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

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!



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Updates and Downtime

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.

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"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

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"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

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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

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"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

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"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

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"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

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"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)

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.

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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.

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Next week: Uhh, something.

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

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.

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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).

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

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"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)

Let’s Go Shoot Her While She’s Crying

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

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"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)

B Sharp/C Flat

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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.

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

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

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.

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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.

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

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"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)

Things That Are Glacial, Things That Are Gone

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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.

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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.

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

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.

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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.

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

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"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)

Look At How Fast I Can Go Nowhere At All

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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.

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

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

Where Is Your H?

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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.

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

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

Mythology

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Lyrics

Citizen Cope needs a haircut.

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

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

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

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.

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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.

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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)

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.

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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.

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

Back and to the Left

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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.

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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)

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.

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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.

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

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.

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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".

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

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

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.

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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.

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

"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)

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.

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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.

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

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.

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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.