The Lost Thrill of Loving the Song

I'm not Alex Chilton's biggest fan.  "Thirteen" is one of my favorite songs, but I don't know much about his oeuvre, have no particular fondness for his albums.  And yet, hearing of his death yesterday brought back so many memories of being young and the endless hours I spent chasing down music.  More than the person himself, Alex Chilton represented a way of understanding, finding, and thinking about music that I now realize was a distinctive era, which I feel has now come to an end.  Today I am remembering being thirteen, and thanking Alex Chilton for being the white rabbit who led me through wonderland.  

There were three major phases of my adolescent music listening.  The first began when I was 7 years old.  When I couldn't fall asleep at night, which was often, I would stay awake listening to the radio, 92.5 Kiss FM in Toledo, Ohio.  My favorite songs were "Never Tear Us Apart" by INXS and "Stand" by R.E.M.    In the next few years, I listened every week to Kasey's Top 40 and obsessively made mix tapes called "Pop Hits, vol. 3."  Like any collector, with the resources I had available I made these precious and fleeting songs mine.  To have access to them at any moment.  This era reached its apotheosis in 1991 when U2 released Achtung Baby, my Favorite-Album-of-All-Time.  It came to a crashing end in 1993 when U2 released Zooropa, and I was Very Disappointed.

I was 13, had an excessive amount of knowledge of the pop music of the previous 5 years, and I was sick of what I could access through commercial radio.  By then, I was listening to the weekly alternative radio shows from Detroit and the local college station, reading Rolling Stone at the library, and most importantly, checking out CDs at the library.  I rarely had money to spend on music, but the library gave me access to the back catalogs of the bands I heard on the radio.  When New Order released "Regret" and I fell in love with it, I followed their career backwards to Power, Corruption and Lies and back to Joy Division.  Same for the Cure, REM, and all the other "little" bands of the 80s who made it big in the 1990s.  I had discovered the musical world beyond commercial radio.  More than liking or disliking, I was addicted to the process of finding music.  It was slow and time-consuming, but the highs were so high!  You were so deeply invested in the music you found.  And it was this process that led me to Alex Chilton.

For the next couple of years as alternative rock became a popular category of music thanks to bands like Green Day and Weezer, and films like Singles and Reality Bites capitalized on the Seattle Sound, I discovered Paul Westerberg.  As I waited patiently through the week to hear "Love Untold" on the Sunday night alternative count down show, I found out through the library computer catalog that he had once been in a band called the Replacements.  I found my way to "Alex Chilton."  "I'm in Love.  What's that Song?"  It was so cool.  Alex Chilton was at least 4 degrees removed from mainstream music and it was thrilling to be in the know.

Everyone is writing about "Alex Chilton" today.  Its lyrics are the headlines of many articles, and deservedly.  It's a beautiful song, and I think it gets at what I am trying to write about.  It's about loving music, about the idolatry music inspires, of the feeling of belonging to the millions who scream for Alex Chilton.

Alex Chilton was the end of the road in more ways than one for me: the genealogical era of my adolescent listening came to an end fairly soon after I discovered him.  There were various reasons for that, and since this is a blog, I'll list some of them.  Partly it was because I got really tired of the alt music--I couldn't stand the big alt stars, I had another Big Disappointment with Radiohead's Kid A (I know everyone likes the album, but I didn't), the radio show I had been following ended, and the Modern Rock station in Toledo turned into Classic Rock.  The Beatles got really big, and I fell hard for the 1960s.  I was already listening to so much older music, but I cut off all contact with contemporary music, and I made the 50s, 60s, and 70s my sonic home.  I also found a friend to share these obsessions with.  Looking back, I see the major change was that I was coming to see access to music as unlimited.  Music was no longer a precious commodity requiring specialized knowledge, but music was increasingly available, a torrent, to be dipped into when desired.

When I got to college, we were the first class to have cable television and internet access in our dorm rooms.  I remember discovering you could listen to anything you wanted at any moment.  Many others have written about what the internet revolution has meant, and I just want to highlight the ready access to everything.  I became saturated with music, suggested by friends and random acquaintances, recommended by websites, and the only delay was how many other users I could download from at a given moment.

I had listened to so much music by my early twenties, that I forgot Alex Chilton, until I came across him again, in much the same manner as our first introduction.  A recommendation to listen to the Replacements, and I was again one of the millions.

The brown squirrel jumped over the lazy fox.

The brown squirrel jumped over the lazy fox.

"Hey, Mr. Fox," that squirrel turned around to say, "why the fuck you so lazy, huh?"

The fox was shocked by this. He opened his eyes and rolled over onto his back to face this unexpected accuser.

--Mr. Squirrel, man, why'd you wake me up, man?

--Foxy, this ain't no game, son. This the forrest. You ain't even realizin' that crazy animals be circling around everywhere.

Mr. Fox, truth be told, had not given this idea serious thought. He was only a few months old, and life had been pretty easy so far. There was a park nearby and humans could be counted on to regularly leave behind the most wonderful foods. As he forgot again about the threats circling around him, the squirrel addressed him again.

--Dammit, Fox. This is for serious. You can't be no lazy fox all your life. Motherfuckin' winter be coming. You ever been to the park in the snow, bitch?

Mr. Fox had never in his life seen snow, it was true.

--Fox, you need to wise up soon. Your weak ass can't just sleep while I'm fuckin' dancing above your head, fuckin' writing lyrics and dunkin' nuts. I'm a champion, but you're making this shit too easy.

With that, the little animal hopped up a tree and spiraled off into oblivion. The fox was still lying there on the ground, his head and neck awkwardly turned to the spot where the squirrel had just delivered his grave warning.

The Light Is On For You

"The light is ON [picture of a church with a star inside] for you."

This is what the billboard outside the tunnel read. Every morning, Steven looked up and noticed it. "The light is ON," he would repeat to himself. The advertisement was plain enough (cmon in, it's a church, and we'd like to help/proselytize), but what was the meaning of the emphasis? The light is ON.

Earlier in the week, his wife had asked him to leave the light on in the bathroom. As he pulled his hand back from the light-switch, he thought, "I will leave the light ON, not OFF." When he bought his morning coffee, the cashier offered him room for cream in his cup. "I don't want to put any cream IN," he'd answered. The cashier's response was quick, but Steven thought for a moment that she had winked at him. "Fill it UP all the way," she told her coworker.

Steven spent about four hours every weekday commuting. It was during these hours that the nagging details of an unexplained conspiracy teased him. "Now arriving AT...," he thought he heard the conductor say. The person sitting next to him called the office to say, "I'm going to be late TO work this morning."

Was it somehow connected to the church in the advertisement? Could it all be some kind of ecclesiastic campaign to alter the way people speak? Worse yet, was this divine intervention? Might God, should He exist, be speaking to Steven through the lips of others?

One day, he resolved to explore the matter and he called in sick to work, though he pretended to his wife that he had left for the office. "I'm off TO work," he said to her, studying her reaction out of the corner of his eye. He thought she raised an eyebrow, but when she answered "okay, sweetie," Steven couldn't be sure what her pause signified.

When he finally walked through the doorway of Holy Oak Church of the People, he found a small table and on it a stack of blue pamphlets. "The light is ON for you," they read on the cover. Steven stopped to pick one up, when a man in a robe entered the lobby.

"Are you the electrician?" he asked.

"I beg your pardon?" Steven said.

"Are you the electrician? I sent for you hours ago. We have service tomorrow and need the power fixed."

"No power?" Steven asked. The priest shook his head. "No lights even?" he asked again.

"We have candles, if need be," said the priest, gesturing to a cabinet in the corner. "So can you help us OUT?" he added.

Steven felt the sky outside darken and the room, it seemed to him, was suddenly smaller than before. The priest was looking at him, waiting for an answer.

An Old Man's Reflection

Henry would sometimes stare at his reflection until he didn't recognize the face. The game reminded him of another he'd played as a boy - one that involved standing in a darkened bathroom and repeating the name of some ghost, with the rumored expectation that a monster would appear and snatch out your eyeballs.

'But whose eyeballs are these?' Henry would say to the mirror. He would stop and look at himself in the glass window of a shop, watching his figure do the same and wait there staring at him. 'She'll get your eyes,' he joked in his head, 'but only yours and never mine.'

Henry was on his way to visit his son today. He went into the shop he'd stopped in front of, and he bought a cup of coffee, which he finished "for here," having no need "to go" for another thirty minutes. He drank his morning brew and tested himself on trivia he'd remembered as a boy. "The weight of a rabbit's brain," "The year George Washington died," and so on. He'd forgotten everything.

Henry finished the drink with a shrug and went off to meet his boy. A few minutes later, he was standing before what appeared to be a much younger version of himself. The younger man was tired, but his smile had more energy than Henry could muster on his best day. Henry experienced a sense of powerlessness, like an old woman holding her thin hand out to block the sun. What a smile!

"Son, you're a sharp looking one," he said in a meek voice, praying secretly that no ghost should plot against either of them.

Reversed Cigarettes

Two haggard dudes sat on a park bench. Their shirts were stained with dirt and what looked to be blood and, if you ventured near enough, you'd be unsurprised to find that these boys were stinky, too.

Sergei, the fella on the left, turned to his friend Mark and punched him hard in his right arm. "HaHA! Didn't see that coming!" Sergei attempted to yell, but he was interrupted midway into "didn't," when Mark landed his own fist in Sergei's kidney.

The two sat a little longer is silence, rubbing their sore spots, before laughing together loudly, at which time Sergei pulled a flask of liquor out from his pocket and announced his intention to toast.

"You sonofbitch," he began, and then concluded without another word, having decided instead to laugh a great deal more. "Yes!" Mark agreed, and each of the two took a long, healthy swig from the little metallic bottle.

"You know," Sergei began again, looking around at the park's many trees, his eyes finally resting on blue sky. "Yes!" Mark screamed again, initiating another gurgling round of booze.

Two hours later, Sergei and Mark were still at their park bench, now joined by a third man. Sergei looked away from his companions, having grown uneasy after the arrival of Bob the Homeless Man Who Lived in the Park.

Mark, on the other hand, was deeply involved in a heated conversation with Bob. "Can I have a smoke?" Bob had been asking the two men. "Why not!" Mark concluded, handing the drifter a clean, stiff cigarette.

"You know, I used to smoke these all the time," Bob said, turning the object over in his hands. "But then they reversed them," he added, holding the filter away from his face.

"They reversed them?" Mark asked with great concern.

"Yep," Bob said sadly.

Sergei shot Mark a nervous look, but Mark was feeling nothing but unhappy sympathy for his friend Bob.

Within a minute, though, Bob flipped the cigarette again and said with a smile, "But I think they changed them back."

Marked

The NPR building in Washington, DC, stands at the corner of a busy street. It looks like a giant wedge landed in the road by some uninventive creator, who perhaps only ever looked at it from a birds-eye. From the ground, the whole thing is plain and dreary-looking, save the very front, where the colorful NPR logo hangs proudly.

Five minutes to the south is the even larger behemoth Union Station. Within its walls is a secular hell populated by the miserable people of our nation's capital. What the bureaucratic gods seem to have miscalculated, however, is the fact that most people assembling at Union during the worst hours, the commute hours, are not DC locals at all (the bad guys) -- but suburbanites and Baltimorians from the north.

And then again, perhaps those were precisely the people who deserved to suffer. Certainly, anyone tainted by the poison of DC has it coming.

A few minutes from Union Station, you'll find K-Street, that home for lobbyists that is, in fact, far bigger than a single street. I saw a headline recently proclaiming that over four-hundred thousand people are employed by private organizations in Washington. The federal government employs another two-hundred thousand in the area. That's more than half a million people whom any sensible judge would sentence and subject to whatever small tortures available.

One needs only to visit the restroom in order to understand both how and why the people of Washington suffer. Whether you're sharing the urinals with an unwashed homeless man or a spiffy think tanker, you can feel that you're in an unhappy place. Your teeth will break from the smell. Somewhere in the coughing and the squirting, the indifferent momentum of the city's life cycle creeps into you.

And you feel yourself a marked man.

The 60th Minute

Gary went to his grandfather with a question in hand. He needed to understand military ranks, and there seemed to be nobody better to ask than his veteran elder, who had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of American war films. His grandfather had a neat row of VHS copies of all the greats, from ‘The Longest Day’ to ‘Tora Tora,’ but his all-time favorite was ‘Midway’ -- the turning point in the Pacific Front, don’t you know.

The cassettes were lined up like a prized collection of Britannica, firmly squeezed between two heavy bookends atop an enormous big screen television set. It was a gaudy display, yes, but the TV was so ancient that it actually had wooden parts -- so it carried an unexpected classiness. And then there was the fact that grandpa may have been able to recite a million random facts about WWII movies and the battles therein depicted, but he probably wouldn’t have been able to answer a single question about the endings of any of the films, seeing as how he fell asleep less than an hour into everything.

This was no prejudice against the Good War or even against movies in general. The sixtieth minute of any activity simply flipped a switch in the old man and it was instant snoozing. Gary always admired him for that -- not that the boy suffered from insomnia. He merely found something charming about an old feller sitting perfectly upright in non-reclining chair, totally and completely asleep and snoring. Gary’s grandfather in the end was a man oddly at peace with the world, despite his insatiable appetite for dramatized conquest.

Never actually in combat, he went through basic training like every man from his generation. His was an age of nationalism and mechanization, and, when people started really getting around, life opened up all kinds of new opportunities for marching and shooting and saluting. Never having faced down death on the battlefield, he learned what he could by studying the films of John Wayne and company.

So, when his grandson came to him and asked him to draw up a list of military ranks, in order to assign titles to his various friends in a mock army they were establishing, Gary’s grandfather had an answer already prepared:

“Just let me watch an hour of my film, and I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

Sleepovers & Cartoons

“Have you ever noticed how they can’t make a good video game where you’re flying in it?"

This was what Adam asked his friend Scott, who was sleeping over on a Saturday night. They were in the third grade and it was 2am, technically Sunday morning. The boys had gone to sleep at 11pm, but set an alarm for 1:30am, when they agreed to crawl out of bed and slip into the family room for the TV, which they turned on at a low volume and used to look for cartoons. The kind of animation broadcast on television in the middle of the night strangely fascinated the boys. This was the early 1990s, and there was no Cartoon Network. Cartoons at this hour were bizarre.

I distinctly remember discovering Aeon Flux on MTV, and I recall being profoundly confused. There was a great deal of explicit sex: tongues swirling around inside mouths and breasts and dicks testing the elasticity of leather constraints. There was hifalutin dialog and melodramatic tension. It was not like the stuff on TV at 3:30pm, when I got home from school. I remember a specific scene when Aeon was running up and down flights of stairs, trying frantically to stop some kind of countdown. As she tried to crack a computer code, she would run back to a high vantage point and fire a rifle at a large plug on the end of a crane, in order to keep it from being inserted into an open pipe. I don’t remember understanding how the plug worked, but it was clear that -- should the bad guys succeed in delivering it (or maybe they were trying to remove it?) -- something terrible would happen. I remember Aeon, this slender, quick woman, trying desperately to prevent the world’s doom on two fronts. The scene probably lasted just three minutes (they were only shorts, after all), but I watched her panic and it felt like hours.

She died in the end, of course. She dies at the end of every clip. That was the design of the show. It was hard to take in, as a third grader. But, damn, it was a thrill.

“And I’d really like to play a decent flyer game, you know?” Adam added to his question. Scott nodded thoughtfully and ruminated on the few ‘flyer games’ with which he was familiar. The one that stood out best was an adaptation of Superman. Once you were airborne, the game was pretty boring. But, he had to admit (though not to Adam, who was something of an ideologue on this subject) that the game did a great job with Superman’s takeoff. He would sort of hunch down the split second before he took off. Scott enjoyed the sensation that small touch gave him. (It’s things like that, incidentally, that separate good games from great games.)

Scott only smiled, though, and told his friend that he was right. "I don’t know what they’re waiting for. Flying is, like, the most desired skill, for everybody, I think," he finally answered.

The boys both nodded, happy and united by a false consensus. The search for unusual cartoons was under way.

"Game on!"

Like many other kids growing up, I used to play baseball. I played ‘catch,’ I played in PE, and when I got older I played four years in little league. I was a thoroughly average player, but that didn’t bother me too much, even if it was a little sad as a child to doubt that I could be the next Will Clark. I did my best not to let the obvious limits of my talent interfere with my enjoying the game, and I would spend weekends in elementary school calling up all the boys in my grade to assemble at the park for an unsupervised game.

We didn’t always play baseball, but we made sure to complete a full round of something (football, frisbee, street hockey) and followed playtime with a visit to the pizza parlor. I remember a group of ten boys swerving in and out of traffic in an unruly pack of bicycles, zig-zagging its way across town to the main avenue that hosted the city’s eateries. Ordering was a hassle, but it was a thrill, too. This was so long ago and so early in life that the sensation of administering and executing a collective order was like an electric rush -- a surge of responsibility and respect. Respect because the pizza cashier, who I’d later realize was typically a teenager and therefore perhaps the lowest form of life in existence, would have to wait on you and scribble down whatever bizarre and stuttering request you made. They’d call your number over the loud speaker and you felt as though you’d won something. And then, when it came time to pay the bill, ten children would frantically empty their pockets of coins, crumpled Ones and Fives, and maybe a few Win-A-Free-Sprite bottle caps, which someone would argue should count for legal tender.

Baseball was often simpler than all that. I played baseball when I was mainly younger. I played catch with my father, but, when my brother was included, our dad would pitch the ball to a batter, whose hits would be fielded by the other brother. We played this game in the street, which made the two most common sounds of a summer evening “strike!” and “car!” We kept (charitable) statistics and even minted little faux baseball cards modeled on the 1991 Upper Deck series. This game was originally played with a whiffle ball and bat, though my brother and I escalated the stakes by swapping in a tennis ball, which could definitely break a window, if it struck glass with the right amount of force.

Incidentally, I once threw a tennis ball at a good friend’s head. This was many years later, mind you, and I wasn’t aiming to hit anyone in the head. But, sure enough, I chucked the thing in his direction, and he turned around just in time for it to smack perfectly into his forehead. It even bounced high into the air, giving everybody a moment to contemplate the rubber violence they’d just witnessed. I couldn’t have nailed him any better if I’d tried.

My brother and I never did break any glass with a tennis ball (though he did later shatter the porch sliding door when he drove an apricot into it with a 6-iron). We did, however, take to playing our game of baseball with the neighbors from across the street, who were Mexican, or Indian, or Philippino (or something). Race, incidentally, is not an easy thing for a kid to wrap his head around. Gender, however, was something of which we were all already terribly aware.

I’m talking, of course, about the no-crying rule. Baseball is only nominally a "full contact sport," but it boasts its share of injuries, like any other macho diversion. For us in our street game, it was always The Skinned Knee. It happened all the time during street play, and there was only one very-spoken rule: do not cry. Crying was for babies and, given the universal consensus that nobody took babies seriously, nobody wanted to get caught crying.

The neighbors’ daughters, however, made it their guiding purpose to catch one of us males in tears. They monitored our play like scavengers circling a dying man, hoping for an unexpected injury, when they’d pounce from nowhere for a close inspection of our eyes, always ready to unload a barrage of abuse on the whiner who couldn’t man up.

The neighbors’ daughters waited.

Surrounded

Bibles and Dan Brown books. There's a textbook, and, oh look, that one's got a book about black men not letting white men "have all the fun." The white guy behind him doesn't appear to be having much fun, but that's probably because his infant son keeps trying to crawl over the back of his seat and get at the laptop of the woman sitting behind them. (She too, incidentally, looks to be stewing in a foul mood.)

All this can mean only one thing: you're on the train and it's the evening rush home. Depending on your gambler's luck, you may or may not have landed a place in the party-wagon, where that boisterous pack of friends seizes the corner seats and proceeds to heehaw for 60 minutes about the various episodes in their day. On Friday, wine or beer often flows, and -- if the week hasn't transformed you into red-eyed grump -- you're welcome to invite yourself into their group, where you'll become temporary best friends on the subjects of football and the weather.

And there will be villains, as well.

Some curmudgeons will selfishly sit on the outside of two seats, or they'll place their bags on the outside. Either way, you're forced to engage them in order to sit down beside them. This treachery among fellow passengers is vile but widespread. The most you can do is single these people out and plant yourself at their side, whenever possible.

The Christians read their ditties, sometimes in raw Ole Englishe and sometimes broken up into more digestible snippets, like nuggets of steak for a puppy that would otherwise choke itself. There are Orthodox Jews, too, wearing their Amish clothes, dragging their 900 kids everywhere. This can make for an altogether different party wagon.

Before you sit, you survey the isles, hoping not to select or invite as a neighbor anyone too large, too perfumed, or too awake. You wander the train, maybe angry or perhaps relieved, to find yourself flanked on all sides by the sleepy, screaming people of the Earth.

The Escape

Jeff didn't know where he was. He didn't know what time it was. The sun was up, but he hadn't seen it set since arriving in this place, and that had been what felt like days ago. He was in a moist cell, crouched because of the low ceiling. The bars were covered in an olive rust and Jeff wanted terribly to have something to drink.

Something, anything, other than alcohol.

Jeff stunk like the inside of a tequila bottle. Normally a baby-faced, in-bed-by-nine kind of guy, he realized that he was now thick-bearded and couldn't recall the last time he'd slept. His stomach threatened to at any moment drop through his bowels like a wet turkey through a grocery bag.

He moaned for the guard, ready to confess to whatever sins his accusers named.

"Water! A bed! Someone, please help!" he shouted.

For a moment, his cries echoed down unseen corridors. Then, to Jeff's great relief, the slow footsteps of the watchman approached.

A young man with broad shoulders turned the corner and twirled a nightstick as he walked up to Jeff.

"So, finally cracked, eh. Ready to confess your sins, finally?" the guard asked Jeff.

"Yes! Anything! Just please--" he began to answer, before the two were interrupted by a growing rumble in the floor below. The guard held up his nightstick to sign to Jeff that it was time to shut up. He inched forward, to where the wall and the floor met at the edge of Jeff's cell, holding out his baton like a water rod.

The guard took four steps before the floor caved in and a ball of fire reached up and took him. It swallowed him in seconds, and his stick, with an eerie apathy, fell to the ground, orphaned.

A long-haired, bearded man leaped up from inside the hole, and locked eyes on Jeff with great excitement.

"Dude, Jeff, we gotta go, man! This party's all spent. Time to bounce, Jeff!" he yelled.

Jeff realized that the bars bad been blown open. His escape was underway.

His binge with Jesus Christ was not over.

Election Night

"If he wins," her husband, John, repeated, "if he wins, I'll shave my head! I chop the whole thing off!"

John was watching the presidential election returns and it was November 2008. Barack Obama was poised to win a four year ticket to the White House, and John had spent the last year campaigning for John McCain. Neither John wanted Barack to win. John's wife, Melissa, had spent the last nine months growing John's baby. She was ready to pop, and John was ready to smash the TV.

"Yes, John, that's awful," she said in a failed attempt to comfort her fuming partner. Patting her belly, she allowed herself a secret smile on the corner of her mouth turned away from John. Melissa had voted for Obama earlier that morning, supporting a Democrat as she had in every election since she was old enough to exercise the ballot.

"They're idiots! He's a damned Communist! A socialist, Melissa! Maybe not even a proper citizen! Are the American people so weighed down by the legacy of slavery that they'll elect a Nigerian Nazi Stalin?" he continued.

Melissa nodded and smiled her secret smile, noticing an unfamiliar tingling emanating from her nether regions. She reached down and found a puddle collecting in her pants.

"Dear," she interrupted, "my water broke."

Minutes later, they were in a speeding car on the way to the hospital. John was weaving through traffic, overjoyed for a moment about the imminent arrival of his child. It wasn't long before he was behind a hybrid with a large Obama-Biden bumper sticker. Talk and excitement about the baby vanished in an instant.

John managed a feat of self-control and avoided ranting again about the presidential race. He locked his teeth and drove on. Sometimes, it's all you can do.

Labor was chaotic. John kept coming into the room and then leaving again. Melissa wondered if he was finding it difficult to watch, but she dedicated eventually to ignore her husband, who had already fulfilled the only task she ever really thought within his abilities.

"Push! Breathe!" he would yell, popping his head into the doorway, then disappearing. The nurse at first thought he was a madman. Melissa had to stop her from phoning security.

Soon there was only the blinding clarity of pain. Melissa focused all her energies on her delivery, and her mind entered a universe as blank and lonely as deep space. She clenched tight against the low hum of silence that filled her ears.

And suddenly, someone with a high voice began to cry. The sound had a weird unison, as though maybe it were two voices: one new and frightened, the other sad and falsetto.

She opened her eyes and stared at the two gleaming bald heads of her husband and son, both sobbing uncontrollably. Barack Obama had delivered his victory speech. She had delivered a boy. John had shaved his head.

"Breathe!" he yelled at her.

The Pearly Gates

"Why hello thar, my name's Jesus Christ!" said a very upbeat fellow to a man who had just landed, from where he couldn't remember, at the feet of the bearded messiah. Jesus looked down and smiled again. "Don't be afraid, chum. On your feet! Be happy!" he said.

As he stood up, Jesus waved his hand and a mojito materialized, floating in thin air between the two men. "Drink up," he commanded. "We've got stuff to do." Gingerly, Jesus then pulled a large key out from around his neck and turned to unlock a large gate behind him. Suddenly, he stopped and asked of his companion, "Dude, what's your name again?"

"Jeff," the man answered.

"Okay, right, Jeff. Yeah..." the holy son pondered, "that's super." He turned back to his work and soon a loud click sounded from the lock. "Sweet. We're in, man!" Jesus said, turning again to Jeff.

Jeff felt queasy from the drink. His left shoe was loose and he strongly suspected that both his armpits hid dark, unattractive sweat stains. He was tired and wanted to speak to his family.

"C'm'on, dude. We're gonna paint the town red," Jesus added, waving Jeff on through the gate.

He walked ahead reluctantly, trying not to drag his feet, hoping desperately not to upset Jesus.

Brothers

There were two brothers. They dressed up and played games. There were role-playing games: the blues brothers, the ghostbusters, cops-n-robbers, and Batman and Robin. There were experimental games: can you lift the heavy stones and throw them high into the air overhead? can you paint the entire surface of the wall with the contents of a single bowel movement? And there were non-consensual games: that apple juice is now mine, or, sometimes for the sake of variation, that apple juice is no longer yours.

A lifetime of whining and laughter was poured into a great funnel. The width of that imperfect bowl eclipsed a proper view of what received this mass of life experience. It might have just dribbled onto the ground.

There were two brothers, always bickering over property, unhappy with their lot, and mutually ashamed of what they shared and what they envied in one another. One would only be Batman, the other would crush spiders under his knuckles. One would go on to athletic bulk, the other to drown in paper.

And still they're so young!

Larry & the Team

Ah, to see it the way ‘the team’ could see it. For this team of hardened gents, things had fallen into focus the moment their eyelids popped open for that first blinding taste. The rainbow of life took one look at these kids and, knowing it had met its masters, wasted no time sorting itself neatly into black and white.

For these guys, it all added up; there was no in-between; and the world made sense. They were the kings of the office, and those who didn’t share their endless glee slipped helplessly into an inhospitable wavelength on the light spectrum. Goodbye, downers! Nobody can see you now!

Larry the Housefly was an exceptionally old insect (he’d miraculously lived to be nearly a year old). He did his rounds in the same hall as ‘the team,’ whom he hated with all the hemolymph in his primitive heart.

The ill will flowing through Larry’s abdomen was one of the only unambiguous feelings that occupied his tiny body. Every day, he exited the comfort of his warm nest and loving family to carry out the duties of his job -- mainly buzzing around aimlessly, so as to invisibly extract small particles of his soul, which in turn floated down onto the ears of ‘the team,’ nourishing their empty heads. Larry naturally resented that the fruits of his labor in any way aided the work of his enemies, but there was larva on the way, and he did so love to fly.

And so Larry kept up his rounds, shedding pieces of himself and living for the evenings, when boys of a moral certitude ran off for booze and chuckles and practice at the shooting range. In those late night hours, Larry would try to rest peacefully with his wife and baby to be, haunted, however, by the distant bang of firearms and the baritone laughter of a faraway oaf.

The Russians

The year was 2050 and Russians ruled the Earth. Any bit of the world not destroyed was now decorated with the trash of drinking binges and sunflower seeds. The planet reeked of dried fish and mayonnaise.

Those alive didn't quite understand how things had gotten to be exactly the way they were, but it was clear enough that life sucked and hope for something happier was, for the foreseeable future, a sad and useless exercise.

Something had gone terribly wrong with the doctrine of mutual destruction. That is to say, only one side appeared to have been destroyed in a (what really was quite inevitable) little nuclear weapons exchange. Owing to a perpetual nervousness stomped into the Russian DNA by thousands of years of bad weather, worse food, and geographic purgatory, the Motherland seems to have been just that much quicker to respond to a flicker of the world's computers in late 2045, when human history was dumped into a vat of borscht.

The hobbling masses that live on today, of course, know very little about any of that, as, in a nuclear holocaust, the flow of information is less a world wide web and more a rumor floating in the wind. Plunged into this isolation and ignorance, most people, oddly enough, still managed to arrive at a common verdict: some alien race from a distant sea-planet had conquered the Earth and fed somehow on the joy and hopes of human civilization.

But they were wrong. It had only been the Russians.

Train Ride

A day's jokes at their end. The day itself at dusk. The man on the train. The train on the tracks.

Friday had come, and, for a brief while anyway, it would remain. These are the moments when the good is ahead, waiting on the tip of a ready fork, and the bad is behind, managed and consigned to history. A dreary thought is flushed into the airless vacuum of your mind, where it eventually grows nocturnal eyes and stabs you.

But, for now (at least) the beast is weak and blind and you are alive and all-seeing. The world before you is a warm bed in the shape of a great open palm. You're standing over a throne and time is stopped.

The lights buzz by and you sit in your seat aboard the train, rocking with the ugly weight of the locomotive. The street lights are a blur and the traffic's headlights and break lights whimper a sad yellow-red song. Your song is the chatter of the train and its tired cargo. Everything moves down the gray metal slick and--facing the opposite direction--you watch the Earth spit up the roads and smile to think where they lead.

You ride and dream of home.

A Chance Encounter

“Dreadful business, war is,” muttered a boy not more than five, as he lined up toy soldiers on the edge of his sandbox with great seriousness. “Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful,” he went on. Across the lawn, gnats buzzed and dragon flies thudded into the wide glass of the porch sliding-door. Behind the door, a man angrily worked the knot of a silver tie.

"Time! Time!" he thought to himself.

The sky outside darkened and warm raindrops splashed down on the yard and the house. For a moment, the rain's pitter-patter rolled over the skylight with the rhythm of a metronome. It was a soft drum.

"Time to go! Now!" the man repeated through locked teeth.

At last, he settled on the state of his necktie, and jumped back to examine his reflection in the glass door. It was well tied; the tip perfectly aligned with his belt, and the knot around the collar in a smart-looking tangle. Here was a captain of industry! A hero in the office place! The man was tempted to strike a pose and rest his hands on his hips, as if he was Superman.

"Dreadful business, daddy. War is," said a voice from inside the reflection. The man squinted and realized he was looking at his son, who stood drenched and holding an armless action figure.

"Can you fix his arms, dad?" asked the boy.

"I can do anything," came the answer.