Tag: fiction

            I rather insufferably considered myself a thrift-store record aficionado back in 2011, at age sixteen, having reached the high point of adolescent insufferability, I guess, when you need to create what you consider a sophisticated persona to differentiate yourself from what you consider the cultural lamestream engulfing you.  In my case, as with many other people of whatever age, I collected, sold, and pontificated upon obscure, decades-old consumer items that the lamestream had once considered beneath notice but now slavered over as the epitome of, to use the cool spelling, kewl.

            So one afternoon back then, while rooting through the vinyl at Pearl’s Thrift Shoppe, searching for my specialized genre, Eighties hard rock (the cheesier the better) I could sell on the Internet, I found a sleeveless seven-incher: fair to good condition, plain white label, “Masturbating Rhythm,” presumably the song title, printed all in caps in a smeary black font, no other information, no label or song on the B-side, probably from sometime before the Eighties or even before the Seventies.  Or maybe even before the Sixties.  Though a prodigious amount of the rock I enjoyed dealt with sexual topics in a somewhat overt manner (to say the least), I’d never seen any record with “Masturbating” in its title.  Ordinarily, I would have purchased such as unusual release, only forty-nine cents, but—I don’t know, maybe I’d considered that single too unusual, too antediluvian, too un-kewl by Internet standards.  By the next day, when I’d changed my mind and returned to Pearl’s, the record had disappeared, though I did find the self-titled debut album by Mascara, VG+ condition more or less, ninety-nine cents, an album I eventually sold on eBay to some guy in Santa Fe for twenty-six bucks.

            As for “Masturbating Rhythm,” I’d forgotten about it until the 1/6 Trumpnoid rampage at the Capitol a decade later (Capitol Records, yeah), when I guess I needed to distract myself from the live streaming coverage.  So I Googled that release but turned up nothing.  I even went on Bing, with the same results.  No one anywhere had written about the single, offered it for sale, or uploaded it.  However, I did discover that it most likely spoofs “Fascinating Rhythm,” an exceedingly old-timey song (from early last century!) by these guys named George and Ira Gershwin.  And thus the search ended, due to my sudden craving for alcoholic beverages.

            Perhaps on this, the one-year anniversary, I’ll resume my “Masturbating Rhythm” search or listen to “Fascinating Rhythm” or both; or I could turn my Pearl’s encounter into a bittersweet memory, the record that got away, giving myself substance, I guess making myself more impressive to my fellow aging collector geeks and to young hipster chicks with daddy issues.

Copyright © 2022 by David V. Matthews

January 2, 2022/January 5, 2022

Turhan Bey Fan Club (2021)

A familiar sight during my childhood: my old man in his shirtsleeves, slumped over the kitchen table at night, beer bottle in hand, complaining to Mom about his day, specifically about the employees at the department store he manages, about the customers who try to rob him blind, about how no one appreciates what he does, much less deserves it—complaining in that tone, equal parts grandiose and self-pitying, that makes me grind my teeth into nubs as I lie on the living-room carpet, in the adjoining room, watching TV.  I’ve just turned twelve.  Mom, of course, sits next to him, not saying a word.  His performance goes on so long, I imagine visual clichés from those old movies she loves: hands twirling around on clocks, pages flying off the calendar.

Finally, the usual crescendo of his complaining arrives.  He asserts he’s done everything he could, and what more can he do?

“Killing yourself would help,” I mutter, softly enough for my parents not to hear; otherwise, either of them, or both of them, would have leaped up, run into the living room, and commenced their usual disciplinary method of beating me in a whirlwind of slaps, punches, and kicks.  I’ve never said anything like that about my old man before.  For a few moments, I feel guilty.  “Ha ha, how fuckin’ embarrassing, right?” I say seven years later when relating this anecdote to my fellow soldiers in the jungle in Vietnam, causing them to go into detail about the butt-kickings they’d endured as children.  Laughs all around, drawing us closer together.

Copyright © 2021 by David V. Matthews

Do you remember Mad magazine? You might have read it as a kid. Lots of kids used to read it. But I didn’t. Growing up during the Nineteen-Seventies, I read a competing humor magazine called Loony, essentially a blatant imitation. Instead of Don Martin, Mad’s Maddest Artist, they had Pete Zukko, Loony’s Looniest Loon, who drew similar comics complete with capsule-headed, floppy-toed characters and even the same type of sound effects—SKRUNCH, FLABADORP, BLIPPLADEEBLIPBLIP. Instead of Spy vs. Spy, in which one pointy-nosed secret agent would elaborately, if bloodlessly, murder another, they had Spookorama (spooks as in the slang word for spies), in which one potato-nosed secret agent would elaborately, and gorily, murder another, limbs and intestines flying toward the reader like some two-dimensional three-D movie. Instead of the Fold-In, they had the See-Through; rather than folding in the inside back cover accordion-style, you’d hold it to the light, and the outside back cover would shine through, creating a new image that would refer to some current celebrity or pop-cultural property. Et cetera. I knew Loony was pretty much a ripoff, but I didn’t care. I preferred reading it because it was also an underdog. Or because everyone else preferred Mad, and I felt like indulging in contrarianism. Or both.

■

A few casual Fridays ago, Zach Breen, that nose-pierced, nineteen-year-old temp in the processing department, walked up to my desk, wearing a black T-shirt with a color photo of Angela Lansbury’s disembodied head on it, above the words WRITTEN IN BLOOD, in blood-red. “Like my shirt?” he asked me.

I nodded out of politeness.

“It’s about Murder, She Wrote.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You ever watch that show?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Me too. I watch it all the time. That show fuckin’ rules, man.” Pointing at Angela Lansbury: “She’s the biggest serial killer ever.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s the one who murders someone new every week, then frames someone else for the crime.”

“Don’t the people she accuses of murder always end up confessing?”

“She’s hallucinating that they do. She’s that fuckin’ insane.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe? Come on, think about it. If your grandma, like, kept runnin’ across dead bodies everywhere she went, wouldn’t you start to get suspicious?”

“Yeah.”

Pointing at Angela Lansbury again: “Plus she’s a widow, and she prolly killed her husband, too, before the show began.”

“Yeah.”

“Though I guess if you’re an old person, killin’ people would prolly be way more exciting than, like, playin’ fuckin’ bingo. Unless you killed ’em during bingo.”

“Yeah, that would—”

“B-7. I-25. N-44 Magnum!” He turned his hand into a gun, the muzzle consisting of his forefinger and middle finger, and pretended to shoot at me. “Bang.”

Copyright © 2021 by David V. Matthews

As you get older, you can suddenly start remembering strange stuff. You can’t remember what you had for breakfast, but you can start remembering strange stuff. Strange, sad stuff. So anyways, it’s my first day of school, at a new school, fourth grade, 1971. Half a century ago. It’s recess, and I’m walking through the playground by myself, a playground that looks like the Dust Bowl from the Thirties? No grass, just bare dirt? Plus some gigantic rocks, almost like the boulders Wile E. Coyote used to try dropping on the Road Runner in those cartoons on TV? Anyways, I’m walking along by myself, getting the feel of the place, when someone kicks me in the butt, a bit hard. I turn around. The kicker, a big kid I haven’t seen before, big in all directions, probably the school bully, says, he says “Shakespeare, kick in the rear!”

Well, the best I can do thinking quickly, I say, I say “Your mom eats dick.” I have no idea what that means, pathetically enough, only that it’s bad. The bully punches me in the face. I fall on the ground. I can’t resist pissing him off more. “Your dad eats dick, too,” I say. I thought I’d really get it now. Instead, the bully laughs and says “Yeah, he does. But my mom don’t. Remember that.”

“You bet,” I say.

The bully walks away. He doesn’t bother me again. A week later, he leaves school for good, for some unspecified reason. The adults, they won’t go into detail about what happened. Adults never tell kids anything. It’s rumored—well, it’s the most popular rumor—that the bully went to juvie ’cause he beat up this three-year-old boy so bad, the boy almost died. Plus the three-year-old was retarded. Adults really hate it when you beat up the retarded. So anyways, the bully disappears, and soon everyone forgets he ever existed. Including me. Until now. I Google him, with no results. Then I call myself a retard for still caring about that loser. Then I watch some Road Runner cartoons on YouTube and really feel like a retard.

Copyright © 2021 by David V. Matthews