I used to think that understanding the difference between a town like Freighton and a city like New York meant experiencing the perspective of a driver - that only the involved wheelman could tap into the city’s patterns a passenger merely glossed over. The inrush of traffic signals and indecisive metal is the honest analogue for what goes on in offices, living rooms, and Google calendars the five boroughs over.
A passenger is absolved from piecing together the swarm of pedestrians and the accompanying kaleidoscope of street signs into a unified logic. It overwhelms onlookers into a gleeful surrender while drivers have the riot of stimuli shoehorned into their brains. The frenzy looks like some panavision epic for the idle onlooker while any hapless drivers have to hone in on half-second details like the posting preteens walking through traffic - the hipster bicyclists weaving through congested avenues, practically begging to collide with a fender. It’s distilled masochism, inflated pride, or the will to survive that keeps the vehicular onslaught in motion and everyone is forced to follow its arrhythmic logic, a cohesion of disgruntled compromises that governs the city’s weird motions.
And I still see them. JFK Expressway. Williamsburg Bridge. Holland Tunnel. The potholes of Broadway Avenue - monuments to white flight. Those sites of spilled motor oil, abraded gaskets, busted horns, steamy engine blocks and cracked radiators were my Stalingrads, Ypres, and Gettysburgs.
But it wasn’t the pandemonium of a gentrifying Bushwick or double-parking against the clock in Flatbush that did me in. The $125 parking tickets, the mass exodus at rush hour, the rout across the four lanes flooded with traffic to avoid being funneled Jersey-bound. No sir. Those realities were anterooms for the inferno’s true designer, the master’s handful of dust: the Luciferian fate of running out of gas.
The vehicle I clung to was a symbol, a representation of autonomy I’d be damned to surrender. So when I faced the harrowing Brooklyn-Queens Expressway the day my tank ran dry, I felt my soul escape from my body much faster than any Faustian bargain. The nervous breakdown I thought might have been an early stroke or a brain aneurysm was so debilitating the ambulance got me to Woodhull Hospital before the tow truck reached my Chrysler Town and Country to be impounded. That was what it took for my escape from home to fall to shambles. It was the catalyst for putting my lurid existence in New York on the backburner and returning to my prairie hometown of Freighton for “re-hinging” myself.
Rather than stowing away in some circumnavigating Pequod, I pursued the safe familiarity of Middle America I hoped would stave off the destructive fantasies becoming more vivid with time. My typically brief returns to the homestead would follow the same pattern - comfort gradating into a still nausea and the lucidity of renewed surroundings inevitably revealed to be the foreshortened deceptions I had made a point to forget.
Freighton’s roads were big and broad and its roadways clear of traffic even in the oldest and tightest of downtown’s streets. You could ride worry free from one end of town to another, the dial on the dash’s red “E” from the glittering refinery towers at Freighton’s eastern edge to the distending western limits, a border that kept stretching out year after year, like a prolonged pregnancy beginning it’s fourth trimester. Running out of gas only meant easing onto a side-street, walking a few blocks to one of the profuse number of gas stations, or in a worst case scenario, climbing off the camber of a state highway and hitchhiking to a nearby pump. But driving on fumes in New York meant gambling you’d sputter out on the tidal flow of the freeway or the current of the city’s main arteries - a train of surly Uber drivers blasting their horns like a Renaissance shivaree.
New York’s road rules - both tacit and offical - are a foreign country’s compared to the rest of the nation, all of which were even more jarring realizing you crossed no customs booth to get here. It wasn’t a faux pas to double park if you had your blinkers on nor was it uncommon to receive a honk in the microsecond the light changed green if you weren’t already moving. You learned not to signal because cars sped up to keep you from getting ahead of them. If you parked in the same spot for three, sometimes only two days, the infraction-happy traffic cops would leave a bright orange fine on your dash for obstructing the tireless street-sweepers serving a city’s cleanliness which they naively hoped would lead to godliness.
Yet - and yet - it was ideal for a kid locked into parental safety nets, a bachelor degree, and a gifted van. The confines of a borough like Brooklyn meant there wouldn’t be a dad to help you diagnose an engine - no garage tools to “borrow,” no AAA cards to piggyback on. I flocked to that road show of vehicular self-interest as if the special guest was Mad Max and my finale of an exit a Thelma and Louise style getaway - if only I could hold out long enough. The three generations worth of car advice kibitzed at Lutheran confirmations and graduation parties was hardly apropos to New York’s automotive anomie - advice that either implored me to avoid any city bigger than Denver or some common sense adage to always check your oil. I suffered alone and relished my fortitude like a castaway survivor drawn to that city’s impatience for failure, remembering Freighton’s coddling and cloying, its admiration of accumulation but its hypocritical resentment of grand success.
Freighton was fixated on reproducing a nostalgia for the dead, reanimating corpses with a simple point of a masculine finger, turning coronels and cowboys into touchstones of nobility and use value. While Freighton still waxed poetic on the West and a way of life you’d think had been dying before the Indians even crossed the Bering Strait, New York was coolly recalibrating its watch. The no bullshit of the City kept me in its hostile bosom, away from what I called Freighton’s virturized homogeny and homogenized virtue.
So, a few months after returning to Freighton like some prodigal son, I dog-sat way out from Freighton’s city limits at the newest housing complex - Lethean Properties - just beyond the purview of Freighton’s civic government, another eighty acre lot of alfalfa seemingly transmogrified into eighty McMansions overnight. About every year, Freighton moved its border another quarter-mile west, subsuming any concerns just beyond its reach, even if it meant absorbing another desiccated field of barley or a listing schoolhouse from the homestead boom. For careful readers of the landscape, it was clear that a dying and drying agriculture continued to open up land for real-estate speculation, strip mall development, and widened roadways that complemented the town they metastasized from. Normal housing developers wanted to stay within the city limits so they could connect plumbing, electrical, and etc. to an established grid, but in the case of Lethean Properties they privatized everything themselves, linking the houses to their own generators and funneling the waste into an ark-sized septic tank beneath their suburbia isolate. Nobody had to pay the town’s property taxes, nor were they beholden to any civic consortium - no chamber of commerce or council to pontificate on the best interests of the community. LP’s residents spurned Freighton’s ethos with a rugged pioneering spirit even their grandparents couldn’t recall.
And of course, everyone but a few retirees at LP worked in Freighton, ate in Freighton, and would probably be buried in Freighton. But Freighton was Freighton, and Lethean Properties was a newly minted inner sanctum, a private xanadu where the fundamentals of the good life were fructified on a make-believe Mediterranean, just as Roman generals and statesmen did basking in Amalfi villas around the time of Christ. In-town Freightonians were drawn to visiting LP’s spacious lawns and abandoned civic inspections, taxes, and regulations. The natural extension of an elm branch into a neighbor’s lawn needn’t require the attendant hand of company or department. Such was the embodiment of freedom for these neo-settlers.
For these duty-bound Freightonians stuck in the present, departing the conventions of civic jurisdiction made attending events in Lethean Properties suggestively taboo, even if just for a one-year old’s birthday party, a transgression punctuated by an infant’s smash cake. Here was where BBQs and bridal showers became pleasantly perverse just by suggesting a modicum of more control for individuals convinced their frontier had closed - a wild west for the HGTV generation.
Mind you, the once foursquare politics of the day seemed flimsier with each year. There was a slow realization that memory wouldn’t be enough to stave off looming progress. The ground beneath their feet wasn’t as solid as caliche but liquid like some wayward thought guided by a stimulating breeze. The route of the affluent and determined was to reclaim their ground and tally westward ho, to voyage ashore their residential island lapped by waves of lonesome prairie zephyrs. Reality didn’t have its previous conveniences as time went on for those padded plains folk, uncomfortably caught in the same flux most of their fellow Americans had always known. The scion of desperate immigrants and their optimistic inheritors now lived in houses sometimes larger than plantation homes.
They spoke in code (and sometimes explicitly) of their bequeathed lineage and earned rights, but a tuned eye could pick out how a flinty countenance kept you at arm’s length, kept you from hearing a selfish naiveté you might suss out if you stayed for the huckleberry cobbler. And when they told the stories, they always worked their asses off. There was a deep insensible happening between the present and the past, and they did everything they could to have that cobbler and eat it too.
So - Cheyenne masks were hung in foyers. Home theaters streamed skirmishes. Stairmasters were mastered, virtual assistants intoned, and player pianos played on, all with such purpose that I couldn’t fathom the remaining passion in the lucana between darkness and sleep. What they were really buying was the right to be removed from a dying town, to feel free, or in some ways, immortal.
Nina’s call was manna from heaven. She wanted me to dog-sit their cockapoo Penny at their house in Lethean Properties who was not only my canine muse but also my ticket into LP’s sideshow of escapism I had yet to see for myself. For years I’d dog-sat Penny at a number of Nina’s domiciles, each home increasing in square footage while the neighborhood decreased in traffic. Nina was the mother of a friend named Sam who I had been deeply in love with for the better part of my young adult life, until one day I’d found I’d moved on from my obsession, about the time I was living in New York and dating a Minnesotan who made her own parallel move to the City from even colder flatlands. Sam’s Beatrice-like face blurred in importance and joined the other expressions in the photo album of my inscape leaving me cynical and rudderless - around your mid-20s where whatever remaining vulnerability either collapses, disappears, or takes on some mutated manifestation.
It was for the best. Around the same time, Sam divorced Fitz, officially came out, and proposed to a cadet from Teneneesee soon after. During previous dog-sits at Sam’s childhood home, I couldn’t help but wonder if lingering over the artifacts of her presence were classically romantic or absurdly perverse.
Shortly before my post-collegiate move to New York, I wrote and published my first and only story while dog-sitting Penny. It was early summer, the state’s prime time of year. The two of us would spend late mornings and early afternoons in the sunroom while I wrote and she gnawed her way through whatever chew toy she’d find.
It was a story entitled “Ostracize'' about someone who dog-sat a labradoodle named Beckett that missed its owner so much it ends up committing suicide. It took forever to figure out how to depict the suicide of a dog. I tried to have the dog starve itself to death, then tried to get her to overdose on Xanax its owner had left by the bathroom sink, until I finally settled on the dog hanging itself off the balcony over the entryway to the house, like some broken pendulum. It seemed the most believable and dramatic, the dog-sitter having forgotten to take off its leash and the poor pooch dropping off the ledge, hanging over the bed of chrysanthemums it loved to dig up. Nobody believes the owner and it ends with him nearly serving prison time for murdering the dog in such a cruel fashion and his resulting ostracization from the community. It’s a bit of a twist ending because you can’t tell if the dog-sitter is really the one who did it, or in the very least, if he’d really mistreated the dog somehow with the whole unreliable narrator shtick, the dog-sitter being equally tortured by this sulking animal who would follow him around the house. It was believable enough to show up in a Piedmont literary journal that fall. Regardless of whether it was a murder or a suicide, there was a link between sadness and violence I wanted to get at (be it self-inflicted or outward), with the sadness used up and transformed into an aggression exacerbated by society’s cold shoulder. More than the money, dog-sitting Penny was remunerative in the form of a good fiction, not to mention a major windfall.
But Lethean Properties brought nothing to the table. Nina’s other homes churned out stories like an MFA workshop, but now with the family dramas ostensibly worked out and my own fraught fascination with Sam resolved, the blankets, artwork, and fridge magnets that travelled with the shrunken family once pregnant with meaning didn’t agitate whisperings into shouts but mirrored my blank gaze with something just as vacant. More startling than before, the new house oozed anxiety not because of its idiosyncrasies but for lacking any at all. After Nina’s divorce with Sam’s dad, she remarried a chemical engineer who had relocated from Delaware and found the relative freedom and rural expanse of our burg’s hinterlands to his liking - the origin of Nina’s three-storied hardwood floors and the parking lot sized driveway my minivan nervously squatted in.
Now, bundled up walks with Penny dead-ended into cul-de-sacs seemingly lifted from a California address and plopped into what was once sage grass and manure. LP’s only signs of life were in the PVC plastic fencing pockmarked by golf-ball sized hail and the drone of the highway, which complemented the tired complex. The home was an air-conditioned nightmare instead of the atelier I expected, so bringing Penny over to Fitz’s place was how I contrived to relieve my swelling ennui.
If Lethean Properties was a liberterian’s fantasy then Burnside was an anarchist’s. But maybe “fantasy” is a little too generous. A byword for Freighton degeneracy, Burnside was only dangerous (how dangerous could humble Freighton be?) if you implicated yourself in the criminal culture that Fitz managed to keep at arm’s length.
There wasn’t a neighborhood as infamous as Burnside in the whole county: a twelve block radius of meth dens and potholes right off downtown that cops mostly left to its own devices unless there was a headline-winning bust to sniff out. To mention Burnside would mean mentioning its continued free-fall into degradation for the last twenty to thirty years, rumors about crumbling mansions built during railway booms and now filled with teens trafficked out at the truck stops lining the state’s network of highways. The violence and drugs were real, but Fitz left his door unlocked without any major problems. Occasionally, a transient on a bad-trip or just plain fucked up would walk into his living room with a stoned Fitz placating the guy by listening to their scattershot memories, give them a hit of his pipe, and send them on their way - wherever that might have been. Of my friends I had abandoned to the sinkhole I called Freighton, Fitz was the only one who met the croupier of fate head-on, doubling-down by facing Burnside’s sensationalized ghettoization with aplomb and finding poetry in a town where I believed it was devoid. In exchange for his thrifty dissolution, he afforded to live an artist’s life, giving bass lessons during the week, practicing in our band called The Weird we’d formed when I moved back, and performing jazz standards on the weekends, free from the 9 to 5 my generation was slowly cozying up to.
Fitz wasn’t home, so I took Penny for a walk, doing my best to avoid the occasional syringe and surreal mats of fiber caked over drain gates that looked more like fungal aggregates than whatever it really was. When I ignored a homeless Native who called me a motherfucker, Penny and I waited in the van by Fitz’s door in the alley. I read a Wall Street Journal article Nina’s husband had continued sending to the house (but not the local Gazette) about the church’s struggle with dealing with mental health and reports of a virus that had spread to the U.S. when Fitz finally showed up with Kirk, the two of them blasting music so loud Penny whimpered in the passenger seat.
“Penny!” Fitz yelled past Kirk who sat shotgun. It must have been the first time he’d seen her since his divorce with Sam. “Penny!” Kirk echoed, smiling even bigger than the reunited Fitz. Fitz ignored me and took Penny inside the unlocked house.
There it was - the surfaces littered with candy wrappers, condoms, dog-eared books, mason jars half full of kombucha, empty High Lifes, tubes of lubricant from planned parenthood, guitar pedals in mid-surgery, candles cratered too deep for use, CDs unplayed but scratched to oblivion, belled cat-toys, homemade deodorant, hats chewed by dead dogs, an upside-down dish, a tiki umbrella for a mixed drink, and a literal cigarette butt in a moldy cup of coffee. The sink was piled up with scummy dishes and the drying rack capstoned by a kokopelli mug affixed to a plastic colander warped in the untold saga of the Melted Sieve and Its Unspeakable Smell. The coffee table didn’t have any coffee, but a phalanx of fallen soldiers, IPAs, PBRs, MHLs kept guard. You stepped on cat food and kitty litter whether you were on linoleum or shag carpet and the wood paneling was straight out of a Midwestern, mid-century basement, the ceiling from a hospital.
His house was a ramshackle granny pod behind the equally run-down bigger house that filled up the view from the sliding door window where most of the light came from. The front entrance was in the back of the house facing the dirt alley where everyone entered. It had a living room with a narrow kitchenette, a bathroom that stayed freezing all winter and a doorless bedroom partitioned by a paisley curtain that was mildly translucent. My new girlfriend was living in his old bedroom and shared the cheap rent while Fitz slept in the vestibule between the front door sealed with insulation and the living room, a space that barely fit his twin bed. Fitz’s kitten hissed at Penny until it got bored and went to sleep on his bed. Penny sat looking up at me sad saucer-eyed and eventually laid down with familiar sighs. Fitz and Kirk began taking hits from the bong. The absence of formal greetings was long-standing.
“So about next week’s show,” Fitz began, “The Feds said they can’t play because Charlie is stuck working at Dominoes. Unless we want to stall until eleven when he gets off his shift we have to find another band. I know, it’s fucking stupid.''
“Well,” I chimed in, “it’s not our fault these bands keep bailing cause they’re too stoned to keep a calendar. If Charlie’s stuck folding pizza boxes, we should just find someone else.”
Fitz cleared another bowl and continued in a strained voice, “As a fully functioning marijuana-addict I agree with Marlowe.”
“So who can we get to play instead? Maybe WhiteAlert? Or Stars and Bars? Neither of them have played a show in a while? Chris said he’d be down to drive the band over from Heightville when we played at Flavor Town? I just want to have a good band to impress Synth Simps when they get into town, you know?” Everything Kirk said he said as a question, a mark of either unshakable sincerity or perpetual confusion. “Fitz, do you want to message them?”
“Umm, I don’t think I want to play with those guys anymore,” I interrupted. I couldn’t tell if Fitz was pursuing his lips because he was stuck holding in another bong rip. “Sorry guys, first of all the band name is problematic, second, they always bring this weird bro energy to shows that puts off a lot of people that don’t show up if they’re there, and third, if they can’t hang with The Weird I don’t think they can hang period.”
“What do you mean?” Kirk asked, head tilted like a cat, “Our band or just weird stuff in general?”
“Both, man! Check it out. Remember when we got them that show in Boise and they freaked out because there were a bunch of trans people at the show? Fuckers bailed and made us look like a bunch of clowns. Said they felt like they were performing for some tripped out cult or something.”
“They’re fucking rip dude.” Fitz opined, “And besides, the name is ironic. It’s like The Dead Kennedys singing about killing children. It’s satire, my guy.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t cut it anymore. For a bunch of guys to play three power chords competently doesn’t mean jack if there’s sketchy stuff going on.”
“They can do more than keep a tune together though. People were freaking out at their last show. You should have been there.”
“I heard about it. But like I said, I’d rather see a band like WhiteAlert than Stars and Bars. Guys call themselves punks but they sound like they’re a Ramones cover band trapped in 1984.”
“That was a good year.”
“Hindsight’s 20/20 and they’re doing the work. WhiteAlert doesn’t fuck around. It’s angry. It’s noise. It’s queer as fuck.”
“They literally don’t know how to play their instruments. Aren’t WhiteAlert just another one of your pretentious New York bands you’re always crowing about? I’m surprised they haven’t already flocked to Brooklyn like moths to the flame.”
“What about The Shaggs? Or The Raincoats? There’s a lot of ways to be punk, man. It’s not just black denim and 180 BPM.”
The Weird was something we three had put together when I moved back, with Fitz the bandleader and principal song-writer. He was also the scene’s impresario with our little triumvirate helping organize the DIY shows in our leg of the regional circuit - not to mention getting on the lion’s share of local gigs. There was something to his looseness and flippancy that kept him likable and steady. When he spearheaded a local music festival in Freighton - Worst Fest, Freighton’s first punk fest and first fest not comprised of country and classic rock - it was his composed nonchalance that kept him sane.
“I don’t crow about any bands that don’t deserve it,” I explained,
“You’ve been gone for a while Marlowe.” Fitz kept flicking his lighter as he explained, “WhiteAlert are the offspring of the Freighton City Council. Margaret’s Dad literally runs the downtown business association. WhiteAlert pretends to play synthesizers against backdropped post-war commercials because they’d rather police their fans than write a real number. It’s edgy but it’s not good.”
“I don’t think you can play the class card if they’re music’s so overtly anti-capitalist.”
“Well, WhiteAlert won’t play shows that don’t have female showrunners anyway so I don’t know why we’re arguing.”
“Is that true?”
“Yeah, it’s true. So unless you want to grow a vagina, I’m calling Stars and Bars.”
“Are we arguing?” Kirk asked.
I wasn’t sure if we hung out with Kirk to temper our disagreements or because we wanted an audience to intensify our dust-ups. When I finally managed to escape the gravitational pull of Freighton’s black hole by moving to New York, I tried convincing Fitz to get the hell out of Dodge and make for the coast with me. For every one of my Joycean arguments to self-exile, he deferred to cyber-culture, metrics on Spotify and Youtube, all cases for the end of spatial importance. I made pleas for the Manhattan of the ‘70s and ‘80s, the Brooklyn of the early aughts, and he referenced Bloomberg’s Manhattan, playing “New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down” just to bring me down. He was right about how slimy a city like New York was - I was never fooled into thinking it was a Mecca for its culture and history - but it was a Mecca because it was so strange to me, so very weird, especially for a kid raised on the unbroken firmament of prairie life. The homogeneity of Frieghton, a disdain for acknowledging differences, and its tenacious grasp on their grandfathered myths made the potential for any weirdness impossible. But that was before I realized how fucking weird samness really was.
Kirk the peacemaker continued, “So, how’s this sound? Let’s have us open still and Stars and Bars will play at the end of the night? That way we still have a solid band to close the night, politics aside, and when Latka Wave gets into town we’ll get an audience even if it’s just people waiting for us to play?”
“We should probably practice tonight then…” I thought aloud. “Fitz, can you contact your confederates Stars and Bars then? You’re going to the Hot Springs until Wednesday yeah?”
“Hell yeah. I’m taking the time to prioritize my endorphins instead of my dopamine.”
“What’s the difference? I thought they were basically the same?”
“Dopamine is the chemical your brain releases when you’re working, basically when you feel good about something you’re striving towards instead of something that you’re getting right here right now. Endorphins are the badass cousin. They’re an analgesic, a pain-killer, a drug - it numbs you with pleasure. Dopamine is the middle man that tricks your senses into endlessly pursuing the unobtainable fix.”
“Spoken like a true hedonist.”
“Nah, you see dopamine isn’t what we should be looking for. That’s what the tech bros in California and the workaholics in Manhattan want us to chase - that’s the real dragon most psychos are chasing when they should be getting loaded and seeking pleasure for pleasure’s sake - not pleasure for work’s sake.”
I thought Penny was napping that whole time but I heard a quiet whimper from her and her eyes were wide-open. When I stood up she shot up, the leash still hanging like an albatross trailing across the floor. She hadn’t left my side since we came in. “Do you guys want to work on this back at my place? I mean, the place I’m house-sitting. Nina never said I could take Penny away from the house like this, so I’m rolling the die by keeping her from the house up on the hill.”
“I’m sure Penny’s just fine trotting around this side of town. She’s getting some culture for once, hanging out with some God honest derelicts.”
“The apogee of western civilization.”
“Nina’s? How’s that going?” Kirk asked.
“Great man. I just blast Sleep with their top-notch sound system that normally plays NPR Dvořák and Billie Holiday instead of stoner metal. Testing the integrity of the house’s craftsmanship with armies of dBs- probing the house for any loose beams.”
“Any luck?”
“Nope. God himself cannot sink this ship.”
We took my car. It was the first warm day all January. I tried impressing the guys about the house, excited to show my old Freighton friends anything to impress them. “Wait till you see this chair out there Fitz. It cost Nina’s hubbie $10,000 and it massages every muscle on your body.”
Fitz smoked a cigarette with the window rolled up. “Every muscle?” When I rolled it down he made a face and kept smoking.
Kirk’s head appeared between the two of us, “Yo, can we stop by my place just so I can grab some notes I made for Worst Fest? Maybe we can bang out the rest of the logistics while we’re out there? We should set up proposals for the sponsors and go through some more submissions? I think a band from Germany noticed the Fest and wants to play here while they’re on tour! I gave them a listen and they’re fucking great? Really sludgy stuff? They have 50,000 monthly listeners on Spotify I think?”
“Nice!” Fitz and I yelled in tandem from the front. Penny sat in the seat next to Kirk looking like a morose Einstein, shaggy hair covering her eyes, the goatee completing the Austrian look. “What’s the name of the band?”
“Lester Mensch, I think? I don’t know what it means but like I said, I think they’re fucking sick.” I noticed Fitz’s side eye and pulled up to Kirk’s and waited with Penny while the two of them went inside. Kirk was renting the place and got a hell of a deal. It had a manicured lawn without any of the ostentatious overkill most houses had farther west in town. Most of these houses were historic homes, just on the opposite side of downtown from Burnside. But even though there were Craftsmen mansions from the railroad days, most of the houses were affordable, well-kept, and personable. The streets were narrow and the coverage of elm trees most of the year made a Saturday stroll a picturesque idyll. Kirk’s roommate was a neurotic Japanophile who Fitz occasionally hooked up with, something that only bothered Kirk when the two of them hogged the TV till morning, binging pirated hentai that Jason introduced to Fitz’s Eucrocentrically pornographic habits.
When they finally came out, Fitz lit another cigarette and Penny sighed with her Teutonic eyebrows, an expression of what I could only imagine was the weltschmerz of a theoretical physicist. Kirk looked concerned when he opened the door. “Is Penny alright? She looks...blue.”
“She just wishes she was in Mexico with mommy Nina. It’s how she feels at home. You should see her face light up when she’s around - a friendly little Buddah! Aren’t you babe! Aren’t you?”
Fitz stalled by the photographs in Nina’s entrance while we ran down stairs wide enough for a car. When Kirk and I were parked in front of the $10,000 chair semi-ironically jaws agape, Fitz walked in with his dialogue prepared: “Like my grandpappy used to say, never trust the work of a machine that replaces the work of a woman! How else you gonna keep em busy?”
No matter what room you were in, the entire house was kept toasty with the Google thermostat on the wall. When I tried to save energy and turned it down, someone somewhere must have dialed it back up. As compensation I kept the lights off in the basement and a little sun came through the egress windows above our heads. Two skittish cats that always avoided me in the house hid under the leather sofa hissing at our presence. The $10,000 chair looked more relaxed than any of us.
“Is that true? Did he actually say that?” Kirk started to climb into the molded indents of the chair.
“Kirk,” Fitz began from the comfort of an armchair, placing his Converse on a beige ottoman, “Sometimes you ask too many questions.”
“Do I? Ha! Alright, so how do I work this thing man?”
"You’re gonna want to fit all your limbs in these grooves here see? Then you can pick between different settings, they’re each about fifteen minutes. Relax, Intense, Stretch, Float, Night, etc. What do you think?”
“Relax, for sure.”
“Alrighty.” The chair began to tilt backwards into “zero-gravity” and the pneumatic bags swelled up to clutch his arms and legs with the grip of a dominatrix.
“Oh Jesus. This shit is intense.”
“You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Rollers in the chair glided up and down his back while air cells rhythmically tightened on his thighs, playing his body like an instrument. Two balled nubs pushed up from the base of his spine and when it crossed below his pelvis on his gluteus maximus, I could see a pupil-dilating sensation. “Oh Jesus, is this thing gonna take me out to dinner first?”
“The chair is supposed to replicate the experience of a shiatsu massage. Apparently the Japanese believe it to be a medicinal practice, a way to cure diseases, ailments, whatever. Only the blind were permitted to perform a shiatsu massage. Those with sight weren’t allowed to do it. Then the Americans banned it during the occupation...I read it in the manual.”
“And here we are.” Fitz was mooning around the room, hovering by the family photos at the room’s far end, “In the land of the blind, the no-eyed machine is king!”
“Gee, did you just think that up?”
“Shut up. They should have some kind of dildo in the back of this chair. How much harder would that have to be anyway?”
“Not sure if that’s their market…”
“Bunch of hypocrites man. Jesus, it’s warm down here. Why don’t you turn the heat down?”
“They just turn it back up every time. Maybe Penny’s a diva about temp and we just don’t know it. Maybe it’s....Penny...You’re done already Kirk?”
“Yeah, man. It feels good, but it’s not really my thing.”
“Really, what do you mean?
“I don’t know? Something about it just creeps me out, you know? I feel...helpless? Can you get me out, I think my arms are stuck?”
Fitz spoke up, “How can you feel helpless when you’re literally being pleasured? Here, let me switch with him.” I pulled Kirk out of the craft while it leaned back up but Fitz jumped back in and set the setting himself, the chair pitched back so far as to be parallel to the ground. “Let’s see if this is the cum-fest you make it out to be.”
“I haven’t even used it Fitz.”
“Ha, even if that were true, why wouldn’t you? Scared of what you might - ohhhhhhh.” He let out a low groan that dropped into a guttural frequency. His face went blank as his chest raised up like a half-assed Dracula.
Kirk continued, “I don’t know, it wasn’t bad per se? I don’t know man, I think it made me feel claustrophobic? Which is weird, cause I don’t have any claustrophobia. I hid in the trunk of a car for an hour to scare the shit out of Jason once. I don’t know, some kind of voodoo or something is in that chair? Uncanny shit?”
We looked at Fitz. His face convulsed for a few seconds, would then relax, then scrunch up again at some penetrative rub. Occasionally, his hips would thrust forward with the chair spooning his behind and he would softly blow out a breath deep in his core. I checked the remote and saw he had selected NIGHT as his curated escape. The two of us sat in silence while the chair lifted up Fitz’s body accompanied by the humming motor that sounded like a little saw buried in the machine.
“Severin” was all he said, repeating, “Severin.”
After ten minutes I began to cockblock him, “Come on loverboy, we got shit to do. Let’s finish up so we can get to practice.” But his arm only reached out for the controller again and he mechanically pushed a few buttons without lifting his eyes. The chair began listing back into “zero gravity.” “Woah, woah, woah. Come on dude, are you helping out or what? I thought we were gonna talk sponsorships for Worst Fest”
He mumbled sleepily but looked like he was in the act of entombment when his chest or groin protruded forward, some invisible hand cradling him before being let down. “Jesus, what is this? Kirk, do you want to work on this sans Fitz?”
“Maybe...yo Fitz! Nothing. I don’t know I’m getting tired myself, if it’s alright with you, maybe just take me home, and let me know if Fitz wants to practice. We still have time.”
“Sure man. Sure.”
I left the dog at the house with Fitz in his chair, and Kirk and I took the scenic route atop the Bluffs that rimmed the northern edge of the town even if it took longer. The sandstone Bluffs above Freighton were a redoubtable bulwark of mother nature that kept construction south of its walls, halting any development from working its way northward. To our right lay the etherized town fanning out for miles. On our left were the rolling hills of ranch land that disappeared into pure colors of blue sky lonely without clouds and gold fields still striking in the dead of winter. But I was fixated on the town below - or rather - the city I wished it was. From my vantage point, I imagined New York stretched over where Freighton was, the view you might get on the Manhattan Bridge or the BQE when you’re stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic but have an opportune view of high-rises and ferrying ships plying the briny waterways. As stultifying as traffic is, there’s always a comforting respite - surrendering to the constant flux with that collective pause that I have to think is a secret comfort to drivers.
“Sorry for bailing like that.” Kirk said, dispelling my daydream, “I don’t want you to think I’m flaky. I guess Fitz has been such a big part of this scene for so long, and I’m a little dependent on him? He’s been the only reason the scene has survived for the last few years. Getting Worst Fest off the ground and running Flavor Town has been really the only thing keeping kids active in the DIY shit that’s still surviving.”
“Yeah, I hear ya Kirk. I remember seeing venue after venue shut down in Brooklyn. As far as brick-and-mortar goes, it’s the opposite of what you see online. Podcasts and Youtubers are beating out mainstream news and anyone can produce an album and put it online, but in real life, the big venues - the clubs, the arenas, the theaters - those spots keep squeezing out the art spaces and garages. Concentrating those gatekeepers...”
“Not only that - I’ve talked to a kid who said he’d probably be drinking from a paper bag or smoking meth if it wasn’t for the local shows that actually let kids in, that don’t treat high schoolers like lepers. I don’t think this guy really knew anything but skipping school and getting high until Fitz invited him to a show? Did you know Fitz just gave this kid his guitar after a gig? Just flat out gifted it and said he had another one?”
“Did he?"
“Nah, dude! He only had the one, but someone else ended up giving Fitz a guitar and he’s been using that one ever since.”
“No shit? I’m surprised he hasn’t said anything. I always thought of him as the boasting type…”
“I mean, yeah, he’ll definitely toot his own horn and own something if you see him do it, but I don’t think he’s the type to advertise his altruism.”
“Yeah, he always has been about living in the moment...Doesn’t really linger on the past...Probably why…”
Kirk waited to see if I’d finish the thought. “I know I’m a bit younger than you two. I didn’t know how to set up a show or fake a press kit. Fitz’s has been super helpful teaching the ins and outs of gigs and touring, and I’d probably would have given up if it wasn’t for him. Would have just been like my Dad and got a job at the refinery. Music is something I believe in, ya know? And I’m glad you’re here! You help make The Weird legit weird. It’s hard to find a drummer with your self-control, playing that repetitiously on purpose. Everyone here wants to do a fill at the end of every measure. Plus, you’re just a fucking weird guy. ”
“Thanks man. Means a lot, coming from you. Ya goddamn weirdo...”
I dropped Kirk off at his house and on the drive back ran out of gas. I walked six blocks to fill a red canister I had on hand but when I tried paying at the pump it wouldn’t accept my credit card. I went in.
The gas station attendant asked unironically, “Run out of gas?”
“Yep. Gotta get home to take care of a dog.”
“What breed is it?”
“She’s a little one. A cockapoo.”
“A what?” He said with a toothless twist of the head.
“It’s a mix of a cocker spaniel and a poodle.”
“One of those yappy dogs?”
“Yappy dogs? I don’t think so, most dogs around here are pretty aggressive though. Back in New York they’re well-behaved because they actually interact with other dogs. Aren’t territorial.”
“Well I’m glad you’re here to enlighten me.”
I filled up the tank while the sun set. I drove back up on the Bluffs but the darkening sky made it impossible to see New York superimposed beneath the dimming horizon.
When I pulled into Nina’s driveway, I was hoping Fitz was raiding the fridge or watching TV in the living room, but he was still vibrating in the chair while Penny lay facing his direction, couchant, like the lions you’d see on the shields of vanished blood lines.
I remember a twinge of disgust register in my body and I wretched him out of the chair the way you never wake a somnambulist. “What the hell man! Get up! You aren’t supposed to be here still! Rise! Rise!” The two black and white cats hissed from beneath the couch. Penny barked at one of us.
Fitz’s eyes were startled and scared and I let go. He awkwardly fell halfway into the chair. “Enough with this! You talk a big game about being weird and fighting the system on your own terms but what the hell is this? The impresario of DIY Freighton found comatose in a $10,000 massage chair? ”
“I think you’ve confused doing the work with suffering.” Fitz said.
“Of course doing the work is painful! That’s how you know you’re doing it!”
“Says you. You only feel absolved when you’re either suffering or admit guilt. You equate your pain as a prerequisite for good. You distrust joy as false consciousness. And if pleasure’s a sign of compromise, what are the goals of not compromising?” I was taken aback. This drooling stranger was aiming for a kill shot.
“You can’t trust your feelings or instincts, Fitz. No one can. At least when you’re hurting you’re not self-centered. At least there’s something out there taking precedence, instead of our egos. That’s how we start the work.”
“You know what the work is?” he continued, “The work isn’t escaping to the safety of some hip city on the coast - some place where you’re so busy surviving you can’t hear yourself think anymore, let alone the wind in the trees. The work means knowing a different kind of pain, one where you have to face up to real pushback and silence and failure - work where you have the room to pull over and actually stop and go - wow, what the fuck? I’ve seen the Statue of Liberty. I’ve been to cities. It’s all bullshit. There’s scraping by and starving to be an artist but don’t that’s not the work. It’s hypocritical because if you want to do the work you wouldn’t have left your shitty hometown. You’d stay here. You’d stop running and start listening to the people you can still talk to. If you really want to milk your suffering for meaning then try and do nothing. Seriously. Try it.”
I don’t remember my reply, only getting in my car and driving farther west from Freighton, past Lethean Properties, down country roads without a destination, hoping I might dead-end at some unmarked ghost town. The symmetry of lines and endless blacktop egging me on, keeping my eyes from shutting. I wanted someone to drive. I wanted to sit shotgun for once and absorb whatever it was buried in the pitch black, have my hands emptied of the steering wheel, my eyes freed of head-lit asphalt.
In New York there were on-ramps and off-ramps, signposts to direct an addled driver. There were guiding lights and advertised distractions but here there was nothing but dark sky and dry scrub. I drove knowing I’d have to only backtrack again, aware I faced the darkness of plains Fitz never abandoned.
But where else could I go? Does this weird silence carve too deep in the body, so deep it penetrates the soul we’re supposed to protect? What can you hear if there’s quiet on the other line? How much can nothing teach?
I thought about pulling over.
I kept driving.
Jordan Finn lives and works between Billings, MT and Brooklyn, NY having just competed his M.A. in English and is figuring out how to avoid a real job. He spends his time writing short fiction and essays, playing drums for a number of bands, and reading the works of Philip Roth. He also has a love-hate relationship with video games and television that he’s working out.