jesse poe.is writing

A Christmas Story

Written Christmas Eve Between 7pm and 9pm 2005

By Jesse Poe

I read in a Lad Mag a couple years back that Japan was the world’s oyster for single white males if they possessed one thing:  a job teaching English. It was a virtual sexual revolution to rival the 60’s in America, and with the way the Japanese consume, ruminate and then elevate retro to a level it never knew during it’s original run, promised a sexual Shangri-La of a magnitude I had trouble imagining and that troubled me when I tried to imagine it, which I did all too often. A country of women, who know the martial arts of sex, waiting for me.  A country of women, demure, dainty and waiting for a single white male like me. A country where I imagined the women’s secret parts would be tight and ribbed like seahorses. So after convincing myself that it was time to become a devourer instead of who is always devoured, I switched my liberal arts major to English and started learning how to eat everything with chopsticks, even soup. Besides I had made enough mugs and macramé for one lifetime, and being a teacher would be something that would make my mother happy for sure. I landed a job in Tokyo with no problem and sure enough my classes were filled with almond-eyed wonders just like I imagined, the only problem was work ethic. Mine, that is. No matter how silky of a smile was flashed from my little learners I just couldn’t overstep that delicate line of teacher to, well, not sure what I wanted to be. I was just waiting for these girls to start parachuting into my flat in the their kimonos and with a samurai swiftness slice open my inhibitions to finally be the devourer, I felt like I should be before I was too old and my looks faded out all the way, they were already in their deuendo, anyway. After, a few months I finally learned enough Japanese to make a fool of myself, and it happened. I was too scared to say anything in English, but once I learned how to say, “Hi, I’m an English teacher.” Every girl I tried it one came home with me from the bar where I launched my off key memorized phrase. I enjoyed a month of this sexual revolution and had more sex that month than I had had in my whole life, but I never got to unleash my hidden devourer within because within those first few months of memorizing my line, my Achilles Heel had already crippled me, and I was as bound as the feet of a geisha. See this is the problem; I hand out my heart way to fast and in a second imagine the whole of my future life in the clumsy hands of the girl I just handed it to. I never make a good decision on which hands I put it into. Love is careless in it choosing, and I am even worse. It’s never the prettiest or coolest, it is just something, a movement of a hand, an imperfection, a secretive smile, a good record collection, a hatred for Wal-mart, it doesn’t matter, it is just something and it hits and it hits fast and there I am handing over my heart to someone who never wants it all the way. Handing it over faster than wadded bills from a polyester preacher at floorshow in a town where he sure nobody knows him. One time I was at a strip-club just like the poor bastard above, handing out the hundred bucks in five dollar increments that my folks gave me to get my teeth cleaned, and this Mexican girl held out her hand for the heart that I always give to fast. I put a five in her stockings and when she caught sight of the rest of my wad, she grabbed my five dollar hand and placed it on the sticky catwalk with the five sticking up between my first two fingers, bent over and slowly put the whole bill in her mouth till her full lips touched my trembling fingers all the while looking me straight in the eyes, and when she raised her strong head of breast-length black hair the bill was folded in half length-wise. She dropped to her knee-padded knees and folded the ends in triangles like a governmental cock, with a quick hip thrust she slid towards me just above the origamied bill, with one hand still nailing mine to the floor, she pulled her g-string to the side with her other hand and spread her knees until the bill disappeared inside of her. Five minutes later I was in the back room with her shelling out my money in 20 dollar, 15-minute sessions. Over the next week, I spent the rest of my Financial Aid in that back room. I wrote her poems and stuck them in the hip string of her panties, and begged her to look me in the eyes again like when she devoured the first five in her sun burnt horizon mouth. I only wanted to her to look at me like that again, to have a coffee with me after she got off work, to have my children and teach them Spanish, and make tamales every Christmas. But my money ran out and when it did I told her and pleaded that my wages would be better spent making her dinner and rubbing her feet and sore knees. That was the last time I saw her. The bouncer was under strict orders not to let me in the door from that day on. I was destroyed, devoured and puked out in the back alley of a south-side strip club and it took months before I fell for a black bank teller who remembered my bank account number. And so it is in this way that I have wasted away my life loving those who never really want me to love them as long as I want to love them, and that is how I missed my big chance of unleashing the devourer in me on the crowed streets of Tokyo. In fact I missed my rickshaw two weeks into the first semester when I ran into one of my students in the street. Sure, GeeCee was by far the hottest thinnest girl in all of my classes and in all the others for that matter, but it wasn’t that, that only made it all the harder. It was that I was out for my daily walk listening to my iPod and wandering around the stores trying to imagine what the hell you did with all the pre-packaged food that seemed to prop up every corner grocery store. The premeditated cupid’s arrow was that my normal headphones were on the fritz and all I had were these 70’s b-movie home stereo headphones that made my Midwest cracker ass stick out even more in a country were smaller is always better. And that’s when I bumped into GeeCee. She took one look at me and said I looked like a white Sun Ra in those Lost in Space headphones. It was all over from that second on. It was all over in those five words and a proper noun. “You look like a white Sun Ra.” A pronoun, a present tense verb, an indefinite article, an adjective and a way out jazz pianist I adored, and I was in love. But she didn’t even have her little nail bitten hands out to take my heart for a ride, so I slipped it into her tiny excuse for a purse. It barely fit and it hurt as I shoved it in there like I knew it would hurt when she found it latter and decided she didn’t want it, but I didn’t care, it was worth the chance, my children could learn Japanese even if I never did and we could have dim sung for Christmas instead of tamales. She dropped out of my class and we dated for a few months and then it was over. I have never lacked the power to get a girlfriend; it is just the staying power that is always in sharp deficit. Maybe because I was picking out china and children’s names when they were busy trying to pick a film from the shelves of new releases. God I make Morrissey look like a misogynist hip-hop ass-slapper, it’s pathetic, but come on Sun Ra, that was spot on. We dated for a few months like I said, and it was fantastic, I never looked in her purse to check the condition of my heart but I filled it’s space with her every gesture and broken-English condemnation of my character flaws and I was in heaven. Heaven, heaven, heaven, like I never imagined possible before, when I was alone I would strut around like a young Mic Jagger, like Jonathan Richman’s Pablo Picasso was my personal soundtrack, but when she came around she cranked my heart beat to an inconsistent infinitium like an O.D.ed Dj. Everything was just perfect. My place was just a single dot in the perforation of that massive city, with Hospital green walls that with the right number of cheap clip on lamps took on a romantic tint that suited the music that I had ripped into my computer and play incessantly, but when she was there it was a penthouse for a modern day Emperor complete with a court of royal musicians. She made everything perfect in my schoolteacher world. Then she left for a month at home to deal with some family things. I turned ever cloud in the sky into a different part of her body, and tried to learn some new phrases in Japanese, even how to make sushi. She came back sick and wouldn’t kiss me on the lips. She said she didn’t want to make me sick, the shit of it was that I was so sick with love and desire and happiness of having back in my flat that I believed her. I made her miso, rubbed her feet and kissed her forehead till she fell asleep. I spent the night looking at her and imagining what are children would look like, whose eyes, whose lips, hopefully not my nose or facial hair, but enough of me through her that I could be proud of our unity. And the next morning she delivered the blow of death. She wasn’t in love, she was….but not constantly, and well she just wanted something that made her ache with love. Something she had thought I could deliver, but in actuality couldn’t. Or at least if I could, not in a form she could accept or wanted to accept, no matter how I promised to form it and reform it to suit her specs, my words just fell like folded paper cranes into the puddled sheets below me, and lost their form as the water overtook them.

I had picked the meanest flower from the bunch, and I just couldn’t be there anymore. Every store looks the same when you can’t read Japanese and that just added to the tsunamic feeling that everywhere I went was somewhere we went, or somewhere she would go. Didn’t matter how many beautifully poignant mix tapes I made, or how many love letters I wrote. It was over. Just over and that was it. So I told my job I was going home for Christmas and I packed what little I had and flew home defeated and heart broken. It is here that my story starts I guess. Not that I thought it would when I swung myself up on the bar stool in this divey Mexican bar in the Midwest called the La Hacienda, where overweight bar maids slid cheap margaritas down the red tiled bar with pastel cowboy boots and cacti. I took a frozen pull off my margarita and nodded at the grizzly motherfucker sitting next to me. “Champ” he graveled, “Champ and Chief.” I looked around him for “Chief” but there was no body else sitting next to him, everyone else was at the other end of the bar probably wondering why I was sitting next to him, or THEM, I guess, anyway. He saw me looking and yanked the chain of his wallet around snapping it open and taking out a snap shot of a Doberman pincher with a middle school Indian feather taped to his head. “That there’s Chief, the kids called him that”, he told me and then started in on his story, a story which would lead to this moment sitting here next to me in my frozen brain culture shock state. Champ was the janitor at a local high school, not the one I went to, the one the rough kids went to, which was fitting since rough would have been a compliment for this guy, but he had motioned for a pitcher of Margaritas so I figured what the fuck, he wants to talk, I want to forget, why not dance? He cleaned up third shift and always took Chief with him so when he clocked out in the AM all the kids were pulling in, smoking on their pimped out Ford Escorts and talking shit. He had a basket on the back of his motorcycle and chief rode in that with him to and fro everyday. The kids took to the dog and started calling him Chief, a diminutive of sorts from their school team The Indians. So chief was popular, like I never was in High school and the kids made him the official un-official mascot. They even took a picture of him with a feather and slipped it into the dusty trophy case in the commons, which I assume was the same photo I was looking at just then. One thing I have learned but have never gotten my own handle on is that if you want to be popular you got to have an angle, a gimmick, a trick or something. Champ and Chief were already way ahead on this game, and they had a simple but effective gimmick. Chief would stand on one side of the chopper and Champ would make a gesture with his hand like a gun, like a one-armed Isaac from the Love Boat. Champ would whip his gun pointed fingers and Chief would take a run and leap across the bike to the other side. The kids loved it, Chief loved the stroking and once and a while Champ could get a flash from the nasty girls in exchange for getting Chief to do his famous Evil Kinevil leap. Except Evil always kept the bike under him when he jumped, if I remember right. Anyway, they had their shtick down and it worked morning in, morning out. Everybody knew about and it was never a problem, till one night Chief spooked a teacher, who came in after hours, probably to sniff seats of the teenage girls that drove him to beating off in the teacher’s john. Of course he complained and the administration told Champ that Chief couldn’t be in the school because of liability issues. It’s always cool till one jerk complains, and then it’s no longer cool. One thing I hadn’t missed about America while living abroad. So Chief was outlawed and so no tricks for the kids and no peep shows for Champ. Anyway one morning before he punched out, the building manager called Champ and asked him to stay for a minute to meet an electrician and show him how he could fish a bundle of wires from the basement to the roof in an old unused heating duct that came out on the roof just next to the parquet wall that squared off the roof and kept folks like Champ and Electricians from falling to their shame. Well, Champ was between a rock and a three-foot brick wall that marked off the roof like a cheap castle, because staying late would wreck his game. Everyone would know that Chief still pulled the graveyard shift with him and that would be that. No more job for Champ and Chief.  He just couldn’t be apart from Chief all night, no matter the cost, so he brought him anyway. Kept him on the roof, meeting up for smoke breaks and a chat under the vast midnight Midwest skies. All they said was that Chief couldn’t be in the school not on the school, but Champ shaved five minutes off all his breaks and cut out early to avoid any problems. But now was a problem. Now was one of those times like in a movie where everything had to go perfect, so they wouldn’t get caught. So he sucked it up, crossed his ammonia burnt fingers and took “Mr. Electrician” up to the Chief Penthouse. He knew Chief wouldn’t move a muscle till he was told he could. Chief was cool and stayed clear of both of them and would have given the electrician and the whole administration the slip, sneaking down to the ground floor with Champ without anyone seeing them and jumping on their motorcycle before any of the teachers pulled in, except, except, except, that a dog is always on 100% when it comes to the loving hand that feeds them, strokes them, that makes their life, the life they know. So Chief waited where he was left, not moving a muscle except those in his overly attentive Doberman eyes, watching every move Champ and the electrician made. Champ was in a sweat to get the electrician busy so he could grab Chief and make it down the stairs and down to the bike. “Where does that duct come up?”, asked the electrician. “Right over there” Champ motioned, pointing to the duct by the wall. Chief didn’t miss a beat to show off his trick and get some much desired loving. “You know that goddamn wall is about the same height as my bike, ‘cept the other side is three stories lower than my bike.” He looked away and asked me how I liked my margarita; I lied and said it was better than all the sake I’d been drinking. He laughed, and told me they were better if you were on pain pills. “Got any you could spare,” I joked. “Course I lost my job, too, cause you know the administration is the administration and if they don’t keep their word, then well all hell cuts loose. Good thing I didn’t have a girlfriend then, probably would have lost her too, just like a goddamn country song, ya’ know?”

“Yeah” I said, “good thing.”

Minnesota

Jesse W. Poe (2004)

It had been three months since I had seen my best friend Ben and now he was sitting across from me next to my girlfriend, Eryn. They were in the no smoking section of our booth. I was sitting next to Anna, his girlfriend, in the full on smoking section, our arms flying back and forth from the ashtray like we were fly-fishing. It had been less than an hour since I had “officially” met Anna and already I was beginning to hate her. Her and her half hollow Parliaments.

Ben and Anna were traveling together cross-country and they had stopped into town so that Ben and I could see each other. So I could met his girlfriend, that I had heard so much about, but never met and so he could met my girlfriend. We had been planning this for months and now here we were sitting in stuttered silence, Anna and I flicking ashes faster than they could appear, while Ben and Eryn stared at us.

When there was talking Anna did most of it and the more Anna talked, the more I smoked. Tom Waits, Louie Armstrong, I got them both by the throat after a pack of cigarettes. Tonight I was stepping into the sub harmonic regions of my range. If she keeps on talking I’ll do structural damage to the bar with my voice.

Ben and I had been best friends since we met a little over a year ago. He lived in California, and I lived in Virginia, so we wrote to each other every day, emailing long letters and talking on the phone like high school girls. Mainly we talked about music and love, his break-up with his long standing girlfriend, this new girl that he was all excited about, the danger of getting involved after practically going through a divorce, stuff that close to us, stuff that hurt.

We wrote songs and sent them through the mail. I would write a song and send it to him. He would add parts and send it back. Ben couldn’t sing so well but the guy played guitar like he had ten fingers on each hand and well, to come right out and say it I could sing like a motherfucker so it worked. It worked real well. We both had bands that sort of sounded the same so we combined our talents and friendship and went on tour together as one big band. One month of practice and lots of beer, and one month on the road playing our songs and yeah, lots more beer.

While on tour we had pipe-dreamed about this meeting like we were sailors at sea. Now it had been three months since we finished touring. He had gone back to California and Anna.  I went back to Virginia and Eryn. We hadn’t talked much since we parted; everything was cool we just had stuff to attend to, stuff that we had put aside for two whole months, stuff we had put aside for music and for friendship.

A lot had happened in my life the past three months and I was excited about my best friend being with me so I could tell him all about it. Here we were together again and, yet, I was getting none of it out. It made my teeth hurt how much I wanted to talk to Ben.

The last time I saw Ben he was asleep on the floor, it was London a few hours from dawn. I wrote him a good-bye note, kissed him on the forehead and left with my bags and guitar for the train station walking through the orange pre-dawn light of London. By the time I made it to the train station I had a bruise the size of a Marshall amp on my leg from my bag banging up against it.

The sun was coming up as I boarded the train and made my way to the smoking car. You can smoke on the train from London to Paris and I was half a pack away before Ben got up.

I fell asleep on the train. Dreamt that I was drowning. Woke up choking. The windows were dark and the air in the train car was weird, smoky and weird. I looked around and asked a guy sitting a couple chairs away, we in a tunnel? Chunnel, we’re in the Chunnel, he said. I’m breathing underwater, weird. Got to have a cigarette, got to write Ben, tell him I had a cigarette under water.

We had just finished our tour the night before. One month, nine countries. Hotel rooms, youth hostels, promoter’s floors it didn’t matter by the time we were done playing. Just as long as we had something to drink and a blanket to crawl under.

I always led the way, stupidly confident as long as Ben was there. Ben was my boat in tow. Insecure until he had a drink in him or a guitar in hand, but he was my gunboat. God even his teeth were insecure, hiding behind each other, but his eyes said it all, so blue and strong and cold. His eyes said I’m a bad ass. Blue intense, like the color of midnight TV. and the black rings around the intense blue ice were the far dark corners of that TV. room.

He played guitar intense like his eyes. I sang. I guess I played guitar too, but once we were in the zone it was just him playing and me singing. Forget the band, once they laid the groove, it was just me and him.

Every night we would start out all pretty and lush and then something would happen. It would click and it all became violence. Destroyed PA’s. Destroyed amps. Destroyed tables and chairs and anyone close enough to be hit with the neck of a guitar or a mic stand, destroyed.  It was too much. The body can’t handle that much output you lose it and end up on the floor not knowing how you got there. You would kick things that you shouldn’t kick. This is Holy ground, get this shit out of my way.

It would always end the same Ben between my legs writhing in flames with his guitar, squeezing his eyes tighter and tighter as he played so all that intensity would just have to shoot out from his fingers, and me paraclete like a roman soldier over my fallen comrade pushing higher and higher into vocal ranges I wasn’t in control of yet. Then the rush. People wanting to buy this and have us sign that. When you coming again? Where can I see you? Oh I have friends there I’ll call them. Would you like to meet my friend? You’re fucking great. What are you doing after the show? What will you have? She likes you. Who are you guys? Oh sweetheart you’re covered in sweat. Like bourbon?  Ever drink Absinthe? Let me buy you a beer man. Hey baby.

I spent a month in Italy after I left him and the rest of the band. Badly bruised, depressed, not knowing Italian. Trying to get by on a little bit of Spanish. I Played solo gigs. They went well but they weren’t the same. Same attention, but no Ben falling between my legs. No bruises. Nothing to kick. Just pretty stuff, and hey baby.

# # #

Three months of change to talk about and here we were listening to his girlfriend, while mine just sat quiet. This was the night we had dreamt about so often on tour and now this well dreamt night was turning into a nervous nightmare.

Anna kicks ass, Ben would tell me as we drove across the European countryside, you’ll see. Smart. Sexy. And can kick ass. You think you know what your talking about and then she schools you. She’s so fucking smart.  We’re going to get married.

Well at least one thing was going well tonight, and that was the music at the bar. The bar tender was playing a mix-tape he’d made instead of punishing us through a whole record of some loud garage band from Minnesota.

“Hey isn’t this the White Stripes”, Anna said.

“Yeah”, Ben affirmed.

“They kick ass”, Anna said.

“ Ahh, they aren’t so good, it’s all image”, Ben said. “Not giving interviews in music magazines only in car mags, that shit is all hype.”

“Smart hype”, I said.

“They kick ass”, Anna repeated

“They sound like a Wal-mart version of Harry Pussy”, Ben said.

I looked at my silent girlfriend and waved away a cloud of smoke. I wanted to lean across the table and explain to her that Harry Pussy was an early nineties garage punk band from New York that sounded a lot better than this shit. Guitar and drums, adrenaline rock. Mainlined aggression and sex in some big amps and a drum set. But I just smiled.

“What you thinking,” she asked smiling back.

“Never mind”, I told her.

“Never mind what sweetie?”

“I’ll explain it to you later.”

“What?”

“Harry Pussy”, I yelled over the music.

She smiled and looked down; her perfect porcelain skin began to radish into her blouse.

“They tell everyone they are brother and sister, but the real story is that they’re divorced,” Anna said. “Ben, remember when we saw the White Stripes.”

“Yeah”, Ben replied.

# # #

In the morning they’d be on their way to Massachusetts or some place cold like that. Ben and I only had tonight to see each other and then what? It would be at least a year before our record labels would want to put us back on the road. We pretty much had tonight to see each other and Ben just kept his hands on his brow shading them from a light that didn’t exist while his girlfriend yelled about the White Stripes and tried to engage us in philosophical debates.

“Remember that paper I wrote on how Descartes’ was a misogynist,” Anna asked us all.

“Yeah’, Ben said quietly.

# # #

It was two weeks after the fall of the Twin Towers, which was good, because it gave us something to talk about. It gave us all something to talk about. The four of us had an enemy, the whole nation had an enemy, and it got the four of us through the conversation lulls. When you don’t have anything to say you can always shake your head at disaster and say, shit.

“Doesn’t this whole Bin Laudin deal have a lot of similarities to the Mithroditic war,” Anna proposed.

“Yeah”, Ben replied like he had heard it before.

“You know how he would get his soldiers all amped up on hashish and have them slaughter tons of innocent Romans, and then Pompeii kicked their ass like Bush is going to do. You know the Mithroditic war, right,” She continued.

“Yeah, Euripides”, I said.

“And,” She said arching the side of her lip.

“Euripides. He was the guy who wrote about the Mithroditic war,” I offered.

“Ooh, smart guy, other people wrote about it too,” Anna said, her eyebrows arching out a great big “Fuck You” as if they were marionetted by some demonic puppeteer.

Who is this girl, I wanted to lean across the table and say to Eryn, everybody who wrote about the Mithroditic war was writing from Euripides, translating it from the Latin. I caught her eye and rolled mine. She smiled and moved her foot slowly against my calf.

“Sure lots of people wrote about it, Hey I almost got arrested today”, I said

“What,” Eryn asked.

“Yeah, obstruction of Justice.”

“Fuck,” Ben said

“Like collecting on a couple parking tickets is justice.”

“How many,” Anna asked.

“Seven,” I said, “Justice! Racket is what it is. I’m in my truck and they are trying to tow it and all I am saying is hey don’t tow it I’ll go pay right now. Just like that. And the cop keeps saying to me that if I don’t get out of the car…”

“Remember when we got a parking ticket in Nevada honey,” Anna broke in.

“Yeah,” Ben said

“Remember how I tossed it on the ground as soon as the cop turned around?”

“Yeah,” Ben said

“You know when we left my truck in Philly with Jack,” I said to Ben, “he got a parking ticket on it and they keep sending me all this stuff about how I have to pay or they will…”

“Jack? Honey didn’t you play a show with him?”

“Yeah, he is the guitarist for Pelt,” Ben said.

“He thought he was hot shit until you got up there and showed him what was up,” Anna beamed.

“Jack’s a really good guitar player,” Ben said quietly.

“Ben is the best, everyone knows it,” Anna told us.

“I know he plays guitar with me,” I said, “Ben’s shithot.”

Tonight’s band was tuning up. Piercing the air with guitar blasts, adjusting the volume and then doing it again. The smoke hung heavy like drop ceiling and people were slowly filing in to see the show. Guitar, laptop and clarinet. Run of the mill art noise in corduroy and black shirt. The guy on the laptop was bouncing his knee and crumbling spoken word into a low-end rumble. The clarinet sounded like the guy was playing a blender with his teeth. The guitar was off getting beer. Hey Sweetheart. Hey baby.

“Is it going to be one of those shows,” Anna chided, “Ben loves this shit, even thinks its music.”

“It is honey,” Ben said.

“I’m just not cool enough to appreciate it,” she whispered to Eryn loud enough for the whole bar to hear.

I passed Eryn some toilet paper under the table to wad in her ears.

“You just can’t talk over all that noise,” Anna said waving her cigarette in a circle.

“I’ve got beer at home, if you guys want to go,” I suggested.

“No we can stay, I’m just tired that’s all,” Anna said and turned to watch the band which wasn’t even playing yet.

# # #

The ceiling fan wobbled drunkenly in my room clicking like slow film. We moved there from the bar so we could talk better. Ben and Anna wrestled their way from the bar to the car, jumping on each other’s backs and slapping ass.  I was sitting on the arm of the couch blowing smoke out the window. Eryn at my feet next to Anna while Ben paced in tight circles around my small room, more than half hour had passed and Ben and I still hadn’t talked. Just bullshit. Traveling stories. What happened the other day. That stuff.  Ben was gesturing a lot, which was new for him, and Anna started mocking him for it. Is he lying or is he looking for words. Weird for him to have his hands anywhere but on his face or a guitar.

“What’s with the gestures? Are you like Faust of something?” Anna laughed.

“I’m trying to talk,” Ben said.

“You’re Czech not Italian use your cute little mouth.”

He was lying. Had to be. God I hope he is lying, because we only have a few hours till morning and then they’ll be off to Minnesota or wherever. He just had to be lying with all the arm waving, netting the air for something to break his silence and balance her jabber. His gestures weren’t the autotisims that usually accompanied his talk. The face touching, eyebrow rubbing, hitting his knee with his fist for exclamation. Normally he looked like Pollack hard at work and a kid on his first date all in one, but tonight Anna was right, he looked like Faust.

“I saw a Jan Scheinkmyer exhibit last year,” I said.

“Who is that,” Anna asked giving her ponytail a quick slithering shake while she squinted at me.

“He did Faust.”

“Faust is a book,” Anna corrected.

“No he did a stop animation puppet film of von Goethe’s” think of something else Poe, “hey the record’s over. What do you guys want to hear?”

‘You have that one Neil Young record, the rockabilly one,” Ben asked.

“Umm, Neil Young and the Shocking Pink?”

“That’s it” Ben said slapping his hand against the leg he had been bouncing all night. “Honey this is the record I was telling you about the Neil record you don’t have.”

“Yeah, good record, but BAD music. I think he and Robert Plant were seeing the same shrink or dealer at that time or something. Plant did that Honey drippers shit and Neil…”

“What’s the Neil Young record we play all the time Honey.”

“On the Beach,” Ben offered.

“Yeah on the Beach, you got that one,” Anna asked.

“Yeah it’s great,” I said hoping we had all beached on some common ground. “Whole second side sounds like he is underwater”.

“It was his divorce record,” she told the room.

What is up with her and divorce records. Every record we listened to on tour Ben would always come back to this. Anna turned me onto this other record this guy did while he was going through a divorce, god it’s so intense, its like “Blood on the Tracks”.

Never really got into that one,” I remembered saying, “Have it, but you know.

Got to listen to it again man Dylan going through like his second or third divorce. Fucking intense shit, he just, ugh you know, just him the studio the guitar the microphone and there it is you bitch I still love you. Got it yeah it’s about you, no I’m not even going to change the names.

Yeah he got religion after that record, didn’t he, I said.

Yeah, Think so, Ben said.

# # #

There we were smoking up my room listening to one of the worst records I own by far, while Ben paced playing air guitar like a pompadour hillbilly hipster. I looked at my girlfriend. I could tell she hated it, wanted to go home, wanted to be asleep on my chest.

“I had breast reductions,” Anna said. “They were so big that I was always getting into…”

“I know,” I interrupted

“How did you know that?”

“I know. You have big scars under your nipples.”

“How did you…Ben?”

“My dad had breast reductions,’ I said.

“What,” Everyone asked.

“Yeah, he was Mr. Indiana two years in a row. He shot so many steroids in his ass that the estrogen built up into tits. Had to have them removed. Said all the nurses were fighting over them.”

# # #

One night after a show Ben and I were lying together.  We couldn’t sleep. We had played really hard and we were still jittery. We were lying there drinking a bottle of wine the bar had given us as we were leaving. We were talking about missing home. Missing our girlfriends. Stuff like that.

You know Anna used to have these huge breasts, so big they just got in they way and caused a lot of problems, so she got breast reductions.

Yeah, Eryn’s chiropractor is always hinting about breast reductions, says they throw her spine out of whack because she is so skinny. I think he’s just trying to turn the conversation around into something physical. You know see if he can get anywhere. Dick.

So she got breast reductions, Ben reigned in.

Really?

Yeah, she has these really rad scars going from her nipples straight down. She thinks they are nasty, but I think they are kind of sexy.

Seen pictures, I asked.

I see them every night.

No asshole, before the reductions.

Oh yeah, they were pretty big, Ben said, like this.

Ben fell asleep a few minutes later and I laid there remembering this girl in my seventh grade shop class. Leslie. Leslie something or other. I had just been transferred into what my mom called secular school, because we couldn’t afford private Christian school anymore. My girl world went from two coo-lot clad waifs to a school of budding seventh and eighth grade centerfolds.  Leslie was white trash centerfold for sure. She had these big soft tits and pudgy cheeks under her straight brown hair and pasty skin. She new she had great tits because she would always wear tight hair metal t-shirts that showed them off. The small kind that they made for hair-metal girls to wear. After years of private Christian school, I wasn’t sure what I would do with those rock ’n’ roll tits if I could get my hands on them, but I knew they had to be soft. They reminded me of hitting the snooze bar in the morning, and then falling softly back to sleep. Knowing you were sleeping. Knowing that you shouldn’t be sleeping and doing it anyway. Half asleep, yet listening for the shower to stop, listening for your father’s footsteps, announcing you were going to be late if you didn’t get up right away. That stolen kind of sleep that is worth all the money a person could pile up. I was sure that Leslie’s tits would feel like that.

Forth period was always the best. Leslie would lean over the workbench in shop class and let everybody see her soft tits, and the teacher would always hover at her table to help. I’d watch from across the room, leaning back and forth, looking between the teacher’s Dickeys and the table saw. Every night of the seventh grade I would think about the way Leslie leaned her tits next to that table saw. Wondering what would happen if they got in the way of the saw. Wondering if they’d pop.

I would lay there thinking about Leslie standing in the lunch line, how tomorrow I would take her by the hand and lead her outside to sit on the cool damp ground. I would push her hair back from her cheeks and then dig a long deep tunnel in the ground for us to crawl into. “What are they filled with Leslie,” I would ask as I stroked her face, “what’s inside?”

# # #

The next morning was even worse than the night before at the bar. We went for breakfast and no one talked except Anna. Afterwards we said good-bye across the hood of my truck.  Anna was hanging on Ben’s arm like they were walking on a moonlit beach. I went inside and stripped the bed. Threw away all of her half hollow butts and a box of empties. Cleaned all of her dyed black hair from my brush and thought about writing a letter to Ben saying something like I was up real late the night before or that I was stressed out from work. Anything but the truth.

# # #

It’s four in the morning. I screamed myself awake, a few minutes ago. The room is still but my heart is cranking like a manic organ grinder. The peach city glow of street lamps is curling into the room and rummaging through yesterday’s clothes. I shut the window and sit on the couch drenched in sweat, naked and shaking with a pillow over my lap fumbling for a cigarette. The falling images remain even after the dream like the colored half moon on my parents TV. Tonight the dream was different than other nights. Tonight not only was I in the Twin Towers, Ben was too. A city street and a huge canyon of cool New York City air separated us. He stood there at the window insecure like always, his eyes shining across the divide. Papers were beginning to confetti the air between us. I stood there forever watching him look at me shielding his eyes from the glare while bodies fell like film loops of Olympic divers. Over and over, they were falling, filing the truant papers as they fell. Then we were on the roof looking at each other. Everything was so still. So beautiful. He took off his shoes, put his socks in them and jumped. I reached for him and fell trying to catch him, but saved myself by screaming.

Eryn is awake and standing naked next to the couch. She wipes a tear from my chin and sits down on the wet pillow.

“What? Bad dream?

“Yeah”, I said

“Falling?”

“Yeah, I was falling.”

Her body looks like peach paste in the pre-dawn light. She yawns and rubs her forehead on my neck and starts to shiver.

Dearest-

                                                                                Forever tethered,

Cruel, cruel words.

Beyond the the infrequent resuscitation of familar communal feelings of love, that you quickly
quench as soon as you realize their reamergence, I have nothing, but the recapitulation of each forlorn
memory, each beautiful crany of our buried love, every musky nuance. And you will not rest until you have
stripped all of these beautiful memories of their importance and individuality.

Due to my previous dishonesty your most potent weapon is the blanding of each instance into the
common, sharing it vsdth each phantom that menaces your mind, and my words fall short. Their fletchings
stripped from the shaft for once I was a liar, so how could I be anything but a liar now?

Once you have succeded in destroying every oneric trist of our late love affair, what will you do
but leave? The buffet diseminated, you’ll leave me to wilt in the wake of your famine and for what?
Retrobution? Justice? To hurt me more than I hurt you? I fear my memories will not withstand your denial
of their part and potentcy, your refusal of their importance, as you delete me from your new biography.

Common, common, common are the clothes you dress me in now. How could you have ever loved
commonly? And of course the answer is you couldn’t have, therefore you didn‘t and there I am–gone. Years
erased in a matter of months and minutes and all the deminishing while you design common cloaks to cover
me lll and to cover the sight of your wound. Dressing me mundane and showing me how plain my
reflection, and “look,” you say. “Look at the back, spin around, go ahead keep spinning, spin because if I
can spin you fast enough you will no longer be able to even see yourself You’ll be and see as you have
become—nothing. Plain old nothing.”