnauss.

"Feeding Mona Marie Claire": A story based on "Blood and Tears" by Danzig, as suggested by musician Andrew Tweedy of Buried Inside (8/100)

2010-07-25T12:53:00.000-07:00

Feeding Mona Marie Claire

I graduated with a film degree and ended up with a job instead of a career. The only work I could find that required no skills but still had enough tact to sort of frown upon felony charges was a job delivering groceries to the elderly. That’s how I met Mona Marie Claire. She was an actress, still is if someone were to ask her what she does, though she’s over eighty years old and hasn’t had a leading role in fifty years and not so much as a cameo in twenty-five.

I was obsessed with writing a successful script. I kept a pad and pen sitting in the basket of the cart when I was going through the grocery store and when I wasn't at work I was writing through the night, passing out in my desk chair more often than not. I finally sold my bed, got enough money to pay postage on a couple dozen scripts.

Mona was always watching her movies when I would deliver the groceries. She knew when I was coming every week, but I don’t think she ever planned it out. I don’t think she even knew that I was aware of her acting career, let alone that the fact that it could possibly be her on the screen, bronzed and busty, sparkling with chastity in the 1950s, clutching scarves to her chest and fainting between two prospective lovers, being Mona Marie Claire better than anyone: the virginal tease.

I wasn’t sleeping very well or very much. It had been months and there was no reply from any of the scripts I sent out. When I’d go out for Mona’s groceries, I’d take all day and add on anything I wanted to the bill. First it was just a Twix, but when she didn’t notice, I did it again. In a few weeks she was feeding the both of us. She didn’t seem to care, and if she did, she never mentioned it. I would sometimes try to make small talk when dropping off the groceries, some comment about how many people were at the store or about something different on her list, but she would only nod or wave me off with a smile. The only time I heard her voice was when she had lines in whatever film it was she was watching.

I was working on a new script because I was always working on a new script, convincing myself they were becoming better and better, slowly realizing they were all just different sorts of decent. I was missing the x-factor. That’s what I was thinking about one day on deliveries. I spent so much time focusing on the one scene or shot that would define my art that I missed the idea of an ever-receding context, the idea that a scene needs to fit into a film as much as a film needs to fit into something larger than it and larger than that, even. I was about to tell Mona all of this, just gush to her in an insomniac’s ramble, but as I turned to her, I noticed the film: The Mercy Club. 1954. Mona Marie Claire’s character is Hosanna, a newly married girl thought to be living the perfect life up until her husband’s betrayal. In this scene, she is absorbing the story of her lover’s infidelity, crying with both passion and dignity, both literally and figuratively holding her head up. It’s famous in some circles, as the director called for Mona to be wearing heavy, black eye make-up, seated and looking upward as the camera shoots her from the ground. The man speaking is off-screen, but his voice is resonating through the image of those dark tears, those Mother Mary tears collecting one, two, and three before dropping from the corner of her jaw. I see this and can only think of our usual non-sequiturs. I watch until the end of the scene, the part Mona ad-libbed on set, the part where she looks at the voice off-screen and says, now smirking, “Darling, nothing lasts.”

**********

Lyrics

Danzig is a band fronted by Glenn Danzig, a very angry man of very little stature. He's from New Jersey, if that explains anything. His first four albums are pretty kick ass. I was in a band that covered the majority of Danzig II, and we even paid tribute to it with the artwork and title of our second album. Danzig is also an internet celebrity and book enthusiast. He should start doing stand-up, as he's one of the funniest dudes ever, albeit unintentionally. My friend Jack met him once and said he was pretty cool, though when everyone else was on the bus, Danzig just sat in the back painting D & D figurines and looking at porno mags. Danzig is the little brother of metal culture: if you're a metalhead, you're allowed to make fun of him, and if not you can go fuck yourself, because he's awesome.

Andrew Tweedy is a member of the Ottowa, Ontario band Buried Inside. The band recently broke up (or at least decided to play a couple more shows and make no plans for new material or gigs), which is a bummer, because their last couple of albums were amazing conceptual pieces of soundscape-sludge. Their 2009 album Spoils of Failure is especially badass, as is the Eugene-Debs-influenced (amongst other things) Chronoclast from 2005. Their first two albums (1999's In and of the Self and 2001's Suspect Symmetry) have a bit more of the hardcore and straight-ahead pummeling stuff, but are still killer. In keeping with the idea that Canada is one tiny city where everyone knows everyone else based solely on the fact that they're all Canadian, I can only assume that Tweedy is meeting up for coffee later on today with Trish Stratus and the dudes from The Tragically Hip. And the members of Exciter will be out front begging for change. Check out Tweedy's solo material, where he gets all tender and lovelorn.

"In and of the Self" from In and of the Self

"Terrortourismology" from Suspect Symmetry

"Time As Imperialism" from Chronoclast

"IV" from Spoils of Failure

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Next week: A story based on "Jesus Christ" by Brand New, as suggested by writer Adam Gallari.

"Follow the Water": A story based on "New Kind of Kick" by The Cramps, as suggested by writer yt sumner (7/100)

2010-07-18T18:05:00.000-07:00

Follow the Water

Factoring in time spent blacked-out and lost, the full circuit takes a little over a week to do. I think the easiest way is by starting in Humboldt with Drano Dave. You’ll spend the first four days there if you’re lucky. If you’re really lucky, you won’t die from the cleaning solvents Dave cuts everything with and you won’t kill yourself after three sleepless days of being talked at. The last I heard, his new thing is putting on two eye-patches he calls his “infinitesimal passion extrapolation glasses” and narrating the beat of your heart until his voice runs out, at which point he takes your hand and taps his words out in Morse code across your knuckles.

Whatever you do, don’t let him follow you.

Wander down into the Lower West Side. There’s a bunch of wop diners lined up on Oakley. One in the middle sells balloons and they don’t watch the helium tanks. You can sit there all day and if you’re still fucked up enough from your stay in Humboldt, you’ll think talking like a chipmunk for the next seven or eight hours will be the best thing in the world. Every medium sized huff kills about 400 brain cells. Other than that, you can’t really hurt yourself. Make sure the last huff you take is a big one. The helium replaces the oxygen and if you have no oxygen you pass out, preferably not on the bike trail.

Hit the Loop and follow the water. You’ll find whatever you want, but I suggest holding out on the heavy stuff until you get to Lake View. There’s a guy behind Wrigley Field named Shakedown. He’s not hard to find. He’s the sort of guy who looks like people call him Shakedown and he’s the one with the formaldehyde. You can either bring your own smokes or buy some off him. Tell him you want to dip them yourself. This is how the conversation will go.

“Shakedown, I’m going to dip these myself, if that’s cool.”

“That’s not cool, motherfucker.”

“All right. That’s fine.” Feign putting your smokes back in the pack. “I’ll just let Seven know you’re being a dick.”

Nobody knows who Seven is or if he’s even real. We all assume he isn’t. For a long time we all thought he was just some burnout named Steven who dropped the “t” and was always looking for an excuse to test his heels on Shakedown’s head, but some sketchy drifter saw Shakedown flipping out one night, arguing with a chained-up bike he was taking commands from, which is when a handful of us figured out that we could probably start using Seven as a threat.

Anyway, you’re only going to need two or three of the formaldehyde dips. Only take a couple puffs at a time and never smoke more than one a day. If you do, you’ll probably end up seeing Seven, too. Nobody’s going to make you stay, but you won’t be moving much.

Avondale is the big Polish neighborhood, and since you’ll probably only be able to pronounce the letters “o” and “w” your best bet is to go there next. Find Suzi. She doesn’t have anything you need, and that’ll feel nice, to have something someone else needs, to be wanted at least once. We called her Lines & Wine for years. If you’ve got a little bit of either you won’t be able to get rid of her until it’s gone. But long enough will be long enough. And she likes a challenge. At this point, the two of you fucking will probably look like a blind person with one hand trying to put a length of rope into a tube sock.

You should go south, cut the corners of Hermosa and Logan Square and end up right back in Humboldt. The trick is to not get caught by the circuit. One girl started and did it for months. We all called her Jill Doe, Jane’s lesser-known sister. The only thing we know her for now is those months on the circuit. When we found Jill afterwards, we saw that she bit her tongue mostly off. Still, nobody slagged her. She did it for the same reasons we all did it in the first place. Once you learn manners and the golden rule and all that other stuff, your life isn’t even into double digits and it’s already over. The thing with the circuit is that it’s always different. The drugs and the people and even each step, never the same one twice, and there isn’t a person I know who wouldn’t bite their tongue off to tell you about it.

**********

Lyrics

The Cramps were a Sacramento, California punk band that was kind of a big deal in the CBGB New York scene in the mid-to-late 70s. Guitarist Poison Ivy Rorschach scares the shit out of me, which I think is the point. The band split up in 2009 after the sudden and fucked up death of vocalist Lux Interior. White Zombie bassist Sean Yseult--who I totally had the hots for when I was fifteen--was in the band for about two months. The Cramps were active for over thirty years, a career that spawned twenty-four singles, nine studio albums, and an appearance on Beverly Hills, 90210.

yt sumner is a charming Australian writer. She likes all the important k/hard-c sounds: Carver, Kyuss, and candy. Her writing is often absurd, often all-too-real, but it never fails to provoke emotion in all the right ways, skipping sentimentality completely and bashing through a series of internal organs until planting itself firmly in a reader's gut. We both have a thing for Jessica Rabbit, probably because you can't go wrong with a busty redhead. If I had to pick the most important flash fiction writers in underground literature today, yt sumner would be on the tip of my tongue (in a platonic way). I stole the idea for this project from her "you and me" project. Go to her site and contribute to it and then become a fan of hers on Facebook.

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Next week: A story based on "Blood and Tears" by Danzig, as suggested by musician Andrew Tweedy of Buried Inside.

"Haunt": A story based on "Ghosts of the Garden City" by Caspian, as suggested by musician Philip Jamieson of Caspian (6/100)

2010-07-11T16:43:00.000-07:00

Haunt

June was dead like me. Like all of us in the city. She wasn’t my wife, but we took each other on in that same way, making the needs of the other equal to our own. We spent our time living like the living as much as we could, talking about people around the city and, on the occasions it happened, sharing memories we had from when we were alive. One day June came up to me and told me that she remembers what ice cream tastes like, the coldness of it, the way that she would eat it on a hot day, breathing slowly over it and watching it steam.

The city was mostly tendrils, thick green spines wrapping up everything until the tendrils themselves were everything. They tangled together at random and spilled far beyond any point that any of us had journeyed. The tendrils were the first thing I saw when I arrived there. They’re the first thing everyone saw when they arrived there. We all had the same experience, wandering into the city and being enamored with them, what they could possibly be attached to if not themselves and the way they had swallowed everything in their way when climbing toward the sun. Later on we all joked about how caught up on them we were and how important it seemed until we realized that we were dead.

There were about a hundred people in the city when I showed up. I knew it couldn’t be a place for everyone who had died. There just weren’t enough people. Of the ones who were there, a few of us had been there for a long time. Though the sky was constantly at dusk and no clocks existed, the concept of time wasn’t completely lost. We tried to gauge time by who had come and gone during our time in the city. Aside from Maddox, June and I had been there the longest, with me showing up right after her and meeting her almost immediately. I arrived in front of her as if appealing to an empress. Maddox was a handsome seventeen or eighteen year old who looked vaguely Spanish, and he could recall when everyone had come into the city, what it was like when he saw them for the first time.

“Man, when you came in, I don’t think I’ve laughed that hard since I got here,” he said to me once. “You just wandered around for awhile, checking out the tendrils, and then you finally walked up to June and said, ‘Why don’t I want a sandwich?’”

He wasn’t a greeter—nobody had a job, even one like that—but nobody could show up and go too long without running into everyone. It was like that every day. We all did the same things in the same places, trying to figure out whether we were going to end up here forever or if we needed to die a little more. Some of us got out, usually the ones who weren’t there for too long to begin with—though a girl named Jeanne was there almost as long as anyone when she just vanished one day, dissipated into a fuzzy gray and then into nothing.

Everyone in the city had a memory full of holes, the thoughts laid out like a puzzle with all the wrong pieces missing. So we—Maddox, June, and I—started writing them down almost as a hobby, if such a thing could exist. We wrote down every detail about every person and tried to find the common ground between us all. If we couldn’t leave, we at least wanted to figure out why we were there.

To be honest, there wasn’t much we had figured out. We didn’t know why any of it happened. The appearances. The disappearances. We collected facts numbering in the tens of thousands. It still made no sense. Maddox thought it was because we had something to do somewhere else, that being stuck in the city wasn’t what we were supposed to do, and when we were ready to move on, we moved on. I was always glad when people disappeared. It meant that the city wasn’t the end.

Once, June told me that she thought I was only partly right. “The city’s just one of many ends,” she said. It was odd of her to say. She never brought up the disappearances. But then I noticed her figure, how wispy she was becoming. We sat down on the floor of the city and didn’t speak. She turned into different shades of dirty milk, becoming more and more transparent, and I wondered how many times we’d have to lose what we had, how many ends we’d have to come to.

**********

Philip Jamieson is the tallest member of the band Caspian. I'd like to thank him for not beating the shit out of me when I asked him if he was going to be playing any Aerosmith songs at the Red Sparowes/Fang Island show I saw him at in April of 2010, though he did offer to beat the shit out of me later for a completely different reason. We both respect and enjoy the music of Neil Young and Mark Kozelek. His guitar gear is way badass, and I don't know if I've ever seen so many delay/echo pedals on one board. Despite his height, I think I could take him in a one-on-one (or two-on-two) game of basketball.

Caspian is an instrumental band from Beverly, Massachusetts. They do not play any Aerosmith songs, but that's all right because their original music is a transcending force to be reckoned with, the sound of prettiness eating itself at a thousand decibels. They're pretty tasteful with the drum machine stuff, too. And they like noted author/scumbag Charles Bukowski. I've heard a couple people say that only the first EP is good, but these people are being assholes (and incorrect assholes, at that). That EP,2005's You Are the Conductor, is a great album, but they've only gotten better with time. In 2007 the band released The Four Trees and in 2009 they released Tertia (my personal favorite). If I made a list of my favorite songs from 2009, I bet "Sycamore" from Tertia would be in the top five.

"Loft" from You Are the Conductor

"Moksha" from The Four Trees

"Vienna" from Tertia

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Next week: A story based on "New Kind of Kick" by The Cramps, as suggested by writer yt sumner.

(Note: This week's story owes a huge debt of gratitude to Kevin Brockmeier's fantastic book The Brief History of the Dead. I consider this story to take place in an alternate-yet-similar location as the city created in Brokemeier's book, and on the offhand chance you enjoyed my take on literary sci-fi involving the post-mortal, do yourself a favor and get The Brief History of the Dead.)

"Focus": A story based on "Hyperballad" by Björk, as suggested by writer Benjamin Rosenbaum (5/100)

2010-07-04T17:59:00.000-07:00

Focus

Every morning I go to the edge of the cliff near my house and throw something off. It’s always something small, washers or bolts from the garage, an empty bottle from the recycling bin. If Neil and I go into town to eat the night before, I’ll grab a spoon or a napkin ring from the table and take it with me to throw off the next morning.

We live on top of a mountain and the drop is huge, hundreds of feet down at least. When we first moved up here a couple years ago, I was still worried about a few of the wilder men before Neil, the ones who focused too hard. Eddie’s one of them. After Eddie and I broke up, he followed me into the restaurant where I was eating alone, and before I could ask him to sit down he grabbed my steak knife. He didn’t say anything, just started carving up his hands, driving the blade up his palm and then between his knuckles and then back around his wrist and up again. Eddie was smart, and he lived and he was still smart after that, but he just wanted the intangibles back he had given me—time, effort, etc—and because that was impossible he did what he did.

Jonah was another. I saw him on the street one day when I was walking to get a paper and he followed me home. Not maliciously, but right behind me, talking about how two people in love are broken and then rebuilt as a single unit. I was polite until I reached my house, at which point I figured the only thing I could do was go inside and lock the door. When he realized I wasn’t going to let him in, he started crawling on his knees back and forth, up and down the gravel walk-up to my front door. He was shouting about how he’d do it until he ground his legs to nubs. He did it for a half hour and his knees were bloody, his pants torn. I finally broke down and invited him inside just for long enough to get his knees bandaged and his pants mended. But as soon as I opened the door he ran past me and curled up in my bed and fell right asleep, the sheets sticking to the bloody spots on his legs.

There were others, too.

I think they’re sort of the reason I started throwing things off in the first place. I woke up too fast one morning shortly after Neil and I had moved up here. He’s a good mechanic and quiet, with a bit of winter in his beard already. He’s lived up here since he was eighteen and I know he doesn’t have it in him to do what Eddie and Jonah did. He invited me to move in with him after we dated for almost two years. It was a few weeks later that I woke too fast. My eyes opened right away and I realized I hadn’t dreamt at all the night before. Nothing I could remember, at least. I slipped out of bed and went outside. We’re up so high that sometimes, at the right angles, the sun looks like it recedes forever. That morning I was eye-level with it. I walked toward the cliff a couple hundred feet away from the back of the house, and when I got near the precipice I looked down and saw a button just at the edge. I worked my big toe under the dirt behind it and lifted up not with speed, but with suddenness, and for that brief moment I felt what little weight there was to the button before it went over. I don’t know why I did it. But I felt better. It was as if I was being filled up, to have something so inherently mine.

The next morning, the same thing happened. Only this time I picked up the rock and threw it. It was a loft, just an underhand toss up and over. I grabbed another, bigger this time, and threw that one, too. I heard it hit at the bottom. I went back to the house and grabbed some of Neil’s change off the dresser, maybe a dollar total. After tossing a few coins individually I walked up and hung my toes over the edge, held out my open hand, and watched the sun hit the money in my palm. As I turned it slowly over, the light hit the divots and crevices of the coins and continued to do so until they fell out of sight.

Now I do it every day, before Neil wakes up. One time I thought he saw me doing it, walking to the edge and throwing some cutlery off, holding my breath as if it helped me hear better, waiting for the tiniest of clangs. It felt as if something had been taken away from me, as if all those old lovers had come back and got what they wanted. I looked over the edge again and wondered what I’d look like on the rocks below, what I’d look like as I went through the air. When I hit, would my eyes be open or closed?

**********

Lyrics

Björk is an Icelandic siren with a voice that can do anything. People have speculated that she's also completely batshit crazy. Her knack for odd dresses has garnered attention that should have been on her music. Her 2004 album Medúlla was made using only sounds made by the human voice (though there is a bit of piano on there, it doesn't really count). It's really damn awesome. In the DVD about the making of Medúlla, she mentions really liking the band Swans, which is also really damn awesome. "Hyperballad" is from her 1995 sophomore album Post, which I listened to a lot when I worked at a gas station a few years ago, often recreating the dance moves from the video "It's, Oh, So Quiet" while mopping the floor at the end of the night.

Benjamin Rosenbaum is a creative, talented writer who married a Swiss woman. He has two children and a book, The Ant King and Other Stories. He is also a computer programmer who speaks several languages. And he's rather handsome in that "Jeff-Tweedy-needs-a-fucking-nap,-dude" sort of way. As soon as I'm done being jealous of his talent and Swiss wife, I'm going to switch to being jealous of that other stuff. His short short story "The Orange" was made into an award winning short short film. He's currently working on a bunch of stuff, including giant ray guns.

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Next week: A story based on "Ghosts of the Garden City" by Caspian, as suggested by musician Philip Jamieson of Caspian.