I like the girls with black paint in their hair and tattoos of dogs fucking horned skulls on their arms.  I stand here all day making coffee with bandaids on my fingertips and I think of spiking each pot with Clorox and I’d be sure to dump half a fucking bottle of that shit into the Decaf because fuck you.

I like the girls that go into the woods at night with a boombox and a fifth of jack and a twenty bag and they lure highschool boys into the forest with them and only the girls come walking out with red all mashed up under their fingernails.

When Davey dies they’ll make me manager here I know it.  And it’ll be goodbye trailer trash, goodbye pizza faced midget, goodbye fat Abercrombie skank, goodbye tall college fag, goodbye black eye bitch, goodbye bad times.  And I’ll hire everyone that looks and thinks and works just like me.  And when they let Josh out of jail I’ll put a screwdriver right into his throat, make him die right on the donuts, because he had to know they would make me take all his shifts while he was gone.  They make me do everything.

I like the girls that look right in my eyes while I’m pouring their black coffee and in them I can see fingers breaking and bombs goin’ off in hospitals and people folding in on themselves and fire on top of skeletons and piles of human teeth and myself.

Back into the forest and back into the forest and back into the forest, because you thought you were lost brother but now you’re in the forest. And no wind and no bare skin and it ain’t gonna rain. Crying glory to the sky because you’ve kissed prison food goodbye and said why hello there to hospital meals. Oh hold me still in the forest and I want to hear that voice, that Billie Holiday thunder rolling out across the lake. Keep your hands up, show the scars and don’t be afraid and don’t be ashamed and don’t take shit from nobody. Glory glory glory. Ragtime celebration in the forest. Kiss me with your eyes open when you come to set me free outside the county jail gates. There is love in the forest and there is fire coming and it’s one and the same.

Smoking before going to pick up your pay check: there is an off chance your boss will ask you to drive him to the trailer park to see if an employee is home from jail yet.  While waiting for him in your car you may see a little boy dressed in a skeleton costume mercilessly beat a cardboard box with a wiffle ball bat.  You may then see his little sister emerge from the box smiling ear to ear.  Your boss may then return from the trailer and regale you with his theories on the state of America as you drive him back to the coffee house.  He might tell you that you are both very lucky because you live in the land of opportunity and everyone deserves a fair chance to carve out a spot of happiness for themselves.  Frank Sinatra will probably be playing much too loudly on the stereo the whole time because you are too stoned to turn it down.

After picking your sister up from the airport I realize she doesn’t curse by the fourth time she says “heck”.  She’s talking with her hands and moving the hair out of her eyes in equal measure as I squint through the salt fogged windshield of my car.

She talks about going to Cornell and I reminisce about the time I had spent in Ithaca probably before she had even finished highschool.  I mostly talk about my favorite pizza place even though my most prevalent memory is of driving to Ithaca from the neighboring community college, high on acid that we had taken on sugar cubes, and shooting bottles rockets into a gorge while doing lines of Adderall off a Captain Beefheart record.  I keep that memory to myself.

She tells me that Buffalo is the second largest city in New York and I nod like I already know that.  A couple blocks from your apartment and “Mr. Jones” by The Counting Crows comes on the radio.  She starts to sing along quietly, sweetly, and completely without hesitation.

What the fuck?

Becca woke up hungover on the first day of the year to find seven dead birds outside her bedroom window.  She could see them neatly circled on the frozen lawn like a ring of roses.  For the past week it had been like this.  First there had only been a single bird, but each day their numbers increased by one. She drank black coffee in bed and observed them silently while a cold wind made the trees outside her window dance slowly.

When the sun had reached a calm gray zenith in the sky she pulled her combat boots on and went into the yard with a trowel in hand.  She sat in the circle of birds and drew her knees up to her chest and watched her breath in the air.  They looked hopeful, like they had opened themselves up to something big and inevitable before freezing that way forever, never able to close their wings around anything.  Their eyes were closed.

Becca knew that someone was probably responsible for this.  Maybe an old lover had noticed she had moved back into her parent’s house and was trying to scare her or even excite her.  They had all eventually revealed themselves to be crazy enough to think that way.  But was that it?  She thought she could remember hearing about something like this.  Some kind of disease effecting whole species of birds here or somewhere else in the world.  But she couldn’t remember if that had just been in a movie or on the news and the fact that she could not remember this made her feel very alone.  The perfection of the ritual seemed inhuman, something old and quiet and scary.

For the last week her father had been disposing of the birds in some undisclosed manner.  But today Becca stabbed her trowel into the cold ground and dug until her hand was numb.  Each bird got it’s own tiny grave, just below the place it had come to rest.  She had bits of dirt and blood under her chipped black nail polish as she lay each one into the shallow ground.  

The first bird made her think of how long it had been since anyone kissed the nape of her neck.  Two years she thought.

The second bird made her think of her driver’s license photo.

The third bird made her think of the scar that started at her ankle and ran all the way up inside her thigh. 

The fourth bird made her think of the blackboard in her highschool chemistry class, the way it always looked so dirty, and the way her arm would raise at every question, trying to reach higher than the other students.  The look on her teacher’s face when he called her name stayed with Becca.

The fifth bird made her think of how many days she had spent entirely in bed wrapped around someone else.  She guessed ten.  She felt warm for a moment but then it passed.

The sixth bird made her think of letters from her brother overseas, pictures of him holding a machine gun and pictures of him in uniform at a dance.  She had stolen one of the pictures, spent a long time looking at the girl in her brother’s arms, and then scrawled “YOU’RE FUCKING A SOLDIER” on the back of it.  At first it made her laugh but then she started looking at it compulsively everyday and she wasn’t sure why.

The seventh bird didn’t make her think of anything.

When Becca was done she sat once again in the circle of birds, now nothing more than tiny piles of earth.  Her nose was running and her hands ached.  She felt a growing sense of panic.  What if this kept going?  What if tomorrow she woke up to find eight birds?  What if she woke up one morning to find enough to circle around the entire house?  But what if she woke up tomorrow to find nothing?  The thought terrified her: an empty lawn, an empty house, an empty room.  No more birds. 

I spent a bad night in a bad room downstate in New York with an unfortunate girl of mine.  It was Christmas Eve and I thought with a little money and a little more of her skin in the moonlight we could make things work.  But she was already asleep and singing to her bad dreams.  And I pulled her skinny long legs out of her jeans and left her heavy in a pile of blankets made out of saccharin with a kiss on her knee caps and lipstick on her lips.  My money and my dope were like a gun I didn’t know how to fire.  I had so much to say about love and so much to say about the future.  But there was blood on my hands and I was so far away from home.  So I went to bed and dreamed of blonde girls and water choked trumpets and records that skipped just long enough to say “You’re the one”.  And when i woke up in the morning the bomb had dropped and I put the pieces back together like a burning jigsaw puzzle.  

And, oh sweet jesus christ, I love the beginning.  

We lost KC to the unlit rehabilitation centers of Pittsburgh.  We lost Ben to the young unwed mothers of Brooklyn.  We lost Bobby to white hot machete tips giving birth to hash fumes in the haunted kitchens of Endicott.  We lost Nix to an Atlantic that swept him out to sea 43 times before never giving him back again.  We lost my brother Thomas to sainthood and happiness and protest marches in DC.  We lost Quint to identity theft in a Boston brownstone.  We lost J to dreams piled on top of dreams piled on top of dreams piled on top of dreams on the launchpad of Elmira.  We lost Gretta to a HOMERUN full bases return to Cortland where she kicked the habit, spit in Satan’s face, and let her belly swell up.  We lost Rainy to survivalist tattoos, a terminal heart, and raw need in the summer heat of Atlanta.  We lost Ken to bullet riddled martyrdom in a town without a name.  We lost Maria to gorgeous ghosts and humans just pretending to be ghosts in the ruins of Syracuse.  We lost Eileen to the future and that bleeding American sadness in the uncompromising architecture of Chicago. We lost Davis to professional drunk driving on the well kept tracks of San Francisco. We lost Sabrena to a very bad place known only as “The Jungle”. 

I lost myself to dumb fucking optimism on the frozen pavement of Buffalo, counting the stars, spun out on too much coffee and stolen anxiety Rx.  They found me in the spring.  I didn’t ask who was left.  They just put me in a limousine and fed me 30 second clips of my own past from tiny green bottles.

Rainy, you hardcore bitch.  Who sharpened the knives of your silver smile?  When the paramedics pulled you out of the metal and fire I bet you were laughing and running your hands across all their faces.  I bet you fought off every doctor and every nurse that tried to take a needle to you.  You had an evil heart but it belonged to you and no one else and when that flatline started to ring I bet it was still yours.

They couldn’t keep you down.  Everytime we thought the impact had finally claimed the last bit of breath out of your body you would shake awake again.  Everyone there said they’d never seen anything like it.  You just wouldn’t let yourself lie down in a hospital, would you?  They found you trying to tie the bedsheets into a rope before that cold wind blew over your skin again and the lights of your eyes dimmed.  You decided to finally die as long as you were in the middle of an escape attempt.

We were never good to you, but you never let us.  Every one of us knew a different version of you.  I still have scars across my shoulder blades from you.  I still have letters from you that I’m afraid to open.  The very last one claims to have been sent from “My Violent Tongue”.  We all betrayed you and you returned the favor.  It was never going to stop but it was all part of loving you.  The way you used to cry wasn’t the war baby, it was the weapons.

So I’m calling bullshit on this.  I’m calling bullshit on your casket and your funeral and your neat little plot.  I know you can come back again, you were too fucking electric with anger to stay dead.  So I’m going to sing, and all you assholes will too.  Stand up and sing this with me because I’ll be goddamned if she’s really gone and she’ll know the song.  Sing:

Stagger Lee met Billy/ and they got down to gambling/ Stagger Lee throwed seven/
Billy said that he throwed eight/ So Billy said, hey Stagger/ I’m gonna make my big attack/ I’m gonna have to leave my knife in your back

Mom made some audio recordings of herself for Dad when she knew she didn’t have much time left.  He didn’t even know.  We found the tapes six months after she was gone and mixed them with some fucked feedback Michael had been recording using his amp like a cheese grater against his Stratocaster, while Ike attempted to press his fingers through a broken line of synthesizer keys.  At first their band was called “Ill Crucifix”, then it was “Mt. Fuck”.  I would occasionally scream into a piece of plate glass they had attached a contact mic to, because as the youngest brother my voice hadn’t broken yet and they liked the way it sounded.  After we brought Mom’s voice into the mix we just gave the band her name, “Eloise Lee”.

Most of the recordings were memories my Mom had of early dates with my Father.  Moments in their first apartment.  Memories of my brothers being born.  Memories that were uncomfortable to listen to.  But some were fairly plain in comparison.  Grocery lists read in her soft voice.  Detailed schedules that had long ago passed.  A catalogue of the food we all did and did not like.  Just Mom stuff.  We used all of it.

Mom’s voice was still there but it bobbed up and under on a jagged static sea.  The sound was red and it was hungry.  Jabs and squeals of electric metal that pierced through her gentle words.  Michael set up a good loop that consisted of a whirring synthesizer tone bleating continuously while Mom spoke to my father endlessly.  “I love you, Warren”, over and over and over, now she loved him forever.  There was something ugly about the whole thing.  We split it into four long tracks and wrote “Eloise Lee” on the CDR.  We left it on the kitchen table.  We wanted Dad to find it.

I was the one that caught him listening to it.  Michael and Ike were out with their girlfriends or something and I walked through the front door of the house sopping wet from a stormy walk from the bus stop.  Dad was in the den kneeling in front of the biggest speaker in the room, rocking gently back and forth.  The sound we had made was deafening.  It filled the room like stinging antiseptic white light.  It hit like a series of concrete walls falling one after the other, audible layers of needles heaving themselves down onto my father, the coffee table, the futon, finally breaking into pieces at my feet.  My father was at the forefront of the noise.

Over everything was my Mother’s voice, simple and clear, reciting a grocery list.  “Toothpaste, hand soap, ginger ale, canned soup, Warren’s special coffee, fruit snacks, pizza sauce” her words sounded like a trumpet call.  My Father reached feebily toward the monolithic speaker, literally trying to reach in and pull her simple breath out of the noise.  The track ended with a long contact grind scoring my Mother simply repeating her name again and again.  “Eloise, Eloise, Eloise”.  Her voice was miles away, living in a bad place now.  My father kept reaching for it like the stereo was a veil he could pull her back through.  But her voice was something robotic, a ghost we’d taken ownership of.  We buried my Mother’s voice in a place he could never bring her back from.

On the third date I was accidentally tortured.  Before we went out for coffee she said she needed to “pick up some money from a friend”.  We parked in a part of Buffalo that looked like metal teeth.  Her friend lived in a house that used to be white and as we walked to the front door she warned me that her friend’s roommates were “a little weird”. 

Things happened quickly but from what I could gather a good amount of drugs had gone missing at some point during this monetary exchange and I looked reasonably guilty to the roommates.  My date ran out the front door as a man with enormous holes in his ears yanked me towards the bathroom.  He had a tattoo on his neck that looked like a pentagram with Mickey Mouse ears.

Waterboarding is a process in which the victim feels as if they’re on the verge of drowning.  This is accomplished by placing a towel over the person’s face while pouring on a steady stream of water.  My Grandfather was a compulsive liar but he said it was a method he used often in Vietnam.

Halfway through the waterboarding I realized I had peed my pants and that Abbey Road was booming from the living room stereo to mask the commotion.  Even though the “weird roommates” kept screaming “Where’s the molly, Green Sweater Faggot?”  while the bath tub faucet poured over my face I could still hear the pop and hiss of the Beatles album.  Then the record got stuck in a strange little groove.  The final track of the record is called Her Majesty and it starts with a noisey instant crescendo before becoming a simple and short love song.  It’s less than a minute long and the record player kept bouncing back and forth, spitting out a jarringly sweet trumpet call followed by a tongue tied valentine.  Again and again and again.  I wasn’t sure whether it was John or Paul singing but I was sure I was going to die. 

A cellphone rang, the drugs had appeared somewhere else in the city, and the faucet was turned off.  While I puked water onto the bathroom floor the large roommate clapped me on the back and explained that he was pretty sure I had been innocent the whole time. 

They handed me a 16 oz can of Red Dog, ten bucks, and a heartfelt “no hard feelings” before pushing me soaking and shaking into the streets of Buffalo.  My date’s car was long gone.

Four months later at my nephew’s baptism I hummed Her Majesty to myself and thought about the Beatles and Yoko Ono and every dumb love song I’d ever heard.  After they forced me to get born again I could barely understand the point behind it all.  So many safe love songs.  I drowned just to buy a redhead a cup of coffee.