Scott Hampshire’s infinite persuasion skills talked me into getting a drink with him at the Fuse Box. Normally under these conditions I would abstain. I have this rare disease that pops up only when I drink. My tongue flares up as soon as I taste the alcohol and it won’t stop until I’ve called several ex girlfriends and told them how I feel about them.
My phone has names organized to prevent this. Ex friends and girlfriends get listed as, for example, “X.Sherry Leworski.” This disease causes just enough mental disconfiguration to keep me from remembering where I hid the numbers. I also learned to keep my work friends and bosses hidden as in “W. Jane ala Accounting” so that I don’t call Jane from accounting at three in the morning just to thank her for giving me a ride that one time or ask her what she’s wearing. Many of these people confront my disease with tough love as though I needed to be quarantined until it passed over, like I’ve got scarlet fever or something. Truly a shame. Sometimes the only ex-relationships that work are those where the girl catches the disease from me. We’ll both go to the phone at the same time and while it’s ringing we’ll find someone on the other line. When in a committed relationship I find it handy to change that girls name to, for example, “+Sherry+” that way she sits on top of your phone list. That way when I have an attack late at night I don’t call someone else and do something stupid, thus changing a happy “+” into an pissed off “X.”
This disease makes it impossible for me to keep friends named “Aaron” unless Aaron has the opposite reaction to alcohol and passes out in the front seat of his car. Anyway. The Fuse Box is a total man-hole. I can’t believe anyone has every met a girl there and fostered a happy relationship where the can even make it to “+” status. It looks like how a twelve year old boy would design the perfect basement. TVs on every wall play the local games, the big games, and classic games from days gone by. Wall to wall Astroturf carpeting, with the 50 yard line at the door and the end zone in the bathroom line. Three video games. In one you have two giant orange rifles and you can go head to head against other dudes in a game where you honestly hunt deer as they hop through a forest. You lose points for shooting a doe. In the second one you put in money to win hypothetical money playing video poker. There’s no jackpot, but on the final level you can play strip poker against pictures of strippers wearing paper doll clothes. One time Conor got thrown out for playing back.
In the third game you drive a car through video recreations of various cities, with the goal in mind of racing through downtowns across the country. You can drive all sorts of things: school busses, hummers, race cars, Italian sportsters, etc. I’ll have to alert the Nobel Prize committee about the geniuses who put a game in a bar that tests if you’re okay to drive.
You would never know that this American dream of a town has room for a place like this. And it doesn’t. You’ll find it hidden in the back parking lot of the post-fascist Italo-storefront of the giant Antonio’s Pizzaria, where an a-frame “A” marks the spot. In back the furtive vans of every moving company, plumber and landscaper roost for the night sometimes. I can’t imagine how many guys have gotten canned because they drove a work truck they shouldn’tve or left one back there overnight.
The walls and the Astroturf smell like twenty years of missed passes.
Automatic cat food machines sit on the edges of the bar, full of chex mix, waiting for gravity to refill the bowl as the next drunken hand swoops in for a pretzel. “I always go for the top,” Hampshire says as he lifts the lid and reaches in. “Fewer gross hands, but you don’t really get many peanuts this way.”
I just think of Conor. His local. He must have spent every Friday/paycheck at this bar with his buddies. Everyone is Conor’s friend inside the bar. Young dudes, old guys, married couples who for some reason can’t buy their Amstel Lights in the grocery store. They go on an on with each other until Conor walks over and then they probably exchanged aphorisms about the nature of work and relationships. The kind of things you might learn if you went to a bait shop and studied all the bumperstickers. Even though they all agree that work sucks they have pride in their employment and regale each other with thrilling tales of roofing and three hundred square foot tarps and nail gun injuries. Conor has never built anything that works, but you will find him in the middle of them all discussing building codes and the high price of PVC pipe right along with them. He has that superpower that comes from drinking Rumplemintz and Budlights. Dad really started to put himself back together once Conor turned twenty-one. The two of them, on the barstools. Conor with the bottle and Dad next to him, pounding Sharp’s Non-Alcoholics. And Conor there with his parishioners joking that his Dad starts NA tomorrow. Non-alcoholics anonymous.
“You can buy me a Heineken and a tequilla and I’ll forgive you for leaving me to die in an Idaho drive-in,” Hampshire smirks at his joke/the TV with subtitles.
“Look, you’re not the one who had to deal with the bad stove all summer.” I still have some money left over from being offended by test advertising. I was saving up for a condo or an education or a new car or a big romantic vacation. But it’s been so long I forgot I was waiting.
Some girl with nutrasweet-blonde hair and Lee Press-on Claws looks over to me and gives me the silent “one second wink” of busy bartenders and strippers. “Watch out for that girl, man. She swallows.”
“I keep hearing that’s a good thing.”
“No I mean she swallows men whole and spits them out. Charlene Cunningham. Those six guys at the bar are probably drinking away the pain from what she did to—Hi, Charlene! What’s going on, girl? I haven’t seen you in forever.” Hampshire does the two-faced about-face that I’ve never seen a grown man master before.
“Liam!” Charlene screams past him and holds her claws over her mouth in disbelief. “Liam Boycott I haven’t seen you in years, remember me? Charlene from the Christian Science Preschool? What brings you back to town?”
Hampshire leans over, “His brother is missing in Iraq.”
Okay, as soon as I figure out something better to say, I’m going to have to make sure to spread it around.
Charlene looks like she’s about to cry. And then she does. “When did this happen? Have you heard anything?” She really just collapses right there. And if they didn’t have five sports games going and another bartender on I wonder if anyone would notice. Through her teary mouth she shouts, “My cousin’s in the Navy and we’ll get those guys and make them pay!”
Since it’s the thought that counts, I won’t worry about what aircraft carrier she thinks he’ll plow up to Baghdad. “Thanks. I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”
“He was just such a good guy. Why’d it have to be someone like him, you know?” She shouts over the jukebox. “Always coming in here, smiling. Nice to everyone. Good tipper. Always full of stories and jokes.”
It hits me, maybe for the first time right then. Conor might never come home. I didn’t even get to say goodbye when he left for Iraq. Now I may never know what happened to him. Ever. With Charlene crying it just all makes sense to me too fast. And before I know it tears start running down my chin. “I miss him so much,” I say to Charlene. “I can’t believe it sometimes. I mean, Why? Why did it have to be my brother?”
She leans over the bar to give me a big soggy hug. And thank God, because my face is red and I don’t know these people well enough to sob. I hide my tears in the blonde mane that still smells like shampoos. Everyone at the bar freezes with their lips halfway to the bottleneck, staring. Of course it doesn’t help that Charlene’s blue thong triangle sticks halfway out of her pants when she leans over. “Let’s think positive, Liam! They’re going to find him and bring him home. Cheer up. Lemme buy you and your friend a drink, okay? What’ll it be?”
“I’ll have a Heineken and a shot of Patron,” Hampshire swoops in on Conor’s wake as if he were just waiting in line. “You?”
“Uhm, an Anchor Steam and a Bulleit Bourbon—no!” I stop her as she leans over the beer fridge. “No, I want to drink to my brother. Give me a Bud light and a shot of Rumplemintz.”
She pulls three glasses out of some green colored water in the tepid sink and lines them up on the rail. Charlene grabs the one closest to her and raises it with us. “Okay boys, this one’s for Peter,” she turns to the boys on the bar. “Raise it up! This one’s for Peter!” She presses her lips to the glass and leaves a lipstick remark behind as she slams it down on the bar, upside down. “Woo!”
I let it go because she definitely suffers some kind of cirrhosis of the brain.
But Hampshire, journalist of record, leans right in and edits her sentence before he even gives the shot glass back. “It’s Conor,” Hampshire points a lazy finger at Charlene.
“Nice to meet you, Conor,” Charlene shakes his outstretched pointer finger. “Charlene.”
“No, I mean his brother’s name is Conor.”
“Then why have we always called him Liam?”
“No, Liam’s brother’s name is Conor. No Peter.”
Charlene turns to me as if I might have anything to add. “You’re Peter Boycott’s older brother, right?”
“No, sorry. I’m Conor Boycott’s younger brother. Peter Boycott is just some kid we went to Sunday school with. No relation. Same Irish last name. What are the odds, huh?”
“So Peter’s okay? He’s alive?”
“As far as I know.”
“Oh, thank god,” Charlene does that lower eyelid-squeegee thing to protect her makeup. “I just saw him, like, yesterday.”

Labels: Novel, One time I wrote a novel about that

It may have been a perfect day to read, kinda grey, kinda gloomy and a little bit rainy, (ok, maybe MY idea of a perfect day to read)
but I got into it right away. (I'm gonna try to write this objectively and not say things that'll make me sound like a goddam idiot and will make you think that I'm just saying good things because you're my friend or whatever, because i wouldn't..) (did I mention Im stoned whilst writing this?) Anyways, so I got into it right away. I was really excited that your Liam reminded me of my Liam very little, so I could root for him. What can I say, kid, I really loved it. It's funny in the way that real life is funny when you think about it all the time. It's got a really nice beat, the way it changes from perspective, and his subconscious and the present and the past and everything else. It's smart. It made me smile and laugh and say OMG!,but the true measure of "reader response" (see how I'm making this objective and professional?) was the part where Liam's at the bar and breaks down to the bartender. I mean, in the span of like three paragraphs I went from tears welling up in my eyes to fucking
laughing heartily about what happened right after. How often does that happen? The answer is almost never. I loved your way of describing thesuburban semi-bleakness that surrounded him (not that it was bleak before, but now it is, and you get what I mean). So I guess that in terms of creating this environment and the characters, you nailed it and I can totally imagine the kinds of people that inhabit this Connecticut of yours.

As for the plot, I really wanted to find out a bit more about Conor, and his relationship with Liam. I also thought that Hampshire was going to totally be the key to unlock mysteries (not in a, "Well, he'll surely know where the brother is! And he'll use his journalist skills to find the mom after all these years! Then they'll go on Oprah! They'll get a car!" cause I'm not expecting it to have a(n)
entirely) happy ending where all the problems get solved and everyone lives happily ever after because that's not the way that real life is, and even though there's a slightly fantastic side to it, I think it's about real life. I'd be hella disappointed if everyone had babies at the end and ate a big thanksgiving turkey together) but it seemed like he was gonna have some information to help Liam put two and two together or something. And of course I wanted to know more about Naomi and Liam together, because their coming together was so organic in a way, that you just know they'd get along great and something very compelling would come out of it, like one of those "Top 5 Breakup" scenes in High Fidelity but not the same at all, also because it wouldn't be about breakups. (Ew, was that an insensitive thing to do? Bring up another book or something? Anyways, I only saw the movie, never read the book, so if you want you can dismiss my previous
statement) but in any case, you should know what I meant, which would make the previous parentheses party completely moot. The Cara character was cool even if their interactions were a little confusing and I see them as just constantly bickering with each other, but you know at the end its not that bad (which is probably why I LOVED the last chapter you sent me, because it had everything I was left wanting after finishing it the first time). The sexy scene was great, not cheesy or porn-y just cool and sensual and intimate and like the memorable times in real life. (Does it bother you that I keep saying real life? It's just the best way to describe it, not real life in a humdrum kind of way, just, R E A L.) I loved the bit about their code, and the whole "why-you-say-someone else's-name-when-they're-right-there-thing." It made me smile and sigh and think of lovers past, which was nice. (kind of sort of)

Furthermore, inspired by that section of the Best American Non-Required Reading book that was all about the best first lines of a book or whatever, I took some time to look at the first line as its own entity and you know what? It's a great first line. I'd definitely be curious about the story if I was handed just that as a teaser. The first sentence tells a little story and also gives a hint of who Liam is, away; I mean, who'd say something like that? I immediately knew that I would like him upon reading it.

And now a bunch of random thoughts:
1) I really like the name Sherry Leworski. I can imagine her as that perfect girl in high school, but not like a Heather. Sometimes I hear Steve Perry in the background singing "Oh Sherrie" when she comes in, but that's a good thing too, I think (and not at all your fault).
2) We never found out what the crap Alan wanted with Liam (Although when I read it the second time, I thought that maybe whatever that thing Alan said when Liam opened the door to which Liam responded "sorry your band broke up" or whatever, was actually something Iraq related that had to do with Conor? which would be freaking awesome.)
3) The Andes don't reach Brazil, (they're on the Western part of South America) so they can't have that kind of wood at the coffee shop (unless you're saying it making fun of it, like "Look at these retards and their Andean wood that isn't even fucking real in which case you might want to make that a bit more clear).
4) Not that I need Liam and "Her's" entire relationship retold, but a bit more background about that would be awesome.
5) Professional Demographic? FUCKING LOVE THAT CONCEPT!

In general, you have a really really good shell to build on. I mean, it's not even finished, but I fell a bit in love with it nonetheless. I don't know if you've been writing this in order or if you just have the basic plot line laid out and fill in the blanks when you feel like it, but it seems like there's a lot of great possible developments that don't end up er.. developing. There were tons of memorable lines that I won't list here or anything, but that I did underline and mark
in there with a green Prismacolor pencil but not a red pen. But I can show you my (haha, yes, MY copy) copy of the manuscript if you want to see what all that little stuff was. (And also, fucking LOVED the binding/cover!)

It really is great Brendan, I want to read the rest and know what happens to everyone and if today is any indication, all the kids in it, stayed in my mind with me and I started thinking about them outside of the book situation, which could be a little weird, I guess, but it was just oddly comfortable.

Also, you already know that I have a problem with prepositions but I also have a problem with run-on sentences, I'm too shizo for regular ones and I like the way the run-on ones sound better. I hope this didn't drive you totally crazy. It was an honor to have you let me read it, thank you.

When You Were Young (Jacque Lu Cont’s Thin White Duke Radio Edit) - mp3

Labels: Brandon Flowers, Novel

Man, i can't wait for whatever takes over after Myspace.

Labels: Novel

Thank you, Jackie, for calling me every morning at 730 to start writing. If you want, I'll name a character after you.

Labels: Brandon Flowers, Vonnegut

MP3: The Rapture - W.A.Y.U.H (Claude VonStroke Pantydropper Vocal Mix)

Labels: Chicago

As much as I've given up on judging people for their music tastes i still have this:
Do you go to 'shows' or 'concerts?'

Labels: Chicago

Even when I left to find mom I thought I'd come back. I thought I would drive home like a champion hunter with my mother bound at the wrist and ankles, tied to the hood of the car.

I would move to this little college town in Massachusetts where the love of my young life would let her brain re-incubate for four years of Pre-Lawyer classes and I would occasionally visit my loving family, forty-five minutes away in Connecticut. But then—and I still don’t know how this happened—somehow this little over-achiever decided that she should go off to college all by herself. My little heart wrapped itself into the world’s smallest ball of twine. That was also the day that I learned that when girls say they need some “alone time” they might forget to add “with someone else.”

Anyway, that’s one pizza I wish I hadn’t delivered.

Young, blossoming, hundred-and-ten-percenter Sherry Leworski. Beautiful, sweet, polite girl. The kind who introduces herself on every phone call. A girl who baked cookies for all of her teachers’ birthdays. Who wrote her college entrance essay about why her best friend is the best. That girl. That girl right there. In the corner of some parents-out-of-town party, giving some other guy a hundred-and-ten-percent.

Oh, Sherry. Three pizza places in town and your over-achieving, college-sweatshirt wearing resume-conscious friends had to call mine. I don’t blame you. By the looks of what I saw, you were far too busy to even know they even ordered pizza.

Like a child’s balloon at the carnival, I was let go. By Sherry first, but by everyone else stood by. Maybe it was an accident, but there’s only so long you can hold on to something tugging at your wrist. And for the first few seconds maybe someone tried to catch me, swiping at my string. People standing by could only watch as I floated above their heads, one foot out of reach. Someone could have saved me. For one full minute everyone stared at my slow, gracious flight. Grey sky, red balloon. Total strangers caught sight of it leaving and paused just to watch me go. Even Alan, the twenty-one year old junior class drop-out stopped strangling kittens for a moment to watch. Because off in the sky, programmed only to fly, it could be any one of us. Sherry, the child who let me go in the first place, wailed as if this logical thing wouldn’t happen if she didn’t want it to. But I floated up and away. And the total strangers warned each other not to mess with balloon strings. As I shrank into the sky and blew out west with a seabreeze, they went back to their melting ice cream cones and dialing new cell phones.

Me? I soared higher and higher, until the people in the carnival looked like one big spreading disease. A cool wind took me and—if you could find the right song—my red balloon would’ve made a great coke commercial. But as I neared the pacific the pressure got to me. My thin skin leaked and I landed in the ocean, where I clogged the blow-hole of some near-extinct whale. It beached itself and tried to exhale me. But with its near-extinct lungs it could only sit there in front of bewildered tourists and people who love the Discovery Channel, not blowing me out but sounding more like a child imitating an elephant. And the local authorities could think of no solution but dynamite—I’m not making this up. Ask the Internet. As its lungs exploded I was shot out with a whoopee-cushion’s zeal, onto the beach at the edge of a desert.

Oh, Sherry Leworski. Tie the next one around your wrist.

Labels: Novel

The older I get the more I like any bar where the music I love is playing too loud for you to hear me screaming along.