Archive for April, 2009

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IN THE SPOTLIGHT By: Robert C. Eccles

Sunday, April 26th, 2009

“This is Late-Night Lenny, keepin’ you company on a Monday night with great tunes all night long! Now here’s another one from tonight’s spotlight band, Thunder Foot!”

Lenny pushed the start button on the CD player and “I’m Sky High Over You” by Thunder Foot went out over the airwaves of 97 KSAW. Lenny cut the mic and pulled his headphones off. He was glad his shift was almost over. He had been fighting a horrible headache since starting his nightly spotlight hour, where he picked a band and played nothing but their music.

Bruce McFarley (aka The All-Nighter) relieved Lenny at 1 a.m. As usual, Bruce walked in smoking a joint.

“Hey, Lenny! What’s happenin’, man? Wanna hit?” He held the joint out to Lenny, who shook his head.

“No, thanks, man,” Lenny said. “I just wanna get home. My head’s killin’ me.”

“I can dig it,” Bruce said. “Hope you feel better.”

“Thanks, I hope so, too.” Lenny drove home and went straight to bed.

****

Lenny was munching on some frosted cherry toaster pastries the next morning when a news story on the radio froze him in mid chew.

“Witnesses say they saw flames coming from one of the engines as the jet plummeted to the ground. The FAA has a team on the scene working to identify the cause of the crash. But again, all five members of the band Thunder Foot are confirmed dead, along with the two pilots. In sports, the Stensonville Monarchs blanked the…”

Lenny didn’t hear the rest of the report. Thunder Foot was gone? He had just spotlighted them last night! Lenny felt light headed, and was glad he was sitting down. Otherwise he might have fallen to the kitchen floor in a dead faint.

****

Lenny put his headphones on and clicked open the mic.

“I’m sure you’ve all heard the news by now about the plane crash that claimed the lives of the members of Thunder Foot early this morning. I thought I’d start off tonight’s show with a musical remembrance of a band that left us much too soon.”

Lenny played a three-song set from Thunder Foot and then introduced that night’s spotlight band.

“In the 97 KSAW spotlight tonight, it’s Morning Glory. We’ll kick things off with ‘I woke Up, and There You Were’.”

Lenny turned the mic off, removed his headphones and rubbed his temples. Damned if that headache wasn’t back! By the end of the spotlight hour Lenny could hardly keep his thoughts straight. He rushed past Bruce on his way out of the building without so much as a word.

****

The sun pouring into his bedroom woke Lenny up. He rubbed his eyes and looked at his alarm clock. It was almost noon! Lenny climbed out of bed, took a shower and got dressed. He didn’t really have anywhere he needed to be, but it was unlike him to oversleep.

Lenny turned on the TV and flipped through the channels, searching for the all sports network. He passed a news channel on the way and caught a brief glimpse of news footage of what looked like a bus that had rolled down into a deep ditch. He stopped on that channel and turned up the volume.

“…for some reason failed to stop at the red light and crashed into the bus, which then tumbled several hundred feet down the ravine. Despite heroic the efforts of some of those who witnessed the crash, the accident claimed the lives of the members of the popular band Morning Glory. Police don’t believe alcohol…”

Lenny dropped the remote control, and his mouth hung open. What the hell? Now Morning Glory was gone? Lenny backed up and collapsed into his recliner. He held his face in his hands and sobbed.

****

After a tribute to Morning Glory, Lenny decided to part with tradition that night and spotlight a band whose members were already dead.

“In the spotlight tonight it’s Shock Factory!”

Shock Factory had died in a mass shooting at a mall on the outskirts of Los Angeles a couple of years ago.  By the end of the spotlight hour Lenny felt better than he had all week. He didn’t even have a headache. When Bruce offered him a toke on his joint, he accepted.

****

The following night, Lenny spotlighted another long-gone band.

“Tonight it’s Bazket Kase in the 97 KSAW spotlight!”

Bazket Kase’s members had died ten years ago in a fire at a nightclub near Austin, Texas. Again, Lenny’s shift ended without a headache.

Friday night came along, and Lenny put Los Alamos in the spotlight. The band had been killed when a party boat they were on capsized off the coast of Nantucket six years ago.

When Bruce relieved Lenny at 1a.m. and asked him how he was doing, Lenny could truthfully tell Bruce that he was doing really well.

Lenny smiled as he walked toward his car. Suddenly, an excruciating pain shot through his head. He buckled over, dropped his car keys and grabbed his head with his hands.  The pain was unlike anything he had ever felt. He almost didn’t hear the shuffling on the gravel around him.

Lenny looked up, and through vision blurred by tears he saw several dark shapes coming toward him. Into the parking lot lights the bloated, waterlogged bodies of the members of Los Alamos stumbled. Next to them came the charred corpses of Bazket Kase. And next to them, Shock Factory, whose bullet-riddled bodies oozed blood and pus with every shuffling step. Lenny turned to run, and blundered into the mangled corpses of Morning Glory and the unrecognizable remains of what could only have been Thunder Foot. Lenny’s head felt as thought it might actually split from his agonizing headache, but he soon found that there was worse pain than that, after all.

—
©2009 Robert C. Eccles

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STRAWBERRY GELATO By: Paul Edmonds

Friday, April 24th, 2009

I’ve been roaming the streets all afternoon, and now ribbons of orange taffy stretch across the sky.  Night is closing in, quietly, hoping to lay low until it’s too late for protest, like a rapist creeping up behind you, all shallow breaths and quick heart beats, waiting for the split second your senses drift so he can pounce on you.

It was a routine eye exam.  I just needed new reading glasses.  “It’s still a few years off,” my doctor had said, “but it’s inevitable, and you need to make the appropriate preparations.”  The look on his face was a look I’d seen a thousand times on the faces of television doctors as they slinked into waiting rooms, their surgical masks pulled down past their chins. My body became the glowing end of a match while my eyes still throbbed from the bright green light of my doctor’s headset.

I pass an ice cream shop.  Gelato spans the length of a glass display case.  Colors of every persuasion spill from large metal tubs.  I’m reminded of the time Carol and I vacationed in Florence.  We sat side-by-side in metal chairs on the sidewalk eating strawberry gelato and waffle biscuits.  Wisps of her black hair brushed against my lips and returned to her shoulders all sticky and sweet.  Before long we witnessed a Vespa collide with a small car in front of the café. Carol had pressed her wet face into my shirt.  Trickles of people wandered over to the accident, tending to the young man, his busted limbs reconfigured in some unnatural fashion.  His blood collected in a small hole in the street where a stone had been dislodged.  The sun ripped through its shroud of charcoal clouds and cast a spray of brilliant light onto the blood.  The wind forced ripples through the swelling pool.  I don’t know if the young man lived, but I remembered the subtleties of his sun-splashed juices, and mixed up a few gallons of matching paint from memory when I redecorated my office later that year.

I sit on a bench next to a mailbox and stare at the park across the street.  I think of Carol.  I slam my eyes shut and run through every detail of her face, her naked body.  I need to be sure I’ll remember. Just like I remembered the color of that young man’s spent fluids. I’ll need to stockpile images to marry with tastes and textures, sounds and smells.  Maybe I’ll become one of those guys who gains some Pollyanna perspective on life once the switch behind my eyes is flicked off forever.  I could volunteer, give motivational speeches. Maybe I’ll get a dog.  A nice dog to fetch me beers and help me dress once Carol packs her belongings and steals away in the dead of night, leaving a hand-written note behind on a single sheet of flower-scented paper, explaining how she hates herself for what she’s doing and that I’ll be better off without her.  I’ll get someone to read it to me.

A blanket of stars snuffs the last of the sunlight.  I’m still on the bench.  My ass is numb.  I don’t want to go home.  Home is bright colors, sharp angles.  A study in modern design and taste.  Carol and I have made our house a museum.  Now one of its curators will have to resign.

The hours pass.  Everything looks ugly under the dull orange streetlights.  A boy stumbles past, staggering into the street.  He tips his baseball cap to me and slurs a few words.  His eyes are shimmering orbs of tears and moonlight.  He returns to the sidewalk and looks like half a gimp as his legs struggle to work in tandem with his brain.

I rise from the bench and follow the boy.  His shadow moves along the brick facades of the old buildings.  He passes the ice cream shop.  I stop walking and watch him enter the mouth of an alleyway.  He falls against a wall and slides slowly, almost gracefully to the dusty concrete.  He removes a bottle of something from the kangaroo pouch of his sweatshirt and takes a sip.  I walk into the ice cream shop and ask if they have strawberry gelato.  “Yeah,” the ice cream girl says, chewing on her nail polish.  I’ll have a small, I say.  She scoops the gelato into a plastic cup and spears it with a tiny red spoon.  I step outside and eat slowly, letting the gelato melt on my tongue and crawl down my throat.  The boy continues to take pulls from his bottle and eventually retreats deeper into the brown darkness of the alley.

An hour later and I’m sitting on the steps of my doctor’s office.  I’m so excited!  I’m just going to wait here all night.  Carol will understand.  She’ll be so thrilled when this is all over that she’ll wrap her arms around me, all weepy and pink-faced, happy that we dodged a nasty bullet.  I’ll greet the doctor when he gets in tomorrow morning.  I’ll explain what I did, and he’ll fix everything.  Then I’ll be on my way.  It’s still a while before he’ll be here, but that shouldn’t be a problem.  I didn’t eat all of my gelato, and what’s left should be enough to keep the boy’s beautiful brown eyes cool until the doctor can make the switch.

—
©2009 Paul Edmonds

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