SoMa Literary Review - If You Want to Know about Society,Hold Your Breath for 30 Days

If You Want to Know about Society,
Hold Your Breath for 30 Days

By Jon Alan Carroll

They were drinking at their usual dive, Decrepit Joe's on 11th, when the wheels started falling off. After a good dose of the beer that made Milwaukee nauseous, Mal told Link he was giving up music and getting a straight job.

"Bad idea," Link said. "Maybe your worst idea ever, Socrates."

"I'm done with retail serfing," Mal said. "I'm 32 years old and sick of starving."

"Don't even think about it," Link said, consistent with the fact that he was a militant bohemian and tattooed to the point of unemployability.

Link then launched into a two-minute spew about worshipping the monkey god and meter-maid morality and the Department of Human Administration Bureau and Boomers in Minivans and WalChrist at GodMart and wolfing down the corporate dogshit like the winner of that hotdog-eating contest on Coney Island.

"Funny," Mal said. "I'm really gonna miss you after I kill you."

But when Mal got back from Decrepit Joe's that night, there was a letter stuck in his bent metal mailbox. The letter said his birth certificate was protected by a court order.

Mal's future employer, Bio-Kleen Industrial Solvents, wanted an original birth certificate, so he ordered one. The hospital was just supposed to mail him a copy, not send weird letters.

He called his mother and asked her about the court order. She said to come over tomorrow night and they'd talk about it.

The old Sunset neighborhood was headed downhill, but his old house looked about the same. The iron couch, the Mess-Master carpets, the Spackle on the ceiling. Mal wrote his first song about Spackle, so he pretty much blamed it for all his problems.

Mal and his mother sat down at their old kitchen table. With her big hair and slender face, she looked about the same. Maybe a couple of new wrinkles.

"Look, Mark," she said, "I'm just going to tell you. This is going to be a shock, but you were adopted by Steve. Your biological father is still alive."

"Andy - your dad - was a good man, very smart," his mother said. "But I got pregnant, so he quit college and got a job at the gas company."

"Then they drafted him and sent him to Vietnam. He never came back to us."

His mother reached in her purse and handed Mal some large bills. Andy Metzner at the VA hospital in Sacramento," his mother said. "Go visit him. Go see for yourself what they did to us."

It was the first time he'd ever seen his mother cry, so he stuffed the money in his pocket and pushed the questions out of his brain.

Mal found a Motel 5 a few exits past the hospital in Sacramento and paid cash for two nights.

The VA hospital was Eisenhower green and easily one of the ugliest buildings he'd ever seen. The guard told him the psych ward was a locked facility and Mal needed to get permission before visiting.

The hospital guard escorted him to an office with four metal desks.

Dr. James Perotti looked Mal over and said, "Yes, your mother said you'd be coming." The doctor was a stocky man with Army-regulation eyes and black plastic Army glasses.

"There are a few things you should know, Mr. Sorbell," the shrink said. "Bad things happen in war. Sometimes, a latent mental illness can arise under extreme stress, such as combat."

Dr. Perotti spoke with the All-Knowing Administrator voice, so Mal drifted off and stared down the hall. The hospital floors were polished, but the walls were scruffy and painted several colors.

"Mr. Metzner's diagnosis is paranoid schizophrenia, chronic undifferentiated type," the doctor said. "I'm sorry, but his outlook is extremely poor."

Dr. Perotti walked Mal over to the nurses' station. The doctor turned to Mal and said, "You should know there are genetic elements in this disease."

A nurse buzzed the door open and walked Mal down the hall. The visitors' room was dim and messy, as if the authorities were losing a guerrilla war against chaos.

"Hello," Mal said, "I'm your son, Mark Alvin. Call me Mal."

His father nodded and shook his hand as if he saw Mal everyday and it was the most normal thing in the world.

They talked on and off. His father had a brother in SoCal and his parents had died several years ago.

His father would be about 55 now, Mal figured, but those must have been some long, hard miles. His father had a three-day stubble and dark-side craters under both eyes. His shirt was buttoned in the wrong holes.

The old man looked at Mal's ink and asked him what he did.

"I'm mostly about my band," Mal said, "Blunt Object. Our songs have been on the radio a few times, but it's all corporate cornpone now. We've done a few recordings on the Abandoned Meatball label."

"Meatballs have no natural enemies, except man," his father said.

Mal half-laughed and said he was quitting the band to take a sales job, figuring his father would tell him to do the practical thing.

His father shook his head. "You're just digging under yourself," he said. "Let me tell you something, Mark. The world is nothing but bullshit. It makes no sense. The cheap crooks in black suits that run the world fill the air with their lies and noise and bullshit and gibberish. That's how they keep control."

His father's voice popped and cracked like an old cassette tape.

"It's all money spinning around and around," his father said. "The money's in charge and the people sacrifice themselves to it. All the people who get up early in the morning and fight the traffic and cry in the bathroom."

"And they tell me I'm insane," he said. "Maybe I'm right and the world is wrong."

Mal stared at the man he now knew was his father. He didn't know what to expect, but this sure as hell wasn't it.

"Me, you, we're all apes on some little shitball planet," his father said. "The world's wrong, so I stay away from the money machine and the evil technocratic overlords."

They sat and talked for another hour, but his father started looking tired and drifting off. Mal said he'd be back tomorrow and his father asked for some Camel Filters.

Mal drove back to the Motel 5 and walked up to Room 1019. He turned on the remote and flipped the channels. He was going to do pizza and TV that night, but it looked like the Motel 5 didn't even have cable.

He walked back to the Monte Carlo and drove around until he found a sign that said BAR. It was the usual no-name blue-collar place, homely and homey, pool tables, deer heads, beer mirrors and John Deere hats.

Five vodka gimlets later, Mal felt a lot less tense.

Mal had developed a firm, philosophical basis for his drinking, which Link called Stoic Hedonism. Yeah, Link. Pretty funny for the guy voted Most Likely to Become a Rampage Killer in high school.

Mal walked over to the jukebox and pushed some money in. He scanned the songs and it was all country-pop, jazz-pop, rock-pop, pop-pop, all down-by-the-old-mainstream music that made his ears glaze over. Every song a four-minute marketing plan with fake emotions and a borrowed beat.

Mal stood there, stuck at the jukebox. He'd already put his money in, and sure, that had been a mistake, a poor strategy, but now he had to choose. Mal's taste was so fiercely obscure that playing anything on this jukebox would be physically painful.

An apparent blonde walked over to the juke and asked if she could play something. He said sure and she smiled up at Mal and said, "Ain't you a long, tall glass of water. We don't usually get drunk hipster goofballs like you in here."

Mal fell asleep at his usual time of three am.

He ate breakfast the next afternoon at a place called the Burger Barn. The waitress gave him a little wink when she brought his omelet. "You're not from around here, are you," she said.

Mal finished his breakfast and drove over to the hospital. The guard checked his ID again and made him sign in.

The nurse took Mal aside for a moment after she buzzed him in. She was a mama-looking woman with a kind face. Her nameplate said, M. Ruport, R.N.

"Mr. Metzner isn't very lucid today," Nurse Ruport said. "He's escalating. I'm guessing this visit isn't going to go very well, but talk out on the patio if you want to. He's in Unit 5B."

Mal wandered the halls and found Unit 5B. It was a drunk and disorderly unit, with three unmade beds. The walls were blank and the room reeked of sulfur and old men.

His father, still in his robe, was slumped on the edge of his bed. He nodded vaguely and introduced Mal to his roommate Gerald.

Gerald, an old guy with splotchy skin and hair the color of a dishrag, looked up from his newspaper and said, "Don't forget to tell him about the evil technocratic overlords. And the gyrosquirrels."

The patio was a cement cellblock surrounded by walls and dead oak trees. Mal handed his father a CD and the two packs of Camels he'd picked up at the Sacramento Shoppe.

"Here," Mal said, "This was our first CD, Hash Oil and RootBeer Popsicles. But that was our stoned surrealism period and we're way past that now."

His father stared at the ground and rolled his eyes around. His hair was uncombed and his robe looked like a museum of stains and holes.

There was something whirring behind his father's eyes, spinning like a hamster wheel or a car tire stuck in the mud.

His father opened the first pack of Camels and lit a cigarette. "I am not crazy, he said, "I am a man."

Mal said, "Where did you go to school?"

"See, I'm a make-believer and a disbeliever," his father said. "I smoked Camels back when I was in the Crimean War."

"So tell me about Vietnam," Mal said.

"You got the wax," his father said, "and we've got the frogs." He stomped out one Camel and lit another one.

They sat and said nothing for several minutes. Mal noticed one of this father's legs was shaking under the patio table. "If you want to know about society," his father said, "hold your breath for 30 days."

Mal leaned back and watched his father smoke. At the rate he was smoking, those two packs of Camels would be gone in an hour.

His father winced like someone was smacking his skull with a tack hammer. His left eye began to twitch.

"It's a crime to be sad and this is my punishment," his father said. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

Two packs of Camels later, something was squeezing his father's head and strange strings of words were popping out. "Streetlight, cornstarch, man of a thousand apes," his father said. "Harry Truman Capote. Here in the frying pan."

Nurse Ruport was right. This visit wasn't working out.

"I have to go," Mal said. "I'll come back when you're better."

Mal went out to the car and drove back to the motel. He'd thought it would get better if he got a straight job, but now he knew it would never get better. Even if he got away from all the cheap apartments and mattresses on the floor, this was fucking it.

He checked out of the Motel 5 and filled up the tank. The traffic was slower than gangrene and thicker than a triple cheeseburger.

So Mom and Dad kind of forgot to mention the madman in the basement for 30 years, he thought. They were so busy, she had to pick up the dry cleaning. It just slipped their minds.

The traffic opened up a little. Mal saw his chance and took it.

Several months later, Mal and Link were weighing their options back at Decrepit Joe's.

"We're screwed," Mal said. "Dead meat."

"Flat-out fucked," Link said.

Their album, Gyrosquirrels and the Evil Technocratic Overlords, was a complete disaster. Spoonfork liked it, and the bloggers said it was their best work since Hash Oil, but only eighty people downloaded "Money and Lies" and only one guy-one guy-bought "The World Is Wrong." It was a new low, even for them.

Their guy at Abandoned Meatball sent a letter saying he was sorry, but he wasn't running a charity and screemo/death-trance was never going to catch on.

The next step down from a micro-label like Meatball was the car trunk.

Two office-casual guys were sitting at the bar, talking shop and sports and hardeharharing. The guys were Boomers in Minivans, working hard to alleviate the shortage of American assholes.

"Those marketing fucks are ruining this fine, sleazy bar," Link said.

The BiMs started dumping dollars in the jukebox and playing take-me-back anthems from the Days When Rod Stewart Ruled the Earth.

Link and Mal were allergic to Bronze Age dreck and decided to leave. That, plus they were out of money again.

Mal and Link walked out to the car and Mal pulled into traffic. He pushed in a CD mix of all the other screemo/death-trance bands that never caught on, like Green Death, the Living Dogs, Telecaust, the Grateful Dead Kennedys.

Half-drunk, Mal waited for the green light. He probably had enough gas to get home.

Also by Jon Alan Carroll on SoMa Literary Review:

Fresh, Bloated, Decay, Post-Decay, Skeletal [Dance Mix] & The Big Empty Thing

Jon Alan Carroll is a fiction and humor writer. On the Web, his work has appeared in Opium, Defenestration, Unlikely Stories, and will be forthcoming in Monkeybicycle.
In the print press, his work has shown up in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Oakland Tribune, the Santa Cruz Sentinel, Silicon Valley Metro, magazines such as Harpoon and The Nose, and micro-press journals like Poultry, No Xmas and Cathedral of Insanity.