The Up North Anthology (No. 129)

Booze Is the Dinner Most Choose

Aaron and Marley left. Not together. Mel and LeAnne cleaned the kitchen and snuggled up in front of the fireplace.

“Do you think Aaron liked Marley?” LeAnned asked.

“Not at all.”

“What?” LeAnne sat up and looked into Mel’s piercing eyes.

“I know him about as well as you can know a guy after meeting him only less than a year ago and I could tell he hated her guts.

“Are you serious?” LeAnne said, exasperated.

“Yeah. I am. I could tell he didn’t like her. Babe…it’s alright. They don’t have to get married. He’ll be nice. He’ll be cordial.”

“He’s still hung up on old what’s-her-name?—Etta Miriam.”

“Who’s Etta Miriam?”

“Some girl from around here. She went to the high school. They were a few years behind me.”

“Were they in love?”

“Oh yeah.”

“What was she like?”

“She was a bitch.”

“You think everyone is a bitch.”

“Most people are bitches,” LeAnne said, then laughed.

“Hon, you gotta give people a chance.”

“You should talk!”

“What?”

“Nothing…” LeAnne changed the subject. “I want to meet your old Chicago friends. I want to meet Hunter.”

“Maybe over the holidays.”

*

Mel Flynn and Aaron Parker and LeAnne Bartholomew and her friend Marley are seated around a dinner table that Mel and Aaron had just finished building, staining, and sealing earlier that week. It was the first piece of furniture Mel made for the house he was remodeling and restoring. LeAnne’s friend Marley—the one with the blonde, gingerish dreadlocks and the self-evident hippie mom—was dragged along. LeAnne assumed that since Marley was her friend and since Aaron was Mel’s friend and since Mel and she were dating, and then it was surely possible that Marley and Aaron would hit it off and fall in love and remain in it forever and ever. LeAnne is overly-sentimental when love’s success didn’t depend on her.

A broasted lemon pepper chicken and cooked carrots and red potatoes are on the tabletop. There is also some wine and sloe gin fizzes and maybe some scotch—the booze is the dinner most choose. Mel worked hard on the meal; however, he was happy to have leftover legs for lunch at work the next week.

“Good food, Mel,” Marley says, her mouth full.

“Yeah, good work, babe,” LeAnne follows.

“Thanks,” he says, returning with the salad. He feels looseness in his legs from the scotch, already at work.

“Glad you all like it.”

Aaron watches as the ladies get lost in a personal, girl’s conversation. He sits and drinks. His night is not that different than what he usually does.

“How ‘bout you Aaron?” LeAnne says, interrupting his blissful, buzzed state. He is alert, but unable to respond to the ongoing conversation.

He says “Huh?”

“What about you?” LeAnne repeats.

“What about what?” Aaron says.

“What do you think of Wisconsin legalizing marijuana in the, hopefully, near future?”

“Oh, I don’t know…”

“You don’t have any opinion on it?” Marley asks.

“No…I don’t think so.”

“Nothing at all?”

“I drink.” Aaron says, taking another sip.

“Sure…so do I, but I also really like weed,” Marley says with an oversized shit-eating grin.

Mel interrupts and explains how Aaron is a great singer/songwriter and that he performs sometimes on Fridays at the Gray Owl.

“Cool, cool,” the girls repeat cacophonously.

“So what do you do, Marley?—for work?” Aaron asks.

“Oh, I just—I just work retail. I’ve been at a bunch of places over the last five years. Now I’m at a garden center.”

“Appropriate,” Aaron says under his breath.

“What?” she says, voice raised.

“Oh, nothing,” Aaron says, gesticulating the same with his hand.

Mel, drunk and yet still the most sober at the table, moves the conversation so as to not have any arguments spring forth, especially over a stupid, tired topic. “What do you think of the table, Marley?” he says.

“It’s awesome. LeAnne was telling me about it earlier.”

“Aaron really helped. We had to sand the wood down for like two hours.”

“Where’d you guys get the wood? From, like, the forest?” Marley asks in a tone just like would be expected.

“It was from a downed barn. We stole it, the wood.”

“Ooooh, badasses,” LeAnne says, showing her sexy streak.

“I know, right?” Mel says, prideful.

“Where’d you—Where was it?”

“Outside of town. Some abandoned farm. We did it at, like, dusk…a few months ago.”

“Did you make it with a design? Did you design it yourself?”

“Yeah.”

“Make me one,” Marley jokes.

“Sure,” Mel says. Aaron smiles snidely. “After I’m done with my house.”

The Up North Anthology (No. 127)

Pretend to Care

“My lack of empathy as a bartender is pretty disconcerting to people. They think I lack self-awareness. I don’t!”

“I know you don’t, Reed.”

“I mean…some people aren’t self-aware. I am!”

“Reed, I know,” Mel responded adamantly.

“Well—people think I’m going to Oprah it up with them. Ain’t gonna happen.” Reed waits and folds up his shirt sleeves to mid-arm. “And dudes, grown-ass men looking for their beer-slinger to pacify them, to give them a shoulder to cry on…What is that?”

“Beer-slinger?!?” Mel quips.

“C’mon,” Reed concedes, aware of the polysyllabic and hyphenated way that he talks.

“People like to air their worries and grievances, Reed. You don’t even need to say anything back, they just want to talk.”

“But you won’t believe some of the shit people say. Last night some old lady told me about how her grandson is brain-dead from a drowning accident. All I could say was ‘I’m sorry.’ What am I supposed to say to that, Mel? I’m so separated from everything that I can barely even pretend to care.”

“You care sometimes.”

“Nope.”

“C’mon.”

“I don’t care about other people. Especially ones I don’t know.”

“You’re a narcissist!”

“So are you, pretty boy.”

“Pretty boy? You’re calling me a pretty boy? You’re the pretty boy.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah…Look, Mel, everybody’s a narcissist. So what? I’ve had enough of people trying to get us all to change and start thinking about everybody else. Stop attempting the impossible and figure out how to placate the self-interested.”

“You really don’t think one must care about what is outside oneself? You’re bullshitting me, (right)?”

“No, I’m not and I don’t think I have to justify myself.”

“That’s pretty damn narcissistic.”

“So what?” Reed responded bombastically. “That’s what I’m saying!”

“I kinda don’t want to talk to you anymore.” Mel said, gulping the last of his beer.

“Great!” Reed said.

The Up North Anthology (No. 126)

Vegas Washes Off

I woke up slowly—the window open, sun rays shining through, a light wind sucking and then knocking the door into the threshold—and I lay comfortably in bed feeling the warmth of my body heat and the soft down comforter swaddling me. It felt normal, but everything was different. I had to leave.

Las Vegas, Nevada is a filthy place. I lived there for one year after my stint at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. I said I was going to Vegas to write, but really I went to dick around, drink, gamble, and attempt to score with a fresh, young assortment of tasty broads: bubbly hostesses, flirty cocktail waitresses, blackjack dealers in tight pants, side-stage showgirls, tattooed strippers, and inexpensive whores. I was mostly successful in all of this. I did write some there, but nothing worth holding onto. The novel I had turned in as my cumulative creative thesis months earlier was unsatisfactory. It would not get the stamp of approval from the faculty and it would never see a publisher. I tinkered with it for a few weeks, but I put it away, and, if I even still possess it, it is on some shelf collecting dust.

I’m not much of a card player. I didn’t have much money. I thought about trying to adjunct at UNLV. Instead, I tried playing some stud in hidden backrooms. That never worked. I was routinely annihilated by some sharks who’d hand my ass back to me on a platter with East Coast cusses and burning stares over Ray Bans as they depleted my stack. Blackjack wasn’t much better. They police it a little too much. If you’re any good or merely run a string of face cards, it is assumed you must be counting. I couldn’t do that kind of math (I was and English major!), and I couldn’t take that kind of heat.

I bartended first shift and spent my nights not writing and in various sports books. At first I hit often enough to keep playing. Isn’t that how it always goes? That’s like a universal truth of life. You succeed just enough to get by. I’d tell my students to underline that passage if it was in a book by a good writer. Anyway, I bet on games the bookmakers didn’t have as good a grasp on: third-tier European soccer, the WNBA, and early rounds of major tennis tournaments. Eventually, I made a decent living doing this. That is to say that I could pay my bills and my apartment wasn’t vermin-infested. It wasn’t glamorous and as far as your ideas of Vegas gambling it was a well-thought, conservative endeavor.

My peers at Iowa were published—novels with good sales, critically-acclaimed poetry collections, and one memoir of adolescent trauma that penetrated the bubble of the zeitgeist and would continue to be read for generations. That’s what I wanted, but in Vegas that dream seemed to wholly vanish like the blood-orange sun on the dusty horizon. I believed I would be Hunter S. Thompson, but with less drugs. Turns out there was less doing of the work, too. They booted me from Iowa City, but they couldn’t stop me from documenting the forgotten people and preaching the sermon of the New America. I could stop myself, though.

I went through broken women like some Frankenstein’s monster stitched together by Chuck Bukowski, Neil Cassady, and Henry Miller. I find women with high and protrusive maxillary canines impossibly attractive. There is a sparkle to that smile—a perfect imperfection that I cannot deny. Those that would go home with me shared this odd, pretty trait. I think they all did, or maybe I’m misremembering or idealizing or I was drunk and/or high (most likely).

Nobody goes to Vegas to find themselves. I didn’t know this. Well, of course, they all say they do—myself included—but they never really know what they’re looking for in themselves. Conversely, Las Vegas is a place of greater confusion. The quest for self-actualization is often sullied by booze, drugs, cheap sex, and dirty money (Ha! Isn’t all money a little dirty?). Bad food doesn’t help either. Everyone knows this before they come. They’re just deluded—they must be? I was.—to think that the American Dream of prosperity and a life uncomplicated can be found in the Byzantium of High Vice, sited in a desert devoid of the very sustenance of life. And so there was a collection of Brendas and Jennys and Caitlins and a few who went by Lexi and Mercedes all of whom came from Mississippi and West Virginia and Minnesota (like me), looking for a happiness they’d never find at the end of my cock. I wish I felt worse about how I treated them, all of them, but it’s hard to feel sorry for other people when you’re constantly preoccupied with a debilitating self-pity of your own.

Vegas washes off, though. Eventually. The filthiness cascades off in cooler air, away from the desert. I thought the dirt would wash off as soon as I took the job of teaching Creative Writing and upper-level Contemporary Literature at St. Cloud State back in Minnesota. It takes a while. Having affairs with girls barely out high school, I’ve found, doesn’t help with the spiritual cleansing. Who knew? As intellectual as they appear, they still need emotional growth and experience. Or maybe that’s a bullshit excuse to rationalize bad behavior at any age. I’m not sure—of anything. I am stunted, but I’m working on it.

The day I left Vegas and the day I drove to Bayfield are similar in my memory. They are both Moments without a roadmap. In Vegas I was broken. At St. Cloud I had been fired and was shattered again. In each case, I didn’t know where I was headed. After Vegas I made my way to the Twin Cities and soon took the first teaching job I could get. After the unceremonious end of my teaching career I found myself drawn to a trauma of my own youth. I vowed to stop looking for the quick-fixes of bad medicine, though I’d still often fail, and start the real mending. Nature and the cold water and the step-brother that I hadn’t seen in decades would help me in this, I thought.

I woke up slowly. The cold air coming through my bedroom window made the comfort of my warm bed a haven from which I’d never want to leave. The breeze knocked my door in and out of the frame and I was fully awake. I walked outside the lakeside cottage I bought with my gambling money, my pitiful college professor savings, and leftover college funds dad didn’t know about, and I saw, really saw, the vastness of Lake Superior and understood for the first time how miniscule and inconsequential my disappointments are in this greater existence. Here the washing began.

The Up North Anthology (No. 123)

A Perfectly Okay Day

The Pavlis Greek and American Family Restaurant—as it is fully called on the sign, “a mouthful” says most, though “so is the food, so there!” says Kostas Pavlis, the owner—is empty, no one is hungry it seems. Father Kostas Pavlis, the owner, and Alex, his daughter and part-time waitress, are the only people in the store. He is in his back office, she, albeit slowly and without care, is cleaning, wiping, bussing.

She breaks down, grunting and screaming. Kostas comes out of his office.

“Make it go away! I should be somewhere else!” she blurts out in anger.

“—Why do you talk like that? Make what go away?” her father responds.

“I—I just can’t handle this anymore.”

“What? What can’t you handle, Alex?”

“This…this life. This isn’t what was supposed to happen.”

“Alex, honey, who are you to say what is supposed to happen?”

“—It’s my life!”

“So what?”

Alex shrinks, silent.

He continues: “Alex, you’re not gonna be able to control everything.”

“—I know that!” she says, confidently.

“You’re life—all life—it’s a mysterious thing. You’re not going to be able to predict the twists and turns. Freewill only goes so far…”

“—And then there’s fate?” she queries, perturbed.

“—And then there’s God!”

“—And then there’s God,” she repeats, then pauses. “You’ve been spending time with Pastor Nathan.”

“No. That belief is my own, based on wisdom and experience.”

“So what are you saying, Dad?” she says impatiently.

“Stop being so hard on yourself and focus your energy on positive progress.”

“Easier said than done.”

“Isn’t everything worth doing? You know this.”

“Yes…I suppose so.”

“Alex—go, take a walk, cool down.”

She nods, “okay.” She jobs down the bike trail—the one she was “born on”—with a collection of snippets of the great works of Bach, Verdi, Beethoven in her earbuds. She cries those big, embarrassing, defeatist tears. They run down her soft cheeks. Mel Flynn glides by on his $1,000 Trek, fast and without acknowledging anything but the horizon beyond.

*

Back at home.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” she says, “For exploding at you.”

“It’s okay, baby girl.”

“You were right,” she says.

“Say that again,” he jokes.

“Shut up.”

“You’ve refocused, sweetie?”

“Yes, I think.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s okay,” he says. She feels warmness in that “okay.”

*

The next day, May 1, she was in that awful diner getup, working the midday, late breakfast and lunch shift—Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” plays quietly over the terrible wall speakers.

After lunch the crowd dies down. Mel Flynn walks in.

“I saw you yesterday,” he says to Alex, leaning against the back wall behind the counter.

She wears that dumb-looking ignorant grin, having not heard him.

“Hey there, Pretty Wallflower,” he says, getting her attention.

She is removed from her daze and walks to him as if pulled by a magnet.

“—Hey.”

“—I saw you yesterday…on the trail.”

“…Yeah…I know,” she says.

“—You saw me too?” he says, excitedly.

“How could I miss you?—you want to order anything?”

“Iced coffee. Ton of sugar, skim milk.

“Food?”

“Nah. Uh—maybe. Turkey bacon BLT on whole grain,” he says, then continues, “—I didn’t think you’d recognize me.”

“Yeah, those bike shorts really cover you up,” she says. He blushes, then laughs. “—I’ll be right back.”

Upon returning Alex cheekily says: “What’s old Funbags up to?”

“Excuse me?”

“LeAnne.”

“Oh.” He smiles, knowing.

“We, uh, we actually broke up months ago.”

“—Really!?!” she says, too excited. “I didn’t know there was trouble.”

“Yeah.”

“I hadn’t heard that. I can’t—”

“—Yeah, we kept it quiet. It was messy.” He felt comfortable with that confession,

“Oh, I don’t mean to pry.”

“Oh. No (you’re not).”

They sit in silence. Mel’s sandwich and coffee is delivered by one of the young, Mexican cooks. He gives Alex a dirty look for not picking up the order.

“You seeing anyone, Alexandra?” Mel asks.

She steps back, blushes, then straightens up. “No. Not right now,” she delivers.

“—I wasn’t,” he says, then reconsiders, “Hey, you want to go to this wine-tasting thing with me? It’s fort of a drive—its south of here. I’ll put on my 90s Spotify playlist, though. So we can jam out on the way—you don’t have to…”

“Sure,” she says, confident. She barely contains the big, toothy grin she so much wants to display. It’s like concealing art. She knows she wants to show him, but doesn’t want to appear too eager.

Mel is lonely—Yes, already. He knows Alex is attracted to him. He’s known for a while. He also is faintly aware that his good buddy Aaron Parker might be disappointed by this. It’s his own fault, though, he thinks. He should have asked her out first. Pretty girls don’t stay alone for long.

“Mel? What day?”

“Saturday.”

“Yeah. Dress warm. Some of it could be outside and this is a cool spring.”

“Cool.”

“I’ll pick you up at your parents at 10. Don’t forget your I.D.”

“Oh. Yeah. That would be bad,” she says to extend the conversation.

Mel finishes his sandwich quickly, and makes for the door, as if to somewhere other than the disheveled home to which he’ll return.

“Okay, good,” he says to Alex, “This’ll be a perfect, little day.”

“See ya Saturday, Mel.”

She lets her smile appear as he exits. It seems to radiate room-filling, artificially-bright light.

The Up North Anthology (No. 122)

Don’t Do That

I walked into the bar, early for work. I don’t’ usually get in early, but today was different. I was sick of my place, sick of the water, sick of the skin I’m in. I needed to get out and occupy myself. The bar was the only place I could go. I decided to do some deep cleaning. The bar could use it, I’ll tell you.

I’m hung up on LeAnne Bartholomew. We fucked in the bar a few months ago and have hooked up a few times since then. I’ve had good pussy before, but I’ve never been high on it like this. I mean, she’s a special girl—a magnificent beauty—and a wonderful person to be around. She isn’t’ playing it easy, though—hot’n’cold all up in this bitch. She isn’t going to fall for my put-on charm and all my old tricks. In any case, as though these lustful dreams are not going to fade. So, I scrub the coolers.

*

He walked back into the bar with trumpets, as if accompanied by the open of Beethoven’s “Symphony #6—or maybe Verdi’s “Triumphal March.” It goes without noting that he was triumphant. He came in with fake confidence. Though, most confidence is fake. He was triumphant, and yet there was something about his face—something buried in the interior. It’s too bad The Gray Owl was dim and purposely unlit and Bayfield doesn’t have much for city lights, because maybe we could have seen into the mystery. Or, not. What is inside cannot be uncovered, if one is unwilling to unfurl it.

Reed Redner had bedded LeAnne Bartholomew and was gloating in front of her not-too-long-ex-boyfriend Mel Flynn. But, maybe Reed didn’t yet have her. That was it. That was what seeped from inside like malodorous ooze. Reed was used to having girls in the palm of his hands within minutes. LeAnne is a different breed, and, of course, she should be.

Mel watched, unamused, as Reed went back to his duties. Aaron was there, munching on parmesan fries, and wanting to care, but also feeling that his own problems deserved some collective attention from time to time. Really, he didn’t ask much.

*

LeAnne went home, took off her bra—the sweet, brisk relief of freedom—put on a soft, long-sleeve flannel and gray cotton shorts, and settled into her couch with a big, globular glass filled nearly to the brim with a dark Bordeaux, her vaporizer, and “The Trial” for the eighth time, though she got bored and turned her attention to a mindless strategy game on her tablet. She received a text from one or two of her girlfriends, asking if she was going out later. They knew not that she had already been out and had shoved off early. Amid those conversations she received a text from Mel Flynn, her ex-boyfriend. All it said was:

Hey. Don’t do that.

Do what? she sent back.

Mel did not respond.

The Up North Anthology (No. 120)

Between the Bar and the Lake

“I was born by the lake,” Aaron lied.

The woman he was talking with had enjoyed his performance at The Gray Owl. He had done a short acoustic set—a little Elliot Smith, a little Jeff Buckley, and one of his own. He knew she had enjoyed it, because she was the whole, real audience and the only one who had clapped vociferously and without the air obligation.

“You were?” she returned.

“Oh yeah.” Reed had slightly overheard the conversation, but decided against interfering. He was trying to be nice to Aaron and resistance was hard for him, as calling someone on their lies was one of his special qualities.

“On the island,” Aaron said.

“Really? That’s cool.”

They flirted and joked for twenty minutes, but she ended going home with her girlfriends, drunk and nearly unable to walk without a human crutch, she, too, shaky in out-of-style, wedge espadrilles.

Aaron saddled up to the bar. “Good set, bro,” Reed told him.

“Nah.”

“No, you were good.”

“I screwed up the chords on ‘Between the Bars.’”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

Aaron let out a grunt.

“You pissed, ‘cause you struck out?”

“Nah,” Aaron lied.

“Happens to the best of us.”

“Does it? Never seems to happen to you.”

“—You want a beer?” Reed followed quickly.

Aaron stared straight ahead at the bottles on the wall. “Sure,” he finally said.

After Reed had delivered the micro-beer in a chilled glass and Aaron had drunk it down to a shallow pool of backwash, the two realized that they were the only ones left in the bar. It was a familiar position for both of them dating back to the “broom stick incident,” a wound that was still not completely closed up.

“What else you got planned, Aaron?”

“Oh, I don’t know…”

“—Keep drinking?”

“Yeah, prolly.”

“Do you wanna take a bottle of Johnny down to the lake out by my house?”

“Uh…Su-ure.”

Down by the lake the two men—step-brothers half believing in the promise of the future—found themselves very drunk and laying out on dewy grass with the brisk lake wind blowing over them.

“How often do you do this?” Aaron asked .

“Usually it’s with a chick.”

“So, you’re working your game on me?” Aaron joked. “Don’t you have any other moves?”

“Shut up! If I were trying to get you, I’d be negging.” Aaron didn’t understand the phrase, but didn’t bother to ask.

Drunk, they both wanted to fight, bring up old shit from the past that still lived strong in their hearts; but they had gotten to sloshed and drowsy. They passed-out—spread-eagle—in the green grass affront the shack Reed called a home. It’d be weeks before they’d talk again, not out of anything but pride and a weird facet of masculinity both left better-off undefined.

The Up North Anthology (No. 118)

A Courting

“You are a perfect everything aren’t you? But you know that already…and all that doesn’t really matter anyway does it?” A brave stranger said to LeAnne as she sat alone at the bar.

“What?” she said surprised and acting as if, though she heard every word.

“Hi,” he said, holding his shaking hand out. “My name is Steve.”

“Hi, Steve,” she responded limply shaking his hand.

“I just,” he started nervously; “I just need to talk to you.”

“You need to?”

“Ye-es, of course.”

“I’m flattered, of course.” Her default-flirting-setting had finally kicked in as she noticed the slight sparkle in his pale, blue eyes.

“It’s true…what I said.”

“Th-thank you.”

“Can I buy you a drink?”

“I have one already,” LeAnne said, pointing to the half-empty orange blossom that was becoming watery before her.

“Oh. I see,” he said, smiling. “How ‘bout the next one?”

“Oh, I suppose,” she said, feigning annoyance.

“May I sit down?” he said, pulling the stool out.

“Free country!” she said.

He sat down next to her, ordering a beer from one of the bartenders that wasn’t Reed. LeAnne would start her shift in an hour and a half. The rules were lax at the Gray Owl. Starting with a drink meant she’d be hammered by night’s end.

“I never got your name,” he said, scooting up to the bar.

“No?”

“No.”

“You’re Steve?” she said, pointing at him.

“Yeah.”

“And I’m,” she said, pointing at herself, “I’m LeAnne Bartholomew.”

“Nice to meet officially meet you, LeAnne Batholomew” he said confidently.

“Likewise,” she returned.

“What do you do, LeAnne?”

“Lots of things,” she copped.

“…For a living,” he mumbled through a quick, tonal laugh.

“I operate this store down here where we sell overpriced shots of landscapes, Lambeau, and the Rat Pack in ridiculous frames. We do framing and matting, but mostly I’m a photographer…though, most of the time I’m trying to get a two year-old to stay still in a bucket of fake suds.”

“So you take those set-up pictures of kids for mothers to hang in the hallway?”

“Mostly…it’s not particularly exciting or challenging—I also work here!”

“Here?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t mean to come off obsequious, but I’ve seen you here before, but never behind the bar.”

“It’s a fairly new job,” she answered, ignoring his GRE words.

“How do you like it? The crowd here can get a little rough.”

“Nah,” LeAnne returned, throwing her arm across the air and space affront her.

“You can handle it, right?”

“—No problemo.”

They were silent for a moment. Each, very earnestly, enjoyed their drinks. LeAnne finished hers and ordered another.

Steve, the brave young man with the sparkle in his pale, blue eyes, asked LeAnne one last question before he left, claiming “urgent business. He said, sliding the white side of his business card in front of her and handing her a heavy, silver ballpoint: “You write your number on there and I’ll call you, ‘kay?”

“Okay,” she whispered, frozen. She did as he asked.

The Up North Anthology (No. 117)

Lightning Crashes

The story, often repeated, was that Reed Redner was born during the fiercest lighting storm anyone had ever seen or heard. They say he shot out at the same moment that a deafening bolt struck a nearby tree. He is a wild one, yet nebbish; like Marlon Brando meets someone much nerdier, some sensitive, unthreatening British actor, probably. LeAnne was more right for someone like Reed then Mel—whose sensitivity is stoic and full, whose masculinity is stubborn and unabashed—though neither of them knew what that rightness was beyond the quenching of their carnal desires.

Sometimes the Gray Owl would have karaoke and Reed would sing a very impassioned version of “Lightning Crashes” by Live from behind the bar. He wasn’t necessarily good, but his passion sold the performance. As long as one’s voice isn’t grating and terribly off-key, a karaoke performance that is truly passionate (liquor really helps with that) can be really effective, and, in a way, transcendent. People pick songs for one of two reasons: (1) They believe the song is in their vocal range and (2) They really mean what they sing. That’s why you’ll see everyone form lonely middle-aged divorcees to suicidal metalheads to soul-brothers who live off the audience’s approval to university coeds smitten by their deluded dreams of stardom up there performing their asses off. Reed fits somewhere in the median of those archetypes. Almost everyone does.

The Up North Anthology (No. 116)

Down the Path

LeAnne Cassandra Bartholomew knew her future. It was easy to see. She’d seen it before, grown up with it all around her. Her destiny as a bar-hag in tight pants and cleavage-bearing blouses, unscrupulously hitting on groups of younger men, dancing drunk on the bar-tops, sitting on their laps, getting some of them to take her home was, seemingly, foregone. She knew this. Of course, she was ashamed of it; but it was also her, something desirous inside her that caused her to be this desperate, now, and ever especially then.

She was hot, make no mistake. Her bottom half was like two cake pops next to each other, two sticks that rise into round plumpness. She’d not lose her magnetic charm on men until she was eligible to join AARP.

She saw into her future when she was alone, smoking during her break as a bartender at the Gray Owl and watching Mel Flynn and Aaron Parker across the street at a different bar, knowing that she’d screwed it up with the best man she’d ever dated, and yet still knowing that although she was the one who messed it up irreparably by cheating it was him that was really bored with her and would have dumped her either way. It’s a sadness that cannot be cured by cigarettes, or even beer or pot. It’s something that she would live with for the next few years and need to overcome so as to not become the woman she saw herself developing into 10 to 20 years down the path.

*

“What? That’s super romantic!” he said, exasperated.

“No, it’s not,” she argued.

“It’s not?”

“You think that’s romantic?” She wore a bitter, confused look.

“I thought so.”

“It’s not…” she said firmly.

“Okay. It’s not.”

“I’m glad you understand.”

“Hey. I—I learned something.”

“Okay—You don’t have to insult me.”

“No, no. I wasn’t.”

“Okay.”

*

LeAnne was the one he thought he would love forever. Little did Mel know. Little do men know. He wasn’t that romantic of a guy. He thought that being himself was enough. Well, he wasn’t himself. There wasn’t a himself to be. He was stuck between his old self and his new self—a secondary puberty. And like the first puberty he was cranky, whiny, and irritable. He would have rather been alone in his first months—first year, really—in this near town. This was his metamorphosis. He had to go it alone. But, he was pulled in by her for reasons that are two-fold: (1) She is a magnificent beauty that also showed interest in him (2) In his old life it was customary that he had a lady at his hip to take to business dinners and philanthropic events. These nights of dinners and events were frequent, so then it was also frequent that he be near/with a woman of some kind. None of this was LeAnne’s fault—how unromantic he is, his need for a “girlfriend as crutch,” his “one-third-life crisis.”

The Up North Anthology (No. 114)

Sugar

“We are okay,” Alex said, adamantly.

“Are you?” Aaron asked.

“Yes we are…Right, Mel?”

“Yes, dear…” Mel said.

Mel awoke from his dream, twittering on his side. He was confused by it. Why were he and Alex Pavlis acting as if they were a “we?” Why was Aaron Parker asking if they were alright?

He fell back into is cool pillow.

*

There is a bluff on Lake Superior that rises above the water, overhead the sea caves and into the horizon. Tourists visit it to look on the expanse of North America’s Greatest Lake. Mel found himself alone on the bluff just days after first arriving in Bayfield. It was his first discovery. He’d seen the oceans on both American coasts—from La Jolla to Cape Cod, from the Puget Sound to South Beach.

None of them compared. Maybe it was that he was all alone—alone with his thoughts and the view. He did not need to share it, and so, he took it all in for himself. It was evening and even though it was nearly summer the air had cooled dramatically. He hugged himself up in his blue hoodie.

The drive back to the house was a respite. Unlike the commute through traffic in Chicago, he was put to peace by the melodious whistle of the wind and the gentle, syncopated hum of the tires’ rotations.

Remembering the night of his arrival a few nights before, he sat in his truck and stared at the house he’d deigned a project—a piece of art, eternally in progress. He knew then that it was over. His old life had concluded. He could not break this promise to himself.

*

The next day he saw Alex Pavlis, working at her parent’s restaurant where he often stopped for breakfast, or, at the least, coffee. A spell of shame or embarrassment came over him and he could feel it pass over his body like heat.

LeAnne had broken his heart a few weeks earlier. Not really, the breakup was mutual, but that’s how he acted. They made intimations toward a future friendship, but he didn’t see how that was possible.

Alex came to him with a notepad, knowing that sometimes his orders were complex—for the cook’s sake, not hers, of course.

“Just iced coffee,” Mel said before she could say a word.

“Sugar?” she asked.

“You can call me Mel,” he said.

She blushed, patting him on the shoulder flirtatiously.