by Holly Lorka
you’ve got a friend
I don’t have blinds on many of my windows because I have never been overly concerned with privacy. If you want to look into my house at night and see me sitting on the couch watching HGTV in my skull and crossbones Santa sleeping pants, have at it. Just don’t make the Chihuahuas bark, because I’m sick of listening to them bark, which I should’ve considered before I got two little Chihuahuas barking machines.
There is a window over my desk that looks out into the backyard, and through it I can see the utility pole that holds the power lines. I spend a lot of time staring out at this pole and these lines, because there’s nothing keeping me from doing it and because that’s how exciting writing can be.
One day I looked out and there was a red stuffed bear sitting high up on the power lines near the pole. The fuck? Writing done for the day.
No, really. There was a red teddy bear sitting up there looking at me through my window, like Hey, Holly, what’s up? I took a picture because I knew no one would believe me, but it was with my flip phone, so I’m pretty sure that picture is gone forever. But I assure you, that bear was definitely there.
How the hell did a teddy bear get up on my power lines? It was easily thirty feet in the air. The pole is in the corner, engulfed in bamboo. There’s no alley, so someone would’ve had to come into my yard to access it. I googled “unusual electrician rituals” to see if maybe those guys like to mess with people by putting things up there when they work on the lines. Good one, guys. But there was nothing on the Internet about this. I can tell you with certainty that no one had been in my yard. The little barking machines let me know if even a beetle shows up unannounced. Person in yard climbing pole to plant stuffed bear equals major barking bonanza.
It couldn’t have been tossed up there—it was wedged too tightly. I considered all the possibilities, none of which was even remotely reasonable, and came up empty.
Regardless of how unreasonable it was, that bear stayed up there for over a year. Through wind and rain, with possums and squirrels climbing over him and bamboo tickling his undercarriage, he just sat up there looking at me through my naked window. He saw me through some cold and lonely times of personal growth, huddled around a cup of tea, pining away for all kinds of silly things. He watched me during some frustrating ones, where I’m sure he wondered why I banged my head on my desk so much (because I’m a writer, bear), and saw me through some triumphant ones, like when I finally learned how to play “Never Going Back Again” on my guitar, which is a really fucking difficult thing to do. I jumped up and down in front of him that day and set the Chihuahuas to barking, which immediately ruined the moment.
Those fucking dogs.
He turned less and less red, to more of a pink, with the weather beating on him. He also got smaller as he lost stuffing and other body parts, but I came to take great comfort in his odd presence. It was just another thing in my life that was strange and unanswerable, but also kind of nice if I didn’t think about it too much.
One day, just as suddenly as he appeared, he was gone. I guess that’s how it is with something like a fall from the power lines. There’s no way to make that happen gradually. Goodbye, bear. It was fun while it lasted.
I didn’t go looking for him. It’s messy back there in the bamboo. I don’t like beetles and possums, and also there are a lot of snails that crunch when you accidentally walk on them. No, thank you. I moved on and started staring at the dead branch stuck up in the chinaberry tree.
Then, some tree limbs that were not dead fell back there (the live ones fall all the time, but I can’t get the dead ones to fall even if I promise them candy and puppies), and when I cleaned them up, I FOUND THE BEAR! Or what was left of him, which was his head with just a right arm attached. My little bear! I picked him up like a kid who just found his long-lost stuffed bear, except I was middle-aged, so it happened more slowly and my hands weren’t as sticky.
I’d never seen his face this closely. I guess I always assumed he was smiling at me from the power line; it was too far for me to tell for sure. But he was smiling now, even though he was missing a bunch of skin off his nose. He was ragged but he was cute, and he was mine.
I hammered a nail in my porch and I securely hung up what was left of him, because I didn’t want to lose him ever again. It may seem silly, but he means that much to me, that little bear. And he fits right in with all the other weird shit I have hanging around my house. I like to drink beer back there with the Christmas lights on while we watch each other and listen to the motherfucking barkers Chihuahuas. It makes me so damned happy that this strange thing happened and that now I can keep this little bear, my odd inanimate friend, here with me. If you know how this little bear got up on those power lines, please never tell me. I’d rather just enjoy the mystery and not think too much about it.
in bed with buck owens
The banjo: a five-stringed wood and steel monster that melds the sounds of guitar and drum into one thundering peal, the only instrument to originate in North America, the epitome of the South, the driving force of bluegrass music, the main character in at least one terrifying movie about four men and a river.
Stacey was my first serious relationship. We met while working the night shift at a big hospital. I walked by her, and she looked up at me and smiled her enormous smile. I was immediately hooked. I just happened to have a vacancy in the pretty, tall, redhead department. Her resemblance to Stefanie Powers was uncanny. Don’t judge us for this, but many a night was spent making out in patient bathrooms, because Stacey had kids and not a lot of free time, and we were being as efficient with our romance as possible. Efficient but apparently not very discreet: one of the other nurses pulled me aside to ask, “So, are you gnawing on Stacey or what?” Night-shift nurses are a special type of classy.
Stacey gave me my first banjo, so I blame this story on her. I started playing it after her father died. He bought it on a whim and picked at it only casually. Mostly it sat in his closet, behind the wool blazer he wore to funerals. After he died of colon cancer, Stacey gave his banjo to me.
When I was a kid I watched Hee Haw with my family. What wasn’t there to like about that show? It had stupid jokes, dogs, and farm girls in miniskirts. The other thing it had was banjo music. Hee Haw was my first exposure to that instrument, and I was obsessed. My parents gave me an orange plastic banjo for Christmas, and I’d sit in front of Hee Haw with it, impatient for some banjo music to come on so I could pretend I was playing along with them, maybe with one of those farm girls on my lap. I’m sure my New Yorker parents were horrified. It was good practice for all the other times I’d horrify them throughout their lives. Poor parents.
When I inherited Stacey’s father’s banjo, I was delighted. It brought me back to those Saturday nights as a kid, sitting there and pretending. Now, maybe, I could learn to play it for real. I immediately signed up for lessons down at Ziggie’s guitar shop, bought some finger picks, strummed my first open G-chord, and fell madly in love. My God, it was so loud and beautiful.
After my first lesson, I went home and started to play. The metallic staccato rolled out of the instrument, crawled up under my skin, and infected me. I was hooked. I began to practice all the time. I developed calluses on my fingers and the muscles required to keep the heavy monster hoisted on my shoulder. I picked my forward rolls, reverse rolls, and multiple measure rolls until they were perfect. I learned hammer-ons, pull-offs and slides. Every night after work I shut myself in the bedroom and played until my fingers nearly fell off. Stacey said that she would leave me if she had to listen to “Boil Them Cabbage Down” one more time, but I couldn’t stop. Playing was methodical, rhythmic, meditative. I practiced so hard that the rest of the world fell away, and I was left by myself, mouth open, drooling.
The banjo began to interfere with my life. At work I’d lose track of what I was doing and find myself silently tapping out the patterns to “Old Joe Clark” or “Cripple Creek” or whatever song I was learning.
I stopped watching all of my favorite TV shows so I could have more time to listen to music and practice. I bought every bluegrass CD I could find and memorized all the banjo parts in my head. I studied the lives of Earl Scruggs and Paul Stanley. I wanted to be like them. I stopped going to weekend barbecues so I could go to bluegrass festivals instead. I bought a straw hat.
I sped through my entire lesson book in three months. I had devoured the chords, the scales, and the songs, and, like a junkie, I wanted more. My instructor told me he had nothing left to teach me.
“Where do I go from here?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “None of my other students ever finished.” I was on my own.
I started going to bluegrass jams to find others like me. What I found, in suburban Phoenix, were skinny old men with dirty fingernails who chain-smoked while debating the legitimacy of claw hammer and the role of gospel in modern bluegrass music. They played “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” like gods; they wielded banjos instead of thunderbolts. I sat in awe and pitifully tried to keep up. They were sweet and took the time to teach me new chords, new licks. My obsession intensified.
I learned things, secret things that only banjo players know. I learned to turn the phone off while playing. Finger picks don’t work for shit on a phone, and taking them off repeatedly is annoying. I learned that dogs flee from the sound and even the sight of my banjo while cats are drawn to it. I learned never to practice in any room near the front of the house because banjo music finds its way under doors and through windows to run amok in the neighborhood and proselytize to innocent joggers and dog walkers.
My friends began taking great pleasure in teasing me about what a hillbilly I’d become since this whole banjo business started. Maybe it was the straw hat. One of them got me a washboard for my birthday as a joke. I had to explain that the washboard is a totally different category of instrument than a banjo, asshole.
I lost a lot of sleep over the banjo. The nightmares kept waking me up. I dreamed that my backyard turned to swamp and teemed with flies and hungry alligators. Then, I was in bed with Buck Owens. He didn’t want to have sex; he just wanted to play “Dueling Banjos.” I used to wake Stacey up to tell her.
“Why don’t you just stop playing?” she asked. But I couldn’t. Not any more than I could wake her dad from the dead and give his instrument back. Not any more than I could stop breathing. The banjo was in me.
poseur with casserole
“That was my first concert. Wasn’t it great?” The girl taking my order for an iced Americano is smiling and waiting for me to answer.
“Huh?” That’s all I can say. I have no idea to which concert she’s referring. I’m pretty sure our conversation up to this point has only been about coffee. She looks at my chest and points.
“Your shirt.”
I finally realize she’s referring to the Pearl Jam concert T-shirt I’m wearing. It’s from their 1997 show with the Rolling Stones at the Oakland Coliseum. It probably was a great concert, but I wasn’t there. “Your shirt,” she says again, like I didn’t hear her the first time.
“Um. Yeah! It was a great show!” I’m enthusiastic, but I’m also avoiding her eyes and looking at the counter to hide the fact that I’m lying.
Like I said before, I didn’t go to that concert. In fact, I haven’t been to any Pearl Jam concerts. I bought the shirt at a secondhand clothing store. I saw it hanging there and it called to me. It was black and worn and the red yield sign on the front of it was just starting to fade in that good way that smacks of vintage. “Buy me,” it whispered, “and you can pretend to be someone else.” Its words rolled out and over me slowly and gnawed at my longing to fit in with a different group of people.
I do like to listen to music and I do go to some concerts. But I don’t buy T-shirts to commemorate my presence at these events because I don’t want to advertise my interest in them. It wouldn’t be cool to wear a shirt from the Junebug Music Festival and Country Carnival. I’m embarrassed by my musical tastes, but I can’t help them. I have a few Indigo Girls shirts lying around, but mostly I wear them to do yard work these days. There’s no need to wear them in public.
This was back in the early 2000s, so bear with me. What that shirt offered me back then was that when I wore it, I would look like someone who went to the most awesome Pearl Jam concert ever, in a coliseum, no less. What the shirt didn’t tell me, however, was how stressful it would be to keep up the act.
It began the first time I wore it. I was at the bike shop buying new handlebar streamers. I couldn’t help that, either. The guy behind the counter looked at my shirt and said, “Dude. That was the best concert ever. I wish they’d put out some better music now. But nothing will ever touch Ten, don’t ya think?” Would you ask that question to a thirty-five-year-old buying handlebar streamers for her bike?
Now, I knew a little about Pearl Jam. I listened to the radio a bit in the ’90s and could tell you that there was a song called “Even Flow” that I kind of liked. I knew they were from Seattle, and I could also tell you that Eddie Vedder was the lead singer. What I didn’t know, however, was what Ten was or if anything could touch it or not. I had to lie. I said, “Dude. Nothing will ever come close to Ten. Can I have my streamers?”
The next time I wore it was in New Orleans. I was walking down Bourbon Street in the midst of a huge crowd, when a girl wearing big black boots and a beret walked up to me and gave me the official rock-and-roll salute, the sign of the horns. I figured she just thought I was cool, but then she said it.
“That concert kicked total ass!”
Did everyone on the planet but me go to that concert?
It happened almost every time I wore it. I’d just be standing there in it, trying to look cool, trying to act like I’m on the cutting edge of at least one thing, when I’d get ambushed by someone who liked to say “dude” or made funny hand gestures that I don’t really understand or had lots of things pierced. I finally had to get on the Internet and do some research about Pearl Jam so I could participate in a conversation about them. This is how far I was willing to go just so I could wear that stupid T-shirt. There wasn’t much about that particular concert, however. So if someone wanted to chat specifically about that incredibly important night in history, I just acted really excited, used the word “dude,” and made a hasty getaway.
One evening I was in line at the grocery store. It was the snooty grocery store, the one where olives are really expensive. A guy behind me in the checkout line tapped me on the shoulder and said, “That was, like, the best show ever. What’s your favorite CD?”
As usual, I forgot that I was wearing the shirt and wanted to reply, “My favorite CD is Dolly Parton’s The Grass Is Blue.” It took me a minute to realize he was talking about my shirt. They were always talking about that stupid shirt.
I couldn’t take it anymore. I was tired of the lying, tired of the facade. I broke down and told him, “Look. I didn’t go to the concert. I don’t even like Pearl Jam all that much. I bought it at a secondhand store because I thought it was cool.”
He looked me dead in the eye. He peeled me down to my very being with his eyes and held me there, naked. “So you’re just a poseur, then.”
As he turned away from me, I stood there, blinking at him, with the smell of old bananas in the air and the beep-beep of the laser scanners going off around me. I was sure that everyone in the store could see what he had just done to me, what I had done to myself.
Yes, I am a poseur, in every sense of the word. I’ve been trying since I can remember to fit into some idealized notion I have for myself of being a cool human on this planet. I’m never cool enough, though. I have tattoos and a pompadour, but I drive a Hyundai, not a motorcycle, as people often assume (motorcycles are way too scary). I listen to bluegrass, Hall & Oates, and some other pretty gay music. I eat dinner at five and go to bed at nine. I enjoy making casseroles for my friends, who call me Grandpa, and papier-mâché puppets for my neighbor’s childr
en. I am the opposite of cool.
I haven’t worn my Pearl Jam shirt out in public since that day in the grocery store. The humiliation was too great. It’s ten years later, but I still can’t get rid of it. It mostly hangs around in a drawer. Every now and then I miss it and take it out to wear to bed. When I wake up the next morning, smelling like an old drawer, I wonder if maybe in my dreams somewhere far away I was finally cool.
hotter, more intensive care
I’m reluctant to tell people what I do for a living when I first meet them. I initially try my smart-ass replies, like, “I’m a stunt driver,” even though I can barely park my new truck, let alone drive it through flames. Or “I’m a hand model”—as long as I’m modeling something like putting on Chapstick or throwing a softball. Perhaps even “I do all the calligraphy on medical school graduation certificates.” I have nice penmanship and there’s a lot of calligraphy on those things. I could probably make a fortune.
What I don’t want to tell them is the truth, that I’m a nurse. There are a few reasons for this. The first is the dreaded words that generally follow: Oh, you’re a nurse! Can you take a look at this rash and tell me what you think? No, I will not look at your rash. I don’t want to hear about your headaches, your sciatica, or that one time you ate beets and the next morning thought you had to go to the emergency room. Can we just keep our conversation to normal things like tomatoes or smashing the patriarchy?
The second reason I don’t like to tell people what I do is because of every sexy nurse picture that exists. Being sexy is what much of society thinks of nurses. If you search the word “nurse” anywhere on the Internet, it’s all that shows up: corsets, teddies, heels, fishnet stockings, and little white hats for miles. FYI, we don’t wear little white hats anymore. Also, WE DON’T WEAR ANY OF THIS! Hospitals are cold—fishnets wouldn’t exactly be practical. And where the fuck are the pockets?