Steve Kistulentz

One condition of work-release is daily to confess my obsessions, which I then write in disco glitter, one gluey blossom across my permanent record. When I eat too much of the local fruit, it gives me clairvoyance. But I forget to write down the predictions, instead crush cherry pits into a fine powder, chop the powder into lines with an expired credit card. The homeless give me quarters. Union rules require at least one mention of the weather here. My flight leaves on an inexact date in the nebulous future, arrives late afternoon, two days before our first kiss. I pay the airline $25 extra to lose my dignity between here and Chicago. At the airport you buy it back. When I walk to the market to buy more cherries, a parade of kittens follows, marching in formation, singing precise and bawdy cadence about prostitutes and crack houses. They change the names to protect the innocent. Signs say this mile of interstate is paved with the bones of the great mastodons, and kept clean by the well-meaning gentlemen of the Kiwanis Club. Vacationers from further south sit in the lobby watching guests from the north put on one-act plays. On even-numbered days, only, of course. Registered letters from the clerk of the court inform me that it won't violate my probation to drag you across state lines as long as I promise to return you by 8 p.m., mostly whole. The desk clerk is also the milkman is the town orthodontist. Instead of leaving Bibles at bedside, Gideons leave individual soaps printed with couplets from the Song of Songs, or corkscrews. I did not catch last night's plays, but promised to attend this evening's performance. I play a slightly amplified version of myself, with one line:Wish you were here. It's a song and dance number. Everyone applauds.

Tonight we shall read from my personal book of lamentations, sit shiva in a room lit with those overly perfumed candles as thick as the aluminum bat I used just last week to flip away the possum carcass I'd found collapsed against the house. Forensics tells us the backyard is Panama before quinine, an ecosystem unto itself, civil war of mongoose, snake, and cat. The cause of the possum's death was obvious, this near-biblical dryness that lasted the summer. This morning I found a carapace, a palmetto bug in my shower, dead in his search for water. He got flushed, a Viking funeral; minutes later I heard about Rocky, 48, complications from a ruptured aortic aneurysm, who went the same week as John, 47, though by less violent means. I'd never introduced either to my family, and now I am covering the mirrors. Pictures from a decade ago exist without context, the bars in them closed, marriages shattered on the pebbly coast of installment debt, bands broken up by midnight arguments dead men can't recall. Forgive us our trespasses, yes, but also this literalism. Let us frame the only surviving picture of the three of us in a rectangle of thorns before we take communion out in the street. I will let those candles burn, burn, burn, burn, burn to the wick, Barracuda, then tell you how I would have laid down my life for either of those two men, and I have nothing to offer now they have done that for me.

for Doug Fieger (d. 2010), Berton Averre, Prescott Niles and Bruce Gary (d. 2006) The men don’t know growls Willie Dixon’s most famous tune, but the version I prefer—low fidelity cassette bootleg, howling tin sound with shredded paper drums—remains unreleased, recorded not by some venerable Mississippi blues curmudgeon whose name, artfully dropped here, would evoke afternoons porch-sitting with magnolia wine and box-string guitar, or might bestow upon me some sorely lacking hipster bonafides. That’s never going to happen, since I am talking here about a nearly unlistenable cover, the monophonic noise and mid-range screech of The Knack, live in Hollywood, before a packed house at the Troubador, July 1979. So what if I was twelve? I’d already gotten it, learned how to pluck out the gallop of My Sharona’ s bass, hoping someday I’d ace out Doug Fieger and be Sharona’s back door man myself, though I’d have been better off learning how to get in the front door first. Which was the vaguest country, women, or the blues? I did not know. I still might not. I only knew what I was learning: that a song could actually sound like sweat; that Ray Manzarek, gangly Ray best known as the piano-playing witness to greatness, had dropped by to sit in, and when he’d come down Wonderland Avenue it was a benediction, as if to say,Hey, these guys are all right, forgive them their sins of leather tie and Beatle boot. So I want to say thank you to whatever thought to tape that show, because it taught me that I wanted a forever girl like Sharona, who, as the 45-rpm picture sleeve promised, played the coolest records for her slumber-partying girlfriends, who all looked like the camisoled girls in the Runaways or the equally fated Go-Gos. But I am getting ahead of myself, since, as Leonard Cohen says, everybody knows how this story ends. I have everything The Knack ever recorded, including this version of Back Door Man, which tells me everything that was wrong with 1979, and later, everything wrong with me. How does the show end? Listen to the cassette, a moment in unsteady time, the Zapruder film of the skinny tie era. For the band, you know how it ends already: rehab, divorce, rehab, forgiveness, comeback tour, state fair nostalgia; immortal Sharona—her real name —sells real estate, million-dollar homes. That’s what those little girls do, they grow up, which reminds me My Sharona, that set-closing number, may be the saddest story I know.