music is so bad right now. It hasn't been this awful since spring 2004.

Two years ago I packed up all the furniture that people through out at the end of college, boxed up my three hundred books and bought a futon for eleven dollars so that I could move to Chicago with Ben, Dave, Farsheed, and Drew.

It was so much fun.

Labels: Chicago

This week I sent only four emails. One was to a well funded magazine to see if they could send me to Cuba before Fidel's 80th birthday. Three were to agents and publishers that have each written me once.

It is infuriating that in the age of blackberries and mobile.gmail.com that people still pretend they haven't checked their email all day.

"Oh sweet, I don't think I've ever had anyone video me..."

My mother used to have a t-shirt that said "Life is uncertain, eat dessert first." So one night Ben and I had these really, really, really, fantastic, fifteen-dollar brownies and then went out to eat sushi in this very dark restaurant.

HELP!

Holy shit! My laptop battery just exploded in my crotch! The PAIN IS UNBEARABLE! AGHH! God, it hurts so bad! I knew I should have done the recall! The plastic battery pack exploded through the metal casing and the shrapnel is sticking into my legs, melting inside of me! Please! Someone IM 911!

Also, I'm about to send this new beginning (I call it the Hardy Boys beginning) and first ten pages to a new agent. Help! *Tell me if anything is unclear, misspelled, wrong or hard to believe/understand.* I want whoever reads this to come directly to my house with a burlap bag of money.

Idaho.
We almost burned down the drive-in last night. Not like anyone cared. No one in Idaho had been there since a movie called “SOUL CR_SH” lit up the marquee years ago. It was a good enough campsite for the night, even if the screen stayed blank. First time this whole trip where we could find any firewood--all thanks to some asshole in a truck who came long before us and mowed down fifty speaker posts. Probably trying to spell his name in a cursive of tire ruts and fallen timber on the mossy gravel lot. The remaining few stood with mouths gaping where there should have been woofers blaring something about the hard life of a Soul Cr_sh.

I left Scott Hampshire back there to sleep. Actually, I left him there forever but he doesn’t know that yet. We’re supposed to be on our way to a summer job at his older sister’s camp in Oregon. But I’m so fed up with him by now that I can’t handle working with him all summer and then driving him back home to Connecticut. My Dad and brother are going to be mad when they find out I didn’t show up for the job. These two think about work the way Mom used to think about church. Before she left us we went every Sunday morning and Wednesday night. Don’t get me started. Christian Science church services are about as much fun as nursing home parties, only there’s no break to take your medicines. Lonely old people go on and on about their intestines and lungs and kidneys. My brother called it the “organ recital.”

I should tell Dad and Conor that I’m not going to this job. They’re both at work right now, so if I leave a message then I won’t have to sit on the phone and get yelled at from someone three years older than me on the other side of the country. I stop at the first gas station I find.

Pluhoooo—
“Hello?” Conor answers our home phone at ten o’clock on a Thursday morning.
“Conor? Why aren’t you at work? It’s—”
“No. My brother is not here right now.” Conor talks right over me and then whispers the word “Reporter.”
“What? No, Conor. Can you hear me a’right?”
Conor keeps talking right into the phone but he’s not saying anything to me. “My brother is in Oregon right now. Or he’s on his way. And I’ll tell you what I told everyone else. I haven’t heard from him since Missouri, and he’s probably camping somewhere out in the Rockies. Obviously I can’t get in touch with him there.”
“Conor? Hello? Anybody home?”
“He is scheduled to be there today. I would love to answer any of your questions, but the police are here and they have a few of their own for me. I’m real sorry.”
“Police? What police?”
“I just want you to know—Sorry, what newspaper did you say you work for?”
“What? Conor. It’s me, Liam. What the f—”
“I just want you to know. There’s. No. Way. My brother. Had anything. To do. With the death. Of Stanley Trout. Okay?”
“Who thinks I killed Trout?”
“One second, officer.” His rough hand scrapes over the holes in the mouthpart. “And there is no way he could have left that message at Trout’s office. My brother is not the type to make Death Threats. Like I said, he’s on a camping trip. To Oregon. I’m sorry, but I have to go right now. And I would appreciate it if you would not call us back today. You can imagine this is hard on all of us.”
My organs finish their recital. Bladder, intestines, kidneys, liver, stomach, lungs, throat, tongue. I land back on Earth. “Are you fucking with me?”
“No. No, I don’t know when Trout’s funeral is planned for. And I think that the best way for my family to respect the memory of that great man would be to let his family have their ceremonies and not worry about us. Okay? Thank you very much, but I will have to—”
Another voice hops on the line. An authority voice. A real one. “Who is this?”
“This is, uh…”
“Speak up! Dammit. Where are you, Liam?” The sound of my own name hits me in the chest and stalls my heart.
I hold the phone with my hand and try to fake like I’m an old man. But with a stalled heart it just comes out all high and girly. I go with it anyway. “Sir. Where I come from a lady is not spoken to in such a may-nor.”
“Who is this?”
“Who is this?” I give it a breathy, phone sex lilt.
“This is Officer Fitzpatrick.”
“This is,” I check the papers on the rack by the phone.
“This is Marsha McKinley cawlin’ from The…Spokesman Review.”
“The what?”
"Our sources tell us that death threats w’made to Mistah Trout from a neahby county in Eye-daho.”
“What sources? How do you know that?”
“Now now, Mistah Fitzpatrick. A lady never tells.”
“Look, Ma’am, I’m sorry. I cannot reveal any information at this time.”
“Well, do you have a motive? It’s the fifth dubya you know? Whh-eye, Mistah Fitzpatrick, why?”
“We dunno. Something about soup.”
“Soup?”
“Ma’am. I’m sorry. We may know more when we find the Jew—the other boy. He’s off with his band somewhere. And he can’t be reached at all. It’s part of their—look, ma’am. We’re very busy. I’m sorry I—”
“No, I undahstand. Kindly catch that killah for me, will ya? Then maybe I’ll have a story to write. About you.” As my heart sputters back into gear I start to lose my phone sex voice.
“I’ll do my best, ma’am. Thank you.”
“No, no, thank you.” I slam the phone down and hide across the street at a donut shop, sweating. Did anyone see me? Can they trace calls? I run into the bathroom and wash my hands for ten minutes.


Connecticut
Chapter 2.
You might as well know that I never had any reason to talk to Scott Hampshire until nine months ago, when I overheard him trying to talk my friend Carl into working with him at some summer camp out in Oregon. We sat at the counter of a diner near the bomb factory in town while Hampshire scooted around the whole place getting the second shift workers their ten PM lunch break. Carl’s parents had bought him a brand new car for his birthday or for what seemed to be a second bar mitzvah for some of the new kids in town. He was used to getting indescent ride proposals. I had a car too but you wouldn’t want a ride. My brother brought it back from the dead for me as a birthday present. And like my brother the car was three years older than me, greasy, and unreliable.
Hampshire didn’t like the other factory kids very much. And we sure didn’t like him. His Dad moved up and up at the factory over the years and now he’s designing some kind of bomb that can explode without fire or something. His mom works for this creepy guy named Stanley Trout. She’s one of his real estate sluts, always smiling into the phone and being really, really enthusiastic. They put Hampshire’s two sisters through college out west and they never came back. Wonder why.
Carl’s parents bought one of these palaces from Hampshire’s mom on the other side of town. It didn’t used to be the other side of town. It used to be woods and fields out there, but now behind the old barns the farmers have learned to grow houses where corn and cattle once bloomed. The developers hurry to clear the trees got in the way of the bigger hurry to grow them again. And the trunks of pines stand chopped on one side, exhausted from the hope of growing back their arms. Now young maple trees stand awkward, shivering alone in the middle of acre-wide lawns with their branches chained to the ground as if they might otherwise escape.
Stanley Trout’s company put up the new houses and the new super market and a newer super store with super savings. And I can’t be the first one to notice how super our lives had become out here without getting any better.
Hampshire is one of those kids with a third eye inside his mouth. Whenever he had to think hard or listen to someone you could almost see it. Slowly his jaw goes slack so that his third eye could peek out, take it all in, and explain it to the rest of him. To focus all three eyes he has to keep his mouth and eyelids half open. He worked the counter over at the only diner in town. People always thought he must be stupid to stare at you like his jaw needed a tune up.
Until right then I don’t think I had ever thought of Oregon. Washington yes; California of course. But never the middle child. I knew where it was, what it was and how to find it. And most importantly I knew that getting there would take long enough for me to stop in on some of Mom’s relatives. Dad and Conor—but mostly Conor—never let me go very far from home since Mom left us.
“So here’s what I’m thinking, Carl” Hampshire finished drawing an outline of the country on a placemat. “I could get you a job at my sister’s summer camp and we could take your car, right? We can leave from my house at four in the morning.”
“Strawberry-Rhubarb?” Carl squinted at the short menu and ignored Hampshire’s lame lame attempt to catch a ride to the Pacific. “That can’t be good. Is that good? Tell me it’s not good.”
“You want a piece of pie? I can give you a piece of pie,” Hampshire said. “I got a lot of pie here.”
“If we can grow strawberries all year in California, we can grow rhubarb all year in California. So if I’ve never heard of it, it can’t be that great.”
“Not to interrupt,” I said. “But hat’s what you said about Maple Sugar Candy and Chocolate Chip Pancakes when you moved here.”
“That’s what I was trying to think of,” he turns to the counter. “Forget the pie. Gimme those pancakes I got last time.”
“If I hear one word about your sugar hangover tomorrow, I’m cutting you off for good. Fucken pancakoholic,” I said to Carl.
“Right, cause I’m addicted to pancakohol?” Carl smirked into his glass of water and looked down at some papers.
“What are you working on?” I asked.
“School Newspaper.”
“I thought you wanted to be a doctor,” I said.
“I do. But I want to get into a good college. So I’m on the paper. You should come sometime,” Carl put down his water glass. “Everyone else on staff is really boring.”
“Weleavefrommyhouseatfourinthemorning,” Hampshire slammed the crude map over Carl’s placemat. “We pack the car that day and drive to Rhode Island. Find a boat launch where there aren’t any fisherman and back the car in so that the rear tires soak up some of the Atlantic before we blast off. Straight for highway eighty, straight to California.”
He makes everything sound so organized and important. I like the idea of the early hours and the urgency. Back the tires in—Dip! Dip!—and take off—Zoom! Zoom!
“We pull all nighters for two days,” he said. “We live on coke and crackers and sleep in shifts like…like truckers carrying really important medicine,” my eyes widened.
“And we’ll get to Cali around sunset on the second day.” California, deargodyes, California. I’ll sit on the beach. Maybe get a peach and take a nap in the cool sand. I didn’t want to see movie stars. I didn’t want to see LA. I don’t want to see cars and driveways. I just wanted to face west and know that I couldn’t get farther away from here unless I had a passport and a warm jacket. I just want to swim with dolphins and camp on the beach. “Find another boat launch and dip the tires in, Carl.” Dip! Dip! “Then we could visit your old friends for a few days. We don’t have to get to the camp until the fourth of July. Maybe you could introduce me to a few California girls and we’ll…y’know…chill.”
“California,” I just liked saying it. Californnnnia. Califfffffornia. Who named that? The Spanish? Dios Mio. I love those names. In New England they stole the names from the people they stole the land from. Awkward, unspellable syllables taken from bad translations. But out west. Sannn Diego. Pal-o Alt-o. Sannn Franciiiisgo. Portland.
Hampshire ran over to a table of second shift workers on their ten o’clock lunchbreak. The fuse guys always fill about an ashtray a piece. You can imagine they have a zero-tolerance policy for smoking in the fuse wing. He came back with our plates.
“This always happens,” Carl sneered at his plate so that he didn’t have to tell Hampshire no. Carl’s parents could probably buy him this diner if he wanted it. But like any seventeen year old, he would love to get the food for free. “Now I wish I got pie.”
“You want pie?” Hampshire smiled. “I can get you pie.”
“They got dolphins in California?” I asked Carl.
“Not anymore,” Carl drowned his stack in syrup. “Unless you get some shitty tuna.”
“What’s your problem? I’m giving you one instant fantastic summer here. I’ll get you a job and set it all up and you can even see your friends. I’ll even get you a piece of pie if you want it.”
“First of all, maybe I know a few things you do not,” Carl said. “Do you know how long it takes to fly to California? Nine hours. And that’s just from New York. The moving van took a week to get here.”
Hampshire strapped on his mother’s face of fake concern. “I sure hope you family wasn’t over charged, Carl.”
“A plane travels at three hundred miles per hour,” Carl grabbed the ketchup bottle and squirted a line from one corner to the other on Hampshire’s map. “So even if you do sixty, all the way, averaging in all of your stops for gas, pissing, and doing whatever it’ll take you…” his eyes danced around the top of his head, checking the math on an imaginary blackboard. “Forty-five hours, which means…you’ll get there at three in the morning in your perfect schedule, which is eleven at night in California.”
“Okay, so say we get there at eleven and wake up the next morning at one of your friends’ houses and finish out the trip. Won’t that be fun? You see your friends, I see my sister. We make some money and come back in time to go to college.”
“That’s assuming we somehow build a highway that is a perfectly straight line from New York to San Francisco, and that we can get on to it somewhere in Rhode Island.” Carl went back to his pancakes. Hampshire put the pie away.
“I can drive you,” I said. “Us.”
“You have a car?” Hampshire said.
“I have a great car. And my brother’s a mechanic so we don’t have to worry about breaking down or getting stuck anywhere. He taught me tons of ways to fix it. Plus I got cousins we can stay with along the way if you want. Chicago, Seattle, Missouri. Maybe we can go to California on the way home if you want.” I said.
I didn’t care about this camp whatsoever. But my Mom’s waiting out there for me somewhere. I really have no idea where, but she’s got family all over. Family we don’t talk to much. Family that has a fold out couch and photo albums just waiting for me. Hampshire’s sister’s camp is somewhere near Portland in Oregon, which means I can call Mom’s brother in Missouri on the way and her cousins all over the west. And my gay Uncle in Seattle. He got disowned, but I bet he still gets her Christmas cards.
Hampshire’s third eye stared at no one in particular as the wheels in his head cranked out the stops he could make along the way. All the places we could go. “I never been much of anywhere,” I added. “So I don’t mind if we stop a bunch on the way out there.”
“I don’t know,” Hampshire squeezed his third eye shut. “It sounds like fun, but that’s a lot for one summer.” Scott Hampshire may be the one guy my age whose eyes didn’t sparkle when you talk about highways and no rules and girls and timezones.
Just then Chuck Micks hooted out for Hampshire from a table down by the fuse guys. “Hampster!” Micks smiled in perfect proportion to the growing frown on Hampshire’s face as he said that dreaded nickname. “Hey Hampster, yer a smart guy—help me out here. My girlfriend sent away and got a star named after us. Do you know how I can find it? I mean, like you know where the stars are?”
“There is an infinite amount,” Hampshire said. “But we can only see a few thousand of them from here. In fact, the one she got you may only be the light from a star that burned out millions of years ago. And it’s just now getting to us.”
“You mean they just burn out?” Micks asked.
“A few do. But most of them just go into a supernova and explode.”
Everyones eyes got wider over at Micks’ table. “So if AlphaJennyLovesMicks exploded right now would we be able to hear it even if we couldn’t see it?”
“Actually, no.” Hampshire said. “For many reasons, no. But no matter what we wouldn’t be able to hear it because there is no sound in space. Space is a vacuum.” Hampshire went back to working on Carl. “Think about it, okay?”
“A vacuum?” Micks shouted. “Like a vacuum cleaner? But isn’t that loud?”
Hampshire couldn’t even start to finish his sentence again. We just sat there, before he turned to me and said, for the first time, something we both realized at birth. “If you have a car, I have a job and that’s good enough. We gotta get out of this place.”

Labels: Chicago

BLING Bing bong

A cellphone went off as I saw Elvis Costello perform tonight with a full symphony. He ignored it at first, figuring the embarassed person would make it disapeart. The song had just begin and the symphony was doing that tention building thing where every member plays one not softly when--

BLING Bing bong

The phone rang again to the disbelief of Philharmaniacs everywhere. Elvis turned his back as he directed the symphony and waited for that one perfect moment to begin amid the cricket-thin whispered notes that followed his every movement and then he turned to--

BLING Bing bong

the audience who were all embarassed to represent Brooklyn. Because we have our own opera house but we still would rather hear the sound of our own cellphone as it cries deep inside our ratty purses and sing. BLING Bing bong

"At least," Elvis whispered into the microphone amid his classically trained crickets. "At least it's on key."

Labels: Elvis Costello

On of the main reasons that the slow, grinding pain of my life slipping doesn't bother me is that I turned 22 a week before college graduation. Being 23 just feels like college was something that happened earlier this year. I couldn't have less to do with the life I had back then, but it's a nice thing to keep in mind when you wake up at noon on a weekday, throw on your sneakers and try and find something to do before work.

The people who have the same job as I are 29, 35, 37 and 52. So they don't care. After DJ'ing last week they poured me a full beer as they paid me. Without looking I swatted the pint glass. It spilt straight down the bar and people had to pick up their purses and change beer napkins.

The next week I apologized again, telling the bartender that I've had a rough couple of weeks and that my agent appears to be playing hard to get. He asked me how old I am and when I told him he said--to my surprise because everyone in New York looks like they're 26--"I'm a 38-year-old train camera operator and I'm still working here. So I think you have some time."