Authors: David Shields,Matthew Vollmer
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
Mason Jar of Eighteen Rattlesnake Tails. Vacuum-Sealed. Glass is Aqua, Reads “Mason’s Patent, October 31st, 1864.” Tails Guaranteed Authentic; Still Rattle.
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, all 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.
Starting Bid: $16.99
Black Low-Top Chuck Taylors (Pre-Nike Era!!!!). Heavily Used. Hole in Rubber Sole of Right Shoe approx. 3/5 inch in Diameter. (Hole Has Been Filled With Wad of Paper Napkins Taken From A Churros Stand at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk). Color Faded. One (1) Eyelet missing metal ring. Size 11½.
Denouncing all manner of helotry, I bought a bus ticket from Santa Cruz to Seattle, arriving the week before the WTO conference and locating, amidst the impending rioters, a half-dozen
online acquaintances
, not quite socialists but something closer, perhaps, to secular nihilists, rich kids, products of divorce, real MENSA types with chips on their shoulders, who by their mid-20s had been bailed out of jails all over the country by lawyers retained by their parents; kids who had grown up on the Upper West Side and gone to St. George’s or Andover, and had formed a small tribe of like-minded individuals hellbent on vandalism (I had learned all this through repeated excursions to the Santa Cruz Public Library, a place sympathetic to ideologies like mine, an institution that has resisted wholly the sensational hegemony of the Patriot Act,
that would rather read Orwell than live it
, a place that fully endorsed the idea of someone who had been sleeping on the beach for a week, unshowered, sitting down and using a computer to exchange messages with a group planning violence, as long as the violence spoke out against larger violence, which the violence in Seattle really meant to), and with the vapors of tear gas roiling about us, providing a berserk sort of vestment, I, along with this crew of a half-dozen, removed a public trash can from its foundation, rocked and then ripped the can free from where it was bolted to the concrete, and while I cannot take credit for actually launching said can through the plate glass storefront of NikeTown, I most certainly did enter the spacious, high-ceilinged shop and wrecked everything I could before an agent of law forcibly detained me; which is to say these very shoes, made by a company subsequently bought out by Nike, destroyed a multitude of shelves, boxes, clothing racks and other props within the previously mentioned establishment. It remains a sad thing for me to see the uneducated hipster masses still wearing these shoes obliviously, wholly unaware that they are supporting a corporate monster. As I had no rich parents to bail me out of jail, I watched my beleaguered cohorts exit the King County holding cell we had shared for the past seventy-two hours, each vowing that they would make sure that their legal representation found a way to afford me a similar freedom. These promises turned out to be empty, and I in turn was held for nearly a month before my day in court, wherein a female judge wore the same terse frown for a full twenty minutes before assigning me a very heavy fine, which I haven’t paid a cent of.
Starting Bid: $8.99
Lot of Mets Paraphernalia, Years 2003–08. Ten Pennants, Three T-Shirts, Two “Bobbleheads” (Piazza and Martinez). Keychain. Inflatable Bat.
And there were more travels, too, trips worn like coats, heavy journeys, all by bus; things that now seem at once fictive and real, not lived but experienced, as I stalled, balked and temporized, trying hard to never commit, to never settle. In Denton, Texas, there was a fistfight during the Fry Street Fair. In Tulsa, I had an affair with a topless dancer, her husband a tornado chaser and retired seismologist. We were discovered after an F4 didn’t pan out, the man walking in while we kissed in the kitchen and subsequently weeping, screaming I was doom’s chattel, the paw of Satan himself. There was a year spent in Cleveland, running bags at a fancy hotel. But with time these jumps summed to nothing, their purpose epicene, if possessing form at all. That is, I (sort of) went home. My father, with whom I had been in touch intermittently, had moved to Long Island City, his pension and part-time math tutoring just enough. I arrived on his doorstep windblown, eight people at once. Time had taken; his hair had turned white. We sat in twin recliners in his small living room. I’m ready to stick around now, I told him. I’ve dreamed that, that you said that, my father said back.
The New York Transit Authority is always looking for a few good men, and I got a job as a Customer Service Rep at Grand Central, the pay rate 25 per. I’m still here, sitting while so many move. My father and I have season bleacher seats at Shea, the Metties, each year, breaking our hearts. The ramp to Grand Central’s lower concourse possesses improbable acoustical properties; in those rare moments when things are slow a single person will descend its length and, passing under the archway, the sound of their footfalls will dance up to the ceiling, and it’s all I can do to keep myself seated, to not rise from my faux leather desk chair and scream at them take me with you, I will pay any amount. Is there a trick to this that I’m missing? Some clue, unfound? At the ballpark are beef franks, soft pretzels, hot mustard. My commute in from Queens is easy, off-hours. But I can’t quite convince myself to buy in completely, and my dad, from a fall, now has a fake hip, and the bills are like virus, dormant then outbreak, and I can’t house this stuff because I can’t keep it near me, can’t see it each day and know more stuff is out there, while I wait here, an anchor, the son now returned, as epics are written and objects constructed and buses, at nighttime, rush over blacktops, always going somewhere better, somewhere else.