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Respect Our Existence
or Expect Our Resistance

cc&d, v272
(the June 2017 issue - the 24 year anniversary issue)

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Respect Our Existence or Expect Our Resistance

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Nothing
Lasts

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May-August 2017
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Nothing Lasts

Jack Moody

    I looked at the bartender’s contorted face through the bottom of the beer glass, emptying what was left of its contents as fast as I could. She watched me back, methodically drying a single glass with a dirty washcloth. Milo was about to join me, once he returned from the convenience store across the street for a bag of nuts. She was attractive, with short hair that I could tell was naturally brown, but had been dyed blonde in most areas.
    “You want another?” She asked, eyeing the empty glass in front of me.
    I nodded affirmatively, and she continued with the small talk that I was hoping she wouldn’t.
    “How’re you tonight?”
    Normally I would ignore the question, but the full, pink lips from which the words came enticed me to be pleasant.
    “I’m okay,” was enough to suffice, but I decided to steal second and really flex my human communication skills. “How’re you?”
    She replaced the beer in my glass and returned it to its rightful place on the bar in front of me. Her fingernails were painted red.
    “You know, I almost believed you there for a second.” She flashed a smile and burned her gaze into the back of my skull. Her eyes were alive and hypnotic; the largest eyes I had ever seen in my long, inebriated life.
    Another soft voice lifted me from my drunken trance.
    “Excuse me...are you Jack Fontaine?”
    The bartender glided away to serve another loyal patron. I spun around abruptly in my seat, irritated with this soft voice for shooing away the large-eyed bartender with the short, bleached-blonde hair.
    “What.” I stated more than asked.
    She was at least twenty years younger than me. A round nose encompassed most of her face, which appeared to be blanketed with acne scars. Her eyes were blue. On most other people, they would have been the very first thing I noticed.
    “I said, are you Jack Fontaine?”
    “Shit. What did I do?”
    “Oh, nothing. I mean, you did. You wrote My Tainted Youth, right?”
    I stared at her for a moment and drank from my beer, very confused.
    “How do you know that?”
    “Oh shit,” she laughed, getting that I wasn’t in on it yet. “Someone put your picture up on TMZ a few days ago. It’s all over the internet.”
    “You’re kidding me.”
    “Nope. I wouldn’t do that, Mr. Fontaine.”
    “Jack.”
    “I wouldn’t do that...Jack.”
    I looked back down into the foaming, golden liquid in my glass and drank instead of giving a proper answer.
    “So it’s really you?” She asked behind a furtive grin.
    “Yes.”
    I could have lied and gotten her off my back, but I didn’t.
    “What’s your name?”
    “Shauna. I can’t explain how great it is to talk to you, Jack.”
    She couldn’t hide her smile any longer and was bursting at the seams.
    So that’s it, I thought; your last moment of anonymity.
    I feared this moment for a long time: the invasive interviews, the unwarranted voyeurism and the armies of angry freaks who would come looking for me, the unsolicited introductions to nobodies whom I already hated. My privacy was now an illusion. Thirty years of successful novels written under a fake name with no face to put it to, and now that was gone. But for some reason, I felt strangely at peace with it. Maybe it was the decades of being another no one drinking alone at the bar, maybe it was the ecstatic face of the woman beaming at me from her barstool, or maybe it was just that I wanted to see what would happen. But most likely, it was the fact that I hadn’t written a goddamned usable word in seven years, and if I really couldn’t write anymore, then maybe this mystical turn of events would pump some very necessary revenue into my previous, all-but-forgotten literary oeuvre. I had spent too many years drinking good whiskey and sleeping in Manhattan penthouses to go back to being a starving artist. Success had made me soft.
    Shauna continued gushing as I filled time with a healthy sip of beer.
    “Your writing changed my life. I’ve never had an author...get me so well. My Tainted Youth got me through college without hurting myself...without you and your characters...I would’ve been so alone. Thank you so much...Jack.
    I emptied the glass and signaled silently to the large-eyed bartender for a refill.
    “My Tainted Youth was the worst novel I ever wrote.”
    Shauna appeared visibly appalled by my answer.
    “But...that was the last novel you ever wrote...”
    “Exactly. What was your name again?”
    “Shauna.”
    “Right, Shauna. Okay Shauna, I’m gonna let you in on a secret—oh thanks,” the newly christened beer glass had appeared before me and I drank deep before continuing anything further. Shauna hung on every movement I made, anticipating whatever barstool philosophy I was about to bestow upon her with wide eyes and open ears.
    “Shauna, I’ve lost the juice.”
    “The juice?” She asked in puzzled astonishment.
    “Yes, the juice. Every novel I’ve ever written has taken something very important out of me. See, people will tell you that that’s the way to write, and I agreed with those people. But that means that every character and story and sentence and fucking comma took something vital out of me; something vital that gave that story a heartbeat, you understand?”
    “To create life as a writer, you must take life from your humanity.”
    “Okay, well put, Shauna. My inner twenty-two year-old can get down with that.”
    She laughed, “Is that a good thing?”
    “That’s a good thing. But with a lifetime of stories, comes a fractured life for the writer, the human. Well, if you do it right. No one who truly writes gets out alive and in one piece.”
    “That’s an awfully nihilistic view of the most beautiful adaptation in human creativity.”
    “That’s a painfully naive view of something you don’t know anything about.”
    She didn’t take that well. I filled the empty static with a gulp of something bitter, that wasn’t what I was drinking previously.
    “What is this?” I hollered to the large-eyed bartender and raised my glass as evidence.
    She burned through my skull with her blue gaze.
    “Something new.”
    “I actually do know something about it.”
    “What?” I swiveled back around to face Shauna.
    “I said I do know something about it. I’ve written a novel.”
    “Oh ho ho hooo, that’s adorable. You did, did you? You and every NYU undergrad in the five boroughs. And what’s it about?”
    “I’m not going to be belittled by you, Jack, no matter who you are.”
    I have to admit, I was a little angry with her. I wasn’t sure why yet. Then she said it.
    “At least I wrote something. You haven’t had shit published since I was in high school, for fuck’s sake.”
    “I LOST THE JUICE!” I screamed. “My shit just got worse and worse until I couldn’t even sit down at the goddamn typewriter anymore.”
    “You use a typewriter?”
    “Yes, I’m old.”
    “No, I think it’s cool.”
    She smiled warmly and put her hand on my shaking leg.
    “Do you always do that?”
    “Since I was a kid. It’s just an anxiety thing, like a nervous tic.”
    “You’re just like your character in the book,” she said.
    “How’s that?”
    “You’re a self-hating, neurotic, depressed alcoholic with a God-complex.”
    “Well, I thought I took a few liberties with that character, but it’s always nice to hear one’s failings and shortcomings as a human being.”
    I raised my half-empty glass to her in sarcastic tribute.
    “No, I didn’t mean it like that...how much of it was true?”
    “My Tainted Youth?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Most of it. I’m not really that interesting, though.”
    “The mental hospital?” She asked.
    “Yeah, that part’s true.”
    “The overdose.”
    “Yeah.”
    “When you were out in the rain in your boxers, fighting with Lacey? And she stabbed you? Was that real?”
    “Mostly.”
    “What was different?”
    “I was naked.”
    “What?”
    “I wasn’t in my boxers, I was naked. I decided my protagonist needed a bit more dignity.”
    I put the glass to my lips without looking and realized there was nothing in it.
    “Let me buy you one,” Shauna offered.
    Naturally, I accepted.
    Milo had walked back into the bar, and was talking with the large-eyed bartender and a tall man in a black trench coat with a green mohawk and facial tattoos.
    Shauna continued to prod at me.
    “If it was true, then how could it have been a bad novel?”
    I drank, belched and indulged her.
    “Because the soul’s not in it anymore. I don’t have anything to write about. I just use loads of pretty, descriptive words to mask my lack of plot because all I ever do is drink. It’s superfluous and amateur.”
    “Jack, I wholeheartedly have to disagree with you. You’re a poet. Everything you write conveys meaning. I’ve never connected with any author so mu—.”
    “The prose is fucking purple! It’s like I think that I’m actually saying anything, its pathetic.”
    “It’s not too purple! It’s creative, abstract.”
    “THE PROSE IS FUCKING PURPLE!”
    My raised voice caught Milo’s attention, and he gestured that he would be over momentarily, apparently quite engrossed in whatever conversation he was now having with the mohawked, facial-tattooed, lanky stranger. The large-eyed bartender had floated back to her post and slid over a scotch and water to me, on the house. Her gaze was anything if not hypnotic, and seemed to follow me like the Mona Lisa as she glided across the barroom floor.
    Shauna laid her hand softly on my shoulder.
    “Look, you writers write about what you know, right?”
    “Right, write, right?” I said and laughed, finishing off the scotch and water faster than I anticipated. This chick was making me anxious.
    “I’m serious, Jack. Why don’t you just write about what you know?”
    “What, drinking whiskey in bed until five in the afternoon, then taking enough pills so that I can answer the door and face the prostitute I called without curling into a ball and throwing up?”
    “Exactly.”
    “Well, I was being a bit hyperbolic.”
    “Spoken like a true writer. Jack, if I may suggest anything...it’s to get out of your own fucking way. And write something. As a fan, please; write something.”
    I drained the last of the tainted water at the bottom of the glass, and life was quite dream-like. I hadn’t expected it to last this long.
    Milo found his seat on the barstool to the left of me, with Shauna to my right. The tall man in the black trench coat exited swiftly out the door in silence. I ordered another scotch and water, and one for Milo as well.
    I slapped him on the shoulder.
    “Who the fuck was that?”
    “Oh him?” He pointed towards the closed door at the far corner of the bar. “That was Ace Venom.”
    “Ace Venom?”
    “Yeah, that’s his real name.”
    “The tall guy with the mohawk and tattoos on his face?”
    “Yeah, he paid $175 to legally change his name to Ace Venom.”
    I nodded. “I can’t be mad at that.”
    The large-eyed bartender yelled out last call. The bar was emptying out. Milo was busy finishing his drink under the new time constraint.
    Shauna tapped my shoulder again. She was paying out her tab.
    “Hey. Don’t you wanna know how people found out that it was you?”
    I finished my drink, stood up slowly and tossed a fifty on the bar counter.
    “No. Nothing lasts.”
    I walked out of the bar alone and drove home drunk.



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