Author: Brad Zellar

Remember that time you threw your heart from the window of a speeding car?

Was it burning?

No, not that time. It was just heavy, a sodden wad of plumbed meat. It felt like a water balloon coated with grease. It couldn’t have weighed more than a softball, and it bounced once on the shoulder of the highway and skipped off into the ditch. Some kid who was out fucking around found it the next day, put it in a plastic grocery sack, and took it to school for show-and-tell. An alarmed teacher confiscated your heart and hauled it off to the principal’s office.

The principal was a wattled walrus of a man, and he called the county sheriff, who came down, took one peek in that plastic sack, and had a pretty damn good idea what he was looking at, even as he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.

Within 24 hours posters started appearing on telephone poles around town, which is how you eventually got your heart back, although at the time you weren’t so sure you even wanted it back.

Remember that dinky town? What a strange place. What a strange time in our lives that was. The town was so small that it didn’t have a newspaper or radio station, and the closest city that had either was almost forty miles away and had been pretending for half a century that the little town didn’t exist.

The town had a serious inferiority complex going back almost a hundred years, and things had gotten so bad that there was a vocal cult of locals that was convinced they were living in the hallucination of a senile god. Somebody had made a trip to a big city in the north some years earlier and had returned with a state road map on which the town was nowhere to be found, further convincing many people that they, their families, pets, cars, homes, neighborhoods, and entire community did not, in fact, exist.

A dwindling group of optimists formed the Existence Party and ran a full slate of candidates for local offices. Every one of them was soundly defeated. Yet still the town carried on as best it could; the residents dutifully paid their property taxes, sent their children to school, maintained their homes and lawns, and –for the most part, anyway– obeyed local laws.

High school graduation became known as Vanishing. Almost without exception graduates fled town immediately with whatever memories they had left, never to return. Newcomers, even relative newcomers –anybody, really, who had not lived there all their lives– tended to suffer from gradually worsening memory problems, particularly regarding how they’d come to live in the town in the first place.

You were definitely in this camp. When I first met you you no longer had the foggiest idea what you were doing in that place or why you had moved there. You insisted it was the most boring place you’d ever been, and you had the odd feeling that you were being held hostage. More and more often you felt like you were lost the instant you left your house. Often enough, in fact, you were lost even when you were in your house.

The streets of the town had become a sort of labyrinth to you, and you often found yourself unwittingly driving in circles, sometimes for what seemed like hours at a time. The streets all seemed to either dead end or circle back on themselves.

Sometimes at night you would park at one of these dead ends and shine your car lights out into the seemingly endless scrub brush beyond the city limits. You said you would see dark shapes moving around out there, and the occasional flash of yellow or red eyes captured in your headlights. Coyotes, you thought, or perhaps even wolves.

It was the sense of captivity, the boredom, and the torment of your eroding memory that led you to throw your heart from the window of the speeding car. A woman had been driving, but you couldn’t remember her name or what she looked like. You retained a vague memory of being tormented by the woman’s incessant chatter.

The day you retrieved your heart from the sheriff’s office, as you drove home with the plastic bag rattling on the passenger seat, you realized that your eyesight was rapidly fading. By the time you got home you were almost completely blind and had a difficult time finding your way into the house.

You remembered that much, at least for a few days. Your house, you said, was dark, and you could barely make out the various familiar shapes in your kitchen. You could hear the hum of the refrigerator. You felt with your hands and located the counter next to the sink, and there you deposited your heart in its grocery sack.

You were so tired, uncommonly tired was the phrase you used, and you suspected that you might be dying. How long, you wondered, could a man live without a heart? And how long had it been since you flung it from the window of the speeding car? Twenty-four hours? Forty-eight? You really had no idea. There was, however, very little doubt about this much: you were now almost completely blind. You were disconsolate. Words were beginning to break apart in your head; they had been slowing way down for quite some time, but now they were truly starting to disintegrate. There was a moment in which you said you were seized with a powerful longing to hear Louis Armstrong. A few snippets of a tune jerked momentarily between your ears and then just as quickly evaporated.

At some point you fell into a deep sleep, perhaps even a coma. When you regained consciousness you were still sitting at your kitchen table, and you said you could hear your heart stirring in the plastic sack. Rattling, initially, and then jerking around.

When I found you you had your heart in your hands, cradled like a rabbit.

Do you remember the rest? Do you remember how we escaped together, and how, even slumped against the passenger window and blind and barely conscious, you mumbled that our getaway in the dead of night was "just like a Bruce Springsteen song"?

Do you remember how I cut up your heart with a steak knife and fed it back to you one bite at a time?

Can you remember that, baby?

Can you please try to tell me what happened next?

I have no desire to be a shepherd of men.

But, no, that’s not really true. Perhaps there’s nothing I’d like more than to be a shepherd of men, providing the men in question were willing to play the role of sheep. If they are going to insist on being men, however, no thanks; I want no part of that thankless job.

‘Shepherd,’ though, sounds like a humble enough job title, but is a ‘humble enough job title’ what anyone truly wants? A humble enough fellow, perhaps, but I’m not sure I fit that bill.

I don’t know, quite honestly, what I want to be or do, other than to sit quietly listening to Charley Patton and Roscoe Mitchell and some of these thousands of other people I have sitting around here waiting to be listened to.

But, you might ask (and you might be right to ask), can I really claim to be ‘sitting quietly’ if I am, in fact, listening to music, particularly music that some might describe as caterwauling or keening?

Point taken.

At any rate, a herder of sheep would, I’d think, have plenty of opportunities to sit quietly, or even to sit listening to music, provided he is allowed to drag a boombox and a bag of CDs with him out into the…what do they call them, those places where sheep roam about? Something bigger than a pasture. A range? Yes, range sounds right, or close enough.

I imagine, though, that a fellow would have to venture to far flung places to find employment as a shepherd, and I seriously doubt I have either the wherewithal or the qualifications to undertake such venturing or secure such employment.

Which leaves me in the same position in which I seem to find myself every Sunday night about this time: Here.

Snapshots from a drive home from work while listening to the new Ween album, which is fantastic if you like Ween, and I do:

Three shiny balloons trapped in the branches of a tree above a baseball diamond.

A long strip of aluminum foil tumbling like an acrobatic hallucination down the middle of LaSalle Avenue.

A shirtless man wearing a sombrero and laughing ecstatically while trotting along beside a prancing little dog outfitted (I’m guessing against its will) in a purple vest.

An old woman, holding a little girl’s hand at a street corner, bending down to clearly hiss something in the girl’s ear, and then whacking her on the head with what appeared to be a Bible.

A fireman dozing off in a lawn chair in front of a fire station.

An awkward young woman alternately lurching and tip-toeing along on roller blades.

A teenage boy sucking a hickey into his girlfriend’s neck at a bus stop bench.

Mormons on mountain bikes, poking through things at a garage sale.

A pitiable spectacle involving an ancient hunchbacked man and a microwave oven he was apparently trying to carry home.

Two hearses lined up at the entrance to a senior citizen center.

A man I recognized as my old friend Clammy Reese, wearing threadbare golf togs and toting a bag of clubs, standing at a busy intersection with a sign that read: “Indulge me, why don’t you? Winter’s coming and green fees ain’t free. God bless you, I guess.”

A sandwich shop with this modest slogan painted on the window: “The Best Sandwiches We Know How To Make –That’s A Promise!”

Hundreds of geese in a supermarket parking lot, from the looks of things holding some kind of meeting, probably having to do with a planned trip south. Do geese in fact fly south for the winter? I don’t know why they wouldn’t.

An inexplicable billboard: “Music is Not a Priority in Unhappy Lives.”

An morose-looking young mother watching her two children burying themselves in the playground sand, and thinking (or so I imagined): “Deeper.”

What are the essential songs for a first-rate jukebox?

If you were to find yourself locked up for the rest of your days with a trio of fourteen-year-olds and a bunch of musical instruments and amplifiers would you join the band or bash out your brains with a tambourine?

Have you ever heard clearly conspiring voices outside your bedroom window at four a.m. and felt yourself utterly devoid of curiosity or alarm?

Was there, I often wonder, a great pioneer of profanity? Who coined all those marvelous curse words, or first used them in a pejorative sense? I’d like to make that asshole’s acquaintance. I’d love to have known that fucker. I’d be proud as hell to shake that shitheel’s hand.

Chandler or Hammett?

Chaplin or Keaton?

Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart?

Fitzgerald or Hemingway?

Basie or Ellington?

Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett?

Rolling Stones or the Beatles?

Charlie Watts or Ringo Starr?

Replacements or Husker Du?

Howard Hawks or Preston Sturges?

Wodehouse or Waugh?

Spring or Fall?

Audrey Hepburn or Grace Kelly?

New York or Paris?

Sherman or Grant?

Sam Phillips or Phil Spector?

Lewis or Martin?

Williams or Dimaggio?

Mantle or Mays?

Leonard or Duran?

Mitchum or Lancaster?

SCTV or SNL?

Maurice Sendak or Dr. Seuss?

Baseball or football?

Beethoven or Bach?

Mozart or Mahler?

Joe Strummer or Mick Jones?

Costello or Presley?

Milton or Dante?

Nancy or Sluggo?

Pepsi or Coke?

Cat or dog?

Now or later?

Friend or foe?

Yes or no?

This or that?

Who or who?

What or what?