writing director - jason melton @captainjmoseswriting director - jason melton @captainjmoses

ATONEMENTATONEMENT

10 issue issuecontributorscontributorsaugustaugust 20142014

jacob sandersjacob sanders

frank zerillifrank zerilli

jason meltonjason melton

editor, design - jacob sanders @jacobsandersarteditor, design - jacob sanders @jacobsandersart

p12-15p12-15

p6-8p6-8

p11p11

p9p9

p4-5p4-5

p16p16

p10p10

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@jacobsandersart

@frank_zerilli

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@drawglenndraw

ATONEMENTATONEMENT

glenn harvey glenn harvey glenn-harvey.com

rosemary valero o’connellrosemary valero o’connell

brian kellybrian kelly

jongmee kimjongmee kim

melody newcombmelody newcomb

@slothboyfriend

thebriankelly.com

jongmee.com

melodynewcomb.com

@jongmeee

@melody_newcomb

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Julianna BrionMelody Newcomb

6

2008 was a year of great failure, and I was on my way out of Portland Oregon. I quit wait-ing tables before I could get fired for habitual tardiness. It didn’t matter that I lived four blocks away from work: I was acutely apathetic. Although it was everywhere in the press, the market crash hadn’t made an impression on me, didn’t make me feel grateful to serve brunch in a hip town, or fortify my work ethic. Rash changes were risky even with the aid of unemployment benefits coming in every week due to hourly cutbacks. However, I was tired of the hiding.

I kept a bottle of Smirnoff vodka inside a small red locker in the basement of the hotel where I worked. At the beginning of a dinner shift I would go downstairs and quietly fill a sports bottle with half iced coffee, half vodka. I would visit that locker at least two more times before leaving the build-ing; and I’d let the stress of the yelling, the clanking plates, and the extra long ticket times wash over me. I returned curt attitude to whoever I wanted because I was highly inebriated.

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Just before a migraine would set in, when all the iced tea filters and the sauces were well stocked, glasses polished and cash collected, I would go to a bar down the block and drink more until I couldn’t remember who I had met or what time it was. Every conversation outside of work was always about work: who we hated, why we hated him or her, and how the restaurant should be run by someone who knew what that hell was going on, someone like me, perhaps. ‘I would do it,’ I hic-cuped, ‘if I didn’t have to take the pay cut.’

But I stopped doing all that. I quit and hid in my basement room, pacing every day for a year within four walls of white cinder block dankness, occasionally looking out one small window to the garage. Barely any natural light shone through that window because there was always a car blocking my dismal view. The basement was a cell but it was big enough to walk around and collect thoughts and talk to myself like a corporate executive conducting a board meeting of one .

I wanted to start writing and be the next great American novelist. But of course that didn’t happen. That never happens! No one in their right mind sets out to write the Great American Novel and does it. Not even when he buys a typewriter on ebay and prepares giant pitchers of French press coffee and drinks all that coffee and reads all the books by Chomsky, Pollan, Dewey, Russell, and Steinbeck.

The waking hours of a depressed person are incompatible with society. I awoke each day at four in the afternoon as the house started its healthy pulse, roommates returning from their day jobs to fix dinner and converse. Their footsteps overhead bothered me. I was paranoid that they would discov-er I had no job or worse; that I was walking around in a smelly bathrobe drinking too much coffee and not socializing. I’d wait quietly until the house went silent and then I’d start to work. But the work suffered because I was always tired and too careful not to wake anyone.

Artists should not be afraid, and I was terrified. My girlfriend no longer wanted to touch me be-cause she saw the fear. However, she still cared for me urged that the solution was simply to get out and get another job. But I didn’t have any desire or money to get another job, and my attitude em-braced the idea of homelessness more than corporatism. When my mother called and I told her that, she told me to fly home. I reluctantly complied.

In Arizona my mother was excited to have what appeared to be a man living with her. That excite-ment lasted maybe two hours before I could see that we were both depressed. She had lost her job too and was struggling to find something in hotel management. She was six months out of work surviving with the help of her parents who had employed her after the layoff. They needed help get-ting around and had four caretakers living at their house around the clock fetching things, running errands, sorting the mail, and, of course, moving them to and from the bathroom when they needed assistance bathing and shitting.

I tried to stay busy by turning my frustration on my mom’s dormant house. It was too much house to care for with only two people living in it. I emptied the garage and made it my own study. Then I went to work clearing dead branches from overgrown trees. When that was finished I mixed mortar, bought bricks and repaired her fireplace. Then I moved on to more niggling tasks she didn’t care for like rummaging through junk drawers and taking the rust off old pennies. I organized every drawer to the point she didn’t know where anything was because I had set everything in a new ‘proper’ place. It was stir crazy behavior resembling that from within the basement in Portland. My mother saw this,

sat me down, and told me that it was the time to do something. I had to get another job.

Uncle Terry and I were vegans when we went to work on the goat bridge. But we practiced vegan-ism for different reasons. I was an idealistic twenty-something who had read too much Peter Singer and Michael Pollan. He was a working class foreman and recovering alcoholic who didn’t read but lost a tremendous amount of weight, easily 85 pounds, when the new the lifestyle took hold. My Aunt Grace confided that it was like he was 30 years old again and had gone back in time to the sev-enties when he fucked like a rodeo bull. Grace made sure that he kept the body he had recovered. She prepared healthy meals of quinoa and grilled vegetables, gave soothing rubdowns and encour-aged him to keep working hard.

The market crash had sent Terry back to the construction site, back to working with idiot carpen-ters who were dodging the law and carrying license plates from different states along with a revoked driver’s license from a 4th or 5th D.U.I. offense. Terry had done well transitioning to real estate as the housing bubble grew. But it was no longer a flush industry. The country’s debt had poisoned that well. Terry hung up the suit, grabbed the hard hat and went back to long days, sometimes 12 to 14 hours on site only to rest for 3 hours and be back again early the next morning before sunrise.

The company Terry worked for made bids on federal works projects from the state and retained one that called for the construction of wildlife bridges. These bridges would preserve the habitat for the indigenous mountain goats crossing to and from their water source and grazing land in the Mo-jave desert. The one obstacle keeping these goats stranded on one side was the state highway 21, a congested two-way stretch of traffic that carried tourists and hopefuls from to the Hoover Dam to the glittered land of Las Vegas.

Terry offered me a job on this project after several conversations between my mom and Grace. He told me I’d go in as a day laborer, which on the construction site meant that I’d be a bitch. I carried scrap, lifted huge pieces of plywood, pulled out nails and emptied them into salvage buckets. I moved anything that needed moving. And everything had a ridiculous name that sounded like everything else. I’d scurry away asking myself, Did he want the ‘t-whipper’ or ‘beam gripper’; and when I didn’t know I asked around like a shy foreign exchange student, sometimes even pantomiming the tool I needed for the crew’s amusement.

I went into this job hoping to come out a man surrounded by men who made things with their bare hands and climbed dangerous heights with no fear, spit on the ground, cursed at each other and came back the next day to repeat it all again. But I didn’t come out a man. Instead I got away from myself and focused on the bridge. There wasn’t one moment, not one time did I ever see a moun-tain goat standing on a hill with its horns wrapped around its face. But I liked to imagine a creature who didn’t know what was going on all day for several months until the trucks cleared out and the men went away and there was nothing left standing but a new road leading to water. I imagined that animal would have instinct and would know that the bridge was for him. I hoped the same for myself, that when I returned to wherever I was going to live, there would be a new bridge set for me, and I would have the goat balls to plant my feet on the bridge and cross it even if I didn’t know where it was leading me.

8

Frank Zerilli

10Glenn Harvey

Rosemary Valero-O’Connell

712

I GET DEPRESSION AND PAIN, and it is funny—just kidding. It’s really no fun.

If I tell anyone about it, they immediately deflect it. Like, “yeah, I have pain too,” or “yeah I get sad too.” “You need to stop worrying.”

And I’m like “great.”

So I’ve mostly stopped talking about my depression and pain. And I am more entertaining!

But just so you know, the pain startsabove my ass and spiders down intomy calf like an electric shock.

I went to the doctor, and she said “it sounds like you’re getting electrical shockpain.” Same shit over and over.

God could completely remove the pain if he wanted. Just saying.

I told the doctor, “No I’m not on prescription drugs at this time. But if you want I can make you cum harder than you have ever cum in your life, your life?”

Just kidding.

I thought, ‘This x-ray will reveal that I have full-blown AIDS.’ Just kidding.

Now the doctor has got to answer this question: Would you trade your life, your life, in order for me to make you cum harder than you will ever cum in your life, your life?Just kidding.Your life?

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I got an x-ray and felt nauseous.

It revealed nothing. No bone damage. No reason for the pain. No AIDS.

Same shit over and over.***

So far, one person cares about my depression and pain. She even got me a pinwheel

for distraction.

Staring at the colorful pinwheel is nice.

Very cute girl. Very intelligent with a good memory. Knows a lot of Bible stuff.

She even told me she would pray for me.

And I’m like “great.”***

My grandpa believes that he is cursed by God, and he might be. I don’t know fucking God. Maybe God hates grandpa. God wrote a book that says he is really really

nice, but I don’t know fucking God and I’m not just gonna take his word for it, ya know?

I told that cute girl that my grandpa thinks that he is cursed by God. We were almost alone in the back room of a bar. A single red lamp almost lit the space around us.

I said, “My grandpa thinks he is cursed by God. And he probably is. I mean, God might not be cursing him on purpose. Maybe God just doesn’t care.”

With God as my witness, my grandpa’s real name is Old Dirty Bastard.

Just kidding.My grandpa’s real name is Jay-Z.

Grandpa Jay-Z takes care of my disabled aunt, Missy Elliott. I don’t know what her

814

disability is. I know she had a seizure when she was very young. She still has seizures sometimes. She has trouble walking. She has trouble with a lot things.

She watches the news but only for the weather. She likes Chicago sports, watching the weather on the news, and collecting stuffed bears.

Sometimes she says “hey mister!”

And she is expressing disapproval. But I like it.

“Hey mister!”

Same shit over and over.

Anyway, I am explaining all this to that very cute girl. She has a good memory. By the way, her name is Fiona Apple. I’m explaining that Jay-Z thinks he is cursed by God, and that’s a terrible thing to think because Jay-Z is a very old man.

I think that it makes the situation much worse that Jay-Z is a very old man. To believe in God and think he hates you. All while preparing for him to knock on the door to your coffin.

Fiona Apple gave me a pinwheel. For distraction. It was colorful and reflective, even in the dim red light of the bar.***It was supposed to be that when Jay-Z dies, Lil Kim would take care of Missy Elliott. Missy Elliott needs to be taken care of, and Jay-Z is preparing to meet the God that hates him. But suddenly, Lil Kim died. Lil Kim was Missy Elliott’s sister. Jay-Z’s other daughter. My aunt.

And it was very sad for all of us.

Sudden death from a kidney infection.

Who will take care of Missy Elliott when Jay-Z is dead.

Does God control who lives and dies?

9

God could have given Hitler a kidney infection. We didn’t need Hitler to take care of my aunt, ya know?

These things happened. And it could be because of the curse from God. Ya know what I mean? I really think Jay-Z is cursed by God.***Although, my grandpa (Jay-Z) may have stopped believing that he is cursed by God. He says things, now, that don’t make much sense. He asks the same questions over and over.

On Thanksgiving, he couldn’t remember why people were visiting.

We were visiting because of Thanksgiving.

Same shit over and over.***I wonder if you can completely forget about God. I will ask Fiona Apple tomorrow.

What would happen if you completely forgot about God.

And someone said “God be with you.”

And you would be like, “Oh yeah. God. I forgot about Him.”

In between now and then, maybe Fiona Apple will pray for me and Jay-Z.

And God will say “Uh huh. Uh huh. Uh huh. Okay. Uh huh. Uh huh.”***

15

Jongmee Kim