You Gonna Bark All Day Little Doggie, Or Are You Gonna Mourn The Passing of an American Legend
I always take off work the week of the fourth of July. I never actually celebrate the holiday. I dislike the government, got too much cool shit to embrace anarchy, so my politics are complicated, but more than that I really have no love for fireworks. This strange quirk makes me an oddity among the Koweski clan. My brothers love explosions more than the IRA.
The youngest Koweski, Alex, keeps a stockpile of fireworks all year round, and he doesn’t need much prodding to launch a show. Sometimes, a good meal or just getting home safely from work is motivation to launch a thirty-minute display. A mid-September visit with me, the oldest of the four, is reason enough to set off two dozen red apple artillery shells in the back alley a quarter to midnight while we’re drinking Okocims and eating brisket in his garage while listening to Wheeler Walker Jr at maximum volume.
With the fifth or sixth percussive blast, I innocently remark “I bet the neighbors love you.”
Alex fixes me with his jailhouse stare. He stands in the alley, screaming streaks of fiery sparks shooting up behind him. There’s a slab of brisket in one hand, a Polish beer in the other and a Juggalo jersey in between. He rips off a chunk of brisket and chews, says “what the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, it’s near midnight on a weekday and you’ve been throwing M-80s around for two solid hours.”
“So? Am I not free to do as I like? Fuck those assholes. That motherfucker ain’t got a job.” He points at a duplex two houses down and works his way across. “He don’t work. That guy don’t fucking work. That motherfucker ain’t got no legs… he ain’t working.”
Their wives probably gotta get up and go to work pretty early, I think, but I don’t say anything. Alex has a head full of steam and bad intentions. As if to prove a point, he continues his fireworks show another hour and scarcely puts a dent in his inventory. At some point, a neighbor from the next street over drags a few cakes out of his garage and launches his own barrage into the starless sky.
I didn’t see one police the entire night. And that’s The Region.
The next morning, Alex wanders the neighborhood alleyways under the guise of walking his dogs. The pockets of his cargo shorts bulge with M-80s. What he likes to do, when he sees a burn pile in someone’s backyard, he’ll hop the fence and hide a few M-80s among the rubbish. And that’s Alex.
So, when I think of the fourth of July, my youngest brother immediately comes to mind as someone who truly relishes the day. I celebrate the birth of my wife, born on the third day of July, and we tend to celebrate the entire week. Since work has been trying for both of us, we began the festivities by lounging on the couch, watching television. Since she refused to watch Night of the Creeps for the three hundredth time, I’m forced to cave in and watch her choice which turns out to be three fucking seasons of Discovery of Witches or some bullshit like that. It’s basically Outlander crossed with Charmed with a healthy smattering of Interview with the Vampire, so it definitely doesn’t reinforce my fragile masculinity. To make matters worse, it stars Matthew Goode. This legally comprises torture. They want to sell Matthew Goode as a viable leading man, but he comes across to me like a skeleton dipped in a vat of pretension. He’s the worst actor working in the business. And don’t come at me with those supporting roles in Watchmen and The Look Out. I could have performed those roles with equal panache and I don’t even have hair on my head.
So, I’m watching Matthew Goode’s stupid, pinched face mugging through some time-travelling vampiric witchery crap when I discovered on social media that one of the truly great actors of my generation, Michael Madsen, passed away. Sixty-seven years old. Considering how rough he lived, not a bad run.
The first place I lived in after leaving home, I had one framed poster hanging above the bed. It was a print from Reservoir Dogs. Michael Madsen as Mr Blonde standing over a prone Steve Buscemi, both of them pointing guns at each other, only one of them looking like they were truly born into the life.
Michael Madsen’s effortless brand of cool was a vibe I aspired to attain for myself. Even before Reservoir Dogs, I remember seeing him in The Doors movie back during my senior year of high school, back before it became considered a comedy, back when I was deadly serious about leather pants and concho belts. Madsen’s small role as Jim’s buddy, the actor Tom Baker, had all the earmarks that characterized his acting career spanning three-hundred-some-odd films, from the peaks of Donnie Brasco through some lesser entries like Cobragator.
I’ve surely not seen every movie or television show he’s appeared in, but I’m comfortable enough to say I think his best role was as Budd in the Kill Bill movies. Man, I wanted to be that guy, and I was old enough to know better at the time. I tried to imitate him as well as I could with what I had. My hair was a bit too thin to pull off a convincing mullet. My kids were young enough to ask too many questions if I wore a gold-plated razor blade around my neck. I had no dwarf friends, no vendettas against steely-eyed, samurai sword wielding women. Only thing I could do was wear a bowling shirt and talk in a slow drawl which quickly got on everybody’s nerves.
But there was one intersection in the lives of Michael Madsen and I and that was poetry. We certainly shared a love of writing doggerel poetry that no one respected. I mean, we both had our literary admirers. For Michael Madsen it was Dennis Hopper and David Carradine. For me, it was a buddy out in Colorado and some other dude in New Mexico. Neither one of us let such a thing as lack of talent or the inability to utilize metaphor to get in the way of putting words on paper.
Now, there’s some Matthew Goode fans out there who would make the point that Michael Madsen wasn’t a very good actor at all. That he made his living by repeating the same tough guy persona from one movie to the next. To that I say, so fucking what. You know, Nick Cave is my favorite singer/songwriter; I’m not gonna dock him any points because he never released a polka album.
That said, I read where one of Michael Madsen’s greatest regrets was passing on the opportunity to play Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction so he could play Kevin Costner’s brother in Wyatt Earp. I’m not certain Madsen would have done that role any justice. I could not envision him convincingly giving a shit about what a quarter pounder with cheese was called in Amsterdam, you know?
Anyway, that’s my tribute to Michael Madsen, a dude so cool I wanted to be him. Maybe I tried too hard and ended up becoming The Polish Hammer, a man who’s pretty cool but not cool enough to star in the non-porno version of Free Willy.
Meanwhile, Alex, wandering the back alleys of The Region is more Michael Madsen than Michael Madsen, himself.
“You hear Michael Madsen died?” I text my brother, having drank a shot of tequila in honor of the man.
“Who’s that?”
“Actor. Mr Blonde in Reservoir Dogs. Beyond the Law. Jimmy the Gent in Hell Ride. Species. Piranhaconda?”
“Was he in Sons of Anarchy?”
“What? No.”
“Then I don’t know him.”
“You know, there’s other shows than Sons of Anarchy.”
“That could be, brother, but I don’t fucking watch them.”
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
