***
You’re about to read Dumpster kicker, if you have time. It’s a chapter from Valencia. But first you get an interview and a few keys to the novel.
***
My nephew was seventeen in 2003. I was thirty-three.
***
I began writing when I was eight years old. I wrote stories for classmates. This was maybe second grade? I quickly learned that people love hearing their own name, love seeing their own name, so I used my friends’ names in my short stories. I would read the short stories out loud to them. This continued into high school, though in high school the stories became much more sexual. My core group of high school friends – about six of us – would sit around one of the tables outside near the cafeteria and I would read them their stories, stories of sexual prowess and perversion. My friends loved these stories. I had X hooking up with Y, B hooking up with C, D doing incredibly perverse things to E. Unfortunately these stories have been lost.
***
I’m searching for material on Scott Bradfield, the author of one of my favorite books of all time, that being The History of Luminous Motion– and I inevitably get caught up in a wikiloop. Click, parse, click, parse. Aaron Swartz had a beautiful brain, and he was easy on the eyes, too. I believe if there were such things, he would be my kind of prototype-guy, if I were a hunter/gatherer, if such things still existed. Why didn’t Obama forgive him, provide him a presidential pardon? He had the ability to do so. As a librarian (scratch that, as an unemployed librarian), I find the death of Aaron Swartz to be sad and disgusting. Barack Obama, whom I voted for, twice, and The United States of Dissolution, where I live, both have blood on their hands, and JStor and MIT are forever tainted. I am extremely disappointed with Obama, but I rarely say it. It is buried. Writers are writers, politicians are politicians. Writers and politicians are paid liars. The death of Aaron Swartz should never have happened.
***
There is a photograph of me from 1978, third grade, eight years old. The only memorable thing that happened in 1978 was Jonestown. I am the same age as Phillip Davis in The History of Luminous Motion in the photo. I look like a Hispanic version of Phillip Davis (German father, Mexican mother). My hair is unkempt; my honey jar eyes know more than they should. They look past the photographer, as if he is beyond the frame, invisible.
***
You may be surprised to learn I am a disciplined person... I think it comes from years of living with a father who would wake me up every morning... TIME to get up, and I would then get dressed and he would drive me around to various post-death scenes in his tow truck... abandoned cars, cars that had just been in accidents, cars left at Greyhound bus stations and in various parking lots, their trunks filled with treasures too various to mention. I knew time travel, as did Phillip, the narrator of The History of Luminous Motion. I also knew life as witnessed from a tow truck bench seat, as my father traveled from accident site to bus station, to the lonely motorist broken down on the side of the road. I believed in The History of Luminous Motion because it felt true, despite the Ford Rambler flub. I was finally able to forgive Scott Bradfield for not knowing his cars because, as I have gotten older, I have come to realize that none of us knows anything, except perhaps that we will someday be dead. That much is certain.
***
Ford Rambler is incorrect. Rambler was manufactured by American Motors. For a long time I found it hard to believe Scott Bradfield could make such a mistake. I was, after all, a salvage lot boy, I knew cars. Didn’t Bradfield do his research? Only much later did I concede that perhaps Bradfield called it a Ford Rambler due to legal issues? Or was it a dissociative device, designed to put the reader further at odds with their knowledge of the world? The History of Luminous Motion is filled with several of these kinds of dissociative devices.
***
How is book design different from dust jacket design? Who is Valarie Jean Astor? Why do author bios always say “…he and/or she is currently at work on a second novel…”? Why not short stories? Is this because short stories don’t sell? Are short story collections the bastard stepbrothers of novels, their ugliness and ungainliness on par with a Diane Arbus photograph?
***
Nude signifies art, naked signifies pornography. I prefer naked.
***
The present became so terrible I began fondly recalling the recent past. Sept/Oct 2007 – I rolled my Free Agent out the door, its nubby tires blackening the carpet. Outside I walk/rolled it until I got up some speed and rode around the courtyard. It was hot and out of my peripheral I saw four or five people sitting around the kidney-shaped pool in the middle of the courtyard. They were drinking. Someone yelled nice bike! He came rushing toward me on his own bike. Ride to the store with me, he said. Uncle do you mind? A man in his early thirties looked at me warily, then nodded. He was a muscled-up gorilla in a t-shirt. The boy was slight and very young, maybe eighteen. His baseball cap was turned around on his head and his clothes were very baggy, as if he were still kicking remnants of 2002 around. We rode to Circle K and I bought grape blunt wraps. I’m Joey. I’m living with my uncle until I get my own place. His big pronouncements sounded funny coming from such a small body. He was a natural flirt, easy and confident, moving freely among the crowd like a greased ball bearing. We soon found ourselves making regular trips to my younger brother’s house in Peoria. My brother sold high grade chronic. This shit is stupefying, Joey said one evening. We were in the car headed back home, to my apartment. Cassadaga was in the CD player, blasting through eight speakers. Joey pounded his fist into the headliner. I occasionally partied with a friend named KayKay, a neighbor who said don’t go getting yourself in trouble, when she saw me riding around the block with Joey after work. KayKay lived three doors down, but on the second floor. Cause I got to see everything, my whole world, fool! I’m like Alexis Carrington up here! But who am I talking?
It went on for a month, the trips to Circle K, the blunt wraps, the Icees, hanging out in my apartment drinking Pacífico. He sat on the couch zoning to my bootleg DVDs of Sifl & Olly stoned and laughing. When he removed his baseball cap his hair fell out from under it like magic, a black mass of tight curls. I got a scar, he said. He lifted his shirt and a zigzag cut across his abdomen like an ice-breaker cutting through forbidden territory.
His uncle knocked on my apartment door on an Octoberish Saturday evening around 10pm. I opened the door and he said in a very stern manner Joey needs to come home right now. He’s only seventeen, you know. How old are you? And that was the last time I saw Joey. One day I came home from work and opened the apartment door to escape the world. A small envelope had been pushed under the door. I closed the door and opened the envelope. It was a thank you card, the kind of card that came in boxes of ten. I’ll be eighteen in 6 months, it said. Can’t wait until March! It was his name on paper, one last time.
I googled his name a few years ago and saw that he was serving a life sentence for murder, a drug deal gone horribly wrong. He was twenty-one years old when he was sentenced – LIFE – did I not love him enough?
***
All clothing is a symbol.
***
When I was twenty-two I was the editor of my college literary magazine, a poor man’s Kenyon Review. I wanted to thank the people who had influenced me, namely Bill Vollmann, Scott Bradfield, and Dennis Cooper. My writing professor said No to Dennis. His writing is much too raw for our little magazine – they’d shut us down for sure. So I did what I could, and I published Vollmann and Bradfield, and the professor coaxed a story out of Robert Coover, a friend of his. One of my manuscript readers for the magazine was Chris Funk, who would eventually become Chris Funk, of the Decemberists. But when I knew Chris we were both lost and young and we shared a love of R.E.M. and had quick retorts for suicidal class-skipping drama queens because sideways razors slide.
***
The buildings downtown are very dark. They look as if they have been rained on for one hundred years. It is cold and I am lonely and the smell of burnt grain lingers in the air. Cedar Rapids is known as the City of Five Smells, due to Ralston-Purina, Quaker Oats, Post and General Mills all having a presence in the city. I hated this place when I was nineteen. Returning when I was thirty-three, it was not so bad. It exuded loneliness, and I needed to be alone at the time.
***
The smell of Cedar Rapids is a satanic mixture of Cap’N Crunch and dog food. The smell lingers in my nostrils, scorches the inside of my forehead. I am too young to duck inside the welcoming doors of a dive bar that beckons me, its entrance the eyes of an old whore sizing up my crotch. Alcohol or sex? Though I’m nineteen, I have access to neither. Across the street is a B. Dalton. I run across the street and push through the doors, in a bad mood, expecting to find only garbage romances for a garbage town. I google B. Dalton Cedar Rapids to refresh my memory and all I come up with is an image of high school football players. Not what I wanted but a nice photo of boys I immediately have bad thoughts about. On the rack are familiar names… Danielle Steel (Portuguese Baroness of Letters), Tom Clancy, Barbara Taylor Bradford… the usual guilty suspects. But nestled next to the BTB was a book with a weird, semi-translucent cover. I picked it up, glanced at the title, and weighed the heft of the book in my hand. It was compact and heavy. I guessed the cover to be designed by Chip Kidd, but when I looked at the inside jacket flap, I saw that the cover was designed by Barbara De Wilde and Carol Devine Carson. Ok, so not what I expected. I studied the author photograph, taken by Jerry Bauer (who had also photographed my spiritual doppelganger William T. Vollmann for the back of his first novel You Bright and Risen Angels), and was perplexed by the Kansas City tuxedo. The author looked straight-up trailer park. Who was this guy? Then I began reading…
***
Mom was a world all her own, filled with secret thoughts and motions nobody else could see. With Mom I easily forgot Dad, who became little more than a premonition, a strange weighted tendency rather than a man, as if this was Mom’s final retribution, making Dad the future. Mom was always now. Mom was that movement that never ceased. Mom lived in the world with me and nobody else, and every few days or so it seemed she was driving me to more strange new places in our untuned and ominously clattering beige Ford Rambler. It wasn’t just motion, either. Mom possessed a certain geographical weight and mass; her motion was itself a place, a voice, a state of repose…
The History of Luminous Motion
***
If it sounds as if I hated Cedar Rapids while I lived there, I apologize – I have given you the wrong impression.
***
As we grow older the need to sequester ourselves becomes more apparent.
***
A writing professor once told me, that is, me and twelve other students in the workshop, that when one is writing a novel, as you come to the end of that novel, and you are pursuing that elusive last chapter, write the last chapter. After you have finished your novel, throw away the last chapter. That is the end of your novel. And also, always remember – the reader has come this far with you… they deserve a killer line. Your ending must be a killer line, unforgettable, unmovable, a block of concrete in the middle of the expressway.
***
Barricades are remnants of our totalitarian past.
***
I have always pursued the killer line, with thanks to my writing professor, as if constantly trying to please an absent father figure, and I am happy to see other writers doing the same thing. In The History of Luminous Motion, Scott Bradfield pulls this off brilliantly. I believe I did it in Distemper, and I also did it in Valencia, perhaps even more effectively in Valencia. But the truth is I wrote the last line in Valencia when I was twenty years old, back in 1990. It was from a poem I had written. It has stayed with me this long. My twenty year old self knew things I do not know now. Where is he?
***
When one is writing a novel, as you come to the end of that novel, and you are pursuing that elusive last chapter, write the last chapter. After you have finished your novel, throw away the last chapter. That is the end of your novel. Murphy, a novel by Samuel Beckett, is another favorite of mine. In fact, the ending of Distemper is cribbed from Murphy. Toward the end of Distemper one of the main characters goes into a bar to get drunk with pieces of his dead lover’s fingers in his pockets. This is an acknowledgement of Beckett. Murphy is almost a perfect novel – but not quite. The novel should have ended with chapter twelve. Chapter thirteen – seven pages – sullies the novel and takes away part of its mystery. It robs it of crystalline perfection. How could Beckett not have known this?
***
Had Beckett ended Murphy with chapter twelve, he would have had one of the most killer endings of all time. It bears repeating –
Some hours later Cooper took the packet of ash from his pocket, where earlier in the evening he had put it for greater security, and threw it angrily at a man who had given him great offence. It bounced, burst, off the wall on to the floor, where at once it became the object of much dribbling, passing, trapping, shooting, punching, heading and even some recognition from the gentleman’s code. By closing time the body, mind and soul of Murphy were freely distributed over the floor of the saloon; and before another dayspring greyened the earth had been swept away with the sand, the beer, the butts, the glass, the matches, the spits, the vomit.
***
Interview with James Nulick
The Unbeliever
James Nulick is the author of Distemper, which was published by the late Karen Gray at Acacia Publishing in 2006. Acacia Publishing is notable for having published a newly translated and largely unauthorized version of The Quran and having its offices destroyed by fire shortly thereafter. Ms. Gray moved her office into her home in Gilbert, Arizona. Ms. Gray was a bigger than life Texan who often said she would publish anything as long as the author was attractive. I’m not sure how this applies to The Quran. She passed away in 2015. James Nulick lives in Seattle, Washington. His new novel Valencia, his first novel in ten years, is forthcoming from Nine-Banded Books in October 2015. This interview was conducted at the bar of the W New York last December. — Drew Estrada
I am waiting to meet James Nulick in the lobby of the W New York. It is a few weeks before Christmas, and the focal point of the lobby is a large artificial tree near the elevator bank. The tree is outlandish, like most of the guests who wander about, and resembles an exploded, glittering Sputnik. When I asked James Nulick via email how I would know him he replied he would be dressed entirely in black. Unfortunately all the guests of the W are dressed in black. I feel like I am attending the world’s most expensive funeral. Suddenly a petite man with cropped hair appears from nowhere. Can we move to the bar, he asks. It is author James Nulick. He is small, short, and has an acne-scarred face. He is twitchy and nervous. I’m sorry about my skin, he says. He orders a rum and Coke and we settle in.
DREW ESTRADA: Are you an atheist?
JAMES NULICK: Wow, this early? Heavens, no. I’m an unbeliever. An atheist says I don’t believe in God, which is a positive. In essence it means here is something, and I don’t believe in it. Well, I don’t believe in any of it. God and the tiny angels, Jesus and the Devil and all the saints. It’s all really silly, don’t you think? I have enough trouble just getting up each morning and going to work. I can’t have all that other fluff in my head.
DE: So did you ever believe in God?
JN: Well I was raised in a large Catholic household, so kind of. I mean, I was raised to believe Jesus was personally going to punish me for masturbating. But then it occurred to me one day, why would Jesus be spying on a twelve year old boy when he is alone in his room masturbating? I kind of threw in the towel after that.
DE: Is it hard not to believe in anything? Isn’t it a bit depressing?
JN: Oh I believe in things. I believe people should be good to one another. I believe friendship is important. Good books are important. I believe people work too hard in this country, despite that idiot Jeb Bush. But people are essentially dumb. You tell them they are not working hard enough, and they believe you.
DE: I once read somewhere that you were born in Iowa. Then in another place I read that you were born in Arizona. Which one is it?
JN: I was born in Phoenix; I went to school in Iowa. Somebody interviewed me once for Out magazine and they got it wrong, and so now I am forever born in Iowa. I don’t care, you can say I am born wherever you like, someone is always going to get it wrong.
DE: You were adopted, right? How old were you when you were adopted?
JN: Yes. I was seven months old when I was adopted. Which means after I was born, my birth mother turned me over to the hospital and the hospital turned me over to an adoption agency, and so where was I for seven months? For the first seven months of my life? Aren’t those first months important? The adoption agency told my adoptive parents that I was placed with a foster family for the first seven months, but of course I remember nothing of it. But when I was twenty-one years old I went back to the adoption agency, which was surprisingly still in existence at the time, and asked about the first seven months, because, you know, I thought it was important. And a caseworker there, a nice elderly lady who looked like she would be a nice grandmother, told me the basics. My birth parents were poor and unmarried, which was a big no-no in the early Seventies. Being unmarried, that is. My mother was Mexican, my father was German. The agency would not give me their names. I was placed with a foster family for the first seven months, an African American family named the Browns. I guess Mrs. Brown was in her early sixties, and had cared for a few babies for the adoption agency. So as crazy as it seems, I spent the first seven months of my life being raised by black people. Maybe that explains my love for early Aughts hip hop.
DE: Was it difficult being adopted? Did you have other brothers and sisters you had to contend with?
JN: Well, it wasn’t that bad. I didn’t really know I was adopted until I was about six years old. My adoptive mother sat me down in her bedroom one day, which was weird because she was no longer married to my adoptive father, she was remarried to a man who would later serve a life sentence for rape, but anyway, she sat me down one day, in the middle of an otherwise boring nothingness of a Saturday and said Son there is something I need to tell you. And so I learned that everything I thought I was, I wasn’t. It was pretty upsetting. But then again, I was six. I mean, what’s the most traumatic thing that could happen? She was probably right to tell me early, to get it over with. But then I started thinking shortly thereafter, who are these people? If they are not my parents, who are they? Who are my brothers and sisters? Is that why they were weird around me? My older sister once slipped up and said well at least I’m not adopted, I remember her saying that; it was before my mother had told me anything, and nothing really clicked in my head at the time, but after the talk it became glaringly apparent. My parents are white Southerners, and their collective children, my nuclear family, are quite white, but I look, I don’t know, slightly Asian, I guess. I have dark hair and these tiny almond eyes and I must have looked nothing like these people, though when I look at childhood photographs, you see me next to my father and you think Meh. Looks like one of his. Maybe he was banging my Asian babysitter? I don’t know. I guess it all worked out. More or less.
DE: More or less? What does that mean? Can you explain?
JN: Well I guess I am pretty old to be bitter about it, to be thinking these things, because if my family ever read it, perhaps they would be hurt. And I don’t want them to be hurt, I love them. But these are only thoughts I’ve had in my head since forever, since I was six years old, basically. But I would often think why these people? They were working class. My father was a machinist and my mother was a stay at home mom, a homemaker. Her name is Sue so she was literally Suzy homemaker. My parents had moved from Arkansas to Arizona when they were young, and they wanted to expand their family, and so there I was, being raised by a black family in the middle of nowhere, and so my parents said ok, yeah, we want him. But they were working class, and I often found myself thinking not only about my real parents, my biological parents, but also about my dream parents, you know. The people who should have adopted me should have been wealthy and Jewish, and barren, and they should have lived in California. How was I ever placed with two working class Southerners in Phoenix, in the middle of nowhere? It blew my mind. I don’t think it would fly today. Of all the rotten luck, I get placed with poor people! It’s that good old Nulick luck, my father would often say. But it is what it is. I love my father, and I love my family, and they have taught me many things. But they are weird. You know, because they took in a baby who wasn’t their own. What sane person does that?
DE: So have you always felt like an outsider? Like you didn’t belong?
JN: I guess in a way, I do. Or at least I did. I mean, after I learned I was adopted, it was kind of freeing, you know? When something went south, or when I was pissed off at one of my siblings, I would escape, I’d tell myself well you people aren’t even related to me, so there. You’re all crazy and I am perfect and I have rich parents somewhere and they are just on a long vacation. Which is great when you’re ten years old and your only concern is when do I get to go out and ride my bike with my friends? But it doesn’t work so well in the real world, in the adult world. I mean, come on, at some point I need to accept some responsibility. My parents were kind enough to pick me up off the showroom floor. I mean, as my father often told me, when I was a kid and I was down, or sad, or being a little bastard, he’d say of all the children, son, we chose you. So yeah, ok, how do you argue with that? So you have this weird silent kid who has dark hair and slanted eyes and who is maybe possibly not so well mentally, a wandering-eyed space cadet, but you bring him into your family and you still choose to love him – it could have gone different, I guess. Maybe it could have been worse.
DE: Do you mean that maybe you could have been placed with a really bad family, or with a religious cult family, something like that? How do you think it could have been different?
JN: Well no, that’s not what I mean. I mean, think of my biological mother. She’s unmarried, she’s pregnant, her boyfriend has pretty much washed his hands of her, I mean, what are her choices? I am personally an antinatalist, though I have only learned of the name just recently, but it has always been there, unnamed. This world is far too shitty to expose a child to it, an innocent being who feels pain and cannot make its own decisions. So yeah, she could have gone there, she could have decided to get an abortion, and, I don’t know, maybe that would not have been such a bad thing? It would have saved me from having to pay taxes, from having to work for a living. It would have saved a lot of suffering. But she was young and Hispanic and Catholic and my grandfather, who is dead now and whom I had never met, because he didn’t want to meet me when I was older, my grandfather was apparently a real hardnosed prick, and he told her you are not having an abortion, you are having that baby and you are placing it for adoption. But maybe if her father hadn’t been such a blowhard prick, had not been there at all, maybe she would have struggled with it and decided abortion was best. Which is not especially bad, at least in my mind, because did the bastard have my welfare at all in mind? Or did he just want to get rid of a mess, an embarrassment, an uh oh?
DE: You seem kind of angry about the whole thing, the adoption thing. Have you been carrying that anger with you for all these years?
JN: Are you trying to say I’m old? Hah! But you are not far off, my friend. I carried the anger with me for a long time, and the bitterness that comes with it. It wasn’t until my late thirties, my very late thirties, after the end of a terribly draining and psychotic relationship, and the beginning of a new, great one, that I finally threw in the towel. It wasn’t even that dramatic, really. It was more of a kind of realization that the bullshit I was carrying was my bullshit, and it wasn’t affecting anyone else in the least, and so why carry this weight around? I mean, my mother wasn’t thinking about it. She was happy and living in California and was in a relationship with a younger man and was flush with the possibility of happiness, so why was I carrying this stuff around? I met a beautiful partner who is very patient and very understanding, and he has taught me that to be patient is simply to wait, to listen, and above all to be calm. To be honest, I am not a calm person, not at all. I mean, maybe I appear to be on the exterior, but my mind is always racing and I have these terrible thoughts and I have hateful thoughts and I hate having to work constantly when I should really be at home writing, and I hate driving, I hate traffic, I like taking the bus to and from work, but I hate the waiting, and the bums, the bums constantly asking for money, or talking to themselves out loud when it’s only me and them, and just being crazy in general, and interrupting what has been a very long and difficult day with their piss-stained craziness, and I smile and I am pleasant but really I am a mushroom cloud, I seek destruction, but not of anyone else, only myself. I dream of obliteration. And this beautiful person, who I am now with, whom I have been in a relationship with for seven years, has taught me to be calm, or at least try to be calm, for his sake. And I am trying because I love him, but it is difficult. But I’m learning. He has taught me patience, because he is very patient with me. I imagine I can be a prick to live with, but he never lets on.
DE: You had an unusual childhood. Having been adopted by a large family, and kind of stuck in the middle of things, stuck in the middle of nowhere. Your father was a machinist, but at some point he started his own business. You were basically raised in a wrecking yard?
JN: Well, I wasn’t literally raised in a wrecking yard. I took showers in a real house, I listened to records in a real bedroom in a brick house – I know you’re thinking trailer, you elitist bastard, but no, I grew up in an actual house, a ranch house built in the fifties, in the middle of Phoenix. But yes, I spent a lot of time in my father’s wrecking yard. When I wasn’t in school, I was with my father, working with my father, in the tow truck with my father, working in a salvage lot with my father. Salvage lot, wrecking yard. They are one and the same. But I learned about people, being at the wrecking yard all the time, because my father had to interact with customers, with people, on a daily basis. And so when school was out for the summer, well, that meant I was at the wrecking yard, interacting with adults, and watching them, watching them talk with my father, and my father was this larger than life Southerner, and he was real fucking smooth, a ladies man, he had this thick head of hair and this way about him, and the men, well I could see the men, his customers, trusted him, because he was a no bullshit type of man, and I often wondered what he thought of his little slanted-eyed queer son, his weird purchase. But he had a big heart and treated people right and was fair and he gave me this incredible work ethic, but also in a way, I inherited his bullshit detector, and he taught me to never take any shit from another man, which kind of gets me into trouble to this day because when I see bullshit at work I call it out, and that doesn’t usually go over well when you work for a large corporation and everything is supposed to be calm and placid and all about head nodding and doing exactly what you are told to do. But I do contain myself quite well and have managed to have not gotten fired, knock on wood. But I guess what my father really taught me was discipline, and self-respect, and to respect others, their autonomy, but not to let anyone step on you. I was such a small kid, a slight kid. My father’s lessons really saved my ass on more than one occasion, and so I am grateful.
DE: Your writing style changed significantly between Distemper and Valencia. What happened?
JN: Ten years happened! When I was writing Distemper I was in my mid-twenties, and I was very much a maximalist, a kitchen sink writer. I think David Foster Wallace may have rubbed off on me a bit too much… you know that parable, the onion and the cheese?
DE: Sorry but I don’t –
JN: I think it was Stephen King – I’m pretty sure it was. He says writers are like a piece of cheese in the refrigerator. Or was it Harlan Ellison? Anyway, you put a piece of cheese next to an onion in the refrigerator and eventually the cheese ends up smelling like the onion. So maybe DFW had been in my life too long – I mean, I spent six months reading Infinite Jest, when I was twenty-six. And I loved it; I loved spending all that time with it. But then I remembered my roots, when I was very young and was reading Beckett, and Kafka, and Hardwick, and Robert Coover, and I wanted to pare it down. In late 2010 I was reading The End of the Story by Lydia Davis, it’s her only novel, damn it, and I was really enjoying it, I liked how she was saying so much but saying so little, and the characters rarely spoke, they kind of just bubbled through the page. Then a good friend introduced me to a band called Titus Andronicus, he said here, listen to this! It was The Monitor. And then their album Local Business dropped in 2012 and my writing became really pared down, which I blame on Titus Andronicus and specifically Local Business. I just wanted to really strip things down and only say the essential, because I think that’s what drew me to Beckett in the first place, when I was a very young man. But think of the difference between OK Computer and Kid A… things happen, you know? You get tired of the same old shit. You want to destroy stuff, and have fun doing it. Valencia is my Kid A, stripped down, cerebral, hermetically sealed. Straight up hallucinatory. But it has a punk element, too.
DE: You had mentioned you were a fan of early Aughts hip hop. Who are we talking about here? In Distemper the characters are talking about rock bands, mostly, especially the kid, who is so enraptured with music, so where does the hip hop come from?
JN: Tre Warner is a great kid, I love that kid. Oh well, I’m really uneducated when it comes to hip hop. I mean there are certain things I really love, but they seem to be of a very specific time. I love all the Neptunes stuff; In Search Of… by N*E*R*D, Lord Willin’ by Clipse, very early 50 cent, Kelis, the wonderful mindfuck album Chicken-n-Beer by Ludacris… understand that I had just come out of a bad relationship, a very taxing relationship, and I had moved from Phoenix to Iowa, I moved back to Iowa after having been gone for over ten years. And so I was away from my family and I was missing people and one day I heard ‘Lapdance’ somewhere, I don’t know where, maybe a bar, maybe a strip joint, and I was super depressed at the time, missing people, and I thought what is this crazy shit? And it really just punched me in the chest like a heart attack and I fell in love right there. So I bought In Search Of… and Lord Willin’ and more or less lived those two albums, lived with them, for a year or so, and then my beautiful nephew, who is very much a mushroom cloud type, like me, and a dumpster kicker –
DE: Dumpster kicker is slang for skater, right?
JN: Right, and so my nephew came out to stay with me for a week in 2003 and this was around the time that Transatlanticism dropped which oddly enough dropped on the same day as Chicken-n-Beer, and so you have this thirtysomething year old tooling around with a seventeen year old and we are in my car jamming to Clipse and Death Cab and the Postal Service and N*E*R*D and his various hardcore rap CDs, of which I know pretty much zero about, so you can imagine that he probably thought I was a weirdo and a fruitcake but he loved me anyway, and I took a photograph of him one night with our collection of bottles, which is hilarious and very endearing and reminds me that October 2003 was wonderful and beautiful and sad and straight up chemicalized and me and my nephew terrorized Cedar Rapids for a week and I will kindly leave it at that.
DE: Why do you write? What drives you to write?
JN: Oh no, not that one. I write to keep my friends alive. I write to have pubescent autograph hounds come up to me and ask for my autograph.
DE: Oh, I like that. Do you mind talking about your influences? The authors who influenced you the most? I’d read somewhere that you think it’s rude to talk about influences, that it basically calls people out, but do you mind?
JN: You’re talking about name dropping, basically, and I’m not into that kind of thing, it’s tacky and fucking unseemly but everyone seems to ask it so I might as well play the game. If you’ll buy me another drink I will play the game.
I order us another round…
JN: Well talking about my influences makes me sound like a fourteen year old girl, but it is really a matter of books and people, of specificity. Well when I was nineteen I was home from Iowa for the summer and I was sitting in my father’s kitchen in Phoenix and I read a review of a book called The Rainbow Stories by William T. Vollmann in the Republic, and I thought it sounded very interesting, but being Phoenix, where it is perpetually 1972, we didn’t really have any good bookstores, and I would be going back to Iowa in another week or so, going back to school, and so I stopped by a B Dalton at the mall and there was a clerk there who I was friendly with, because I was always in the store, and I told her I would be going back to Iowa soon, but could she order a book for me and mail it to me in Iowa? And remember, this was 1989, and there was no Amazon, no internet really, at all, I mean people still used touch tone phones, and she says I’ll order it for you and of course I will ship it. So I get back to Iowa and I am there in school and doing things that nineteen year olds do and one day a package arrives for me at the student union and I take it to my dorm room and I unwrap it and it is The Rainbow Stories by William T. Vollmann. Well I really don’t need to say much of anything else about it, you can read Valencia for yourself and see that it was a touchstone, a monolith in the darkness, a weird and beautiful and otherworldly thing. And yes, it was a hardcover first edition. I still have it on my shelf. Vollmann even signed it for me in 1991, when I was studying with him, or more like bothering him, in New York. It is one of my most prized possessions. I mean, I own a lot of signed Vollmanns, but it was my first, my introduction to him, and so it has a special place in my heart.
DE: Do any others come to mind?
JN: After I graduated from Coe in 1992 I left Iowa and returned home to Phoenix, but it wasn’t really home anymore because my father and my stepmother were on the outs and she didn’t want me there because I was, you know, a reminder of the other woman. So I moved to a very small town about fifty miles south of Phoenix, a little nothing town, which has become fictionalized in my mind because I have been gone for so long, and I lived with my adoptive mother and her boyfriend. They were very kind to take me in, as I was a twenty-two year old nothing. I had a degree but no real skills, other than writing. I was young and slim and had an enormous sexual appetite but who doesn’t when they’re twenty-two? It was such a small town, I left on the weekends to meet people in Phoenix, meet them in bars and explore. But in my new little town I found a job at a convenience store, because I could feel that my mother’s boyfriend wanted me working, wanted me to earn my keep, which is fair. And so I had this night job and I wasn’t used to working nights, and after a few months my equilibrium was shot, and I began to hallucinate while on the job because I wasn’t sleeping, and so I wasn’t sleeping and I had this vast appetite that wasn’t being addressed and I couldn’t really jerk off at home because my room was so small and it was right next to my mother’s room and so the only way to find my way through to the other side of the hallucinations was to read, and so I read and read and read and it was liberating, I mean really liberating, because it wasn’t the nonsense in school. I read The History of Luminous Motion by Scott Bradfield and it blew my head open, because I saw a piece of myself in the main character, the boy Phillip Davis. And I read Closer by Dennis Cooper and it really scarred me, it scarred my mind, and I identified with it because I saw the self-destruction I craved. I mean in college I was tying myself up in my dorm room and choking myself out. And somehow, I think reading Closer saved me. It made me realize there were others like me, that I wasn’t such a freak after all, or if I was, I wasn’t the only freak. Had I not read Dennis Cooper I would have eventually stripped off all my clothing and run naked through the desert behind the convenience store and would have pushed my dick into anything with a hole in it; I mean ok so sometimes I did strip all my clothes off and run naked through the desert, but I was twenty-two and I kept the back door to the convenience store propped open with a little block of wood, and who cares? It was three in the morning! And it was better than jerking off to Penthouse or Playboy, which contained very little of what I needed. I was always more of a Hustler boy, even at ten, eleven, and twelve. I had an enormous sexual appetite as a child but that is all gone now, thank god.
DE: Any others that had an influence on you as a young writer?
JN: Other than Vollmann, Cooper and Bradfield? Some are obvious, perhaps some less so. Ulysses changed the way I looked at novels. Joyce is huge, inescapable. Like the sun. Beckett is another influence. His later texts are almost math equations. They are definitely in a different language. Franz Kafka is like a father to me, or maybe an uncle. I feel I’ve known him my entire life. Garcia Marquez, Borges. I read Susan Sontag when I was young, and also Elizabeth Hardwick. Sleepless Nights was very influential. I read a lot of Latin literature when I was young, and the traces are still there, the magicality of it. I read Infinite Jest in 1996, when I was twenty-six, and I fell in love with the mind that created it. There are others, of course, stuff I would prefer to keep buried. I don’t want to ruin the illusion.
Nulick downs the remainder of his rum and Coke, then opens his wallet and places two twenties on the counter and I recall one of the final scenes in Distemper...
JN: Can I go now? My other half is up in our room and we want to grab something to eat before it’s too late. I’m bored talking about myself and it takes a lot of energy to do this.
Drew Estrada is twenty-eight years old. His writing has appeared in Artforham, Bookforham, Geer, Popular Machinists, Spun, Strolling Bone, Between See and Dee, Penthouse Forham, Hustler, and The Unbeliever. He is an educator and a pedophile. He is also a character in the extremely funny and somewhat bizarre novel Distemper by author James Nulick. His novel Nice Butt is forthcoming from Kelly Mary Press in 2016.
***
Excerpt –
Dumpster kicker
I was on my way to cultivating a serious meth habit. This was a few years after the collapse of the Twin Towers. I was thirty-three. I lived in a fourplex in a small desert town. The town looked as if it had recently suffered a nuclear blast. Midwesterners with irradiated brains had taken over. People voted Republican. Motorists drove slowly. They talked even slower. Meth heads and crack heads slept on sidewalks. They slept under the zinc shelter of bus stops. Mexicans were shot at the border. The sheriff was interviewed on the local news station about the shootings. Population control, he said. I lived in Zombietown. I was quickly becoming a Zombie.
• • •
My nephew was seventeen. He was born in 1986. He was half my age. He was the son of paper sister 1965. I was very close to him. We had done drugs together. Doing drugs with someone creates a closeness that is different from other relationships. I felt guilty about doing meth with him, but not guilty enough to stop. I figured it was better for him to get high with me than get high with a
stranger.
• • •
A large brick fireplace sat under the veranda of the fourplex. The fireplace was for decoration. It wasn’t intended for actual use. The bricks it was made of were real. Why not, I thought. It looked stupid and lonely. My nephew and I were high. It was a cold evening in December. Uncovered plants had withered and died. Unpicked oranges hung from skeletal limbs like shrunken heads. It was very cold outside. The desert is a place of extremes. It can be seventy-five degrees in the daytime and thirty degrees at night. One adjusts to the bipolar weather. We walked to Circle K. It was located a few blocks from my apartment. Firewood was stacked outside near the door. We took several pieces of firewood without paying for it. We ran back to my apartment, treated wood under our arms, and loaded it into the fireplace. The logs had been pretreated with an accelerant. I struck a few Diamond matches and placed them below the logs. The wood caught quickly and we were soon warm. We talked and laughed and made a general nuisance of ourselves. It was somewhere south of two in the morning. My nephew looked up. Holy shit, he said. I followed his eyes. The roof of the veranda was on fire. I grabbed the garden hose. It was wound in a neat tight coil against the wall. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t turn the spigot. My nephew twisted the spigot and sprayed the roof with water. We caught it in time. The veranda sustained minimal damage.
• • •
A homosexual obsessed with Stevie Nicks lived next door to me. He was in his mid-thirties. He was short, balding and tubby. I never bothered learning his name. He worked for a janitorial service. He cleaned offices at night. He lived alone. In the middle of the afternoon the smell of nag champa drifted from his apartment. He smoked marijuana. He’d invited me over one evening and I got high with him. He put Bella Donna on an old turntable. He pranced around the room in a Kmart shawl. I was slumped in a secondhand chair wondering what had happened to my spine when I felt his hands tugging at my belt. I laughed and said I gotta go. I stood up and left. He didn’t mention it when I saw him a few days later. I said hello. I was cordial. But I didn’t like his wandering hands and his greasy, thrift store ways. Sometimes we want to be owned and sometimes we don’t.
• • •
Keep it down, I said. You’ll wake the neighbors. My nephew laughed. What neighbors, he said. Stevie Nicks poked his head out of his apartment door. He looked like a sequined turtle. Disaster averted, my nephew rolled up the hose and sat next to me. What’s going on? Stevie asked. I laughed. Go back inside, my nephew said. My neighbor stepped outside his door. What’s going on out here? When he saw my nephew his eyes lit up like cubic zirconia. Nunya, my nephew said. We laughed as he minced his way toward us. He pulled up a chair and sat next to my nephew. Want to get high, he said. Stevie fished in his robe. A moment later a fat joint materialized in his hand. He’s only seventeen, I said. That’s ok, honey. I’m not going to molest him. My nephew laughed. Who’s your little friend? My nephew, I said. I didn’t mention names. I didn’t want to give Stevie anything as concrete as a name.
• • •
Sorry about the noise, I said. We passed the joint around. That’s ok, dear. I don’t have to work tomorrow. Uncle, can you grab us another beer? I momentarily left my nephew with Bella Donna. I didn’t think it was a good idea to leave a child on the edge of seventeen with a fusty old queen, but I was stoned and I was in a forgiving mood. You want one? I asked Stevie as I opened my apartment door. Oh no, dear. I get gassy when I drink beer. My nephew’s laughter splintered the darkness.
• • •
Methamphetamine is a loving woman who whispers in your ear as she twists a knife in your back. She shows you things, impossible things. My nephew and I once tried putting a motorcycle together in a hot garage using a million parts we had spread out on the floor. Somewhere around six a.m. we threw in the towel. Neither of us wanted to believe the failure at our feet. I collapsed on a sofa under the air conditioning in my sister’s house. I slept until it was time to find more meth. That meant cars, streets, and driving through dangerous neighborhoods, all while maintaining the appearance of sobriety. I would sometimes let my nephew drive, but those occasions were rare. He was young and his reckless driving made me nervous. I didn’t want the police involved. I usually drove while he made his presence known in other ways. One of his favorite things to do was shoot marbles at windows using a wrist rocket. You’re going to get us arrested, I said. He’d laugh and load another marble. Occasionally lights would illuminate a house that only moments earlier had been a dark quiet box. I would drive faster, stoplights only a suggestion. My nephew laughed as we blew through stoplights. Brakes screeched and horns honked. I finished my beer and tossed the empty bottle in the back seat. My nephew finished his beer and whisked the empty bottle onto the asphalt. Why are you always so loud, I said. Chill out, uncle. You’re worse than an old woman.
• • •
I was arrested for possession of psilocybin in May of 2004. It was a Friday night. Psilocybin is better known by its street name, mushrooms. In the State of California in 2004, possession of psilocybin meant possession of a controlled substance, in violation of Health and Safety Code section 11377(a). To wit, a felony. This happened in the County of Los Angeles. Los Angeles is not the best place to get arrested. I had twenty-eight grams of psilocybin on or near my person, in addition to the methamphetamine traveling through my body. My skin was flushed and I felt hot. I needed to shit but couldn’t find a decent place to do so. It was shaping up to be a bad night.
• • •
My nephew and I drove from Rio Seco to California to visit my friend Donald. Donald lived in Glendale. I was in my early thirties. Donald was a year younger. My nephew was not yet legal. We arrived at Donald’s parents’ house. The porch light was on. Dusk floated on the horizon in the distance. I wanted a beer. You have the shrooms? Donald asked. Yes, I said. I wanted to unwind, cast out to sea. Driving for six hours on meth is like riding in a boxcar filled with acetylene tanks. Something bad is bound to happen. I wanted to drift, sit on a lawn chair under the stars with a beer in my hand. Donald was anxious to begin the evening. I need to drop a few turtles in the pond, I said. Hurry up, he said. I said hello to his parents, introduced my nephew, excused myself, went to the bathroom, took a shit, noticed my penis had almost completely disappeared into itself, removed a small Ziploc from my pocket, and did another bump of meth. I heard echoes of chatter throughout the house. I felt very old. Our plans are stupid and often amount to nothing.
• • •
We walked to Carr Park. Donald and I were familiar with Carr Park. The night breathed heavily against our backs. A breeze caressed the back of my neck. Cars passed us on the street. A few horns honked. A hooker and a john discussed politics in front of a liquor store. Transactions were made, lives were bought and sold. I had half an ounce – fourteen grams – of psilocybin on my person. The other half was in the trunk of my car. I pulled a second Ziploc from my jeans pocket. I unzipped it. Donald and my nephew ate mushrooms in the dark under a tree. I fingered a few caps and stems. I ate them. The popcorn sugar stink needled its way into my teeth. I drank from a bottle of orange juice to mask the taste. I needed sugar. I felt weak. We found a park bench. I sat on the table top next to my nephew. My jeans were dirty. I wasn’t completely sure I’d wiped my ass in Donald’s parents’ bathroom. A band of wire tightened around my skull. White faces floated in the darkness. They came toward me. Disembodied heads were tied to strings. What the fuck, Donald? I screamed as they came closer. Relax, man. They’re just balloons. There must’ve been a party here earlier. I took another look. They were balloons. My nephew laughed at my stupidity. Are you feeling anything, I asked Donald. He shook his head no. I ate more psilocybin. My nephew took the Ziploc from my hands. He ate more psilocybin. Donald took the Ziploc from my nephew. He ate more psilocybin, as well. I was beginning to wonder if the kid I’d bought the mushrooms from back home had stiffed me. A three-legged black dog hobbled in the dark. I got up to investigate. It was a tricycle. I got on the tricycle. I made my way through the dark. My nephew pushed me through the cloud of balloons, a satanic congress quantifying every move I made. I laughed as the trees whispered. They were old giants. They had been there long before I was born and would likely be there long after I’d died. The veins in their leaves resembled the veins in the back of my hand. Life pulsed through us, the truth hidden just under the surface. The leaves opened their mouths in unison, a leafy chorus. You’re headed down the wrong path, they said.
• • •
I was blinded by a flash of white light. Is this death? The lights pulsed and expanded into reds and blues. Malevolent orbs of light darted through the trees and surrounded us. I heard strange voices. The voices did not belong to Donald or my nephew. Tires whispered on pavement. Three cars crawled along the concrete path in the center of the park. Rude lights ignorantly blinded me. Doors opened and closed. A voice came from behind. What are you doing? Hanging out, I said. The park’s closed. Fuck off. I was yanked skyward. The Big Wheel between my legs dropped to the pavement. This isn’t good, I thought. God smells like cheap cologne. Someone twisted my arm behind my back. I resisted. The prick wanted a fight. What the fuck, man? I kicked out behind me. I connected with a solid object. I was slammed onto the pavement. A moment later I found myself in the back of a squad car.
• • •
I tried committing suicide in jail. I couldn’t. They took away my shoestrings. I wore jailhouse slippers. My bed was a sliver of foam. A green sheet was stretched over it. I had a bottom bunk. The sheet would not slide through the metal slats of the top bunk. The slats were tightly woven together. The County of Los Angeles had thought of everything. I was arrested on a Friday night. I was processed. Friday night bled into Saturday morning. Judges weren’t available on weekends. I would see the judge on Monday. Night bled into day, day hovered over morning, and morning became night again. I shared a cell with five other males. I could not sleep. I did not look at anyone. I did not talk. I did not piss or shit. I did not shower. I kept everything to myself. I folded my head between my legs. I ate like an animal. I didn’t look up from my plate. I tried determining the time of day by what was served. I could not. Were peaches a breakfast food or a lunch item? The cell was filled with bright light. The bright light was always on. A series of naked bulbs were encased in a metal cage, an impenetrable colander. I lost track of time. My body began to stink as I came down off the meth and psilocybin. A young man gravitated toward me. He was white and I was white. He was sick with drugs. I moved away from him. He stepped closer. I didn’t want any problems. I had my own shit to bury. I called my father collect in Rio Seco. He didn’t have any money. He said what kind of bird doesn’t fly? I wasn’t prepared for questions. A jailbird, he said. I thought of my mother, my biological mother. My hatred bubbled to the surface. Why didn’t she scrape me from the womb when she had the chance? I wanted to fill negative space. I wanted to disappear. I counted the slats of the top bunk. There were 178. 178 divided by 2 is 89. I counted them again, backwards. I sensed a slight tremor in one of my eyelids. My body wanted to release the poisons stored inside of it. I resisted. I kept counting. The metal slats were coated in grey-green plastic. We don’t want you killing yourself in here, they said. The young man eventually fell asleep. I moved away from him.
• • •
The judge was Jewish. He saw my name but he did not see my name. God bless your people, I thought. The transmigration of souls is a felony act in the State of California, son. It comes with a $10,000 fine. Pay your tab. Next!
• • •
I was a first-time offender with no priors. The State of California offered me a 1000 P.C., which is a deferred entry of judgment. My criminal record would be expunged. My name would not have a felony attached to it. My life would continue. All I had to do was close out my tab and follow the rules. Donald scraped up $2000. His brother came up with another $1000. His aunt donated a hefty amount. I borrowed from my 401k to pay my attorney. I wouldn’t be buying a house after all.
• • •
I was placed on probation for two years. I attended substance abuse classes. My attendance was required. I pissed in a cup twice a week, then once a week, then once every other week. I did this for one year. Most of the people in my substance abuse classes were kids, twenty-somethings adrift at sea and without a captain. People attended classes. They got better. They graduated. I was often the oldest person in a constantly-changing class, though not always. They called me the Mushroom Man. I laughed at my nickname. I had no anger. I earned a certificate. It looked very similar to my master’s degree. I said goodbye to my classmates. I paid off my attorney. He had a nice office in Encino. I still smoked marijuana on occasion, but I stayed away from the meth.
• • •
My nephew said he had to stay clean for a while. I understood. His mother was not pleased. California was a bad dream, the jail cell a reminder of everything my brother Andrew had lost. My nephew burned a CD for me. I still have it. I cannot listen to it. If I play it in the car all the bad memories come rushing back.
• • •
We were outside my sister’s house. I’d been meth-free for three days. The car’s air conditioning pushed against the heat. My body felt metallic inside my clothes. My jeans stank. I hugged my nephew over the gear shift. I didn’t want to go inside. I didn’t want to face my sister. What will you do, I asked. I’ve got to get out of here, Uncle. This place is fucking nadaville. I thought of the times I’d pushed a broom through a Circle K parking lot at three in the morning, my dreams corralled by the tumble139 weeds slowly closing in on me. I gave my notice. On my last night on the job I filled my gas tank and stole a bottle of Captain Morgan. I put the bottle in the passenger seat and drove home as the sun broke through the clouds. I hid the bottle in my pants as I crept past my mother. She was asleep on the couch. I got drunk in my bedroom. I didn’t have to work the next day. It was a high like no other. Pink rays of sunlight announced a new day was blossoming beyond my window. What would I do for money? The thought passed as I sipped rum from a Dixie cup. I listened to my mother breathing in the living room. My records sat silent in the closet, my turntable gathered dust. Posters of bands curled away from thumbtacks, the members of Guns N’ Roses attempting to escape the tiny prison of my room. I have to get out of here, I thought. This place is fucking nadaville. Wind blew against the side of the house. Dust fingered its way through the windows. I took another sip of rum and stared at the feet on the end of my dumb legs. Why was the world so ugly and unknowable?
• • •
It was four in the morning. We were coming down. In another hour the sun would break through the dark river of the world. We went into the garage and fished out two broken lawn chairs. We walked along the side of the house with the chairs folded against our hips. We made our way to the backyard. My nephew found an extension ladder. He propped it against the eaves of the roof. He climbed first. I followed. Once we were on the roof we found a spot that drifted over the slab of the back porch. I walked lightly. I didn’t want to wake my sister. We pulled our chairs open and sat under the stars. My nephew sat to my left. He named the stars as I threaded them together in a spectral web. He told me his dreams, what he would do with his life. They were bold statements.
• • •
It was a Saturday night. I couldn’t find my nephew. I called my nephew’s mobile. It rang and rang until finally it went to voicemail. My youngest brother sold high quality marijuana. I drove to my brother’s house on the far side of town. My youngest brother was my father’s son and my stepmother’s son. He lived with his wife. They had two daughters. My brother was not home but there was a car in the drive. A dark figure sat on a chair near the car. I recognized the car. It belonged to one of my brother’s friends, a boy named Jeff. Jeff was born in 1982. He was close to my brother’s age. I was a dozen years older. It was early February. The nights were still cold. I wore a Buffalo shirt and an old pair of jeans. I opened my door and stepped out of my car. Jeff said hello. I’m waiting for your brother, he said. He went to the store. They’ll be back soon, he said. Jeff was handsome but he was twenty-two and I was thirty-four. We didn’t have much in common. Perhaps this wasn’t entirely true. He liked old cars. I did, too. We both smoked marijuana. I sat on the table top of an old park bench. Jeff moved from his chair. He sat next to me. I scanned the darkness of my brother’s backyard.
• • •
My baby brother was always acquiring and selling things. He’d owned a dozen cars in his short life. A few of them sat rusting in the backyard. Jeff asked if I wanted to drive somewhere to get high. I’ll drive, he said. Sure, I said. We got into his car. It was a black 1971 Monte Carlo SS. Jeff had restored it from the ground up in his father’s garage. His father had helped. Jeff turned the ignition. A throaty rumble announced Jeff’s presence. A stereo clicked and whirred. We drove through my brother’s neighborhood until we found a cul-de-sac. Several houses on the street were under construction. The stick figure houses cast ominous silhouettes in the cold winter moonlight. The interior of Jeff’s car was warm. He loaded a fresh bowl into a glass pipe. He handed it to me. Jeff knew I was queer. My brother told me he thought Jeff was queer, too, but Jeff wouldn’t admit it. I understood the pain. I also understood hiding it was worse. I pulled the smoke deeply into my lungs. I passed the pipe to Jeff. I closed my eyes, drifted, and exhaled. Jeff slowly breathed through his mouth. He passed the pipe back to me. We sat in his car for ten minutes getting stoned. Jeff wore black jeans and an old bomber jacket. The steering wheel was ridiculously large and authoritative. The center console separated us. The engine coughed and rumbled like an old bulldog. The bare studs in the stick houses vibrated in their tentative foundations. Jeff’s hands hung loosely at his sides. He seemed to be waiting for something. We should head back, I said. My brother is probably home by now. You’re probably right, Jeff said. There was a muffled sadness in his voice. He put the car in reverse and carefully backed out of the cul-de-sac. He made a sharp left. We drove down the dark street. The houses farthest from the cul-de-sac were occupied. The blue light of television screens flickered in windows. We arrived at my brother’s house. My brother’s truck was parked next to my car. You lost your parking space, I said. Jeff laughed.
Wouldn’t be the first thing I ever lost, he said. A pile of groceries sat on the kitchen counter. Where have you girls been, my brother said. Your brother was blowing me in a church parking lot, Jeff said. My brother laughed. I don’t think so, he said. He’s got higher standards than that. Jeff laughed and shook my brother’s hand. Maybe so, he said.
• • •
I miss my nephew’s voice. I don’t see him much these days. We say hello at the occasional wedding or funeral. He has a girlfriend, an apartment, a job. He’s been clean for ten years. Stevie would say children get older, and I’m getting older too. Perhaps it’s for the best. As we grow older the need to sequester ourselves becomes more apparent. I tire of my own voice. I turn the mirror facedown. I shut off the lights. The curtains speak to me. I practice my perfection of silence. I enjoy sitting in the dark, the noise of a ceiling fan over my head. In the dark I can’t see my face in the mirror. I can become someone else.
• • •
I began experiencing headaches. They lasted from the time I got out of bed until the evening sun colored the mountains of Rio Seco pink and purple. Aspirin didn’t help. I tried caffeine but it only burned small holes in my stomach. I was alone in bed. I pulled the covers over me. Something pulled them away from me. I sensed a presence directly behind me. When it wasn’t directly behind me it was slightly to my right. When I moved it moved. It mimicked my exact body posture, location and position. I tried opening my mouth to scare it away with my voice, but my mouth wouldn’t open. My eyes turned against me. When I closed them fireworks exploded against black velvet. When I opened them tracers streaked across my peripheral vision. The headaches were so powerful my eyes throbbed with the pressure of each heartbeat. At times they would become so irritated I wanted nothing more than to pluck them out. The presence watched me from a dark corner of the bedroom closet. It laughed at me. It grunted like a depraved child. It slowly compressed into a black ball and moved under the bed. It breathed as I did. I did not look under the bed. I knew I would die if I did. It’s the meth, I told myself. It’s just the meth.
• • •
I come down. I feel the earth beneath my feet. I’m not sure I recognize the view. I miss the lawn chairs on the roof. I miss the sky filled with stars whose names I can’t remember. I miss my nephew sitting to my left. I cover my eyes. I fail to summon the darkness. There is only pink and purple. It’s the blood surging through my fingers. Our cities are too bright. We’ve lost our ability to see the stars, to make our way in the dark. We have turned away from God, and He is punishing us.
*
p.s. Hey. This weekend the blog has the great pleasure of doing its part to usher the extraordinary writer plus d.l. James Nulick's long-awaited second novel 'VALENCIA' into existence, and James has kindly put together a generous peek, behind-the-scenes tour, and sampling of what lies between its covers for us. Please give it a thorough going over this weekend, won't you? And direct some feedback in the author's and your fellow d.l.'s direction too, if you don't mind. And thank you muchly for the treasures, James. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Some really nice onomatopoeia in those two words, yeah. ** James, Thank you in-almost-person, James! A true pleasure on this place's end of things. I wish I had a front desk. I used to. Well, 'Hiker Meat' is real, it's just shot recently in a retro style. Yep, that Charles Ray wrecked car work is one of the very best. ** Steevee, Hi. I think I'll borrow Michael S.'s download of 'Goodnight Mommy' and give it a try. I'm always immediately wary of the 'torture porn' designation, having had my books tagged and dismissed as that by occasional critics ever since I started publishing. Obviously, I think exploring the visceral and ostensibly 'cruel' in a disturbing, uncensored way can be a valuable thing. Anyway, now I'm curious to see how 'GM' does that and whether the thing itself warrants its approach. ** _Black_Acrylic, Thanks Ben! Yeah, that Kouri IB games is super strange. I hadn't heard of it until I was searching for material for the post. I'm in total agreement with you about 'Unpainted Sculpture', and I've not only seen it, I had the great luck of getting watch Charley construct it from the start. I think if I have a favorite of all visual artists, it's him. ** Bill, Cool, thanks, Bill! I did think/hope you might find those works interesting, it's true. She's in Arizona? I thought she was in Florida for some reason. Huh, that does make meeting her seem more possible. Hm, I'll see if anybody I know knows her by chance. ** Armando, Hey, man! Nice to see you! I'm good, intensely busy with projects, but I'm very happy about that. Glad you liked the Rubinke stuff. Oops, about BEE. It's cool and positive to have one's opinion evolve, so that's probably a good thing. I have been to Nice, but not since I moved over here. Zac's mom lives in Nice, and he goes down there to see her a lot. I still haven't seen 'The Smell of Us'. I don't have such a burning desire to see it, but I know I will. I don't know what 'The Anniversary' is. What is it? Oh, I can google it. I will. No, very embarrassingly, I haven't read your poems yet. That's awful. I've literally been working on four projects at once for months and months, and I've become horribly neglectful of everything that isn't directly involved in them. I just made a note to read your poems finally. I'm really, really sorry. Oh, it depends, drafts-wise, on the novels themselves. A lot. I would guess, at minimum, a couple of dozen drafts or something? Hugs and love back to you! ** Gary gray, Hey, man! Congrats on the new laptop! Nothing like a new laptop. Oh, right, you mean for Fanzine. I mean Blake's solicitation. Yeah, go for it, for sure. I know nothing of those Yale lectures on youtube. Huh. I'll peek at them at the very least. Cool you liked the Halloween art show. Yeah, that Charles Ray piece is crazy great. 'Sad Satan', no, darn. Okay, I'll go see whatever is left of it. Or give me the link(s) if you don't mind. I'm real good. A ton going on. Haven't been traveling, but Zac's and my film is playing at two film festivals in October, so we'll be traveling for those gigs if nothing else. Take care, bud. ** Liquoredgoat, Oh, wow, it's you, Douglas. Nice. Good timing, i.e. Halloween. H sent me the Duvert pdf. I'm going to look into how I can imbed/share it on the blog such that it can be downloaded. I'm pretty sure there's a way. No, I've never seen 'Cemetery Man', strangely. Strangely because I've meant to watch it for yonks. Cool, I'll get my paws on it. Thank you! ** H, Hi. Thanks so much for the pdfs.I just saw the email arrive in my other open browser while I was doing this. I'll download them in a minute, and then I'll find a way to share them here. That's great and so kind of you, and it will benefit so many! Thank you, thank you! ** Okay. (Re-)train your attention on the exciting new novel by Mr. James Nulick now and for the foreseeable future, please. And have excellent weekends in general. See you on Monday.