Peon Strings

    While showing us his Friday Night Playlist this week over at Sid's sister's apartment we started discussing the best possible "DJ Name" for our friend Jose and I remember a few things, not many, like that the conversation occurred just as Mari was leaving and that Jose was really leaning hard into something vaguely pallidromatic like DeJay Jade or deejejose but I'd already had two whole gummies so I was catching fly suggestions out past left field.

    "How about Lead Pipe Octopus?" I suggested helpfully, scanning through the Youtube results on the TV for the right clip of David Gilmour Live at Pompeii "or what about DJ Maudlin Emperor?"

    Sidney's sister, primly polishing off the leftover nachos, licks her fingers with a quiet determination and squeaks "I like dj jose."

    "Yeah me too —" assents Jose, "guys that was just an example. There was already a dj jose when I was in Riverside," he bemoans "he sucked balls."

    "While spinning records?" I ask, "some double act!"

    Jose twiddles his pencil and stares out the window at the early streaked marks of an acid trip of a skimpy January sunset.  "I keep coming back to DJ Reconocer." His spanish accent sounds porridged through a mouth full of chocolate.

    Potential DJ names swirl around my brain like overlapping airport announcements, I gnaw at the word 'suspect' like an itchy tongue.  "What about DJ Spectroscopy?  Or Spectroscootter?  Spectrosc-otter.  Centrafugal Farce? Centrifungal.  Centri-Fun-Guy?"

    Sidney's sister gets up to go the fridge and, thinking aloud, pipes in with "how about DJLectremo? Like electric emo?"

    Jose makes a face.  Later I would realize it was his shut up and leave me alone you freakin' losers face, but at the time I misdiagnosed it as writers block and suggested maybe he be DJ No-Name for the gig.  Or maybe Dee Jay-Cognito.  

    The face did not go away but I must have.  I awoke on an austere Thursday morning to find myself on Sidney sister's spare couch and floundered into the dark bathroom.  My hair had plastered itself hard to starboard, eyes look suckered back into the deep strip mines of my eye sockets, I try smiling, to see what that would do, but I just look pained, like I'd just heard a bad joke.  

    At 4:45AM, when I head out to work I walk the half mile to catch the bus on the quiet streets biting with cold.  I've found that after about a quarter mile the bite loses it's teeth and anyway I had my earbuds to help carry my mind away from chilly reality.  

    There was a old lady on the bus in a thick bubblewrap hoodie who spilt a whole pocketful of coins onto the aisle and I gather it all up and give it back to her.  "Have a blessed day," she thanks me, as I examine the sticky something now adhered to my index finger and thumb.  I haven't heard 'have a blessed day' used in years. Time telescopes. 

    The time drags. The drudgery of another day in the cubicle, another painfully long day, the indignity of the conference room, the phone, ringing, ringing, incessant, endless, until breaktime, which is timed to the second, and the insipid banter that eats away at that break, inexorably exchanged with coworkers who no longer count as friends because I got a promotion and they didn't, so I listen as I chewy the papery pre-packed lunch while everyone gets to listen to Celinda talk about nothing her kids and her loathsome spouse, and then Divorced Dave gives out parenting tips that he got from his court-appointed case worker, and then after lunch, Drama Dave comes into my cubicle and crouches down low, looking around two or three times before anouncing, in a speedwalking whisper, "they're going to fire me."
    Now, if I may ask, how long can you ignore a comment like that and pretend to be working, but your obvious inability to making flipping through work-windows only makes the your non-response all the more obtrusive? I can, it turns out, make it only 24 seconds, unfortunately, and cave: "Says who?" I ask, initiating the Drama Dave equivalent of  Russian Roulette.
    "Says everyone.  I can feel it." His feral eyes pop for a moment of pure trapped cow panic, a look I will later question because maybe it's glee.
    "Why are you getting fired, Dave?"
    "Why?  Why?  What have you heard?"

    After work I take the bus back but only so far as the 7Eleven where I pick up a six-pack and a family sized bag of Tostitos (and, for the pre-payday flourish, a tin of jalapeno bean curd dip) and I grab a bargain bill documentary  DVD "about regret and redemption within the 2015 German immigrant influx,' then walk up the hill the rest of the way home.  I start a text to Mari but don't hit send.  What to say?  Where is the right GIF?  Once inside, the thermostat turned to a life-supporting 60°F, I feel oddly compelled to put on some water for tea, and take a little bite of medicine.  One remembers other Januarys in which home gave more than this modest reprieve from the cold.  It's been a frugal winter, none of us really wants to pay more than our normal allotment for the electric bill so we've been living in the past, so to speak, our house transformed by the cold into a kind of Dickensian creaky hovel.   
    When the tea is ready I steady it against the rented DVD and curl up like a cat in the chair reclining out of the irregular octagon of light cased by the west window. My stiff hands tinge at the warmth of the mug. I get about as far into the documentary to recognize regret.  One presumes that redemption came about later on —it put me to sleep, so — I suppose it did.

On Friday the three of us ride to the bar in Jose's Nissan, the two-door that only opens on one side, and we first drove through Jack in the Crack for a soda and some fries. The limpid sunlight dampening avenues of malt grime. The club smelled of disinfectant and patchouli. "I'll go get the equipment," Jose says, and I lurch over to the back bar where they keep a stocked bookshelf, some Cormac McCarthy and John Sandford.

    "I'll see you tonite," texts Mari. Does this warrant a response?  "Sweet."  I say, because, as I don't say; that's so sweet of her to think of me, and to remind me that she is thinking of me because she's going to see me tonight.  One thinks sad regretful thoughts about lost loves, affairs which might've been saved had we had texting, and then one remembers loves lost because we do text.  Jose sets up his equipment.  The crowd has yet to trickle in.

    Greasy Jack behind the bar sees Sidney's sister sideeyeing the taplist and says "the beers' free if you're really, really pretty," slides me a neat scotch, "but otherwise they cost five bucks." He pours a soda for himself and takes a sip. She blushes, points, "is that like Blue Moon?"
    "No, but the Pyramid Hef is, and the Campfire Stout is a super easy imbibe, not too overly sweet."  She smiles and asks mewlingly for the Pyramid, and "is there a like happy hour snack like menu?".  Suddenly all at once there are pulsing beats and thumping bass laser-braining from the walls.  When we all orient ourselves accordingly, it's in the direction of Jose, aka DJ Betternaut, who has started his set, and is obviously oblivious to reading the discordant mood evicted by the room, I can see the sweat beading across the raw pinkish wrinkles of his forehead from across the room.


    "Came in kinda hot and disco-trance bothered, doncha think Joey?"
    Jose looks around the club.  "It's mostly college kids. Nothing much older than twenty-eight here tonight."
    I smile and slap his back reassuringly.  The sound system is really important for a friendship between guys.  So, too is music itself.

    "   " texts Mari. What do you say to that?

    ""

    "Has he started?? What's the music like????"

  Mainstream rock country hiphop pop blues tangodancehall reggae skabilly wavemetal grungecore alterna-synthpunk, how to play this?  Honest?  Then she'll know how much I know about music.  Snide?  Then she'll think music isn't important to me. 

    I stand up by the door and note the crowd, their clothes, their physiques, the postured caring about looking like you don't care about how you look, the subtlety inherit within the permissable bends in the reed-field of consensus. They look like I looked five years ago. The scrubby boys all wear hats (it is January), the sylphlike girls all wedged into sports tights and boots, or jeans I guess. I'll catch myself staring when I start questioning my generalizations, but the girls do look so much more posessed of themselves — alert gazelles in the same simpering savannah as the Miller-Lite-swizzling lions, males. There are more women than men, not surprisingly; Greasy Jack has always had better talent for attracting females than he does males, and, it's early yet on a Friday night no less.  This is the safe starter-bar for a lot of these girls on a weekend. 

    The music transitions in an eery prog-rock rip-off with samples from some old flapper movie scene from the twenties.  I actually laugh out loud, it's so fucking wrong for right now.  And I feel my hip ping at the incoming text from Sidney herself:

    "Can you pick me up at the office? My car won't start." She's uptown just getting off work, I already know, and her car wouldn't start last night either, when she tried to drive home, I saw, on her twitch.

    Jose took it pretty rough that he would have to stop spinning (in order to give me a ride).
    "Sorry, ladies," he taps the mic for added emphasis, "my friend is having car trouble. Can next up take over?"
    One girl raises her hand straight up and emits a little cunning chirp as she jumps up and runs around the laptop to give Jose a hug and click a few buttons.  Jose says, from three directions at once,"guys this here is Alyssa. Let's give it up she is going to handle the next hour. I have been The DJ Betternaut. Peace! then this tune comes on that is like chill and chirupy and absolutely 180° capital R Right for this scene and everyone starts clunking their necks in exactly the same groove all across the room in perfect syncronous alignment and Jose has in half a mosquito's breath has pounced his way up to the door, yanking Sidney's sister on the way from where she was waiting for her to-do box, and I could see her lips mouth 'ah fuck it' as we made our abrupt leave of the place, back to the parking lot and the Nissan through the one working door of the two-door and Sidney's sister whines as we wheel it outta there, "should either of you really be driving?" with a vocal fry that would impress even Zooey Deschanel but we don't hear her as we are already hey hey erecting our congratulatory spire for Jose on his innaugural disk jockeying success.

    "That was one outstanding out, I gotta say— having your own backup lined up."

   Jose laughs with relief and adrenaline, "it's always good to have a backup. You gotta have a backup. You never know what'll happen."

Even for a January evening its nippy, a chill breeze whistling across the freeway and down the pock-lit sidewalks. When Jose gets to Sidney's building he points out to us that that the engine light has come on, again, so while leave to retrieve Sidney, Jose and Sidney's sister stay and pop the hood to investigate the culprit and wait.

    I sign-in at the front desk and wait for them to waive me through after checking my credential.  The elevator shines like a brand new laudromat quarter, and the hallway lights don't even buzz or hum.  Sidney's desk is still third row back on the right and I can see from the glow of her computer monitors that she's not yet ready to be ready.

    "Ready?" I ask.  I can hear myself, my own voice, and I sound like I'm twelve again, back when you had to call a girl to ask her out, and she knew it, and she wasn't going to suggest it or even answer the phone herself so you dialled her number and ended up having to speak to her Dad and ask if it was okay if Ashleigh came on the line.  "Did you get my texts."

    "On our way," Sidney taps the screen and reads aloud from the phone by her right hand, while style typing with her left, and also finishing her coffee and calling GHS and reparting and pinning her hair and putting on her overcoat and shuffling a few files into a folder and a few folders into a shoulder bag and then she restarts the computer and she's ready to go. "Onward!" she orates theatrically, "for the arts!"  I tell her Jose and her sister are out in the car and she's already a reflection in the elevator before the understanding sets in about what she's just heard.  "Fuck me.  Are we still —do we still need to go?"
    "You missed it."
    "If Jose is in the car then whose inaugural DJ set are we going to see?"
    "I have to meet Mari.  I think Jose is going to stay awhile.  He seems — the music was ... decent." 
    "That bad, huh?"   
    "You didn't miss much.  There wasn't much..." to miss.  She skips from the elevator and out through the double glass doors and down the 400 meters to the edge of the No Parking curb where Jose has the Nissan plonked with his head in the hood and Sidney's sister revving up and back on the gas like a snoring Dominic Toretto.

    She gave Jose a big hug, longer than necessary.  I slunk into the back with the other mice and the hood slammed shut and we were off again.  But not more than three miles later he pulled off along the verge, popped the hood and leapt out without explanation.  We heard him laugh to himself as he stood up there half in the headlights.
    "Accidentally left my phone in there on the engine block," he said, "I couldn't believe it was right there where I left it."  We all agreed that he was a lucky S.O.B

    Mari wasn't there yet so even though she hadn't spokne with me all week I had a second Scotch and called her. I asked her, "did I do something wrong, hey?" then I told her "tell me, please, tell me what I did wrong. "Mari tched her tongue and took a deep breath.  She said "I don't know what you're talking about."
    "Don't you?"
    "No! Why would I? Nothing has happened. Again."
    "Nothing?"
    "Nothing.  Again."
    I asked her, "are you jostling me?"
    "Jostling?  You mean Joshing?  Or Jostling? What is this to you— a rehearsal for Gilbert & Sullivan?   You get you some strange you do man.  I finally got you to myself this week and what did you do?"
   What? I didn't say.  I didn't have to. Even through the phone I could see her hot breath filling the night as she spews "you took me over to your ex-girlfriend's  house to listen to her boyfriend scheme over his DJ name, then you ate two gummies and started twirling words around like an absolute mindless idiot."    "But you cancelled dinner."
    "I? Yeah.  Okay. Yes, I cancelled dinner because you obviously did not want to go. Mister mopey mask. Because how does that make me look?"

    I had the idea of a car entering the unlit onramp of an inevitable neverending mountain highway.  Downshift.  Downshift.  Downshift.  You hope there's not going to be a storm and you pray you don't get stuck behind a truck.  That metaphor got away from me there.  I sit here in the chair reclining away from the irregular rhombus of what little weekend sunlight we get this time of year and I feel gratitude that the winter is short.  Spring too.  I wish they were longer, but that's not true, I don't, one appreciates mother nature's posturing, her ever-changing face a kind of tragic arc in which, all these years later she can still be found caring about looking like she doesn't care about how she looks, inexhaustibly.  It makes one tired to ponder it.  Just one of the many wobbly firmaments uponwhich we rest. 

I text Jose, "I still think DJ Herbert Fine and the Finite Herb would have packed that place."

When I awaken from my nap I find two he's texted back, "Thanks for coming" and "coming over for Bengals Bills tonight? There's brauts."

"Bring it on," I texted, and went off in search of my coat and shoes.

I can hear electric lights talking
but they ain't talking to me
-Dr Dog