Saturn in Retrograde I 1:2, 1:3

Note: I wrote Saturn in Retrograde in 2004, based loosely on the Columbine High School massacre. At the time, school shootings and mass-casualty shooting events were rare. Sixteen years on, they have become all too common. I feel the novel is somewhat prophetic in thatregard. At any rate, it's a real thrill-ride for the reader, the story of a young man and his hostages to fortune on one fast, sexy and ultimately tragic night of violence and bloodshed.

Two

“Oh really,” the voice at then end of the long phone cord sounded plainly unconvinced.

“Yes. They just called me and told me. He had been ill for some time. Cancer.” The voice stalled for a moment, rang up a customer, and said, “What exactly is it you do in the kitchen? This is Gary.”

It was okay, he thought. It was all going to be okay, because it was Gary. Gary was an enormous, hulking man that looked like he shit solid bricks of steroids. He was a bartender. He was a doorman. He was always, seemingly, smiling. You get that much pussy, Tanner thought, and the world always seems like it is bathed in rosy light. ‘Um, what kind of cancer was it exactly?”

He switched to awshucks, you're my littlebrother mode; he put on a more child-like tone. He found it appeased the latent homosexual in all of these guys. “Tanner, Tanner lemme hear it...” Gary’s voice suddenly grew, oddly, cheery.

“Ah-oo-uh.” Gary said this into the phone, slowly. Loudly. “Ah-oo-uh, Gary” Tanner, said, knowing he was expected to reply in the like. It was a strange, seal-call sound that is still widely in use by the U.S. military as a sort of secret handshake. Gary had been ROTC in college. Tanner’s dad was ex-military.

“Be here. Eleven. Got it?”

“Sure thing. Thanks Gary. I mean it.”

Tanner hung up the phone, wondering, not for the first time, what Gary might want to do to him if they were locked up in a cell together for an extended period of time. Sure. A few more hours sleep, or time to dry a little, at least. It was what he needed. It was just now two, and he still had his job. He threw some clothes on, and wandered downstairs to smoke. But first he grabbed his work-shirt and satchel. Eleven o’clock, he sighed. He would play by the rules. He would be a good boy. Little did he know then, he would never work inside of that stinking kitchen at Delcino's Sports Bar again.

Three

He went back upstairs and took a little nap. A few hours. He dreamed short, vicious, stabbing dreams that rocked him. But, upon awakening, he could remember what none of them were, really, about. He pulled on his clothes, tied on his floppy canvas shoes, and grabbed his satchel. He walked through the gloom downstairs. The night was reasonably warm; the neighborhood was quiet as can be expected during the first few summer nights when life is just starting to creep back outside the front door aster winter’s icy claws have been retracted. He could smell backyard cooking, and hear some (probably) blond teenage girl giggle on some back porch in the arms of her (probably) boneheaded boyfriend. This was a nicer neighborhood. This was a piss-poor town, only thing to recommend it was the college, but on a night like tonight one could forget that one lived, essentially, in the backwaters of human civilization, in a piss-poor town that didn’t give a damn how happy you were. Or weren’t. His feet beat the pavement. If he could have taken a satelite photo of himself, he would have seen a slightly stooped, twenty-seven year old male, very short, very bald, ragged in appearance, and with a pot belly. There was no getting around it: in a culture that seemed to take so much stock in beauty and wealth, he was a marked man. “I will die a lonely, bitter fool,” he often thought. “I will never make a million dollars. I will never be anybodies boss. I will never sleep with a decent woman.”

Pause.

“And I will never drive a Lexus. Damn.” He tallied up some more of his inadequacies. It was mind be-numbing, really, this constant self-deprecation; he felt it was a necessary buffer against himself and the expectations of the world,. After all, didn’t America care about it’s best and brightest? Wasn’t that what he was? A man with an I.Q. over 150? A college graduate? A published writer? Yes, yes, and yes. Still, it had not, for over a year, made much of an impact on anyone. Boo hoo. The moon at least looked beautiful. A lovely crescent shaped sickle moon, adrift in the heavenly aether and oblivious to the little scurrying atomic humans that stared up at it on summer nights that promised the joys of good food, good sex, good times, to some. He lived in a little rooming house down the street from the college. It was okay. At least he was within earshot of any loud noises. Loud noises were important to those that were, perpetually, frustrated with silence. And he had always been frustrated so.

“I am a loser. I am a loooooser. But,” he consoled himself, muttering under his breath, “at least I am smarter than Gary. Colon cancer? Oh, jeezus, he actually bought it, I think.”

Flip-flop.

Flip-flop.

Down the cracked sidewalk, closer to campus. Closer to scantily-clad young women. Closer to alcohol. He kept moving. Just one drink. He kept shaking. The night seemed pregnant with possibilities. He shuddered. Closer. It seemed like time was just about flying by. He stopped by the Student Union to see if anyone he knew might be there. It was a large building, fifty years old, and he had once been a janitor there. That had been okay. He got to use his psychic powers. He had been sitting by himself up in the hotel area of the large, t-shaped old building, surrounded by bath towels, and old magazines, and little complimentary soaps that smelled like douche. He was hiding, avoiding his crew leader. He didn’t have to work very hard at this. The crew leader was out back near the dumpsters, smoking a joint. He felt the first few, faintest stirrings of consciousness play within him. He had only woken up around forty-five minutes ago, and had struggled in the dark, five-in-the-morning weather to get to the Student Union. It was funny how nothing had seemed real. As he walked down the lonely streets and sidewalks, he could feel the age of the world, free at last from the energies of eighteen thousand sweating bodies, pulsate around him in the dark. The moon had been high and scythe-like then, as well. Now here he sat, in an old room off the main hallway, flipping through an outdated National Geographic and smoking a cigarette. He could feel tendrils of pleasure lick him. It made him want to shit. Suddenly, in the fluorescent glow from the fluorescent tube in the ceiling, he could see his smoke whirl into a little galaxy of cancer.

His eyes glazed over. His tummy rumbled. He slurped coffee. He felt good all over. Good and relaxed and pure. Suddenly, out of the blue it hit him like a bolt. Imagine an old man standing before you in immense brown corduroy pants. You have no idea how large the misshapen ass must be, but it must be very, very large and pendulous. The face has withered with age, and the jowls are a mass of flab. The pants, incidentally, are pulled up to the middle of the chest, old man style, and the shirt is some checkered piece that would have been better off in a Salvation Army bin. The breathing is a horrifying, rasping, wheeze. The old man walks with a claw cane. He looks like a jolt of lightning brought him back from the wrong side of the crypt. That man was standing in front of him, now. Materialized, for a moment, in the smoke. Tanner nearly wet his workpants. He rubbed his eyes. He was sure he must have dozed off. The mouth worked; the throat rasped. Something was coming. This foul revenant was trying, in some way, to communicate. “Chukka!” Was the best it could do. It defied logic. It stood between himself and the door. It vanished, slowly, still making the same rasping groan in it’s throat. He flip-flopped through the glass doors and into the building. Best not to think about that right now. There was a dining commons down the hall. Tanner could already hear the pounding lapping beat of rock music drone outside the double doors to the left. Coming out of those doors, incongruous with the office-like bearing of the Student Union, a group of trendy emo-rock fans walked across the hall and out the front doors. Tanner had come in the side. Tanner had come in the side. Now, did he want to stay? Seven-thirty and all was well. A girl stood farther down the hall.

She had a perfectly-squared jet black haircut and a plaid mini-skirt.

“Hey,” he said, sounding gruffer than what he meant to. “Who is playing tonight?” He already knew the answer to this, but he wanted to appear as if he was actually interested. The girl looked at him as if he had just asked if he could piss down the side of her face.

“What you mean you don’t know? Get a life, dude.”

“Hey, all I want to know is who is playing tonight, is all. I like these bands, I party with them sometimes. You ever party with any of the guys in the band?” She got all huffy. “Well, if you must know, as a matter of fact, my boyfriend is in, like, the hottest band around. They just got signed to an indie label in Indy.”

“A-- w h a t ? ”

“An indie label from Indi-anapolis.” “Oh, that’s really cool,” he said. He attempted to sound like he had a grain of enthusiasm. Suddenly, the ice seemed to break a little. Now she was doing her job, promoting her boyfriend’s band.

“Yeah. They’re called Saturn in Retrograde. So. Yeah.”

She kept staring at him, and drew her yeah out as if the word, in and of itself, held some sort of magic significance, as if it meant that she was agreeing with him agreeing with her that Saturn in Retrograde was really something to get all hot and bothered about. He turned, mumbled, “can I piss down your face?”

“Do I wanna trade some tapes? No, I don’t have any tapes to trade myself, but if you wait till after their set I’m sure Chuck has some demos he can lend you. Or sell.”

He went past the double doors. A skinny, wiry, bespectacled youth with an anti-racism patch and 140 facial piercing asked him if he had six dollars to donate for “the cause”. He didn’t, but managed to get past the table with only giving four bucks and collecting several ragged pieces of literature on the wonders of vegetarianism and the necessity of harassing those that didn’t agree with your particular viewpoint. He walked ahead into the darkness. Tables had been cleared away, stacked haphazardly, but it was to no avail. The turn-out was rather poor. On stage, several lanky young substance abusers belted forth a kind of listless, droning, clap-trap music with occasional screamed vocals. The bass itself was overpowering; the creative gestalt was not. Ringed around the large, relatively empty floor, bored high school students crammed into booths usually reserved for campus dining. There were a multitude of backpacks thrust onto tables. All of them looked exactly alike: festooned with buttons and patches. Non-conformity was astoundingly similar this season, he thought with a wry grin. These kids never change. The young man singing looked like a tall, well-groomed, black-clad aardvark. His lyrics could not be discerned. His band looked as if they were practicing for part-time positions as living mannequins. The overpowering funk of their sweat was noticeable three feet from the podium. A huge television set had been moved so they could set up their equipment. A skinny, anorexic-looking young girl with the same perfectly-bobbed hair swayed in time to the music. This was Saturday night. He looked around. He wished it would have been some loud and fast nightmare, some punk band playing, and that a few more people had crowded in. Then he would have had an excuse to slam dance someone. As it was, he yawned, and walked out the opposite door. He walked down the stairs and out back of the Student Union. Did he dare look at his watch? It was dead of night dark, now. He saw a very skinny, haggard-looking girl smoking a cigarette at the bottom of the steps.

He walked down slowly, cautiously, stopping at the bottom of the steps and, casually, taking out a cigarette. She was having a very heated conversation on her cell phone, finally plopping her ass on the cement curb at the bottom of the stairs, next to one of the ashtrays. She was looking at Tanner, but talking to a (probable) bonehead boyfriend. “Yes...I know...I fucking, hey, that’s not fucking fair! Well, he sure thinks it is, so maybe I should just...no, I haven’t been fucking him. Well, why don’t you just go get some fucking skank pussy off of your crack whore sister, big boy? Do you hear me? Just go fuck your own sister, you fucking dickless asshole. Cause we’re through! Yeah, you just try it, cause if I ever see your sorry fucking face again I’ll blow your goddamn head off! Motherfucker! Ahhh!” She clicked her phone off with a yell. Tanner sat there looking at her, dumbfounded. That had all been loud. Very loud. Very, very loud.

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