by Tom Stern
“What the fuck, man?” Klaus yelled, both because he was upset and because his hearing was now at least temporarily shot. “You’re buying me a new microphone.”
Walter loved seeing Klaus adopt such a not rock ’n’ roll tone.
He looked over to Richard Pope, too, who was rubbing his ears semi-ferociously in an also not terribly blasé move.
Regular Walter knew that any moment now he would feel terribly about his behavior. So before that happened, Rock ’N’ Roll Walter walked over to the tattered microphone parts and violently stomped on each cluster of wires, sensors, plastic, and metal, bitterly mashing everything to a shredded, dented, unfixable pile of rubbish.
“I fit,” Rock ’N’ Roll Walter repeated with an almost cautionary overtone.
Then he did the only other thing he could think to do: he turned and walked calmly out of the apartment/rehearsal space/multi-purpose space.
A few blocks down the sidewalk, Walter came to the realization that he did not care one bit for the added rasp in his vocals. In fact, he wasn’t even sure why he thought it would have sounded good in the first place.
A few blocks after that, he found himself thinking about the gray envelopes again.
“Dennis, if more gray envelopes come to this house addressed to me, I want you to throw them away,” Walter waited until 11:01 p.m., after Dennis’ daily TV viewing ended, to insist of his roommate and/or landlord, “and do not tell me about them.”
Dennis’ face soured with worry before he explained, “That’s an awful lot to ask of someone.”
“I was actually thinking of it as a relatively small task,” Walter replied, confused. “You’re already getting the mail, yes? And disposing of some of it, presumably?
“I can’t pay attention to what color the mail is,” Dennis spat indignantly before escalating his point, “and then sort it in different ways only if certain colors are addressed to you.”
“It would just be the one color,” Walter explained.
“There are countless shades of gray,” Dennis insisted.
“Well, then,” Walter adjusted strategies, “let’s forget about colors. Any piece of mail that comes to this house that is addressed to me, just throw it out. I don’t want it.”
“What if it’s an important letter?”
“There is no such thing as far as I’m concerned. In fact, I hate mail. I resent it deeply and it would be a great kindness to me if you would help me keep all mail out of my life.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s illegal for me to tamper with your mail,” Dennis demanded.
“It’s not tampering if you just throw it away.”
“I think throwing it away is tampering.”
“No, just…” Walter took a moment, and then redirected. “Dennis, think of the trash can as though it were the counter.”
“What?”
“Just a simple mental shift on your part, really.”
“Are you crazy? That makes no sense.”
“Right now you put my mail on the counter so I will find it. Henceforth, I would like you to place all of my mail in the trash can. And I will look there for it.”
“No,” Dennis demanded. “What if I take out the trash before you check your mail?”
“I will take out the trash instead of you. You don’t ever have to take out the trash again. I will do it. So that I can be sure to check my mail.”
“But why don’t I just leave it on the counter instead? It seems so much easier.”
“It’s just this weird thing that I have, Dennis. I like to get my mail in the trash.”
“But I thought you hate mail?”
Walter decided now that he hated Dennis Milk with every last fiber of his being.
But he had already come this far in what was surely the dumbest Goddamn conversation he had ever had in his life. Not even Rock ’N’ Roll Walter could let these lost precious moments turn into a complete waste of his existence.
“Receiving it in the trash can,” Walter pressed on, “makes me feel a bit better about mail.”
Dennis’ brow creased deeply with consternation as he attempted to take this in.
“Every piece of mail?” Dennis finally semi-conceded.
“Every single one,” Walter affirmed.
“I guess, man. But you are really fucking weird.”
Before Walter could either soak in the joy of this momentary, even if miniscule, victory or truly process the absurdity of Dennis Milk calling any other living person weird, there was a knock at the door.
Both men froze.
There was never a knock at the door.
So much so that neither man could be certain he had heard what he suspected he had heard.
So neither man did anything.
Until the knock sounded again.
“This is my home,” Dennis said.
Walter was not sure what, exactly, the man meant by this statement. But his tone seemed accusatory, as though the knock was the result of Walter having violated the sanctity of this space by speaking of its existence to members of the outside world.
But before Walter could conjure a suitable reply, Dennis stood up and headed toward the door.
Once there, he paused.
He took a good long look down at the ground surrounding his feet, seemingly thinking pretty hard about how next to proceed. After a stretch of several seconds, Dennis looked up at Walter and then back to the door, where he considered a moment longer before finally opening it.
Then Dennis Milk made a sound. It was an involuntary spew of a sound, a mixture of disparate elements hybridizing a shrill exclamation, a frightened yelp, a deeply infatuated gasp, a stupefied moan, a terrified low wail, and multiple elements incomprehensible. Impossible to truly define or comprehend what this odd sound might have been, it nevertheless made the identity of their visitor instantly and singularly clear to Walter, even though he could not see out the semi-open door from his current vantage point.
“Is Walter Braum in?” asked the unmistakable cracked squeal of Wallace Braum’s voice, confirming what Walter already knew and dropping his heart lower than his toes.
Dennis stood speechless and nearly motionless, managing only slow, stuttering shuffle-steps gradually backing him away from the open door. Eventually he pierced the awkward silence by muttering something that sounded loosely like, “I mean you no harm.”
Walter found himself walking over to the door and stepping in between Dennis and what seemed to be one of the man’s worst imaginable fears.
“I don’t want your letters,” Walter explained.
“I have things to say to you, Walter,” demanded Wallace, more assertive than Walter had ever heard his twin before.
“Well, I don’t want that, either.”
“Why did you disappear?” Wallace insisted.
“I’m perfectly visible, Wallace.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I don’t care what you mean!”
“I can’t be blamed for things that just happen,” Wallace declared as tears started to spurt from his eyes. “I did not take anything from you that you had not already left behind! But you are taking away my brother!”
Dennis was starting to emit an increasingly panicked squeal-like noise that started soft but was building now to a distracting volume.
“Stop crying!” Walter yelled. “You can’t expect people to act in their own best interest if you’re always crying your weird tears all over the place.”
Walter slammed the door shut, which seemed to assuage whatever was causing Dennis’ wail.
And it was silent. But for the muffled crests of Wallace’s sobs that somehow snuck around and through the wood of the door.
Walter opened the door again to add…
“If I wanted to be found, I wouldn’t be hiding, now would
I?”
But much to Walter’s surprise, Wallace was no longer there.
He stepped out into the hallway but saw no trace of the mutant there, either.
“Not that I’m really hiding,” Walter yelled out a small point of clarification. “It’s just a turn of phrase.”
This sudden disappearance after such a sudden reappearance of one of the very people he had been working so hard to avoid made Walter momentarily doubtful of his own faculties.
He turned to Dennis, whom Walter only now noticed was cowering against the wall, thunderstruck, stupefied, and bracing his turned head with an arm raised over his eyes. Walter nevertheless went ahead and asked what was surely a pointless question given Dennis’ current state…
“Was there a small, really odd looking man here a moment ago?”
4.
“It’s not working out,” Klaus explained as Richard Pope looked on, stone still. “Something in the sound,” Klaus continued, without even a hint of awareness as to how pompous and moronic he sounded.
“Sound takes time,” Walter replied earnestly, also without even a touch of awareness as to how pompous and moronic he sounded.
“We’re not feeling it,” Klaus insisted.
“Well…I’m feeling it,” Walter insisted right back.
“We don’t think you are.”
Walter tossed his eyes between Klaus and Richard Pope, before explaining, “You don’t know what I feel.” He was embarrassed by how not rock ’n’ roll that sounded.
But Klaus and Richard Pope did not flinch, unwilling or unable to validate Walter’s statement.
Walter was surprised to find a heavy sorrow settling into his chest and tears stinging at his eyes.
“If this is about our disagreement the other day, then…” Walter trailed off.
Klaus scoffed gently.
Walter couldn’t quite tell but Richard Pope might have done the same, only his just barely perceptible. But he probably didn’t. He probably just remained completely still.
“It’s just not working out,” Klaus repeated, ignoring all the words that had been said since last uttering this same phrase.
“You already said that,” Walter demanded, angrily. “What I’m trying to do is make it work.”
“We don’t want to make it work,” Klaus shrugged the words from his mouth.
Walter could not help but admire the man’s cool and irreverent indifference, even if Walter happened to be on the wrong end of it in this particular moment.
“Don’t say ‘we,’” Walter could not stop himself from scrapping. “Richard is his own man. Let him speak for himself.”
Walter looked to Richard Pope.
But Richard Pope did not move a muscle. He just sat. As he always sat.
Walter strained to recall a single moment when he had seen Richard Pope anywhere other than seated behind his drum kit. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t even imagine it. He had never even seen the dollop of a man stretch his legs or, better yet, arrive at practice and take a seat behind his kit. Richard Pope was just always sitting there. As far as Walter was concerned, the man might not even exist except when banging out his sloppy drumbeats or waiting to bang out his sloppy drumbeats. Come to think of it, Walter was only now realizing that Richard Pope was perhaps the most rock ’n’ roll motherfucker he had ever seen in his life.
“It’s only been a few months,” Walter altered his approach, still unwilling to let his band go, lackluster and infuriating though it may be.
“Time enough,” Klaus replied.
“And you haven’t even heard ‘The Not Monster Song,’” he adjusted again.
“Don’t care,” Klaus countered.
This smarted.
Walter fell speechless. But still he did not move.
So Klaus got up, walked across the room, and opened the front door to whatever the hell this space was. He left the door open and walked back to the middle of the room where he sat down amidst the band’s setup and started to tinker on his guitar.
“Just leave, man,” he dismissed without so much as looking up from his guitar.
For the first time and only now, Walter realized that he truly loved this band.
Were they great? No. They weren’t even good.
But it didn’t matter.
Because they made music that they cared about making. And they poured themselves into this music, shitty technique and all. And the best Walter could tell that might well be just about everything that making rock ’n’ roll music was truly about.
In some ways, their lack of potential made it all the more possible for them to just stay focused on the present, to make the music they were invested in making, to ignore any pressure or expectation to be anything other than what they were.
Walter loved this sense that no one was watching and that no one cared. No one but Klaus Klein, anyway. And allegedly Richard Pope.
All the same, Walter could see there was nothing left for him to say.
So he shrugged and shook his head as he started for the door where, without an ounce of deliberation, Walter lifted his right foot and drove it swiftly into the wall beside the door frame, planting a huge hole in the drywall and ripping some electrical wires from a circuit, causing sparks to fly and a single overhead light to go dark. Without a moment’s hesitation or consideration, he continued right on out the door.
As he started down the hallway, he heard Richard Pope speak the first and only word he had ever heard or would ever hear the man speak.
“Dick,” Richard Pope breathily mused with just a touch of awe in his tone.
Walter was fairly certain that he had never been more rock ’n’ roll than he was right now. He was so rock ’n’ roll that it seemed a profoundly distinct possibility that Klaus and Richard Pope just might be second guessing their decision to kick him out of the band. Were it not directly contradictory to the bold irreverence he had just displayed, Walter might have even gone back just to double check that Klaus and Richard hadn’t changed their minds. But Rock ’N’ Roll Walter didn’t care what anyone thought of him, this was precisely what made him so rock ’n’ roll. Even if Regular Walter just really did not want to let the band go, his heart heavy and starting to crack.
When Walter got back to the apartment, drywall still dusting his shoe, Dennis Milk was immersed in his evening television. Walter went straight into the kitchen where he had planned to work on the lyrics to his song. But before he could so much as sit down, Walter found himself greeted by yet a third gray envelope sitting plainly on the kitchen counter with those embossed initials puffing their chests at him.
“Fucking Dennis,” Walter muttered to himself.
Then he tossed the letter in the trash can, where it already should have been.
He grabbed a pen and a napkin, sat down at the kitchen table, and began turning the now familiar melody of “The Not Monster Song” over in his head.
He hummed the words in a run up to what would be the song’s next line, but found himself ultimately just staring at the trash can.
He pulled his attention back and took another pass through the first few lines of the song, gaining momentum with the melody and starting to dance in his seat. But ultimately, once again, he found himself silently staring through the trash can right where he estimated the letter sat.
So Walter stood up and headed to his corner of the living room where he pushed a few of Dennis’ errant things aside and pulled over a wooden chair. He sat and put the napkin on his lap, perched his pen and started the melody back through his mind. But the television kept saying distracting things, ridiculously trite, cliché, or grammatically incorrect things.
Things like “she can run, but she can’t hide.”
And “I thought this meant more to you than a job.”
And “that’s what family is for, kiddo.”
And “you’re the only person I can trust.”
Walter sighed and stood up. He started rummaging through his bag for his headphones.
“You got a letter,” Dennis coughed over his shoulder right as a commercial took over the television screen.
Walter tensed a moment, stopped sifting, and turned to face his roommate/landlord before spitting back, bitterly, “I’m working on a song.”
Dennis said nothing in response, falling silent and still, waiting for an awkward silence to be fully established before turning his eyes back to the television set.
But Walter could not stop himself from pressing further. “When I’m working on a song,” Walter insisted, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t interrupt me.”
Dennis kept right on not only saying nothing but acting conspicuously as though nothing had happened or was happening. While this was more or less a variant of precisely what Walter was asking Dennis to do, the reaction nevertheless set Walter seething and, in turn, erupting. “And I thought I asked you to put my mail in the fucking trash!”
Still Dennis did simply nothing, acting as though he was entirely alone in his apartment on a perfect normally day. So Walter got up and walked in front of Dennis, planting himself smack in between the man and his beloved television. An act that instantly shattered the recluse’s charade of solitude. “Move,” yelled Dennis, as if by uncontrollable reflex.
“I don’t disturb you when you’re watching TV,” Walter reprimanded, insistent that someone, somewhere in this world was going to heed at least one of his deeply felt perspectives today.
“Yes you are! Right now! You are!”
“So can you please not disturb me when I’m working on a song?” Walter only now noticed that he was yelling.
“Get out of the way!” Dennis yelled back.
He got up from his chair and started attempting to push Walter aside, although his deep hesitancy to actually touch another human being made his push more of a nudge than a fully realized imposition of physical will.
“Tell me you won’t disturb me!” Walter barked.
“This is my house! And I say move!” Dennis fired back.