Chess, of course, often ends with no winner: there is the draw, the resignation, the fifty-move rule. My parents didn’t give up so much as cede to logic: there were no tactics left to employ. They came back to Buffalo; I graduated in May; James jumped from the roof of a building in June. He’d been holding the chessboard when he went airborne, landing headfirst. Toxicology found traces of phencyclidine. James’ last meal was bread. In a mortuary not far from Symphony Circle, I asked the Funeral Director how they’d put my brother’s face back together. My mother was in a separate room, perusing caskets. Light baroque played from speakers in the walls. Well, the man said, looking to my father for intervention but finding none, in cases like your brother’s, we insert a plate. He shifted from one foot to the other and I smiled; discomfort meant life, and it was a joyful thing to see. And this plate, I said, how will it look like my brother’s face? Well, incisions are made at the temples, and here, the man said, pointing under the chin. So you peel back my brother’s face and put the plate in, I said. That’s right, the man said, as though he’d solved something. And what about the stuff that’s in the way, I asked, the bone and such. My father was reading an unfolded brochure about flower arrangements, engrossed. The bone is sanded down or removed, the man said, his consternation growing. And how about his eyes, I asked. The eyes are untouched, the man said. AND HOW ABOUT HIS SOUL, I said. Okay, my dad said. Okay, that’s enough.
I put in two years at SUNY–Albany, fucked on drugs and not part of the world but not ever, really, wanting to die—as I mentioned already I have the heart of a coward, an organ so puny and useless it can subsist on next to nothing at all. I walked the campus at night dressed in a long wool coat, drunk on gin and setting small fires in the bathroom sinks of empty school buildings. I trailed coeds until they jogged from fear. Tossed out, I packed up and struck west, sending a postcard to my parents bought at a gift shop in Dayton. A Unique Possession from a Bygone Era. Board’s Hinges may need Oil.
Starting Bid: $89.99
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13” Tulipwood and Teflon Stiletto. Italian-Made (SKM). Single-Action OTF; Blade Retracts Manually. Length of Closed Knife is 7 Inches. Used Once.
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Bad times in Decatur. The Midway Inn let you pay by the week, and I developed a dangerous friendship with the night clerk, a trailer-bred gun nut twice my age who sometimes kept minutes for the local chapter of a hate group called Lone Wolf. I was drunk always, beyond grace, and Wynn Jost saw in me a lamb, someone whose psyche held all the worth of a torn kite, and was thereby open to suggestion via the newfound fraternity and acceptance provided by himself and other members of his ethnocentric cell. I worked at a meatpacking plant; I literally packed meat, wrapping t-bones in wax paper and boxing them, sixty-five per. The drone of industrial machinery was womblike, the white conveyer belt splotched, in patches, to pink. Some of Lone Wolf’s goons worked here as well; a hulk named Jack Milk handed me, weekly, half-full cartons of cigarettes, the paper container’s free space filled with hate literature meant to be distributed in the dark hours of morning to mailboxes within walking distance of my motel. In this man’s stone basement I sat on a metal folding chair, surrounded by a dozen of Central Time’s Aryan zealots. The aforementioned Mr. Jost, intellectual ringleader of this poor circus, forced these men (most of whom had not finished high school) to give reports on Nazi memorabilia Jost had purchased at trade shows in the greater Illinois area. Trip-ups in reading words off the page were covered up by loud cries of White Power. An urn for coffee sat tabled under a German flag.
I was scared and lost and Jost was letting me live in the Midway for free, the owners absentee and oblivious. I bought the above switchblade at a pawn shop for protection, and three nights later Jost found it stashed beneath my mattress, tossing my room while I was out delivering pamphlets that explained why Jews would lead the human race to Apocalypse. I should emphasize here, for clarity, that I really was starting to digest what was being fed to me: that White Christian Protestants were being treated unfairly in the media, the workplace, the cities; that the continued crosspollination of the races would lead to the demise of Christian Virtues; that it was kill or be killed, and the war, begun long ago, was roiling around us, more acid and thicker than ever before. Trauma (James) both debts and affords, the results often scary. Jost, along with Milk and three others, were waiting for me in my room when I returned that night. They drove me in Milk’s Buick to an all-night gas station, where we waited for the next person of color to pull in. Forty minutes passed, the six of us crammed inside, listening to hate metal on low volume. Near dawn, an elderly black man shut off his Chrysler and entered the Conoco. He beelined for the bathroom; Jost handed me the knife. White Power, he said. White Power, I said, and got out. What happened next was a miracle, so unearned I am sure that I cannot pay for it, ever, in this life. The black man stood at the sink, rinsing. He turned his head when he saw me come in. White Power, I said. What Power, he asked. I pulled the knife and sprung the blade. I saw all of you in that car, the man said. He had on a navy blue baseball cap, the name of a naval destroyer spelled out in gold. So, I told him. The man unbuttoned then rolled up one sleeve of his dress shirt. Cut me, he told me. Here, on the arm. What the fuck, I said. Do it, the man said. They won’t come check on you. Do it. Right now. He moved his arm, bent at the elbow, out toward me. He wore glasses; he had pleated khakis on. Come on, man, come on, you don’t have the time. He bobbed his arm up and down, his bare arm. I strode over to him and sliced. The blade sunk under the skin. He made a sound that was something very near a yawn, a morning sound, a first sound of the day, then stumbled backward into the hand dryer. I dropped the knife and picked it up and turned and ran out of the store.
Back in the Buick I threw up on myself, the men of Lone Wolf cooing like bemused middle-schoolers, which I suppose in some ways they were. My accommodations gratis, I had a small nest egg stored, and once Jost’s pickup departed from the Midway’s lot that morning, I ran, at full speed, to the bus depot, buying a ticket for the next coach out. I wrapped the switchblade in my work shirt and mailed the whole thing back home to Buffalo. Maybe you don’t believe the story I’ve just told. I can only reply: Lucky you.
Buy It Now: $10, Firm
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Brown Mesh Trucker’s Hat, “Custer Gas Service, Custer, South Dakota” Printed on Front of Hat. Good Condition. Bill Rounded (Broken In). Ready to Wear.
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A long engagement to one Katherine Anne Svenlund that consumed over three years of my late 20s. Sioux Falls is a pleasant place and were I a different person, more even or stalwart, I might have managed an existence in that large village, continuing my work as Night Manager of Country Buffet #3847 and spending much of my free time browsing the ample selection of goods offered at the Salvation Army out near the airport. The Svenlund family is of fine Nordic stock, if genealogically naive, as their ancestors arrived to this country via propagandistic literature, specifically brochures and/or pamphlets that outlined the unequivocal agricultural promise of the Great Plains (I should mention here, out of fairness, that these false promises were not limited to peoples of Norwegian descent nor just the acres comprising South Dakota; rather, America’s new Robber Barons hired a great number of men to promote falsely that most of Middle America was a Farmer’s Utopia—that places of near-apocalyptical aridity and barrenness were ripe wombs of earth, an agrarian delight, and that much of the middle part of the country was populated via the exacting of high levels of bullshit).
Lone Wolf sent no minions to find me and I settled in, saving enough to afford a one-bedroom above a paint shop near the train tracks. I worked six days a week, seven, the staff at Country Buffet my surrogate family. One of my foster siblings was a short kind punk rocker named Tyler Banks. Tyler was five-five and washed dishes and sported a mohawk that changed colors every two weeks with each new paycheck received. He was always smiling and did no drugs and brought
with him, each shift, a small battery-powered boombox, which he set on a shelf above the sink, The Germs or Anti-Flag slamming it out while Tyler sprayed dishes clean. Nighttimes in Sioux Falls were slow affairs, our clientele mainly truckers and conspiracy theorists, the two demographics often overlapping. I’d started out bussing tables days but the turnover was constant, and within months had worked my way up to running overnights, the franchise’s owner finding my demeanor supererogatory (in truth, it didn’t take much). Through Tyler I found a small group of close friends, punkers and book nuts and antiestablishment crocheters, all of good heart and sound mind. Here were the intellectuals of the prairie, too poor for the fridge to be full consistently but able to knit cardigans and talk Gide. Dilettantes, it seems, keep to the coasts, Chicago. The prairie kids were all about worth.
In autumn of ’97, while I spoke with a trenchcoated man about the hoax that was the ’69 Apollo moon landing, Katherine Anne Svenlund walked into Country Buffet for the first time. To say the restaurant’s teal-carpeted environs was in direct contrast to the glamour that Katherine possessed would not do her aesthetic true justice. Beneath my nametag, my heart leapt. She was five-ten, in tight indigo Levi’s. Red heels held thin, perfect feet. From a side pocket of her black leather biker’s jacket Katherine removed a silver cigarette case. Her lipstick matched the shade of her footwear exactly. But betrayal: a brightening of Katherine’s eyes, the good values instilled upon her in her youth usurping the glam vamp she was trying, so hard, to be. She smiled, and it was a smile of church Sundays and ribbons received at 4H events. It was a smile of wheat. Is Tyler here, Katherine asked. I’ll get him, I said, but everything that was going to happen just had.
She moved in with me, the two of us watching Fellini’s oeuvre and reading Dickinson aloud. Katherine ran the phones and did filing for a tow place; we lived modestly but never went without. Her parents, Meade County residents, generally approved of me; they worked cattle west of the river, and had a small cabin in the Black Hills to which Katherine and I sometimes escaped, the mountain air at the west end of the state like no other air I have smelled. I saved in secret, telling no one other than Tyler of my plans. A year later, I walked into Raymond’s on South Phillips (part of Sioux Falls’ historic Downtown) and purchased a gold band with inlaid Idaho opal. Katherine’s big eyes leaked, her full smiling lips making her cheeks dimpled: we would wed.
Setbacks—Mr. Svenlund sustained a broken hip from being kicked by a heifer during calving; the Country Buffet, from asbestos, was temporarily shut down. We pushed the date back a year; I had had meager and infrequent communication with my own parents though they did know my whereabouts, and a month before the makeup date for the wedding, a call came from my father: it was time to come home. Cancer had eroded my mother’s lungs; the chemo worked and then didn’t. I flew on an airplane for the very first time. The hospice aide was a Catholic ghost, so pious she seemed to float down the ward’s halls. She spoke in soft tones, aroused by the misery her workplace lent. The lobby’s vending machines became close friends; I can still recall that C4 held Twix bars, H8 Junior Mints. My mom was tubes and skin on a gurney. I told her of Katherine; I told her I was sorry. Also: cold hands held with no words said; crows on telephones poles. Collapse. After purchasing a second lot at Forest Lawn Cemetery, after the insurance money had come in, after my dad took early retirement from Grover Cleveland and sold off my childhood home, I packed up my duffel on my last night in town. At an all-night donut shop, my father wept over coffee. What do you want me to do, I said. Better, he told me, putting his Merit out on his bear claw. I flew back to Dakota but the bottom had dropped out of things there: Tyler had moved to LA to act in commercials, and ownership at the Country Buffet had switched hands. Katherine, too, had vanished, disappearing into Proust’s seven volumes just as autumn set in. The choice to terminate the union was as democratic and affable as such a decision can be, but I wonder still what my life might have been like had things gone differently: the Midwest is this country’s best wonder, and to know again the pastoral life, where small things mattered, where big clouds moved like ships across wide blue skies, the fields windswept, the post-and-wire clocklike, its taut lengths measuring the course of each day—to return again ever would bring about a sort of devastating grace I’m not prepared for. Talcum applied to Hat’s Interior Lining, to get out the smell.
Starting Bid: $3.99
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Mason Jar of Eighteen Rattlesnake Tails. Vacuum-Sealed. Glass is Aqua, Reads “Mason’s Patent, October 31st, 1864.” Tails Guaranteed Authentic; Still Rattle.
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For me our country’s true west is not its coast but rather that odd strip that comprises the western part of Mountain Time, and the eastern part of Pacific—here are your Elkos, your Provos, your Yumas, Pocatello and Pueblo and Butte. Here the word hardscrabble seems not sentimental but correct, the mesa erasing everything, the Rockies and Tetons stern reminders that humans are but minor pox or canker, a virus that with time will be flushed out. I spent six months in the first city mentioned above, working third shift at a gas station tucked to one side of I-80. My rented doublewide stood just across the interstate, and each dawn I crossed the blacktop on foot, this trek emblematic of the fact that I was not living the life that most people were, that here one had a road that ran from Oakland all the way to New York, that millions each year crossed east to west or west to east and I, other, without car or bank account, without obligation to spouse, child or family, without mortgage or any other mile marker common to status quo American existence, could get across in under thirty seconds, and be home.
My coworker was a middle-aged Chicana named Aura. Her daughter, jailed for possession with intent, had left her in charge of two grandsons, who more often than not slept on the white beveled linoleum behind the register, under twin fleece Wal-Mart Cookie Monster blankets. My first month I bought a computer from a “traveling salesman,” a Mormon-turned-meth-head who had stolen an automobile in Boise and was willing to sell me the Compaq desktop unit for one-quarter of the going price. I bought in, an installer coming to my trailer the next day. Here was the world, shrunk to pixels. I couldn’t figure out why anyone cared. Weren’t we brought up to not talk to strangers? I unplugged the device, spending those winter days watching snow bloat the desert. But vice thrives on intrigue and with time I plugged back in, locating individuals (see below post) who viewed this new medium in a manner not dissimilar to how Thoreau viewed the railroads: that what was being built was also taking away; that the tech boom was not trend but monster, a dark thing with sharp edges that preyed upon the more craven tendencies of human society; that sought to destroy connection through mimicry of connection, private industry now making the rules for the very ways in which we, as a species, would interact. Or something like that. For a while the banter was static catharsis, fun if a little bit odd, but with time the irony of such persiflages produced in me deep melancholy: we had to pay in to the very thing we sought to critique. Spring came and I set the device by the highway, and a day later it was gone.
Aura’s grandsons, Rodolfo and Rogelio, presented me with the snake tails on my last night of work. The gas station mandated that two employees always be present, the ideology being that this coupling would somehow stave off any felonious acts from being rendered upon their establishment. And they may have been right: my half-year in Elko passed without incident. But it was too much seeing those children sleep under cheap and highly flammable blankets night after night, and more often than not I told Aura to come in late or leave early, her time card doctored accordingly by myself. The boys fought as they handed over my gift, each one wanting to be the chief presenter. And where did you get these, I asked, bending down. Out there, said Rodolfo, pointing past the pumps, the jar almost dropping. I took a bus out of town, skimming California’s coastline before settling, homeless, in Santa Cruz, the cool sand under the Boardwalk’s planks home to a coven of vagabonds from, it seemed, al
l ends of the earth.
To this day I have no idea how that trio of people ultimately came to possess one and a half dozen tails of venomous reptiles, but I have, as stated above, verified the items’ authenticity, taking the jar to a taxidermist in the Bronx, who in turn referred me to a herpetologist at Rutgers–New Brunswick. Tails are Divided between Two Varieties: Great Basin (Crotalus viridis lutosus) and Panamint (Crotalus mitchellii stephensi). While neither species is considered particularly antagonistic, if cornered either will stand its ground.
Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, Found Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts Page 20