Ryan Werner

We were between the ages of twenty and thirty, a time in our lives where it seemed logical to accuse other people of being falsely modest, to first resent them for thinking they could be as fucked up as we were and then for thinking we wouldn’t notice. We started a KISS tribute band at the end of one of those lost summers we always seemed to have.

At first, it didn’t necessarily seem like we had to be KISS. At practice, we played “Shout at the Devil” and “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.” We played “Rockin’ in the Free World” with a few of the right words but mostly just endless, mid-tempo chugging on our thickest strings and the title of the song yelled out over and over. Like the process of moving through our lives, we assumed we had options, that we merely had to let those options simmer for a while, and they would turn into opportunities.

Unlike the process of moving through our lives — our gas station jobs, our drug problems, our lack of profitable skills — we started learning KISS songs and found out rather quickly that not only could we not become anything we wanted, but that, at our best, we are only a part of something bigger than ourselves.

And, also unlike the process of moving through our lives, this was something wonderful.

The city we operated out of is Dubuque, Iowa, population 58,000. It was mostly a manufacturing city until the packing plant — once the third largest beef slaughterhouse in the nation — started to do poorly and was subsequently sold around the time Lick It Up by KISS was released. Lick It Up was an empty renaissance and The Pack going under was just empty.

After that, unemployment shot up to twenty percent. People made stickers and graffiti that said Will the Last One Leaving Dubuque Please Turn Out the Light? It’s an idiom that came from the post-apocalyptic Stephen King novel, The Stand, an unofficial city-motto akin to naming the state bird after a meal from KFC.

In 1990, the city tried to increase diversity by bringing in a hundred black families from Chicago. The Ku Klux Klan quickly convinced the already-struggling, mostly white inhabitants of Dubuque that this was a problem. Between September and October of that year, five crosses were publically burned.

KISS played the Five Flags center, because location is everything.

Things eventually got better. Dubuque ended up fifteen years later having the 22^nd-ranked fastest growing economy nationwide, went from less than one percent African American to four percent, and stopped burning crosses. As for KISS, they put the make-up back on and played the hits.

Luckily for us, KISS songs are easy to play, with plenty of energy left to carry both their history and ours around our necks like almost-tuned guitars.

The named we picked was Crazy Knights, a combination of the late-80’s KISS record Crazy Nights and the Knights In Satan’s Service acronym that pastors and their wives made up to insert the coolness of the devil into what would have otherwise been sloppy musical theater. We practiced in an old warehouse in an industrial district and everything was a hassle, just the noise of life. It had been a schoolhouse years before, but by the time we got to it, it was gutted and used for storage.

The owners half-assed a remodel for three-and-a-half years. Power tools and the people who ran them were always in our way. The plumbing didn’t work except an intermittently functional toilet that, in the lengthier periods of downtime, would grow a thick film atop the water that we’d encourage one another not to puncture.

It was like practicing in a thermos or the trunk of a Buick. In the summer, we had fans that did nothing except blow the hot air all over us. We’d finish looking like we left the pool. In the winter, we’d move everything out of the open area on the main level into an eight-by-twelve room and plug in several space heaters. One was a propane flame blower that almost claimed every cable and pant leg we had until it was eventually stolen by one of the construction workers.

The owner’s kids would show up and want to use the space to practice Red Hot Chili Peppers songs. The roof leaked in a different spot every month. Most of the floor tiles were loose, damaged, or missing. The front door didn’t have a handle.

That all sounds kind of terrible, but listen: I had a Peavey Butcher from the 80s, which is the kind of amp people buy when they want to be louder than the people who buy nice things, and I turned it up so goddamn loud that it wasn’t even notes that came out of the speakers.

It too was the noise of life, but the right kind.

Some of the problems we had were regular band problems: when to practice and what songs to play and endless fucking up. Some of them were a subset of that, the kind really only found in tribute bands based on a financially successful and overly-branded juggernaut. This meant discussions about whether or not to have promo pictures taken, about whether or not to do stage banter in character, about which period of costumes to emulate, and if it’s crucial to coordinate, to spare the world from having to tolerate, on the same stage, a Love Gun Peter Criss with a Hotter than Hell Gene Simmons.

We’d rectify some of these, but were still a KISS tribute band — our biggest problem, the one that couldn’t be broken down or built up by reason.

We reduced the scale of KISS and localized it, plotted out our entire career arc in a documentary that never got made. The harmless idiocies of KISS left us plenty to pull from. Ace Frehley claiming to be an inventor. Peter Criss being the overwhelming shame of Gene Krupa’s drum tutelage. Gene Simmons buying an arena football team. Paul Stanley keeping an acoustic guitar handy whenever he has guests over, just so he can randomly serenade them with the terrible ballad, “Every Time I Look at You.”

We were obsessed with KISS: with the disease Mark St. John, guitarist on Animalize, had that caused him to quit, with what kind of heart cancer Eric Carr had, with Alice Cooper’s guitarist playing all the leads on side four of Alive II. Being in a KISS tribute band wasn’t the biggest or hardest or most important thing in our lives, but it was the most of all of those at once, the rare occasion where three essential qualities were presented and we didn’t get to pick only two.

Our buddy Harpo has the world’s largest florescent light bulb collection and a goiter the size of a water balloon. He got into heavy metal in the first go-round of it back in the 60s and 70s, saw Black Sabbath play one of the local high schools. All that stuff. If anyone we knew would be an expert, would be able to share in a life with us that we’d previously thought was impossible, it’d be him. After our first show, he was pretty much the only person who said anything to us: You should’ve been an Ozzy cover band, bud.

All said, we only played three shows. Did you think it was more? Did you think that rock and roll would make itself out to be something larger than it was?

The makeup we bought never set right. Ten songs in and we’d look more like The Cure than KISS.

Our Paul Stanley was too short. Our Peter Criss was too tall. Our Gene Simmons, for the first two shows, wore denim cut-offs that he had — for some reason never fully explained — spray-painted gold.

Me as Ace Frehley left a lot to be desired, too. My first costume was cheap black spandex with strips of white, curved foam — from ice cream cone boxes at my gas station job — poorly superglued around my wrists and chest. My next costume was a silver windshield reflector that looked much better but also — in addition to reflecting the heat from the stage lights off me — retained the majority of my body heat.

My third costume was similar, but we had pretty much fallen apart by then. It was on Christmas Day — Merry KISSmas! — and I was Ice Frehley. I didn’t even bother to shave, just put makeup around my eyes and used a can of fake frost to spray my eight-month beard white.

The actual three performances themselves I don’t remember much of. I know that I couldn’t read the setlist without my glasses and nobody seemed to care about the deep cuts we were so excited to play.

But I remember the warehouse, the practices spent playing the first twenty seconds of “Twist of Cain” by Danzig and “Reign in Blood” by Slayer, before chuffing our collective way through the twin lead part in “Detroit Rock City” for just ourselves. It didn’t matter if Ace Frehley played Marshalls and I could only afford a Peavey, if our Paul Stanley didn’t know how to tune his guitar, if our Gene Simmons and I were hardly talking to each other by the end of it, if our Peter Criss wished we were playing Motley Crüe songs instead. We all loved rock and roll and our version of it, our part of a lineage of pure, earthbound joy, and when it was loud and we were alone, we made the best sound that nobody else ever needed to hear.

“Crazy Knights” originally appeared in print in the chapbook, Maybe Don’t Drown Everything You Ever Wanted in a Mop Bucket That Isn’t Yours, from Passenger Side Books. You can buy a copy here: http://passengersidebooks.blogspot.com.

RYAN WERNER has got a body built for sin and an appetite for passion.

Ryan Werner

I didn’t marry a girl named Florence and then she won the lottery. That’s not the way I tell it, but it sure is the way she tells it, like they’re related, like there couldn’t be one without the other.

“I’m building a pool the size of your apartment building,” she tells me. “Come on back and I’ll fill it with whatever you want.”

“Fill it with New Coke,” I say. “They haven’t made it since we were learning long division. Get the last drop to the brim and I’ll pack up everything I own.”

She tells me not to bother, that she’ll buy me a new whatever. “Everything in your apartment looks like it was made in the dark,” she says, and the next day a bottle of New Coke shows up in my mailbox, a reason to wonder if the world can only be a better place if we are in it alone but, also, why I might go back: something important is going, gone.

“They’re supposed to be sweeter than the Coke they make now,” Florence tells me when I set a bag with nine bottles and four cans of New Cokes on the floor in front of her, half a week’s worth of deliveries. “There’s really no telling how many are even left in the world.”

A couple minutes later some construction workers show up to start digging the pool. At one point they partition off the circumference and Florence yells for them to extend it by a few inches.

She turns to me and asks, “How many more bottles do you think that is?” though what she really means is Why don’t you want the sort of love I have to give?

I keep waiting for the money or the New Cokes to exhaust themselves but neither of them will. I get a bottle from New Jersey one day and two cans from Nova Scotia the next. She’s paying the equivalent of good repairs on a shitty car to overnight them to me and I can’t make her stop.

“I’d say we’re at least an inch deep right now, drop for drop,” Florence tells me over the phone. “And the pool is coming along nicely. Twelve feet in the deep end.”

“How much in the shallow?” I ask.

She coughs into the receiver and pauses. “Who cares?” she says.

So many New Cokes build up over the next week that I need a laundry basket and both crispers in my fridge to take them all to Florence. I tell her the extra weight is going to kill my shocks.

“Great,” she says, stuffing some bills in my hand. “This should cover the shocks, the gas, and the fact that your car looks like a sixteenth birthday present for a set of twins whose parents barely love them.”

“I’ll get a bus pass,” I say, setting the money on the table. As I’m walking away I look back and see her in the window, bottle of New Coke in one hand and a glass half full of New Coke in the other, her way not of giving up, but of showing the magnitude of what she has to spare.

In the drawing before she hit it big, Florence bought me a lottery ticket, too, either as an excuse to see me or as an attempt to develop an addiction she could blame on me.

When I told her that I ended up winning $20 she showed me the classified ad for her wedding dress and said, possibly changing the subject, “Doesn’t it feel good, gambling with something besides your life?”

I short Florence by a six pack the next time I deliver to her. She barely says anything to me when I’m over there, just takes me to the backyard to show me the wet cement around the pool, a full bottle of New Coke stuck in at each corner like bedposts.

The men working inside the pool make a racket and what I think Florence asks me is if she needs a life coach. “Some things are just too big for one person to handle,” I say.

It isn’t until later that I realize she said lifeguard, worried, always, about the compartments of her helplessness.

When I met Florence, she told tell me everything about her name except where it came from. “There’s a city called Florence in almost half of the states in America,” she said. “And Florence Nightingale pretty much founded the idea of modern nursing.”

“And it was the real first name of the mom on The Brady Bunch,” I said.

“Exactly,” she said, holding one hand in the other. “It’s like having built-in matriarchy.”

Over the years, she told me it’s been a hurricane, a poem, and a saint, but I never asked which one she is.

After a while of four or five New Cokes a night, I get two of the three worst stomachaches I’ve ever had, just sugar on top of sugar until I can’t stand or sleep.

The third stomachache I get the hard way, I’m sure, but it’s been there so long I don’t know how.

The New Cokes start to slow down on my end, and whatever I’m taking off the top slows it even more on Florence’s side. She demands I drive the missing ones over to her house. It’s between early and late with no sun, but I’m awake and shaking anyways, just finishing up the last pile of New Cokes I’ve got around.

When I get to her house she’s not in it. The light in the backyard is on with the flood bulbs pointed at the empty pool. Florence is sitting in a $6000 chair at the bottom of the deep end, empty bottles around her.

I climb down and sit on the arm of the chair. “I’ve been reading up on this stuff,” I tell her, picking up one of the bottles. “There’s a conspiracy theory floating around that Coca-Cola changed the recipe on purpose knowing that people wouldn’t like it, which would spark interest in returning to the original formula and make the company more popular than it was before they switched.”

She sets the bottle down and walks over to the ladder in the deep end, leaping up, barely getting her fingers around the bottom rung, and climbing out. Instead of following her, I sit down where she was in the chair.

A few minutes later I hear a hose near the shallow end. I turn around to look and see the water start to flow in with Florence next to it, sitting down with her legs pointed in and then sliding onto her feet. She’s holding a silk pillowcase full of New Cokes over her shoulder and walking so slowly toward me that when she finally reaches me the water has already began to touch us.

RYAN WERNER has got a body built for sin and an appetite for passion. He practices shameless self-promotion at his blog, ryanwernerwritesstuff.com. He is the author of Shake Away These Constant Days, a collection of short stories published by Jersey Devil Press, and the chapbook, Murmuration, from Passenger Side Books.

Ryan Werner

The reason we drink poison with water and not liquor is the same reason I’ve wrecked four cars that were mine and two cars that weren’t.

If I say before I quit drinking people take it as when I thought I was fun, but I never thought I was fun. I just liked things better when they were slippery.

Eugene went to the meetings with me. Years back, he’d set the pace for our drinking and then stopped on his own when he found out he’d actually be able to live through it. It’s nothing he’d ever say, but there were always bigger problems for him to deal with, ones that couldn’t be defined by medicine or helped by meetings and, therefore, became something to alternately feed and fix.

Maybe devotion isn’t a circle, but it’s definitely a shape.

The way I got Eugene to agree to go with me was just by asking him. His only stipulation was that we go to one in a school, not in a church.

“I’d rather cram my body into a desk than cram my mind into a God,” he said.

TV shows and movies appropriate AA meetings just fine. I drank mediocre coffee and spoke meekly at a podium. Eugene did the same, making it up as he went, becoming his own extra in a movie about his life. He was Todd from Ohio. He accidentally killed a man, got away with it. He divorced models. Models divorced him. He hit bottom after bottom like splitting an atom, finding all that stuff inside it and wondering when it will end.

Regardless of where the end was at, I was pretty sure Eugene wouldn’t find it in the truth. So I watched him stand in front of strangers and lie, Todd from Ohio, Eugene’s personal martyr. Or maybe, I guess, the other way around.

The one thing about Todd from Ohio that isn’t a lie is Eugene accidentally killing a man. It’s true that he spent a lot of years attempting to remove rage from his first five or six reactions to any given situation, but this wasn’t one of those times.

Someone pulled a gun on Eugene and he pulled it right back. This was outside a bar called The Sweet Spot. Tacky people liked the irony of it. Lots of Hawaiian shirts, lots of drugs and weapons either stuffed inside or strapped around tall, loose-knit socks.

As much as all the movies and TV shows got AA meetings right, they got it all wrong about shooting someone in the face. Eugene did it and watched the guy bleed out and twitch. Maybe this was just the movies, too, curiosity layered from base-level humanity on up, but I think it was just Eugene being satisfied with himself for realizing he had to stand still and wait.

When they called on me to testify, I told them I didn’t know Eugene to have a history of violence. What I meant was that spent knuckles and a dozen years of broken glass don’t add up to bank statements or toe tags, but, there they are.

Eugene tells me that some rats have built up an immunity to the poison, how us doing the same thing is like teaching our skin to deflect knives, which is something people say when they’re scared, when they’re trying not to be scared.

Eugene doesn’t know what’s enough for him, so he keeps adding, keeps taking away.

On the table in front of us are the poison and an eyedropper and two shot glasses with water in them. “I think a few drops each should do it, but I don’t know how big,” Eugene says. “Like a raindrop or a teardrop?”

I ask him which one’s smaller but he gets nervous, rushes to put a fat drop in each glass.

I say, “Depends on the weather, depends on the eye.”

I thought it’d be different when Eugene got all that settlement money, pretended to fall over a pile of shingles and off a roof to cash in on his insurance, but the only thing that’s changed is the accessories. He buys new stuff and I get the old stuff. I’ve got three toasters at my apartment and no bread.

Because I’m the one whose legs never needed to be pieced back together, I’m the one who drives Eugene’s pregnant girlfriend, London, to the hospital for her checkups. The hospital is named after a saint, but they’re all just boys’ names and girls’ names to me.

London tells me it’s Saint Luke. She was raised Catholic, so she tells me that and then about Luke the reformed Greek gentile and Luke the stalwart companion of Roman prisoner Paul. Luke of squalor, Luke of social justice.

“Luke thought God was like Robin Hood,” London says. “In Luke’s gospel is where Mary says that God brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. He filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.”

She’s thinking rich like McDonalds, but I’m thinking rich like Eugene, pregnant girlfriend, money as a dead end, the same face on the same head with the same brain inside it forever, just waiting to be sent away empty.

Two boys died at the park a few years ago. It wasn’t exactly murder but it wasn’t exactly solved, either. I don’t know what happened, but after it all went down the city put a mile of fence around anything taller than a sapling and then sent out telepathic messages to parents to make sure they give me dirty looks for smoking near the bathrooms.

Eugene never wanted to go to the park before the boys died, but now he calls me up all the time and asks for a ride. The exercise he says he needs isn’t much. He’s got a cane with a little snowglobe on the end and he thinks it’s funny, either out-of-season funny or kitsch funny or both, to grind his way through the park with it.

The spot we park in is as far away from the deaths as I can get and still actually be considered near the park. I do this every time and keep hoping it means that we won’t make it to the old nasty part, but that never happens. There is no joy between the last thing and the next thing. I never get used to it, never stop thinking of things that aren’t ghosts but aren’t like me or Eugene, either.

I ask Eugene if he knows that I hate going here and he doesn’t mock me or ask me if I’m afraid, just tells me that I can go if I want, that he can call a cab. This isn’t a bad wife trick. He has no interest in where either one of us rank in importance to the other.

“I have the money and the time,” he says. “I can call a cab from Chicago if I want to.”

I stay. When we make it to the rocks where the boys died, there are four men playing cards next to the big lookout over the river. I want nothing to do with them, but Eugene gets in on the game, loses ten bucks and then fifty.

I have about seventy dollars on me and then I have it in my hand, ready to give — loan, he says, and means it and has the funds, so why not? — to Eugene. He sets the cane down in front of the men and says, “This is worth $200. You can part it out and melt it down and get at least a third of that. Let it count for thirty bucks. He’s got $70 more for an even hundred.”

This goes through. We bet our frightened money on the idea of too late and win.

The men stand up and shove Eugene to the ground. I help him up and they run with what they hadn’t really lost, see I’m not following and slow to a walk.

One of them throws Eugene’s cane up into a tree. It takes me a minute, lots of hiking up my pants and retying my boots, but I make it up there and get it down. I hand it to Eugene who takes it and arcs it back like a crescent moon, brings the snowglobe-end down on the rocks. There’s no explosion of glass and glitter, just a crack like a heavy click and the sound of whatever water isn’t the river beyond us, Todd from Ohio back for the view.

London is having triplets. That means an extra 700 calories a day — 300 for the first kid and 200 for each one after that. She starts bringing herself a milkshake home from work. She grills whole chickens and puts kale on everything.

Eugene and I are up to half poison, half water. It took a week or so after the first big shot for anything bad to happen, but then my gums started bleeding a bit one morning. Eugene gets nosebleeds all the time now.

We’ve both got bruises on our forearms, the fat of our ribs. I’m afraid of shock. Eugene’s afraid of not nothing, but nothing happening, always.

I’ve been using Eugene and London’s computer to read about symptoms and reactions. We eat more bananas, vitamin K and anything that helps with blood clotting. The bruises are from minor hemorrhaging, little leaks we’ve sprung inside our guts.

London asks what I’m doing on their computer all the time and I tell her I’m looking up ways to help her. “Wear biking shorts for more support and to help with stretch marks,” I say. “Get more pillows for your bed and nap after big meals.”

The next time I see her she’s traded her old basketball shorts for tight green spandex. I look at Eugene and he looks back. I start coughing, swallow and taste blood. London stands up to get me some water and she’s huge above me, bursting out from her middle in what seems like all directions.

After a couple years of being clean, I stopped going to meetings and just had Eugene help me instead. He said he was step thirteen. I’m not an idiot or a sucker for a clever phrase, but there’s appeal in the next level of anything.

It’s still a process. I go over to his house and London is gone, out with friends or who knows what. Nothing wild. Eugene is sitting in the living room with the lights all on and a hunting show on mute on the television. It’s all he watches.

“I’ve got another drinking lesson for you,” Eugene says to me, propping himself up on an old generic cane, the kind stunt elderly have when they’re extras in a show.

I follow him to the kitchen and the poison is already out on the counter. He makes his way to the fridge and grabs a beer, pulls two shot glasses from the cupboard.

He says, “There are always two choices, but they aren’t always right and wrong.” He fills one of the shot glasses full with beer and one full with poison. “You’re going to drink one of these and I’m going to drink the other. You pick.”

“Eugene,” I say. “Eugene.”

“Sometimes the only question is how do you want things to fall apart?”

“And sometimes it’s not,” I tell him, but here I go, reaching for the both of them.

Eugene with a temper. Eugene looking on the ground for teeth he’s knocked out of men both better and worse than him. Eugene breaking a cokehead’s arm. Eugene lighting a dumpster on fire, just because. Eugene smashing side mirrors off cars. Eugene jumping off tables at bars and kicking out the ceiling fans. Eugene sitting down at a jury’s doorstep.

Eugene pretending to fall off a roof. Eugene in a hospital bed. Eugene part steel. Eugene with never enough company. Eugene at a Chi-Chi’s with a thick librarian. Eugene at a concert with a chain smoking belly-dancer. Eugene at coffee shop with a tall woman with a history of minor league basketball and a name from far away.

Eugene poking a hole in his own condom. Eugene jaundiced from poison.

Eugene and me, undone and done, back and forth and on and on.

I look up a recipe for elk meat and then go buy some. Everyone needs to protein. London keeps trying to help me in the kitchen and I keep reaching up, taking her by the shoulders and sitting her back down at the table. Eugene just sits at the table, looks like seven dollars.

He goes by me, pulls out three shotglasses and I put them back and neither of us says anything about it. When I finally set the elk on the table, it doesn’t outlast the smell of it in the air. We devour it like it had once chased us.

Filling up gives London a memory that she mostly uses to recall that she has a mouth. I listen to her talk about TV shows where people lose an arm and vanilla Coke with real sugar and playing basketball in Montana.

“There was a girl named Ava who was known for swinging her elbows. We called her The Helicopter. The last game we played against her team left one girl with a minor concussion and three others sitting out the rest of the game. She would pay this time, I decided.”

London is clearing off the table and I let her because I feel as full as she looks. But then I begin helping anyway as she says, “Ava drove up the lane and I was bigger than her by a mile. I posted one foot back and gave her a shoulder in the ribs. It hit her so dead center that when I stood back up she was just hanging over my shoulder like I had captured her and dragged her away.”

I’m behind a seated Eugene, reaching for his plate with London in front of him doing the same. She’s going on about Ava, her prize, her big shoot-down of The Helicopter.

I see Eugene’s elbow come back and a fist at the end of it going right for the triplets. London’s belly is the moon in front of him and he’s going to clear the sky. I lean in, lock my arm around his, bicep to bicep and not budging, and London chatters away, thinks I tripped on the leg of a chair or the rug and caught myself on Eugene.

“I had to think to myself,” London says, resting the stack of dishes on her hip. “Do I set her down lightly?”

I’m sitting in the living room watching the dogs fight over a soup bone shaped like a skull when London’s water breaks. I get her to the car and then come back for Eugene. He recently slipped on an icy patch near his garage and rebroke one of his ankles.

He’s stopped drinking poison, which is good, because it means that I’ve stopped drinking it, too. We look better, bleed less.

We make it there and wait. All three girls were in the right position, so they came out in a line, like a runway, like a red carpet. No c-section. Doctor said it was one of the easiest deliveries she’s ever been a part of.

The staff lets me walk Eugene into the room with London. She’s cradling the girls against her like they’re melons at the market. “Go ahead,” London says to Eugene before nodding and smiling in my direction. “You too.”

I pick the tiniest one and hold her first in my hands and then, finally, against myself. Their newness scares me more than poison. Eugene is sitting, rubbing the tips of his fingers along the top of his daughter’s head. He doesn’t know what to do, so he blows lightly across the top of her like he’s messing with the dogs.

I imagine him weak in his middle and giving in to her, to all three — all four, London included — when she needs a dollar for a distraction, a car to leave him, a house to exclude him, nothing left for him to do but remove most of the severity from everything, put holes in his gut and then try to fill them up. His life is half a joke and it doesn’t matter which half because neither one is funny.

He holds her tightly, as do I.

RYAN WERNER has got a body built for sin and an appetite for passion. He practices shameless self-promotion at his blog, ryanwernerwritesstuff.com. He is the author of Shake Away These Constant Days, a collection of short stories published by Jersey Devil Press, and the chap book, Murmuration, from Passenger Side Books.