It was the hottest day of the year.
It was also the deadest.
The Blue Angels practiced slicing up the sky for air show this weekend.
We sought shelter in a Starbucks for an hour.
The processed cool air felt lovely and natural.
I took Lauren to an audition.
A woman collapsed on the street by Oprah's fortress.
Her family tended to the swollen shiner below her eye.
Lauren recommended the ice at Subway, then played a fairy godmother at the audition.
We hung out at Starbucks for a few more hours.
I got my fourth and final low-paying run from those T-shirt mopes on Belmont.
After earning that $5, we sat in the van eating sandwiches and celery in the shade.
Lauren had to be at Second City at 4:30.
Tonight was the opening night for the remount of Rod Blagojevich: Superstar at the Metropolis Performing Arts Centre in Arlington Heights.
I would have attended but I was manning the door at a bar.
I have a hard time reading at the bar, but I found I could write.
I wrote a short story:
'96 Tears
He made a list.
But first he got another beer.
"Only three more," he mumbled.
He lingered by the open refrigerator. It was another hot night. The swamp coolers helped but not really. They were better at curling his stack of radio resumes.
"RC Cola vending machines" he wrote at the top of the list.
RC was her favorite drink. Her family bought it by the case. She had never seen a vending machine graced with the Royal Crown logo until she visited Chicago with him last winter.
He missed Chicago. It was a real city. A real place. He hated the desert.
"Summers aren't so fucking stupid" was next on the list.
At least that's how he chose to remember them. He had forgotten that most of his summer existence had been spent indoors in front of a television with the air conditioning at 68ยบ. Chicago summers could be just as brutal.
But a Chicago summer had never melted an entire case of irreplaceable mix tapes. Those crimes happened solely in the desert.
If he didn't hear from 91X by next month, he was moving back. He loved working in radio but had to get out of the Coachella Valley.
He wanted Jennifer to join him.
She was on the fence.
"Man or Astroman listed Chicago as one of their top ten cities to live in"
Jennifer already knew this. She read it in a zine.
He turned off Tom Snyder and crumpled the unconvincing list into a little yellow ball. The humidity from the swamp coolers made compressing it a pleasurable task. He pounded his MGD and stuffed the list down the neck.
It was 1am and he still had energy. He wanted to rock out but that would inevitably wake up his landlord. Even though the guest house was tucked away in the corner of the property, John was a light sleeper. He liked John despite his devout Christianity- and he did turn a blind eye to Jennifer's occasional overnight visits.
Sometimes Jen was loud. One time she let out a shrill scream during a particularly passionate tryst. They kept going but he covered her face with a pillow. She stopped fucking him.
"What the fuck, Andy!"
Jennifer was at her parents house tonight. She had an astronomy class in the morning.
He yanked his work headphones from their leather case and plugged them into the stereo. They were nice headphones. He spent $100 on them, half a week's salary.
He put on side two of Legacy of Brutality.
It was the first Misfits record he bought.
2nd Hand Tunes on Clark in Chicago.
Autumn of his junior year in high school.
"Angelfuck" pounded into his head. He clenched his fists. This was the music he wanted to play on the goddamn radio. He staggered around the one-room house swigging beer and being Danzig. He felt alive.
He hated the music he was forced to play on the radio. Payola poofs like Matchbox 20, Dishwalla, Third Eye Blind, Dog's Eye View, The Verve Pipe, Collective Soul, Edwin McCain, Tonic, Primitive Radio Gods, Chalk Farm, Semisonic, and Deep Blue Something.
The endless pollution of grunge apes like Brother Cane, Candlebox, Seven Mary Three, Silverchair, Sponge, and 412 other mindless meatheads. Those shitty bands reminded him of the jocks who put on plaid shirts once Pearl Jam made MTV's Buzz Bin and continued to trip him in the halls.
So-called "indie" type bands like Tripping Daisy, Green Apple Quick Step, and For Squirrels. Instead of trying to rewrite "She Don't Use Jelly" over and over again with a different set of slackery dopes, why not just play actual indie rock?
Alanis Morrisette clones like Patti Rothberg and Tracey Bonham.
Why were they even playing Alanis Morrisette?
Beer commercial blues prodigies like Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Jonny Lang.
Techno horseshit from Stabbing Westward and God Lives Underwater.
And then King's X and Jars of Clay?
Fucking Christian rock?
These weren't even bands!
They were starry-eyed rubes conned by the cokeheaded henchmen of oily businessmen driven by numbers to sell tacos and Mazdas.
It wasn't even music!
He crooned along with a young Danzig.
Candy apples and razor blades,
Little dead are soon in graves,
I remember Halloween!
He had a hard time justifying playing that payola crap on the air.
But if 91X rang, he'd compromise some of that integrity.
He could handle that scruple in San Diego.
That was a city. That's where a 21-year old should be.
Not wasting away in some sweltering basin where rich golf assholes go to die and meth-headed tweakers race fry-eyed toward death.
At least he didn't have to play Geggy Tah.
Side two of Legacy was done in eleven minutes. So was his beer. Only one left, which put a slight damper on his buzz. On the way to the fridge, his headphones snapped off his head and hit the crumb speckled carpet.
"Fuck it."
He put on a succession of Blues Explosion 7 inches: "Afro" b/w "Relax-Her", "Son of Sam" b/w "Bent". He played violent air guitar and danced like a pinata, like he did in the alley of Lounge Ax when The Blues Explosion came to Chicago three Decembers ago. Underage, he and Ralph listened to a muffled version of their sweaty set from behind the club wrapped in a blanket. They turned shivers into dance moves, kicking the city's grimy grey snow into the air. They stayed in that alley until the band loaded out around 3am, and he bought all the merch his part time pool table salesman job could afford. He missed Ralph.
"Shirt Jac" plopped sloppily onto the turntable. He belted out Jon Spencer's garbled anti-lyrics into his beer. For the flip "Latch On" he introduced high jump stomping to the one-man party.
There was only one 45 left: "Train #3" b/w "Train #1", a thrilling one-two punch of fuck you rock'n'roll.
During one of the many detours on the A-side he leapt onto the thrift store couch and bounced over the thrift store coffee table, creating a rugburn on his knee. The stylus skipped back to the first verse. He leapt on the couch again and inverted the last MGD for its final drops down his throat.
"EXPLOSION!"
The B-side was a fucking monster.
It sounded more like a truck than a train.
He played air theremin and shook his electrocuted head.
It felt like a real fuck you to the desert.
The miserable, class-ruled, speed-fueled, small-town, small-mind, boring ass oven of a desert.
He charged headfirst into the couch and overturned the floral-printed Goliath. The thud skipped the record forward, sounding like torn pieces of chaos scattered and resewn. The stereo's input jack spat out the headphone cord.
Suddenly "Train #1" was loud as it should have been.
Jon Spencer screamed "HOBOKEN NEW JERSEY!!" over and over again.
New Jersey.
He had sent a resume and an air check tape to WHTG in Asbury Park.
That's where Matt Pinfield got his start.
Never heard a word from them.
He joined Spencer in screaming.
"HOBOKEN NEW JERSEY!!!"
The song finished with a sleaze rock groove, retarding into the opening triplets of meter-clipping drums and direct input guitars. It sounded like big, B-movie bees were stinging those guitars. The only bass sound came from the groaning theremin lurking underneath.
This record was in the red.
He kicked the air and convulsed in the nest of the defeated divan, until the theremin got away and unleashed a murderous slash across the song, immediately ending its short, crazy life.
And then it was over.
He stared at the ceiling, his heart still pounding to the beat like the song's shadow.
A grapefruit crashed through the window pane and landed on his bed. A tiny shard of glass bounced off his nose.
"What the fuck?"
The guest house sat on property surrounded by a trailer park. Apparently they weren't fans of the Blues Explosion.
He got up to investigate.
It was a grapefruit, alright.
On the way to the dustpan he noticed the answering machine was blinking.
He pressed its lone button.
"Andy..."
It was Jennifer.
"...um, I was hoping you'd be up."
She sounded weird.
"Can we meet tomorrow for lunch? I want to talk..."
A masculine knock rapped the door.
Jennifer continued.
"...In 'n' Out maybe. Call me when you wake up."
Three more raps on the door, and a concerned Christian voice.
"Andy, is everything okay in there?"
***
Verdict: Win
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