Other bands: Everything Now!, Saababanks, The Dirty Steps
They opened up the upstairs at the Heorot and decked it all out like the belly of a Viking warship. At the far end was a wide-open room with tall ceilings and an area that was big enough for an average-sized rock band to exist without discomfort.
If I haven't mentioned The Heorot before, it's been a mainstay of the downtown Muncie beer snob scene since the mid-90s. Compared to other pubs in the region, its brew selection is enormous and its swords-and-sorcerers ambiance is something you'll not find many places outside of Valhalla.
We were playing now for bits of change to pay bills and to keep our chops up. We still drew fairly well in our hometown, but without the under-21 crowd to fill out the ranks, the room was thinner than we preferred it to be. We owed the honor to Indiana's draconian "blue laws." No wristbands for 18-year-olds in our town, those poor innocent precious things.
I drove the van to and from work, dwarfing the other cars in the parking lot except for the occasional monster farm dually. There were other times earlier in the year, when we'd come back off the road late at night and I was too tired to unhitch the trailer. I'd drive the whole thing to the shop and park it somewhere out of the way.
I was itching all over, figurately speaking. Even though I was present molecularly, I was at work about as often as I was at home. Which is to say rarely. I'd stumble around job sites with my head burning through thoughts and ideas like isopropyl alcohol. I did the least amount of work I could possibly do to make myself valuable. I stared off into space. I was writing my book in my head. Writing an album. Budgeting money I didn't have. Giving interviews that never happened. Talking to executives that didn't exist. I furiously scribbled words and songs and sketches on receipts, scraps of boxes, pieces of wood. I made lists.
Compulsive mental-list making is one of the indicators of obsessive compulsive disorder, they say. I won't say I was a full-blown case, but my tendencies were certainly exacerbated by the tempestuous circumstances of my life then. It was an anxious grab for control over a situation I had little control over.
I didn't tell too many people about my lists, because even I could tell they were reaching absurd levels. I had at least a dozen word documents itemizing everything from places I had been, to places I had yet to go, to films I had seen, to books I had read, to food I had yet to eat, to tasks lists encompassing everything from taking a shower to fixing dinner, broken down by day, week, month and sometimes year. And then I would spend hours contemplating getting them done, the processes involved, scrutinizing the end results before they were even materialized. It wasn't a Rain Man-style memorization-of-the-contents-of-a-refridgerator, but it was beyond what a fully rational person would consider appropriate. (And I was always sure to flex all the muscles on one side of my body an equal amount of times if I had happened to flex the muscles on the other. But I had always done this. Quietly.)
And I continued to write.
The first lock is easy.
The second needs a shimmy.
The third always gets a good whack from the bottom of a shoe, or a book, or a complete anthology, if I happen to be wearing my shoes at the time.
The deadbolt slides smooth as bunker oil.
Bread goes in the cupboard where it will probably mold. Vegetables stay on the counter where they will probably rot. Captain Mainwaring’s Tinned Beef goes in the cupboard next to the bread where it will not rot or mold because it is, as the package says, tinned by the Captain himself! Eggs, milk, and butter go in the icebox where they will turn sour and so rot my brain with strange dreams and fill my belly with strange vapours. A case of Maudlin Rose goes next to the cupboard. Like all good spirits, Maudlin keeps very well, and, in fact, gets better with age. A case equals twenty-four bottles.
Laundered shirts and pants get thrown onto the bed where they will stay until I either wear them or unwittingly wash them again. I separate them into two piles. One consists of a single pair of socks, a pair of underwear, a pair of pants, an undershirt, an overshirt, an in-between shirt, and a coat. In addition to what I already have on, I mentally designate them “save.” Everything else will be left on the stoop two flights down for a lucky passerby.
Last week I sold my radio. It was a cathedral-style radio with a clock that picked up three signals: one broadcast mostly music and a little news, one broadcast mostly news and a little music, and one broadcast variety shows involving all manner of fire-breathers, dancing dogs, screaming children, and genius equines, but only came in well when the elderly shut-in upstairs had her lights off. I used the money from the sale to buy the bread and Captain Mainwaring’s Tinned Beef.
I cleaned out my desk and found one dollar and thirty-seven cents in change, a train pass with two rides remaining, a ticket stub to a film I don’t remember seeing, an overdue electric bill, three unused typewriter ribbons, a picture of my mother with a coffee ring stain hovering halo-like around her face and a man’s name scribbled in the lower right corner, a pewter St. Lucy pendant, a paper clip chain twenty-two links long, the manual to the radio I sold last week, a wooden fork with two tines missing, three broken pencils, one working ink pen, one that doesn’t, a small book of dead leaves I collected a few years ago when I fancied boring hobbies, and a letter from Grace with a yellow perfume stain on the envelope that no longer smells.
I took everything from the desk, with the exception of the typewriter ribbons and my mother’s picture, which I hung on a tack above the mantle, and threw it down the incinerator chute where it fell far into the belly of the ancient building in which I live to be burned to ash and smoke by an enormous pot-bellied industrial furnace, kept aflame by a tiny old man with an engineer’s cap who stays up far into the night whispering into the ancient radios that fill his tiny dark office under the street. In a surge of theatrical audacity, I disconnected the phone from the wall and threw it down the chute, too.
Finished, I poured a glass of Maudlin, put Long’s Second on the phonograph, and sat down to my typewriter. The traffic signal outside my window blinked and clicked like an aroused cicada, casting lurid shadows of green and red on my wall.
The drink was bitter and sweet and stung on the way down and it helped me think of one thing at a time.
