Long Nights

Jan 16, 2008 - 22:40 PM PST

*Work in progress*

“Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning him-self to let it eat him away.”
-Dickens, Tale of Two Cities.

It felt like there was a flicker or two of hope in the world, the hierarchy of America shifting its butt cheeks around in the galaxy's poshest recliner. The Republicans' stranglehold on third world resources was beginning to weaken; people were talking about "change." A black man was running for president. And a woman. A Mormon even slipped in there, those slick devils, while the Jewish, Muslim, Latino and Asian male homosexuals were left out in the cold. In spite of these unthinkable American happenings, there still happened to be quite a few members of the younger echelons who felt life had gotten worse, who believed the planet was never nearer to its own destruction, and that it was all going to hell so fast that life kind of defeated its own purpose. Unfortunately for the reader, our protagonist was among the sad souls whose destinies had become (and let us pray, temporarily) an entirely passive experience.

Evan was flying off the rails on a locomotive called chaos. He rode an obsidian chariot led by gasping, black stallions with uranium hooves, lashing his whip out at the world like the armored tail of a scorpion. Apart from this, he managed to keep a job as a waiter, to be loved by a wonderful girl whom he did not at all deserve, and to keep himself out of jail and, luckily, alive. If people worried about him, Evan knew they cared, and people were all Evan had going on.

"Leave a message at the beep."
"Bjorn-n-n-n-n!"
There was a click. A sigh.
"Hey, what's up, Evan?"
"Whiskey."
Bjorn laughed his dark cackle of a laugh. He sounded raspy and mean, like a soldier staring down a firing squad after refusing his blindfold.
"Whiskey, huh? Where's this shit going down?"
"At the Come Back. I'll pick you up on my bike right now." Bjorn and Evan both imagined themselves cruising down the streets on the '81 Suzuki, but with opposing emotions.
"Are you sure that's such a good idea?"
"Yeah, I'll borrow Adam's helmet."
"Okay, Cool. Anybody else gonna be there?"
"Anna said she might come by later on."
"Yeah, not if she finds a dyke to bang first."
"Christ, can you talk like that because you're a writer? And she wouldn't be out banging dykes if you'd take her home for a change and pass the dykes onto me; Anna has good taste."
"I'm not a writer yet, and let's drop that topic."
"Agreed, we can talk about it drunk. See you in ten minutes?"
"I'll be ready."
"Peace."


Evan pulled into the parking lot of Bjorn's apartment complex and filled the air with the growl of his engine revving in first gear. Bjorn approached him and shouted over the noise.
"Evan. Turn it off for a second." Evan stared at him from inside his helmet, his eyes searching for meaning. He paused his mp3 player and dropped the bike into neutral.
"What's up? Let's go, get on."
"I was just thinking, man, I've got a bottle of Weller's, here." And indeed he did, right there in his coat pocket. "Maybe we should roll on over to the wigwam and roast a few bowls instead. Start a fire, clear our heads for a change. I'm bored of the fucking bars."
"Yeah," Evan said, "I know what you mean," though he didn't, and would have never agreed had it been karaoke night. "What about Anna?"
"She knows the way, or she can call you and we can meet her at the road."
"Fuck it, man, let's do it." That was as close as Evan came to making decisions. "But if there's spiders everywhere, I'm bailing."
"Spiders don't like fire, man, we'll just get that fucker blazing." Bjorn had caught ahold of something, and Evan was curious where they would end up. He threw the bike into gear and pushed play on his music. Bjorn felt just as cozy on the back of the bike with a giant bottle of whiskey in his pocket as Evan did imagining himself surrounded by big ass forest spiders, but they sped off fast and hard anyway, Evan stretching out the gears and making that sweet motor howl. They knifed through traffic needlessly up and down the hills of the ithsmus through the university housing they both knew by heart, they screamed obscenities at the jaywalkers on State Street and hollered at the girls waiting in line to pay 10 bucks for a martini glass full of bullshit. They navigated the four lanes of University avenue like a frigate on a stormy sea, pouring out onto Park Street at 15 over the limit--that was standard driving practice for downtown Madison, drunk or sober, and Evan loved every second of it. He turned the bike off Park and took a residential road to the edge of the Arboretum, Wisconsin's most prized conservatory, where his friend, PJ, a Hansel of High Life cans with a case-a-day habit, had taken it upon himself to throw up a 12 foot diameter dome made from downed brush. He and his comparatively sane roommate, with occasional help from Evan, had taken up the task with such a fervor that the architecture now included a blind to blend it into the landscape. The hole in the center of the bark-shingled roof was just wide enough for smoke to funnel out, and PJ even built a shelf for his laptop and spread woodchips around the fire pit to suck up the dew.

Evan parked the bike near a house and they both locked their helmets to the frame. They walked quickly across the road and down the Arboretum drive, which closed at sunset, and ducked off onto the first footpath they came across. They found their way through the dark to a boardwalk, where Evan had the bright idea to use his cell phone to light the way. They turned off the boardwalk at a familar tree and headed east, through the loose and muddy earth to the edge of the swamp, coming up on the wigwam faster than they remembered, laughing at how well the blind worked, at least at night.

The crux of the wigwam was a giant maple, which bordered the wigwam's northern facade and snuffed out the view of firelight from the road. It hadn't rained much recently, and the firewood was already stacked and sorted into tinder, kindling and fuel piles by PJ, the fallen boy scout. Despite these luxuries, Evan and Bjorn struggled with the fire until they remembered to blow into the coals, heaving like furious ogres between exhortations and curses. Once the flames took off, they found logs to sit on and busted out the bottle. They had seated themselves across the fire, and they stretched and groaned to pass the bottle back and forth rather than sit side by side, which seemed appropriate for whiskey drinking around an open fire in a nature conservatory at night. Bjorn took a pull and set the bottle near the fire to warm. Evan watched for spiders. They both basked in the quiet crackle of the coals and listened to the frogs finding love out in the dark. Evan, as usual, was the first to speak.

"Do you think we're comforted by the fire because of survival and evolution and shit, or because the whole idea of it mirrors man's soul?" Bjorn laughed and reached for the bottle.

"Probably the first one, but what's this soul metaphor bullshit?" Bjorn knew exactly what this soul metaphor bullshit was all about; it was why they'd come to the wigwam, but he was terrible at patronizing people and Evan caught on.

"Probably both, and you know what the hell I'm talking about, so don't try to bait me into any self-reflection just 'cause we're out here in nature and shit." Bjorn took a big old swig of sauce and corked up the bottle, coddling it in his lap like an infant.

"Look, Evan, we've more than perfected the art of getting fucked up and doing crazy shit, but I can't pretend I'm content with it anymore. I've begun to hate myself for ignoring everything I used to dream about." Evan started laughing.

"Ambition? That's what this is about?" Evan could turn an ideal on its head faster than the Pope, or better yet, make an ideal out of something that was just about the hard facts of life. "Go ahead and publish your shit, then. Submit it to a hundred worthless rags that nobody even reads except a bunch of literary geeks, and maybe you'll get lucky and one of them at The New Yorker will line their hampster cage with your work. It's all a crap shoot, man, and besides," Bjorn was staring at the ground; Evan felt guilty.`"No, no, seriously, I'm not putting you down, man, but besides that, what stories will you have to write without the utter abandon we create when we're all fucked up?" Bjorn had known this one was coming.

"First of all, we should be able to do it all sober, if we have any balls at all, and second, being hungover all the time keeps me from recording it." Bjorn shook his head. "I mean, you majored in English, too, you bastard. What ever happened to your creativity? South America, your uncle's death, you've got a novel already with all the shit you've been through since you've been back."

"Oh, so my uncle goes manic, divorces his wife and kills himself, my ex toys with me for a year and a half, and I should turn lemons into fuck-all and make myself famous, eh? That's your solution?"

"Stop it, you dick. We can't live like this forever, and you know it." Evan managed to fanagle the bottle away from Bjorn with a quick tug of his outstretched ankle. The bottle went rolling through the woodchips and into his clutches. The "ploonk" of the cork helped a man always remember, it was Weller's that was getting him drunk.

"We can't live like what? Like non-stop wrestling matches that end in separation at knifepoint? Screaming obscenities and racial slurs into the twilight off PJ's porch for no reason whatsoever, just because we giggle when we think of some poor fuck who has to get up at six a.m.? What about all the sweet ass vandalism, or drunk driving, you want to give up all the badass shit we've gotten away with? Kerouac was a pussy compared to us, and a dumbass, too, because he thought he could find something in the world greater than himself. We know better already, man, and I ain't saying this whole existentialist jive doesn't get a little circular after a while, but tell me, and I'll honestly listen to you, tell me what the fuck makes more sense than this? I'm rolling a joint, but go ahead and testify, my brother; I'm all ears." There was a twig rolling back and forth between Bjorn's fingers, a dangerous place for a twig to be.

"Let me ask you something: how long has it been since you were excited to get out of bed and start your day?" Bjorn received no answer. Evan was grinding up a bud in the palm of his hand; the silence finally nudged him to attention.

"What? Oh, I dont know, a long time. I could take it or leave it when it comes to mornings." Bjorn scoffed, which he made a point to not often do.

"Mornings? You get up at two in the afternoon. It takes you ten or twelve hours to sleep off all the damage you do to yourself every night. I'll admit, it's a struggle for me to go to work, because I hate my job, but not get up, and if you're so unhappy being alive, why don't you grow a pair and kill yourself?"

Evan was pinching the last particles of weed in the creases of his palm and sprinkling them into the rolling paper. He looked up with a frown.

"You know how I feel about suicide, man. My friend in high school, now my uncle, it's everyone you leave behind to pick up the pieces. I've been there, that's why." Evan lit the joint without inhaling. Once the cherry had taken off on its own, he passed it to Bjorn, who reached out with a groan and nearly dropped it in the handoff. Bjorn lost his train of thought in the process, but one little puff brought it right back.

"So, these people you care so much about, where are they now?" And with the question went the joint back to Evan, who hit it before responding.

"They're back in Minnesota, you know that."

"When was the last time you called your mother?" Bjorn despised the way he heard himself talking, but knew it would rattle his friend, which it did.

"Fuck you, Bjorn. What's this all about, anyways, fucking interrogating me when I thought we were out here to clear our heads and relax?"

"clear our heads, with whiskey and pot? You're fucked, man. You've finally convinced yourself of your inevitable destruction, something that could motivate the hell out of you, and you're pussing out, walking your fucked up version of the straight and narrow, going to bars and getting baked all the time, destroying things for no reason and laughing about it. How many friends do you even have left? You've fucked over or pissed off almost everyone you know, again and again, like you did it by design, and now that I'm the only person left that actually cares what happens to you, and I'm confronting you about it, you want to just hole up like a little bitch and pity yourself."

Evan brooded for a moment, and Bjorn tried to imagine the rationale he would send back his way, but his friend said nothing. He merely hit the joint once more and tossed the roach into the fire. His eyes stayed low, his face was covered in shadow, and Bjorn nearly jumped at hearing his voice come from nowhere.

"God dammit, Bjorn, why do you even care? What difference does it make what I do?"

"Because, you selfish fuck," Bjorn began, barely to believe they'd even come to this point, "there's lots of others just like you and I who are paralyzed by our own knowledge. You know if we'd been born stupid, life would seem a lot better to us, it might even come easier to us, but we're not. We're bothered by the government, by the national police state and the corporate Christians who all work together to make our lives hell and fuck over the environment at the same time. People with no foresight, or no soul to give a damn about what everyone sees coming from a mile away. And we're the resistence, Evan, and they want us to forget that." Evan chuckled.

"This isn't political, you dick. It's a personal problem, and who's 'they'?"

"Are you sure it's not? Do you remember how you saw the world in high school, or, rather, how you saw yourself? I was more driven, more self-assured then than I am now."

"Yeah, but that's everybody; you go out into the world and it bitchslaps all your notions of how it works."

"Or, people like you and I were funneled back into the masses of business majors, chemical engineers, and pre-law assholes so that we lost our faith in the humanity that binds us all together."