[pumpkinmaster999]

Heroes Walk in Dirt

By Jess Awh

At last call at the bar I am eight shots in, swing dancing with a broom while Sasha wipes the wood down. His face says he’s wondering how a mess like me can be trusted to clean shit up.

I tell him when I’m home I like to vacuum drunk. Drunk vacuuming is kinda like being on a swing: you blithely toss your body around the room in a tango with the vacuum, singing to yourself, forgetting certain corners. I sing the live recorded version of a John Prine song, “That’s the Way that the World Goes Round.” Sasha asks why live. The song’s got this line: “it’s a half an inch of water and you think you’re gonna drown,” I say, but on the live tape John Prine tells the crowd how a woman came up to him in San Fransisco once and asked him to play his song about the happy enchilada. She thought it went, “it’s a happy enchilada and you think you’re gonna drown.”

In my bedroom I take eight shots of Jim Beam and grab the expensive vacuum I bought at Costco with the different detachable heads which I call “my vacuum ingredients,” and I swing and sing to myself about the happy enchilada.

Sasha shrugs and scrubs the gun line. He says that that John Prine song has a verse where John Prine pretty much says it’s ok to beat your wife. It isn’t okay to beat your wife, I don’t sing that verse. I know it isn’t okay to beat your wife. My wood floors shine. I hate when dirt from the floor sticks to my feet as though it were all the world’s injustice.

I smoke in the tub and I swim in the Hudson, so in a way no bath I take is ever clean as a true baptism. I dislike the laundromat, so I wash clothes at home and hang them on the fire escape. In a nutshell, all I can do is try, I say, in a nutshell. Trying is what we do when succeeding eludes our sight. Sasha once came over after work and laid on my bed eating pistachios, setting the empty shells down on his chest. He’s been upset because his ex is about to marry a man she loves less just to get him a green card and have some kids. I’d never ask anyone or anything to change. I would’ve vacuumed his shirt, though.

I walk to the train to work like always and Lee is waiting outside the liquor store. For whatever reason, the liquor store people hired him seemingly just to stand outside and ask people how they’re doing as they go by. He’s hardly ever inside, and when he is he doesn’t seem to be doing anything. He doesn’t have any flyers to hand out. “What’s new, Lee?” “Oh, you know, new gangsters, new crackheads.” “Oh yeah? You look spiffy. I like the blazer.” “Ah, thanks, it’s gettin’ cold.” “Yep, yep.” “My birthday’s coming up.” I like that one because he always tells me what’s new with the block when I’m really asking what’s new with him. “Shit, when is it?” “The 26th.” “No way, I’m having a party that night. I’ll bring you a piece of cake or something.” We laugh. Lee is always in a clean black button down and black pants that are never wrinkly. He’s like a blackboard that got wiped down with a wet towel. I’m gonna bring him cake because he doesn’t expect me to. We live in this charmed narrative where we move one plant into the sun, or put a sardine out for one stray cat, or organize one shelf, and then the sky opens up so sunbeams land on our shoulders like we somehow answered a prayer God didn’t even say out loud. I read this story in American Girl Magazine when I was nine where they’re walking on the beach and they find hundreds of washed up starfish dying in the sun. The one girl says “we can’t save them all, it’s pointless” and the other starts throwing them in the water one by one. She goes “but we can at least save a few, and that still matters.”

I get to the bar and this guy I know is there drinking, Grant Barber. I tell Sasha I’m going to go hide in the basement and he knows what I mean. A couple summers ago when I was bartending in Chinatown I became friends with Grant Barber because he was living in the radio station. He’d listen to my show on the mail room speakers on Sundays and say things like “I’m glad you played Patsy Cline” or “I can tell you like the music, that’s why you’re such a good host.” Grant Barber has blue eyes like Santa’s eyes, and that’s why I started buying him lunch and letting him shower at my apartment. I’m a good person but I get starfished sometimes. So I served court papers to the squatter who’d forced him out of his place in BedStuy, I went with him to the notary and everything, but when the legal shit started to drag along and he was sending me messages like “I’m gonna kill myself today” and “why won’t you answer me, I’m going to die” I stopped replying. I couldn’t fix it any more for him, and what was I gonna do, sit there listening to a dude I barely knew threaten suicide because I ignored his Facebook DMs? He said he never asked me to “fix it,” just to be there, and then he said he was in love with me. I said this is too many starfish. Actually, I said nothing.

Grant Barber talked to Blaze Foley in Austin back in 1985. I believe that story because he never lied to me about anything else besides the killing himself. “Fuck, I love Blaze Foley, seriously?” Yeah, at this concert at The Outhouse where he was double billed with Townes Van Zandt. Townes played for an hour straight, and I was there with my girlfriend, they were waiting for Blaze to come onstage but no one could find him I guess. He came on and played one song, then left again. That night is the only time I talked to him ever even though I saw him twice or three times. I’ll never forget what he said…I went to the men’s room and he was there barreling through a fifth of whiskey…slouched over a urinal. It was just us two and for some reason I started rambling about how much I looked up to him, how his music moved me, and then he stared at me and said one sentence. He said, and he was slurring—it took him a whole long minute to say this—he said “my problem is that I can’t stop being funny.”

I was funny once, at a nude figure drawing session held by a local art club. They had offered me thirty bucks to play the guitar and sing my songs while the models posed and the artists sketched them. The room echoed like the inside of a drum and the floors were shiny. I sang things I had written and they mingled with the dust lit up by the window and hovering in the air. Afterwards a girl came up to me and said “I loved your lyrics, they were so funny!” And maybe they were funny, but I recoiled because I felt stung, because I had been admitting that I was weak, which is braver than most things I do. Blaze Foley got shot in the chest by his friend Concho January’s son. That’s how he died. He confronted Carey, the son, about stealing Concho January’s veteran pension and welfare checks, and a few days later Carey shot him. Blaze’s friends covered his coffin in duct tape because he never got starfished, he knew his strength even though he looked to be made of flesh. Sasha was uninvited to his ex’s wedding because Gavin (the new fiancé) hates him, and when he found out he said fine, I’m happy for you guys, then cried on my shoulder in the bar basement later.

I love Blaze Foley but I doubt I would’ve ever dated him because I bet his hair was dirty all the time. He has this song called “Sittin’ by the Side of the Road” that’s about being homeless and being fine with it, because what do you even need besides a guitar and a meal to eat? I need a sanctuary that I can control and retreat to. The best gift I’ve ever given a friend is an invitation to stay with me, to hide in my house with the vacuumed floors, out of New York, and feel clean. This is why I wouldn’t date Sasha: his apartment is an unheeded hodgepodge of once-important or still-important things not set in order, not categorized, not scrubbed with Clorox wipes. I wonder what service he’s out there doing that makes him forget about cleaning. He texts me that Grant Barber left the bar and I come upstairs, eyeing the balled-up napkins and brown leaves sprinkled on the ground as I walk to the front door. I will clean this up before anyone else has a chance to disregard it.

[pumpkinmaster999]

Cave City

By Jess Awh

On Christmas Day in 2003 I flew into a fit of rage, over what I can’t remember, and cut a sizeable chunk out of the goose. My older brother quickly alerted my mother to the fact I was wielding scissors, which I’d scaled the kitchen counter to obtain, and she wrenched them from my hand with frightful anger in her eyes before whisking the goose away, cradled in her arms, to be patched. They were Madonna and child: she was aflame, tawny blonde hair flying out of her ponytail. The goose stared at me from its haven with little button eyes that loomed out of its sleek green velvet head like individual living creatures.

It had been a preemptive strike. I had to bring that goose to its knees before it had the chance to cut my loved ones down. The goose was retired the next Christmas after a clandestine incident of strangling left its curved neck hanging limp, empty of stuffing.

Ten years later I was fifteen, and for my grandparents’ 50th anniversary I broke out my mother’s sewing kit. The goose had come to me on the previous Thanksgiving, much to my chagrin. It must’ve been with my cousin Steve before then because after everyone had left, I went to vacuum behind the couch he’d been sleeping on and there it was: wedged next to the wall, staring with its one remaining lifeless beetle eye and waving with its one remaining white embroidered wing. Fuck you, Steve, I muttered as I wrenched it free. I set it on the living room floor and slumped onto the couch, at which point we just sort of looked at each other for a minute as if neither of us knew what to do or say. According to tradition, I’d have to find a way to covertly dump the goose on somebody else without them noticing at the next family gathering. Until then, we’d be in each other’s way.

However, seeing as I had dedicated my life to the destruction of stasis in the moment I first removed a chunk from the goose, I shouldered a pair of scissors once again (plus a needle and thread) to realign its neck, replace its eye, and adorn it with pearls and a miniature wedding veil. When we presented it to my grandmother (the one who originally sewed the goose) at the anniversary party, she nearly cried. I was prepared to feel a twinge of affection for it on that day, like a thumbtack in the bottom of my heart, but it never came.

When I was two or three I was able to ride the goose’s back like a rocking horse. At that time it had a red and green ribbon around its neck (the Christmas goose). There are four important landmarks on the leg of I-65 that stretches north from Nashville.

A blackened barn in a barren field that reads, in large crudely painted white letters, “NICEST BATHROOMS ON I-65 NEXT EXIT.” I have never seen the bathrooms because they’re south of Bowling Green and because the barn exudes a concerning energy which almost seems to lock my hand in place if I try to turn the wheel and get on that ramp.

A larger-than-life statue of a milking cow in a flatbed truck parked (precariously) on an overlook west of the highway.

Cave City.

An old red brick farmhouse with a high-ceilinged front porch. Its only neighbor is one tree that’s been blackened and stripped by lightning. My grandmother calls those “bone trees.” Driving from Nashville to Louisville with my third boyfriend, I used to point out that house every time we passed and say “I like that house,” and then I’d say “bone tree,” which is how it quietly became a landmark.

The goose is not good company, but silent company, at least. I like that no one’s asking me where we’re going or why as I careen down I-65 at an alarming speed. I’m driving to Cave City the way a blind man walks from his bedroom to his kitchen— my hands know the route better than my mind does. If I thought about my whereabouts too hard I’d probably have to open a map. It’s like having a dead body in the truck, I think, glancing over at the goose. Not as if I’m a murderer, though; as if I’m used to driving a hearse after a decades-long career of doing so and I sit in comfortable silence with the body, imagining a mild camaraderie, imagining that our quality time will open the buds of kinship one by one into blossoms that adorn our bodies. I’ve only been in a funeral procession once, in Louisville. On that day I learned that cars don’t pull over for funeral processions in every city the way they do in the South, and thus, sometimes part of the ceremony is waiting in traffic. On that day I stopped in Cave City twice. Driving today, I am glad to have the goose in the truck with me rather than a flock of my third boyfriend’s aunts mourning the death of their mother.

I’m driving to Cave City for a different reason than usual. Typically, one stops in Cave City because it’s north of Bowling Green and south of E-town. E-town is a crooked place. A haven only for darkness and pirate-like individuals. Its aura is different from NICEST BATHROOMS, however—different enough that I sometimes find myself stopping there. In late summer the year I turned eighteen I hitched a ride from Albany, Wisconsin back down to Tennessee in a little red car with a man named Joseph Allred. That was one of the times I ended up in E-town. We stopped for gas around nine p.m., and he walked out of the Circle K as I was sitting on the hood of the car smoking a cigarette, hiding from the deep water blue of the nighttime around us in the lemon glow of a streetlamp. He said “it’s been a long time since an angsty teenage girl last sat on the hood of my car smoking a cigarette,” which was a longer sentence than he’d said to me in the entire day of driving. Then he handed me the body of a black swallowtail butterfly we had found fluttering by the pump.

Circle K is one of those places where you can almost touch someone, or you can glimpse what it might feel like to touch that person, but only for the brief interval of a lightning strike.

In childhood I was plagued by an unintentional vagrant’s longing for completeness. My mother often tells the story of the day I found out my heart wasn’t situated in the middle of my chest, behind the soft spot that lies where my lowermost ribs might’ve intersected. I cried and cried—I was inconsolable. For six years after that, I diligently forgot the existence of my body. Then, one day, a handshake from a boy who was elected along with me to fifth grade student council returned me to my form and brought back all of the imperfection.

Driving to Cave City now I am listening to a radio program in which the host asks each of his callers: “what is the most romantic thing that ever happened to you?” One lady says her boyfriend drove from Chicago to New York City to surprise her on Valentine’s day and picked her up at Port Authority in the middle of the night. Somebody says their wife surprised them with a moonlit picnic on the riverbank where they got engaged. One night when I was fifteen, I was standing with my first boyfriend on the bridge over Graffiti Creek down the road from a house party our friend Gustavo was throwing when my ring fell off my finger and dropped in the water. I exclaimed in dismay, but soon after tried to convince him it was no big deal—he jumped in regardless, soaking his sneakers and trouser legs to retrieve what, in the end, had been a green aluminum band from the 25 cent prize machine at the laser tag arcade downtown. The bruise-like stain it left on my finger was as sweet a reminder as the warmth in the memory of his lips on mine that night. I think of calling the radio station to say this as I drive past the statue of the milking cow, but I can’t figure out a way to distill the story into one sentence. I decide it’ll be better off living and dying in the privacy of my own head.

Dave Blaskey. People used to tell me he looked like a basset hound. I was hit with a swing one night that year when we were all getting drunk at the Dragon Park playground—blood blossomed out of my forehead like a red ribbon unfolding, right from the center. There’s a photo of it somewhere. We broke up the next day and it was the only time I’ve ever been dumped. I was too embarrassed to ask why, so I pretended to be unfazed, but I spent the next month canceling plans to sit around at home with a band-aid on my face listening to Chet Baker Sings and throwing little rocks at a picture of Kris Kristofferson taped to my wall. I’m so glad I am not like that now. My heart has never been broken again. There are a few other places like Cave City; I have them marked out in my brain like a little map.

Horseheads. It’s somewhere between New York City and Rochester. The only things in that town are a motel that looks straight out of Lolita, an abandoned strip mall with no signage, and a gas station with a huge old coal engine out back lying on its side. All the trees there are bone trees.

The Belvedere Oasis. Somewhere between Albany and Chicago. An oasis is like if a mall fucked a rest stop and they had a fucked up baby that you can only access from the highway. Every time I stop at the Belvedere Oasis I happen to have a ridiculous amount of stuff in the back of the truck. Last time it was this big aluminum tub with a wheelbarrow and a broken porch swing in it. The parking lot is indescribably vast, like the surface of an artificial moon. When I stop there I always make sure to get an Orange Julius (which I never finish).

…

These are places I wish I could take the goose to. I want it to see them, maybe as a kind of apology. Maybe I’m trying to make amends. Alas, today I can only drive us as far as Cave City. I have a job, of course, and other random shit to do, so it isn’t too often anymore that I get one of these question mark days that prods you with its emptiness to undertake a mission that lies rotting in the corner of your own heart.

I’m driving to Cave City the way a married couple talks about going on a second honeymoon while sitting in the living room of their comfy brick house having coffee and listening to the thunder and smiling at their dog. I guess what I mean is I am loving myself quietly from opposite ends of the couch. I’m not saying I’m never going to get there—I probably will. The goose and I are up past Bowling Green when I decide to pull off the road and park on a strip of gravel. The two of us get out and go sit in the back of the truck for a minute, admiring a barn. It’s around suppertime now and the sky is the color of a cotton candy Philly Swirl popsicle, warm blush and ice blue and glittering with a tinge of frost that appears to be floating down slowly onto the grass. There are baby birds chirping in a bush. I fool with the cuff of my sweatshirt where it’s sort of coming apart into little strings. The world looks so fucking impossible I almost expect to see languid fish gliding around in the sky, flame swallowing the barn like a pyre on a raft drifting out into the center of the grassy lake. I’m starting to believe that a tree is still a tree if it’s a bone tree, and a goose is still a goose.

Dinosaur world. The only other location is in a town called Plant City in Florida, funnily enough. There’s a large fake tyrannosaurus rex standing proudly by the side of I-65, accompanied by a sign that says “DINOSAUR WORLD! EXIT NOW!” And that’s how you know you’re near Cave City.

Guntown Mountain. I guess it’s a giant warehouse firearm retailer. I’ve only seen it from a distance because it’s up on a hill overlooking Cave City like a fortress holding Cave City’s protective god. Or its oracle, or its talisman.

The general store with a big yellow sign. The man at the counter wears an eyepatch and looks sort of like a goat that’s about to kick the shit out of you, but he’s kind and sells beautiful tobacco pipes.

We get back in the truck.

[ninthwardjawn-deactivated201902]

conversations in a parked car be intense as fuck.

[shitboy96]

Why is this italicised

[beaky-peartree]

remember when lol meant “laughing out loud” instead of “this is to indicate that this brief text isn’t hostile”

[sleg]

[ruta-mia-blog]

[jeliyfish]

(via WHI | Get lost in what you love)

[dangered]

[powerburial]

Crazy how…you could just be a regular guy at work…but you come home and have a kooky sense of humor and play the elite video games and listen to secret music

[melisica]

[wealthyslug]

hmm what’s that word for when u want to die but u gotta pretend u don’t bc u got company

[pumpkinmaster999]

thinking abt being honest with him makes me sick to my stomach....tbh i just need to be like "hey, i'm sorry to be so blunt but i can't really tell if you wanna hang out with me but you're busy or if you just feel obligated to be nice to me. it's totally fine regardless, please don't feel bad, i just wanna know?" agagahshahshsjsj

[thomasistired]

[gloomgaze]

why does everyone think the guy from iceage is the hottest person ever dude looks like a soggy towel

[nyambient]

are we talking the mammoth or the sloth?

[nyambient]

oh you mean the band

[mjalti]

I just wanna be so beautiful that I bring immediate peace to the area where my feet have touched the ground and flowers bloom in my presence while I pretend to not be aware of being one of nature’s favorite mediums of self-expression ?

[heresay]

I was very fond of you, but now I’m so, so tired.

Albert Camus, The Plague  (via sempiternele)

[mercury]