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.
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.")
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
