Last Gig

“Womb-envy?”

He is struck with the familiar doubt as to whether his guitarist's repetition of these words contains a dry rhetorical incredulity inviting further elucidation, or if it is merely the easiest-parroted phrase from his lengthy and verbose preamble, a demonstration of the bewildered half-attention to which he has grown accustomed. But, undeterred:

“Womb-f*****g-envy! A complete inversion of the Freudian concept. Penis-envy is too absurd and perfectly wrong to be anything but the exact opposite of the truth. And womb envy accounts quite elegantly for the genesis of such an idea. Think about it; penises are wonderful. I'm thoroughly stoked to have one. Aside from peeing standing up, though, what is there to be envied? Whereas the burden and privilege of inculcating life inside one's abdomen, to bear and excrete a coherent body-and-soul? What greater thing can a human do? Nothing. Nothing! Hence art and architecture and war and weapons and science and religion; Wordsworth and Hitler and Jesus and f*****g Pericles! All the historical and fictional figures and recorded and recordable moments of Literature and Recorded History, that is, everything that we wrote down and remembered from the inception of Patriarchal Rape Culture down to yesterday's Predator Drone Strike, all a direct or just-barely-indirect result of those twin desires to overcompensate for our masculine inability to gestate life and to straight up destroy that which our Mothers have borne before us and which our wives and sisters bear in front of our eyes...

“That's why it pisses me off to hear women b***h about the pain of childbirth. As if the physical pain makes it not worth doing. As if f*****g pain makes the best thing any human can do a terrible f*****g burden. It's such a perfectly feminine way of spitefully rubbing our faces in their inescapable and abject superiority.”

He stops, blinks self-consciously, drags on his cigarette. He is not sure how a train of thought with such admirable shades of neo feminism led him to such a moment of misogynist resentment. More so, though, he is proud to see the contradiction for himself before his friend can mention it in rebuttal.  He keeps talking, but his friend isn't really listening, anyway, and by tomorrow it will all be forgotten.

…

The next morning, he is in line to buy black market cigarettes at the bodega across from the good one, where the egg-and-cheese heroes are cheesier and less frequently overcooked, while the grill-man of the latter prepares his breakfast. Behind the elevated counter, two brothers, presumably the young sons of the owner, placidly share a bag of Cool-Ranch Doritos while absorbed in the small screen of a Gameboy gripped in the hands of the younger. He can almost see the translucent, phosphorescent motes of artificial-flavoring on the fingers and lips of the older brother as he guides another chip into his mouth. Hunger, he reflects, is a fact of life. Humans cannot be trained to be hungry, nor made immune to its call. The subtleties of stimuli associated with its satisfaction, though, are burned indelibly into the subconscious mind during youth. The overwhelming saltiness, the chemically pungent tartness of the approximated ranch flavor, doubtlessly engineered by well-paid scientists in a laboratory inside the sterile, gleaming viscera of some mammoth, windowless structure among identical mammoth, windowless structures nestled behind razor-wire-topped chain-link fences in a fortified compound outside a decayed American backwater before being harrowed and perfected by dozens of bored and desperate focus-group responders, the grist of their surveys milled into data points about preference and reported instances of gastrointestinal distress which allow the scientists and their executive-marketeer masters to expertly balance the explosiveness of flavor and diarrhea and maximize the addictiveness of the cheap, pressed triangles of post-industrial corn byproduct; these exaggerated stimuli will reverberate back and up through the young boys' obsolete survival instincts and inculcate a lifelong desire to overwhelm hunger with insane distortions and magnifications of the flavors available to their ancestors. Trained addicts from the cradle, not necessarily addicted to the more obviously psychoactive crutches of drugs and alcohol, although quite possibly to those, too; but, inescapably, addicted to buying something to satisfy each and all of life's hungers, be they novel or familiar; addicted to laying the twin sacrifices of Spirit and Intellect upon the sticky-sweet altar of Instant Gratification; addicted, above all, to addiction itself. He sees all this in the twinkling eyes of two boys eating Doritos. He shakes his head, moves to the front of the line, buys his slightly-cheaper cigarettes, and goes out the door to retrieve his sandwich across the street. It should be done by now.

…

Back home, he reaches through the grille of the iron gate of the basement apartment to unlock the handle as he has done since he lost his keys some months before. He calls out a monosyllabic, catchphrase-like greeting to the guitarist and the bass player to announce his arrival, stomps the snow off his boots, shifts the black plastic bag of sandwiches from hand to hand as he removes them, and walks through the short entrance hallway, where amps, speakers, and instruments lay packed up against the wall, into the kitchen-and-living-room where the bass player sits on the dingy, yellowish-green couch, bent intently over the drummer's laptop. He hears the guitarist in the shower as he enters the room, tosses one of the foil-wrapped sandwiches onto the couch and places the bag with the remaining sandwich onto the wing-back chair in which he will sit and eat. He hears the mumbled thanks of the bass player as he crosses to the filthy coffee maker next to the refrigerator, which bubbles and hisses with the steam of spilled water trapped underneath the pot. He rinses a stained mug perfunctorily and fills it with the thick, black coffee, rancid-tasting because the pot and plastic filter are dirty and excessively bitter because he always uses too much of the cheap, canned coffee grounds to make it. He asks the bass player if he has heard from the drummer, careful to omit the name of the other singer, at whose sublet the drummer has slept the night before as he has almost every night in the preceding weeks. They are both overly loud and excessively jovial because it is a bummer of a morning and spurious joviality is their shared favorite refuge from the chronic melancholy which plagues them both. Apparently the drummer and she will be there soon, they have slept in but would be back in time to help load up the van so that the five of them could hit the road and make sound-check after the five-hour drive. He makes room for his mug among the trash, ash trays, and paraphernalia atop the stained coffee table, removes his own sandwich and a wadded handful of napkins from the plastic bag in his chair, and sits down upon it. He hears the shower cut off as the bass player drags a window with a list of sitcom re-runs from a website that illegally aggregates pirated television shows and makes them available for streaming from the laptop onto the large flat-screen TV; following a brief negotiation regarding which re-runs have been re-watched by each of them most recently, they settle on an episode and begin to eat their sandwiches. The guitar player, having dressed fully in the bathroom after his shower, emerges and grunts a good-morning. He hasn't picked up a third egg-and-cheese because the guitarist doesn't want one.

…

The sandwich wrappings have been balled up and added to the trash pile on the coffee table when he and the bass player hear the clang of the gate and the violent throwing open of the inner door which herald the drummer's arrival.  The guitarist has gone into his bedroom and shut his own door after a couple minutes of watching the sitcom distractedly in order to strum repetitively on his unplugged electric; the metallic, spastic plucking is barely audible over the comfortingly snappy dialogue of the sitcom.  The drummer walks heavily into the room and asks where the guitar player has gone, in spite of the habitualness of this particular form of retreat. Either he or the bass player responds that he is in his room, playing, after a brief hopeful moment of waiting for the other to answer first. The drummer asks where the van is parked, and whichever hadn't spoken before tells him that it is right out front. The drummer informs them that the other singer is hung over and still getting ready; they will pick her up after they've loaded the gear into the van on their way to the BQE. The drummer picks up the van keys from their place at the top of the stairs and turns towards the door, grabbing a first load of musical materiel and going outside to start loading up, quite pointedly not asking for help in doing so. He looks at the bass player in profile after the drummer has left the apartment; the former is once again absorbed in something on the computer screen in his lap. A draft of frigid wind blows through the already-cold air of the poorly insulated apartment from the still-open door. The bass player suddenly snaps the laptop shut and announces that he has decided to take a shower, after all, and goes quickly into his room and shuts the door. Unlike the guitarist, the bass player always disrobes completely and wraps up in a towel before going to bathe.

With an inward sigh, he looks for a moment at the closed door, and then gets up from his chair, walks out to where he has left his boots by the door, and bends to pull them onto his feet. This done, he turns to pick up the heavy bass speaker which he knows from long experience must be packed into the van first in order to fit the band's full complement of gear. The drummer re-enters briskly; he has not washed since the night before, or, if he has, not thoroughly, and for a moment he can smell the other singer's p***y upon the drummer's breath and fingertips on the crest of the slight breeze he creates by coming through the doorway. He is choked for a moment with a fiery desire that somersaults quickly into loathing. He struggles to maintain a neutral face as he meets the drummer's eye and grunts a non-committal response to whatever friendly platitude he has just uttered. A shared joke, no doubt, that used to be funny, before. As he follows the drummer out to the open tailgate of the van under the heavy load of the bass rig he realizes that he will never forgive him, her, or himself for this one moment; that the combination of this accidental exposure to that most intimate of odors, juxtaposed with the image of the post-coitally self-satisfied smile on the drummer's face, has ceased to be a moment of sensory perception among other moments and become a Moment that instantly and simultaneously flows backwards and forward through time, annihilating intention and perceived need and redefining years of effort and shared struggle, shattering painstakingly wrought reason and rationality with one instant of sheer intuitive certainty. He sees this in himself as if in someone else's mind, as if it is the thought process of a man in whose consciousness he is a guest, one who can bear witness with interest and sympathy but then bid farewell, above, outside of, and immune to the consequences. This time, when the drummer makes another friendly joke upon shoving the speaker into its place in the back of the van, he smiles, abstractedly but without effort. For, even though there are several more shows to do in the coming weeks; even though there are untold hours of compensatory and exaggerated hilarity followed inevitably by dark, Byronic brooding through which to suffer; he understands that, in this moment, for him, it is over.   

Reviews

[Bright Ocean Star]

Thanks for sharing this story. I like the detail and the imagery, you put us right there in the apartment, and I even like the different rants from womb envy to postulating in detail how ranch doritos make their way into the world. It was very entertaining!