by Tom Stern
And Dennis wasn’t a bad guy. Best Walter could tell so far and from the classified ad he had responded to, Dennis just didn’t like living alone. Although he also certainly didn’t care to participate in the basic niceties that one might typically associate with a desire for company, such as conversation or demonstrations of even superficial interest in other people.
Dennis lived in what appeared to be a semi-condemned building. Walter considered it probable that Dennis didn’t even pay rent himself but instead had asserted some sort of squatter’s rights.
He seemed to have nothing at all going on in his life.
No friends, no family, no work. No ambition, either, it seemed.
Dennis always said he was looking for a job, but there didn’t seem to be any discernible evidence to that end. No resumes, no job searches, no anecdotes of job interviews gone awry.
He seemed uninterested in most everything, really. In love, in accomplishments, in stature. In money, in success, in joy or contentment. Even in meaning.
His sole and profound interest was in watching his TV shows. There were four to five of them each night that were built into a nightly hopscotch-esque viewing plan to which the man was downright professional in his commitment, never missing a single frame of his shows. He even kept detailed notes about the key plot points in a tattered, yellowing binder. He would review these plot points intently prior to each week’s new episode. Reruns did not bother Dennis either. He would simply use them as an opportunity to revise his notes, refining them to more astutely render the key goings-on within the worlds of the stories. He watched his TV in real time, too. Walter presumed this was the result of lacking the requisite resources necessary to acquire a DVR, but figured it might also just as well be because Dennis simply had not been exposed to enough of the outside world to have come into contact with the information that DVRs existed. It might also have something to do with the fact that the cable was probably illegally obtained in the first place. No matter the explanation, it was a bit of a throwback, really, watching Dennis. He’d time his trips to the bathroom with the commercial breaks. He’d keep all conversations concise and safely within those same time windows. He wouldn’t answer the ringing phone during show hours. He’d deliberate over snack plans and bring more than needed to the couch just in case. He’d schedule all plans and projects before or after the viewing blocks. Walter would even get commercial jingles stuck in his head for days since Dennis couldn’t fast forward through them.
Dennis made it clear that Walter was not to speak to him during the show segments. It was also recommended but not required that Walter stay in his corner of the room during viewing hours since Dennis would require use of the couch at these times. Moreover, while Walter could use other parts of the living space, it was requested that he do so in complete silence. After each evening’s shows were over, Dennis would retire to his bedroom, allowing Walter to reclaim the couch for the night.
Walter’s daily routines had shifted since moving in. He found himself staying up until three or 4:00 a.m. each night to write and rewrite his lyrics in these post-TV quiet hours. Then he’d sleep until noon, at which time he’d get up and go for a walk or sit with a cup of coffee down on the corner or just stare out the window for a while. At 6:00 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays and at 3:00 p.m. on Saturdays, Walter would show up at Klaus’ dual-purpose space for rehearsal. Klaus on guitar, Walter on vocals, and Richard Pope, a fat pizza delivery guy and longtime friend of Klaus’, on drums. For the time being, they focused on playing covers. But once a week Klaus would ask about “The Monster Song.”
“It’s not a monster song,” Walter would correct Klaus, since the point of the song was much larger than just the first line that referenced a mutant. Also, he wasn’t really saying that Wallace was a mutant. “It’s poetic license,” he made sure to clarify further before reassuring mostly himself, “but I’m working on it.” Walter was eager for the band to take on his original material.
Over time and as Walter’s ear sharpened a bit, he came to see that Klaus was a pretty bad guitar player at best. And Richard Pope was a piss-poor drummer. And Walter still hadn’t really heard himself sing, so for all he knew he was an even worse singer than Richard was a drummer. But Walter still believed that they could grow into something really good. Their hearts were in the right place and their passion was true. Eventually, they would record themselves and at that point they would be faced with the reality of their actual sound. But until then, they were content to make their music and to search for their truest sound, a topic upon which Klaus was full of ideals.
Walter admired Klaus’ ideals.
He also found them incredibly annoying.
Oftentimes in equal measure.
The snare should be sloppier. The vocal should have a more spontaneous feel. The song wasn’t meant to sound so “math-y.” Not that Walter didn’t respect the desire to be better. And not that Klaus wasn’t sometimes correct. But he was always obnoxious.
Richard Pope, on the other hand, literally never said a word, not a grunt or an eloquent musing or anything in between. In fact, he never even acknowledged other people’s words. Not a nod, not a sigh, not a sound. He just started hitting his drums when the song started and he stopped hitting them when the song ended.
This was their process.
Klaus talked a lot, then they’d play a song. Klaus would talk a lot more. And then they’d play another song.
Walter would be home by midnight and he would resume work on what he had started referring to as “The Not Monster Song.”
This was Walter’s rock ’n’ roll life.
It was, to him and in its own way, completely remarkable.
He was daresay happy, or at least the happiest he could remember himself being in decades.
He was laser focused. He felt no extraneous weight. He was unconcerned with anything else. And life afforded him the circumstances to be exactly these things.
For three months, anyway.
“You got some mail here,” Dennis announced bitterly as Walter came in one night after band practice and during a commercial break.
Inasmuch as the mail was not in Dennis’ hand nor was his hand pointing anywhere, Walter deduced that Dennis’ use of the word “here” was meant to suggest that the very delivery itself of the mail to this address was the objectionable content of this occurrence.
“No one knows I’m here,” Walter explained, as much to himself as to Dennis.
But Dennis just shrugged.
So Walter simply returned the shrug.
“It’s on the counter,” said Dennis, a distinct recrimination in his voice.
Walter headed to the kitchen, which was in its usual state of relative uselessness, a static wasteland littered with clustered colonies of torn and discarded food packaging distributed about all flat, open surfaces. This evening, however, a small, pale gray rectangle stood out as an unexpectedly elegant flourish amongst the distributed heaps of garbage. As Walter neared the geometric shape, he confirmed it was indeed an envelope. As he drew even nearer still, he spied two gorgeously embossed initials in the top left corner: W. B. These initials quickly betrayed beneath them the presence of Walter’s former address.
Walter did not touch the envelope.
Instead, he simply considered it for a good full moment, parsing through what the words inside might intend to convey. But any possible missive he could posit failed to pique his interest enough that he was willing to risk the weight, the tangle, or the superfluity of the content therein. Walter just wanted to stay focused on his music.
So he decided not to open the envelope.
He backed away from it.
Then he backed himself out of the kitchen and sat down in a chair in his corner of the living room. He would have bothered wondering how Wallace had found him here, but he knew that the little savant could all but effortlessly accomplish
anything at all to which he set his mutant mind.
As Walter began sorting through possible topics to ponder by way of not thinking about the envelope and its contents, he found his mind instead settling squarely upon the topic of the envelope and its contents. Rather than resurfacing his deep-seated ire, however, Walter was surprised to find that the mere gesture of the letter having been sent, irrespective of whatever the words inside might or might not say, actually fostered in him a strange and unexpected modicum of comfort. Walter could not help but wonder if maybe he didn’t hate his little bastard of a twin nearly as much as he thought he did.
“Loosen up, Walt. You gotta just let it go,” Klaus waxed exceedingly moronic at band practice the following Thursday. “Singing’s all about the pop and the—” he made some whooshing/phlegm-y noise “—and the whoowap and the boom.”
Walter stopped listening at that point.
For the past two days, he’d been having trouble focusing on anything other than the still unopened letter sitting on Dennis Milk’s filthy and cluttered kitchen counter. The fatigue of so fixating had, in turn, rotted away any belief in the intended generosity and beneficence of the letter, replacing it instead with a bitter certitude that Wallace somehow possessed a downright effortless ability to completely upend any sense of normalcy that Walter might ever manage to find in his life. Also over the span of those same past two days, and perhaps in a related capacity, although Walter could not be sure, whatever he had once considered Klaus Klein’s charm had summarily evaporated.
Walter just wanted to sing some songs. And he wanted the space and time and solace that came along with singing those songs. And he wanted to stay there for a while. He did not want any of the other ancillary things that came with singing those songs. No diatribes, no windbag opinions, no disagreements, no waxing faux-philosophic, no pointless theories, no insistence that Walter do things differently, no demands that Walter be some way other than how he was.
“Walt?” Klaus asked.
“What?” said Walter, annoyed with either Klaus or the letter—which, in some odd way, might actually have been the same thing.
“Can you do that?” Klaus asked, clearly repeating a question that Walter had not heard.
“Yes,” said Walter, simply to do his small part to at least momentarily stymie the additional torrent of words that would otherwise undoubtedly have spewed from Klaus’ mouth. “Of course.”
“Then let’s do it!” Klaus scream-yelled, cueing Richard Pope to start pounding sloppily on his drums. And Klaus started playing lazy notes that quickly descended into an indiscernible mess before reviving into something still just barely shy of recognizable.
“Go! Go! Go!” Klaus was suddenly yelling at Walter.
But Walter made no sound.
So the cacophony melted to a halt.
“What’s the problem, Walt?” Klaus barked.
Richard Pope looked on, void of reaction per usual.
“What are we playing?” Walter asked.
At which point, Klaus threw his guitar down and stomped out of the apartment/rehearsal space, filling the ample square footage with feedback from his still-hot amplifier, a swelling, shrieking pulse of sound that was strangely somehow comforting inasmuch as it was at least filling up what would otherwise have been an empty silence in which Walter’s mind would have undoubtedly turned right back to the letter on Dennis Milk’s kitchen counter. Walter stared affectionately at Klaus’ guitar as it emanated its cloud of sound while maintaining the appearance of complete stillness.
Walter sat down on one of the threadbare couches.
He closed his eyes.
He relaxed into the noise.
Richard Pope remained slovenly perched at his drum kit, seemingly unaware that anything out of the ordinary had happened and ready to start playing again just as soon as someone counted him off.
Walter took a breath and let the sound melt his thoughts, reducing all theory, conjecture, and thought down to a graceful, fluid rubble as only the grammar of sound could.
When the second letter arrived a week later, the only thing that kept Walter from flipping the fuck out was the rock ’n’ roll persona he had established and defined over the last few days, a character whom he had dubbed simply Rock ’N’ Roll Walter.
Rock ’N’ Roll Walter did not care about things.
Certainly not things like letters.
Or what time it was.
Or when he’d last worn a particular outfit.
Or people’s indirect intentions.
Or retirement accounts.
Or sales quotas.
Or when he’d last eaten.
Things like marriage. Or fidelity. Or respecting marriages and fidelity.
Things like family. Or exercise.
Or bourgeois comforts.
Oil changes, good posture, lawns, dress socks, cell phone data plans, coupons, steamed vegetables, umbrellas, house plants, interest rates, human interest stories, home renovations, legalese, five-day weather forecasts, carpool lanes, different colored jeans, facial scrubs, imported sodas, bus stop advertisements, foodies, deadlines, moisture-wicking socks, comparative pricing, general professional competence, colorful or patterned straws, Krav Maga, real estate brokers, golf, fedoras, odd little men with the uncanny ability to easily uproot their sibling’s whole existence with the simplest of actions… Rock ’N’ Roll Walter stayed focused on whatever was present. And damn the rest.
Rock ’N’ Roll Walter, for example, had just that morning decided to add a sort of grumble into his vocals at rehearsal that night, sort of a light Tom Waits touch. Regular Walter would never have even thought to just cavalierly do something so bold, but Rock ’N’ Roll Walter thought the idea had edge.
As Rock ’N’ Roll Walter left the kitchen that evening, orphaning the second letter on the counter, it did happen to dawn on Regular Walter that the first letter was, for some reason, no longer on that counter.
As Regular Walter stopped to think about it, he realized that it hadn’t been there for several days now. Admittedly, it wasn’t very rock ’n’ roll to worry about the first letter, even if he wasn’t worrying about the second letter.
In truth, Walter just really wasn’t all that rock ’n’ roll yet. In moments, sure, but not in any sustained manner that could be construed as a general attitude let alone as a life philosophy of sorts.
Regular Walter considered inquiring of Dennis as to the first letter’s whereabouts, but neither Regular nor Rock ’N’ Roll Walter were willing to engage in a full-fledged conversation with Dennis. So Walter just left the apartment for band practice without mentioning either letter, or anything at all for that matter, to Dennis.
“What are you doing, man?” Klaus asked condescendingly and after waving his hands at Richard Pope not thirty seconds into their first song of the evening, turning everything but Walter silent.
“I’m singing,” Walter replied.
“That noise. What’s that noise? That raspy noise.”
“I’m experimenting with our sound.”
“You should just sing what you’ve been singing. I’ll handle our sound.”
“I thought our sound was about passion,” Walter explained. “And I really feel this.”
“Right,” Klaus spat, extremely annoyed. “What does passion have to do with what you feel?”
“Well…” Walter paused to offer this question fair consideration before answering it, “…everything. By definition.”
“That’s such an unexamined view, man,” Klaus scoffed to Richard Pope, feigning an aside.
“I just think that…” Walter began only to be interrupted by Klaus’ proclamation…
“It’s just not a good fit.”
“The raspy grumble?”
“With our aesthetic.”
“We have an aesthetic?”
Klaus was so offended by this question that he steadied himself for a moment, calming a deep, smoldering outrage churning inside of him. Then he looked over to Richard Pope, who looked disinterested as ever.
“Fuck you guys,” Rock ’N’ Roll Walter demanded. “I’m a part of this sound, too.”
“I am the sound!” Klaus screamed like a maniac.
Before Rock ’N’ Roll Walter could answer Klaus’ irreverence with some lunacy of his own, Richard Pope cleared his throat. It was a small sound, but one so unexpected that it all but shook the walls. Juxtaposed against Richard’s heretofore immaculate stoicism and placed at precisely this instant in time, Walter couldn’t help but at least wonder whether Richard Pope was laying claim to some part of the sound himself.
“And Richard is, too,” Klaus added, clearly suspecting the same thing.
“But I’m the voice,” Walter insisted.
“And the voice needs to fit the sound!” Klaus yelled.
“I fit!” Rock ’N’ Roll Walter yelled right back as he suddenly, unexpectedly, and violently rocket-launched the microphone in his hand across the room. As his arm sprang forward and released the mic, he felt an almost perfect satisfaction, as though this action completely expressed the very emotion it had come into existence to convey, as though there was much more truth to this simple, emphatic declaration than he even knew. What he had not anticipated at the time that he was firing the mic across the room, however, was that it would eventually collide with the poorly hung wall opposite him and that the union of these two things would result in an eardrum-bursting boom that caused Klaus and Richard to recoil just as the piece of equipment shattered into four splintered pieces and fell to the floor. But Rock ’N’ Roll Walter was somehow so committed to his outburst that he managed not to react to the violent sound at all, nor to the broken equipment, nor, and perhaps most importantly, to the ire of either of his bandmates.