Originally published in Verbicide issue #14

I hadn’t really seen anybody in quite some time. I was working long hours and not making much money, which was okay because it meant I didn’t have much time to think about all the other things else in my life that weren’t okay. But today I’d gotten off earlier than usual from Wired (clever name for an internet café, huh?) and I thought I’d spend the time on something special, so on the way home I stopped by this punk dive called Double Zero — which has now since turned into a really lame (and expensive) goth bar called apathy or atrophy or something with a lower case a, so whatever. Anyway, I went in to get a beer—they got dollar cans of Schlitz, so what the fuck. Plus it was a long cold walk home in February in the middle of the night and it would be nice to do the last mile and a half with a modicum of inebriety.

Double Zero’s was a good respite from the New England winter, and it was one of the few places in this college town that didn’t irritate the fuck out of me. The punkers had all been punk enough for long enough that they didn’t have to try to prove it, and you were just as likely to hear Motorhead or Mr. Bungle as you were the Ramones or the Sex Pistols. It was dark and smelled bad, and there was a gumball machine filled with peanuts and another with mixed nuts, and all the walls were covered with posters for Black Flag and DK and The Germs and Circle Jerks and all that — not posters you bought at Hot Topic in the mall, but photocopied flyers that had been stapled to utility poles to advertise shows that had happened decades ago. You had to climb this rickety staircase in the dark to get up to the bar. (The first floor of the building was a printing press that had long since gone out of business.) I’m sure the whole thing was a gigantic firetrap, but whatever fratboys the stairs didn’t scare off, the bikers and hardcore butch dykes did.

Last time I’d been here, I played a few games of pool against this chick with a Mom tattoo on her forearm, like the kind a sailor might have, with the heart and arrow. Our longest game ended when she sank the 8-ball on her fifth turn. The second game she ran the table after I broke and got nothing. That took the wind out of my mack, but I was still actually kinda hoping to see her when I stopped into Double Zero’s because she was kind of cute.

She wasn’t there, of course, but I did run into this dude named Beef who I used to work with at the Café La France. Beef had with him his friend Jeremy, a pretentious motherfucker if ever there was one, and short, too, which made it worse. They were both artists though, so it was all good. Beef was an artist and even more cynical than me, plus he drank a shitload to boot. I liked the stuff he painted, especially the crap he did when he was blitzed, which is usually just the opposite with most artists. I think he used to be a HC skater kid, but had become too jaded for even those Gen X pursuits. He was a big thick dude with a big thick beard, too jovial to be intimidating but too intimidating to be jolly.

Jeremy was a little guy with thick glasses who mostly did sketches and criticized everyone else’s art for being too much like this or that artist’s. He really knew his shit, so it wasn’t uncommon for him to tell you your painting looked like some guy you’d never heard of. I think he might have secretly thought that the purpose of art was to sit around and try to think of how to be the next “X.” But fuck “X.” “X” was “”X” because it was and will be the only “X.” Everything else is just second best. Jeremy would probably paint nothing but dots and rhombuses for the next fifty years, but I guess it was better than dogs playing poker or babies with vegetables . Shit, he’d probably be the only one of us to become famous.

I only had enough money for a couple beers, but Jeremy and the couple girls he was with were drinking slowly, so it was all good. The gals seemed bored by us and I can’t say I blamed them. I’m not a real good conversationalist, and Jeremy is irritating as fuck, so me and the girls were basically just sitting there, listening to Jeremy talk about all the irritating things he knew so much about.

I was just kinda trying to nurse my beer, but Beef was cranking ‘em back. He was wasted, and showed no signs of slowing up. Beef did not give a single solitary fuck, flying or otherwise. He’d knocked back about eight beers in the time it’d taken me to down two, and knowing him, he’d probably polished off a sixer, or even a twelve, before hitting the bars. He was essentially gone by now and pretty much just staring off into space, but every once in a while he’d burst in with something completely tangential and bizarre, like how much it would suck to be buried alive or how despicable Canadians are.

It was good to hang out and chill, I guess. I don’t get too much human comfort these days. Human comfort cost me the difference between two and six beers, but what the fuck. It’s good to get the HC once in a while. I mean, I didn’t really add much to the conversation and the girls left pretty quickly, but you know.

Anyway, I was kind of glad the girls left so soon, because I could tell Jeremy didn’t want them to. He was probably the kind of guy who was always calling every girl he could get a phone number out of until they ran out of excuses and had to go out with him and then leave early.

I didn’t blame them.

He’s such a putz, Jeremy. His picture should be there in the dictionary next to the word putz. He’s just this wimpy loser who has nothing better to do with his time than learn more than you about everything that you like and make it seem pretentious and lame. Jeremy’s the kind of guy that makes you think maybe the jocks in high school had a point when they beat up geeks like him. What a schmuck.

But I guess I didn’t really care. Beef was drinking and I was sitting there, and Jeremy was doing the talking. About Pavement now, a band I fucking can’t stand even though I’ve never heard any of their records, just because everyone I’ve ever met who likes them is like Jeremy. God, it’s like the only thing he can talk about is his fucking music. No wonder I hate every band.

Whatever.

When I drink I tend to get quieter and just sit there and defer my opinion on things, and notice how irritating everyone is. I don’t know. The whole scene at Double Zero’s was just becoming a headache. It was beginning to suck. I don’t even think Jeremy realized that he was being obnoxious…but at the same time, the fact that a person could be that obnoxious without realizing how obnoxious he was being just adds that much to his obnoxiousness. And now with the girls gone and Beef pretty much polished off, I was stuck with this twit. I began to regret not just walking home and getting a 40.

Double Zero’s was lame — even if I was hearing Hendrix in a punk bar. (“I don’t care if all the hippies cut off all their hair.”) Now that Jeremy’s unwilling dates had left, there was only one girl in the whole place, so I was just kinda half listening and half looking at the hot girl at the bar, thinking of all the trite things some person who wasn’t me might use as an excuse to start a conversation with her.

Jeremy, of course, was oblivious to any aspect of his environment other than potential receptacles for his musique critique, when I told him that I hate the fucking Beatles. I’m sorry if you like them, but I can’t fucking stand those twats. Any of them. In any of their phases. I hate them. Fuck ’em. I’m not saying that the fucking Beatles didn’t change the fucking History of fucking Rock n’ Roll. (I mean, gee, if it weren’t for them, we never would have had New Kids On The Block or N’Sync or “American Idol.”) All I’m saying is that I like music with soul, and The Beatle just ain’t got no soul, rubber or otherwise. And I hate the way everybody sucks their dick and expects me to, too. The only songs of theirs I like are “Come Together” and “Revolution #9.” “Helter Skelter” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” aren’t too bad, and I’ll stop on them if I’m scanning, but so what if I’m just not that into the fucking Beatles. Fuckin’ sue me. It’s not an international crime, is it?

Well, it fucking is, according to Jeremy’s Geneva Convention of Rock. I am instantly sentenced to be made to listen to Jeremy harangue on Exactly Why the Beatles are So Fucking Great. Jeremy had flipped his wig, gone purple toupee. His tiny and inadequate mind was unable to fathom the fact that somewhere within the vast reaches of this cosmos there could possibly fucking be an intelligent being who didn’t like the fucking Beatles.

I tried to explain, “I mean, I just don’t feel it, you know. It’s just kinda bland. Like when you hear John Lennon singing ‘I love you, I want you, I miss you,’ you don’t actually get the impression Lennon really loves or wants or misses anyone in particular. You know, it’s just a song. Whereas with say Bob Dylan, you can tell he’s dissing particular individuals. It’s all very personal. The Beatles are just really, you know…white.”

Jeremy explicated me the truth and exactly where I went wrong. “Bob Dylan is a whole different subject. I think Beck described him best. When he was asked if he thought of himself as a sort of Gen-X Dylan, Beck called Dylan a ‘cul-de-sac.’ I think that’s pretty apt. I mean, Dylan’s a poet, he’s a genius. But when you think about the influence on rock n’ roll, I don’t think you could question the fact that the Beatles…”

Beef raised his head from its position on his arm. He looked around.

“Hey, did those girls leave?”

“Uh, yeah.” Jeremy’s attention was taken away from his gay legends for a second, while his friend tried to confirm the obvious. “They left like half an hour ago.”

Beef looked relieved. “Oh good. I can stop trying to impress them,” and crashed back down on the table.

“How can you not like the Beatles?” Jeremy resumed. “Can you believe Ron doesn’t like the Beatles?”

Beef looked up again, “The Beatles? Weren’t they from Canada?”

“They were from Liverpool.”

“That’s what I thought. Fucking Canadians.”

“I like The Rolling Stones,” I ventured.

“The Stones were nowhere nearly as important as the Beatles. In fact, I don’t know if you know this, but the Stones started out emulating the Beatles.”

“Yeah, and they quit sucking as soon as they stopped biting and started getting into the blues. The black man, that’s the real source of good music. The Stones, Zeppelin, Sabbath, they all wished they was from Alabama. And what about Hend…”

Jeremy couldn’t handle it anymore. “The Beatles invented Pop,” he screamed at me. “You obviously don’t know anything about music!” He was bright red, like a boss creature that you’d just blasted with a volley of super-missiles; I thought/hoped he was going to have a heart attack and die right there on the spot. The motherfucker was furious. It was like I’d told him I thought Aryans were morally, mentally, and spiritually superior to the darker races, or that I liked Goo better than their Daydream Nation.

I tried to object that I didn’t like Pop, but I was out of my depth — that bridge had already been burnt. Jeremy was apoplectic. “You don’t know anything about music at all,” he almost sobbed.

What the fuck? What a fucking asshole. I know just as much about music as you do, fuckface. But who cares? I the fuck don’t. I don’t give a shit if you only listen to Madonna and the Pet Shop boys. Or if you’re gay in a different sort of way and like U2 and Billy Joel. Maybe you listen to Radiohead, Tool, or Pink Floyd. Ani Difranco. The Grateful Dead, Rush, techno. So what? Most of those bands make me wish I was deaf, but I’ve had friends who were into them. The last thing I care about in a person is their taste in music. It is actually possible for a person to have an incredibly wrong idea about what doesn’t suck, and still have some worth as a person. I mean, I’d try not to judge you if you had a wooden leg either.

There’s a lot less difference than you’d like to think between mean scenesters like Jeremy who idolize Modest Mouse and Calvin Johnson, and that lady at your office who subscribes to People and Entertainment Weekly and is in love with Tom Cruise. I mean, when you come down to it, what’s the fucking difference? Didn’t you listen to Sonic Youth when they told you to kill yr idols?

God, I was sounding practically as bad as Jeremy. The whole scene was getting boring, when the fiasco happened. One or the other of us looked askance as Beef, but he was already gone.

“Go look for him,” Jeremy told me, “I have to pay the tab. God I hope he doesn’t have the keys.”

I fumbled my way downstairs and emerged into the parking to see Beef standing in the middle of the road cackling madly in an evil red glow that seemed to emanate from the very snow. He grinned like a skeleton.

I blinked and he was just a silhouette in the intersection.

Then he glowed again. Beef was standing on top of a giant streetlight that had been downed by god knows what calamity. I walked over to the blinking man.

The signal looked much bigger on the pavement. Just the stack with the three lights was a good five feet long, and the pole swept across a goodly portion of the street.

“What do you think happened?” Beef asked. He pointed to a dent in the pole. “Someone must have totally creamed it. I wonder if they got away with it.” The signal looked like some fallen metal dinosaur ringed around by orange mourners. Beef picked up one of the road cones blocking off the intersection.

“Maybe you can knock down a few poles on the way home yourself dude.”

“Yeah.” Beef walked into the glow. “Dude,” looking down into the lamp, “that’s really bright.” He stood up and blinked in an exaggerated pantomime way, but the light really was actually a lot brighter than you’d expect.

Damn, it was fucking cold. I wondered what the fuck was taking Jeremy so long. He’d probably struck up a conversation with the one girl in Double Zero’s and was trying to get her number, even though he hadn’t hung out with her at all while he was there.

Beef put the cone over the red lens, which looked like a slightly thicker version of what you have over the blinkers on your car. The cone blinked an eerie translucent orange. I don’t know what it is, but there’s just something inherently creepy about anything that glows from the inside. Maybe I’ve just seen too many horror movies, but why would so many horror movies use that if it wasn’t scary in the first place.

Finally Jeremy came outside and stood with me, mesmerized by the flashing cone illuminating Beef. I was certain the UFOs would be beaming him up any second now. Or maybe they already had.

Blink. Blink.

He understood everything and we understood nothing.

—

Christopher Staley lives in Tacoma, WA. He has just finished his second novel, Button on The Nose, and has high hopes for its success. It’s funny, fast, angry—a true punk rock novel, with some Steven King-style blood and gore added in for good measure. And awkward sex scenes, too. If you’d like to read it, or have any book publishing contacts, let him know: rokgalaktik@yahoo.com.