The Book of John

John Gourley, singer for Portugal the Man, entered onto a darker stage. His band—bass and drums and keys—followed. They started right away. Portugal’s sound was a pleading gospel rock. John’s vocals frequently broke into sharply-pitched falsetto and then a semantic obscurity like back-country glossolalia against a blues rhythm. The guy on keys and the bassist both spilled their voices behind him. The blend was haunted and gothic, like all the bible was a rock opera and all the apostles were bright ghosts who sang acid-laced blues on the street at night. It felt like the South’s old mystical religion, but blasted forward, cradled in modern cities, anxious about guns and gods at the same time. The songs were hard energy, and the stories each seemed to end in quotidian apocalypse, like if you told the story absolutely right one time, you’d be so shaken open by the experience that it could never exist again. That was the urgency, the critical importance of watching and listening: “Once you crawl in you’ll never come back again.”

I tried to read the tattoo on John’s skinny arm, right above the place where it crossed over the body of his guitar, but couldn’t. I tried to listen for every lyric but the syllables blended so smoothly I couldn’t group them together, like trying to draw lines on the color spectrum. Show me where blue ends, draw a line, show exactly, but I couldn’t quite, and the whole stretch of it seemed fine enough undivided. I could read them later in little books or on a computer screen, but it didn’t matter so much then. It didn’t matter either the shape of ink on his skin. It was good just to see and wonder about it. I’d heard that the guy had spent a lot of time traveling around Alaska with his father. Not the tourist kind of traveling, but the lifestyle kind where it’s not about collecting flashy toys or replicating photographs you’ve seen somewhere else. Maybe so much time floating around made him want to keep a certain thing close. Maybe it was a story he didn’t want to forget about once it was over.

It was hard to focus too long. Alternating flashes of red and blue backlit the stage like speeding police cars. As soon as a person was visible they were hidden in black again. It made everyone on stage seem equal. People disappeared and reappeared and no one got a spotlight. The stage was always moving, and it was easy to feel part of that motion. Thin strings of green and yellow light appeared at random and tracked carefully between faces in the crowd. Penetrable darkness hung between all the lines, all the networks of neon and sound.

The space was too small for anyone to feel distant. Even the bassist on the other side of the stage didn’t seem far, like I could reach him, like anyone could reach anyone else. The last time I’d watched bassist Zachary Carothers on that stage, he’d been even closer. He’d stood right in front of me. The room had felt lighter, maybe it was summer. It was probably summer. I was in high school. Zach and John had played for a band called Anatomy of a Ghost, a harder faster band where John screamed more often. It was wild music that made the musicians thrash around onstage. They kicked each other and collided and played as fast as they could. I took a picture of Zach standing in front of me, bending his body over backward until his torso was parallel with the stage and his head hung toward the floor, all perfect limbo. This seemed in direct opposition to the commandments of physics or god but he never stopped playing his bass. In their new band, the guys didn’t move around as much, didn’t feel so overcome by the music as to fight each other. I caught Zachary once though bending over backward with his bass, not as far, not all the way, but it was close to the picture I had of him. Maybe he didn’t have the muscles to go back as far anymore or maybe he didn’t want to.

It seemed a miracle at all that musicians played together for so long. The album I put on once every other month, or that darker album I only played at the end of long winters because it seemed like that kind of album, the band played those songs all the time, in June and April and September. My best effort at imagining the life of a musician was to take the album I played once a year and imagine it on repeat in smoky bars and old passenger vans, like the musicians couldn’t rid it from their minds, like they wanted to run from it but couldn’t. The songs were just always present or they were always playing them, and no matter how exhausting that was they couldn’t stop. They weren’t allowed to stop, just kept playing and hearing the music all the time, new bar, new city, the same songs all the time, so other people could listen to it just once. My best effort at imaging this lifestyle was to create a bludgeoning tragedy where artists cursed what they wrote for the days it gave them. Because I imagined musicians that way, it was beyond a miracle that anyone could play music for five years with the same people or ten years or twenty. But I had it all backwards. I thought the lifestyle was twisted because the presentation of it was so lovely.

Mania

*I have been reading way too much Charles Bukowski. Here is the result:

To Charles Bukowski

"I haven't shat or pissed in seven years," she tells him, negotiating each word around the Marlboro.

Because he doesn't know what else to say, Isaiah asks, "Haven't you seen a doctor about that?"

"Of course." Her words fall out white clouds against an off-white carpet and light cream plaster walls. The air is a stinking thick haze of tobacco smoke. There are only a handful of boxes next to them; they sit on the only pieces of furniture he can see, two metal folding chairs. The room is bare.

"If you don't shit or piss for a week the body poisons itself -- drowns in its own filth," she says. "The doctors said there was nothing wrong with me. One or two actually went as far as to say I was lying. But I haven't defecated or urinated for about the last quarter of my life."

"That must be uncomfortable," Isaiah says, his desire to fuck her quickly subsiding with this new bit of information, thus he had no reason to stay. He'd made his delivery -- the last that evening -- a thirty-six pack of downy toilet paper, to one Beatrice Smith who, despite his usual gamut of old ladies and stay-at-home moms, turned out to be an attractive young woman, shorts tight enough to count her change at a glance and a tight white T-shirt thin enough to see the absence of a bra. Her hair was tied back in a red bandana. When she turned to get him the money and a drink he decided she had the best ass he'd seen in months. So they sat down for drinks, he a beer and she a Long Island iced tea. Then she told him she hadn't shat in seven years.

Kill the beer and go, he thinks. Bitch is crazy. Still. "So, why order the largest and most expensive package of toilet paper?" he asks indicating the behemoth sitting next to him.

She shrugs. "Entertaining guests. I've made a rule, you see. Once I've run through three of these I move. That usually takes about a year of entertaining guests, boyfriends and whoever else walks in."

"So," Isaiah says, "you have a certain threshold of shit you take before you move."

"Exactly."

The wind blows, the apartment groans and the rain slaps the window at the termination of freezing, forming a sliding layer of ice on the glass. It looks like the whole world is melting.

"Want another drink?" Beatrice asks.

"Yeah," Isaiah says before he realizes he's handing her his empty. He calls to her after she disappears into the kitchen. "So, how long have you been doing the one-year-and-then-move thing?"

"Seven years."

"Since your problems started?"

"Since my problems started?" she says and it sounds like she's telling the punchline of a dirty joke. "My problems started a long time before that."

She reemerges from the kitchen, hands him his beer, sits down and gets to work on a martini. "What about you?" she asks. "How'd you end up with this shit job? Having to deliver toilet paper at four in the morning to weirdos and ass holes."

"It's not so bad when the weather isn't a mother fucker," he says. He considers hammering the beer and excusing himself; it's a good rule to keep the subject as far away from himself as possible.

She nods and lights another cigarette. "I'm surprised anyone does deliveries in this weather."

"Somebody's gotta do it. Gotta get those batteries, bottles of water, beer, groceries, nails, light bulbs or whatever to all the people too lazy to get it themselves. I nearly skidded off the road four times getting here."

She takes a drag of her cigarette. "You think I'm lazy?"

Mistake. "I didn't mean you. I just meant…"

"No," she says smoke. "You meant people are lazy. All of them. We're people too. We'd all like it if we had everything handed over right now."

"Yeah," he says. She takes a drag. They listen to the rain break. That wasn't what he meant, but better she think that than whatever it was he did believe. "That's what I meant."

She eats one of the green olives in two tiny bites, sucking off the gin and vermouth with full lips. It's arousing and Isaiah suddenly remembers his intended purpose. He hasn't gotten laid in a month and it was agony in his groin. So, she's full of shit. Most people are. He glances at her thighs, crossed, shaved, perfect, smooth.

The building groans.

"You nearly died three times driving here?" she asks.

"Yeah." He crosses his legs. "I've never seen a storm like this. The whole world's been turned to ice."

She nods, drags. "I've seen worse."

"That's rough."

"That's life. Need to use the bathroom?"

"No." He kills the beer. "You didn't bring very much with you?"

"Booze, clothes, books, games. I don't need anything else. I can fit everything I own in my car."

"I haven't moved in a long time."

"I guess so. I have wanderlust. Drink?"

"Sure."

He follows her to kitchen and sees a well stocked bar on the counter. Bombay Sapphire, Johnny Walker Black, Grey Goose and all the bottom shelves. "You're a bartender?"

"It's the one profession, besides prostitution, that you can find a job anywhere. Johnny?"

"Yes." While she pours, he talks. "I just have the odd jobs. Deliverer, chef, I worked at Toys R Us before I got this job. Manager position."

"What's the strangest thing you've ever delivered?"

She turns and pushes a glass into his hands. He tries hard to consider as Beatrice leans against the counter, close to him, pulling her shirt tighter.

"Weirdest thing? Well, this is pretty strange. Toilet paper to a woman who doesn't shit." He laughs. She doesn't. He clears his throat and thinks. "The weirdest thing. Probably the time I had to deliver for a party. At least, I think it was a party. This woman ordered three cases of beer, a dozen tubs of ice cream and a lot of mixed candy. When I pulled up to the drive, out of town in the country, she had three little kids, no older than ten. She paid me and gave me a twenty dollar tip. Didn't look like anyone was coming to a party. The kids were screaming and the ice cream was melting as she paid me. That was weird."

Beatrice stares at him, sips her drink and he watches the outline of her nipples. "Do you want to stay the night?" she asks.

"Well," Isaiah says without thinking and realizes he has nothing to say.

She moves closer to him, wraps a hand around his waist and presses her crotch against his. He sits down his drink on the counter, wraps his arms around her and imagines kissing her, but doesn't. He tries, but doesn't. The building creeks.

"I want to fuck you," he says.

"I want to fuck you," she repeats.

She pulls him to her bedroom and undresses them both. They lie on her bare mattress. He wraps around her; she is so small in his arms and frame. The window rattles and the room stinks of smoke, but neither moves, neither does anything. It is not sexual, Isaiah realizes. He has no desire; he is too tired for that. It just is.

"I want to fuck you," he says.

"Then why don't you?" she asks. He cannot see her face.

"Because it's never enough. You know, I had a nympho girlfriend once. We had sex four times a day and we hated each other. It's just too hard to break things off with someone who's the solution to your own desire."

Between her ass cheeks his penis is limp.

"All my boyfriends I've ever had called me worthless," Beatrice said. "I tried to fix my life and discovered that it wasn't worth the effort."

"It's never enough," he says.

"I smoke until I'm sick."

"Keep trying to leave and never get anywhere."

"The shit builds up until I can't take it."

"Everyday I just wish I were someone else, somewhere else, but I wake up in the same bed."

"Black out dreams are the best."

"It's never enough. Just to fuck."

"I'd love to just have sex and sleep and that's it."

"I'd love to just fuck and sleep and that's it."

They wake up the next morning and the window is royal purple stained glass. The whole world is frozen. Both are awake, but neither moves. She does not light a cigarette. He's limp. They look at each other. They see one another's breath and feel the other's warmth and fall asleep again.

Soundoff

All,

Just seeing who is still checking this website. If you're reading this, please leave a comment.

Sam

Mine Will Be a Purple World

I was revisiting Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson today, reading it to my nephew on a train from Stuttgart to Freiburg. It was one of my favorite books when I was little and I was glad my nephew asked me to read it to him. He's gotten bigger, my nephew. Smarter, more mischievous and, in a few years, perhaps he will qualify as diabolical. I'm already proud.

Reading Harold again I realized some themes I never picked up on as a kid. Sure, it's a cute story about an imaginative four-year-old who makes his own dream world, but think about it a moment. He draws landscapes, people, animals, plants, monsters and none of them are animate. It makes sense, in a way. The world he creates is static, just a picture in which he inhabits. But, what a desolate place. Unlike all those other little comforting little stories we were told as kids (Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz and so on) they had their friends and enemies, the products of a schizophrenic, sick mind, but ultimately a psyche that is not lonely. What a healthy and solipsistic world Harold creates.

I finished reading the story. My nephew was busy watching the landscape go by, asking "Are we still in Germany," to which I replied "Yes. We're still in Germany. We will be for a long time." The landscape grew, darkened and shifted into the Black Forest and I recalled stories of clever wolves and twisted fairies and the weird and the evil that I don't really believe in anymore. What a lonely little world. The sky changed to dusk, grey to purple on the horizon.

Modern Water, Modern Blood (excerpt)

It’s snowing hard again,

and I don’t feel well about that

because now, it doesn’t just melt. Now,

city trucks carry it off by the ton

and dump it in the river,

and the river carries it off,

and this way

it won’t all melt at once and flood the city again.

(Disasters aren’t really worth

that “coming together” feeling we all get afterward.)

And since God hasn’t revised the water cycle in like

a million years,

we’re doing our part,

carrying away the snow in trucks,

which is the same snow as the year before,

recycled, the snow you’ve always watched

even though the blood you have is not the blood

you were born with

and the skin you have, at best,

is rotting.

Wouldn’t it be something if our cells

came away in chunks not so small

as to be invisible, but if we instead

shed whole layers like rattlesnakes,

and it was someone’s job to walk the streets

and clean it up.

The first time I saw the polluted orange

glow of a city from within that city,

I thought it was a phenomenon of nature,

a kind of Northern Lights.

I was walking on campus with my girlfriend and I looked up and noticed that the sky was fucking orange.

“The sky is fucking orange,” I told her, ecstatic.

“The whole sky is fucking orange. All the way across.”

I wonder how someone’s life might be different

if they believed every pollution

was actually a miracle.

The popcorn I made

to snack on during the blizzard

is cold now, and clings together in a sickly mass.

There is no good liquor left in the apartment.

Some cheap rum, but no whiskey.

Whiskey is best for blizzards.

Certain music is best for blizzards too.

As a rule of thumb, any band whose name ends in “head”

is probably good for blizzards:

Portishead, Radiohead, Zebrahead, Buckethead,

the Futureheads, Talking Heads, Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head

There are probably more,

which is sad. But at least I’m not the guy

on the street cleaning up people’s skin.

A Thought On First Rights

I guess this was brought up with Steve's welcome for the blog, and I was thinking about the concerns of publishing. Actually, I think this blog could actually be beneficial for both you and any publication that accepts your work.

First, if you plan on publishing something, don't put it all on here, but maybe select the best scene or the one that really summarizes the piece.

Next, get that mofo out there and get it published!

When someone does say "yeah I'll take that", say to them "hey, I've got a piece of this action on a blog where other people are working on stuff and reading it, I could totally put a link to your site!" So then they have a nice little link from one site to the other, and assuming more people start interacting with this here blog, that sounds like a winning plan to me.

Swish!

Zeitgeist

This is a short I wrote once-upon-a-class. I quite like it and thought I'd share. Really enjoying other people's work.

"So, since you actually spent some time in Germany, maybe you can tell me what the hell 'Zeitgeist' means," I shouted at Lissy over the din at the Deadwood. For some reason I thought the question was clever or at least appropriate since I was finally buying her birthday drink about four months after her twenty-first birthday and three months after her return from Germany.

We had to pause so I could sing along to Old Crow Medicine Show and Lissy could consider her answer. "Rock me momma like the wind and the rain… This is my favorite song," I said.

"Well," Lissy said, took a sip of her Guinness, and struggled through. There was a piece of white confetti in her hair from Rocky Horror; we had just left the theatre when I suggested I should finally buy her a late birthday present. "At least you remembered late," she had said.

"Vielleicht mann kann sagen…" She slipped into German. "Tut mir leid. Okay it's sort of like the whole… artistic, intellectual mindset of the time. I mean. The Germans just see it differently."

"So you have to be German to get it," I said.

The Deadwood didn't smell the same as it did when you could barely see your hand through a fog of smoke. I missed that. We've come to an age where everyone's worried about someone else's bad habits killing them.

"But I ain't turnin' back to livin' that old life no more …" There was a girl behind us singing along now and both she and I were equally out of tune.

"So, reading anything worthwhile?" Lissy asked

"Just an Orwell essay. How he hates Latin and how we're all fucking up the language. He says the only good English is a direct translation from Biblical Hebrew."

"Oh." Some people laughed at the bar and we both looked back to see Tina Fey reenacting Sarah Palin evangelizing. "You know," Lissy said, "I kind of feel sorry for her. Palin I mean."

"Yeah." I finished my beer - whatever the special was that night - and wondered about how people all across the country could be in love with a woman I thought was a fanatic and a fool. "Don't you ever get that feeling of foreboding? Like everything in the country is changing and you're too small to see it."

"Everybody says that." Lissy shook her head and turned away from the TV.

"But not in so many words."

"If I die in Raleigh at least I will die free…" Old Crow Medicine Show concluded.

"You know," I said feeling a wave of nostalgia for ashtrays. "My parents used to come here when my dad was in law school. They used to live in an apartment right across the street."

"Isn't that weird?" Lissy smiled and looked down at the sticky, wooden table.

"Yeah, random."

How to Wait

>

This is the beginning to a fiction-nonfiction hybrid thing tentatively called "How to Live Life: By Gator T.D. McBride, translated by David Guisinger".

When you come home, I am very happy. I am so happy my tail wags so hard that I can't stand still, but I know I can't run down the driveway. Because I won't be able to stop.

Sometimes I do it anyway, I'm so glad you're home.

When I see your car pull up, I wait, because sometimes it isn't your car. Once I thought you were home and I ran to the street but when I got there it was someone else so I had to go back up to the back steps and wait some more. And when I wait I do it for a long time on those steps. I wait in the day even though the sun makes me really hot, and I wait at night even though I can't see very well in the dark. And even I get cold sometimes.

When it is you I'm almost as happy as when Mom comes home. Don't be offended; Mom gives me hugs and bones. But when you come home I'm really really happy, because I like having you around, even though you leave too often. When you leave I go outside and wait, though sometimes I go in for a nap or a bone.

When you come up the driveway I need to find a bone or a toy, because I know you don't like it so much when I bite your arm. But I love you! I keep bones around outside so I can usually find one before you get close enough, and when you get here I wish you would stay outside and run around with me in the yard like when I was a puppy and I chased you around the yard trying to get the toy.

I know when you're coming home. Maybe it's the way Mom and Dad talk, saying your name a lot and then not at all. Maybe it's just that we know things about when we're getting close to each other, like how the sky seems a different shade of blue (I can see colors, you know) or when I feel really lonesome so much that I just want to be by myself because it's a special kind of lonesome.

So when I know you're coming home I sit outside and wait. Once it was raining. I like the rain. I like getting wet, I like how the drops feel on my head, like when you sit next to me and tap the top of my nose with your fingers. Gently. I like going inside and having Mom or Dad dry me off with the towel. I disappear in it and feel it rub all along my body and it reminds me that I'm loved.

One time you surprised me. Remember? I was off with Dad and you came home when I was away. I was so excited to be home and see Mom that I didn't even notice your car was in the street, and when I walked into the kitchen you came from around the corner and said "boo". I jumped and didn't know what to do. So I bit your arm and wagged my tail because there was nothing else for me to do.

When you come home I am very happy, because I love you.