Manager says I\u2019m banned from open mic night till I agree to stop using a Glock as a drumstick. He says a gun in a club, even an unloaded one, poses a safety risk. I say that\u2019s the point. He says the music\u2019s not even any good. I say it\u2019s performance art. He says why not use nunchucks. I ask if he\u2019s ever licked paint or anything like that.<\/p>\n
The genius of the piece\u2014that\u2019s not my word; that\u2019s the word of an underground zine edited by a nonbinary goth freelance makeup artist\u2014is that the ever-increasing frequency of the beat can mean something different on any given night. The meaning can change even over the course of the piece, which lasts about nineteen minutes, depending on how slow I start.<\/p>\n
The beat can be the ticking of mortality\u2019s clock. The litany of lives lost to senseless gun violence. The sound of a shrinking universe, reversing its outward push after billions of years of reckless expansion, closing in faster and more excitingly now toward that final, violent, ecstatic Big Crunch.<\/p>\n
I just think, Jesus. If you can\u2019t confront this stuff in art.<\/p>\n
After a few nights I called the manager and told him fine I\u2019ll try the nunchucks. They bring the house down. Nine-and-a-half-minute standing O. My leg falls asleep before the crowd\u2019s finished.<\/p>\n
Funniest thing I\u2019ve ever seen, says a guy in a denim jacket with Pep\u00e9 Le Pew patches to me afterwards as I\u2019m in the alley smoking my American Spirits. It started funny then stopped being funny then started being funny again, he says. Like the rakes, he says.<\/p>\n
I repeat that phrase to myself the whole grimy fluorescent bus ride home. Like the rakes, like the rakes. I try to find the poetry in the words, like I\u2019m always trying to do with words.<\/p>\n
I think I\u2019m getting close to achieving nirvana when the brakes squeal. The metallic crunch that followed will live in my head forever, or at least the imagined version I\u2019m constantly newly creating will.<\/p>\n
The guy had apparently been trying to take a right on red where you can\u2019t take a right on red. Killed on impact. \u201cAtomized,\u201d I heard a police officer describe it later as. The bus driver swore in court he\u2019d never seen him, even after he felt the impact. Which feels impossible until you consider how adrenaline impacts a person\u2019s perceptive abilities. There are accounts of shark attack victims who swear for the rest of their lives they\u2019ve never seen a shark.<\/p>\n
We all had to stay on the bus for more than ninety minutes while the police came and a report was drawn up and statements were taken. Then the driver had to be escorted away\u2014I saw his shoulders shaking\u2014and a new driver had to be quickly groomed and installed.<\/p>\n
This whole time that phrase remained looping in my head: like the rakes, like the rakes. Rather than bonding with my fellow passengers, who all around me now were holding each other and dabbing at their eyes with balled-up Kleenexes and breathing into McDonald\u2019s bags, instead I found myself repeating quietly those few words, like the rakes, like the rakes, worrying them over my teeth and tongue like prayer balls. As the bus got up to speed and the pneumatic air brakes spat out angry hisses into the night air and the sticky scent of motor oil filled my nostrils, it felt increasingly and inexplicably urgent that I find every available variation and nuance of those three syllables. I had the sense\u2014or maybe fear more like\u2014that if I could just express them enough times in enough different ways before I reached my destination, I could get them to\u2026 Well, not make sense<\/em>, but\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Manager says I\u2019m banned from open mic night till I agree to stop using a Glock as a drumstick. He says a gun in a club poses a safety risk. I say that\u2019s the point. He says the music\u2019s not even any good. I say it\u2019s performance art.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":25484,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3530],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flash-fiction","writer-andrew-graham-martin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24561"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25485,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24561\/revisions\/25485"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}