, Author at Post Road Magazine

In a Sentimental Mood

By Vanessa Stone

There is a need to be of use. To be of service. To be of help. Otherwise, how would anything get fixed? This is what I told Maev. And while we are on the topic of fixing things, could you give me a hand here? Maev slid her chair next to me and organized my pills. Calcium, riluzole, vitamins A, B, C––I’ve been taking so many pills lately that I’ve begun to wonder if I will ever, ever properly shit again. Maev said she sees why not. I’m not particularly fond of Maev, but I find it much more manageable to say her name than the others. A year ago Care for Life assigned her to my case and so for a couple of hours, several days a week, she is of help to me.

Maev is of greater use to me particularly in the mornings when I spend an hour or two searching on the internet. Last month I thought I could learn to knit. After several hours of watching YouTube videos I attempted to make a yellow knitted blanket. It wasn’t long though before my fingers started feeling aggravated and so I settled for a knitted coaster instead. Maev pointed out I should try MasterClass instead, but I’m a socialist at heart and really enjoy public goods like clean air, literacy, lighthouses and free YouTube courses.

Despite her poor advice, Maev is a good listener. No one listens to anybody these days. We all just talk at each other. I suppose though listening skills come in handy if you are mothering six children. How Maev does it remains a mystery to me, of course. I have no children myself. Never had time. I posed this to Maev––why any woman in her right mind would allow a man to control her like that is beyond me. I do not think Maev understands the import of this statement because a) English is not her first language, and b) she never had a father nor a husband. Men, for all she’s concerned, are of no use to her.

“I understand,” Maev said.

“Really?”

“Of course I do.”

“I don’t think you do.”

Maev gave me the eye. The type of eye I imagined she must have used on her children perhaps when they were misbehaving. But I recognized it immediately as the type of eye I gave to my sister when she would call me about her divorce. An exhausted eye.

“You don’t need a man. Like me! Men, tsk, useless,” she unlocked the breaks on my wheelchair.

She wheeled me to the door where a full-length mirror rested against a wall. We both glanced at ourselves. In a month or two Maev would need to take me to the salon to get my hair colored back to brown. She took out two hats from her tote bag that she had placed rather sloppily near a glass vase earlier that morning. I wondered if she knew how much I hated that. She could have easily broken the vase by accident. At noon, as usual, the sun cast its sharp light against my home. On the south side, English Ivy was spreading its tendrils on the walls.

“Could you help me take this down please?” I asked Maev.

“But why? They’re very charming,” she said.

I do not think Maev has ever owned a home.

“Behind the beauty lies insidious problems,” I explained.

She did not answer.

“Do you see these tendrils? They might look harmless but they can do serious damage to the wrong type of structure. Listen, Maev. My home was built in the 1930s so it has significantly weaker mortar.” Maev remained circumspect so I stopped explaining it further at which point we resumed our daily walk.

With newly renovated homes cropping up in my area, I wanted to get acquainted with some of the new faces in my neighborhood. A young couple lived on one end and from what I gathered they are the kind of people socially engaged. According to Maev, whom I might have sent over to get details for me, Frank and Rachel just received their Gold Creator Award for the one-millionth person interested in watching them whisper while they cook. If you ask me there’s nothing impressive about whispering while cooking at all; most people don’t talk while they cook. And if you are screaming while cooking, then you are Gordon Ramsay––in which case, could you please not?

On the other end of my block lived a middle-aged man named Robert. I met him on one of my morning walks with Maev when I tried shoo-ing his fat white cat lying on the sidewalk. Out came Robert apologizing with his hands swishing in the air like one of those giant inflatable blow-up tubes you see at a car dealership except wearing a mask.

“Oh, you don’t need to do that,” I told him. He had only known the cat for a week. He adopted the poor thing shortly after he left his partner of fifteen years. Apparently it makes him feel selfless. And he was just starting to bond with Toby (the cat) when it decided it preferred to be an outsider rather than an insider.

“I’m afraid he might be harboring some sort of resentment towards me,” he explained.

“Why would you think that?” I asked.

“I started dating again,” Robert said as he winked at the cat.

“How do you feel about dating during a pandemic?”

“It can be scary, yes, I suppose. But you know, I’m really trying to be careful and only date those with potential antibodies.”

“I see.”

“In my opinion, it’s much better than waiting for a vaccine that may or may not come and may or may not do what it was supposed to do. It’s difficult to trust public health officials these days now that everything has become so politicized, you know what I mean?”

I can tell he wanted a visual agreement from me but after swallowing twenty-odd pills with my orange juice this morning to manage my amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, I physically could not. After a mouse captured Toby’s interest, the sidewalk was free for human use again. Maev wheeled me back home.

Maev was visiting her family in Cambodia for the first time in twenty years. She planned to rekindle what had been lost, she declared. Can you really do that in fourteen days? I asked her. She never got around to answering my questions before she left the spare keys on the table. I am still wondering. Personally, I think it is a blessing to have such a considerable distance from your family. Too much of anything is dreadful for you. Too much water intake can lead to low blood sodium, too much socializing can lead to social fatigue, too much talking is a symptom of logorrhoea, and so on. Take it from me, I have found plenty of freedom and solitude since my mother and sister passed away in a car accident nine years ago. I specifically told them to take a cab instead, but as I mentioned, nobody listens to anybody these days. Anyhow, since Maev was on a vacation, I once again found myself with plenty of freedom and solitude. As a result, I have begun a new routine––watching my neighbors across from me. Stuck on my second floor, I found that my guest bedroom afforded me a better viewpoint. From here, I discovered a few interesting facts about my neighbors:

The wife worked remotely, usually engaged in a video conference call, and always dressed professionally from the waist up.
The husband was a health worker, based, of course, on the scrubs he wore every day to go to work.
They had a child (children, maybe) who might be off to college judging from the multiple collegiate signages splattered on a bedroom window.
They were a bit delusional. They turned TWO whole walls on their third-floor bedroom into an eclectic collection of mementos. At a certain point, keepsakes no longer stood for anything other than a representation of junk.
A strange man appeared at their door on a Tuesday afternoon.
They ate dinner separately. Usually the husband in the living room watching TV and the wife in the kitchen on her phone. I couldn’t help but think of Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher, when he said, “It is the saddest sight in the world,” upon seeing the vision of New Yorkers eating meals all by themselves. He continued to describe it as, “sadder than destitution.” He further went on to assert––and I love this––“He who eats alone is dead.” The French, as the old cliché suggests, approached the dining experience as something akin to the act of lovemaking. Baudrillard failed to realize two things: First, no one ever ate alone and thought, well this is the end of me. They just sat down, ate, and went on with their lives. Second, according to Robert, Americans do not love make, they fuck make. By this reasoning, my neighbors were certainly not French.
I confirmed that they have not made fuck for the past week and that the only intimacy that had occurred between them was on Sunday when they brushed against each other in the staircase.

Maev left my medication organized which I was grateful for because today my symptoms included twitchy legs and stiff arms. More importantly, my tongue felt like a dying seal. I knew this because I called to make a socially distanced date with Robert and he kept asking me why I was moaning. He hung up and followed up with a text:

If I were into women, that
would turn me on,
winky emoji, enjoy your day, love!

My doctor explained it to me. It is sporadic, he said. This means that while I am slowly deteriorating there will be days I can move without a problem. He advised that on those problematic days I should keep myself intellectually engaged. I took his advice and finally signed up for the MasterClass courses, which the Gold Creator Award winners swore by. Apparently, anyone can become an insider these days. And since I can’t be an outsider, I might as well be an insider. I scrolled through the different courses, all documenting the artistry of the world’s biggest and brightest celebrities. For ninety US dollars I, too, can have a perfect backhand like Serena Williams, the ability to scout a film location like Werner Herzog, or possibly win an Oscar like Natalie Portman. I clicked on Natalie’s impeccable cheekbones, which launched me into the “Lesson Plan.”

It was a series of twenty videos of varying lengths. In her burgundy dress and beachy-wave hairstyle, Natalie looked directly at the camera. In an equally laid back and pleasant tone she outlined her expectations, namely what I should take from her class and the basic principles of acting. After two hours and thirty-seven minutes I completed the course. Like a great actress, Natalie gave a great performance as an instructor. Each lesson provided various modes of Natalie. There was a reminiscent Natalie, who tells you a story about her past. There was a reverent Natalie, who talks about the fine actors and performances she admired. Finally there was a spiritual Natalie, who claims empathy is the root of her artistry. This was important because we all know that empathy is free but acting lessons are not. I am wounded at this realization. I was made to feel like I gained something. Oh yes, Natalie. I, too, can act. But the moment I tried it, I realized I was completely inferior and that yes I can see that you can do it, but I know that I cannot. I spent the rest of the evening feeling betrayed.

The next morning, despite trying positivity, a key scene in Natalie’s course lingered in my mind. It was when she staged a room and pointed at a spot and said, “Here I find out I am being cheated on.” The strange man appeared at my neighbor’s house again. The door opened. He entered. I pinched my phone screen, zooming in on the house. In the kitchen was where they spoke. The man’s arm around the wife’s waist. In the living room, he looked at her from under his lashes and there she laughed, throwing her head back as if riding a rollercoaster. In the dining room was where they kissed. Up they went into the master bedroom where she glared through the blinds, abruptly, before closing them. That was where she would cheat. I closed my eyes.

She was in her red slip with her bare feet, hair tied back so as not to disturb the vision of him now in front of her. And there he was–––as beautiful as ever, as strong as ever. She ran to him, jumped on his thighs, and stuck on him like glue. Her hands grasped his.

“Oh but you are in my blood you’re my holy wine,” Joni Mitchell sang.

She climbed down his lengthy pole of a body, twisted, and pushed him to the ground. She stared at him until he sprung up like spring flowers. She lifted her leg, pointed her feet, and twirled like a dress.

“Oh and you taste so bitter, bitter and so sweet,” Joni sang again.

She leaped into his arms, folded her legs around him. There was nothing to do but for him to carry her in circles until he was exhausted. Until she was exhausted. Until there was nothing left of them. Only breath.

“Oh I could drink a case of you darling,” Joni sang for final time.

I felt it all. There I was, once upon a time, on that stage, where my body moved and lived. My numbness returned. I knew I was in the wheelchair again, bound to it like a genie to its lamp. The room was hotter too. I tried opening my eyes but could not. I could not open my eyes. I could not open my eyes. I tried to yell but my tongue was as dry as a riverbed. If I were a genie now, I would make a wish to be able to open my eyes or scream or throw that damn vase by the door. If I could just move, or perhaps if Maev was here, or anyone at all, my mother, my father, my sister, or even Robert, I could tell them there was a very, very serious problem that needs to be fixed.

Vanessa Stone is a creative freelancer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her stories have appeared in The Coil Magazine and Lumina Journal. She holds a BA from the University of Washington and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is at work on a forthcoming novel, The Things We Did to God.

Three Stories

by Ashley Mayne

Scarsdale

Every time she rode the train from the city that winter, she saw the house in Scarsdale. Colonial white, a peaked roof. A backyard choked with trees. One in a row of similar houses, though less immaculate.

A black cellophane bag twisted on a branch. On windy days she’d see it inflate like a torn black lung, sunlight punching through it.

They were together in the house once. His paintings everywhere. Displayed and stored, leaned against walls. There was a portrait of his wife standing in front of a garden shed in calico. A face of sharpened innocence.

Another woman’s icebox. Another woman’s couch. An eiderdown like a cold snowdrift. A cat purring on the sill. The lace band of her underwear scratched her thigh.

It rained that time. Rain fell in the orange rinds in the ashtray, and in the champagne flutes they’d left on the porch, one half-full and the other empty, each with its own hollow chime.

That airless gasp. The pained sheen of his eye. A shudder in her brain, a hard, dark star.

He told her she’d made him feral. A crow out of a cage. Dear God.

When a stranger on the train spilled into a diabetic swoon, everyone tried to give him candy. He’d slumped in his seat across the aisle from her. She moved next to him and grabbed for his hand.

Pray, someone said.

The look the man gave her as he came out of it: something she’d never seen. Not even in her lover’s eyes, in the house. He would carry the sun in his mouth for her if she asked him. If she stayed by him through this.

Her roommate over drinks: How well do you know him really? The artist?

She said: Where do you think he was when I was a child?

A painting of the Williamsburg Bridge, not the girders but the spaces between, embryonic shapes of light. The sugary orange from his fingertips burns her mouth. In the skeleton trees behind the house, she sees him tall as her father.

One of her earrings went missing that time. She worried about it later, riding back on the train. Thought of his teeth against her ear, the click of gold on bone. Had it fallen in the eiderdown? She knows he’s capable of having stolen it.

Or maybe it dropped in the backyard. In the deepest leaves, in the black earth no one sees. Gold glistening like the seed of next year’s sun.

They’d put out the cat in the rain that day so it wouldn’t stare at them, laughing at themselves. The cat stalked off across the backyard to shelter in the garden shed. She saw it for a moment from the window, over the arm of the couch, before he pulled down the neck of her blouse.

It turned back once, betrayed, mewed from the far side of the yard. It had a child’s voice.

The Deep

Your mother calls you from Astoria and says: I was like this when I was waiting to have you. She says a lot of things. Nettles for iron. Blue for luck. Breathing exercises.

You look up nettles in a field manual. You tell her you’ll go cut some by the well in the woods behind your house. But really you want a cigarette.

You bought the house at auction for a prayer. Another woman, a girl, lived in the house before you did. You worked for a non-profit in the city, fighting the good fight. But now you need someplace no one can find you.

The postmistress in town likes to tell you about this girl. Long hair, sang like an angel in choir. The usual. Until she thinks she knows you, and it gets weird. A sad, lost girl with secrets. In trouble is what she says. Not crazy or knocked up.

She looks at you and waits to see what you’ll do. You stand there without speaking, holding your junk mail, grocery store coupons, keys, and thinking: It’s the country, maybe you really should have a gun.

Then the postmistress tells you the girl was alone for a long time, in the house that’s now yours. Where was her mother, anyway? Where were her kinfolk? For months, this woman tells you: She didn’t attend church, didn’t post any letters. No one suspected anything. It would have been rude to try the lock.

You think of the pale spot left by a rug at the foot of your bed, the place where the girl once said her prayers. Of the tap that leaks and probably always has. Of the dust on the baseboards, the cigarettes in your desk, the water stains making wolf tracks on the ceiling around that one light fixture. You wonder if the girl ever felt safe here.

The postmistress wants you to say something. So you say, When did you know she’d vanished?

She tells you a bird flew against one of the windows. Broke a pane. Ladies from church finally came by with lamb casserole and noticed how the air exhaling from the house was cold.

The house went up for auction. She had no family, bless her heart. Oh, honey. Would you like to sit down and rest your legs?

It’s a sad story. What did you expect? You imagine it: The house, the well, the dripping faucet. Darkness moving on the face of things.

The postmistress rings you up for stamps and packing tape.

Somewhere you heard Charles Darwin saw the word mother on a Scrabble board and said: There’s no such word. And you like sad stories, or at least you did. Before you left the city, a man went off the Brooklyn Bridge. He removed his shoes like he was getting into bed and left the sky and the air, escaped into the water. Disappeared the way men do. Left his shoes waiting like hopeful little dogs for him to come back up.

You really should call your mother.

You can see the well in the woods from the window of the old house, breathing damp air. The cell signal is always bad. Afternoon. You stand in the middle of your bed and stretch to hold the phone toward the ceiling. Her voice, so far, so small, sounds like the wind around your ears when you were a kid floating in her sight on Lake Winnipesaukee. Those floats they used to have when you were young, lungs on children’s arms, what were they called? Water wings? Something made for flight, for jumping the blue. Something an angel would have.

You pace in the house tonight and the baby kicks you. A foot against your hand under the skin. This presence, you and not you.

It’s only now you wonder what disappearing will be like. The way a girl can vanish. The way an animal’s breath fades slowly from a window. The way God doesn’t exist, all over everything.

When you were small you cried in your mother’s arms and she was the invisible world. Summer in the eighties. A Volvo 240 wagon, packed to the tops of its windows: fishing poles, sunscreen, jigsaw puzzles, Call Of The Wild. Ribs of the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson. Your family’s annual summer flight from the city. That cabin on the lake.

A meteor, a mockingbird. A yarn god’s eye hanging in a tree. She was God with a birthmark on her breast, and you cried in her arms, sunlight. The dust of your lashes left a mark on God’s blue dress. The white, ghost strike of a bird’s wings on glass.

Lake Winnipesaukee. Your mother held your head above the water. When you swam in her, she breathed for you.

The damn bathtub. Still that wire of rust locked in the porcelain. Baking soda isn’t going to cut it. In the leaves by the well there’s a lost shoe.

You’ll have to throw out the cigarettes in the morning. In the woods, where no one will find them. Not even you.

Song

You hear that car accident song in June, before you know. The refrain: Take me. You think it’s a love song. He thinks it’s about death.

White Wolf Tequila and an old Nikon. His head flung back against the night sky. Take me.

All summer a forest unspools in film ribbons from his eyes and mouth. You touch him, and his body shakes. You hold onto him ‘till you can see his dreams upside down on the dark grass, and you take in these images, all of them. Too many frames. Too fast to see.

Your body fills with old light and you hold him. You never imagined you could hold so much.

Wait, you say. Take me, too.

You know what your arms have been for all your life.

He leans down in September, jaw scraping the corner of your forehead. His body now a delicate, hard machine taking him somewhere else.

So you spool the ribbon back, play it again. Backward, forward, half speed, fast. You live in black and white now, the way an animal does. But there’s nothing in these frames you haven’t seen. Maybe that flicker right there. A ghost on the lens. His gorgeous eyes. The shadows of cars sliding upside down across the ceiling of a room where a man smokes in bed. Now a collared dog, tied up. Now a hypodermic needle. Now the rafters of a crawlspace. Now a child’s birthday party. A boy running his hand down the neck of a grey guitar.

Did he see time when his eye was on you?

Or have you been an old fear all summer, something wild in the house? What was he saying yes to, the times he told you yes? When he shook against your body and the two of you lived in colors, wanting the speed no one survives. When you became another kind of dying.

The summer’s over. October comes. You hear that song in your head on the back of a motorcycle, take me, and your arms around somebody’s waist say yes to death. Death doesn’t love you back now, though it will someday.

Grace presses in. You’ve never fallen faster. The engine is a wolf shaking. The trees on this country road flicker until they blur together, form a white tunnel of light, and you hold on, all your life. Hair slices behind, wind cuts across your throat between the helmet’s chinstrap and the broken leather collar of your jacket.

Just your arms holding time.

Ashley Mayne’s work has appeared in Fence, Post Road, Juked, Peripheries, Blight Podcast, Metambesen, and elsewhere. She is one of the founders of Crystal Radio and edits fiction at Fence.

The Rat Man

by Babak Lakghomi

The man who’d turned into a rat had the same sickness, Ali says. You have the sickness if you dream of boys and want to press against them.

This is something Ali has heard from the kids on the street.

My father has left me with Ali’s parents. He is staying with Mother who is hospitalized in the city. It was supposed to be only for days. But it has been weeks.

Ali and I go to different schools. He is two years older than me. Ali’s brother is younger than both of us. I sleep in their room on a futon on the floor between their beds.

At night, their mother comes to the room, kisses them both, then kneels down and kisses me.

You’re like my son too, she says.

Ali and his brother take off their pajamas when they go to bed.

Each time I call my father he says Mother can’t talk.

I don’t tell my father anything about being sick or the Rat man.

Before turning into a rat, the man had thrust an eggplant into his asshole. It was only after his wife left him that he turned into a rat.

Do you want to watch it for yourself? Ali asks me one night. They speak in French, he says.

His younger brother is sleeping. We check to make sure his parents’ bedroom door is shut.

Ali inserts the VHS tape in and turns on the TV, mutes it. I hear rustling as Ali takes off his underwear.

Back in the bedroom, I cover my head with the blanket and try to go to sleep.

I want to forget about the Rat man.

I want to forget about the sickness.

I want to sleep in my own bed again and kiss my own mother goodnight.

Babak Lakghomi is the author of Floating Notes (Tyrant Books, 2018). His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, NOON, Ninth Letter, New York Tyrant, and Green Mountains Review, among others.

Tawny

by Lincoln Michel

Some of the colors of the dog shit were ochre, taupe, beaver, and burnt umber.

I was standing in the dog park with my girlfriend, Olivia Mantooth, and her dog, Claudius Mantooth. Claudius was normally white, but the brown dust of the park had already turned him tan. Olivia Mantooth’s face was bright red, or I guess I should say scarlet.

“These filthy animals.” Olivia looked at me with her lip curled all the way up to the nose. “Can you believe it? Disgusting.”

Olivia wasn’t talking about the dogs. She was talking about the owners. “Nobody gives a crap about anything but themselves. That’s the problem right there!”

Olivia walked around the park picking up pieces of trash. Some of the pieces of trash were coffee cups, bottle caps, broken glass, and one limp and translucent condom.

“Hey, let’s go home,” I said, meaning back to her apartment. The flushness of Olivia’s cheeks was making me awkwardly aroused. “I bet Claudius is tired.”

“Could you imagine what I could do with this dog park?” she said, waving a silver snack wrapper in my face. “I could put in a new fence, plant green grass, add a watering trough for all the dogs. If only I had the authority, I could turn this place into fricking Shangri-La!”

A large black dog ran by, kicking dirt into my face. I wiped the grit out of my lips. “Let’s go home, roll around ourselves.”

Olivia just shook her head. She was in one of those moods where she didn’t get in the mood.

“Goddamn animals.”

Some of the breeds in the park were bulldog, basset hound, shiba inu, chow chow, and wire fox terrier.

“Can you believe that?” Olivia pointed at a mutt who was pooping an inch away from her foot. “Tell me if you can believe that! Am I going crazy?”

The dog looked up at her with an inscrutable expression, then sprinted off to join the rest of the pack.

“They’re not even going to pick that up.” She moved her pointer finger to aim in the direction of a couple on the bench across the park. She shouted, “Hey, did your dog just poop?”

The woman pulled off her earphones. She was wearing a chartreuse blouse and had long nails painted tickle me pink. “Which dog?”

“That little brown dog,” Olivia said. “You need to clean up after your dog. There are such things as rules. This is a society.”

The woman rolled her eyes. “Which brown dog, bitch?”

Olivia turned her hands into tight little tennis balls. “Clean up after your dog. Have some self-respect.”

The woman waved her open hands, pink fingernails extending like the spikes of some deep-sea monster. “Oh, no,” the woman with the pink fingernails said. “Hell to the no.”

Olivia and the woman were a few inches away from each other, shouting and growling.

“This park is disgusting. People like you make it disgusting.”

“I asked which brown dog, bitch. They’re all brown.”

The two women looked like they were about to bite each other’s throats out.

“Tawny,” I said.

The woman with the pink fingernails and Olivia both whipped their necks around.

“What?”

“Tawny,” I said a little louder. “The dog that pooped was tawny. It was the tawny dog.”

“I don’t have a tiny dog,” the woman said, wiping her lips with the back of her hand.

“Not tiny. Tawny. Like yawn with t.” Then I added, “And also a y at the end.”

“What the fuck is tawny?”

“It’s like a brown,” I explained. “A light brown.”

“Don’t call my dog tawny, asshole.”

Olivia stepped in front of me, shielding me with her body. “Don’t call Franklin an asshole. Franklin is a sensitive and accurate man. And tawny is a sensitive and accurate word!”

The woman stepped to the side, and looked at me from head to toe, stopping and shaking her head halfway at the midway point.

“He looks like a tawny piece of shit to me,” she said.

Some of the dogs were starting to notice the excitement. They crowded around us, wagging their tails. Some of the owners were walking over too. The sun was bright and hot, and the dust was floating all around us.

“Step back,” Olivia said.

“Let’s all just calm down,” someone said. “It’s a nice day at the park.”

The tawny dog trotted up, a chocolate brown stick in its mouth. It dropped the stick at my feet, looked up with its tongue out.

“Hey, here’s the tawny dog.” I stuck out my hand and started tousling the dog. “See? The tawny dog. Right here!”

I smiled and looked at Olivia and the other woman, trying to get their attention.

I kept jiggling the dog’s face and saying, “See?”

I guess I was too busy trying to get Olivia and the woman to notice the tawny dog that I didn’t notice that it was growling. Didn’t notice that it was baring its bright white teeth.

We had to take a taxi to the hospital. They charged me extra for bleeding on the seats.

Later, the bite on my hand started to blossom with a variety of colors as the infection spread. Some of the colors around the wound were rose madder, eggplant, smoky topaz, and lemon chiffon.

Lincoln Michel is the author of the story collection Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press 2015) and the forthcoming novel The Body Scout (Orbit 2021). His short stories appear in The Paris Review, Granta, NOON, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and elsewhere. His essays and criticism appear in journals such as The New York Times, GQ, BOMB, and The Guardian. You can find him online at @thelincoln and lincolnmichel.com.

V. Oscillation

Carlo Rotella, Charles Farrell and James Parker

James Parker: Aren’t we describing an endless oscillation, or a kind of aortic valve that you’re closing between these two conditions?

Carlo Rotella: Maybe we are. My original hope was that we might just find a more wrinkly way to think about it that isn’t the obvious compromise of Well, you need both.

JP: When you compromise, you’re risking fucking up both ways.

CR: You do it wrong and don’t make it new?

JP: Exactly! You do it right, badly.

Charles Farrell: Or you do it right in fifteen different ways, which makes it wrong.

CR: That’s the How many sets of hands has this screenplay been through? problem.

CF: That’s exactly what it is.

CR: I still have a deep suspicion that it’s not just my perverse personal taste, that in fact there’s a kind of systematic logic to one’s perception of the relative merit, relative value, the relative importance of doing it right versus making it new as you go across the forms and genres. As we’ve been saying, part of the answer is that historical conditions can create a situation in which somebody needs to make it new or play it right. Market marginality or centrality can squeeze out all the making it new or playing it right, so if any shows up you treasure it and value it.

CF: There are so many fail-safes put into doing it right when there’s a lot of money involved. By the time it reaches the market it can only have been done right.

CR: You mean, like, if I was going to a big arena show of some major entertainer, I would really be hoping—

CF: You’re looking for the experience that separates it—

CR: I would hope that they would screw it up in some way that it would make it new. Like come out roaring drunk and make a spectacle of themselves.

CF: And that’s why with mainstream entertainers like, I don’t know, Judy Garland, people live for the fuckup. I mean, that’s the thing that elevates it. Because that’s the only thing available.

CR: Sort of a substitute for making it new.

JP: At that level, the fuckup is the only thing that will make it new.

CR: The halftime show at the Super Bowl might be the ultimate example of that. The only reason I would watch the halftime show at the Super Bowl with interest is if I knew that something was going to go wrong. Like the lip sync would screw up and they had to actually play the instruments. And I would be, like, Okay, let’s watch, because that would be interesting.

CF: This is all the opposite of the Little League game, which resonates for you in a very specific way, as does hearing the group at the Station Inn. And it’s quite a similar way.

CR: There are institutions involved that shape the work and the experience—a music club, a youth baseball league—but they’re not money-intensive. In both cases we’re at the margins of the market, getting together to put on a show in the old barn, essentially, which is reason enough that I will be thrilled for them if they do it right.

CF: So in a sense, doing it right is very secondary. Because doing it right is the product of what’s interesting to you. And what’s interesting to you is a kind of problem solving.

CR: Yeah, I love problem solving—problem solving in context. Let’s say Elizabeth Warren is in a TV debate and a crazy person rushes in from the audience and tries to hit her, and she makes him miss and makes him pay in absolutely orthodox fashion: she, like, double-jabs, hooks off the jab, head-body-head. There’s nothing more overcapitalized and predigested and inevitable than a presidential campaign, so there’s just about no value to me in watching her do the debate right and solve whatever debate problems it might present, like how to talk about gun control without alienating centrist independents, or whatever. But I would be immensely satisfied by watching her solve this other problem, do this other thing right—even better, in some ways, than watching her make it new with some crazy idiosyncratic martial art she invents on the spot. Because I would want to know how it came to be that Elizabeth Warren knew to hook off the jab. I would start having questions about the historical and stylistic conditions in which she learned how to hook off the jab. Whose gym has she been spending time in? Who’s she training with?JP: I watched this footage of Crosby, Stills, and Nash playing a festival in California somewhere, and basically that thing happens. A nutter arises and starts having a go at them, like, Ah, everything’s being commercialized! Stephen Stills gets so triggered by this geezer that he just comes over like he can’t handle it and is very uncool about it and ends up almost fighting with this man, who’s clearly very vulnerable himself. They have to be pulled apart, and it’s kind of a disgrace. But it’s a magical fuckup, a beautiful moment.

Charles Farrell has spent his professional life moving between music and boxing, with occasional detours. His book (Lowlife): A Memoir of Jazz, Fight-Fixing, and The Mob, will be published in July, 2020.

James Parker is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the editor of The Pilgrim, a literary magazine from the homeless community of downtown Boston.

Carlo Rotella‘s latest book is The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood. He is a professor of English at Boston College.

How Not to Get Spat Out

James Parker

I saw the Who the other night at Boston’s Fenway Park. What’s left of me saw what’s left of the Who. Pure magic. Full moon over the Citgo sign, and my face molten with tears as seventy-four-year-old Pete Townshend, in a red boiler suit, windmilled at his guitar, clanged it over his raised knee, forced gorgeous unpredictable sounds from it. They did the best bits of Tommy, then the hits, then the best bits of Quadrophenia, then some more hits. Jesus Christ, what a band. What a story. (Somewhere in there they also did a new song called “Hero at Ground Zero.” Cue mass piss-break.)

Opening for the Who was Peter Wolf, formerly of the J. Geils Band. I never liked the J. Geils Band. In fact, as a younger man I would have taken this opportunity to write something virulently shitty and vaguely militant about the J. Geils Band. But not today. Because as I watched Wolf and his band, the Midnight Travelers, perform the J.Geils hit “Must Of Got Lost”—Yeah I musta got LAWST… —I was granted a precious insight: this, this kind of comfortably catchy mid-paced mid-brained blues-based chugalong singalong, is what all of rock’n’roll would sound like if there had been no geniuses in it. No one to make it new. Kevin Barry, guitarist for the Midnight Travelers, is very very good: he peeled off a couple of exquisitely shapely solos. Talk about playing it right. But the surrounding music, the surrounding dynamic, was resolutely genius-free.

Pete Townshend is a genius. He’s a possibility channel, a conductor for the ineffable. It’s still visibly pouring though his gangling high-tensile body: even though he’s seventy-four, you wouldn’t want to get in a fight with Pete Townshend. Who-music has not dated. Why? Because the entire agon of Townshend’s creativity has been to connect the base elements of rock to the transcendent, to wire them up to the unearthly, the beyond time. The beyond the J. Geils Band.

So am I coming down on the Charles side of things? Am I, finally, of the pro-make it new party? I don’t think so. I will explain.

This is a tricky position for me, and yet it’s one I am very used to. I always seem to end up here, in the middle, at the dull heart of the dialectic: Charles has his shining radical thesis (“Make it new, ever new!”), Carlo has his barbed antithesis (“Play it right, goddammit.”), and I have my spongy and vitamin-deficient synthesis (“Uh, how about a bit of… both?”)— Zzzzz. The intellect moulders at room temperature. Revelation 3:16: “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”

But what if, what if, we took this discussion away from boxing and free jazz and into the realm of the personal, into the realm of (say) ME? My life. I wake up in the morning and I bloody get on with it: cold shower, bring the wife her tea, rouse the boy for school, eat the oatmeal, boil the egg, walk the dog, get to work. I love it. “Very easy to assassinate me,” I say merrily. “I do the same thing every day, ha ha!” I luxuriate in routine. The liturgy of habit. I wedge myself into layers of familiarity and sleep there like a beetle. I play it right.

And then, every few months or so, I don’t. I wake up with a demonic desire to—yes—make it new. I say “demonic” because it possesses me: it gets me between its teeth and shakes me like a dog shakes a rabbit. Shred everything. Rip it up and start again. There’s a riot in the nervous system. Shearing silver volleys of Charles Farrell piano-notes are coming at me. From the inside! It’s a wild feeling, not to be accommodated. And at such times I have to manage myself quite carefully—I have to, if possible, play it even righter than I was playing it before. There’s brimstone in the air. Head down, plough the well-worn groove.

Does that make sense? (Have you noticed how everyone is always asking that these days, as if we’re all on the verge of a catastrophic failure of understanding, a Babel-esque breakdown?) I think you know what I’m talking about, reader. The nice man who just served me my coffee advises me that this is a Taurus thing—but not exclusively. Repetition adds value, builds significance, stacks on power: it’s the science of a good riff. But something in us, with exactly equivalent force, seems to demand the opposite: the scream of ungovernable feedback. What’s to be done? Cultivate the old Keatsian “negative capability,” perhaps—the capacity to flourish in tensions and contrarieties. Or in my case, as I once heard the poet Don Bajema say (he was opening for a spoken word set by Henry Rollins): “Try like fucking hell to be a man.”

I’ve been meditating/trying to meditate, on-off, in-out, up-and-down, for eight years. Like (I assume) every other meditator, I am the worst meditator in the world. Which is to say, the most feckless, fidgety, carnal, trivial, incipiently schizoid, obsessively woolgathering and tail-chasing person ever to attempt the noble practice of meditation. I’ve felt this way for as long as I’ve been doing it; I feel this way every time I sit down to meditate. I claim it and I wear it—the wobbly, wobbly crown of worst-ness. And so (I assume) does everybody else.

It was my friend Tina, a priest, who taught me to meditate—who transmitted a technique to me (the inner repetition of a word), and steadily renewed the invitation to practice it. The introductory sessions left me quite rattled. Tina calls it “the first gift of the spirit”: this dramatic, instantaneous acquaintance with your own fragmentation and restlessness. What the second gift is, I haven’t yet found out.

But I have gained, in fits and starts and fallings-away, a sort of education. I’ve learned that you can’t stop thinking. The brain is a thought-generator, that’s one of the things it does, so here come the thoughts, one after another. (Don’t attach, let ’em pass, yeah yeah.) I’ve learned additionally about the physicality of thought: with what speed something that starts immaterially, up in the rafters of your skull, moves to un-ghost or embody itself. A thought, an idea, just a little waggling of the wires, can tighten the chest and coat the gullet with nausea and drench the system in adrenaline. Drizzlings of sadness, elation sparks, roaming anxiety bubbles, a rumble in the underpants. When you meditate, you watch these things happen, over and over again. And cycle by cycle you cultivate, I suppose, I hope, a certain perspective.

That’s me and meditation. By no means a hero’s journey. The point is that trying to meditate puts you right between the antlers of the make it new/play it right dichotomy. In following your practice—the word, the watched breath, whatever it might be—you are doing your damnedest to play it right. Doggedly you sit down, doggedly you settle. Your brain, meanwhile, insists on making it new: What about this? How’s this? Did you ever think of this? And so on. I think there’s beauty here. I believe that reality is the second-by-second self-renewal of the Logos, the first powerchord of Creation ringing through us with eternal sustain. All new, from beginning to end, from the utterance to the eventual silence. And playing it right—maybe—is developing an ability to get to the edge of understanding this. Does that make sense?