Downtown Owl

by Chuck Klosterman

  During the entire month of September, Vance Druid had never tried to buy Julia a drink. He never chatted her up or challenged her to billiards or asked if she wanted to see E.T. or War Games or Cujo. And this (of course) made him seem like the only attractive man in the entire town. And that (of course) is a romantic cliché, which (of course) only serves to illustrate Julia’s damaged self-perception. It was all (of course) too predictable to believe. Which is how life always is. In baseball and sex, clichés are usually true: Pitching beats hitting, and people always want to be loved by anyone who doesn’t seem to care. So when Vance walked out of the men’s room at 11:58 and stopped to look at a jukebox he never played, Julia decided she would initiate conversation with this unfriendly man, much to the quiet chagrin of every bozo in the bar. She could do this. She was the most attractive, most charismatic, most enchanting woman in North America. She could do whatever she wanted.

  “Hello there,” she said. “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Julia.”

  “We’ve met,” Vance said, still looking at the letters and numbers behind the Plexiglas. “I’ve met you.”

  “We have? When?”

  “Some other night. It was a while ago. I don’t remember. You were drunk.”

  “I don’t think we’ve met,” she said.

  “Well, then maybe we haven’t.”

  Vance was not putting any money into the machine. He was just looking at it. Seven uncomfortable seconds disappeared.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” Vance said suddenly.

  Four seconds passed.

  “It’s nice to meet you, too,” Julia said. “You’re Vance, right? Your name is Vance.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

  Eleven seconds passed. He still had not looked at her. It was like talking to a prison guard.

  “What songs are you going to play?” asked Julia.

  “This jukebox is terrible.”

  “What kind of music do you like?”

  “The Rolling Stones,” said Vance.

  “Yeah, they’re cool. Who else?”

  “That’s it,” he said.

  Five more seconds passed.

  “The only band you like is the Rolling Stones?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Julia. “No one only likes one band. You must at least like the Beatles.”

  “Not really,” said Vance. “Their songs are boring.”

  “Wow. That’s really interesting,” said Julia. “I’ve never met someone who didn’t like the Beatles. What about Foreigner? Or Boston? Or Styx? Or Journey?”

  “I can’t tell any of those bands apart.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know, I know. You’re probably one of those Led Zeppelin people. Guys like Zeppelin.”

  “No, they were gay.”

  “What?” said Julia. “You thought Led Zeppelin was gay? Weren’t they, like, sex fiends?”

  “Their singer always seemed gay to me,” said Vance. “I haven’t listened to that shit since ninth grade.”

  “How about Fleetwood Mac?” she asked.

  “I don’t like female singers.”

  “The Eagles?”

  “Nobody listens to the Eagles.”

  “Quiet Riot?”

  “That trash is for dope addicts and twelve-year-olds.”

  “Van Halen?”

  “Mother of God,” said Vance. “That clown is even gayer than the queer from Zeppelin. Plus, their guitar player is boring. Why would I want to listen to a guitar that sounds like a police siren?”

  “I’m running out of possibilities,” she said. “How about…oh! I know: ELO? I love ELO. You better not say anything bad about ELO!”

  “They’re like a combination of the dullest parts of the Beatles with the gayest parts of Led Zeppelin.”

  “This is crazy,” Julia said. “I don’t think I believe what you are saying. I don’t think any person could hold such opinions. Do you at least appreciate music that’s made by people who aren’t in the Rolling Stones? Do you appreciate Bruce Springsteen?”

  “He seems like an asshole.”

  “Oh, he does not.”

  “He tries too hard,” said Vance. “He’s needy. He needs people to like him. It’s undignified.”

  “Pat Benatar?”

  “There again, girl singer.”

  “Cheap Trick?”

  “You know, I actually saw Cheap Trick during college,” he said. “They came to West Fargo and played the fairgrounds. Some dipshit asked me to go with him. The band played for fucking ever and dressed like circus freaks. It was ridiculous.”

  “The Police?”

  “Never heard of ’em.”

  “I suppose I shouldn’t waste my time with the Sex Pistols,” Julia said.

  “That’s not music.”

  “Are you one of those people who says, ‘Disco sucks’? Are you actually going to say the words ‘Disco sucks’ if we keep talking about this?”

  “I can’t speak to that,” he said.

  “You must hate Steely Dan.”

  “Steely Dan,” Vance repeated as he looked deeply at the words Bat Out of Hell. He seemed to take her question very seriously; this further confused Julia, as she had been operating under the assumption that he’d been answering her questions thoughtlessly and without justification. “You know, they’re not terrible,” he eventually said. “I like ‘Deacon Blues.’ That’s a song. But still: boring. I’d never waste money on their records.”

  “So you’re serious about this,” Julia finally said. “You only like the Rolling Stones. Inside your house, the only music you play is by the Rolling Stones.”

  “Yes. Why not? They have plenty of albums,” he said.

  “Do you have a favorite?”

  “Probably Black and Blue or Goats Head Soup.”

  “I thought guys like you were supposed to love Exile on Main Street,” she responded. “The records you like are generally considered to be their worst ones.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” he said. “Well, nice meeting you again.”

  Vance walked back to his bar stool and finished his sixteen-ounce Beast, and then he drank two more. Julia went back to her booth, deflated by the awkward, baffling conversation with a man who did not seem to care about anything she said (or about anyone, except possibly Keith Richards). Had she not been inebriated, it would have been both embarrassing and discouraging.

  But they would talk again tomorrow. And things would go better.

  OCTOBER 12, 1983

  (Horace)

  “It’s not even in the newspaper.” This was Bud Haugen talking. “Not on the front page, not on the editorial page. Nowhere. It’s like it didn’t even happen.”

  Today’s afternoon coffee was stronger than usual, depositing black acid bitterness into the blood of its disciples. It was an entertaining anomaly. The old men embraced their caffeinated anger. It felt good.

  “You know, I saw the school bus running this morning,” added Gary Mauch. “The kids don’t even get the day off anymore. Only the postman.”

  “I don’t care about the children,” said Bud. “It’s the newspaper that gets me. Think of all the crap they run in that rag. Think of all the idiocy that constitutes somebody’s version of public information. They will put anything in there. Did you see last week’s Sunday paper? The region section? They ran a picture of a dog wearing a neckerchief. It was the front of the region section. That was news. Yet what do they do on the anniversary of the most important event of the past thousand years? Nothing. I guess they’d think differently if America had been discovered by a dog wearing a neckerchief.”

  “The problem,” said Marvin, “is that reporters have no sense of history.”

  “That’s not the problem,” said Bud. “The problem is that you can’t celebrate Columbus anymore because it perturbs the Indians. That’s the entire issue. And now that they run the casinos, they control all the money. It’s politics.”

  “Bud ma
kes a halfway valid point,” said Marvin. “The way young people talk these days, you’d think Christopher Columbus was the Caucasoid Pol Pot.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Marvin. “Doesn’t matter what kind of person Columbus was. Doesn’t matter how many Indians he killed or didn’t kill, or if he was or wasn’t an asshole. From what I’ve read, Columbus probably was an asshole. He probably deserved to get hung. But here’s the thing: He didn’t get hung. The man climbed on a wooden watercraft and collided with North America by accident. It doesn’t matter what happened afterwards or what his motives were. He found it. It happened. He’s what history is. It was his destiny to be that particular man, and it was his destiny to do those specific things. But nobody at that newspaper cares about anything that happened before they were born, which is why they don’t give space to things like Columbus Day. Which is why I stopped reading the newspaper in ’74. After they busted Nixon, it all became bullshit and advertising.”

  It was difficult to argue with Marvin. It was difficult to argue with anyone who’d ever a) fallen off a thirty-five-foot corn crib, b) broken four vertebrae in the process, yet c) elected to return to work the very next day. (He shoveled grain while wearing a full-body plaster cast underneath his overalls, sweating like a mule.) Marvin Windows was unkillable, which meant he was unassailable. In 1971, a raccoon bit him in the neck and he had to undergo a series of fourteen rabies shots in the abdomen. Everyone in town remembered this incident except for Marvin; within the catacombs of his mind, the raccoon had bitten his brother. He had no recollection of seeing any doctor. This sort of thing happened a lot. Marvin could not remember how many times he had been thrown through the windshield of a moving vehicle, but it was at least three. He was the godhead, and he had no rival. Who could win a debate against a man who did not recall how many times he should have died? It was like trying to beat Rasputin at chess. As such, Horace did not voice his disagreement with Marvin’s thesis; he just swallowed his unusually strong coffee. But he did disagree with what Marvin was claiming, particularly with all that business about Columbus having a destiny.

  For most of his youth, Horace had believed in destiny. He believed it was his destiny to fight in a war. But this was not some romantic, self-destructive fantasy; he did not believe it was his destiny to fight and die. He believed it was his destiny to fight and live. He believed it was his destiny to kill faceless foreigners for complex reasons that were beyond his control, and to deeply question the meaning of those murders, and to kill despite those questions, and to eventually understand the meaning of his own life through the battlefield executions of total strangers. He had believed this since he was a boy. Wars changed men, and often for the better. Unfortunately, Horace had been born in December of 1910, a terrible year for anyone who hoped to experience militaristic calamity. He was still a child during World War I; to Horace, WWI was just a radio show. He was thirty-one at the start of World War II, but too responsible to leave the country—his three younger brothers all enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor, so someone had to stay home and take care of the cows. He was forty-two during the Korean Conflict; that was too old to help Ted Williams kill any Asian of consequence. Vietnam had been for the kids. Four wars, and he missed them all. And (of course) Horace knew he was supposed to feel fortunate about this. He had fallen through the few slender chasms that buffered cataclysmic events. He knew that all wars were brutal (especially the Civil War) and that he might have been tortured or emasculated (especially by the Japanese), and perhaps he would have gained nothing from the experience beyond what he more easily learned from reading books (most notably All Quiet on the Western Front) and ignoring the lies of television (most notably M*A*S*H, a program whose pro-Communist themes consistently enraged him). He was not naïve about the realities described by people like Stevie Wonder and Michael Herr, despite the fact that he had no idea who those people were. Horace was a reasonable man. Everyone believed this. But there was simply no way he could accept that his destiny was to not fight in a war. There was no way the defining experience of his life could be the four experiences that he missed.

  This is why Horace stopped believing in destiny, sometime during 1955.

  His wife had not believed in destiny either, but she had different, less creative reasons: She felt the concept of predestination was lazy. She thought destiny was a mental construction for people who did not want to take responsibility for their own actions; she thought destiny made life too simple. Horace felt destiny made life harder. In a predetermined world, people were like slaves unaware of their enslavement. If not for free will, every human action would be work; every human achievement would be devoid of meaning, or at least devoid of credit. And that would be acceptable—except that you’d still have to do all the shit that came along with it. I mean, let’s assume Marvin was correct. Let’s assume it was Christopher Columbus’s “destiny” to discover the New World, and let’s pretend he was consciously aware of that fact. What possible difference would that have made in his day-to-day life? He still had to build the boats. He still had to beg Queen Isabella for funding, and he still had to significantly underestimate the circumference of the earth. He still had to wait for someone else to invent the compass. He still had to wake up in the morning. As far as Horace could decipher, destiny was a concept that forced you to live a certain kind of life on purpose, even though you were already living that life by accident. And that seemed immoral, not to mention stupid. Why would existence be designed as a redundant system? Destiny made God seem like an unconfident engineer.

  “I don’t know what you’re so hot and bothered about,” said Edgar Camaro, directing his words away from the unassailable Marvin and toward the eternally assailable Bud. “What, exactly, do you expect the newspaper to write about Christopher Columbus in 1983?”

  “They should recognize the man,” said Bud.

  “Why?” asked Edgar.

  “The man deserves recognition.”

  “That’s not an answer to the question. You’re just repeating what you already said. That’s not an argument.”

  “Why should I have to explain why Columbus is important? You’re acting like a two-dollar jackass.”

  “I just think it’s idiotic that we don’t get mail today, simply because Columbus was a bad explorer. You do realize he discovered America by accident, right? He thought the Indians were pygmies.”

  “We all know that,” said Bud. “That isn’t the point. Have you not listened to anything we’ve been saying for the past twenty minutes? Do you have shit in your ears?”

  “You know, they say Columbus was a rapist,” said Edgar. “I don’t know if that’s fact or fiction, but it’s certainly not impossible. And I’d hate to think we didn’t get our mail this morning in tribute to an Italian rapist.”

  “Now that’s just downright stupidity!”

  “Jesus wheels,” said Gary, almost laughing. “Ed Camaro, you are a piece of work. Anytime there’s something to be against, you’re ready to be against it.”

  “Edgar was born thirty years premature,” said Marvin. “He would have made the ideal hippie. He could have moved out to California and lived among the orange-juice drinkers.”

  It was at this juncture that Burna waddled out of the kitchen to refill everyone’s cup. Burna was Harley’s daughter-in-law and the café’s lone employee between lunch and dinner; she was thirty-eight and pregnant, and she usually thought about Elvis Presley when she made love to Harley’s son. She always smiled and rarely eavesdropped, which made her a better-than-average waitress. “What are you rascals arguing about?” she asked the group. “I could hear Bud caterwauling from the kitchen.”

  For a moment there was silence.

  “I think Edgar would like to order a glass of orange juice,” said Marvin.

  They all laughed at this for a very, very long time. Gary had to remove his eyeglasses in order to wipe away his tears with a napkin. Five years from now, Edgar would recount the memory of this joke at Marvin’s
funeral, and they’d all remember the details perfectly. It was so Marvin.

  “Burna, this is coffee,” said Horace. “This is coffee. You’ve really outdone yourself, Burna.”

  OCTOBER 17, 1983

  (Mitch)

  “Explain his world to me,” said Laidlaw. He was an upright Gila monster wearing a polo shirt. It was Monday morning, 8:45 a.m. “Explain what the world of Winston Smith is like. We know he’s in London, and we know the year is 1984. But what is it like to live in that place, at that time, within this story? Who can tell me?”

  As he spoke these forty-six words, twenty-two autonomous teenagers stared into his transfixing reptilian face, thinking the following twenty-two respective thoughts:

  1) How awesome it would feel to be sleeping.

  2) Unaffordable denim skirts. Fuck.

  3) What it would feel like to be asleep.

  4) Sleeping.

  5) The lack of cool guys living in Owl, at least when compared to how the guys in Oakes were described by a cousin during a recent telephone conversation.

  6) An empty room, filled only with white light and silence. (This was Rebecca Grooba.)

  7) The iconography of Teresa Cumberland, chiefly the paradox of why no one else seems to realize that she is a total backstabbing bitch who talks shit about everybody in school and then acts as if she is somehow the victim whenever anyone calls her on it.

  8) The potential upside of being comatose.

  9) Theoretical ways to make a Pontiac Grand Prix more boss, such as painting a panther on the hood or moving the entire steering column and floor pedals to the passenger side, which would likely be impossible without a cherry picker and extremely expensive tools.