War Is Language : 101 Short Works (9781937316044)

by Jones, Nath

  Anyway. Steve Cohen says when writing this kind of essay, “Whenever possible, kids should stay away from the 3-Ds—death, disease, and divorce.” I don’t see why. It’s like you’re supposed to prove your worth and inner fortitude by talking about shit that doesn’t matter at all. I mean, yes, good, great, awesome: I was captain of the lacrosse team. Who wasn’t? Do you care? No.

  The point is, last year, on the day that my mother and father were both killed in a head-on collision while coming home from the dissolution hearing that ended their marriage, I, having recently been informed (two hours previously) that I was now head of household, received a phone call from my extended family’s internist who went into great detail about my grandmother's imminent demise.

  I didn’t want to step up. What the fuck? But the doctor’s sense of urgency moved me, and—given the gravity of the situation—I felt strongly that Grandmother should not hear about the extremity of her diagnosis over the phone. She turns her ringer off during Wheel of Fortune anyway so calling her wasn’t an option.

  I couldn’t drive over to Grandma’s to inform her of the dire situation as the family car was totaled. In fact, after being described in a police report and being photographed by the insurance agent, the gruesome mangle of crunched plastic and metal was still being hosed down so it could be towed off to the junkyard after the (Awful! Pitiable! Just terrible!) wreck that killed my parents.

  Usually I just let Grandma watch her shows. I don’t go over there. Why would I? But. Come on. She had a right to know what I knew after the doctor told me what was going on with my family that was so quickly falling apart. So. That day, instead of forgetting about my grandmother and biding the allotted half-hour during which Wheel of Fortune airs, instead of chatting about the rather widespread use of inhalants, I got on my bike and headed over to her house.

  I read online that, “According to a 2002 AARP report, approximately 50 percent of grandparents live more than 200 miles from their grandchildren.” In our family, on average, the distance is 780 miles because there’s so much circuitous evasion and avoidance between my parents’ and her place. That day I settled for less than average, made a beeline on my bike, and it was closer.

  By the time I got there, she was dead. I wasn't sure exactly what to do. The coroner's cell number was in my phone from the events of the morning. I sent him a text asking if he wouldn’t mind to swing by, pick her up, and drop g'ma over to the funeral home, too.

  It was a tough day. I'm not sure why it makes me want to go to college or why I'm sending this essay to your particular institution of exorbitantly expensive secondary education, but I guess I just feel like maybe I can hang out with the cool kids there, drink some beer, and hopefully get to use your quantum harmonic oscillator sometimes.

  3 — Labor Movement

  Big Business is like, "Be grateful for your paycheck. We could be in India, you know." And The People are like, "Fuck you. You're not going to India. Give us back our benefits."

  Big Business is like, "The hell we won't go to India. We're already in India. We just haven't shut down our U.S. operations yet, because you're not the only patriotic ingrates.”

  And then The People are like, "Patriotic? How are you patriotic when you don't even ride on the fire truck down Main Street on the Fourth of July anymore? Symbolic imagery is the only thing that matters.”

  And then Big Business is like, "I'm the lifeblood of this economy! Why should I have to do a big charade on national holidays just to prove myself? I don't like fire trucks. They're loud. Swirling lights make me nervous. I had a bad experience at a rave once in the '90s."

  So then The People say, "You expect me to feel sorry for you? Why don't you overcome your stupid irrational fears about swirling lights and get over being traumatized. It's not like that bubble only burst for you."

  "That bubble? There were like three! In a row! I'm totally shell-shocked. And God knows what’s about to happen with commodities. On top of that, Jesus, look at what's happening in Europe. You’re one to talk about irrational fear.” Big Business takes a silent non-transparent moment in the black box then comes back with, “Why do you want this job anyway? Take a risk. Figure it out for yourself like we did. We weren't always this big, you know."

  The People fly into an uncontrollable tizzy. Cops get up and go to their lockers for riot gear. "A risk? Seriously? How are we gonna take a risk? We’re just supposed to rail against the Man. That’s you. You’re the Man.”

  Big Business, who still hates loud noises, says, "I can force the issue if you want. You'll have no other choice."

  There is a skirmish. It is unclear who might pin the other. The cops do their best/damnedest while being demonized/glorified.

  After a while the two parties grow tired, bored. The People finally say, “Yeah, I guess you're right about nationalistic pride. It really is self-defeating. Fuck it. I don’t really care that there are jobs I don’t want because I’m not trained to do them. I short-sold my house anyway so I’m coming with you to India. But. Fuck. You’d better get me one of those hot towels from first class. Bring it back to my pre-negotiated-metasearch-OTA-cut-rate seat behind the wing where I'll be listening to electronica and breathing exhaust for the next eighteen hours straight.”

  73 — Bad Person

  Dear Fake Advice Columnist,

  I tried to talk to my mother about her life, but I didn’t feel like listening. Do I have to?

  Dear Bad Person,

  No. And I’ll tell you why. I’d much rather you help me listen to my mother. I called her up about a rhubarb cobbler. She kept going on tangents. Telling me how she planted the rhubarb too deep, how she couldn't bring the dogwood from Pittsburgh, how rhubarb doesn't grow well in the shade. I tuned in and out. Hearing only, “… and then I thought, ‘Damn,’ and moved it." But if you had been there you might have heard the rest.

  She told me all about the new yard somewhere. I know it was the town where I was born, but otherwise I don’t remember where she lived. How the sun beat down on the garden, how the limestone dust billowed over from the quarry nearby, and how she had to subdivide the rhubarb some years and double dig it every spring.

  I fondly recall my mother’s regaling me about oxalic acid in the leaves and how she got the rhubarb plants from the neighbor who originally wanted to kill her rhubarb in Pittsburgh. (This woman had an irrational fear of her little girls’ chewing on the poisonous leaves.)

  "And it thrived in the brutal Midwest sun and under the limestone dust from the quarry.” Then she started on the rest of the garden. (As if I cared.) I can still hear her saying how the ageratums have taken over, but she says she’s encouraging the rhubarb even though it has a new enemy down here due to the slight difference in the thermocline.

  85 — Content with the Status Quo

  Dear Fake Advice Columnist,

  My husband is having an affair, and I’m so relieved. I was getting really bored fucking him the same way every Friday. I’m really glad someone else has to do it for a while. The problem is my friends think I should give a shit and stage some sort of intervention. I’m really not sure why. I mean he pays the utilities. Lots of times he gets milk on his way home. And it’s not like she’s pretty. I’m busy with the kids and exhausted. Frankly, I like watching Law & Order reruns in the evenings alone. Is there some way that I can just ignore this and not lose the respect of my children and friends?

  Dear Content with the Status Quo,

  What you need here is a lifelong state of denial. If your friends know that you know about your husband’s affair, then you’ll end up being peer-pressured into exhibiting the necessary moral rectitude.

  Try to show up with your husband in public places where he can then slip off to the cloakroom with his lover right under your nose. When he slips away, start talking to the people in the main room about how good your husband is to you, how much he loves you, how devoted he is—shit like that.

  After a while the tragedy and inherent heartbreak of the
situation wherein everyone else is aware of the affair but you are projecting a sense that you are unaware to preserve and prolong your ability to watch Law & Order reruns may run afoul of their sense of duty. Never let this happen.

  If they feel the right thing is to tell you what is going on, then you’ll be right back where you started in that position of having to demonstrate a passable degree of self-respect on behalf of your children. We can’t let that happen. So go ahead and let everyone hate you a little bit for no reason. Or. Better. For good reason. Be slightly irritating, fairly obnoxious, overbearing, somewhat annoying, less than courteous, and, of course, bossy. Let your entire social circle think you deserve his cheating on you. Let them think it’s funny, that you’re getting your just deserts. You’ll never need a DVR. Good luck!

  5 — Imported Silk Wedding Veil in the Kitchen Trash

  Beach does not wait. On a brisk early fall day it crawls up out of Great Lake water and reaches toward Chestnut Street pulling behind it its blue train, the soaked horizon, as though a well-dressed stroll up that Magnificent Mile—lit by high-concept storefronts and LED trees—might be possible. Gorgeous, the blue roils, consuming Chicago, and then the lake demurs, receding, pulling back, and assuming again its unawareness of having reached the definition—the limit—of those trucked-in, morning-raked sands, those concrete walls committee-planned by civil engineers.

  Earth slips out under those waves, hollows itself in support of them. So what if there is an end to waters? It’s just perception. Not anxious only, not deferential, only, but also with respect, with propriety, with the simplicity of physics the waves pull back as much as they charge forward to claw at the skirts of the skyline. But the plan has that arm’s length reach factored in. The presumption is these are big discontented waves. So if calm will not hint at all that lies sleeping under that beach’s safe home sky, then where the water abuts a futile desuetude the disconcerted lake-end bashes against solidity, throws up confetti-white spray for edge-wary runners who trust in things like urban planning and put less faith in wildness.

  Surge after surge the heedless lake tosses momentary veils skyward, like so much dried lavender, cloud showers for the cement cracks to catch and drain back. Those lake waters heave toward the river of headlights, while beach sand kneels in submission, in rage, in contempt, in futility outside the windows of The Drake.

  The city ignores this constant body in motion, or tries to, making lists, making calls, making it home in time for dinner, making that careful thirty-five-mile-per-hour turn with forty-five-mile-per-hour braking hands at two and ten and so many offensive drivers’ eyes going forward toward goals harbored with resentment, bitterness, distrust, and fear, yet, every one impossible to yield in compromise. The drivers talk, talk, talk one-sided in those hands-free-equipped cars. The words, babel chatter over songs on the radio, over baby screams from the backseat, over commuted dreams, travel as fast over unseen infrastructures as over those most concrete. Chips of cell phone conversations: Must. Do. Get. Have to. Home. Need. Be there. You’d better. First. And to really make the point, sometimes every single one of them says, “I’m on The Drive,” which means, “You have to do what I say or I may just lose control of this vehicle, right now, and die.” So swerve the talkers, driving insistent. But that lake, beach, dried lavender sky-break repetitive surging veil allows no dismissal either. You’d never recover from the guilt of not submitting to this opined whim. Even in the fastest afternoon traffic that whips around Lake Shore Drive’s S-curve, during conversations where demands are made and fixations asserted willfully as irrefutable facts of what momentary existence should be, apparently a sort of convicted refusal, those thrashings of waters on the kneeling beach enter their peripheral steering awareness. But the beauty is a threat. They will die, surely, if they look long enough to perceive it.

  Sun skips the lecture. The drivers are already closer to home but The Drake, the curve, the beach, the waves stay right where they are. Lest the September beach-walker be forgotten, without faith or grace someone manages an end-of-season last chance at a good weather barefoot walk. There is no Tibetan spaniel. And it’s almost as if that lone individual didn’t even bother to project any emotions at all upon his or her surroundings. What would be the point? Waves are water. Still. There is a smitten moment clung to and claimed able to combat winter’s coming eulogies. Even though there is no real way the beach says, “Roll up your pants. Go ahead. Get in,” feet are invited into the water somehow, as eyes penetrate what becomes the depths further from shore. Surface and substrate are so close to closure where the inch of weedy residue floats above the intrepid walker’s wiggling toes, so curious, happy. You cannot walk to Mackinac from here. But you can take one step, maybe two, and so yes, ten too-cold bare toes wander out past the man-made world and get to that modulate edge, where sand, waves, and broken-hydrogen bonds rub up and down, back and forth, against the city’s particulate air perpetually, sensually, seductively, and become waters unbound, and might stay that way, droplets forever, if not for so many rules of order. Surface tension coheres all that heave-heavy wind-wave upforce that crashes down as if to please one life.

  57 — Doc

  Dear Fake Advice Columnist,

  Sometimes I want to be objectified by men, but I’m sort of embarrassed about it. I stand in line, in a swirling crowd, my mind sedated by the white noise of a juice blender, and I wonder: Is there a way to be young again and reclaim my Doc Marten-wearing, angst-ridden, teenage years?

  Dear Doc,

  The thing is you’re an old hag. What are you doing comparing yourself to these new cocktail-dress-wearing twenty-somethings in their cute coming-of-age outfits? Don’t.

  6 — Saucony After Adidas

  Ernestine took her pants off and sat on the foot of her bed in the lamplight staring into a brand-new running shoe. The interaction from the night before replayed in her mind. He had asked, “Do you want to fuck?” because he had to have her consent. She hadn’t answered. Just went through the motions, let him get off, and got a cab. But. Holding that shoe the next day she wished she’d said, “No, I don’t want to fuck. But if you can seduce me and keep a straight face about it, I’ll suck your dick for the rest of your life.”

  She loved new running shoes. Such detail. So much careful engineering. So many design elements. Thinking of the great remnants of culture across the ages, she thought of time and this shoe. Carved alabaster? No. Great pyramids? No. Maybe the Bonneville Salt Flats.

  He was like, “So you are a stuck-up bitch.” She turned the shoe over. Looked at the sole. Lasting legacies and tributes to the prowess of human endeavors? Well, no. She stared into the heel cup, relishing the turquoise satin, the turquoise felt, the impressive duotone font of the decal, the recessed wording around the heel, and the bold empowered name of the shoe itself. She flipped the white leather and turquoise-detailed thing over again in her hand, felt the laces, could almost see light through several layers of synthetic mesh.

  Sitting there on her bed she thought of the future—the sweat bound to escape that loose weave, grit, mud, sand, and soggy filth from inevitable puddles. He wouldn’t hear her footfall against grass, asphalt, cement, even against the tops of picnic tables in desperate need of paint jobs, across hoods of cars, across marble plazas, down lakefront sidewalks and hilly rooted paths in the forest preserve.

  But he might call again. Carefully, she folded back the tissue paper, placed the shoe in its box.

  77 — Escapist Pleaser

  Dear Fake Advice Columnist,

  I mainly cave to external pressure. I like the idea of someone loving me for me, but it seems like a lot of bother to go to all that effort of disarming oneself, of recognizing the defense mechanisms, of filling in moats, coming up from dungeons, dismantling stockades, moving obstructive piles of rubble, and paving the way to my happy furry greeting card heart with something other than land mines.

  I mean, no one’s vulnerable anymore and having to give a shit about som
eone else in real ways seems so, dunno, trite, maybe? Like maybe humanity is done with love. Don’t you think so? I do. It’s time fear and rage have another good turn in the spotlight. You know? Power. Domination. Control. That stuff’s awesome. Why disarm at all? You’ve got to pounce on another person and take away their sense of security and personal pride. Humiliate them into total submission. Really show that lover who’s boss.

  And why not? I’d eat docile popcorn for that. But then I get super confused about how I’m supposed to have someone love me for me unconditionally or whatever. So. I guess my question is, even if I pull someone’s hair and scratch up a few backs, what kind of intoxicants are most socially acceptable so I’ll be able to coast through life without awareness since it’s unlikely I’ll have any real satisfaction, fulfillment, or happiness?

  Dear Escapist Pleaser,

  It depends. From your letter I can’t tell if you’re a man or a woman. And it matters. I know lots of women use the historically male escapes of drinking, gambling, drugs, and promiscuity. Whoopee~! They’re all liberated now, you know. But there are not very many men who find relief from themselves by making their grandmother’s chocolate pudding for the lady down the street when she’s in hospice care for cancer of the jaw.

  9 — Be Where

  Be where the life runs solid—not like whey protein isolate—but where Weights and Measures get conducted through ceramic-insulated copper wire as an invalid warranty, as electric-wire arsenals carry speeds of light after the installation of 44,000-V, XLPE, CSA, and PE sheathed underground cables. Be where domestic silenced biodiesel, natural gas, clean coal, and tapped core-of-the-earth heat carries cash to dissipate fuel on a prerun accounting calendar with easygoing beta carotene repeats and sun damage specifically designed to excel what’s piled up on recalibrated local roads for metadata blasting hip-flexor bronco-buck-monkey-minded citizen-athletes.