This is a story I wrote a while ago, for an anthology put out by my now nonexistent publisher, and it is one of my favorite things I have ever written. It is rare, but sometimes, the words come out exactly how you want them to come out. This was that, one of those magic and rare times where the song I wanted to sing just allowed itself to be sung. The title is shamelessly stolen from an 800 Octane song off of their album Rise Again, a song that set me thinking about this story and how I wanted to tell it.
Paging Mr. Bronson
A story by Ralph Pullins
I roll over and look at the clock. 4:43. In the morning. I think of the call I received four or five hours ago, as if I hadn’t been thinking of nothing else while I stared at the ceiling and didn’t sleep. I heave a sigh, hoping, but not really believing that I can get this heavy feeling off of my chest. I sit up in bed, look over at my still sleeping wife. Hell, I decide, might as well get up, make coffee. This is going to cause a fight.
She looks skeptical, and seems like she could be rapidly sliding into full on pissed off how dare you mode, which I am prepared to handle, but want to avoid.
“You’re shitting me, right?” she says, levelly. She’s a great woman, a goddamn gem if I am being honest about it, and a damn sight more than I deserve.
“I wish I was,” I say. Nothing for it but to face this thing head on.
“You want to go sit with an old girlfriend.” She looks at the ceiling as if looking for help understanding there. “You want to take off work, and travel to be with an old girlfriend.”
“She was never my girlfriend. It was never like that.” I shrug. “I know this seems crazy.”
“Only because it is crazy,” she says. “You’re a goddamn lunatic for even asking me this.”
I shake my head. “I’m not asking,” I say. “This is something I have to do, and I’m going to do it.”
“Oh, you’re telling me what’s what, now?”
“Look,” I say, trying to head this off, “I know this is nuts, okay?”
“No way,” she says, shaking her head. “No goddamn way. You can’t go out west to visit some random chick from your checkered past. It’s bullshit.”
I close my eyes. “She’s not some random chick. She wasn’t a girlfriend, either. You know this, we’ve talked about this. What this is, is not what you’re making it out to be.”
“Well you’re not going,” she says in a that’s final, this is over kind of tone, and she turns and starts to leave the kitchen.
“I already booked a ticket,” I say to her back. “I’m going. I have to.”
“What?” She turns around, her face a caricature of shock. “You what?”
“I know you don’t understand this, and I’m not asking you to, but I promise you there is nothing to worry about here. I’ll be back soon, okay? I love you, but I’ve got to go.”
She stands there with the morning sun streaming through the kitchen window, her mouth open in such a cartoonish look of pure bafflement that I almost laugh. I don’t and I’m glad I don’t because that would be just another thing she didn’t understand, that I would have to explain away. I don’t want to hurt her.
“Jesus,” she mumbles finally. “What the hell is even happening here?” She spins on a heel and walks out of the kitchen.
“I love you,” I say to her back. “I’ll be back, soon as I can. I promise.”
And I hear her voice, faint, from the other room: “Fuck. You.”
My parents divorced when I was thirteen. They fought all the time, about everything, about nothing, but more than anything what I remember about them being together were the terrible silences. The meals punctuated only by the clinking of forks on plates, as I sat there between them looking back and forth like some absurd child-sized tennis judge, waiting for something to break. It did of course; it broke, as everything will, eventually. If I had a brother or sister maybe it would have been easier, we could have clung together, we could have propped each other up, but I didn’t, and there was no one for me to lean on, there was no one there for me to cling to. It was a terrible and drawn out bitter thing, a court case and a custody battle, and lawyers and judges, everyone asking me impossible to answer questions, interviewing me and if I hated the silences before it was all I could do during that period to not scream at everyone that tried to talk to me to just shut the fuck up, please just stop with the questions and the recordings and the awful decisions. Just leave me the fuck alone, I wanted to shout in their faces, all of you just leave me alone. Please.
And so my hate-filled parents ended up splitting the sheets, and I stayed with my mom, but I was supposed to go to my dad’s every summer for a few months, and when it was all decided, after all the horrible bullshit, I was ejected out the other end, feeling completely alone and disillusioned and not inclined to have anything to do with either of those fucking gargoyles.
After the end of the school year, we moved away and she rented an apartment, a shitty thin-walled two bedroom, in a falling apart neighborhood, and then she faded off into whatever depression-fueled shitfest that she was involved in.
And there I was, at the beginning of the summer of my fifteenth year, alone, set completely adrift on this vast ocean of confusion and fear.
My wife doesn’t pick up when I call from the airport. On impulse, I call the kid back on my cell before I get on the plane.
I hear it pick up but nobody says anything. “Hello?” I say into the dead line.
“Yeah?”
“Is this Tommy?”
“Yeah.”
“Hey, um.” and then I realize too late that I’m not sure why I called. “I was just calling to let you know I’m on my way. I’ll be there soon, okay?” He breathes into the phone for a second, long enough to make me wonder if he is autistic or something. Just goddamn surreal. I am about to say hello again, to make sure he hadn’t hung up on me, but he speaks before I can.
“Are you my Dad?” he blurts, and I hear the hitch in his voice, and I get it. He’s not autistic; he’s been trying to get up the courage to ask me that, or maybe to keep himself from crying, or likely, both. Oh what the hell am I doing?
“No,” I say. “I’m just an old friend.”
“Are you sure?” About eighty five percent sure I don’t say, unless my math is way off.
“Yeah,” I say instead, “I’m sure. I’m just a guy.”
He pauses for a moment before speaking again. “She loved you I think,” he says. “She talked about you all the time. I always thought, that maybe-” his voice breaks, and I hear my gate called. Time to go, no time to call the wife again. Shit.
“It will-” I stop myself from telling the kid it will be okay. “I’ll be there soon. Hang in there Tommy, okay? I gotta go get on the plane.”
“Ok,” he says, and I hear that hitch in his voice again. The kid is just fifteen as of this month, and his entire world is crumbling around him.
I turned inward, instead of acting out as some kids might do. I didn’t get in trouble, I stayed quiet as my mother entertained every longhaired fucking burnout in three counties. I didn’t steal or start doing dope or get into fights because I really didn’t want her attention at all. I was just counting the days until I could leave. I kept my hood up, my headphones on, and spent all my time out of the apartment, that was too filled with desperate braying laughter, and smoke, and shitty hair metal from a decade or two ago. I went to the park, and I found a little picnic table away from the playground. I had no interest in being eyeballed by wary mothers, scared of the hooded loner, but hell, the park was close to my mom’s shitty apartment, and it was public property. So I sat there nearly every day, my headphones on, filling my head with fast angry music, the music of every young and alone, disillusioned, unwanted kid ever, Black Flag, and Minor Threat, and Poison Idea, music to fight to, music to cut yourself to. Circle Jerks and MDC and Agnostic Front, and I sat there everyday, spiralling into the darkness inside, in smaller and smaller revolutions. I filled notebooks with words and drawings in ball point pens, journals and poems and stories and songs, and my world was filled with cold black isolation and a repeating feedback loop: you’re no good, you’re no good, you’re no good, and if Christa hadn’t sat down next to me, hadn’t started talking to me, hadn’t adopted me as her pet project, a stray cat, I would have just kept on spinning, spiraling until the terrible gravity of my own tarnished self worth crushed me, until I finally-
She saved me.
And suddenly I was no longer alone.
I get the voicemail again when I call my wife after we hit the ground. “Hey,” I tell her machine, “you’re going to have to talk to me sometime, because I’m not going to stop calling. I’ve just landed. Call me back okay? I love you, for fucksake.”
I stand out front waiting for Ben to pick me up if he decides to show, if he can get his car to start, if he wakes up on time, none of which are a lock. I wait, and look out at the rain and the people here all seem to ignore it, because it always rains here.
On impulse, I bum a cigarette and a light from this bearded kid with a ratty backpack. I offer to buy it, but he waves it off, and then wanders down the way. He looks like he might be in the same boat as I am: with unreliable friends and no inclination to walk fifty miles in the rain. I look at the smoke in my hand; what the fuck am I doing? I haven’t smoked in fifteen years, why did I even do this, but somehow it seems right to be standing here smoking, that oh-too-familiar hot dirty taste of it, the light headrush, the rain and me standing here waiting for my flaky old friend. Fuck it, I think, I’m giving this asshole until the end of this smoke, and then I’m going to rent a car and give that bearded kid a ride while I’m at it. I’m a grown ass man, not some teenager. I’ve got an excellent credit score. This is fucking stupid. I’m nearing the end of the butt when I hear some old familiar chords from somewhere off to my left, and then this shitty old Chester Molester van comes careening around the corner, and I know without a doubt that Ben has arrived, and only a little bit late, which must be some kind of record for this guy.
I pitch my butt in the gutter, and pick up my backpack. I didn’t really bring anything in my haste but a book that I was supposed to have read a dog’s age ago, my old sixty gig iPod, the classic one with the wheel, not the stupid half-a-phone Touch. I just wanted music. I threw a couple of old t-shirts in there as well, but even still, I wasn’t laden down.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Jumpin’ Jimmy fuckin’ Haynes,” the maniac bellows, making an old lady to the right tut under her breath and a nervous-looking mother move a bit further down the sidewalk. “You old motherfucker, how long’s it been?” He’s fatter than I remember, but hell, aren’t we all? This getting older shit ain’t pretty for any of us.
“Been a while, Benny Boy, it’s been a while, that’s true,” I say, and I seem to be slipping into the classic modes of speech. The lazy slang all comes back to me; it’s like trying on an old t-shirt from when you were a kid, and finding that it still fits perfectly.
“Fuckin’ TOO long, brother,” he booms. “Holy shit, get in the van, dude, let’s go get smashed, yeah?”
“It’s ten thirty in the morning.” I feel like it’s prudent to point this out.
He looks at me like I’m a Martian. “What?” he says, finally.
I shrug. “Nothing, man, never mind.” I heave my pack through the open window of the van, still blaring out some three chord madness at a ridiculous volume. I’m not sure whether it’s broken, or just rolled down, but given the rain and the open window, either way I figure I’m going to have a wet ass. “Pretty sweet ride, dude,” I say. “What did you name this one?”
“Oh what,” he says feigning hurt, “I can’t just have a van now? I mean, fuck dude, I’m almost forty, you know?” I cross my arms in an I-can-stand-here-all-day kind of gesture. “Sweet Baby Your Mother’s Nightmare,” he says finally. “It’s called Sweet Baby Your Mother’s Nightmare. Sweetie if, you know, you’re into that whole brevity thing.”
“Atta kid,” I say, and I jump in the shitty thing. I’m thinking ten-thirty or not, I might just take him up on that beer; it feels good here, in the seat of this shitty old broken down van. It feels like home. I close my eyes for just a second, let the three chords wash over me, remember what it was like to be seventeen again with a ticket to the punk show in the city and ten bucks for beer money. The van rocks as Benny hops in the driver’s. Bad springs on Sweety here, broken windshield too, I see when I open my eyes again.
“So where to?” he says.
Lonely is something that you might not notice until it’s gone. Christa took my lonely and made it disappear when she sat down next to me on that park picnic table.
“Whoa, cool,” she said, just plopping down next to me without so much as a hello, who are you. “I’m going to invade your privacy and personal space,” she stated, like this was a normal thing to say. “That is rad as hell,” she continued, looking at my notebook, where I was drawing in black and red ballpoint. Her shoulder touched mine, and even though I didn’t know her at all I hadn’t been touched by another person, not a hug or a handshake or a slap in the face for nearly two years. I scooched away a bit, but not too much. I had my hood up as usual, my headphones were on, but it had stopped playing anything I didn’t know how long ago. It happened sometimes; I put it on shuffle, and the songs just played and I drew and wrote, and maybe the battery would die or maybe whatever I had cued up had ended and I wouldn’t really notice, because it wasn’t really about the music when I was drawing and writing, it was about filling my head with noise and blocking out the world both internal and ex, so I could find that sweet spot where the pen moves, and things get better, when the stupid meat part of me was out of the way, that’s where the magic lies, somewhere outside of biology, somewhere beyond this godawful painful life. So that’s why I heard her loud and clear when she told me that what I was doing was rad as hell and brushed against my shoulder.
I simultaneously wished her to both go away and to scooch closer. I wanted this to end, I wanted it to go on forever. I turned my face up to her, and she wasn’t anything unusual, she was just a regular girl, a bit chubby, and had a few crooked teeth, a bit raggedy, but normalish. She had a blue streak through her black hair and a Dead Kennedys t-shirt that was held together by safety pins and was probably older than both of us.
She smiled, and I stopped thinking of her as normal there and then. She was so warm and open and just interested, that after so long in isolation, so long being ripped between two parents that only wanted to keep me because it might hurt the other one, so long under my hood with my eyes watching the ground as I walked, so long since anyone had looked me in the eyes or had taken even the slightest interest in what I was doing, that I knew she was just a normal girl, wandering around the park, but to me she seemed like a savior.
“Do you talk?” she said after I sat there silent for a few moments. She wasn’t being shitty. I think she thought I might genuinely be deaf or a mute, maybe.
“Yeah,” I said. And that might have been the first words I spoke aloud to another person in weeks, months.
“OH-kay,” she said, after I didn’t say anything else, and she looked again at the notebook I was working in. “These are awesome. Do you have more?”
“Yeah,” I said again, and pushed her the notebook.
“Not much of a talker, are you?”
“Not really,” I said.
“That’s okay,” she said. “I can talk for both of us. Hey this stuff is really cool. I’ve never seen anything like it. You’re really talented.” And then she shifted her voice deeper in a dopey sounding parody of my own. “Oh gee whiz,” she said, clearly as me, “thank you so much, I really appreciate your interest in my work.” And then in her own voice, “No problem. I see you here all the time. Really, too much of the time if I think of it,” she said thoughtfully. “I was just wondering if maybe you needed some company?” Then in the goony voice, “Oh yes, that would be lovely, thank you so much for taking time out of this beautiful day to come over here and find out more, I really appreciate it.” And despite myself I felt the first cracks begin in my cold hard shell. “No problem,” she continued in her own voice. “My name is Christa, and you are?” And she held her hand out to shake, waiting for me to take it. I was waiting for a moment there, waiting for her to answer herself in the dopey voice, but she didn’t and I realized a little too late that she was expecting me to speak.
“James,” I said, finally. “Or Jim.”
“Nice to meet you, Jimmy,” she said. “I’m Christa.”
If there is something more don’t give a fuck than an ice cold Budweiser bottle and cigarette while driving around in a van that practically screams probable cause at ten-thirty in the morning, then I hope I never run across it. Goddamn liberating is what it is. It feels great; I haven’t done anything except work, planning and organizing and fucking administrating, in for-fucking-ever. I’ve got a pile of checks that need signed, suppliers that need invoices on my desk, and it’s been so long since I poked my head above the weeds that sitting shotgun in a busted old van and sipping an absolutely irresponsible beer feels like heaven, it feels like home.
But even still, there is a part of me that knows that this isn’t real, this isn’t life. I look over at my old friend, one of the last remaining of the old guard, and he looks as smiley as he ever has. The dude is the human equivalent of a goddamn golden retriever, but the miles are showing too. I left, and he stayed, and he kept rocking, kept rolling and, well, I didn’t. And even now through the haze of smoke and nostalgia, I can’t help but think that maybe I abandoned ship, like a rat.
I have him drop me off at Christa’s parent’s place, and stand there on the sidewalk as he harangues me through the open window.
“Fucking call me later,” he bellows over the music.
“Fine, I will,” I tell him.
“Don’t be a little bitch and do it. Call because I’m going to round up some of our dudes and we are going to burn this motherfucker to the fuckin GROUND!” And he swerves into the street with a screech, leaving me standing there on a middle class suburban sidewalk with an empty beer bottle and a backpack, feeling foolish and guilty and ridiculous. Jesus H, it was always like it with these guys, they seemed to possess their own gravity, their own energy, unique to anything else I have experienced, and I’ve been away for longer than I was here.
I turn and face Christa’s, a place that I would argue was more home to me than that garbage apartment my mom lived in ever was. It was here that I stayed when I got kicked out, when I ran away, when I got in a fight or was fucked up and needed a place to put my head down, sometimes just because it was mostly quiet when no where else was. Oh my God, have I flown halfway across the country to be here now? It looks smaller than I remember, but hell, the whole town is smaller, the bridges and the roads and the buildings, everything felt to be on a slightly smaller scale than I remember.
The door opens, and the kid pokes his head out, all hooded up, and I drop the bottle on the sidewalk where it shatters into a million pieces. Holy shit.
“You’re Jimmy,” the kid says. “You’re him, right?”
“Yeah,” I say. You are too, I don’t say.
“Should I get a broom?”
“A what?”
“A broom,” he says, pointing. “For the glass.”
“Oh shit, right, yeah I’ll do it,” I say. “Sorry about that, I’ll get it,” but he has already pulled back into the house as I yammered and has come out with a broom and a matching dustpan on a stick. I take it from him and sweep the bottle into the pan. “Your grandparents home?” I say.
“Oh no,” he says, “they don’t live here anymore, it’s just us here.” And there’s that hitch again. Since the shock has worn off, I can see that he doesn’t really look like me, not really. My face is wide, his is narrower, he has a longer nose, bigger eyes. It was the hood, probably, it was the beer and this place, it was everything else, but I swear I thought for a moment that it could have been me standing there.
And so she helped me out of my inward spiral, and I went over to her house nearly every day. We sat in her room, and I drew and wrote in my notebooks, and she played music and made things, small objects, she would find items and glue them together and she would make animals or insects or faces, whatever it was that spoke to her. They were beautiful, and I never thought to call them her art, though that is exactly what it was, they were just the things she made.
I honestly don’t know why, but her parents were never there, and she had a debit card that she would use to buy herself food that we would sometimes take to the grocery store and get stupid stuff, pixy sticks and giant jawbreakers and swedish fish. I was there nearly constantly, due to my own parents, who were terrible and left me feeling as if raising me was a distasteful chore to be completed. I maybe met her mother once and never her dad, they were busy doing other things, travelling places or something. Her dad was some kind of businessman, and her mom went with him I think, and I realized that Christa had approached me in the park for the same reason, because she was essentially alone in this world. Even though her parents were still together, even though all her basic needs were taken care of, she had been set adrift too.
It was Christa that first put a guitar in my hands. She had an old beat-ass POS, pulled out of tune after nearly every song, and she showed me three chords, and then she took me to the Deuce, where I met a couple of other dudes that liked to make noise the same way I did. Then suddenly, instead of being a weirdo loner in the park contemplating suicide, I was in a band, and I swear, nothing filled the void better, and I played those three chords like my life depended on it, maybe it did, maybe it did, and for the next two or three minutes, nothing else mattered, nothing could touch me, nothing could hurt. And in the sweaty frantic noise I found a truth: that there in the chaos and slam, there was a place for us, there we were never unwanted, there we were never alone. And she was always there, standing off to the side, smiling and proud as hell.
She was always there.
“I’ve read 3 Chords,” the kid tells me, and I can’t get over this place, it looks almost exactly the same, the same furniture and the same carpet. There’s something else now too, a smell, maybe, or-
“Uh huh,” I say, not really listening, my mind drifting away. A long time ago, this was my sanctuary. Now it is something else entirely.
“I like it a lot,” the kid continues. “My mom first showed me because her name is in it, but I’d like it even if it wasn't, you know?” He's nervous, and babbling a little bit, which is understandable. “You're kind of a legend around here. Not just here, in the house I mean, but around town too.”
“Look,” I say, “I'm no legend, I’m just a dude that caught a break.”
“Yeah, but-”
“Listen,” I say. “You’re not allowed to be a fan of mine.”
“But-”
“I need you to be my friend,” I say, “and friends can't be fans of each other. A fan is someone who likes what you do. A friend is someone who likes who you are. I know you don't know me very well, and I don't know you at all, but I need you to be my friend anyway, because I'm scared of all of this shit, and now that I’m here, I’m not positive I can go through with going-” My voice catches unexpectedly and I gulp.
“She loved you,” he says.
“I know,” I say. “I loved her back.”
He stands there for a minute, then he says, “Then why did you leave?”
Damn.
I started keeping stories of our scene which wasn't exactly punk, but some weird small town hybrid of metalheads and punks and fantasy type D&D nerds and grunge hold outs and pretty much any other kind of outcast you could come up with. We all hung out at the Deuce, and some of us played in bands and there were some drugs and somehow fights were rare-ish even though most of us were drunk or high a good portion of the time; it was just acknowledged that this was the place we went to get away from the assholes that seemed to populate the world in such great numbers. The Deuce was ostensibly a cafe; there was a menu you could order various fried items off of that arrived in a grease spotted paper boat, and there was coffee for the kids that would order it and drop some cheap whisky in. It was out in the industrial part of town, and nobody seemed to care too much. I think the officials of the town probably thought it was best to keep us all contained, and so mostly they left us alone.
Even though I wasn't spiraling anymore, I still wasn't much of a talker; I watched and I drew in my notebooks and I took notes and every time something interesting happened, I sketched it in black and red, every time someone told an outlandish bullshit tale, I wrote it down.
It was Christa that suggested that I retrofit all these drawings and stories into one kinda sorta cohesive thing; we sat on her bed in her big empty house and played old records on her turntable and we laughed and worked on this big stupid project, until it was something like complete, and when it was done it wasn't a big stupid collection of my sketches and scribbled notes, it was something special, it was what would later become 3 Chords.
I remember that time, sitting on her bed, sipping sickly sweet wine coolers and giggling in the warm orange light from her standing lamp, I remember it like Adam and Eve would remember the Garden of Eden, before they were thrust out into the world. I would sleep there sometimes, feeling her warmth next to me, and it felt like home, or what home should feel like, not like my sad, desperate mother in her sad, desperate shitty apartment, being there made me feel welcome and loved and that I wasn't a waste, a burden. We never kissed or held hands, if I touched her on purpose she would always pull back. I don't know if that was a product of her own hurt, or of it was just her protecting our peace, and I never found out. I just know we never let it get weird, we just were there in that soft cocoon, there clinging to each other in the churning maelstrom that is this beautiful, terrible, painful, glorious life. We held on, and she pulled me up, propped me up, made me believe that it wouldn't always be this hard, that I was worth more than an afterthought, than a chore to be done.
I follow the kid down the hall, down toward the room that I couldn't seem to forget, that I had spent so much time in. There is a warm orange-ish glow coming from under the door, and I am struck with an overwhelming sense of deja vu; the quiet empty house, the darkened halls and suddenly I'm seventeen again, a ratty kid in torn-up clothes, set adrift in this vast and frightening ocean, left to fight or die. Suddenly I am a mess, and my hands shake and I put my hand on the kid’s shoulder.
“Wait,” I say. “I can’t. Wait, okay?”
He shrugs off my hand, my cowardice, and walks down the hall, and opens the door. And the orange light fills the hall, and music pours out, old grungy chick music, The Breeders maybe, or Garbage, or Belly, or Mazzy Starr. I could never tell them all apart; that was her bag, and that was fine with me. It was all good in my opinion, even if it tended to bleed together in my mind.
The kid steps in and says into the room, “He’s here,” then turns to look at me expectantly. I don't know how I do it, but I put one foot in front of the other, I make my feet go, I will the muscles in my legs to move, even as my mind screams for me to leave, to just go home to my angry wife and my small, but tastefully beautiful loft. I walk in and there is the room, and it looks exactly like I remember it, even if it is filled with machines and tubes and a low but incessant beeping noise.
And there in the bed, there she is, and she looks like a cadaver, like someone who is dead, but just hasn't realized it yet. There in the bed, where I sat so many hours, spent so many nights, wrote so many songs, there is the shell of the best friend I ever had, the best friend I would ever have, and she was dying, there was no way to deny it, there was no way to rationalize it, or hide from it. She was there, and she was dying, and maybe I was dying a little too.
“Jesus, Jimmy,” she says, and her voice is a broken whisper. “You look like shit.”
And I blurt out a completely inappropriate laugh. Fuckin’ girl could do it every time, even now.
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s been a rough week.”
When she handed me the acceptance for 3 Chords, I was just short of eighteen. I just sat there, cross legged on the bed, with the freshly opened letter in my lap. She sat there too, in the same position, facing me. I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes, gratitude, and something else, too. Grief maybe, because it was clear that whatever we had here was ending. The letter changed everything.
It was Christa, of course, that sent the manuscript for 3 Chords in, it was her that chose the perfect place for it, that would want it and appreciate it and would treat it with respect. I had left it with her; I didn't see it’s value, but she did. She saw the value in everything, even me, even when I couldn't. The publishing house loved it, but the house in this case was just one guy who found and published strange graphic novels and chapbooks of weird poetry, and he wanted me to come out, outside of Chicago, a couple thousand miles away, he wanted a partner, he said, someone who “got it,” and based on the work in 3 Chords he was convinced that that someone was me. He wanted me to move out there and start a company that first would publish 3 Chords, then would produce another book, and find other outsider art and publish that, too. This was my ticket out. And it was produced entirely by her.
“I’m not going,” I said to my lap, tears falling on the letter, and even I could hear the lie in my voice, even I could tell that that wasn't the truth.
“Don’t be stupid,” she said, and her voice wavered a little too.
“Then come with me,” I said, “I’ll go, but you have to come with me, okay? I can’t do anything without you. You know that.”
“You’re still being stupid,” she said, “but you know that. This was all you, all the writing the art, this all came from you, and your selfish asshole parents might not know it, but you’re an amazing person that deserves everything that he wants. You will go, and you will be great. You don’t need me for any of that.”
I finally looked up from the goddamn fucking beautiful, awful letter. I looked at her, with tears streaming down my face, and I reached out and touched her face, and for once she didn’t pull away, didn’t flinch back. “I love you,” I told her, for what might have been the first time. “You saved me, and I will always love you.”
She smiled her beautiful imperfect smile and she leaned close. “I love you, too,” she said, and for the first time in all the years since she found me spiraling on that park bench, we kissed, and then something cracked and broke, and then it was all hands and mouths and urgency and heat, and tears, and fire and loss, and for a long moment, nothing mattered, for a moment there was nothing that could hurt us, or rip us apart, there was nothing but us, together.
And then it was over.
And then a few weeks later, I packed a backpack up and I hopped a bus to Chicago, to an uncertain future, and into the life that she had opened up for me.
I left her behind.
Now, I sit cross legged on the end of her bed, and with my eyes closed, and the music and the warmth and the orange light creeping through my closed lids, I am seventeen again. I am lost but not alone, and the world is sharp and broken and it cuts you all the time, but I know I will heal, and the scars might fade, but they will never disappear entirely, and I threw the letter away, I never left.
But it is just a moment, and I open my eyes to see the best friend I will ever have and she is dying.
I want to tell her that I’m sorry, but every time I open my mouth, I choke on the words, because if she hadn’t pushed me, I would have never had the courage to leap on my own, and to be sorry for that, is to say that she was wrong to push, and that would hurt her, would diminish her sacrifice and her generosity.
“Take it easy, you pussy,” she whispers in her cracked voice, and she nudges my leg with her foot. “I’m high as a kite. You want the really good stuff, try dying. They don’t hold anything back.”
“I’m good,” I say. “I’ll stick with beer.”
“The kid called, huh?”
“You got it.”
“He’s a good one. Reminds me of you sometimes.”
“Well you created us both, didn’t you? In a way?”
“Jesus, Jimmy aren’t you poetic. All that work you’re doing out there turned you into an art fag?”
“I guess dying hasn’t make you less of a bitch, huh?” I say back, and we both laugh a bit, mine sad and lost, and hers a wheeze and both of them jack o lantern hollow.
In the end it wasn’t 3 Chords that was the breakout success, but we did have a breakout, a beautiful and terribly sad thing from a young artist writer, hand painted in watercolors and ink, a work of hybrid art by any measure, and it got some national attention after a morning talk show host ran across it in a hipster arty bookstore near her ridiculously expensive downtown loft. Suddenly our tiny art house graphic novel company was hot as shit and beautiful things poured in and we kept making them, and our back catalogue blew up including 3 Chords, a strange ink and paper punk rock story collection that some unknown writer had thrown together forever long ago. I sent Christa the papers to sign, to get her the money for it as co-creator, but they kept coming back unsigned and I kept sending them until finally one came back with a big red hand-written message: STOP BEING A DICK on every page. I put the money in a trust, paid her royalties into it, and that was that, because even though she never wanted to acknowledge it, 3 Chords was as much hers as it was mine, and it would never have existed without her. Because of our crazy success, I was busy as hell, and the years passed and our letters and calls fell off, one by one and then it had been years, forever really, since I had even spoken to her, or had read a word she had written. Fuck, I didn’t even know she had a kid, until I got the call, I didn’t know she had gotten sick, I didn’t know that I was losing her for good this time. I didn’t know, I swear, I didn’t know.
I sit and she sleeps and I pull out a notebook, and I draw, pen and ink, black and red like I used to, I draw her in that bed, a skeleton that talks, skin stretched over bones, I draw her as a savior, as an angel. I draw myself as an aloof tool, a villain, a thoughtless careless abandoner. I draw Benny’s van and my morning beer, and my wife, another woman much better than I deserve, looking at her phone, hitting decline on all my calls. I write everything, sweeping up my glass on the sidewalk, and me sitting here cross legged as the Breeders plays on her old boombox. I get lost in the lines and the words and I chase it away, all this horrible guilt and melancholy. I attack it with the pen and paper until it can sit in my head in a way that seems to be tolerable, until I can live with myself, and I don’t even notice that she woke up again until she coughs once, a wet and painful thing, and I look over and she has tears in her eyes and trailing down her cheeks.
“You were always so good,” she whispers. “I could always see it, even back then.”
“There’s money,” I say. “I put it away for you, never touched it even in the lean years. It’s yours.”
“Jesus, Jimmy,” she says, “what the hell am I going to do with money?”
“Fuck, I don’t know,” I cry, “it’s something isn’t it? There’s nothing that I can do for you? Nothing?”
“Take the kid,” she says, her words falling out like rocks.
And my head fills with the ocean, fills with static.
“What,” I finally manage. “I can’t. I-”
“You can,” she says, “and you will. I know you, Jimmy, you’ll look out for him. My parents are god knows where, his dad was never anything other than a regret. You take him and look out for him. He reminds me so much of you-” she says and the tears start again.
“But there’s legal shit right? Guardianship and whatever? I mean I’ve-”
She held up a hand, barely lifted it off the top of the blanket, but it stopped my babbling.
“It’s been worked out. All of it. He knows what’s up, and now so do you. After-” her voice breaks, she falters. “After all this is over, you go home, introduce him to your pretty wife, watch out for him. It’s only a few years. Show him that manly shit, how to shave and how to treat a woman, how to drive and change a tire. Then you can give him that money if you want to, if you think he won’t piss it all away on something stupid.”
“But I can’t,” I say, and I crack open there on her bed. I lose it, turn to water. “I don’t know shit,” I say, “I don’t know a goddamn thing.”
“You can,” she whispers. “And you will. I know you Jimmy.”
And I stayed for a few days, and so did she until she couldn’t. She left me like I left her, and then I was alone again.
Except I wasn’t.
There was the kid.
And as the plane takes off east, with him sitting beside me looking lost and alone, his hood up, his face pressed against the glass, watching his home disappear under the grey clouds, looking like he was adrift in a terrible and confusing ocean, I touch his arm.
“Hey kid,” I say, and he turns to me, his face a mask of grief and confusion. “Hey,” I say again. “I want to tell you about how your mom saved my life.”
Still Writing,
Damn it. I I read that while at work running karaoke and now I am trying to not stand here on stage bawling. Beautiful.
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