I have never been fishing
It's Friday today.
My apartment is a little messy, not too bad, not as bad as when I got back from San Francisco the Monday before last. My bags are still on the floor, but all the clothes that were inside them have been washed and put away. There is still space on the floor in the middle of my living room, and all the dishes are clean except the mug I used last Wednesday. There are crumbs on this table, but my drafting board is free of dust.
I've been exhausted. Something is happening with my capacity to write for school. I fear it is disappearing. I've always been one to procrastinate, but complete and utter failure to deliver final papers, ever, is not something I suffer from, or at least it wasn't until a year or two ago. So I'm taking all studio classes this semester, to try and knock myself out of the habit. I'm good at making final projects (although it is true that I rarely finish them on time - a consequence of being an ambitious perfectionist). I'm in three film classes, so I can make the same final piece for each, but it has to fulfill all the requirements of three finals instead of just one. I'm also in an artist's book class, which is turning out to be my favorite class, I think - not because I've been making any powerful, conceptual, insightful artistic works, but because the course is technique based. And the skills we're being taught are my favorite kind: finicky, repetitive, dependent on dexterity and exact adherence to measurement and process, and resultant in beautiful functional objects, pleasurably tactile. I spend too much money on paper. And my accumulation of finished, empty books is alarming in a sense of material space. But I rarely have to complete work out of class, and time spent in class is meditative, soothing my compulsive ticks and itches.
I am spent, spending money on film, ridiculous amounts on film, and paper, and ink and bristol board and glue and wax and thread and last week a hundred dollar fine at the Media Center, and sometimes food. I've forgotten what it is to buy clothing, though I've always preferred to make my own and my collection of fabric rivals my collection of sundry mark-making utensils, and was, for the most part, acquired for free. Thank goodness I have custody of Mandy's aunt's sewing machine (shhh, don't remind her) even if she got custody of our cats. I am spending time, but I've always been on that list, the one they keep at the sleep bank, the roster of customers with terrible credit. My fifth class is a comics class. I like it very much, mostly because I enjoy the company of funny little Jeremy Tinder, who spends the day moseying around the room to talk to people about pop culture nostalgia (or in my case, personal stories of the unusual or entertaining, eg. anything about my family, spiritual upbringing, or general life events) and sitting at his laptop, projecting across the wide concrete room, through the dust and pigment in the air and the spiny backbones of filthy, janky easels, leaning heavily on the bent metal tubing of their back legs, like hungover phasmotodea in a petrified forest, videos of car crashes on YouTube. But I draw slowly, and I find myself lagging behind the on-task trolly, pedaling furiously on my plastic tricycle.
It is energy too, my expenses, there is no budgeting for human interaction. There is only holing up by yourself and then getting hassled by your friends. And how much I want to help! How much I want to be there, to listen, to collaborate, attend the inductions of inside jokes into the language of shit shooting. Parties, films, concerts, barbecues -
%
Wednesday night I didn't sleep. I spent all night working on a one page comic about myself turning into a werewolf and then getting my period; at noon I got on the bus and tried to read an essay by Bazin on plastics and montage in the language of cinema, but stared out the window instead. I got to class twenty minutes late and missed the first film David Gatten had screened in his visiting artist's presentation to the class, but I caught the discussion and the three other films he showed and discussed. He was wearing a thin white t-shirt with torn cap sleeves, overalls, and a very nice black vest. David Gatten has a big square beard that juts out in a clean -45 degree angle from his chin, long limp hair just down to the nape of his neck, greying and thinned, and glasses with rectangular rims. He speaks kindly and respectfully, and is excited by opportunities to talk about his work, which he does honestly, with a thoughtfulness that is concise. After he left the class I successfully led a discussion on the Bazin essay, somehow, and then Michelle, my darling teacher, demonstrated to me after the class had dispersed the mechanics of the Bell & Howard 16mm projector. It sits in the projection booth in the back of the room and steams, and hisses, and rumbles. It is full of beautiful silver gears and sprocket wheels. There are chips of ruby lining the aperture plate.
We found some film to practice with and I projected an interview with a psychiatrist in an office with an orange color scheme, upside down and backwards, satanic messages being revealed in his reversed speech and the glint in the lenses of his giant glasses.
There is a ballroom in 112 S. Michigan Avenue, the Sullivan Center, more commonly known as 'the Michigan building', on the second floor. The original architecture and interior design have been meticulously reconstructed from photographs and documentation by the Historical Renovation department of the School. The chandeliers are gigantic and they look like beehives full of light, slashed up and down by decorative iron curlicues. There is red velvet and wallpaper all covering everything, and a large checked tile floor, marble pillars and a scalloped balcony, gold paint on wooden trim in spiral and leaf relief on the walls, near the floor, and near the ceiling. The windows look out over Michigan Avenue and the Art Institute across the street. Between the two buildings runs a gaseous torrent of automobiles. There were folding tables in the ballroom yesterday, with two large fake crystal bowls full of clumping hummus, a black plastic tub of slightly chilled pita bread cut into wedges, a dish of cookies, sugar and chocolate chip, and a collection of heavy plastic towers holding liquids labeled 'fruit punch', 'lemonade', and 'cold water' sitting next to a stack of translucent plastic cups. About thirty to forty students and faculty were milling around and sitting at large round collapsable tables, watching Kasper Hauser, a rock band with slight country influence, playing the kind of solid music I respect but rarely seek out. The four (five?) middle aged men, including Thomas Comerford, faculty at the School, and a good man (one of my favorites), stood on a stage at one end of the ballroom, a vast geometric expanse of historically renovated tile stretching before them which their audience fastidiously avoided. Sunlight from the windows behind them flooded the room, and jealous stage lights on the ceiling glared in response, serving only to blind the band. They finished their set with a Johnny Cash song around 5pm, after which I crossed the floor to say hello to Thom, and then left, down the forking spiraled staircase, covered in red carpet.
I went upstairs to say hello to Lale and bring her a cookie and she asked me to draw the face of a sexually excited, bald and fat man with a mustache, which I did, but not fast enough. I left the Michigan building and walked to the Gene Siskel Film Center, met Alex and Nick, and watched David Gatten's first public screening of the three he's having this weekend. He had switched his t-shirt to a striped long sleeve button-up, but the overalls and vest were still in use. In the lobby after the screening Oli tried to convince me to make an appearance later that night at Big Chicks, a lesbian bar near my house, for a dance night which he rated highly, and Michelle Mahoney, my Super 8 teacher and overlord of the Media Center, slyly asked, in a clever twist of diction, if I was alright from Tuesday, when I cried in class because I was trying to talk about how emotionally manipulative Tarnation is. I appreciated it.
I rode the Green Line to Sayer's house, or rather warehouse unit of sustainability, where he helped me patch my bike tire and fed me lots of hot vegan food. We talked about comics and Reclaiming and cats, and when we began discussing the upcoming Elements class I've volunteered to head, I found myself becoming increasingly uncomfortable on my left side. Sayre was talking about the importance of teaching sustainability from a positive perspective as opposed to guilt and grief based motivation, and suddenly my attention was fractured, it was impossible to focus on what he was saying, and making eye contact watered my eyes and sent stabbing pain to my cerebellum and down my throat. I felt alien and terrified, and the upper left quadrant of my body was tingling and overheated. Sayre stopped talking, looked at me, staring wide-eyed at the table and my hands, and said, "Is there someone standing on your left?" To which I said "Yes," in a gasp, without thinking, and then the sort of body-confirmation of this hypothesis hit me, along with a stronger sense of mental and physical invasion, and water started pouring out of my face, and I tried not to panic. Sayre said, "It's alright, just be firm, tell them to back off. Don't run away, your body is your home. Don't close your eyes." I opened my eyes and looked across the table at him, at his eyes, which seemed unfamiliar to me. "Are you yourself?" He asked, and I said yes with no conviction, though I was capable of reciting my address, and I continued to look at Sayre for the next five minutes until my reply carried weight, leaving me feeling warm and hollow, and very hungry.
I left Sayre's house at midnight feeling much better. Last night was the warmest night we've had since early December, and the wind was from the southwest, and I was riding northeast. My back tire went flat right before I left to go to Pantheacon, so it had been almost a month since my last bike ride. The sky was clear, with wispy cotton ball clouds occasionally blowing by the moon, and I rode like a demon, and shouted and sang the whole way to Nick's house.
I used to visit Nick all the time last summer and fall, since he lives pretty close to me, and their household is one that is very rarely empty, and even less often asleep. Since school started I've been too busy to visit as often, especially since I usually stay up all night once I'm there. The last few times I've dropped by have been duds. The shades on the bay windows were pulled all the way down, so I couldn't spy inside to see if anyone was in the living room, and the barbecue sat lonely in the back yard. Nick's house is like the house of Father Time, perhaps, sensitive to the blanket of snow that falls throughout January, hibernating seasonally. So of course, as I rolled past last night, I found them all in the back yard celebrating the warmer weather with bottles of gin and vodka lining the insides of their leather jackets. Some neighbors were over as well, and they stood around shouting good-naturedly, swaying slightly, clutching slabs of barbecued steak in their hands and their teeth. I shouted across the fence and they turned like curious marmots, a second's delay as my face made its way through the booze to their brains, and then a happy crowd hollered my name, Nick walked to the fence and gestured me around, beaming, to the gate. I met the neighbors and some guy named Jorge who shook my hand three times in succession, said he liked my bike, and then pulled out his phone and asked if he could call me for bike help sometime. I laughed and said, "I'm not going to give you my number", stepped to the side as he moved to either hug me or fall over, and shook his hand again. Danny made a lewd gesture at me and I made one back, and there was much camaraderie. After about an hour the neighbors and Jorge left, and we heard the loud gunning of a Harley motor from the street, and shouted in response. Our caterwauling increased as the owner of the motorcycle turned into the alley and stopped outside the fence, where I had been an hour before. He took a long look at the three drunk twenty year old boys jumping around their overgrown lawn and whooping. He cut the motor and asked, "Can I get a beer?" Nick whipped the vodka out of his coat excitedly, and the man on the motorcycle said, "All right, I'll just gun it for a minute and then pull around the back." His bike roared to life again with the ripping, gut sound of bass and exhaust thundering across concrete. Dust shot away from him and then rose, obscuring his silhouette slowly, like a glass filling with steam, and then he kicked forward, one creature, the bike chewing through space, snarling, pulling around the corner and into the gate.
He was kind of tall but not notably so, fit, grizzled but clean enough. He looked cold, and the first thing he did after drinking the vodka Nick gave him was come over to stand by the barbecue and warm his hands. He looked 50 but kept saying he was 60, or 59, and his eyes were a light blue grey. He wore an old black leather jacket with biker patches from the 70's stitched to the sleeves and arms. He shook hands with each of the boys and introduced himself as Spider. He had been looking for Wyatt, he said, who lives in a basement across the alley. Nick and Mark knew him, they said, they often see Wyatt and his girlfriend Destiny fighting in the alley. They're crackheads, it was discussed. Spider told us about how he had saved Wyatt's life a couple times, coming to his rescue after some bad drug deals. But when Spider showed up last night at Wyatt's, he wasn't allowed inside. All he wanted was to come in for an hour and warm up in Wyatt's basement, but Wyatt kept talking about how he didn't own the house, it was his mom's house, and he couldn't let Spider in. Spider had been biking to bars all over the city to try and get warm, but all he had was two cents, and he'd get a glass of water and sit down, and in ten minutes they'd kick him out again. Spider had nothing, he kept saying, all he wanted was to warm up, he was just fucking cold, he said again and again, just so cold, holding his hands over the coals, Nick leaning across the lid of the barbecue facing him, Danny on Nick's left side, next to Spider, me on Nick's right, squinting against the wind, and Mark also with his hands out for warmth, between me and Spider in the circle, facing Nick. We listened to his stories about getting into fights in bars. Spider had bad luck with that. He'd always get in fights with people who ended up being cops. "They all look like fuckin' dorks," he said, and I said that maybe he should avoid getting into fights with dorks. Danny was starstruck, and rattled off stories about his own juvenile delinquency. "I punched a cop when I was 15," he chattered, and Spider asked if the man was on duty. "Yeah, he had his whole outfit on," continued Danny, and Spider interrupted him, saying, "Then that ain't cool! You're a fucking idiot!" They transitioned into a discussion about his Harley, and Mark brought up his parents, who are both bikers in Texas. Danny started talking about his dad's friends, one-percenters, hardcore outlaw bikers. Spider referred to someone in a story as a 'chink', and later Danny referred to his dad's friends as 'spics', and i wondered if one had directly influenced the other.
We stood like that around the barbecue for a long time. It became clear that despite its repetition, "nowhere to go, and I'm just cold" was not an awkward plea by an old man for a place to crash, but an honest statement of regret, as well as an expression of bitterness towards Wyatt, the crackhead. We learned that Spider was a veteran, and had been in Iraq six months before. He was a sergeant. Before Iraq he was in Afghanistan, and before that, Vietnam, Special Ops. Spider had an easy manner, that of a man who is too tired of pain and anger to pay it much attention anymore, and has consequentially achieved a sort of contentment with misfortune. He was cold and tired, but he was happy to stand by a barbecue, and he was grateful for the drink. We wanted to know what it was like over there. He was a sergeant, he said again, they called him back into duty when he was nearly 60 years old, to order around 20 year old boys. "Kids like you," he said, and we felt it. "It's fucking boring," he said, "you're sitting around in a truck for 18 hours, nothing is happening. Then all of a sudden there are fucking rockets everywhere, boom, boom, you have no idea what's going on, you just try to get the fuck out. There's no one to fight. You try to get the least amount of your troops killed." He grabbed Danny's collar. "Kids like you. I show up, they give me 20 kids, I come back with 12. Look. You're there with me." He let go of Danny and pointed at Nick. "You're there too. And you." He grabbed Mark's collar. He looked at Mark. "I come home with you." He pointed to Nick and Danny. "You guys are gone."
Afghanistan was worse, he said, they just don't tell you about it. He expressed distaste for the current wars, saying there's "no point", but stressed how important it is to serve your country if it matters, using Vietnam as an example. "That's your mom. Your kids, your brother, sister, grandkids. They ask you to serve, you do it. I don't care how scared you are, you go. Your country needs you." "That's your future!" Shouted Danny, and Nick and Mark nodded fervently. "That's America! I love America! I fucking love America!" he went on, and Nick agreed. "We live here," Nick added, "it it's in trouble we've got to protect it." I watched my three ironic, pacifistic friends fishing for the earnestness necessary to respond to the man in front of them with the respect he was due. Nick shot me a half-wink when Spider wasn't looking, but I could hear the honesty in their fabricated responses, and when Nick looked at me, his expression was unsettled, not amused. The conversation shifted. "I was drafted when I was 17," Spider was saying, "I arrived in Vietnam and it was 87 degrees. It was the worst place I've ever been. I got out after nine months, came back," he shook his head, "I was fucked up, I'd done too much - seen to much stuff. You're in Vietnam and then you're back in America and some asshole is swearing at you at a stoplight. It's just..." he went quiet for a second, "I was back for a couple months and then I went back and signed up again for three years. I didn't want to be here. I was hoping I'd die in Vietnam." He laughed. "That didn't happen, obviously." He showed us a scar on his right eyeball where he had been hit by shrapnel. As far as I could tell he had no other war wounds. He showed us the ghost of a Hell's Angel's tattoo on his knuckles that he'd had removed. He started talking about being an old man. "I'm Catholic, you know, and I'm gonna die soon, and I just think, if you read the Bible, I'm going to Hell. It says right there. 'Thou shalt not kill.' I've killed a lot of people. I've done a lot of bad things. I've killed a lot of kids. And I have two daughters. But you don't know, you never know. In Afghanistan, kids would run up to you, little kids, they throw a grenade in your truck. So you're the sergeant, you see a nine year old kid coming up to you holding something, you tell your troops, 'shoot him in the head.' And they shoot him, and his head explodes," he made a GCHKWOOOSH sound effect, "and you go up to the body, and it's holding a flower." There was a collective grimace. "Yeah. And that haunts you. And the next time, the kid's holding a grenade."
Danny's face was lit up with 1000 watts of awe. He kept reverently repeating "I could never kill like you" as Nick was shaking his head, wide eyed, intoning, "That is so fucked up. That is so fucked." It had become a sermon, an unconscious invocation of the Real. Spider's stories were intensified by his ignorance of their potency. He confided in us, as lonely old men do. We huddled closer to the glowing pit of coals as the wind picked up. Spider kept telling Danny he didn't understand, none of us understood. We didn't, and I was glad. "Have you ever stuck a hook through a minnow for bait?" He asked us. We nodded. "It's like that. Your first few kills, they really get to you. After that, it's like hooking another minnow."
%
My apartment is a little messy, not too bad, not as bad as when I got back from San Francisco the Monday before last. My bags are still on the floor, but all the clothes that were inside them have been washed and put away. There is still space on the floor in the middle of my living room, and all the dishes are clean except the mug I used last Wednesday. There are crumbs on this table, but my drafting board is free of dust.
I've been exhausted. Something is happening with my capacity to write for school. I fear it is disappearing. I've always been one to procrastinate, but complete and utter failure to deliver final papers, ever, is not something I suffer from, or at least it wasn't until a year or two ago. So I'm taking all studio classes this semester, to try and knock myself out of the habit. I'm good at making final projects (although it is true that I rarely finish them on time - a consequence of being an ambitious perfectionist). I'm in three film classes, so I can make the same final piece for each, but it has to fulfill all the requirements of three finals instead of just one. I'm also in an artist's book class, which is turning out to be my favorite class, I think - not because I've been making any powerful, conceptual, insightful artistic works, but because the course is technique based. And the skills we're being taught are my favorite kind: finicky, repetitive, dependent on dexterity and exact adherence to measurement and process, and resultant in beautiful functional objects, pleasurably tactile. I spend too much money on paper. And my accumulation of finished, empty books is alarming in a sense of material space. But I rarely have to complete work out of class, and time spent in class is meditative, soothing my compulsive ticks and itches.
I am spent, spending money on film, ridiculous amounts on film, and paper, and ink and bristol board and glue and wax and thread and last week a hundred dollar fine at the Media Center, and sometimes food. I've forgotten what it is to buy clothing, though I've always preferred to make my own and my collection of fabric rivals my collection of sundry mark-making utensils, and was, for the most part, acquired for free. Thank goodness I have custody of Mandy's aunt's sewing machine (shhh, don't remind her) even if she got custody of our cats. I am spending time, but I've always been on that list, the one they keep at the sleep bank, the roster of customers with terrible credit. My fifth class is a comics class. I like it very much, mostly because I enjoy the company of funny little Jeremy Tinder, who spends the day moseying around the room to talk to people about pop culture nostalgia (or in my case, personal stories of the unusual or entertaining, eg. anything about my family, spiritual upbringing, or general life events) and sitting at his laptop, projecting across the wide concrete room, through the dust and pigment in the air and the spiny backbones of filthy, janky easels, leaning heavily on the bent metal tubing of their back legs, like hungover phasmotodea in a petrified forest, videos of car crashes on YouTube. But I draw slowly, and I find myself lagging behind the on-task trolly, pedaling furiously on my plastic tricycle.
It is energy too, my expenses, there is no budgeting for human interaction. There is only holing up by yourself and then getting hassled by your friends. And how much I want to help! How much I want to be there, to listen, to collaborate, attend the inductions of inside jokes into the language of shit shooting. Parties, films, concerts, barbecues -
%
Wednesday night I didn't sleep. I spent all night working on a one page comic about myself turning into a werewolf and then getting my period; at noon I got on the bus and tried to read an essay by Bazin on plastics and montage in the language of cinema, but stared out the window instead. I got to class twenty minutes late and missed the first film David Gatten had screened in his visiting artist's presentation to the class, but I caught the discussion and the three other films he showed and discussed. He was wearing a thin white t-shirt with torn cap sleeves, overalls, and a very nice black vest. David Gatten has a big square beard that juts out in a clean -45 degree angle from his chin, long limp hair just down to the nape of his neck, greying and thinned, and glasses with rectangular rims. He speaks kindly and respectfully, and is excited by opportunities to talk about his work, which he does honestly, with a thoughtfulness that is concise. After he left the class I successfully led a discussion on the Bazin essay, somehow, and then Michelle, my darling teacher, demonstrated to me after the class had dispersed the mechanics of the Bell & Howard 16mm projector. It sits in the projection booth in the back of the room and steams, and hisses, and rumbles. It is full of beautiful silver gears and sprocket wheels. There are chips of ruby lining the aperture plate.
We found some film to practice with and I projected an interview with a psychiatrist in an office with an orange color scheme, upside down and backwards, satanic messages being revealed in his reversed speech and the glint in the lenses of his giant glasses.
There is a ballroom in 112 S. Michigan Avenue, the Sullivan Center, more commonly known as 'the Michigan building', on the second floor. The original architecture and interior design have been meticulously reconstructed from photographs and documentation by the Historical Renovation department of the School. The chandeliers are gigantic and they look like beehives full of light, slashed up and down by decorative iron curlicues. There is red velvet and wallpaper all covering everything, and a large checked tile floor, marble pillars and a scalloped balcony, gold paint on wooden trim in spiral and leaf relief on the walls, near the floor, and near the ceiling. The windows look out over Michigan Avenue and the Art Institute across the street. Between the two buildings runs a gaseous torrent of automobiles. There were folding tables in the ballroom yesterday, with two large fake crystal bowls full of clumping hummus, a black plastic tub of slightly chilled pita bread cut into wedges, a dish of cookies, sugar and chocolate chip, and a collection of heavy plastic towers holding liquids labeled 'fruit punch', 'lemonade', and 'cold water' sitting next to a stack of translucent plastic cups. About thirty to forty students and faculty were milling around and sitting at large round collapsable tables, watching Kasper Hauser, a rock band with slight country influence, playing the kind of solid music I respect but rarely seek out. The four (five?) middle aged men, including Thomas Comerford, faculty at the School, and a good man (one of my favorites), stood on a stage at one end of the ballroom, a vast geometric expanse of historically renovated tile stretching before them which their audience fastidiously avoided. Sunlight from the windows behind them flooded the room, and jealous stage lights on the ceiling glared in response, serving only to blind the band. They finished their set with a Johnny Cash song around 5pm, after which I crossed the floor to say hello to Thom, and then left, down the forking spiraled staircase, covered in red carpet.
I went upstairs to say hello to Lale and bring her a cookie and she asked me to draw the face of a sexually excited, bald and fat man with a mustache, which I did, but not fast enough. I left the Michigan building and walked to the Gene Siskel Film Center, met Alex and Nick, and watched David Gatten's first public screening of the three he's having this weekend. He had switched his t-shirt to a striped long sleeve button-up, but the overalls and vest were still in use. In the lobby after the screening Oli tried to convince me to make an appearance later that night at Big Chicks, a lesbian bar near my house, for a dance night which he rated highly, and Michelle Mahoney, my Super 8 teacher and overlord of the Media Center, slyly asked, in a clever twist of diction, if I was alright from Tuesday, when I cried in class because I was trying to talk about how emotionally manipulative Tarnation is. I appreciated it.
I rode the Green Line to Sayer's house, or rather warehouse unit of sustainability, where he helped me patch my bike tire and fed me lots of hot vegan food. We talked about comics and Reclaiming and cats, and when we began discussing the upcoming Elements class I've volunteered to head, I found myself becoming increasingly uncomfortable on my left side. Sayre was talking about the importance of teaching sustainability from a positive perspective as opposed to guilt and grief based motivation, and suddenly my attention was fractured, it was impossible to focus on what he was saying, and making eye contact watered my eyes and sent stabbing pain to my cerebellum and down my throat. I felt alien and terrified, and the upper left quadrant of my body was tingling and overheated. Sayre stopped talking, looked at me, staring wide-eyed at the table and my hands, and said, "Is there someone standing on your left?" To which I said "Yes," in a gasp, without thinking, and then the sort of body-confirmation of this hypothesis hit me, along with a stronger sense of mental and physical invasion, and water started pouring out of my face, and I tried not to panic. Sayre said, "It's alright, just be firm, tell them to back off. Don't run away, your body is your home. Don't close your eyes." I opened my eyes and looked across the table at him, at his eyes, which seemed unfamiliar to me. "Are you yourself?" He asked, and I said yes with no conviction, though I was capable of reciting my address, and I continued to look at Sayre for the next five minutes until my reply carried weight, leaving me feeling warm and hollow, and very hungry.
I left Sayre's house at midnight feeling much better. Last night was the warmest night we've had since early December, and the wind was from the southwest, and I was riding northeast. My back tire went flat right before I left to go to Pantheacon, so it had been almost a month since my last bike ride. The sky was clear, with wispy cotton ball clouds occasionally blowing by the moon, and I rode like a demon, and shouted and sang the whole way to Nick's house.
I used to visit Nick all the time last summer and fall, since he lives pretty close to me, and their household is one that is very rarely empty, and even less often asleep. Since school started I've been too busy to visit as often, especially since I usually stay up all night once I'm there. The last few times I've dropped by have been duds. The shades on the bay windows were pulled all the way down, so I couldn't spy inside to see if anyone was in the living room, and the barbecue sat lonely in the back yard. Nick's house is like the house of Father Time, perhaps, sensitive to the blanket of snow that falls throughout January, hibernating seasonally. So of course, as I rolled past last night, I found them all in the back yard celebrating the warmer weather with bottles of gin and vodka lining the insides of their leather jackets. Some neighbors were over as well, and they stood around shouting good-naturedly, swaying slightly, clutching slabs of barbecued steak in their hands and their teeth. I shouted across the fence and they turned like curious marmots, a second's delay as my face made its way through the booze to their brains, and then a happy crowd hollered my name, Nick walked to the fence and gestured me around, beaming, to the gate. I met the neighbors and some guy named Jorge who shook my hand three times in succession, said he liked my bike, and then pulled out his phone and asked if he could call me for bike help sometime. I laughed and said, "I'm not going to give you my number", stepped to the side as he moved to either hug me or fall over, and shook his hand again. Danny made a lewd gesture at me and I made one back, and there was much camaraderie. After about an hour the neighbors and Jorge left, and we heard the loud gunning of a Harley motor from the street, and shouted in response. Our caterwauling increased as the owner of the motorcycle turned into the alley and stopped outside the fence, where I had been an hour before. He took a long look at the three drunk twenty year old boys jumping around their overgrown lawn and whooping. He cut the motor and asked, "Can I get a beer?" Nick whipped the vodka out of his coat excitedly, and the man on the motorcycle said, "All right, I'll just gun it for a minute and then pull around the back." His bike roared to life again with the ripping, gut sound of bass and exhaust thundering across concrete. Dust shot away from him and then rose, obscuring his silhouette slowly, like a glass filling with steam, and then he kicked forward, one creature, the bike chewing through space, snarling, pulling around the corner and into the gate.
He was kind of tall but not notably so, fit, grizzled but clean enough. He looked cold, and the first thing he did after drinking the vodka Nick gave him was come over to stand by the barbecue and warm his hands. He looked 50 but kept saying he was 60, or 59, and his eyes were a light blue grey. He wore an old black leather jacket with biker patches from the 70's stitched to the sleeves and arms. He shook hands with each of the boys and introduced himself as Spider. He had been looking for Wyatt, he said, who lives in a basement across the alley. Nick and Mark knew him, they said, they often see Wyatt and his girlfriend Destiny fighting in the alley. They're crackheads, it was discussed. Spider told us about how he had saved Wyatt's life a couple times, coming to his rescue after some bad drug deals. But when Spider showed up last night at Wyatt's, he wasn't allowed inside. All he wanted was to come in for an hour and warm up in Wyatt's basement, but Wyatt kept talking about how he didn't own the house, it was his mom's house, and he couldn't let Spider in. Spider had been biking to bars all over the city to try and get warm, but all he had was two cents, and he'd get a glass of water and sit down, and in ten minutes they'd kick him out again. Spider had nothing, he kept saying, all he wanted was to warm up, he was just fucking cold, he said again and again, just so cold, holding his hands over the coals, Nick leaning across the lid of the barbecue facing him, Danny on Nick's left side, next to Spider, me on Nick's right, squinting against the wind, and Mark also with his hands out for warmth, between me and Spider in the circle, facing Nick. We listened to his stories about getting into fights in bars. Spider had bad luck with that. He'd always get in fights with people who ended up being cops. "They all look like fuckin' dorks," he said, and I said that maybe he should avoid getting into fights with dorks. Danny was starstruck, and rattled off stories about his own juvenile delinquency. "I punched a cop when I was 15," he chattered, and Spider asked if the man was on duty. "Yeah, he had his whole outfit on," continued Danny, and Spider interrupted him, saying, "Then that ain't cool! You're a fucking idiot!" They transitioned into a discussion about his Harley, and Mark brought up his parents, who are both bikers in Texas. Danny started talking about his dad's friends, one-percenters, hardcore outlaw bikers. Spider referred to someone in a story as a 'chink', and later Danny referred to his dad's friends as 'spics', and i wondered if one had directly influenced the other.
We stood like that around the barbecue for a long time. It became clear that despite its repetition, "nowhere to go, and I'm just cold" was not an awkward plea by an old man for a place to crash, but an honest statement of regret, as well as an expression of bitterness towards Wyatt, the crackhead. We learned that Spider was a veteran, and had been in Iraq six months before. He was a sergeant. Before Iraq he was in Afghanistan, and before that, Vietnam, Special Ops. Spider had an easy manner, that of a man who is too tired of pain and anger to pay it much attention anymore, and has consequentially achieved a sort of contentment with misfortune. He was cold and tired, but he was happy to stand by a barbecue, and he was grateful for the drink. We wanted to know what it was like over there. He was a sergeant, he said again, they called him back into duty when he was nearly 60 years old, to order around 20 year old boys. "Kids like you," he said, and we felt it. "It's fucking boring," he said, "you're sitting around in a truck for 18 hours, nothing is happening. Then all of a sudden there are fucking rockets everywhere, boom, boom, you have no idea what's going on, you just try to get the fuck out. There's no one to fight. You try to get the least amount of your troops killed." He grabbed Danny's collar. "Kids like you. I show up, they give me 20 kids, I come back with 12. Look. You're there with me." He let go of Danny and pointed at Nick. "You're there too. And you." He grabbed Mark's collar. He looked at Mark. "I come home with you." He pointed to Nick and Danny. "You guys are gone."
Afghanistan was worse, he said, they just don't tell you about it. He expressed distaste for the current wars, saying there's "no point", but stressed how important it is to serve your country if it matters, using Vietnam as an example. "That's your mom. Your kids, your brother, sister, grandkids. They ask you to serve, you do it. I don't care how scared you are, you go. Your country needs you." "That's your future!" Shouted Danny, and Nick and Mark nodded fervently. "That's America! I love America! I fucking love America!" he went on, and Nick agreed. "We live here," Nick added, "it it's in trouble we've got to protect it." I watched my three ironic, pacifistic friends fishing for the earnestness necessary to respond to the man in front of them with the respect he was due. Nick shot me a half-wink when Spider wasn't looking, but I could hear the honesty in their fabricated responses, and when Nick looked at me, his expression was unsettled, not amused. The conversation shifted. "I was drafted when I was 17," Spider was saying, "I arrived in Vietnam and it was 87 degrees. It was the worst place I've ever been. I got out after nine months, came back," he shook his head, "I was fucked up, I'd done too much - seen to much stuff. You're in Vietnam and then you're back in America and some asshole is swearing at you at a stoplight. It's just..." he went quiet for a second, "I was back for a couple months and then I went back and signed up again for three years. I didn't want to be here. I was hoping I'd die in Vietnam." He laughed. "That didn't happen, obviously." He showed us a scar on his right eyeball where he had been hit by shrapnel. As far as I could tell he had no other war wounds. He showed us the ghost of a Hell's Angel's tattoo on his knuckles that he'd had removed. He started talking about being an old man. "I'm Catholic, you know, and I'm gonna die soon, and I just think, if you read the Bible, I'm going to Hell. It says right there. 'Thou shalt not kill.' I've killed a lot of people. I've done a lot of bad things. I've killed a lot of kids. And I have two daughters. But you don't know, you never know. In Afghanistan, kids would run up to you, little kids, they throw a grenade in your truck. So you're the sergeant, you see a nine year old kid coming up to you holding something, you tell your troops, 'shoot him in the head.' And they shoot him, and his head explodes," he made a GCHKWOOOSH sound effect, "and you go up to the body, and it's holding a flower." There was a collective grimace. "Yeah. And that haunts you. And the next time, the kid's holding a grenade."
Danny's face was lit up with 1000 watts of awe. He kept reverently repeating "I could never kill like you" as Nick was shaking his head, wide eyed, intoning, "That is so fucked up. That is so fucked." It had become a sermon, an unconscious invocation of the Real. Spider's stories were intensified by his ignorance of their potency. He confided in us, as lonely old men do. We huddled closer to the glowing pit of coals as the wind picked up. Spider kept telling Danny he didn't understand, none of us understood. We didn't, and I was glad. "Have you ever stuck a hook through a minnow for bait?" He asked us. We nodded. "It's like that. Your first few kills, they really get to you. After that, it's like hooking another minnow."
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