EMAIL HIM

His Philosophy

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1. Immortal Lee County Killers, All Night, The Loners
Supersuckers Country Western Extravaganza, with Jessie Dayton

Michael woke up on a couch with a bass guitar across his lap and 12 ounce can half filled with warm, stale beer at his feet.

People were talking loudly in the other room. Michael went into the kitchen and looked at the clock on the microwave. It was 7:30 a.m. Somehow the blow bypassed him. He had probably turned it down.

Michael checked the fridge for a beer. It was empty. He walked down the hall to the bathroom, went in, and took a leak. After he was done he went across the hall to say hello to the vampires.

The room they were in was very small. There were much larger rooms in the house where they could be comfortable. No one seemed to care.

“Hey ya.”
“You’re up! Lookin’ good!”
“You guys are up early.”

They all laughed, tiredly. They were exhausted but still jabbering away at what seemed to be a good conversation.

Michael went back to sleep on the couch.

Three hours later he woke up. All the other people were either gone or sleeping. Michael went into the kitchen and got a drink of water. He noticed some cold pizza on the stove and took a slice and ate it. He drank the water down and washed his face in the sink, then wiped it dry with a paper towel.

Ten thirty wasn’t a bad time to wake up for a Sunday. He would have all day to himself.

Home was a mile and a half away. He started to walk. Buses didn’t run on Sunday.

It was sunny, but too early to be hot, and the ground was dry. There were no sidewalks and he had to walk in the grass and dirt, so he appreciated dry ground.

Michael’s shoes had been a good pair of shoes. They were soccer shoes, and lasted two years before falling apart. It was time for some new ones. The tread was bald. There were holes in the bottom. When Michael walked on wet ground, the water seeped through to his socks. The lining inside the shoe was also disintegrated, so most of his socks had holes from contact with the cement.

Cheap shoes weren’t worth it. His last were a $20 pair he bought for a funeral. They were ruined after a long walk through a rainstorm. He left them out to dry but they developed some kind of fungus and the stink wouldn’t go away, so he threw them out. Tragic goddamn pair of shoes, he thought, then laughed.

When Michael got home, Anna was in the kitchen making vegetables and rice for lunch.

“Hey! I’m home!”
“Hey.”
“What are you makin’?”
“Lunch.” She paused, then asked, tiredly, “Did you have a good time last night?”

Anna was trying to be a good girlfriend. It bothered her that he was out all night. Three years ago she would have clawed his face off.

“Yeah.”

She stirred the rice.

“Did Pete go back to Pittsburgh?”
“No, he’s probably still asleep. I think he’s going back tonight.”
“I wish he could come down for a beer or something.”
“Yeah.”

Michael opened the fridge. There was beer left from last night.

“Get me one too,” said Anna.
“That’s what I was doing. Hey, I’ll get myself one while I’m at it.”

They sat in the living room and drank the beers while the rice cooked in the pan. They flicked around the TV for a while but nothing was on. Michael put on a CD: The Who’s Tommy.

He walked into the kitchen. “You need one?”
Anna picked up her can. “Umm…yeah. Get me one.”

They opened two more beers. Michael felt great. Anna had to work that day.

She got up to get the lunch. “Do you want some rice and vegetables?”
”No. I had some cold pizza for breakfast.”
”I love cold pizza for breakfast.”
”Me too.”

Anna ate the lunch and went to work. Michael was alone.

He went upstairs to take a shower. He turned the knob on the bathtub. Cold water came down from the showerhead onto his back. Someone had left the shower on. The cold water woke him up.

After his shower he dressed. He went downstairs and opened the sliding glass door that went out to a small, fenced-in cement patio. He didn’t go out, but closed the screen. The outside air curled into the apartment.

He sat on the couch and read for a while. Then he walked over to the stereo and pulled a record out of a crate that had “THOU SHALT NOT STEAL” written on the side of it. The record was Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. It was an original pressing his uncle had given to him when he was about 14 years old. A white ring surrounded by tiny white wear marks was worn into the sleeve. He took the record out. It had a faint, distinctive smell of an old album, a smell like dust and marijuana from twenty eight years ago. Twenty-eight? Holy shit. Michael and Paranoid were around the same age.

Michael put the needle down onto the spinning vinyl. Warm static crackled out of the speakers. He looked at the sleeve with the ring and the wear marks and thought of the Shroud of Turin.

He went to get a beer. Last one.

Michael drank the beer and danced around the room like an idiot. His mind danced along and sang and played Billy Ward’s drums and Geezer’s bass and Tony Iommi’s SG.

He was nowhere and everywhere. This was an ingrained ritual since he was a child listening to Kiss records in his sisters’ room. He saw AC/DC when he was 16 and he went crazy and everyone else went crazy right along with him and he was in a big field of rock n roll under the stars and no one was afraid of looking like a Fool because Angus was the top Fool.

And here was Michael Harrigan, amped-up in a sea of Nowhere, inside the music.

The album was over and the beer was gone. Michael went up to the market to have a beer or three on the lawn. It was a large lawn with picnic tables and an artsy-fartsy rock fountain in the middle, and because of some fantastic loophole in the law you could drink a beer outside.

He got a 25-oz “oil can” and took a table outside, under the market’s awning.

Michael drank his beer at the table. He took out his marble composition book and began to write with an ink pen stolen from his office job.

Dark clouds filled the sky and a heavy rain began to pour. Maybe it was the beginning of a more spectacular thunderstorm. A big girl with a thick ass and large breasts carried a box out the door of the market and out into the rain as though being wet was of no concern. Her clothes were just tight enough. l watched her ass wag through the rain and across the street. The sky soaked her and she was defiantly indifferent. I watched her ass go through the parking lot of the municipal building past the police cars. She casually looked left and right for cars as the rain made her clothes tighter. Her ass disappeared behind the bricks.

As I started to write the wind blew dead leaves under my table and around my ankles. On one side of me a couple sat and drank wine. On the other side a faggoty old man ate supper. The couple got up and I got a good look at the girl. She had dark hair and skin and a nice body but was bitchy and tense in her actions. She smashed the wine bottle against the door of the garbage can and dropped it in. Her boyfriend probably wanted to commit suicide.

In place of the couple three people sat and talked aloud about a court case, and older man, a younger man, and a middle-aged woman. The older man was a lawyer and the other two were journalists ….

Michael wrote descriptive accounts of all the people he encountered there between sips of beer. He didn’t talk to anyone.

Then the rain receded and Michael forgot about the girl with the box.

After Michael finished a second beer, he went back into the store to take a leak. The wine section was near the bathroom. He used the bathroom then looked at some expensive wines. He decided to go across the street to the supermarket to get a six dollar bottle of California merlot. Then he did just that, and bought some cheap steaks and some charcoal along with it.

The rain never turned into a spectacular thunderstorm.

Michael put the bottle on the counter when he got home. He had a good buzz from the beers. The dishes were piled high. He took Anna’s portable stereo and put it up on the counter next to the sink. He put a Carter Family mix into the CD player and did the dishes. The steam rose up as Michael scraped off the dried food. He got to the casserole dish. One piece of burnt cheese from some enchiladas wouldn’t come off, so Michael got out a steak knife and scraped it off. It was a good chore, listening to music and doing those dishes. He got lazy about doing them from time to time, but when he got into it, he dug it. It was a good, solitary chore.

All the dishes took him about an hour. A dishwasher would be nice, but not necessary. Michael remembered the day his parents got a dishwasher and remembered thinking it wasn’t necessary. Michael had to do dishes from the time he was tall enough to reach the sink. He watched his house transform, gradually, from the time he was in high school up until a few years after he was out of college, from homey to modern: a new stereo and the old one with the 8-track went out to the garbage, then big porches on the front and back replaced the old cement porches, new sinks with cabinets replaced the old white porcelain, new reclining furniture, and a new white carpet replaced the old burnt orange one, and Michael had to take his shoes off and worry about staining the carpet in his own childhood home. Going back there was almost like visiting someone else’s house, but the value went up, and when his mum and dad retired, they could get a good price on the place.

I am thinking tonight of an old cottage home
That stands on the brow of the hill
Where in life's early morning I once loved to roam
But now all is quiet and still - Carter Family “My Old Cottage Home”

He cleaned the stove with the scrubber and some soap then wiped it dry with the dish sponge. He took the wine out of the shopping bag and pealed off the label. He unscrewed the cork and poured himself a glass.

He went out on his front patio. The grill was dirty so he cleaned it with a wire brush. The coals went in next and he lit them from a matchbook he got from a bar around the corner. It was instant light, but a generic brand, and the flames went high at first but died down quickly. He got it going though.

His neighbors were about the same age as he and Anna, late 20s, and they had a kid. The neighbor was down the row was cooking some shish kabobs. “Hey how’s it goin’?” said Michael.
“Hey.”
“Man, that smells good. What is it – shish kabobs?”
“Yeah I got some sausage on there, with some peppers, onions. I like the way thee-uh, thee-uh...”
“The fat drips down, haha?”
“Yeah.”
“Smells damn good.”
“What are you cooking?”
“Aw, just some steaks. She’s coming home from work pretty soon. Thought I’d get some steaks on.”

They both saw each other as intelligent and knew a little bit about one another but never hung out. They were perfect as neighbors.

Anna was happy about the meal and the wine when she came home. Michael lit a candle and they ate Greek salads and the steak and listened to the Carter Family.

I'm going to eat at the welcome table
I'm going to eat at the welcome table
Some of these days
I'm going to eat at the welcome table
I'm going to eat at the welcome table
Some of these days - from “River of Jordan”

Michael listened to Anna talk about her day. She was relaxed and it relaxed him. Michael felt sweet Solitude with her tonight.