Der Subübermensch

I sit at a pine table listening to a retro ‘50s hand-holdable radio try to work out a melancholic oldie through hiss and feedback. I like the sound. Everyone else hates it. I can’t say anything. I’ve got my sweatshirt hood up almost over my shorn head. The hood’s tucked behind my ears. I’m wearing a pair of wraparound shades that someone left on the table. I’m doing nothing but drinking and wearing my hood and these dark sunglasses. Suddenly, they’re critiquing my silence. I’m even wearing sunglasses so no one can see unconscious sarcasm in my eyes. I’m trying to disappear, listen to what’s being said. Not even that. I’m trying to get drunk, see if I can shut up, see if I can shut out everything without closing my eyes or stuffing my ears with firecrackers. I’m sitting there getting drunk with sunglasses on and my hood up and tucked behind my ears at the sides as they tell fishing stories about reeling in huge sunfish on three-foot plastic rods and I’m almost achieving a divinely detached and aware silence—albeit inebriated—when suddenly I’m attacked for looking like the Unabomber.

They’re like: Now he’s trying to play himself off as the Unabomber! I’m getting dizzy!

There’s nothing I can do. I take off the sunglasses. I reveal my reddening eyes. I unhook the hood from behind my ears, expose my shorn hair, finish a can of beer. They’re silent, for a moment, so it’s time to drop a bomb on them. It’s expected. I fill the silence:

“Allow me to wax pathetically about my internal struggles.”

Once I told Crowley while getting drunk one twilight after work and listening to all the new fall music, I said something like you can hold this against me later but right now I am so confident in my abilities that I would welcome an incredibly harsh critique so I could incorporate it and prove to myself and the critic alike that I am impenetrable. This was a while back. He disagreed with some of the fundamentals of the arguments I imagined him to support. But then I read him his arguments back to him as I imagined them after he spoke the same thing I had written. He thought I should revise his dialogue. But then I reread the part where I wrote that he would suggest revisions.

He was aware that I would turn my reading of one of the stories to him into one of the stories. He said I would write about the fact that he was aware that I would write about whatever he’d say in response to the reading. Which isn’t true. I’m just writing it now to show how writing fiction that loosely includes friends who are aware of their characterization is dangerous. When I start busting drunken chaotic licks, they see me as someone speaking into his own ears. It’s not conversational, it’s improvisational. Not talk, performance. It seems like I’m dictating something that no one’s transcribing. It also ups the ante of the talk. They’re dizzy because how do you respond to something like what I just said?

And then that incredibly harsh critique arrived unexpectedly in slapstick. It’s not as easy to lasso and wrestle and pin down, not a rational plan of attack I can slash with a tongue-machete. It’s a catchphrase. And at the end of the night between three thirty and six in the morning, when everyone’s asleep, I crank some rock music and write in my quickest hand the most important lines I’ve ever written. I crack can of beer after can of beer and chain smoke. I sit at the head of the pine table, look at the clock after long passages to see that time passes quickly, that I’m writing the greatest lines I’ve ever written, only to fold the paper into the smallest square I can manage, unfold it, scrawl inspired scribble-scrabble across my words with a felt-tipped pen, fold it again into a snub-nosed paper airplane, then take it out into the street and set it on fire then throw it as high into the sleeping air as I can, only to see the quickness of the descent extinguish the fire. It lies there barely smoldering as I go inside to sleep.

In the morning I can’t find the airplane in the street, it’s gone, and inside again I feel as though there should be blood everywhere (as though I aerated my skull with a thousand punctures and then, standing in the middle of the kitchen, spun in tight circles, splattering the walls) but I only find cigarette ashes across the table and almost-empty cans stacked one atop the other in three aluminum towers.