by Nick Mamatas
“What?”
“What’s with that show downstairs?”
“Don’t like it? We’re in progress. Making changes. You can leave feedback afterwards, but I have to say I won’t take it very seriously if you’ve already left to come look for me,” the kid says. His voice sounded a bit hollow, as though he was still speaking into the vent.
“I mean, what is this supposed to be about?” I was angry, annoyed, asking all the wrong questions. I felt like some Long Island idiot wandering the halls of MOMA and snorting derisively at the artwork. My kid could paint that! “I mean, what’s your name? Are you new in town?” Below my feet, the band in the basement thumped like the building’s very own heart.
The kid smiled. “You meant to ask me my name, but instead you accidentally asked me to explain to you the themes of the Abyssal Eyeballs. Honestly, I don’t even know. This just felt like something I had to do. It’s, like, important somehow.”
“Let’s pretend that is so,” I said.
“My name is Roderick.”
“Do you live here?” He looked around the room, eyes questioning. “Yes, I mean in this house?”
“Of course not.”
“New in town?”
“You forgot to preface that with ‘Hey, sailor,’ ” he said. That made the blood rush to my head. My Will was totally scattered. His was quite focused. “Anyway, I have to do something now,” he said, reaching for some papers on the cot. Then he leaned down near the vent in the wall and put his hand on the lever to open it. “Please close the door behind you. Help yourself to anything you might find in the fridge. And promise me you won’t do something crazy, like kill yourself and leave blood everywhere, while I’m setting up.”
He chuckled, and didn’t even look up at me, but I said, “I promise.” I stepped out and closed the door. I even went to the fridge, in case he was giving me some sort of clue. Life wasn’t like that; there was nothing of interest in the fridge, though it did occur to me that the Abyssal Eyeballs were squatting here—maybe for the night, maybe forever. I could go down to the deli and call the police on the pay phone to shake things up. But cops can ruin things, and I was no rat, plus the notion smacked of spite, of flipping over a chessboard. From the small kitchen window I saw the backyard filling with people. The show was already over. Greg and the Chelsea girl were holding hands. I decided on a disappearing act.
8.
I’ve been a punk for three years. My initial reason was pretty stupid. Once my father started disappearing for a few days at a time, I realized that I wasn’t going to have a sweet sixteen party when the time came. The lights went off, and Grandma had to call LILCO to get the power back on. She thought she was growing forgetful, and she was, but paying the bills had always been Mom’s gig and she had never let anything slip, until Dad was home one summer after a layoff and decided to take over. Then the phone started ringing off the hook, and the caller on the other line was always asking for her, even after she died. You have to pay for cancer treatments whether they work or not, as it turns out.
Life was getting a lot smaller. People started drifting away from one another, finding their own little sections of the unicursal hexagram back when I was thirteen, when Mom was still alive, when I was spending a lot of time at the hospital. Then Dad started acting oddly, and as news travels fast in a small town the good girls started keeping me at arm’s length. The bad girls didn’t give a fuck about me either. And guys—it was either play Dungeons & Dragons, or spread my legs. Neither option was all that appetizing. So I spent a lot of time in my room, compulsively rereading the few books I owned: Anne of Green Gables, and Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, which I’d liberated from Dad, were special favorites.
One night I was fiddling with the radio and turned the knob almost all the way to the left of the dial. Someone on TV had said that classical music helps with relaxation, but instead I got an ear-raping roar of guitars and vocals that sounded like barking. It was WUSB, the local college station, and the program was Outrage, a hardcore punk show. For what seemed like a very long while, I didn’t move. My hand stayed on the knob. I don’t remember breathing, but I must have, because a dozen songs later, when the DJ’s voice came on to read off the names of the songs, and the bands, and where they were from—England! California! Mexico! Long Island!—I exhaled so completely I nearly fainted. I’d never heard of any of the bands, but rushed for a pencil and paper to write down some names.
The show was two hours long, and I’d missed some of it, but I spent at least ninety minutes practically wrapped around the radio. Critics and parents say that hardcore is just noise, and honestly, they’re right. On that first night, and for many Wednesday nights thereafter, I could hardly tell one song from another, and the DJ never repeated a song. I wrote down snippets of lyrics I could comprehend and even attempted to transcribe riffs that I liked, scribbling down brbrbrbrbrbrbrrrrreeeeng and the like. It was a whole new secret world, populated mostly by guys, doing things all by themselves. They were bored and disgusted, just as I was, so they created their own little kingdom with its own aesthetics, politics, and foreign policy. An aggressive, expansionist foreign policy aimed at colonizing the suburbs where I lived. By the end of the month, I was a dedicated fifth columnist.
The weeks between Wednesdays dragged on. That’s when I took up my hobby of peering in through windows to see how the other ninety-nine percent lived. I suppose I was trying to find a new way to live, or at least a happy family that I could pretend to be a part of. That, and I wanted to get caught doing it, so that my father would wake up, so that some kindly social worker or teacher would take an interest in me. But I was already invisible. One night, instead of listening to Outrage, I decided to try to meet the DJ, whom I imagined to be a boy maybe just a year or two older than me, with a great cockscomb of a Mohawk and long muscular arms. A thin guy, tall too. So I took the bus to Stony Brook, as on-campus parking is terrible, found the student union, and for about an hour before the show started, hovered around outside the door to the station.
WUSB’s studio was on the far side of the corner of the student union, so there was little traffic in the hallway. I didn’t attract much attention. I didn’t even bring a book to read, or a snack, and spent about forty-five minutes silently fuming at myself, my stomach enflamed and squirming, should-I-stay-or-should-I-go arguments won and lost every second. Finally, with a grunt, a man carrying a milk crate full of records turned the corner and walked past me. I got a look at one of the covers, and it was nothing like hardcore. He hit the buzzer with his elbow, and said, “Trevor, let me in.” Trevor was the name of the hardcore DJ—he must have already been in the studio preparing for the show, even before I got there. And there was Trevor’s voice, tinny and distant, saying, “Okay,” then the door buzzed, and the man shouldered open the door and let it swing shut behind him.
I took a deep breath, and pressed the buzzer. I heard Trevor’s voice saying, “WUSB?” impatient and questioning at once, and then I ran from him like a fool.
“What is the sound of one class struggling?” a guy behind a card table asked me as I tried to hustle out of the student union. There were a number of student clubs out that afternoon. Some Hindu cult with a diorama of a lion about to attack a sheep with a man’s face, a number of ethnic clubs and frats, and this guy, who didn’t look like a student. A perennial graduate student, maybe. He was tall, even in his chair, with glasses, and balder than any teacher in my high school. If there was anyone else in his club, they weren’t tabling with him. A sign taped to the edge of the table read red submarine in handwritten black swirls and a number of zine-like pamphlets decorated the tabletop. They were all homebrew jobs.
He handed me one entitled The Tao of Marxism and said, “Interested in overthrowing society?”
“Well, which society?”
“What you got?” he asked, and laughed.
“I’m not a student here. I go . . . somewhere else.”
“It’s okay. We do
work in the community too. And in our minds.” He tapped the pamphlet he’d given me with one thick finger. “The old revolutionary methods don’t work anymore. I mean, look at the Soviet Union, at China.” At the time, I knew almost nothing about either country, except that they had nuclear weapons and were “bad” and the people were poor and had to stand in long lines for toilet paper in Russia, and rice in China. “They’re just the other side of the coin.” He leaned in close. I took a step back. We had opposite ends of the pamphlet pinched between our fingers. “What’s your major?” he asked me.
“Uh . . . psychology?” I blushed hard. I certainly didn’t feel like a college freshman. I wanted to run again, but there were so many eyes on me, or there seemed to be anyway. And I did want the pamphlet. “But I have to go now. Can I just take this . . . ?” I tried to pluck the zine away from him, but he had a well-practiced grip.
“It’s a dollar,” he said. “It’s a Red Submarine pamphlet I wrote. Not to be confused with any other organization on campus, or anywhere on earth with a similar name, like Red Bal—” He stopped himself, probably because my eyes were rolling to the back of my head, caught his breath, and started again. “I’m Mike Schmidt, the leader of Red Submarine.”
“Mike Schmidt—like the baseball player?”
“Yup! Iron Mike. I actually love the Phillies,” Mike Schmidt said, suddenly happy. “Are you into baseball?”
I dug up a crumpled dollar from the pocket of my jeans. Bus fare, plus if I bought his shit I wouldn’t have to talk about baseball. I’d have to take the train home and hope that either the conductor didn’t bother to check for new passengers between Stony Brook and Port Jefferson or hide in the lavatory the entire trip. “Wait, is paying for things properly Communist?”
Mike let go of the pamphlet and smiled a big toothy smile. “Excellent question!” Then he snatched the money from my hand anyway. “The answer might be in the pamphlet, which is now yours to read.”
“So . . . are there even any other members in Red Submarine?”
Mike shrugged. “Sure. We keep the group small, though, to avoid splits and purges. You know, arguments over political questions and disagreements often lead to organizations breaking apart.”
“So you keep yourself a small group on purpose, to not break apart?”
“That’s reverse psychology,” he said.
“Well, then, if I find the pamphlet persuasive, I certainly won’t come back and join your group.” I was pleased with myself for that little rejoinder. Generally, I wasn’t very good at thinking on my feet back then.
“You have leadership potential,” Mike said.
“How did you become the leader of your group?”
“By founding it,” he said, a little abrupt now.
“Just like in China and Russia, then?” I asked, and he frowned. I’d gone a little too far with the teasing, and was growing embarrassed again. I wasn’t here to meet this weirdo, and the guy I wanted to meet was behind a closed door, and his show was about to start. My Walkman had an FM tuner, so I put my headphones on, waved the pamphlet like a goodbye, and tried my best to walk away without rushing. There were free copies of the Village Voice in the vestibule, and I’d never had access to one before, so grabbed one too.
The Tao of Marxism, I understand now, made very little sense. Mike Schmidt was a “freelance revolutionary” and had been since he was a freshman back in the 1960s. The About the Author section was two pages long. The whole pamphlet was only sixteen pages. But in its way it was mind blowing. Mike liked Lenin, which surprised me given his comments on the Soviet Union, and was enthusiastic about what he called “the anarchist Lenin,” whom he found hiding between the lines of several of Lenin’s writings. A lot of the rest of the pamphlet was a rant against traditional leftist organizations—SWP, CP, RCP, RWG, the IS and the ISO, with the ISO being a split from the IS. I was reminded of a microbe budding little O-shaped daughter cells in order to reproduce. Regents-level biology, you know. There were a whole raft of other abbreviations he never deigned to name or even describe. That was all fine and sensible, if poorly written, radicalism, but then there were the last three pages. The revolution wasn’t an event that was going to come; it had already happened. There were a couple of million leftists in the US—anarchists and Marxists and Greens, anyone to the left of the Democrats, basically—and they were all doing something in culture, in industry, in schools. One day, they’d all do the same revolutionary thing at the same time, like iron filings influenced by a magnet, and the revolution, already “both imminent and immanent,” would be complete. All we had to do was join up, somehow. One didn’t even need to be a member of Red Submarine to be a “red submarine,” obscured under the waters of capital, ready to act in response to the revolutionary yang impulse to overthrow the yin of reaction. These were the cadre of the Imaginary Party.
It sounded good. Good enough that when I got home and started flipping through the Village Voice I decided, on impulse, to shave my head. Plus, maybe then my father would talk to me, and my grandma would say something to me that wasn’t about meals or television. I used my father’s clippers, and didn’t clean it out afterwards. I was ready for an infinity of abuse, and I got it. Kojak and Ban Roll-On jokes from the boys, sneers and outrage from the girls. I shut myself away, piloting a submarine in my own belly, waiting for the revolution.
9.
There are almost no girls or women in my life. I had wanted to make friends with that Chelsea girl before she started making out with Greg. After that, I just wanted to talk to her. Bernstein always said that he had almost no other men in his life—in his real life, that is, outside of his busy days writing and responding to letters. We’d found one another thanks to a complex of sociosexual reasons, the demand for yin by yang, and “vice-a-voisa” he had said to me once. Bernstein had a bit of a Queens accent, and years of isolation on Long Island did only a little to dampen it. Only when he was performing a ritual or speaking with his true Will behind him did his voice change, growing deeper, almost senatorial, and the nasal buzz of his voice vanished.
I called WUSB and asked if they had anything by the Abyssal Eyeballs, which was sort of a fool’s errand, since their library was so huge. Then I called the concert line, but it was still the same tape from the day before. There were never too many shows on a Tuesday night.
And then I was at loose ends. For years, I’d been wandering from encounter to encounter, from weirdo to weirdo, hunting for other members of the Imaginary Party, my haircut a freak flag which people could salute. I found one in Bernstein, then he was taken from me. I decided to give Grandma another whirl and planted the painting of Crowley’s Tower card in front of the television. The apartment was only a one-bedroom, so she slept on a fold-out couch in the living room. When she awoke, it was slow and awkward, as if each new day was truly a disappointing surprise.
Grandma’s eyes focused on the painting, as if it were part of the set of Good Morning America. Then she said, “Is it Christmas? Is Jerome coming again?”
“Did he only come on Christmas?” I asked.
“Well, he always came on Christmas,” Grandma said. “His parents were Orthodox Jews. He liked the idea of Christmas, I guess, since it was forbidden fruit for him.” It had never even occurred to me to think of Bernstein as a human being with parents, possibly siblings, with connections to the world other than the ones he had revealed to me.
“When did you last see him?”
“Oh, oh . . . years ago,” she said. “Just before we lost the house.”
“Really?” I wanted to reach out and shake her, to crack open her head like an egg and paw through the stupid goop of her brains for the information. “He was at the house?”
“He bought the house . . .” she said. “He was going to let us stay.” She sucked on her lip for a moment. “But then he didn’t.”
“This is Christmas Jerome you’re talking about. Jerome Bernstein bought our house when the bank foreclosed?”
�
��That’s right.”
“That’s fucked.” So fucked it was hard to believe. Memories drift like ice floes in the dark sea of Grandma’s mind. Sometimes two different ones collide and combine into a new memory of something that never even happened. When Grandma was in her right mind, she hated cursing. Even “shut up” was too much for her. She’d tell me, “Say ‘be quiet’ if you must say anything, because the word ‘quiet’ ends with a smile. ‘Shut up’ ends with a frown.” When I turned thirteen I started saying “lighten up” to her in response, but she never did point out that I was still frowning. She would just frown and wander away.
Now her antipathy toward cursing was gone. “Oh yes, very fucked indeed,” Grandma said. “That’s what put Billy over the edge, I’m sure.”
“Well, why did he?”
“Why did who do what, dear?”
“Why did Jerome buy the house?”
“Oh, Jerome didn’t buy our house!” she said.
“Who did?”
“Billy’s other friend from school.”
“Okay,” I said. “Was the name of Billy’s other friend from school . . . Jerome?” Grandma just looked at me. Sometimes a little presto-changeo like that could help her brain reset, but not this time.
“No, no,” she said. “Jerome is a Jew. This was the other fellow. Billy’s friend from school.”
“The non-Jew,” I said. “Okay, why did the friend who wasn’t Jewish buy the house?” There had to be an easy way to find out who owned the house now. The county clerk’s office or something.
