EDDIE HAD TO perform all these community service duties before they would let him off probation after burning down the Homes for Disabled Kids. They had him judging the talent contest at Youthvale Community Center now, and that was one of the band names on the list they gave him, Albinos Born Today. They had a lot of different bands signed up to compete. Eddie looked at all the names on the list again. They were all pretty great. Fistful of Vomit, Devil May Care Highway Workers, Slow Moving Stars, Passive-Aggressive Observers, Frank Tribute, Jr. It sure looked like it was gonna be a real good show. Eddie was in his 40s now but still loved a good rock and roll show. He looked about 30 and didn’t remember his 20s or most of his 30s. He sure had lived an exciting life so far, but nothing much was going on just then. He kept waiting for something to happen. Eddie drove his beat-up Cadillac off into the desert in a direction he felt would be safe and got high before driving back in. He sure was looking forward to hearing some rock and roll that night. Coming back into the neighborhood where the Community Center was, he picked up a chick who was hitchhiking and smoked another bowl in the car with her even though it was dangerous. They parked behind some bushes near the Community Center. “So where you headed?” Eddie asked her. “I’m on my way to the Golden Bell Arena,” the willowy hitchhiker told him. “Got nowhere else to go tonight.” She was looking for some action and Golden Bell was the only action going on a night light this in that town demented by its sick love/hate relationship with food, that never stopped building temples to food up and down all its many roads. “I gotta judge this talent contest tonight up at the Community Center,” Eddie told her, knocking out the bowl of his pipe in the car’s pop-out ashtray and reloading it. “Whole lotta bands with crazy names. I could get you in if you’re interested.” “I don’t see why not,” the hitchhiker commented without committing. “I got an ear for punk rock.” “So what do you say?” “Sure.” “All right.” The first band took the stage. Albinos Born Today. It was a bunch of black customers and they were all brothers. One of them had been born an albino and the other three wore powder on their faces and their bodies in a surreal effort to support their brother. The music was edgy, surreal, infectious and poppy at once, like a punch to the gut. “That was great!” enthused Eddie. “What did you think—did you tell me your name?” “I haven’t got one anymore,” the hitchhiker told him, lighting a cigarette and throwing away the match. “I burned my old name along with my old reality. But you can call me Wanda.” “Well, what did you think, Wanda?” “They were pretty good all right.” Next came Fistful of Vomit, a heavy metal combo with a real sense of humor about themselves, followed by Frank Tribute, Jr., an Elvis impersonator in the style of Frank Sinatra who wore a white jumpsuit and carried around a martini glass with his hair swept up in an enormous pompadour, long sideburns going down his cheeks. Things were going along pretty good. Eddie looked over at Wanda questioningly. She was bobbing her head to the beat and her eyes seemed made of ice. O Wanda! thought Eddie. Your eyes are like blue Sno-Cones. Eddie wasn’t a very good poet but her nearness filled him with poetic language. He was glad she’d come along with him to the Talent Show that evening. Maybe he’d get lucky later. “What’s you think of THOSE customers, Wanda!” Passive-Aggressive Observers followed them, a gang of square shouldered keyboard players with very short haircuts wearing identical gray jumpsuits who all wore these little round shades and kept staring around at the room and each other while playing with flat, expressionless faces, mouths slack and eyes vacant. That was a pretty good gimmick, thought Eddie. They were the only band to make Wanda smile all night. Eddie realized their whole demeanor might have been some sort of post-modern joke, but they came on so serious. Maybe that was the punchline. Maybe they’re making fun of disabilities or something, thought Eddie, who had once burned down some homes for disabled kids by accident himself. Customer, what a sick, sad world it sometimes is, he thought. He’d been caught in the undertow long since and maybe he’d never get out. Did anyone ever get out? Eddie wanted to be the first to do it. He never meant to hurt those kids, he was just being stupid lighting hair spray on fire and using it as a blowtorch one teenage night. A lot of kids go through that phase. Now he was the one disabled. Locked up in a cell with some dirty magazines and dreams and the occasional sawdust and shredded newsprint cigarette. Some of the dirty magazines got him high when he smoked them, something about the kind of ink or some other printing chemical. It wasn’t like the old days when you knew for sure what you were doing to your mind and what your mind would do about it. He kept trying and sometimes it worked. What he missed was the old days but he really wanted new days more. Was there a way to make better new days or did you have to take what came no matter what? Just one more of Eddie’s self-defeating, complicated wonderments. Did they make him a genius or an idiot? He kept going on to the next place then on to the one after that. Was time passing? Was he really even moving or was it all stagecraft moving around him as the fixed point? Was it all an illusion? Eddie gave Passive Aggressive Observers the first prize that night and drove Wanda the rest of the way up to Golden Bell Arena after locking up the community center. “Thanks, mister,” she told him, hoisting her bag on her shoulder and setting off into the wasteland of new unknown nights. “You take care,” said Eddie. He let out the throttle and rumbled away in his dirty old beater. The moon was coming up and he could see a cactus on the horizon that seemed to be holding up one of its curving green arms and giving him or the whole world the finger. Eddie pulled over, got out of the car and took a small hatchet out of the trunk. He stood there for a few minutes holding the hatchet and looking at the ground. He took a few steps in the direction of the cactus before turning back and putting the hatchet back into the trunk before slamming it and driving away.
Zack Kopp holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and blows a blue harmonica. You can find his frequently-updated blog at www.campelasticity.com and all his books at Amazon. His latest work of fiction, Main Character Syndrome, was published in Feb of 2024, and a collection of interviews, essays, and commentary called Rare But Serious was just published. Kopp lives currently in Denver, Colorado.
