How Best to Avoid Dying (10 page)

But if you listened to the words—not every word, only every third word—the song is one of the saddest pieces of music ever recorded.

You know
I
love to
feel
the beat
.
Dead
ahead is
loving
street
.

Music
kills
my blues
.
I'm
never all
alone
now
!

Are
you
alone now
?

Are
you alone
now?

Are you
alone
now
?

Baby
,
I'm
coming on
over.

What happened to Zane Bellows? Some say he and
Licorice
sank to the bottom of Town Lake. Some believe he didn't destroy
Licorice
at all and is simply waiting until the world is worthy of hearing it. Still others claim he's in India searching for the source of all sound.

The truth is, Zane Bellows changed his name and his appearance and began a career as a freelance jingle writer. You've heard his work. His songs have sold everything from dog food
to diapers. But in each lighthearted jingle Zane slips subversive hints and harmonies, like hiding hallucinogenic mushrooms in Wonder Bread. Once again change is sneaking in. Zane Bellows is transforming the world one commercial at a time.
¹⁴

1
If you're not John Erler, please don't be discouraged. Perhaps I've missed the spot trying to write a story for John Erler and hit splat damn on a story for you. If this is John Erler . . . hi.

2
Though knowing you and your passion for Brian Wilson, I'm sure you'd argue that
The Beach Boys' Smile
gives it a run for its money… not the 2004 or 2011 version, but the one we never heard.

3
You once said to me that a man must love and serve a woman because woman has suffered so much. That's one of the reasons you loved her.

4
Yes, that's right, just like the name a young Marlon Brando propelled from the depths of his soul at the end of the film. She's heard it before. Don't do it. Zane didn't and she was pleased.

5
You're not gay. You are homoerotic. I would say you believe in the erotic in variety of forms. But people who know you could see you as gay. I think this turns girls on.

6
You've been in love. “Goofy love,” you called it.

7
You and I were once watching a blue jeans commercial in which a couple faces a herd of buffalo plowing toward them. They take each other's hands and the buffalo stream all around, but leave the couple unharmed. “That's what it feels like to be in love,” you said. “You feel like as long you've got the other you can do anything.” A cliché, certainly, but such a passionate cliché.

8
You're enthralled by laughter in music. I'm sure your passion is inspired by Brian Wilson. As I write this I'm listening to you on the radio (KUT). You've been playing songs with laughter in them for much of the morning. Laughter: rhythmic, repetitious, melodic. Isn't laughter where music began?

9
Remember how change snuck into your life? It was because of her. You hardly knew it was happening, but one day you found yourself kinder.

10
Part of me wanted you two to fall apart. I'm sorry, but you were almost offensively happy. Watching that kind of love can be stressful. But then you cried, and you're not the kind to cry. Lots of days you wouldn't answer the phone.

11
I had thought you were not in this story. None of the characters are based on you. But perhaps you are here. Perhaps the three (Zane, Stella, and David) are you. Zane is action; David is inaction; Stella orbits the two like a comet between stars. Is your genius your contradictions? Is your being the unlikely love affair and hate affair of anonymous elements? The pain and joy of your year has pushed out the edges of your soul. In some ways it can hold more than it ever held. But the seams are torn and your soul pours out on me and all those you see.

12
You loved her when she danced with you riding piggyback, stumbling, laughing, making love to
Smiley Smile
.

13
Maybe you love her even more now that she's gone.

14
I'll take the dream that you and I and junior and all our friends old and new and all the good people in the world are gonna live lives of total ecstasy and one by one slip into Heaven where there'll be Gladys Knight records and licorice for all
.

—Abbie Hoffman, in a letter to his wife.

THE ADVENTURES OF STIMP

Stimp was trying to get the key to turn on his apartment door. It was getting dark and he was frightened.

“You're all right, you're all right,” he whispered to himself, trying to twist the key. But he didn't believe he was all right.

Stimp could hear Pumpkin squeak from inside the apartment. Pumpkin was a hamster, a fat hamster. Some days Stimp could hardly see her eyes for the fat and fur surrounding her face. She was so brave. Never afraid. Sometimes she'd crawl to the top of the water bottle and jump over to the wheel and get her fat little legs caught in the spokes. She smelled like hamster. A wheaty, wood-chippy smell. The whole one-room apartment smelled like hamster. Stimp smelled like hamster. He couldn't smell it himself, but he had overheard someone at the post office
mention “the aroma of gerbils.” The person had said, “gerbils,” but Stimp knew he had meant hamster. So Stimp had made an effort to not smell like hamster. He had washed, purchased special perfume-enhanced soaps, stuffed his pockets with potpourri. He had even given Pumpkin a very unappreciated bath. But you can't get the smell of hamster off a hamster any more than you can get the smell of baby off a baby. Now babies, that's a smell. Stimp liked that smell, but he was afraid of babies. He had once held a baby, his mother's neighbor's baby. He hadn't hurt the baby, but he had imagined what it would be like if he had. Like if the baby just wriggled a little too much, or some loud noise made Stimp throw his arms up in the air like he'd done with that platter of Ritz Cracker sandwiches at his mother's housewarming party. Crackers hit the ceiling, some stuck there. Which is bad for a cracker, but really bad for a baby. And they probably wouldn't believe it was an accident. They'd probably think he wanted to hurt the baby—not just hurt, those crackers splattered—kill the baby. The judge would be all stern and say something like, “Let the hamster-smelling man with the tiny, crooked penis approach the bench.” But how did the judge know about his penis? But Stimp wouldn't ask because that would be contempt. His lawyer was no help. A cheap, state-employed lawyer who wouldn't like Stimp. He's all, “I'll prove my client is innocent,” but winking at the jury and whispering under his breath, “Innocent of showering, ha ha.” And they all laugh, which is nice for them, because they're all mad at having to be a jury instead of at home or at work. No, instead they have to watch a child-killing, cracker-smashing, hamster-smelling, small-crooked-penis-having, gerbil-fearing, scabies-suffering guy on trial. And who would take care of Pumpkin? Probably
no one. Pumpkin could be starving in her cage, especially since he had put the brick on the top so that she wouldn't get out. But now he wanted her to get out. To get free! Not to have to eat her own leg or something. Hopefully she'd try around the water bottle. The mesh is loose there. Yeah, and just in time because here comes Mr. Crawnan, the world's worst landlord. Knowing Mr. Crawnan, he wouldn't even wait for the trial to end, he'd go right ahead and rent the place and sell all Stimp's stuff, which is totally illegal, not that Stimp can talk, since he killed a baby. Except his vinyl collection, Mr. Crawnan would keep that for himself. He had once even said, when fixing a lightbulb, “Nice album collection.” Yeah, right. Nice. You mean
very
nice, as in very nice for your love nest upstairs with all its purple pillows, felt walls, and mood lighting. Yeah.

So he'd be stomping, Mr. Crawnan that is, all around the apartment, clumsily searching for the albums, which are hidden. Stimp would hide them for sure. Note: first thing tomorrow, hide albums from Mr. Crawnan. And while searching he smashes the Precious Moments figurines, which is okay cause they're creepy and Stimp only kept them because his mother gave them to him, but he made them face the wall cause their eyes are all big and freaky. And Mr. Crawnan knocks over the hamster cage just as Pumpkin nibbles through the mesh around the water bottle and Pumpkin jumps into her clear plastic ball, rolls out the door, down the stairs, and into the stream just behind the apartment building. And Pumpkin doesn't care a tinker-tat about the fish staring at her through the plastic because she's coming for Stimp, her friend, so Pumpkin gets to the prison where Stimp is because Stimp lost the trial, and she sneaks Stimp a key, pretending just to be a
mouse. Stimp's cellmate, Rocko, doesn't tell on him cause he has become such a good friend cause he had scabies once, too. And he understands how Stimp feels being oppressed because of the small, crooked penis. Not because Rocko has a small or crooked penis, his penis is fine. But Rocko is black and black people get oppressed, which Stimp understands because he owns three Ray Parker Jr. albums, so Rocko wishes Stimp luck as he sneaks out, but Rocko stays cause he's trying to get his GED. And there's a huge search for Stimp, but Pumpkin leads him to a safe place to hide. A circus, where Stimp guesses people's middle names, only it's a scam because they have to show their driver's license to get in the circus and the guy who sees their license tells Stimp their middle name through a radio in his ear, but sometimes it's just an initial and Stimp has to guess and he guesses wrong, but the circus boss says that's okay cause it makes it look more real, and say, don't I know your face, say, I hadn't noticed the smell because of the elephants, but say, aren't you the Hamster Man that killed that baby? And Stimp has to run and hide in the woods where Pumpkin teaches him how to live as one of the beasts. Free. Alive. Strong. But when the winter comes, there are no more berries or leaves or anything and even Pumpkin looks skinny. Pumpkin scratches a picture in the dirt showing a stick figure man eating a stick figure hamster and Pumpkin crouches by the drawing and nods her little head and points her little claw at her little chest and Stimp is so hungry he almost does eat Pumpkin, but instead he cuts off his own pinky with a sharp rock and makes a tiny fire to roast it over. He feeds most of it to Pumpkin and saves just a morsel for himself. As the months go by he takes another finger and another and another, till finally he only has one finger left
and he can't hold the sharp rock, not even with his toes, which would have been smarter to eat first, but now he and Pumpkin just lay on their backs, hoping it will rain in their mouths, but it doesn't and they die. Which is sad because Rocko, now out of jail and a captain with the police, is looking everywhere to find Stimp and when he finally does, he sees Pumpkin and Stimp both dead, Pumpkin cradled in Stimp's one remaining finger. Rocko cries and tells the dead Stimp he was innocent because the baby was already dead when it was handed to him and the mother knew it, and she just wanted to blame it on Stimp so she had given him the baby and had paid someone to make the loud noise, so it's okay he threw the baby, and that he broke out of jail, and he has a strange penis, and he smells funny, and he's always afraid, and the key turned and the door opened and little Pumpkin squeaked to see Stimp home. Stimp closed the door behind him and sighed. “No nibbling. Good hamster.”

Then he put on his favorite Ray Parker Jr. album and they danced. Stimp jumping and flaying, Pumpkin rolling back and forth in her plastic ball.

FOUR TINY TALES CONCERNING TRANSFORMATION

1

The Yellow Stone

I sit and mindlessly dig my fingernails into the thin tree bark, peeling it away and letting it fall to the mud. I like the smell.

As I dig, I find, smack dab in the middle of the tree, a tiny, yellow stone. Like a jewel, sort of, I think at least. I have never seen a real jewel. Plastic stuff, well, yes. Mother did enjoy her collection. Tacky I suppose, the collection that is, but my yes, they were tacky times.

So I begin to pick at the yellow stone, thinking of wealth and my mother. It's wedged in, but I'm determined to get it out. I'm not lacking strength. I once dated a tennis player. Strong, very fit.