Luna

Chapter One

A silent ceremonial parade of white and red clad Latino clergymen, religious patrons, kids and grandmothers came shuffling down my busy street to the sound of a lone door violently closing shut, the fake plastic glass halfway up the door shuttering. I abrasively stopped and became illustriously attached to the scene happening on my street. I was late for something and as always jumped from the foot of my door over three tiny stone steps to the uneven sidewalk and turned space shuttle-like to the direction of my old black car. But today my boosters didn‟t ignite. I could hear mission control in my earpiece demanding I explain my failure for take off. Those frauds. The only sound now was a single hand bell played perfectly out of time by the eldest altar boy at the front of the procession. I had never heard this part of the city so quiet. I could vaguely hear the drone of the Kennedy down the block and I never heard one cab honk at pedestrians down at the Armitage corner. It was a beautifully breezy day. Chicagoans love these unalarming breezes, for they are usually brought with the piercing stabs of winter or the solar wind fumes of humid summers. The breeze set the ancient Catholic garments of the altar boys awry like how I remember the American flag flew when I obtained flag duty in the fifth grade. I‟d unfold it like I was taught, unraveling and respecting the perfectly tritipped corners. After it locked at the top of the pole I‟d cover my eyes towards the tepid May suns during my flag pole duty week and watch it fly for a few minutes, like I had seen Neil Armstrong do in projector films we watched in the grade prior. Luckily, my classroom was right outside the flag pole patch of grass in the front of the middle school so in between bells I‟d sneak behind Ms. Tasker‟s desk and watch the flag I raised silently ripple to the sound of eleven year olds snarling and attempting to tell sex jokes behind me before Ms. Tasker would come in from hall duty and force us back into our seats. I felt like I had built that flag and its majestic pole. It was my responsibility to see that it flew proudly all day through. The altar boys passed me, as I watched the procession between a car and the alleyway, utterly the lone witness. Behind them came what had to be a three-year-old girl in a tiny white wedding dress dropping crimson flowers onto the

oily, pothole crater street. Behind her walked the priest that was to say mass that Sunday. He was underneath an altar cloth with fringed edges draped across four glossy, wooden poles held up by four men in tan suits. It reminded me of when I was obsessed with epic, Saturday evening religious movies like “Ben Hur” and “The Ten Commandments” (it‟s quite possible my fascination was with Charlton Heston; a fascination I hold no longer), and the high priests, pharaohs, or golden calves were held up by four muscly men with poles on their shoulders while passing through the noisy merchant masses in the city centers from Jerusalem to Cairo. Bringing up the rear of this apparently ritualistic procession was the congregation. There must have been seventy-three of them in their literal Sunday bests, the solo hand bell still perfectly out of rhythm. They filed in through the side of the church and the cars waiting behind the parade roared past the steps of the bell tower building. They were angry they had to wait while whole families and rippling garments hoarded their street space. The hand bell faded, echoed hungrily and triumphantly by the big brass church bell atop the tower, fan-faring in noon mass at St. Mary of the Angels.

St. Mary of the Angels is an old Polish church across the street from where I live right now. I‟m told it is the largest Polish church in the Midwest and is designed in the Neoclassical form, and I believe it because I believe things people tell me. It has Corinthian columns which I learned from a “Les Cinq Ordres D‟Architecture” poster I have in my living room and I believe that because I believe anything that is hung upon a wall. I‟m inventing a proverb that all artists should live across the way from a Polish Catholic church. In Chicago there are mounds of them: Polish, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Costa Rican, Italian, Vietnamese, Native American, Filipino, Saturanian, Scandinavian. Their bells ring at noon and six for artists and artists only (the former for you to rise, the latter for you to rise also). The latter works better, most creators begin at dusk. I think Henry Miller said something about Parisian writers needing to live by a cinema “so the bells will wake you up in time for the matinee”. That fraud.

I have a Paris. I think I have a Paris. Does every artist need a Paris? I‟m no writer. I‟m no musician. Some people still think I‟m a folksinger, some call me a guitarist, some people still think I‟m a drummer, some people only remember me as prom king and a guy who once had a love affair with the city of New Orleans. What I really am is a ball of observance; a sponge whose holes are not holes but impact craters from stupid emotional meteors orbiting the filmy layer of heliosphere around my heart. These meteors aren‟t conscious but like sperm, appear to be completely aware of where they are going and why. They shoot down towards my heart, catching fire one quarter of the way down, crashing purposelessly but randomly. They all do this. Not all at once. Each of them have a God-like predetermined moment when they choose to become rogue, and make me deal with it. I guess I deal with them through being a folksinger, a prom king, and a drummer. But that old identity can go to hell. I‟m a writer now. Danny Aberdeen, an old friend of mine, who used to live with me across the street from the gargantuan Polish church, lives with a girl in Lincoln Park now. I haven‟t called him „Danny Aberdeen‟ in many years. I‟ve known him since high school and everyone has always called him Berdie since he doesn‟t look at all like a Danny. He still pays rent here. His bed, diplomas, rags, and stacked drum set he bought during a fit of male quarter life crisis are all strewn about the larger room of the two-room apartment like a no-legged woman no longer begging for your soul. (The other week in a hangover-ridden car ride home to the suburbs- I was about as low as I could go- I saw a onelegged teenager get off a small bus. He had crutches which seemed like they were so part of his human fiber that they no longer clinked and crunched under the fumy, humid black tar driveway. They no longer had hollow sound. They were no longer hollow, just as his bones aren‟t hollow. He looked determined and outright maniacal. I could tell he was frustrated at the cards he had been dealt, but the frustration he turned into sheer courage and daily life. Everyday he has an Everest, maybe even multiple Everests. Getting to his doorway from the bus was one. Inside that barbarian face of his I saw purpose. He has his life‟s purpose constantly in front of him and it is chrome clear. He has meaning. He has something to live for. It was the saddest and happiest thing I had ever seen and I wanted

nothing and everything to do with having a single leg. I saw him struggle up the steps to his door in my passenger side mirror and realized I am the loneliest man with four limbs.) Berdie and I moved to the city from the horrid suburbs triumphantly a year ago. We parted ways with Roselle, IL and in an opus feat bid farewell to the strip mall bars and the plump faces of ourselves and our high school friends scurrying through parent‟s pantries bloated with voluptuous diets. We partied as free men do when life gifts you a fridge to fill with your own Krankshafts and trophy cheap Bourbon atop its sticky and dusty head. We whooped in the face of the West and hollered down to Harlan and Annie Fincher who share a courtyard with us and broke into the abandoned convent of former St. Mary nuns next to the courtyard with us the night we moved in. The convent was my new favorite building in Chicago. It had a dead elm tree in its tiny front yard, the same skeleton as the decaying trees that lined the innards of the home street I had just abandoned. The only way we found into the convent was through a half broken window at the summit of four flights of wooden stairs in the back where graffiti tagged swingsets and four-square outlines took graves. We whooped and hollered to the all the other folks breaking into haunted convents all across this wide street city. We could see the neon Wrigley sign over the passing cars on the Kennedy and we screamed to Lincoln Park and all its people we wanted nothing to do with because we knew they weren‟t breaking into convents. We bobbled our heads around the south side of the convent and screamed toward Logan Square and we listened for the recall of irresponsible boys from across our generation breaking windows of dilapidated buildings to find the mildewing honesty of a failing machine. As soon as we stopped hollering we heard the soft voice of Annie rise from the budding spring courtyard asking us if maybe we should keep our hollering down because if was a Sunday night and we had moved to a professional familial part of the city where people took the Metra out to suburbs where they worked and cut their teeth in the new reverse commute because people took jobs wherever they could find them and most people I know work in the towns hugging this wide street city. We stopped hollering because there is only so much irresponsibility I will succumb to and I have an awfully

painful fear of getting in people‟s way or letting people down. We silently crept into the convent where we found blood and syringes on the floors in rooms with skeletons of twin beds, the fat from their bellies were in clumps in closets. We walked down the hallway perpendicular to the window we smashed passing rooms where squatters had clearly been squatting and arrived at a small balcony with a wooden railing. The balcony overlooked ten pews and an altar with a nailed down table and Jesus on a cross slid into what looked like a large nailed down candle holder. The Krankshafts we brought in were drunk on the balcony in total silence, as you would in any functioning church. My days as an altar boy and one hundred thousand Sunday masses had taught me well. We found some stairs around the side of the balcony behind a wall and a door and went down into the stomach of the convent where within the pews we found a copy of St. Andrew‟s Daily Missal like a deflated heart in the greasy rib cage of a failing machine. We took a walk around the basement and left through a door in the side of the convent and went back to the new apartment through the courtyard and grabbed a handful of clanking Krankshafts and careened down to Jeremy Tiles place on the first floor because we heard that America had found and murdered Osama Bin Laden and the President was about to take off his shirt and show us the abs he‟d been working on for the past few years and Jeremy Tiles had a brand new flat-screen television and the 1993 Sony my dad bought the family to watch the Chicago Bulls win the Championship of the same year hadn‟t yet been plugged in.

You have to come see the way the sunset sets across the street from me, by the gargantuan church. It‟s such a lonely turning, but patient. The maroon brick of the church against the autumn-toned sunset clouds pasteurize into a clear, lonely moon lit sky. I sometimes find it funnywatching the sunset or moonrise or when the moon is hanging in the air like a baby‟s chew toy- that we can see these magnificent orbs. We can make out the definition of the sun and even more the definition of the moon. We can see craters of a cosmic meteor shower cracking up the surface of the moon. We can clearly equate our role in the process

of the universe by just witnessing with our eyes the moon and the sun. But still they feel like props in some creaky old theater of reality- one of those dark, small community theaters where you know one or two of the actors but don‟t find anything they‟re doing enthralling but give them a huge hug and offer to buy them a drink and a burrito after they take their makeup off and while waiting for your actors with your hands in your pockets on the empty stage you‟re able to get up close to see the props: the sun is made of candy wrapers and the moon is an oriental crackling lamp, hanging there, them moving, not us. But they aren‟t props. They are ridiculous, psychedelic orbs that exist to create and destroy life. Look at the moon. You are floating on a planet. You are not a cab driver, coffee drinker, gang banger, street rascal, free lover, priest, poet, archivist, masturbator, cell phone salesgirl, civil engineer, Enron employee, senate gopher, rummager, paleontologist, masochist, mirror, runner, Medusa, Theresa, budding bomber, or a modern man. You are the universe conscious of itself; you are the everything of and in the universe. For all we know this is first time the universe is getting lost in herself and breaking her own heart and turning tables in markets or throwing her records against walls because of how frustrating the bloody sirens of a gaunt Saturday night can be. For all we know this is the first time the universe can feel her sweat clog the pores of her paved skin and the first time she can see her hands turn and wrinkle right before her wandering eyes. For all we know this is the first time the universe is counting on herself and through her breath and through me I want you to know that you believe in everything already. You are the universe conscious of itself.

A moon is a name for those things that float around planets. I‟m sure we have names for all of Jupiter‟s sixtythree orbiting moons. We have no name for our moon. It is responsible almost as much as the Sun for life on Earth. Why not give it a name? Ancient Westerners called it Luna, I think. Then they turned it into a day of the week; a sad pit of a day. Then they turned it into a carpet company as well as a Mexican taco stand. We should rename it Luna. Or maybe Luna Portuna, the port at the moon. No, just Luna.

But alas, the moon will most likely remain nameless for all eternity. It will lock in orbit until it is too far gone because every year the moon inches farther away from us. One day our seas will cease to slush around and woman will cease to embody her womb. YOUR SINISTER SECRET IS OUT, LUNA. All alone, Luna, having to watch all that life flourish day in and day out on Earth knowing full well you‟re leaving us behind. I‟m sure she knows how important she is. But why is such a lonely yet savagely important being leaving us for dead?

Chapter Two

Our apartment is small, a slender slit on the third floor of a late nineteenth century building. There are rats in the basement that will eat and shit on anything. They scurry and race back and forth across the stone walkway that leads to wet darkness at the far end of the basement. It‟s almost as if they‟re packing their little belongings hurriedly into tiny attaches, going from room to room, bathroom to bedroom obnoxiously grabbing for toothbrushes and skin cream, swim trunks and old pictures. Their doom reaper has come to take them away in the shape of a frighteningly sweaty, depressed twenty-something in ripped red jean shorts desperately looking for a window AC unit. This summer is hot. I knew it was going to be. The winter was mild and groggy. It was balmy at times and the air was always wet. Things always have to balance out. This summer is sweltering. It constantly feels like you‟re a beam of sweat on an overly tan, vile, muscly Wrigleyvillian and however hard you try cannot shake that fate. I sit in front of a large industrial fan. I sleep in front of a large industrial fan. I sometimes trek to my parent‟s house in the suburbs where the AC is blasting. Or I just brave the constant humidity and sun in this putrid hell of a summer. I started a band and Berdie met a girl. He rarely comes back to this rat-infested apartment building. Good on him. “I feel awful, spending all my time at Molly‟s”, says the dark red-headed Berdie.

He is a good friend. I‟ve never had any one person more supportive of me in my entire life, other than my parents. He can spend as much time with the person he loves as he wants, that‟s what you do. I am so happy for him. Molly is a darling girl. She takes care of him. He needs that. I can only do so much. Plus, I really enjoy the time alone and the apartment to myself. I get things done, and I drink less. But I‟m at that point where people are starting to take pity on me. People are inviting me to dinners. Oh, the dinners! They‟re these things one goes to where people ask questions like “so, Andrew, how ARE you?” and “Andrew, you must be so excited about the band! I‟m really happy for you!” or “What about at the pub? Aren‟t there any girls at the pub you‟re into? Andrew, you‟re a good-looking man! Any girl would be lucky to be with you!” I have a weird shaped head and there is too much skin on my neck. It doesn‟t go well with my hair, all that neck space. I‟m not looking for pity nor am I looking for a girl. I‟m actually rarely attracted to girls. The intervallic time between when I find a girl attractive is gaping. It‟s usually when I‟m driving past Big Star Tacos. I don‟t know why but the women there are so right. There are always girls outside Big Star Tacos. I never talk to them because I‟m driving. Big Star Tacos has the shape of a place that would spring up in L.A. I‟ve never been to California. I should move to L.A. for a year and then write a book about it. California MUST have an outside bar where you can order incredible tacos with high fashion women wearing white sunglasses, licking sweat from bottles of Lone Star with their dirty blond hair and seared bangs, flat shoes and short canvas shorts with a masculine button up shirt buttoned down and tucked into their short canvas shorts. I sometimes pretend I‟m in one of those gangs of Los Angeles, with a bandana and a Hanes white shirt, driving slow past Big Star Tacos with my eyebrows down, searching through all of these fad women. In reality, though, I‟m just Squints walking around some wiry fence trying to catch the eyes of Wendy Peffercorn. But I haven‟t the courage that Squints has because I‟m Smalls, some lost white kid from the suburbs. I never talk to these women when I‟m walking either. Or standing. Or drinking. Or wiping the sweat off my forehead. This loneliness goes beyond the love of a good woman. Any relation with women just makes me sadder for

some reason. Nothing is ever real. I‟d rather be real and myself than have a bowl full of leftover hair clips needlessly kept with the dust beneath the nightstand.

The stupidest thing I‟ve ever done is re-engage a digital friendship with an ex-girlfriend on a social fucking media site. I harbor no ill will towards this person whatsoever. But everyday is a thread of disgusting photographs of her and her boyfriend of two years. How do I know it‟s been two years? Because their anniversary was June 10th and how do I know it was June 10th? Because I‟m friends with my exgirlfriend on a social fucking media site. Her boyfriend is crazy handsome, too. I think he‟s Vietnamese and Spanish. Most human beings that are a mixed race of European and Asian have a dynasty on the fairness of attractive looks. It isn‟t fair for the rest of us full bred European and Asiatic descendants, with our rigidly plain features and normal everything. It was almost four years ago we were like two stars in a cosmic, dusty nursery. What swirled around us were pigments of love and hate and function and dysfunction, sane and insane, sex and no sex, a hot breath dissolving and evolving into a slimy serpent tongue between stars and behind clouds of electricity, a matter inside matter. These slithering orbs of fire magnificently collide only to destroy and destruct and in the constant process of destroying and destructing create separate life-making suns, which then spiral and cool and go their separate ways and look for the balance and imbalance of the universe and use it for purpose. They move forward and try their luck at unconsciously making conscious life. They move on to nudge the universe awake; to wash the crust off the infant eyes of wailing Earths. I wonder what a nursery of stars sounds like. I wonder if it rumbles deep and low. I wonder what kind of eternal rhythms I‟d hear. Music is the organization of sound and the sound of stars being born is the sound of the organization of organization. You‟d probably die in the

audience of that galactic orchestra. You‟d burst. Your consciousness would pop. My seats would probably suck, too. I‟d pay for balcony seating, but not floor. But what if it‟s standing room only? I‟d probably get stuck behind some awkwardly tall white guy in a stupid polo shirt and I wouldn‟t want to watch and hear millions of years of interstellar music making and star-sex bobbling my head around some awkwardly tall white guy in a stupid polo shirt.

The whole country is drunk right now. Berdie and I drink a lot and Molly tags along but doesn‟t drink. I‟m not an everyday drinker. I could be. I know many people who are. My friends and I like to go out or have gatherings at our apartment complex, which we call “1841”. Calling it an apartment complex makes it sound like we live in some stainless steel and glass futureplex with mazes and phases of escalators and clear flat touch-televisions. We don‟t. We live at 1841, which might as well have been built in 1841. We sleep in front of fans and window AC units in kitchens and tiny bedrooms with black dirt on windowsills from the rain that spills in during summertime and mixes with dust. Our knees are sweaty and our moods are swung by the stable instability of some semblance of an adult life. We have felt real glory in our giving up the pursuit of money; real glory in handling our own business our own way; real glory in owning patchwork in the American quilt. Real glory. We aren‟t irresponsible, just having a good time at times. The time has come, though, to take a look at things, to question things like drinking, to find new harmless glories and put our flesh flag on the summit of the bosom on a new and emerging sexual America. It is a time to move. These times at 1841- where our goal each weekend was to not get drunk enough to order Chicago‟s Pizza but as soon as we got a little drunk we wanted Chicago‟s Pizza and then our goal was to get drunk enough to order Chicago‟s Pizza and then two large cheese pizzas would show up and Berdie would always foot the bill and Harlan Fincher would dance around him in a three piece suit championing a tumbler half full of Buffalo Trace and we‟d all cheer and embrace the fantastic work we had done all night- were joyous times and I had just moved from the horrid suburbs and I wanted everything to do with evenings like that.

After these parties at 1841- when the stragglers go home and the neighborhood drunk sings his last left-handed song on my right handed guitar, and a dear friend from childhood who is visiting me over the weekend in the city (as the sun rises over the blinking billboard across the highway from the back porch) begs and commands me to be his friend again. I say “WE WILL” and “WE WILL grab coffee in the morning.” But I am a fraud and a new American and we don‟t do that sort of thing. “But I‟ll follow you on social media and I‟ll „like‟ things that pertain to me and me only while dying in bed from self inflicted shots and PBR wounds while scrolling without end through designs and designated stopping points for friends like you.” There on my phone under a green comforter in a closet room that fits only a bed I scroll endlessly on my phone, a fate that awaits me the next muggy afternoon- we‟ll go down to Marie‟s on the corner of Armitage and Hermitage. This is never a good idea. “NOTHING GOOD EVER HAPPENS AT MARIE‟S” is their actual motto. Marie‟s is musky red and full-up with failures and black angels. The jukebox plays about twenty songs and when those twenty songs are through, Marie somewhere somehow hits replay and the cycle of late 1950s singles breathes in again. Marie died two years ago from throat cancer. Marie‟s is a last-ditch-effort-to-get-laid of a place and is open until 5am and doesn‟t open again until 11pm. None of us go there for sex. We go there for something but we don‟t know what. You can feel it the next day, though. We probably go there to feel something. It sits on a corner that bums find particularly welcoming during the day. I see them crumbling into themselves and then their arms outstretched as people walk past them in bike shorts and sunglasses. They crumble into themselves again from people‟s disregard like some erroneous heartbeat and continue this Christ-like hanging all day through. They un-crumble to me as I sit sweltering in my car with the AC full on waiting at the longest stoplight in the entire fucking world. “I want nothing and everything to do with you, friends. You should have been at Marie‟s last night”, I say to myself under the hum and rush of AC splashing in my face. It sounds like deep space. This musky-red, cheap-Italian-cologne-cesspool of a place has a red door with triangular slit windows at its peak. It reminds me of an old neighborhood woman‟s door

from my childhood, Henrietta. We used to have to go and visit her as kids, my little blonde sister and I. She lived down the block and on the same side of our suburban Chicago street our house was, next to the homes whose roofs overhung their driveways. There weren‟t many trees on our side of the block because when they built that part of town in the early 1950s there wasn‟t enough money to plant trees. Plus, most of the land outside of Chicago proper was cornfield, which was uprooted to pave roads and put up houses whose roofs overhang their driveways. There were no trees to begin with. Henrietta was a farmer‟s daughter. She was in her eighties when we‟d go and visit her. There were a few farms left in the town, not when I was born, but in the early 20th century, and many families chose to stay despite the urban progress. They usually became politicians or worked for politicians because they still owned massive amounts of land, which they eventually sold to Italian developers and the land was turned into ugly granite subdivisions. This happened in most suburbs during the later part of the 1990s and 2000s but stopped as soon as the recession hit. My mother grew up across the street from Henrietta, and then chose to raise us on the other side of the block. Henrietta knew my mother when she was a kid. So we would go with my mom down across Marion Ave., where I would peer down the street to see if my friends were playing baseball in Marion Park. They used to ride their bikes to 7-11 and get Milky-Ways and Mountain Dews and sit on the ump box behind home plate and wait for me while I spent a lot of my childhood doing adult things like visiting old ladies who I never really liked and who I actually found kind of mean to my mother but never said anything because my mom had a duty to take care of the old lady who lived across the street from her when she was my age. Henrietta used to work at that 7-11 on Roselle Road, even in her old age. She was an angry old lady and would flash us the face of Medusa under rosy glasses with a beaded metal chain around her head every time we went in there and every time we went in there we quite nearly turned to stone. I didn‟t go in today, and she wasn‟t working because I was visiting her. My friends were waiting for me on the ump box as I crossed Marion Ave., kicking their bike pedals backwards and pretending to run the baseless infield. Also, I couldn‟t stand Mountain Dew because Brandon Jacobson told me it lowers your sperm count

and I knew that sperm lived in your nuts and it hell when my older cousins would slap me in the figured sperm was very important and stayed the from Mountain Dew. Bitch of a hot day. Brandon,

hurt like nuts so I hell away you fraud.

Henrietta had that same red door with triangular windows at its peak, the same as at Marie‟s. After we rang the doorbell her messy old lady hair would fill all the triangles. I cannot remember the insides of her house. It is completely lost on me as I walk into Marie‟s angrily carded by a bouncer. NOTHING GOOD EVER HAPPENS AT MARIE‟S. Sam Cooke is on the box and the long skinny bar is filled with a musky red odor. The regulars are there as well as a bunch of obnoxious people who care nothing about solitude or the quest for comfort of self and I wanted nothing and everything to do with each and every one of these people. But they are all just an arsenal of misdirected souls in a last ditch effort to get laid in Bucktown and I wasn‟t one of them. I pretended to be, but in the end I truly enjoy going home alone because Marie‟s is a hell of a classy place and they let you buy a six-pack of PBR to go.

“It‟s so God-damn fucking hot in this fucking apartment I literally can‟t believe it! There is nothing about this fucking reality that I believe”, I scream out loud as I punch the side of the entrance way to my kitchen. I have a slight temper indiscretion in my personality that comes out every so often. I‟m a frustrated person. “Frustrated” is such an impeccable adjective. I adore it like I adore a good, dark television drama. It‟s easy to adore as I write about this dark passenger of mine. Being “frustrated” implies complexity. I can‟t just be angry because anger is a surface emotion. I need layers upon layers of things to think about and be frustrated with. I know that my raw anger to the heat in my apartment is just my frustration with the fact that I cannot afford AC which is then a frustration with the fact that I am sacrificing money and a steady job to pursue a career in art and not have AC, so why am I pursuing art if I‟m constantly frustrated? and why am I the only one sacrificing things? and what am I really sacrificing for because I‟m so frustrated with the fact that I can‟t see any success with art in my life that everyone tells me about and if there is success then where is the money to buy AC? The worst part

is I‟m frustrated because I‟m frustrated that I can‟t be happy with how perfect things actually are in my life. It really is hot in my apartment. I have to sleep in the living room where the overhead fan and industrial floor fan invisibly meet and fornicate above my coffee table (which is really an old bedroom chest) and their windy offspring reach my bare, white, misty body in luke-warm puffs of dusty air. I walk to the back porch. It‟s actually cooler outside at three in the morning than it is inside. I can see the white fangs of the Sears Tower above some tree. It is flashing information to all the other Sears Towers in the Milky Way Galaxy. I think about the past weekend and all the guilt it brought. I did everything right except take care of myself. I didn‟t read or write. I didn‟t listen to music or play music. I didn‟t go for a walk or call my parents who left for vacation for a week. I didn‟t spend time my sister like I said I would. I didn‟t go and meet my good friend at that shitty bar in Wrigleyville. I didn‟t talk to a girl the bartender I work with wants to set me up with because I found her to be imperfect and if I‟m with someone imperfect that must mean I‟m imperfect so I said nothing to her. I‟m selfish and shitty and I want to move to Europe. Doing all those things would have made me happy, too- except moving to Europe. I‟d get homesick and cry like a baby. Maybe I‟ll have a baby sometime soon. That‟s something I could do. At least then there‟ll be born some part of me I could love. At least then there‟ll exist some part of me someone else could love. I would just have to get through the first twentythree or twenty-five years of their life and then I could talk to them like adults and have beers with them at city bars where they live and are struggling like I was at their age. I‟d have a girl and a boy. I‟d have so much to tell them, so much to help them with. I‟d be a hero. They‟d thank the universe and Luna for having been born to such an imperfect person so that they knew what imperfection was and wanted nothing to do with it. They‟d thank the universe for giving them such a loyal parent, one that would spend hours and hours in line to see them sing a song. They would lovingly laugh at me for introducing my eldest son to the cute bartender who I talked with before my son arrived about them being a great pair. He‟d blush and thank his old man for honoring his apparent loneliness and I‟d pay for

his beers because of how proud of pursuing his dreams. He shouldn‟t that clear. There‟s a much better could be and if there‟s anyone to why I wanted him.

him I am for fearlessly be like me and I‟d make version of me that he do it, it‟s him. That‟s

But I don‟t like being on Earth a lot of the time and I don‟t know if I want anyone else who is half-me to be here. It‟s an unfortunate thing- having to be here and wake up to myself everyday. I didn‟t ask to be here. I don‟t even know if I wanted to be here. I had no choice, no say in the matter, just like my babies will have no say in the matter. There is little I can do though, because killing myself would bring immense pain to a few people and I never want to do anything to hurt anyone. I would never abandon those people. But people will abandon me because I‟m loyal. People will abandon ferociously loyal people because they‟re loyal. They can get away with it. It‟s an atrocious existence and I have everything to do with it. I‟m trapped. I was duped into being here and duped to get out. I was born with all the imperfections of mankind within me. I was born to shove myself into sticky apartment doors and call myself inhumane names for having inhumane thoughts. I was born with a heart for everyone but myself. I was born into a soft curved corner of a lonely orb and it is time to scream and scream until someone hears that I am here. I met Berdie at Big Star Tacos tonight. He desperately needed to explain his disillusionment with the state of music in today‟s society as he arrived out of breath on his bike. He slowly took his earbuds out and I could faintly hear the sounds of fashion and coolness. These bands have the ears of an entire generation and they are choosing to say nothing. He said words like “franchised” and “sold to you”. I agreed. The one core problem with the state of music so far this decade is that anything can be popular if it is made popular. There can be quality in cheap sounding music BECAUSE it‟s cheap sounding music, as long as it‟s sold to you and, well, irony is selling. Berdie came on his bicycle with a silly black helmet on that he clipped off after seeing me at the table and headed my way. We ordered tacos from the window-stand next to the bar. The night air was hot but there was kind of a tropical breeze gushing through the tables and tables of hipsters with mustaches and parted hair. It‟s incredible to me how much they all look alike but still look different. It‟s like they vet the people they choose to be in public

with, so that they appear to be in uniform- a fortress of giant eye-wear and vintage button ups wallowing in their combined hatred towards organized sports- it‟s cookie cutter shit for those that think they aren‟t cookie cutter shit. I pick my friends based on the inconsistency of their moods. Berdie is one of these, as goofy and childish as he can be one time and as seriously confused and worried about the direction of his life at other times. He helps me sort through things better than anyone because he‟s honest and caring and doesn‟t know what he‟s talking about but seems to always know what he‟s talking about. I actually love that he wears a silly bike helmet with rolled up socks and running shoes in shorts. The reason why dear Berdie rides his bike everywhere now is because his car caught on fire in the winter. Berdie is a guy who has everything go wrong all at once. Our senior year of high school he went to Hawaii for spring break and stayed at this quaint little bed and breakfast with his family. Some older woman owned and lived at the inn. Berdie was sure she was a grandmother because of her love of photos of people who stayed with her. She was internet savvy for the time and took a photograph of Berdie and his family and put it on the inn‟s website. His entire family was sitting on a king size bed. Berdie and his younger sister had their hands in a fist under their chins smiling and sitting between his parents. Then there at the of the bed was his little brother strewn about horizontally, his arm holding his head up and smiling like a little girl. How do I know this photo? Because some kid in high school found this picture of Berdie and his family on the website during spring break and then blew up copies of it and put it all over school the Monday we came back to school from break. I couldn‟t walk anywhere without seeing this photograph. There above the water fountains was Berdie‟s family on their honeymoon. There, next to the epic wall montage of Lancers riding horses into some kosher of a battle and their lances catching lightning from overhead clouds was Berdie‟s little brother posing embarrassingly for all the world to see. At that age, your school is the world. This prank was fun to some kids, but horrifying to Berdie and his siblings. He lost contact with a lot of his friends, rightfully so, but kept solid with those that stood by him. And so, Berdie and I are together now in this leathery, hairy city like spots on a bull‟s hide separately denouncing our position nearest to the bullshit.

The way I found out about the car fire was through a call from Berdie one evening as I was in my car in a hurried drive to play guitar for a friend‟s show. Berdie was also on his way to that same show. However, his trip back into the city from work was much more historical than mine. “Hello?” “Dude, my car is ON fire. Right now. It is ON fire”, he was laughing festively as if the car was somehow a surprise birthday cake and he was 4 years old. I could hear him jumping up and down as he laughed. “It‟s on fire? Your car? How is it on fire? Why is your car on fire? Where are you? Are you okay?”, I ask. “I was sitting at a light on North Avenue in Melrose Park and the hood of my car just started on fire. Here…” Her took this moment to send a picture of his sandy colored 1998 Toyota Camry with flames rising from the sides of the hood. In the back of the picture- just out of focuswer fire trucks with their lights caught in whites and blues and firemen caught in mid-stride towards the searing hunk of Japanese ingenuity and the roaring end to its thirteen-year lifespan. He had JUST met Molly at work that week and she came back west on North Avenue to pick him up at the fire. They were sort of on a date that night and were driving separately to the show I was playing guitar at. That was the first night I met Molly. Ever since then Berdie has had no car. Molly and Berdie now carpool together, sleep together, live together, eat together, gossip together, cringe together, fight together, wilt together, squash together, lunge together, count calories together, doggy day care together, love together, read different e-books together, find Groupons together, be together, and whatever else modern couples do. I wouldn‟t know, which is why I called Berdie to meet up with me at Big Star. Berdie and I met up to talk about a girl I met the other night after he and I had walked around some filthy, low brow street fest drinking beers. There are moments when both of us are silent and the transparency of our generation engulfs us like a fever sickness, where your skin aches and is sensitive to the touch. These uncaring, get-ahead, greasy people can just go away. This dirty old

frat culture can just go away. I feel isolated, miscommunicated. I don‟t belong in this culture, in any culture in North America. Maybe somewhere in South America I do. Is there art on the street there? I feel like there would be exotic dancing and exotic taxis taking you to some red candle-lit first floor apartment that bursts with color and violins and castanets. The triplets and soft snare bracing you until a big bass drum and the fury of hundreds of years of a rich and important human subculture snap the wires of the fear and anxiety-based subculture you‟ve only known. Buenos Aires must be like that. Berdie and I needn‟t speak words at this juncture at the street fest. A simple shaking of heads will suffice. We both despise cover bands with the passion and solar flares of a million red giants oozing and bleeding out after the War of a Million Red Suns, so we left the street fest and laughed at the musical misfortune of an „80s cover band not far enough away from our ears. We passed under the tracks that nestle the alleys of Sheffield Avenue and praised Zeus for the beauty of the train‟s monstrous boom when you stand directly beneath its sparky interim between stops. Our ears rang so piercingly after the train overhead gurgled through the distant electric poles and telephone wires towards Diversey that we were barely able to hear Bon Jovi anymore. We landed at a decent bar for craft beer and each had chicken tortilla soup and two beers apiece. We talked about the struggles of life and how to meaningfully manage the trials and difficulties of our individual everyday lives. We were both down about our weekends. It was a Sunday night. Molly lives right around the way from this craft brew bar so I walked Berdie there and we shook hands and dispersed. I walked home through west Lincoln Park down Webster and decided to walk into and around the Finkel and Sons steel plant where sometimes the sliding doors will be open and you can look in and see hell. Sparks the size and shape of lighting bolts shoot out of towering greasy machines with giant spider legs and silo shaped heads and an open stomach full of bright yellow molten lava. There are piles and piles of black rubber or dirt- I‟m not sure which onewith men covered in soot shoveling black into other black and stopping to adjust yellow helmets and baggy Lee Dungarees. These were real men, the men of folk music everywhere around the world.

The doors were closed this particular evening and I cursed walked over the river and stopped to look at the skyline. It looked magnificent through the dark red iron bridge beams. Iron city! Glass city! White city! Stone city! Even at night you can point out the different eras of architecture. All along this patch of riverfront were cranes and semi trailers and oversized dumpsters with Lindahl on their sides (I went to elementary school with one of the Lindahls in the suburbs. I vividly remember swimming in their in-ground pool and eating macaroni and cheese in the afternoon one day in third grade. They lived on the other side of Granville east of Roselle Rd, the other side of where Henrietta and I lived. I remember being brought home in a GMC SUV by Mrs. Lindahl to our little cape cod home three blocks away with the Indian arrowheads I found buried deep on the side of the house, which I think Brandon Jacobson actually hid there one day while I wasn‟t looking.) The night was warm. There was little humidity, but still fairly summer smelling. I stopped into the pub after walking past the livery in Bucktown. The summer is the worst time for the odor that permeates out of the livery and pervades the breathing space of neighboring apartments, mine exclusively included. Some days I‟m at my computer by the window facing east and a breeze arrives off the river delivering with it the musk of cattle innards and molten lava. At the pub I was a little full from the soup and thick, dark craft beer so I just ordered PBR‟s. I saw that Sketch was working. Sketch is another bar-back at the place. He‟s black and from Bronzeville, a place I‟ve never been. I haven‟t even been anywhere south of Pilsen. The world he comes from is a world I‟ll never know; a world just under five miles away. He‟s a kind and gentle man with one of the most positive outlooks on life and music I can only dream of getting to. He‟s a twenty-seven year old, handsomely talented hip-hop artist and he was telling me about his upcoming trip to California. “Yo! What‟s the word, Andy?” “Hey, man!” I said that with a laughing smile. His enthusiasm in seeing me was so genuine and excited that I couldn‟t contain my affection at his offering friendship. Part of it is that I am an extremely white, moderately privileged, suburban, Seinfeld-loving boy. I know every

word to “Big Willy Style” because I thought Will Smith was a gangster and because it was the only “rap” CD my parents would buy me because of how funny he was on TV and the fact that there wasn‟t a parental advisory sticker on the cover. Will Smith, my unhealthy obsession with “Space Jam” and basketball players of the 1990s is about as entrenched as I got within black culture growing up. “What‟s new, man? How was your weekend?” I ask. “It was busy”, he says. “Worked at Haymarket last night. Got up early, did some writing, hung with my girl, then came here. I‟m starting to write the next album and I‟m gonna call it „Sell Coke to White Folk‟, haha. Heard you had a fantastic show the other night. Getting ready to head to Cali next week. You think you could work for me Friday?” He always packed so much information into a paragraph of verbal speech, much like his art. He can hand you so much to think about and question in just one normal social interaction. “Yeah, man. I‟m free Friday. I‟d be happy to”, I respond. “Word. I want to spend a night with my girl before I head to Los Angeles.” “Great! What are you doing in L.A.? “Uhhhh, I‟m going to be giving a lecture at a small college outside the city about politically charged hip-hop.” “That‟s incredible!” I scream and shake his hand congratulatory. “Thanks, thanks! I‟m excited and a little nervous, though.” I was a little buzzed at this point and I always praise people too much when I‟m buzzed. It‟s somehow uncool to come off like you genuinely care and want to connect with someone and what they‟re doing in this age. It‟s much cooler to act unsurprised and a bit uninterested. It‟s that post-modern crap gone mad. But when I‟ve had a few beers, the gloves come off. I once told Jeff Tweedy that he was “my hero” right to his face and in front of his two little boys. This was when he was just out of rehab for painkillers and right when he quit drinking. No modestly successful, emotionally struggling artist wants to hear the “hero” line. Bob Dylan didn‟t even want to hear the hero line. “Hero” is reserved for people like Neil Armstrong and

George W. Bush. You‟re a hero if they name a library after you and a fraud if they name a coffee after you at Ipsento Café. I consider people like Jeff Tweedy my saviors. It was he who saved me from listening to shitty music when I was 18. Jeff Mangum is my newest savior. If I ever meet Jeff Mangum I‟ll tell him he‟s my savior. Then one time I met the „Gasman‟ from “Dumb and Dumber” at a dive bar in Boystown we used to play songs at in college. His real name is Michael Starr. He was in “Goodfellas” too. A bunch of us would sing at the open mic at Uncommon Ground early and then trek to Town Hall Pub for late night open mic, a much drunker form of open mic. Depending on who was bartending, if you were underage, it was possible to get in. I had just turned 21 so I was able to frequent this open mic every Monday. At this time, Lakeview/Boystown was a fairly hip and artsy place to be. It is no longer the case. I was sitting at the end of the bar with my girlfriend of that time, and the „Gasman‟ walked past to go to the bathroom. I thought about it long and tough. Was that the „Gasman‟ from “Dumb and Dumber”? I asked my girlfriend if she saw him and if she even knew who the „Gasman‟ was. She hadn‟t a clue. This was before our phones had the internet and Motorola Razrs buzzed and danced next to half drunk pint glasses of Pointe down the bar. So I asked the bartender, Julia. “Julia, is that the „Gasman‟ from „Dumb and Dumber‟?” “You mean, Mike? Tall, big guy?”, she answers looking towards the bathroom doors with a white towel in her left hand and intertwining tattoos of birds and beasts careening into the bottle neck of her cleavage. “Yes.” “That would be him. He‟s a friend of the owner. He comes in whenever he‟s in town. He lives in New York, but is a huge Cubs fan. So he comes in for games. He‟s been coming here since the early 70s.” The owner was apparently an old hippie who opened the bar in the early nineteen seventies in the aftershock of the end of what some deem a sexual, musical, and cultural revolution. He has pictures of himself with Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh, which for me, at the time, was a huge deal.

“WHOA!!! What‟s his name?” I ask. “Mike Starr.” “Mike Starr”, I repeat. I turn back to my girlfriend. “Ummmm, that‟s the fucking „Gasman‟ from “Dumb and Dumber”. Another unhealthy obsession from my childhood was Jim Carey films. I must‟ve seen “Dumb and Dumber” a thousand times, so running into a character from those moving images singed into my pre-pubescent brain at a local bar was mindblowing to me. “What? Oh, cool.”, she said entirely unenthused. She was much more interested in listening to and playing songs than freaking out about C-grade celebrity sightings. “I don‟t need her. I‟m talking to him”, I thought. I was JUST drunk enough to think that. We talked about the Cubs and the owner of the bar and he told me about his favorite memories of Chicago and Town Hall Pub, this Mike Starr. Soon all my friends were gathered around him asking questions about his movies and being a celebrity, all of us twenty-one year olds. He bought us each a few shots within a span of ten or fifteen minutes. He was a very kind human. I asked him what it was like working with Jim Carey and Jeff Daniels and he said it was the most fun he‟s ever had in his whole life. Then I was JUST drunk enough to ask him who is favorite band was and he said Bob Dylan and then JUST drunk enough to go up and play a God awful rendition of “It‟s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and then JUST drunk enough to dedicate it to “MY NEW FRIEND MIKE STARR”. I sat down after the song and ordered another beer with my girlfriend of that time. Then I noticed Mike get up and start to leave out the back door. I raced off the stool, used the bar as momentum like a push-up, and shouted down the bar: “MIKE! YOU WERE MY CHILDHOOD!”

Yes.

“You were my childhood” is what I said.

He gave me a very quick puzzled look, nodded his head, and left out the back. “YOU WERE MY CHILDHOOD!” I‟ll never forget those words. I‟m not even sure what they mean exactly (I grew up with you?). I could have saved those words for my ailing and dying grandfather. Or told them to my aunt who watched my sister and I everyday for years and years while our mother and father went to work and grad school. Or told my parents who worked and went to grad school so we could have a privileged life and buy us rap CD‟s and take us to see the Bulls play. I could have saved those words for people who had a profound impact on my childhood. I could have saved “YOU WERE MY CHILDHOOD!” to the people who actually were my childhood and are very much still alive. I saved “YOU WERE MY CHILDHOOD!” for the „Gasman‟ from “Dumb and Dumber”. After telling Sketch that I‟d work for him on Friday we took a few shots and he walked up to the microphone to do some freestyle poetry. I moved towards the end of the bar amidst the n-words and vocal anger furrowing up into a cartoon cloud of black smoke and white noise above his head. Live art is sometimes like watching someone in a sauna. Toxins are boiled until the flame diminishes and evaporates over your head. Oddly, your skin feels cool while your insides are tepid warm, like riding the warm 147 bus up Michigan Ave. and through Lake Shore Drive after being caught in a torrential, warm summer rain. After Sketch came off the mic, he was all smiles and high fives as if he had just clobbered a triple after being in a hitting slump. What a difference a stage presence can be; anger and animosity one poetic minute, and pure crosscultural, race-less human elation the next. I moved towards the end of the bar where I could be alone and pass judgment while also putting on a long face and looking like I need someone to talk to. It worked. A “vixen in a red dress” came to speak with me. This vixen in the red dress- she was referred to me through this sentence by a regular at the pub trying to solicit her possible affection for me- was a waitress across the street from the pub and frequented my corner. I‟m very much not into meeting women in general, particularly in bars. I refuse to meet the love of my life in a bar. My friends laugh because

why would I meet the love of my life in a bar anyway? Wouldn‟t it, instead, be more apt to meet a fine, young woman in a bar and casually date and engage in a dangerous liaison with? Wouldn‟t it, instead, be more apt to meet a fine, young woman in a bar to engage in short textual cell phone conversations with late at night with full intention of not dangerously liaising with but sometimes engage in a dangerous liaison with on Sunday nights after open mic and six PBR tall boys and a few shots on the house? Wouldn‟t it, instead, be more apt to meet a cute, young vixen to talk about cats with and go to piano themed shows downtown where theater carpets remind her of Vegas, and then sit in cars and watch her smoke cigarettes and listen to tired radio songs from the nineteen eighties and take note of where she was when her father had originally showed her these then contemporary hits? Looking lonely, she appeared and we talked about our hometowns. There was a butchered version of a Neil Young song we had to speak over. She was a quiet talker and so the entire night at the bar was spent with my ear in her mouth. Then my mouth in her mouth a little later, but by no progression of my own and by no continuation of my own. She was an assumingly silent solider on the hunt for human flesh- like the Viet Kong or African snipers. She was actually a very sweet girl, I‟m just always prepared for battle. She fought hard. I just wanted to talk, get to know her. The way to a man‟s heart is through his brain. Entertain me. Tell me about something you‟re obsessed with. Tell me about something hard you‟re trying to overcome. I don‟t want to talk about drugs. What is aching you? You must be aching! This generation makes me ache. Does it make you ache? Why are we not discussing our shared neuroticism towards feeling artistically inept? Why haven‟t we pointed out how manic we feel some months and how overwhelmingly filled we are in others? I don‟t want to talk about the corner. I don‟t want my mouth on your mouth because I want to hear things that I need come out of that mouth. Why don‟t we list all the places we‟ve been and why we want to be there right now, in this moment? I don‟t want to go to Marie‟s. We go to Marie‟s. Maybe if I give this some time she‟ll say something so fantastic I‟ll leap across the table and violently kiss her and take her home with me. We get to the red door. In the triangle windows at the top of the door I see backwards baseball hats and glittered hair. I had to wait for the vixen to smoke a cigarette. I kicked

at the side of Marie‟s, its chunky cream paint I tried chipping off with my thin, summer shoe. I looked up and saw the hand-made “Riptide” sign in some sort of musical note excerpt from God knows what piece, and chuckled at the situation in which I had found myself- some sayvoluntarily in. I wanted nothing and everything to do with this girl. We went into the bar. I saw the normal people that I know patron there. I saw the normal people I don‟t know patron there. I saw the people that belong there forever It‟s purgatory for everyone there, including me: between the over welcomed stay of the bar before to the staccato thud of my couch after leaving Marie‟s. The rest of this story is just silliness and ends in misfortune and a bit of fun, as you can imagine. She stopped me in front of St. Mary of the Angels. The crimson bell towers made a developing story develop longer into the morning. The rising stone Corinthian columns hailed at my reluctance towards the beckoning balcony beneath the pinwheel stained glass where the faceless angels creep over Hermitage and over a cardboard man and rubber vixen and their shameless display of disaffection. I saw the façade of the church in a sharply clear globe with sleepy Luna wrapped in her cirrus blanket- she existed only for this Hermitage globe, and the corner, a planet itself, with too little people to feel free and too much four in the morning nausea to begin to populate the thunderstorm feast of rotten purity gooped around the rungs of the closest and most malevolent storm drain. I‟m telling this all to Berdie over tacos at Big Star. There isn‟t even space for comment because of the implication of immaturity in the story. He picks up his helmet and we walk to his bike just around the fence and he rolls the bike along with me and we cascade back to Hermitage through the deadness of a hot Monday night. Berdie takes off from Hermitage and back through Lincoln Park, past the Lindahls and Finkels, not quite to the tracks, and with the overarching humid stench of next morning‟s rise, Molly lets him in the back because he lost his key to the front.

I got up to my apartment and turned on the industrial fans and poured a glass of filtered lake water because I am

a new American and that‟s what I do. I sat on my cornered couch and thought about what it means to be this age in America- what it means to be ANY age in America. The seagulls squawked annoyingly just above the street lamp near the alley. Just two months ago I thought their squawks were glorious because I heard them early one Saturday morning through a sunless air and my toes were still cold and my heart was still frozen but just thawed enough like a slab of salmon taken from a freezer and left on a white plate on a porcelain kitchen counter. I thought a lot about Berdie and his constant dilemma. I thought about my constant dilemma. Berdie has it bad in the new-American sense, which means he‟s getting close to the truth. He‟s getting close to righteousness. The actual American dream is now attached to his heels and pulling at his heart with an Ethernet cable up through his khaki slacks. All his life he‟s done things right. He got fantastic grades in high school, went to a top Midwestern university where he studied international business. He now works for a very private but influential company that sells cell phone cases, printers, sponges for cleaning electronic equipment, robots that type text messages for you and computer screens that self-clean. I think about him a lot and how he‟s doing because he was duped. I told him we‟re all duped, but he wasn‟t listening. This entire generation isn‟t listening. Nobody does what they want to do because nobody does what they want to do. People that don‟t do are then jealous of people that do and the people that do are all liars and fully constipated with digital shit. The only ones telling the truth are the ones lost and questioning and unafraid to be lost and questioned. They are the ones who need a beer and a conversation. They are done masquerading as a good American and want to extinguish the policy of what is a good American in a discerning bright America. We haven‟t heard the President‟s voice in ages because it seems he may think this generation is a shot in the dark. This generation is deathly sad and no one wants to admit it. It‟s okay, though. This generation is sad because we‟ve been given everything and our parents don‟t understand us. They‟ve given us too much. They had to work for what they wanted and had to work for what they got. Our grandparents had to learn how to be the youth of the Great Depression and prepare and come back from world war and they weren‟t able to give their offspring much. So their offspring conspired to do great things like fix economies and teach in public schools so their offspring could have

everything and now we have everything and it‟s the saddest thing in the whole wide world. We‟ve had the best Christmases in American history because we got what we asked for except for me because all I wanted was to be Santa Claus and bring joy to the billions of other kids of the very ripe 1990s. But it turns out it was all a fraud. There are also so many people of my generation who weren‟t given anything. Who come from nothing and fight for themselves and come to bat for others. They come from broken homes across central Illinois and despite odds are helping others light torches. People like me, who have everything, are being lifted up for air towards the crest of the oceanic spirit of those who were given less. There are people in my generation who come from less than me and do more than me. They are the ones that have. They are the ones that become Presidents and are the faces of the twenty-first century Congress or start blogs about independent coffee roasters or take classes in woodworking or open their doors for traveling bands coming through their large town in need of a floor for one air mattress after moving to these larger towns because there is more in a big town than all of the less that they came from. They come from lineages of immigration and bleed in the color of a new mingled America on the palette of justice and fortitude they learned in our public schools whose agendas haven‟t changed since our grandparents learned how to be children of the Great Depression. They are the ones to fight for and keep fighting for. Don‟t apologize, America. I‟ll apologize for you. You have nothing to apologize for, America. You unknowingly picked your first men to be men of the pen and the brain for the future. Whether they like it or not we are now bursting apart in color at the seams of the Constitution and we are moving across the feathered cursive empirically. They also come in forms like me. I actually don‟t have everything. I come from middle-income middle-America along with all my friends and relatives. All my friends and most of my relatives are alive and are well fed and have jobs as teachers or mechanics of heating and air-conditioning and host parties where we make quilts out of the flannel shirts of a deceased grandfather. We have nothing and everything that we need. We need no more and no less. We are the middle. Except I want more and I want it all. I want glory and I want the gutter. I want it all to be real and I want it when I‟m ready. I don‟t know if I‟m ready. I am starting over. I‟m going to start over with nothing. I am going to

be so honest that you‟ll have nothing against me and nothing to hold me to. I am going to engulf with flames all the lies and reservations I hold and I am going to inject with venom my secrets until they secrete willingly out of my fingernails. I am going to be honest with you- I just want to be honest with you- LET ME BE HONEST WITH YOU. I don‟t want anyone‟s help. I‟m going to take everything that I deserve. I am going to stand on the right side of righteousness. Berdie needs to join me on this side. He should quit his job and demolish his comfort. He should annihilate his simple life for the promise of a simpler life designed by he and he alone. But with my faux nobility comes real struggle. I do pine for a life with money and a computer and time off and weekends with snowmobiles and deviant dogs to take heed of. There‟s something righteous about Berdie‟s life. It‟s wholesome and true. It‟s an honest day of work and an honest night of camaraderie with Molly. He has the elasticity of opening himself to someone in the confines of a home in the evening and in the morning is greeted with a clean car ride to the sun burnt northwest suburbs. He may already be standing on the right side of righteousness. What does it look like?

I sometimes wonder that when my heart explodes if out will pop carcasses of dead moths, impaled by yarn, like stale popcorn strung around a Christmas tree. Before this happens, though, I want to grow old and sad with someone. I‟m already sad and I‟ll always be sad but I want to learn how to grow in sadness with someone. I want to grow weird with someone. I don‟t know if it‟s sadness or weirdness I‟m after. I like both. I want to watch sad films and read sad books with a person. We‟ll have normally sad children who love spending all their time with us and are interested in things made by other sad humans and then make things themselves and by doing so help the even sadder people of the world feel better. We‟ll bear weight together and live in a small European village together. We‟ll take on things bigger than ourselves and in that find the insurmountable summit of sadness that comes then so we‟ll compress that sadness into something we can

use to fight with and throw it at things we make with our hands. We‟ll keep it at bay and use it when we need it, like super heroes. We‟ll be super heroes together and by doing all of this we will have abolished the debilitating effects of sadness. We‟ll keep it at bay. My mother would love to know that I‟m keeping it at bay. I am. I don‟t know if I would be able to die in a European village. Part of me wants to die in my home state. I wish I were ready to die. I wish I were Justin Vernon who could die anytime he wants because he made something for the world. He made something for us and can die with grace. I am the loneliest man with four limbs but I want my funeral to be the happiest place on Earth and for floozy Luna to make her way closer to us to wear a party hat and whatever family and friends I have at that moment to be joyous and rip pages out of books foreign and gothic and tossed up with shards of smashed instruments and people hollering on chairs and swaying with locked arms and arched backs and belly‟s full of brown Bourbon transported by plastic red cups. But first I need to make something and be the leader of something huge and then retire with it. I might want to retire on the Mississippi. I should retire on the Mississippi. I‟ll retire in a loving brothel made of mud and Indian skin near a skinny forest on a skinny shore. I‟ll retire on the Mississippi with a tender molar fixed numbingly at some local shop by some local dry hand because I failed to get my teeth fixed in my 20s among things and other things failing like sore knuckles and a machine with a dirty, greasy hand shoved up my intestines pulling out auxiliary meals and the sparkling split ends of electrical chords made unruly and all tangled by me and me alone. (I meant for the dead to hear the rumble of my car over the mumble of my laugh through the un-humble contents of my acidic breath.) I am fixated on retiring on the Mississippi. I am fixated on being away from home with someone from home. This reminds of something that happened while I played a music festival in Austin, Texas this past spring and I went with Berdie to the pub to tell him about what happened. It was a Sunday night and I told Jimmy Conlon I‟d play some new songs at his Sunday Open Mic. It was a warm March, and but spring still hadn‟t come. I remember thinking that it felt like the weather in Chicago had a wet fever with gusts of chills cresting on the sweaty forehead of a nauseous and

unaware infant. Berdie and I never meet at our eventual destination. We go together to places. We‟ll pick each other up or we‟ll meet on a corner and then walk a block to the place where we want to be. I don‟t know why we do this but if I had to bet it‟s because we grew up in the same small suburban town and were never too far to pick each other up even if it was a little out of our way. It has always been our etiquette. Sketch was working behind the bar and we ordered Krankshafts and shoved popcorn into our faces. Chicago is a beautiful place to get nothing done in. Sometimes it feels like no one is getting anything done. In the summertime I don‟t think anyone does anything because they‟re out looking through boutique windows or running towards the lake and along its front. In the wintertime I don‟t think anyone does things. The pub is always empty and I walk out of there with thirty dollars at most Saturday winter and spring nights and I spend fifteen of it on pour-over coffee at Star Lounge every Sunday morning before rehearsal and fifteen of it on Krankshafts after playing songs at Jimmy Conlon‟s Sunday Open Mic. Harlan Fincher came and met Berdie and I once he found out we were around the corner. Harlan is my brother in arms from the band and my back neighbor at 1841. Harlan has a sleeve of tattoos of which I‟ll never remember when, why, or where he got them, though I lie because one of them is a heart with an arrow through it and when I consistently ask him why he tattooed it on his body he exclaims: “‟Cuz it‟s a human heart with a fucking arrow through it!” with much empathy and vibrato laughter. He does things because those things make him happy and he never looks back. Harlan is a tame, but wild bird and the only one of my friends who is married. His wife Annie and I come from the same area; cut from the same suburban teeth. We are white and Catholic and carry our whiteness and Catholic guilt like the sleeve of tattoos subdued by the light blonde hair of Harlan‟s arm. I grew up playing in bands with Harlan‟s brother-inlaw in church basements and community centers in the very young part of this century in suburbia America. We often reminisce at Gold Star Bar on Division where Harlan bartends after thirty-two free PBRs and arguments on which suburban Rec. Center threw the best Friday Live & Local shows twelve years ago while Annie smirks behind her vodka

and lime at the prophetic centeredness of human existence. I don‟t remember Annie from my days in the suburbs as much as I remember her brother, but she grew up to become a social worker at an HIV positive clinic up in Uptown and am fascinated by her daily life. She speaks little of it as Harlan and I constantly converse and argue about the workings of being in a young and impressionable band. Everyone surrounding me is saintly. Harlan is from the deepest southern part of Illinois and might as well be a Kentuckian for all I know. You wouldn‟t know it until he wants you to know it, and then and only then you‟ll know. He‟s a skilled individual- one of the most on-the-spot creative people I know and the most innovative guitarist in the Midwest as far as I‟m concerned. Harlan‟s father just became Mayor of his hometown and I‟m still not sure what that means. I‟m not even sure what Mayors do. Most Mayors I know are great at planting flowers and taking money and closing schools and building unnecessary basketball arenas and hating the arts. If Harlan‟s father is anything like Harlan, he‟ll focus on the people and the people will focus on him. I wish my father would run for Mayor. The large, colonial house I grew up in is right next to City Hall in Roselle, Illinois so he wouldn‟t have to travel far, which he hates doing but loves not dealing with people too much to run for office. Harlan and his family love people. I keep telling him to be a writer with me because of how he understands people. He should be a writer with me. Harlan is a hot-headed son of a bitch but I love him so. He‟d get in any fist-fight for me if it came to it. One time he knocked over a guy because the guy made fun of the three-piece suits Harlan and I were wearing on a Thursday night at Marie‟s. “Haha, nice suits, faggots.” said the Marie‟s drunk almost inaudibly behind the sharp tin of a PBR. “Argggghhh!” said Harlan and that was that. To the floor went the barfly. Harlan lost and bled out an earring that evening. It was nothing that the top pin of a ballpoint pen to cartilage couldn‟t fill. Harlan meet Berdie Kryzcinski, see all the

came to the pub that night without Annie to and I. The regulars were there: Victor Jerry Valetti, Richard Beckett and three guys I time but don‟t know their names. A girl named

Marisa was there too. She comes on Sundays to flirt with the regulars. She‟s the best at it. The regulars are from the “Class of ‟69”, as they say. They‟re all in their early 40s but look like the class of ‟59. They sit on the south end of the bar facing north. There are 4 or 5 stools they hover around, slap each other‟s backs at, and amass an arsenal of dirty pint glasses in front of. Sketch cleans them up with honor and class. Marisa, who is nothing north of twenty-three has it bad for one of the regulars who is Irish. I don‟t know many women who aren‟t into Irish men in Chicago. Marisa comes in with her ponytail and dinosaur white teeth and she smells of fragrances pertinent to floral infused vodka and touches legs and brushes arms of sad men hanging in the balance of the needs and fraudulent desires of a girl half their age. I wanted nothing to do with what was happening at the south end of the bar as Berdie, Sketch, Harlan and I glared towards this obscenity. It‟s hard to focus when such a fiasco was happening that close to you. Marisa got up off her stool and came trotting to me cycling her arms like a steam locomotive. I wanted everything to do with her right now. She flirted with me as I laughed coyly knowing full well her game and her game was nothing and had no end. The attention was swift and made me tingle but then I wanted nothing to do with her when her eyes jetted disloyally to the back door of the pub. I acted uninterested so I could get back to explaining to Berdie why I was fixated on being away from home with someone from home. Marisa sprinted in the direction of the closed-to-the-public back patio so she could smoke a sly cigarette with waiting men. She stayed out there in the black air because she infiltrated that group of older men sneaking cigarettes and they demanded her attention by giving her attention. The patio would be open in a few months for summer and sitting in my small pocket of people at the bar I had not a clear idea of just how warm that summer would be. Berdie asked about the festival. Harlan rolled his eyes. By now my bachelor escapades are fodder for married men across America and Harlan had been with me in Austin and could harmonically vouch for the events that ensued. Berdie knew I had accidentally fallen for a girl named Charlotte after learning that Charlotte had somewhat of a sliver of a microchip interest in me. Charlotte was a lesbian, naturally. For all I knew she fared women but we live in an age where people fare a lot of things (too much

so). She played violin in a band that was also from Chicago and also at the festival. I didn‟t care if she wasn‟t interested in me at all. I saw something I could believe in and I went for it. I barely knew her and I certainly didn‟t know how serious of a lesbian she was, not because I am insensitive to her situation but because I truly didn‟t know her situation and I didn‟t want to know her situation. I knew she made me laugh and that was all I needed. I electronically asked her to get drinks with me a few nights before we left for the festival, which was very stressful thing for me. It took me a day to read her answer because I knew what it was going to say. I took a huge risk asking her to get together in the first place. Of course she‟d say no- I‟m a straight man. I was in the suburbs with my family when I checked for her answer. I was in the bedroom I grew up in with the door closed like I had all through high school. I tend to hole up somewhere safe because I‟m always struggling with something and I don‟t like being in a room full of people asking me why I am the way I am. Charlotte said yes. She‟d meet me for a drink. That was all I needed. I opened a beer and for the first time in a while I walked un-tormented into a room full of people I love. WGN news was on and Tom Skilling said that Luna was out in full form and I knew we‟d all be saved after we held on for long enough. No one could see Luna, though. Not through all that humidity. I knew deep down that Luna was continuing her sling shot descent into the orbit of Mars and then Jupiter and she‟d probably get eaten up by all the colors of Jupiter and her skin would stretch into two dimension; her skin full of the footprints and flags from beautiful mammals spinning out of gravity and tethered to televisions of the greatest civilization the middle-aged Earth has ever felt. Charlotte and I met the next night for drinks and pool in Logan Square and it was effectively the most pleasant evening I had in years. I felt like I was in middle school and Charlotte and I were in the basement of a mutual friends parent‟s house. That mutual friend was with some other mutual friend making out in the room with the workout equipment. People let us alone to figure things out and work this knot out of a social situation. So we played pool and she kicked my ass, naturally.

We parted ways and decided to meet up and spend a lot of time together in Austin. The next day the band and I left in a freshly cleaned van that would continue to get dirtier and dirtier as she left on a freshly cleaned plane that would be freshly cleaned again the moment her flat summer shoes crossed the vacuum of the loading gate into an absurdly warm place to be from the devastatingly cold March we only knew of. Before I arrived in Austin, the band and I played shows and did some travelling. My thoughts were with Charlotte the whole time. Adrian Warnimont, the bassist of the band, knew Charlotte better than I and coyly laughed every instance her name was brought up. Jeremy Tiles, the drummer of the band who might have the best sense of humor of anyone I know but who also takes everything very personally, laughed as well from the back floor of the van where he will ride horizontally for every trip or tour we ever take because of some pinched nerve in his left leg. He doesn‟t hear very well from there above spindles and tiny muscular men shoving coal into other small spindles to stop the decaying of goals and lives forced to fit in cubes because to us a shiny silver spindle is a much better shape. So Jeremy is constantly screaming “Huh?” and “Wha?” from the underbelly of the poly-sleeping back monster in the back. He hated, more than anything, to be left out. “Sorry, John. Not talking „bout you. Go back to sleep, John”, Harlan whoops while constantly changing Graham Parsons songs in the front seat while taking us sightseeing through Southern Illinoisan back roads. For some reason he never calls Jeremy by his real name. It‟s either John, Johnny, or Jerry. Jeremy laughs like a kid every time Harlan calls him John. There‟s a level of recourse to it, but he knows that‟s just what Harlan‟s going to do from now on. “I was asking what happened with Charlotte, ya dick”, cackled Jeremy. “Ohhhh, okay. Who are you dating this week, John?”, mocked Harlan because Jeremy had been dating the same two girls for the last two years. Never at the same time, of course, but most assuredly one after the other, then one again and then the other. I could feel Jeremy raise a shamefully playful smile under his big blue glasses and onset of salt and pepper

hair. He is a good looking man. Everyone in the band is. That‟s why they‟re all snatched up. Except me- I have a head shaped like half of a watermelon and can‟t grow hair on my face and I look dopey in skinny jeans. “We‟re just tuggin‟ on that old dick of yours, John”, Adrian said and wrapped his right behind a suitcase like a breathless serpent of righteousness and caressed Jeremy‟s exposed kneecap for longer than any of us desired until from the drivers seat Harlan caressed his other knee longer than any of us desired until finally Jeremy shooed their bony fingers with the raising of his pinched nerve leg. “ALRIGHT!”, I shook my head from my perch in the front seat and felt happy to be in a brotherhood with these gentle men. We trotted along through the maize carcasses and semifamiliar landscape in the bowels of my home state. We were supposed to get to Carmi, Illinois by the time Luna was clear above the bereaved Midwest winter soil. Carmi was Harlan‟s hometown and we always stayed at his deceased Grandfather‟s house that remained in the Fincher family. We were groggy and half asleep when Harlan stopped the van and ran up to the mailbox of an unidentified house and jammed his hand in and out of it fishing for something. I hoped it was a mold of my face I could wear like a mask through horn-rimmed glasses and mild-mannered modernists of a pregnant and awaiting Austin, Texas to hide my face behind my face without a soul knowing it is my face. But not a soul knows my face anyway, so I hoped Harlan was fishing for keys to his Grandfather‟s house so we could have the leftover beers from the Carmi Corn Days Festival the past fall and sit on a porch of astro-turf and send regards to a slumbering South. We each had a beer, and Adrian, who doesn‟t drink found a twin bed and 101 Dalmations sheets and comforter to crash his tall body on. The rest of us followed shortly and nestled into improvised sleeping cells dreaming of the tepid shower and fresh soap morning would greet us with. Since we were in town, Harlan‟s Grandmother insisted she take us to breakfast. We easily complied because she‟s the sweetest woman on the face of Earth and subsequent Luna you could break of a piece of her and dip it in whipped cream and having whipped cream for breakfast wasn‟t off the menu at the buffet in an abandoned grocery store she took us to that next morning.

The four of us showed up with wet hair smelling unilaterally of the same shampoo. We looked like we didn‟t belong and the people eating at the buffet warned us behind guarded macaroni and cheese and transparent iceberg salads. There were constant magnetically fluorescent tubes high atop our heads and across from where we sat were empty rows of grocery store shelves pinning down worn and cratered yellow tile floor. We walked slowly behind Harlan‟s grandmother who was always smiling because of how proud she was to be the lone Carmi resident with “such handsome city boys”. “Ya‟ll are my treasures. You know what? I‟m so lucky to have Harlan up there in Chicago doing his band and ya‟ll be so kind to come see Grandma Karen in little Carmi! Ya know Jeff‟s the Mayor now, don‟t you?” Harlan looked embarrassed and we laughed and congratulated Grandma Karen on being the mother of a Mayor and Harlan for being freshly crowned royalty. We finished our wondrously greasy food under tubes and drove Grandma Karen home where she wouldn‟t let us move farther south without giving us two brown grocery bags full of Ritz crackers, peanut M & M‟s, Doritos for Jeremy, pistachios, Band-Aids, Twinkies, three cans of Progresso Beef Soup, water bottles, a 6 pack of Dr. Peppers, Red Vines, and an Epi-Pen. We drove away as she waved and cried in the driveway. Harlan apologized and we unanimously roared in protest to him feeling sorry for a colorfully beautiful and sweet morning we just had. We raced towards Texarkana. Adrian and I talked about death in the back of the van. He told me death was just a passing, a changing of vessel. I told him how mad I am sometimes that I ended up on Earth. I wondered if I‟d ended up on Luna it would be any different. At least I‟d be alone and it would be quietexcept I would hear Om loud and buzzing like I had in the womb and I‟d weep at how fast I moved around Earth. I would still have to live with myself. Adrian said that I chose to be here. “On Earth?”, I asked softly. “Yeah. Or wherever we are. Wherever you are right now. You chose to be here.”

“My parents made the choice for me to be here”, I said negatively, though I didn‟t fully believe my words and was just experimenting in playing devil‟s advocate. “YOU chose your parents”, Adrian caressingly jabbed his pointer finger into my right arm. “How did I do that?”, I asked. “How did you anything? How did you other? We needed each other. You needed the thing you needed to be here. You‟ll vessel to be even more of the thing you said admiringly.

and I find each your parents to be choose your next want to be”, Adrian

“But what do I need to be?” “You know. You for sure know. You‟re a good man, brother. Trust it. The universe will be constantly giving you options and opportunities to fix things or change things.” “It will?” I asked. “Sure, brother. Every time a situation comes where we feel challenged, it‟s the universe saying „Okay, here‟s a chance to do something different.‟ If you choose to not deal with it, the universe is not going to be offended. It‟s not going to be resentful like a human might be. It‟s like standing in quick sand waiting for the rope to swing your way so that you can pull yourself out. When the rope swings your way and you decide not to grab it, because you might fall off and hurt yourself, the universe says „Oh, okay. I see you missed your chance there. No worries, man. Here‟s another one.‟ Then the rope swings your way again. This time you don‟t grab it because what if it‟s easier to just stay put? What if you stop sinking and just stay in limbo. That‟ll be okay. What if the other side is just more quicksand anyway? Or full of Bengal tigers? “The universe doesn‟t play the „What If” game. The universe just is, just as you are, and it‟ll keep sending you the rope. This time you grab the rope and you‟re scared out of your mind and you prepare for the worst but you have to hope for the best. You may miss the landing. The universe doesn‟t care how many times you miss. The universe doesn‟t have the capability to judge. Again, the universe just is. You are just a follicle on the universe‟s head of hair. Just as you don‟t comb every individual hair, the

universe doesn‟t maintain you individually. It maintains the whole of itself, as you do, and because it does that so you are maintained.” “So the universe is indifferent to its own?” I ask. “No. Not indifferent. The universe has no desires or benevolence. It is not evil, but infinitely giving” said Adrian. “We are the universe, conscious of itself”, I say, “so then is the universe conscious of itself as a being? We as humans are aware of ourselves.” “You are aware of yourself. You are a part of the universe. Therefore, the universe is aware of itself.” Adrian was talking about the Tao. He squeezed my hand lovingly. He cares for me a lot. I can feel it. He‟s glad he found me. I am glad I found him.

We continued to watch the southern Illinois country on our way to faraway Austin. We were stopping in some small town to play a show for $150, which would only cover our gas from Southern Illinois to Texarcana. The bar was called John Brown‟s on the Square and I know this because they gave us pint glasses full of brown ale brewed in house and they let us take home the glasses surrounded in brown bathroom tissue. The show was fun and they paid us more than they promised because we were friendly guys and we didn‟t take ourselves too seriously that night. Jeremy had been listening to a lot of hip hop recently and since it was March in Illinois he wore a light brown leather coat with a flamboyant rabbit fur collar when if popped looked like he belonged as the Flava Flav to some local rap crew. We kept our CDs and other merchandise in a brown leather briefcase with gold locks near the handle. I was standing at the bar talking to some of Harlan‟s family drinking my crisp John Brown Ale when Harlan came running up to me with half a glass of whiskey yelling “Look at John! Look at what John‟s doing right now!”

Jeremy was going around this unapologetically white, southern bar with a popped rabbit fur collar and briefcase in hand taking pictures with people around the room. He was feigning some sort of gang sign with his one hand and straddling the briefcase around the patron‟s shoulder so it fell on their breast. It looked like the briefcase was full of cold cash, obviously a vibe he was going for. People were lining up to take a picture with him. We watched from the bar as the line between appropriate and inappropriate teetered and tottered but the John Brown Ale didn‟t help our judgment in any case so we loaded up the van with our gear and quickly decided to grab Jeremy and drive back to Carmi where we would sleep again somewhere normal and safe. It might have been a bit illogical but as soon as Harlan piped Kerouac Reads Kerouac through the shitty van speakers and we stopped to pee on the side of some dark road into cornfield while the van doors open and Kerouac echoing into precipitated rows and his breath on the backs of our arched-back urinating backs, it seemed to be the best idea we‟d had all trip. As Harlan and I told Birdie the John Brown story at the pub, I could see his mouth grow wide with the good type of envy. Birdie wanted experiences like John Brown‟s. He craved them as the dusts of metal in his bone marrow rattled and sent signals to some huge lustful part of his brain. Birdie shook his head and said “man, I wish I was with you.” It was March and still cold out as we watched the blurry rain bead on the windows of the bar reflected in the two mirrors behind Harlan gruffly singing new songs at Jimmy Conlon‟s Open Mic. I wished Berdie was with us too. I sometimes wish he was more like us. He needs to quit that job. He needs to open up a café where all of us can go every evening and write and have espresso with wine and stay until we can‟t intake anymore caffeine and need to move to alcohol. It shouldn‟t have too many choices- just four different bottles of wine and two local draft beers poured out of brass taps without any labels, just the names chalked yellow on a board above the register and between two mirrors. It‟ll be the right place to meet girls because it‟ll be the right place to be men. We can sit outside with small tables covered in thick white cloth and demand that people judge us. All those Chicagoans who love to judge all

day long will love walking by and seeing us with mouths gaped open and laugher strewn out like projectile vomit and it will be a goliath Vesuvius and ten times a Le Select. I know it is what Chicago needs. Berdie and Harlan too. We all know what Chicago needs. Sketch came by and said “Ya‟ll still talking about Austin?”. We were. I still hadn‟t arrived at the good part. The boys and I got to Texarcana one late morning where we ate salads and talked to our moms on the phone in the biggest and most extensive strip mall parking lot I had ever talked to my mom on the phone in. That‟s saying a lot considering my hometown is one giant strip mall, though tastefully divided. I used to use strip mall payphones to call home and let my mother know that “I‟d be leaving the card shop and stopping at Roselle Music before riding Brandon Jacobson‟s homemade go-cart through his back yard and out to the one cornfield we have on our west side until the flashing lights from tiny Schaumburg Airport fortify the onset of dusk and my inevitable return home for sweet corn, grilled hamburgers, and frozen French fries.” I‟d swallow any pill that could make me be there again. We had a good seven to eight hours left in the van until Austin, which included Jeremy‟s pee stops, Harlan‟s smoking and Dallas traffic. We decided to spend the night outside of Austin in the rural part of Round Rock, Texas on a very large piece of land Harlan‟s uncle Rob owned where we could build a fire and drive ATV‟s around herds of longhorned cattle. We spent about an hour on long stretches of one-lane roads out to where his uncle was waiting for us in front of a high wooden fence. He wore a huge smile and was so proud of his nephew for making it to Texas. He opened up the fence to let our van through and hopped on an ATV that was behind a tree and led us down into a silent, vast and chalky Texas. I felt like was in a terrestrial spacecraft exploring a new planet. It looked like a new planet. I knew it was a planet because I come from a planet. Things were familiar because if I can survive here and I made it here, this place must have similarities to my home world. Our spacecraft smashed rocks under the wheel while occasionally slicing a dried, dead tree branch that split in two just before crunching the hundred leaves at the edges of the wood. Long-horned cattle propped their heads up as we passed nearby and galloped off slowly as we inched closer.

I could see up in the sky where day was meeting night and our van hovered under a glowing network of cirrus and was headed toward a cold and stark starry night sky. We parked the van next to a tiny little trailer that looked like it could be towed by a pick-up truck it was so small. Rob laughed boisterously and said in a jolly, older man voice “Oh, I know it‟s a tiny little thing but it‟s a place to sleep and it‟s got a stove for cooking.” The trailer was 999 square feet, which, in the state of Texas is technically not a home and therefore doesn‟t require payment of property tax. So I‟m told. The mini home had a small porch where Adrian and I stood and overlooked a rocky plain and saw Harlan and Jeremy riding Rob‟s ATV out towards left of center from my view. Harlan was driving and chasing cattle (and what appeared to be sheep) around acres and acres of Texas. Jeremy, from my angle, had his arms around Harlan‟s waist and the side of his face pressed deep into the back of his aged jean jacket which I imagined smelled of blue American Spirits and a small unsealed bottle of Jim Beam- both tucked into the dark denim of his inside left coat pocket. “We are on the right side of righteousness”, I told Adrian. Harlan and I had been questioning this for a few months now- what it means to be on the right side of righteousness. Berdie needed to be there. He needed to see what righteousness looked like. It didn‟t look like a cubicle. It didn‟t look like a miracle. It looked like harmless freedom. We were able to be real and be free because we made art and were open to almost anything and that democratic commitment had manifested itself under the unbuttoned bosom of the Texas night sky. I had never in my life seen so many stars that I felt I was on Luna burrowing my thin shoes within her rocky soil and closer proximity to the heavens. We built a fire next to the trailer and drank bourbon in red plastic cups and ran out to where the fire‟s light wouldn‟t reach us and threw rocks up at the stars and cursed our heavy Chicago lives. Adrian, a few meters away and silent when he‟s at ease, was holding his phone up to the cosmos and shouting back to us the names of constellations seen from that acre of rotund Texas earth. I smiled and walked back to the fire where I poured more un-needed bourbon into my cup and sat down on a wooden chair which broke as I leaned back in it and fell straight down into a patch of dry dirt as Harlan‟s shrill laugh shot boyishly through the fire towards my

clumsiness and I stared up at Luna through a dead tree as “Canis Major! Aquarius! Leo Minor! Piscis Astrinus! Lyra!” echoed its way around the fire to the rattling bones of my benevolent ear.

We left late next morning after each of us took a walk out to a pasture where there were huge donkeys and very curious sheep. “You gotta check out those things over there,” each one of us said to the other after lone walking around. I asked Adrian if I could use his battery powered face shaver because I didn‟t know if Charlotte liked scruff, even though I barely have scruff even after five days in a van. I want a huge beard but I‟ll never be able to grow one. It‟s the saddest thing. We picked up Annie Fincher at the airport outside Austin. Harlan gave her a huge hug and helped her bags into the van. The first thing I did when I got to Austin was see her. Austin was warm. It was a dry warmth similar but entirely dissimilar enough from the blanket of water in the air in my kitchen that summer to come. The first the thing I did was shower after living in a real van with real boys for half a week. We were staying with an older ex-bandmate of Harlan‟s. Harlan had lived in Austin for a year or so once and played in a blues band with a bunch of older guys who were all medical doctors. One of them, who connected with Harlan on a very deep personal level, offered his Barton Springs Ave. home to us while we visited, all in the spirit of music. I put on my summer shoes, rolled up my jeans and sprinted towards downtown Austin, Texas. It felt great to be warm and feel slow burning beads of sweat drip down my forehead. We were staying at an apartment on the top of a hill about a half hour walk outside the murmurs of the music festival. What a clear and concise way of feeling in this cloudless sky and unfiltered warmth of a round small city inside some clean globe. I saw a slit Luna east of the late afternoon sun as I pounded and ran across hot pavement shattering my ankles (later realizing) in pursuit of meeting her on the steps of gorgeous Capitol. I told her to meet me there because it

was close to the chicken hut where she was staying. I thought I could make it in fifteen minutes but ended up being forty-five minutes late due to my inept navigation of a city I had been to once before. I hadn‟t ran since middle school track but my focus was on the Texas Capitol and I could see its bobbing head from streets I randomly chose to trudge through. I would have to jump onto river bridges to get a line of sight of the damn thing. I would run past streets and buildings- peer down- and if I saw even a top window of the Capitol I‟d screech and change course to head down a perpendicular street toward it. It was Pac-Man from high above in Canis Major. It reminded me of trying to find Sacre Couer in the midst of Montmarte with Berdie in Paris and the unbreakable cobble stone streets that whittled my ankles to bone dust much like my running through paved Austin did. I met Charlotte on the Capitol steps. She was sitting before the iron gates with giant sunglasses and a freshly updated cell phone. We hugged as though we had made it to Mecca. Fucking hipsters. We left for east 6th where we drank free Brooklyn beer and ate free tacos in a room with an abandoned piano. We had paper wrist bands that we both played with nervously while talking about our relatives and our clarity in being away from Chicago and the clarity in the cloudless Austin sky and the clarity in drinking free beer for the better part of a few hours. I didn‟t know what I was doing. I didn‟t know if I was being delusional. I didn‟t know if I was being irrational in my feelings and entrapments with a lesbian. I tried my hardest to not be delusional. I tried my hardest to heed the signs and co-signing of a girl and boy in their mid-20s and only act when acted upon and only proceed forward with a logical plan when the proceedings applied. But then I laughed out loud when she took a picture of people taking pictures of some C grade celebrity walking in the middle of an Austin street and that was all I needed to believe again. I had to leave her with some mutual friends so I could go to an interview at the Driskill Hotel where the better artists and better minds of my generation called home while at the festival. I saw them all walk past me mid-interview. They came with entourages in semi-slow motion and looked like they belonged here forever- deserved to be here- and quickly glanced at me while the rest of my band talked about our band and in semi-slow motion knew I belonged here forever chasing a lesbian and a semblance of a life in the

musical spotlight of a generation. I wanted everything to do with them. The interview ended and I crutched my soring ankles out into the warm crest of night. I saw Luna open up all the way down 6th street at the end of the mass line of people my age doing things my age allows. The amount of people made the air warmer and with Luna clearly in my view we were at a planetary party and it was the only thing that existed. It was everything I wanted right now. It was snowing in Chicago. I met back up with Charlotte and our friends and we caught up with people we hadn‟t seen in a year or so and went our separate ways at the end of the night after a group of us walked Charlotte home to the chicken hut largely outside the city. It was about an hour and a half walk back to the apartment we were staying at on the hill so we walked half way and took a cab to the apartment. We played some shows the next day and they bummed us out because they were a lot of work with little to no connections that came of it. I decided to not dwell on these mishaps and focus on the weather and try to find a way to misspend my time in the city. Anytime I try to misspend anything I end up being responsible and learning things about myself. It is when I am caught off guard on a Thursday night after getting sushi with Berdie that we end up at Marie‟s and wake up anxious and guilty the next day. So I thought clearly, honestly and soberly in Austin in contrast to the drunken immaturity that permeates above the streetlights and street vendors of downtown Austin. Thinking clearly and soberly lasted just under three hours. After the shows I walked back to the apartment we were staying at and collected myself. I needed some time alone to decompress from the constant stimuli the past 24 hours. Later in the evening I walked back down the hill towards the owl-eye building and I went to meet Charlotte at some well-attended show near Stubb‟s. It was five bucks to get in 9 bucks for a shot‟s worth of whiskey in a Dixie cup. I ordered three cups with brittle ice jetting out like an iceberg underwater and waves of whiskey near the bottom. One cup for Charlotte, two for me. Her phone told my phone that she was up front at the stage. I told her I hated crowds and there‟s nothing worse than weaseling your way through three hundred people that were there for hours

already. She told me to get over it and that was all I needed. For some reason everyone up front were tiny, short humans. I hovered over the entire first two rows. I peered down at everyone and everyone peered up at me. I was some sort of ancient giant that had nothing but the best of intentions. It was then that I first became painfully aware of my reality with Charlotte. There was nothing normal about our situation. It stuck out the same way I, being the tallest person in the first two rows of some buzzed up new band, did and everyone knew it. I didn‟t know how to proceed. Charlotte would look up at me behind her blackrimmed glasses and fragile Irish skin poured over freckles just beneath confused eyes reading my lips and her eyes stayed there after she understood the words that left them. I wondered if she‟d ever kissed a boy before. I was worried I‟d kiss her and be her first and then I‟d love it and I‟d love her and then I‟d want to grow and old and sad with her because she‟d be perfect at it but I knew how this was all going to turn out because I could see over heads and I could see into hers and I read it and it said “I AM NEVER READY FOR THINGS GIVEN TO ME”. I recognized it as something that I see in my head but in this case I wanted what I felt was real and I wanted something I could believe in and that was all I needed so I moved my eyes towards her eyes and I indicated I wanted not be a giant up front anymore and we left out the front row and went to the bar and ordered more nine dollar whiskeys. After a few whiskeys we walked down to 7th street and ran into some friends coming out of a bar. We huddled in a circle, all of us Chicagoans. I wanted badly to be an expatriate somewhere with other Chicagoans. We travel well together. I loved being away from home with people from home. I was going to walk her back to her chicken hut and I offered profusely after we ran up and down those concrete hills formed under thick expressways that jet into sidewalks and at the top where pigeons coo and modestly flap their wings in retaliation to two twenty-somethings invading their homes but she said she‟d be fine and that I should head back my way considering it would be another hour and half trek if I walked her. I gave in, smiled and touched the side of her face and she smiled and I started back through 7th street wondering if any boy had ever touched the side of her face before tonight.

Groups of horned rimmed people stood in front of all the bars no longer serving alcohol or touting bands. I weaved in and out of circles of people and around corners and side streets off 6th the same way Charlotte weaved through my thoughts and I felt like she was inside my brain dodging my affection the way I dodge affection most of the time. I didn‟t think to say hi to Luna until I sat on an iron park bench next to the river as I let the spoils of my generation who wear tank tops and American flag underwear saunter back to their rented ranches and chicken huts on the outskirts of the other wailing twenty-somethings of downtown Austin, Texas. I belonged with them and so I belonged with them in their saunter to a fleeting home. The next night Charlotte and I went to a few shows where we took photos of people we thought we knew and pictures of folks we knew we didn‟t know but knew others would know them. I was absolutely enthralled with Charlotte because I knew she was completely uninterested with me. I waited in line with her for a few hours to see Tegan and Sara and a very large and open parking lot full of thousands of people. I didn‟t realize just how weird this was until a few days after, given the fact that both are sisters who are gay. We got into the concert and she met up with her friends who were very cute girls. We all talked swimmingly. The festival had been giving out free condoms all day long in Austin and I had about twelve in my leather coat pocket that fell out as Charlotte gave it back to me because the night was getting warmer for some reason and I had respectfully given her my armor when the sun went down. I jokingly said to Charlotte‟s friend: “Hey! Need one? I‟ve got plenty.” “I like girls,” she said deadpan. “Oh, okay” I said. “I was totally kidding.” “Let‟s go to 6th street.” We all left for 6th street. Charlotte, her lesbian friends, and I head to a bar I‟m told is a good place to start or end an evening. The street was bursting with lubricated joy as the festival was coming to an end. The people would be out until sunrise for sure. Little did I know I wouldn‟t be one of them. We went into a bar that was surprisingly not filled with people but couldn‟t get a drink at the bar when a boy

with a black leather coat and white undershirt secretly told us there was a small, quaint bar in the basement of the place. We slowly walked down stairs with an oncoming low ceiling. It smelled and looked like a wine cellar or a place to store barrels of brown Bourbon- crooked old bricks that turn your ankles into dust like the wicked streets of Montmarte. I looked to my right as I descended into the cellar and there was no one in the tiny barroom except a bartender, who was a midget, leaning over the cash register. He smiled warmly and invited us down with a wave of his hand. “Welcome, welcome, welcome.” “Hey, man. Are you serving down here?” “Absolutely, my friend. What can I get you? I‟m Nick by the way,” he stuck his hand out after propping himself up from the register. I ordered ginger whiskeys and a lager from him. He left the cash register down a series of crates, each one closer to the sticky floor with what I imagine to be the loose liquid of Fireball shots. I could smell the sugary cinnamon. He mixed the drinks under the bar and climbed back up to the register through the shaky crates and rang me up. The girls moved to the other end of the cellar. “It‟s not every night you find an entire bar to yourself, ya know?” I told the guy. “Well, not a lot of people know it‟s down here. It smells like piss and everyone wants to be near other people on 6th which is why they stay upstairs. But it‟s good to have you. Where you from?” “Chicago. You?” “I live in Brooklyn. I‟m a bartender there. A good friend of mine owns this bar”, he pointed upstairs, “and asked if I‟d come help out during the festival. Why not? I wouldn‟t pass up the opportunity to be somewhere warm in March. Plus the music, the girls.” “Yeah. It‟s a wild place right now, huh?” “Sure is. Where you staying?” he asked. “Up near Barton Springs, close to the amphitheater.”

“That could be a hike,” he said as he continued his lean over the register. He smiled after everything he said as if he understood my plight in every nuance of the world. “It very well could,” I said, “but I like it. Especially at night. You‟re sort of forced to contemplate things alone. You‟re in a foreign city, but you find a pattern of streets that take you back to where your sleeping bag is. The sounds are all different. It smells different. You‟re alone. It‟s cool.” “Definitely,” said the bartender. I thought about sitting on the porch where we were staying overlooking Austin and how funny it was that each of us would saunter back at different times. I would see Jeremy buried in his phone walking up jaggedly the circular drive to the porch coming from some adventure downtown. A half hour later Adrian would be next with his arms raised up high walking like some tranquilized Mick Jagger coming from some adventure downtown. An hour after that Harlan and Annie walk up with frozen yogurt and looking tired and clearly done with the whole trip but easy to spend a quiet evening overlooking the sound of happy chaos. After conversing with the bartender I walked across the cellar to where Charlotte and her friends were but not before being detoured by a group of men who were totally okay with touching me and playing with my hair. I hadn‟t seen them come down while talking to I didn‟t want be rude but I decided to be rude and passed through them and got the attention of Charlotte and told her how nice Nick was. I went back to the bar and the girls followed. One of the girls ordered us Fireball shots, which I hated and made entirely clear to the bar. Charlotte and her friends walked back to other side of the cellar and I realized whatever was happening was over. Whatever delusions I had or realizations I had were over. It was done. I walked up to Charlotte and touched her face. She smirked. I wanted to kiss her. I told her. Then I told her I had to go. She said “No, don‟t go. It‟s nothing.” “I know, but we‟re not as interested in each other as people who are interested in each other should be. There‟s too much distance and I must go.” I went upstairs and outside and saw people with other people laughing and arms on waists loony and looping around

the streets. I went back inside and downstairs and asked Charlotte to come with me into the madness of the streets. The point of it all was to be mad, after all. She looked down at the cellar floor and I touched her face once more and darted up into the madness alone, the only way I knew how. I walked up the circular drive at Barton Springs and looked up to see Adrian, Harlan, and Annie on the porch watching me arrive.

“So, it was a gay bar?” asked Berdie at the pub that March night. “Holy shit. It was a gay bar.” My mind flew back and folded on itself and I stared at Berdie for about ten seconds before he burst out lauging. Berdie laughed uncontrollably and I could feel the gyrating of his gut through the high chairs and onto the old wooden floor of the pub to the gold banister where my feet rested. We didn‟t talk for about a half hour, just the consistent laugh of our guts full of Krankshaft. Berdie every so often would rub his eyes, which were red from crying. Harlan and Annie came back from chilly patio that still wasn‟t open for season yet and asked what we were laughing at. “It was a gay bar,” I told Harlan. “Of course it was,” he said with a smirk. “We‟re going home.” Harlan and Annie left to get some much needed rest from a wild trip we had just come back from. “Goodnight, gentlemen,” said Annie also with a smirk as Berdie and I watched them leave shaking our heads in disbelief.

Berdie and I talked about how funny me telling that story was as we trudged through a brutally warm August Bucktown night. We remembered the beads of cold sky that March as cicadas phased at our toe steps on the tree-lined street and the mirror-point of the humming window units

moved us as a moving walkway does toward the pub where everybody we knew was. We had just played a show in Lakeview after unloading all of our gear and dropping off our van at some loud warehouse built by Frank Lloyd Wright a the turn of the century where we had a little room near a loading dock where shells of drums fly in and out. Our room smells like fresh mold and we can‟t organize it because we‟re all artists and need chaos (we don‟t know it yet). All the Algrens and Sandburgs must listen now to what we scream in Frank Lloyd‟s premier building just when he thought the White City was a burgeoning and swollen heart and how easy it was to be well known because you made things, good things, and then Hemingway being born in the creamy town where Frank Lloyd would have homes and every time I think of Oak Park I think of burnt-tan pages of his books and slimy covers, thirty of them, on the bookshelf in the high school classroom of my mother beneath thirty copies of another expatriate and I never knew why until now. So listen now you Nelsons, you Carls, you Ernests, you Terkels, you Steinbergs, you Dybeks, you Kogans, you Kots, while we drive our red steed to apartments and to pubs our voices rasp and wasps sting our throats carrying blood in their rear out of gaping mouths set in stone against street lights with cameras and they watch us and you will listen to us now. “Is Molly coming tonight? I hope Molly‟s coming,” I told Berdie. “She is. She‟ll be here soon. She was at the show but had to take the dog out first.” “I haven‟t seen her in so long. How is she? How are things with her?” “They‟re okay. She has to listen to my shit all day. I feel bad about how much I hate work and she works at the same company. I‟m trying to be better about it. Living with someone is hard.” “Technically, you still live with me,” I said. “True. In any case, Molly‟s the best thing that‟s happened to me.” “I agree.”

We arrived at the pub that August and Sketch was working behind the bar and the rest of the band was in the beer garden at the far end. Berdie and I walked through and patted the backs of the regulars bellied up. The beer garden backs up to the Kennedy and I saw slow moving semis overhead emerging from the streetlamps around the fence that sectioned off the garden. The guys were all very happy to see Berdie as he had been gone to China for a few weeks on business. But Berdie was shaken up and pissed about his trip. He had prepared so deeply for China and was so humbled to be entering into an ancient world. He had all these plans and sights to see but ended up only being able to see the chilled units of five star hotels and the expensive silverware of Hong Kong‟s finest eateries. This was hard travel for an off the beaten path person. His job demanded he spend his trip this way and there was nothing he could do about it but tell us how disillusioned he was with corporate America. “You know what? It‟s just corporate bullshit. The thing about it is I went over there to whip people in line. Did you know that? It was my job to go into these dingy, clearly misevaluated factories and say „Hey, all of you underpaid workers, you have to work harder or else we‟re going to pay you less because we can‟t sell our product for any cheaper so we‟ll just put less money into our production to weigh costs.‟” “You said that?” said Adrian, who was nursing some sort of hard cider in his right hand and his left hand was in his back pocket and was leaning his head against the wooden fence. “Pretty much,” I interrupted. I had heard the story three times already his since he returned from the Orient. I actually enjoyed listening to it again. The more Berdie talked about it, the more he understood what he wanted out of life and it wasn‟t in a company that sends you to do crap like that. I slid to the bar to get a few beers and talked with Sketch and Jimmy Conlon about the show. Jimmy and I clanked glasses and he told me to come to his open mic the next night. He had an earnest mustache that he donned all the time like a Tom Selleck and like a true barfly lived above the pub and danced around the bar every forty five minutes and sat down with another group of people. He knew at least

one person in each group always and people were constantly welcoming him in. He knew thousands of songs and whenever a line from a song would come up in casual conversation like: “I can‟t even read this number you put in my ph-“ Jimmy would then burst in and sing “I can‟t read the number that you just gave me/She‟s living in L.A./With my best old ex-friend Ray” from Operator by Jim Croce. He sang like the hound dog from Fox and Hound. He raised his head high above the group, which wasn‟t hard given his mustachioed face reached a towering six foot four, squinted his eyes and grinned wide and with puckered lips sang the tune as people clapped and gathered around him. He danced in the middle of them a weird cowboy dance with his hand on his hip and clicked his Caterpillar boots on the old wooden floor. He broke the circle of people and continued his dance while walking backwards and pointing at his small audience until he bumped into a new gathering of people and repeated his process. Jimmy knew everyone in Chicago. He knew every musician. He came up with the Smashing Pumpkins and early Wilco crews and had juicy after hours stories about a majority of famous Chicagoans. I‟ve only heard a few of them given how side-tracked he gets if he hears a sentence that vaguely sounds like a lyric. “Jimmy Conlon,” I said pointing behind me as I sat back down in the garden handing Berdie a Krankshaft. “Jimmy fucking Conlon,” said Harlan with a cigarette between his lips. “Oh, thanks,” said Berdie to me quietly, “the thing is, I planned to find some small villages to travel through and drink tea made in backyards or eat whatever was handed to me. I wanted to SEE China, to learn and to be part of them. Instead, I was treated like a privileged American. Our tour guides planned every meal and activity so that it felt like home. I ate turkey sandwiches and drank Coke for lunches. They even had hot dogs and fries for us at one point. You know what we ate for dinners? Steaks. We drove in American cars and spoke English and we didn‟t even drive the cars! We had chauffeurs in black cars take us from our nice, clean hotel rooms to disgusting factories that we inspected in order to find cheaper ways of producing our shitty product line and then back to our nice, clean hotel rooms. The worst part is, none of the people I was with saw what was going on and I couldn‟t look displeased because my boss

was there and I was working. I had no one to turn to. To everyone else, we could have been in Birmingham, Alabama. It was just work. But we were in China. Fucking China! Clearly the next biggest thing this planet see- the America of the twenty second century- and we were completely disrespecting them and their thousands of years of life because we can and that‟s what we do.” We kind of all laughed quietly and so did Berdie. What he was saying was so good it was absurd. We loved absurdity. It made us all laugh. “You‟ll figure this out, brother,” said Adrian. I patted Berdie on the back. In the middle of Berdie‟s diatribe Molly showed up and sat down next to me. “China?” she mouthed to me. “China” I nodded. When she smiles her entire mouth opens and she plays with her right ear lobe. She has strikingly white teeth and is always in a supportive mood. We all sat and talked for a little while longer but I wanted to leave and be somewhere quiet. I was done with all the bars. I think I‟m done with being in bars for now. I got what I needed. We all parted ways except for Harlan and Annie and I who walked to 1841. I realized this would be one of the last times the three of us walked home together as I was moving into a one bedroom at the beginning of September. “Are you going to miss this walk, Andy?” asked Annie very innocently. “Absolutely. I don‟t want to think about it.” Berdie was officially moving in with Molly and I would never be able to afford my apartment all alone even though my bedroom was a closet. “You should just find a new roommate, man,” Harlan said as he and Annie walked down the stairs on the side of the front building that led to their coach house in back. They turned around to hear my response as I fiddled for my keys attached to my belt loop and walked up the stairs that led to the front door of 1841. “Nah. I can‟t live with anyone. I could barely live with Danny Aberdeen. I need my space. I need a place to be me. I need somewhere to wallow.”

“Fair enough. We‟re going to bed. Good show tonight. Stop by Gold Star tomorrow night,” Harlan said as he walked down the corridor between the apartment buildings, his words getting louder as he and Annie neared their door and I heard him fiddle for his keys attached to his belt loop and the patter of their dog coming down to the sidewalk so vivid I could see it in the reflection of my door.

I decided I didn‟t want to go home just yet and I‟d go for a walk and maybe find some food. I walked toward the corner and felt the angels of St. Mary‟s stoic eyes upon me. I felt really terrible for the way I had acted that evening. I was rude to a few people from the stage and had avoided numerous folks after the show. My guilt wore heavy on my face beamed to it from the angels. The morning would be Sunday and it would be good of me to stop home for mass. It was never expected of me, but I know my mother would appreciate it. I remember being punished for waking up late on Sundays. My parents were the musicians for 10:30 mass every Sunday morning from as long back as I can remember. They stopped about twelve years ago and sort of broke social ties with the church for some reason. I‟m still not sure why. Our religion sort of dissipated after 9/11, a lot of people‟s did. But I‟m still an emotionally practicing Catholic. There are a lot of us out there. You‟ll find us sick to our stomachs after socializing and overdrinking and then upset at ourselves for overdrinking and depriving ourselves of smiling for the next two weeks. We are not the voices of a generation because we were never allowed to raise our voices in exaltation and never allowed to get up to urinate during mass and the ones who did were watched by all the congregation whose heads were in tandem creaking around and around while in tandem sitting up and sitting down, kneeling and sitting, kneeling and standing. We are not the most assured and reel at the flicker of an eyebrow from ushers and priests because we were always doing something awry, so we‟re told, and there are groups of us who can recite the Blessed Sacrament in melodic chant and then send messages the next day expressing our distaste in ourselves. As a child, funnily enough, the only way for me to rid myself of the toil and tangledness of my insides was to see a mass all the way through on Sunday mornings and then return home and put my church clothes in the hamper and put on basketball shorts and an oversized t-shirt. That was cleansing to me and that is why I believed so much in God. It was also the farthest away from next Sunday morning

as I could get and part of me felt like I finally deserved to go outside and play basketball and ride my bike because I had sat through what God wanted me to do. I knew that I was too small and childish to know his true nature for me so I took comfort in knowing that I didn‟t know but knowing that by doing what I was told I was able to make my insides feel better and play basketball and be friends with my friends guilt free. (That, and my church clothes smelled like cigarette smoke, bacon, and jam because every Sunday we ate brunch at The Rose after mass with a majority of the rest of the congregation.) Up at the corner I thought I saw people I knew. In a warm embrace under the lamp at Cortland and Hermitage were Harlan and Annie‟s friend Tommy and his French wife Ellie. “Ah! Bonsoir, Pelletier!” Ellie said. She always called me by my last name because she could pronounce it so well. “We were coming to meet you guys at the pub. Did Annie and Harlan retire for the night?” asked Tommy. “They sure did. What are you guys up to?” “Thinking about heading to the lake. Want to join?” I heard voices snickering in French coming out of the pub half block down. The language carried so well through the sound of taxi brakes at the four way stop where we stood. The voices and snickering ascended as two girls raced towards us giggling and skipping. I laughed and pointed. “Do you know them?” I asked the couple. “Ah! Oui! These are my friends from Paris, they are hear for the weekend,” said Ellie. “Hellloooo! Good to meet you. Are you Pelletier? We heard your music.” the girls said. “That‟s me,” I said. “We‟re heading to the lake, my darlings,” said Tommy. “The lake? What is the lake? It‟s far?” said one of the girls.

“The lake is that big thing of water next to all those tall buildings,” Tommy laughed. He pointed in the direction of downtown knowing full well there was no skyline in sight. “Ah! You joke, Tommy. Such a funny man,” said the other girl in a thick Parisian accent. We walked toward the lake. It was a half hour walk at best past the Finkels and dusty red iron bridges. As soon as we could see the skyline I said, “See? The skyline. The water is over there.” The French girls had a bottle of red wine they passed around and I told them I had been to their Paris and they made fun of me for pretending I knew more than I knew, which I was guilty of. I asked them if they liked Chicago. “It‟s nice.” “It‟s more than nice,” I exalted. “Just look.” I pointed to the skyline. “Oh, handsome city. You are such a well-groomed city,” I said as I scurried up a fence around an underpass. To those of you who have never been to this husky city I can assure you we eat the best pork shaped in tubes that snap pig juice all the way to back of your gullet. We shape iron into fire-pokers and pack wheat into train cars kneading America‟s bread into beds for tubes of pork ingested in stadiums under bleachers and out of the storm in packed groups fighting with shoulders brazen and large. I can assure you, French girls, that people say Chicago is evil and now I believe it because I have seen women swoon under fluorescent marquees for boys from the short west, central, and south of Illinois and disobey themselves. People say Chicago is misled and I know because now I have seen its politicians lie and then be free to do lie once more. You just told me that you think Chicago is corrupt. You‟ve heard of its corruption. “You are corrupt,” I say. I ask you to find another city so proud to be a place on Earth. Don‟t mistake our corruption for our cunning, our curses for our courage. We take job after job, drive miles to work in the suburbs to come back to the city. We work like dogs and are fiercely rabid towards the wilderness of an indifferent Midwest. We are constantly rebuilding and consistently rebragging and our pride will surely commit us

to suicide. We laugh like unaware children and we play chess even though we‟ve never played chess and therefore cannot lose. And we love our city so much we never leave because we are native savages and we host awful burdens and destinies and we hate walking because of how stretched out an avenue like Western can become. I can assure you, mademoiselles, the view you see here before you on the lake is unlike any other scape your eyes will fall upon. Do you see? Can you see? Pass that bottle to me for I am indifferent to your failing might. Your output is weak and you have nothing to put out. My love has failed. We sat with our feet dangling above the lake, Tommy and Ellie out to my left and the French girls to my right. We watched heat lighting shock the purple dark clouds out towards the state of Michigan and then overwhelmed and charged the beach and made jokes about World War II because Ellie being from Normandy. They made fun of my American exceptionalism and one of the girls had some old camera and kept snapping pictures of me running barefoot saying “This…is…Pelletier!” all slow and dramatic. I felt like Andy Warhol but I didn‟t want to feel like Andy Warhol, a tragic Catholic. I‟d much rather keep a good diet of eggs, and pigs, coffee beans and the tannin of guilt all fuzzy on my tongue than mock the idea of an America without 9/11 and without Catholicism and the “where were you when it happened?” question. I was in the throws of puberty and I mocked the day with my friends because of how stupid you had to be to fly planes into famous buildings. We are now all post 9/11 artists and generationals and our elders and leaders didn‟t know what to tell us when it happened and our teachers and priests didn‟t have answers and none of us have answers anymore. We‟ve learned to grow older in a wickedly fearful country and to be just okay with everything that‟s thrown in front of us. It‟s not all bad. Our art has changed. It has become more real, more fearful, more honest. We aren‟t afraid to be afraid anymore because we have seen our parents and congressman rile in fear. We are now obsessed with truth. One day, long from now, a group of people will define us as the ones directly after 9/11 and the ones who were ripened by the Great Recession- the ones who had to live with parents and neutered adulthood the moment they entered college. Their misled debts were folded closely like an ironed uniform and then no one knew what they wanted to do

and they thought about it a lot because there weren‟t any jobs to placate the wanton so we are finding things that we want to do and relying less on money, because there isn‟t much. People of my age are moving to making things once again. These things will come in ideas. The textiles will come with an idea, the coffee an idea, the pig an idea. We are now being sold experiences and it is joyous. Do you see it? But, we will only be remembered by the things we make during this time. What a wonderful thought. Art today will be revered when people want to start remembering our age and find it the exaltation of a people caught up without a comb in the split ends of the American dream. “It‟s a lot like New York,” said one of the French girls looking back at Hancock and his small army of buildings surrounding him. “I guess it is,” I said and she snapped forty three photos of me all the way back to North Ave. where I solemnly hopped in cab and went back to 1841.

The next afternoon Berdie called and asked if I wanted to get lunch. I gladly accepted his invitation and he said he‟d be by in a half hour. He walked from Molly‟s and when I felt he was close, I ran out my door and jumped the three stone steps onto the uneven sidewalk and saw Berdie round the corner by the old convent. I saw the Marie‟s bartenders walking disheveled to their cars parked on Hermitage. I wondered if they‟d stayed at Marie‟s all night and were just now bereaved at their evening‟s end. I needed to get a different pair of glasses out of my car so I told Berdie it was just down the block the other way of Marie‟s. It wasn‟t. “Was it here?” Berdie said pointing at a car shaped hole in the succession of parked vehicles. “Yep.” “And now it‟s not?” “Yep.” “So, someone stole it?” “Probably.”

Someone stole my car. It was gone and I‟d never see it again. I had seen it just the night before when getting out of the cab after returning from the lake. But now it was gone, stripped for parts, ran for drugs, backed into the blackness. We called the cops but they wouldn‟t come for another two hours. Harlan came out after hearing the commotion. He was baffled. He had rode with me from the show and saw me park it. He called his friend who was an officer in the area and he came by immediately in a white SUV. There wasn‟t much they could do. There wasn‟t much I could do. There wasn‟t much anyone could do. I couldn‟t eat much that day. I had to work in the evening at the pub. It was a slow night. I played songs from my phone and a crazy guy named Barry came in and told me racy jokes like he did every week. Straight into my mouth he would speak, his white stubble broken up with darker grey and mismatched grey teeth all beneath dusty old glasses. I think he was a carpenter. My dad would have been a carpenter if not for going to a Catholic high school. Barry, I don‟t want anything to do with you. Your jokes reek and swarm like buzzards near the corpse of my material misery. Every time I saw police squad lights race pace the pub I ran towards the swinging front door and watched them blow stop signs all down Cortland hoping they found my car and weren‟t attending to murders and corruption and being corrupt themselves and using their blue lights to run red lights.

1841- where our goal each weekend was to not get drunk enough to want to order Chicago‟s pizza. But as soon as we got a little drunk we wanted Chicago‟s pizza and then our goal was to get drunk enough to order two extra large Chicago‟s pizzas. It was joyous. The way I see t, things will calm down sometime in my 30s. The thing is, they want us to be engulfed in our phones and technology. They give us things to be excited about and things to take photographs of. I want everyone to love all the things I post about and I get obsessed with checking to see how many people like what I‟ve shared with them because it defines me to the rest of the world. All of our backs are against a wall with a glowing beam of selfishness streaming back on our faces and our eyes are wide open and our heads are parallel with the earthen gravel. This is where they want us. They want us in this very position and as soon as every man, woman and baby‟s sweet American face has been strewn about some screen they‟ll start the process of coming for our heads. It has already begun. It‟s in the news. Have you seen? The beautiful thing is, we have the enormous power to stop this beheading using the exact platform they‟ve given us. But they‟ve made possible for us too many things to take photographs of and too many things to brag about that your warning will be lost amongst the zapping pages of the buzzing journals of a stagnant generation. I shaved before I got to Austin.

Western Avenue you are my new home street. You and I will drunkenly tango on your sneakered curbs and I‟ll throw

thimbles nervous. and your your and and all.

into your floozy storm drains when I feel most I will pollute you and your over-wrought length muscly girth with my over-sized couch I left in my alley, it being too big to fit into my new door

Maybe I‟ll have a child sometime soon. I guess I could do that. At least then there‟ll be one part of me that I could love. At least then there‟ll be some part of me someone else could love.

I don‟t know what‟s in store for me. I don‟t know if I‟ll grow old and sad and weird with someone and have norm sad kids that want to create things out of sadness for the greater good of those sadder. But what I do know is that I want to walk around America, drive around America, and see things and talk about them and write about them and sing about them. I want nothing and everything to do with everyone. I just want to be honest with people. I‟m trying to be honest with you. Please just be honest with me.

I really like this a lot brother! I think you‟re most certainly on to something here. I made some notes; feel free to delete them at your will. I think two fantastic lines that should be sprinkled in here for spiritual glue if you will, would be the fraud imagery, and the statement “I want nothing and everything to do with it”. In fact, I l love the latter line so intensely, I think it would make the most excellent of melodramatic resolve to this beautifully dark orchestra you are tuning up; i.e. blah blah blah…”and I want nothing and everything to do with it,” and then the credits roll, the curtain goes down and so on and so forth. And eventually someone will be sweeping up the popcorn. As always, proud of you!