Fifth Monday Fiction

Excerpt from the novel Room to Fall

By Michael Hanson

[Solomon, 27, has just received news that provokes reflections on his high school years (a decade gone), during which he met his best friend, Kurt.]

I’d never even spoken to the guy—he was a junior, after all, and I a lowly (scared shitless) freshman—when he appeared at my locker one afternoon and said, Hey man, you got a sheet of paper? Removing a single sheet of loose-leaf paper from a spiral-bound notebook, I handed it to him only to watch him tear it into squared sections, turning fragments this way and that to be torn further while I watched apathetic and dubious, wondering what in the world he was doing and why was I being asked to bear witness to it? When the sheet was at last reduced to what I imagined were dozens of small torn scraps, he began to unfold it…opening the once-shredded but magically-restored sheet while my mouth dropped stupidly, awestruck—me damn near bowled over—and by the time he finished and handed me the fold-worn proof of this miracle and said, Take nothing for granted, he was by then bored with it, walking away casually as if he’d already done for me all that he could.
    Luckily he’d do a lot more in the ensuing years.
    Trust me, he wasn’t like the rest of us. There was this urgency to everything Kurt put his energy into, everything, like he knew his days were numbered and refused to squander the few he had. Sure we all know this (supposedly) but with Kurt it was different: that understanding was the motivation for every move he made. He used to say, We gotta get busy. We’ll be dead before we know it. And while we all just shook our heads and smirked at him as an extremist, he proved that he meant what he was saying by acting like he meant it—that is, by doing. And Kurt didn’t bother with a thing unless he saw a creative angle, something that challenged him and took him out of his comfort zone. While most of our high school classmates were arguing over football games or agonizing over who to take to the prom, Kurt labeled them lemmings and determined we’d be maverick artists—he dubbed us The Wild Bunch (his favorite movie) and I remember one of his early “projects” was an outing to the Civic Center to see the wrestling matches: he said it was research for a novel he was going to write. Not the Olympic-style wrestling where the object is to pin your opponent, but the one where the object is to maim him, bloody him up by any means and get people to pull for you while doing it—the one where all the wrestlers have ominous names like The Assassin or The Maneater. I saw it as nonsense, silly as hell, but Kurt looked at it like a phenomenon, hence believed that—when examined closely—it provided insight into the true nature of certain types of people.
    That’s Kurt.

So one Friday night we tanked-up on Wild Turkey and forked over more money than I could believe just to watch a bunch of shirtless oafs run around a ring pretending to pound one another, me and Martin bearing witness while Kurt spouted all his observations into a miniature cassette recorder he’d brought along, lapping up the lunacy of a spectacle at which we could only gawk in astonishment, the packed arena crawling with all kinds of crazies: middle-aged women in curlers and halter-tops with their faces painted like Injun Joe, the wrestler who’d topple his opponents with a tomahawk when the referee wasn’t looking, then scalp them by stripping off a phony-looking toupee to reveal a shiny-shaved head; and tobacco-cheeked, potbellied men in tee-shirts bearing slogans for their favorite wrestlers—one said ON THE EIGHTH DAY GOD CREATED THE APOSTLE (a big blond mauler who, the man sitting next to us told Kurt, “fights for God”). On top of the whiskey we drank before going, we were slamming beers at something like six bucks a pop, which I volunteered to fetch so Kurt wouldn’t miss anything. Consequently my trips to the concession stand were frequent because he needed more of what he liked to call medicine for the madness. For all of the two hours’ worth of fighting the fans screamed nonstop, violent vilifications for the bad guys and gut-throttled rebel yells for the good guys. People seemed to buy the whole business, hook, line, and sinker—they were deeply into it, causing Kurt to comment that it made him understand Nazis. We were close to the front, fifth row from the ring, because Kurt said he wanted to immerse himself in the insanity. The wrestlers deemed bad guys would threaten the spectators around the ring when booed, causing women to flip the classic single finger while the men hollered about having a crack at him, saying in all seriousness to their surrounding buddies, “I could take ’im…I know I could!” Kurt was talking to everyone, asking them questions like, What do you do for a living? Who’s your favorite wrestler? Is it really real? And, Do you believe there’ll be wrestling in heaven? (To which many replied, oblivious to the pun, “Oh hell yes!”) When people asked about the tape recorder (which Kurt made no effort to conceal) he’d explain with a sincerity even I could believe (almost) that he was under contract from a big publisher in New York to write a book on wrestling, embellishing the fiction with words like important and significant, which caused more than one inquirer to give their names and addresses. And he’d shout at the ring right along with them, coaxing me and Martin to chime in but being careful to intuit the sentiment of the crowd surrounding so as to take the appropriate stance. There were actually some tense moments between fans, minor disagreements over wrestlers that threatened to escalate into something even uglier. In an effort to connect us to them, Kurt kept turning to us to scream, These are human beings! At one point he bent toward me to speak into the tape recorder and said, The problem with having alcohol at a function like this is that one becomes susceptible to the Fear, capital F. And late in the evening, just subsequent to the finale (a match of terrific violence that included chains and billy clubs and left both men hideously bloodied), I turned to Kurt, whose seemingly endless ebullience had waned from booze and humanity, his head down and a half-finished cup of beer hanging sadly in his hand, whispering with Kurtz-like loathing into the recorder, The horror…the horror….
    He’d swindle us into these wild situations like they were all around just waiting to happen, like life was this crazy adventure if you’d just step off the Standard Path long enough to get a look at what’s out there. When we were sixteen he coaxed us into the country for a rattlesnake-hunting excursion. I thought, we’re going to look for rattlesnakes? Aren’t they best avoided? But Kurt wasn’t kidding: he’d bought blowguns, for christ’s sake, mail-ordered and hand-delivered in a long cardboard box marked HOUSE OF WEAPONS. I couldn’t imagine what we were getting into. We set out on a Saturday at the ungodly hour of five a.m., driving Martin’s pickup in the dark early morning, Martin and Lewis and Kurt all crammed in the cab while Grant and I sat in back in the rutted bed, the truck barreling along in pursuit of some crazy romantic notion Kurt had read about in an essay written by one of his heroes. It took nearly three hours to get there, some dusty, god-forsaken outback buried deep in a county “chock-full of rattlers,” or so Kurt had been told by a farmer who delivered produce to the grocery store where Kurt was a bagger. We never questioned these quests for phantoms born out of books, for he read and believed and made you believe that something was there for those willing to seek it. It was important...it was everything...it was ALL.
    And hell—we were sixteen, bored out of our minds. Need I say more?
We parked just off the shoulder of a nearly-nonexistent graveled road, and before setting out fueled up on thick slices of smoked ham slathered in spicy hot mustard with a couple of beers apiece, then locked the cooler in the cab and gathered our gear—me and Martin and Kurt all with blowguns, Grant carrying a can of gasoline with a three-foot section of garden hose, and Lewis “just along for the ride.”
    A scary sense of expectation shivered through me as we slithered some of the hose down into that first hole in the side of a hill, then—all of us save Kurt and Grant standing back a bit—Kurt funneled in some gasoline and the two of them rushed away, the fumes from the fuel supposed to drive the unsuspecting serpent from his dark earthen chamber. For sixty seconds of breathless anticipation we all hung as if suspended above solid ground...but no snake appeared. So we wandered on, the day becoming hotter than hell and my skin starting to sear from sunburn, combing the baked desert-like terrain convinced that success awaited us somewhere as we repeated the ritual again and again and again to no avail, Grant soon growing weary of lugging the gasworks, and my blowgun feeling ever sillier in my hand.
    To this very day I’m certain that, had we actually concocted this scheme without Kurt and carried ourselves up and over those hills for hours on end, we would’ve capitulated to failure long before success finally slithered out of that last hole, drunk and disoriented while we scrambled back and away in a stunned panic—all save Kurt, who had calmly, calculantly, slendered a dart into the mouthpiece and raised the long weapon to his lips, the dart striking the snake so silently we could hardly tell it had hit. He’d already put another dart in place and blown it before Martin and I moved up to join him, me flinching with my first strike, the snake snapping at the air around him while we covered his body with cone-shaped darts, the sound of his rattle sending relentless shivers. He was easy to hit, coiled tightly in strike position though there was nothing for him to fight, and we emptied nearly fifty cones into the poor bastard before Kurt called it quits, ordering a ceasefire like he was our general. The rattle sound had died but still we stood at a safe distance...taking no chances...just standing there waiting all expectant and impatient, hoping that time would pass quickly and me saying over and over I can’t believe it I can’t believe it, while Kurt responded smugly, Who do you think you’re dealing with?
    When the time came, he ordered us all to stay back and insisted on approaching alone, making his way to the snake stooped low to the ground, then reaching out longly to poke the body with the tip of the blowgun, at last scooping some of its still length onto the end of the pole and lifting it to see if there was any movement whatsoever from the head. There was not.
    The troops could move in then...have a look at our handiwork. After a few cursory expletives we all fell strangely silent, staring with a sort of sad dread at the beautifully patterned skin so horribly covered now with yellow cones, nail-like protrusions we ourselves had put there, and Kurt said, I had no idea it would take so many, which we all knew was his way of saying he was sorry—not only to us but to the snake himself. As if suddenly ashamed he bent down and began pulling the pestilential darts from the body, saying Keep these separate, as he passed back a handful to Martin, then to me, making a little pile on the ground beside him with the rest, and finally lifting the dartless snake and running his hand smoothly over it like something he loved, saying My god the sheer design of the thing.
    He stretched the snake straight out on the ground to see his length, over five-and-a-half feet, and said, Pretty damned impressive. And in a rare moment of blessed inspiration I laid myself on the ground alongside that snake to give us a sense of scale, pleasing Kurt in a way I always longed to please him but never could accomplish often enough to suit me. Would you look at that! he boomed, becoming more amazed with every minute.
    Are you going to cut off the rattle? Lewis asked like a dumbass, and Kurt fired an appalled face of incredulity and said, Are you kidding? I’m going to mount the skin intact, rattle and all...the meat we’ll eat for dinner. This was news to some of us, and my uncertainty must’ve betrayed me because Kurt took one look at my expression and said, If you want to sleep with a clean conscience you’ll eat it, otherwise consider yourself a murderer. He said this with the complete conviction that I would fall right in line if for no other reason than to please him….
    Which of course I did. That very night at Martin’s we grilled little bite-sized bits of rattlesnake with pepper and butter, the meat a little tough and rubbery but not at all bad and tasting nothing like chicken (as someone had said it would). We shared wine from Kurt’s leather bota, and he lifted it like a horn to toast the snake who’d died for us, saying Welcome to the world as it was. While I was fine with the world as it is, some atavistic side of my friend longed to live in that older world, where what we ate was worked for, not blindly purchased in Styrofoam packaging. More to the point, Kurt managed to convince even the most skeptical of us that something Significant lay in these schemes of his, which I can see so clearly now that cancer has confirmed his years were numbered to 30, gazing at the never-again-used blowgun running the length of my windowsill like a memory...alone in an apartment thousands of miles from a body that used to be my friend but is about to be reduced to the same dirt The Wasteland warned us about...I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
    I never understood, didn’t get it, but now sit knowing, awaiting my own date with that greedy bastard Kurt called The World’s Landlord, my sad, tired feet firmly planted on the dull Standard Path, and not one soul in sight with the wild brilliance to shove my lazy butt off of it.
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Copyright © 2013 by Michael Hanson
The prologue from the author's novel This Sweet Intercourse was published on Moristotle & Co. on August 17.

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