I spotted the guy as he came around the corner where the protest was happening outside the library on the plaza. Kind of scummy-looking, and not in a hipster way. White guy, wearing a plain Hanes T-shirt frayed at the collar and scuffed aviator sunglasses pushed up into unwashed hair. He was carrying a homemade poster with WILL PERFORM CUNNILINGUS FOR VODKA written on it. His half-committed stride made him look simultaneously purposeful and furtive, a demeanor that made the journalist and former soldier in me take notice, but when he caught sight of the Black Lives Matter crowd of thirty or so people listening respectfully to the speaker, he slowed and hung back. Maybe it was the young black dudes he’d be facing with his sign, or maybe it was the presence of the elderly NAACP ladies with their church hats and earthbound bulk, but he seemed to be reconsidering his original plan, whatever it was. I watched his wheels turn while a wiry little preacher quoted Deuteronomy.
Listening from the shade, the glass-and-steel 1970s municipal library behind me and the rusty silhouette of the shuttered blast furnaces of Bethlehem Steel visible on the next hill over, I wanted to think this dude suffered what I call a moment of humanity. I wanted to believe that he was moved to some human empathy by the disquieted murmurs and affirmative nods of that sorrowful crowd of people protesting a murder, but he may have just realized that he could end up getting his ass kicked.
And, yeah, I’d love to tell you that I went up to the guy and steered him away from the rally for humanitarian reasons of my own, but no. The rally was disappointingly small and going nowhere. I could have waited to see if some kind of dust-up happened, maybe if Mr. Provocateur had worked up the courage to show the sign he was now carefully turning away from the sight-line of the main crowd. But even that story would have been a cliché.
Maybe I’ve got compassion-fatigue, though some of my Fallujah buddies would point out that no one survives patrol for long without developing a healthy cynicism about people. The truth is I’m just tired of writing about white guys provoking outrage. I’d written that story from the military angle about three dozen times when my tour was up. It got me a lot of goodwill from certain kinds of editors. Since it turns out there’s a war brewing in the streets of this country, too, I probably looked like a good bet to shine a light on it. I’d been on this beat for over three years: racial tension, gun control, mass shootings, Black Lives Matter, dickhead politicians. Man, I was bored beyond belief.
Mr. Provocateur at least offered something different. If I was lucky, it’d be a story about a guy who came to do wrong and ended up having a change of heart. Another cliché, to be sure, but one that had all the fury and redemption Americans love to feel good about. There was no question that this guy was going to have a story. Whether it was a story that my editor would think was worth printing I wouldn’t know until I got it. I tucked my notepad into the side pocket of my shoulder bag and walked over to the guy.
“I’ll buy you that vodka,” I said.
He looked at me suspiciously. “You expecting me to suck your dick for it?”
I shook my head. “Just answer a few questions. I’m a journalist.”
Looking me up and down for some outward confirmation of the claim, he asked, “Questions about what?”
I indicated the crowd on the small plaza behind me. “About what you’re doing here. With that.” I pointed to his sign. As soon as I did, he quickly tilted the poster away from me. A weird look crossed his face, equal parts embarrassment and fear. He set his shoulders, but it was clear from the awkward way he occupied his skinny body that he wasn’t used to taking an aggressive stance. I’d seen enough of both the fearful and aggressive kinds in Iraq to know what was genuine and what was bluff.
“Why should you give a shit?” he asked.
“Don’t necessarily.” I shrugged and pulled out a pack of gum. “Maybe you’re just a new angle on an old story.”
“You gonna say I’m a racist?” he asked.
I loosened a piece of gum from the pack and held it out to him. It hung in the air between us. “Are you?” I replied.
He hesitated, using the time that it took to reach for the stick and unwrap it to walk back his surprise that I’d bothered to ask.
“Well,” he said, scanning the rally doubtfully. “I guess if you’re really buying.”
I let him lead the way to a bar down the street from the plaza. He said his name was Mike. A couple of times, he tossed out a controversial comment, looking sideways at me to see how I would react, but I wasn’t picking up what he was putting down, and by the time we were in front of the bar, he seemed less suspicious. I noted that he folded his poster board in half before we went inside, but I didn’t mention it.
The bar wasn’t one of those dim, lonely places you see in police procedurals but it was working on becoming one. The chairs around the wobbly tables were uncomfortable to even look at. The green leather padding on the bar stools was scraped up, and the seam of the booth seat I slid into was coming loose and rubbed against the back of my knees through my jeans. It was the kind of place a smart marketing person would call “shabby chic.” We were the only two people in the place.
A tall, gangly guy backed his way through the swinging doors of the kitchen holding a dishwasher tray of bar glasses, a bag of ice on top of it. He turned around and dropped the stuff on the counter, reaching into the back pocket of his painter’s pants and pulling out a pocket knife that he opened fluidly with one hand and used to slash the top of the bag off. He dumped the ice into the bar refrigerator and slid the top closed over it.
He was balling the bag up when he noticed us sitting in the booth. I’d say that he paused, but it was more like a glitch, a kind of momentary stumble through the air that he immediately recovered from. Then the balled-up bag flew through the air into the open garbage container behind him. He returned his attention to the dishwasher tray, pulling out two glasses in each hand and lining them up on the bar.
“You buying?” he said to neither of us.
I glanced at Mike, but he was looking at me expectantly. “What do you want?” I asked him. He told me. I told the bartender.
Mike and I watched the guy make the drink. There’s something beautiful, almost graceful, about watching an experienced bartender make a drink, the way they reach for two things at once without having to look. Something about it always makes me think about Dr. Octopus from the Spiderman comics I read when I was a kid.
Placing the vodka-and-tonic and bottle of Heineken on the counter, the bartender put a palm down on either side of the drinks as if he was standing guard over them, then lifted his eyes to stare at me. I got up from my seat and approached the bar to pay. I handed him a twenty.
Hold out money to most people and their eyes will drop to look at the bill. Not this guy. He kept his eyes on me. There was some intensity in his expression that I didn’t understand. He took the money and turned to put it in the register. When he turned back to hand me the change, I took it and lowered it onto the bar as a tip. Something told me that waving it away as I might have with another guy wasn’t a good move. One of the things I learned when I was overseas was that little moves can have big consequences, and I just had a second sense about the guy standing preternaturally still before me.
I wondered if he was a veteran, too. If he was, it wasn’t from the most recent war. There was gray at his temples, and his skin had a rangy, used quality, the kind you get when you’ve lived long hours in the sun or smoked too many cigarettes. He wore an olive colored T-shirt with the arms cut off at the shoulders. The hair under his arms was clumped with sweat, and he had a pocked scar from an old smallpox vaccination on his upper left arm. As he slid the bills off the bar, I saw another scar ran across the backs of the fingers of his right hand.
The bartender lifted his chin toward Mike. “One drink he gets,” he told me. I looked over my shoulder at Mike who was fidgeting on the booth seat, then back to the bartender curiously.
“OK,” I said, and waited.
“You have as many as you want.”
“OK,” I said again. It was apparent after a few seconds of silence that no additional explanation was coming. I took a drink in each hand and went back to the booth.
Mike was fiddling with the poster board which, even folded, was hard to put out of the way. Finally, he stood it up on the seat next to him. I slid his drink to him. There was a grateful shine in his eyes as he took a sip.
I indicated the sign. “So?”
With the back of his hand, he nudged the poster further away on the seat. “That’s not me,” he said cryptically.
“OK.” I took a sip from my bottle. “Who is it?”
He turned his glass in a circle, then dragged it aside to run his index finger through the condensation on the tabletop. He seemed to get some visceral pleasure from the act. Now that I had an excuse to stare right at him, he looked more upwardly-mobile than I’d at first guessed. There was an earring in one ear, something small and silver. His teeth, though not perfectly white, were at least straight enough to suggest that someone had bothered to get them that way at some point. He took another long sip of his drink and pulled his lips back in a half grimace of approval when the alcohol went down his throat.
“Aren’t you going to record our conversation?” he asked with a sidelong glance.
I tapped my temple with my beer bottle. “Got a good memory,” I told him.
As Mike tried to tell whether I was playing him or not, his hand suddenly jerked involuntarily off the drink, then settled again around the glass. We both stared at it. The twitch took him higher up the next time. His shoulder jerked toward his ear. I realized that what I’d mistaken for fidgeting while I was at the bar was actually a medical condition.
“You take anything for that?” I asked.
He raised his glass in answer. His grimace was real this time as he downed the rest of the vodka tonic in a single swallow. I glanced over at the bar to see if the bartender was watching, and then slid my beer bottle across to Mike. He accepted it without comment and drank that off, too. He pushed it back into the middle of the table.
“Thanks,” he said.
I shrugged. We waited through the next several tics in silence and, to kill the time, I reached into my front pocket for the packet of gum again. I unwrapped a stick and put it in my mouth.
Seeing my expression, Mike explained. “It’s because I’m trying to be still. You don’t see it so much when I’m moving around.”
I nodded.
He shrugged. “It’ll calm down when the alcohol hits my nervous system,” he told me. I drummed my fingers on the table for a second and then rose to go to the bar again. The bartender looked up from wiping out the speed tray.
“Same again,” I told him. His eyes narrowed. I held his gaze. “It’s for me.”
The twitch at the corner of the bartender’s jaw wasn’t medical. It was anger. He poured the drink and pushed it at me. I pulled my wallet out and the guy growled, “You want me to start you a fucking tab?”
I pulled a credit card from the wallet instead of cash and held it out to him as blankly as I could. “That would be great.”
When I picked up the drinks and turned away from him, he yelled past me at Mike, “Hey, retard, why don’t you get yourself real medicine instead of taking these poor suckers for a ride?”
Mike cringed, then held his hands up to the guy in appeasement. I put the V&T down firmly in front of him and slid back into the booth without acknowledging the douchebag bartender’s comment.
“Nice guy,” I said to Mike.
Mike raised his glass in a pseudo-toast. “My brother,” he said, and drank off half of the liquid. It was unclear to me whether he was expressing solidarity with me or he actually shared genetic material with the guy behind the bar.
“I don’t have anything against the blacks. African Americans,” Mike said, when he lowered the glass. I let the words hang there between us to see if just hearing them would prompt him to keep talking. Instead, a series of tics, milder than before, but a staccato burst of them nonetheless, distracted us. The guy was just barely hanging on to his own body.
I shook off my fascination and tried to return our attention to the topic. “But …?”
“No but.” His fingers danced in the air above the tabletop. “You got any matches?” he asked. I said I didn’t. He glanced longingly at the bar, so I got up and went over again. The bartender didn’t even look up; he grabbed a pack of matches from the bowl on the shelf behind him and threw it onto the bar in front of me, then put a square napkin holder down next to it. I didn’t ask. I carried both back to the table.
Mike pulled a cheap napkin from the metal holder and began to carefully rip off long strips of paper. His body seemed to quiet as he worked at the napkin, and his expression of fierce concentration began to dissolve. When the first napkin was in strips, he pulled out several more and continued. “Doing something physical helps,” he explained.
“Got it. So, the poster?”
His smiled was almost rueful. “Trying to inject some levity. Things are so fuckin’ serious out there.”
“Needlessly, you mean?”
“Didn’t say that,” he shook his head. A small pile of scraps was piling up in front of him. Paper particles from the frayed edges floated in the air around him and he pinched his nostrils between his fingers for a second when it seemed like he might sneeze. When the itch passed, he rubbed his nose and went back to ripping. “Thing is,” he said, “a little rally like that is just a feel-good exercise. Totally pointless. You see anybody who matters there? Mayor? Police Chief?”
I shook my head.
He nodded and gathered the pile of napkin scraps between his palms and shoved them into his empty glass. “See? You gotta think about the aim of protest. If it’s to effect change—” and here my ears pricked up because the phrase pointed me to a different kind of background for the guy, “—then you either gotta have huge numbers of people coming out to swarm the street, or there’s gotta be an implicit threat of violence from them. Those are the only two ways to force something to move in the entrenched system.”
I leaned back in my seat. “Poly-sci major?” I asked, but he shook away that facile assessment with a dismissive little gesture. The vodka had loosened him through his joints and you could see that the guy might even have been graceful if the tics had been more merciful.
“Naw, man. You don’t have to major in shit to know shit. You just gotta think. The people out there? They’re already convinced. That’s called preaching to the converted. Nobody can change anybody’s mind anymore.”
Somewhere overhead, a fan switched on and the air in the bar began to move. Mike paused his tearing to reach for his second glass and drain it. He cracked an ice-cube between his teeth and drew the book of matches toward him. Striking one, he dropped the lit match into the glass of alcohol-soaked napkin. There was a flare bright and hard between us.
The sudden flare reminded me of our loader, a Nebraskan named Elko who yelled “Light ’em up, baby!” every time we fired our tank gun. He was a rosacea-plagued kid whose enthusiasm for wrecking destruction was cover for reading philosophy and writing soft-hearted poems to his girlfriend back in the States. It was Elko who’d made me realize that people just can’t be reduced to headlines.
Mike waved in the general direction of the protest. “That out there is just political theater. Might as well try to lighten things up some.” He gave me a likeable grin. “Anyway, don’t I get points for everything being spelled correctly?”
“Hard word to spell,” I agreed companionably.
He tapped his temple as if to tell me you’re not the only one who commits things to memory, bro. There was a moment of silence between us, during which he began ripping up napkins again, piling them into the glass that now had a jagged edge of soot ringing the inside.
“But you didn’t go through with it,” I said finally.
He shrugged. “Like I said, things are serious out there.”
The bartender was out from behind the bar, nudging seats back under their tables with his hip as he came over. With one hand, he picked up the empty beer bottle Mike’d pushed to the edge of the table. With the other, he handed me my credit card. He glanced down at Mike, who shrank back into his shoulders like a frightened hermit crab. The bartender looked at me.
“You’re done,” he said brusquely. “No charge.”
I took the card without objecting and slipped it into my shirt pocket. I’ve had enough fighting to last four lifetimes and there was nothing here to risk my neck for.
“The guy’s a journalist, Jovey,” Mike said. His hand shook as he lit another match. “He’s just getting my story.”
Jovey reached over without expression and pinched his fingers around the flame. “No story here,” he informed me, stepping to one side so I could slide out of the booth.
His certainty suggested there was, but whatever it was, it wasn’t for the newspapers, and I would need a dissertation to tell it. I rose, handed him my half-full bottle, and headed for the door with Mike pulling another match from the matchbook. Behind me, I heard Jovey say, “Steal my fucking sign again and I’ll beat you down, you marionette retard.”
I hit the exit bar on the door with enough force to suggest to Jovey that he wasn’t the only one with violence on tap—I hate a fucking bully—and then I was out on the sunny sidewalk, the door slowly swinging closed behind me. As I readjusted the shoulder strap of my bag, it occurred to me for the umpteenth time that asshole-dom is such a moving target. That, and how first impressions soften around the edges and fall apart like wet construction paper the more you know. But neither of those was a story I could sell.
I glanced into the window of the bar and caught sight of Mike dropping another lit match into his glass. Just like those bright explosions of violence from the tank gun, the white flash of Mike’s napkin fire temporarily obscured the detail around it so it was hard to say that anything became clearer in the light it provided. When the light went out, I looked toward the rally, wondering if it was worth heading back there, wondering where Elko was now.
Mini-interview with Elizabeth Rosen
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
ER: Maybe not a moment, but a person. My senior English teacher, David Waters, required his classes to keep a weekly journal of writing. As I recall, you could write whatever you wanted, but he did pick the journals up to assess them. He was so enthusiastic about what I wrote and so encouraging. Years later, I had a story in an anthology and there was a signing at a local bookstore. Mr. Waters came rushing into the signing, saying, “Oh, my goodness, I’m on my way to the airport, but I saw your name in the advertisement and thought I must stop by to say how wonderful!” I know that I’m writing today because of Mr. Waters. I think of him often.
HFR: What are you reading?
ER: The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly, and The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us About How and When This Crisis Will End by Neil Howe. It’s pretty unusual for me to be reading nonfiction like this. Unless I’m researching, I usually stick to fiction. I’m behind on my literary journals, so I have copies of Post Road and The Alaska Quarterly Review waiting for me.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “Light ’Em Up”?
ER: The setting came from a real protest I went to, but the events are fictional. I liked the idea of getting to sit down with one of these clowns who are always trying to disrupt protests and ask him questions about his motivation. I also knew that everyone acts based on their own pains and joys, so I created a main character who might have a chance to get at that under-story. But then my main character’s voice became so interesting and it turned out he had pains and joys of his own that were informing his views. This was a story I didn’t see coming.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
ER: A flash fiction chapbook. The past couple of years I’ve been doing a deep dive into the genre. I was working on a short fiction collection, but last year, I wondered whether it would be possible to take the same collection of stories and make a flash version of it and what that would look like.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
ER: Like a lot of creative people, I’ve found it hard to create in the last six months, but I’ve taken refuge in doing the nitty-gritty of writing: focusing on the building blocks of punctuation, syntax, verb tense, image-building, and so forth, as I go back to old, unpublished pieces to revise them. There’s been joy in inhabiting that world of minutiae, and some sense of restored control.
Originally from the Deep South, Elizabeth Rosen now lives in small-town Pennsylvania. She misses fried oysters po-boys and telling Southern ghost stories on the front porch, but has learned to love snow and colorful scarves instead. She is a proud member of the MTV generation and can still tell you all the words to “Karma Chamelon” and where the video for “Hungry Like the Wolf” was filmed. Her work has been published in North American Review, Baltimore Review, Flash Frog, Pithead Chapel, New Flash Fiction Review, and many other places you can learn about at thewritelifeliz.com. Colorwise, she is an autumn.
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Heavy Feather Review 