My Life in Heavy Metal Read online

  Further Praise for My Life in Heavy Metal:

  “Every once in a while somebody comes up with the ability to describe the mechanics, the emotions, the raw energy of sex in such a way that you get a soaring—and sometimes searing—experience of it. Steve Almond is the latest somebody. … My Life in Heavy Metal will leave you gasping, gulping and guffawing from beginning to end.”

  —Michael Alvear, Salon.com

  “The best fiction I’ve read this year. Almond has a master’s touch. His stories—about a generation caught in a whatever world—are sexy, touching, funny and gorgeously written.”

  —Jan Herman, MSNBC.com

  “In twelve lean, emotional stories, he limns lust, passion, loss, betrayal, and office crushes. Essential reading for the man who loves too much.”

  —Janet Steen, Details

  “Almond’s riffs on love gone wrong are tinged with melancholy and humor as well as a robust enthusiasm for sex. … His stories capture out-of-control moments with the measured skill of a writer twice his age.”

  —Playboy

  “A glittering collection. Mailer and Roth are aging, and we need somebody out there willing to report on the existential pleasures of sexual engineering. Almond is just the man for the job.”

  —Roger Gathman, Austin Chronicle

  “None of these stories is anything less than thoroughly entertaining, and the best of them are funny, touching and disquieting. … Underneath all the sexual frankness and clever descriptions, there’s a moral sensibility at work that gives My Life in Heavy Metal a real potency.”

  —Rob Thomas, Madison Capital Times

  “A right hook from the fist of reality … You’ll laugh out loud, cry to yourself, blush once or twice, and end up thanking your good fortune. … [Almond’s] prose crackles with electricity, as if his sentences are plugged into massive amplifiers, shaking the readers’ rib cages, urging them to rock on in the still of the night. And under it all is the ironic drone of the modern world.”

  —Greg Lalas, Boston Magazine

  “My Life in Heavy Metal is an auspicious, audacious debut, absolutely confident in its tone and subject matter and boldly provocative in its ideas.”

  —Stephen Deusner, Memphis Commercial Appeal

  “[A] gifted storyteller … [Almond] writes with a loose, anthropological humor.”

  —Claire Dederer, The New York Times Book Review

  “My Life in Heavy Metal is an amazingly intricate and complex collection that takes on territory once home to F. Scott Fitzgerald—the confusion of desire and the sweet derangement of urban romance. In story after story, Steve Almond gets into the heart of American youth to portray the pleasures and terrors of contemporary intimacy with beauty and regret, humor and surprising tenderness. A brilliant, sexy debut.”

  —Stewart O’Nan

  “These stories are passionate, sexy and resonant. They look at relationships and dissect them without making them rosy or disgusting, heartfelt or horrible. They just show them as they are.”

  —Jonathan Shipley, Oklahoman

  “[Almond’s] stories mostly deal with the tumultuous topography of modern-day relationships, but they come at it from a range of characters and settings. … Almond’s writing is riveting; the characters rise from the page emotionally bared. They fumble and make mistakes, desperate for physical and spiritual connection.”

  —Clay Risen, Nashville Scene

  “Read this collection for more honesty and humor than you’d ever hoped to find about the hopelessness and redemption of men.”

  —Erin Flanagan, The Omaha Reader

  “The short story speaks to us like no other literary form, and Steve Almond is among its latest champions. I read these wonderful stories with awe, envy, and delight. Almond is a writer to watch.”

  —Rick DeMarinis

  “Almond’s gift is the way he confidently and almost immediately conveys the tone, setting and personalities of the twelve stories.”

  —Erin J. Walter, Austin American-Statesman

  “Steve Almond’s subject is the emotional terrain between lovers, and he nails it. These are dynamite stories: sexy, stylish, full of nerve and moments of uncanny wisdom. This is a writer to watch.”

  —David Long

  “An accomplished collection of stories … The prose is often startling.”

  —Mindi Dickstein, St. Petersburg Times

  “Almond has a keen ear for dialogue and an eye for the absurd.”

  —Marc Mohan, The Oregonian

  “Almond excels at capturing the pinwheeling physicality of sex, and he does so with a devilish sense of humor.”

  —Damon Smith, Boston Phoenix

  My Life in Heavy Metal

  My Life in Heavy Metal

  STORIES BY STEVE ALMOND

  Copyright © 2002 by Steve Almond

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST PAPERBACK EDITION

  The stories in this book have appeared in the following places: “My Life in Heavy Metal” and “How to Love a Republican,” Playboy; “Among the Ik,” Zoetrope: All-Story; “Geek Player, Love Slayer,” Missouri Review; “The Last Single Days of Don Viktor Potapenko,” Another Chicago Magazine; “Run Away, My Pale Love,” Ploughshares; “The Law of Sugar,” The Denver Quarterly; “The Pass,” New England Review; “Moscow,” North American Review; “Valentino,” Other Voices; “Pornography,” Boulevard; and “The Body in Extremis” in the anthology The Ex-Files.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Almond, Steve.

  My life in heavy metal : stories / Steve Almond.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4789-0

  1. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3601.L58 M9 2002

  813′.6—dc21 2001055638

  DESIGN BY LAURA HAMMOND HOUGH

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  To my grandparents—

  Irving and Anne Rosenthal

  and Dorothea and Gabriel Almond

  —whose sacrifices have allowed me the luxury of art.

  Contents

  My Life in Heavy Metal

  Among the 1k

  Geek Player, Love Slayer

  The Last Single Days of Don Viktor Potapenko

  Run Away, My Pale Love

  The Law of Sugar

  The Pass

  Moscow

  Valentino

  How to Love a Republican

  Pornography

  The Body in Extremis

  I slept but my heart was awake.

  Listen! My lover is knocking.

  —THE SONG OF SONGS

  My Life in Heavy Metal

  Josephine Byron chased me all through college. Nobody could figure this out, not her friends, not mine, nor the frat boys who watched her wag across the wide lawns of our school. She was one of those women invariably referred to as striking, a great big get-a-load-of-that: gleaming black hair, curves like a tulip. Snow White re
figured, made warmer, more voluptuous. She was also utterly convinced of herself, her good taste in clothing and men, her beauty and intellect, which she unfurled in earnest, vaguely Marxist jeremiads, while the rest of us gazed at her lips.

  In the dim, yeasty haze of after parties and the stoned vistas of Hope Hill, on the cruddy avenues of our college town, Jo came to me bearing gifts, a fresh-baked loaf of bread, a Mardi Gras necklace, bearing her sly smile and plump white breasts. She let me have my way with her, though I was never quite sure, in the end, she wasn’t having her way with me. At night, she kissed my body all over and in the mornings made me omelets. It was like having “Happy Birthday” sung to me each day: ecstatic and deeply disquieting.

  A few months after graduating I moved to El Paso, where the daily paper needed a clerk. I lived alone, in a basement, and ate fried chicken from boxes. The shower in my place was like being spit on, so I got in the habit of showering at the YMCA, where I swam a few times a week. The lifeguard was a quiet woman who wore clunky glasses and a red Speedo one-piece with a towel wrapped around her lower body. If I stuck around long enough on Wednesdays, she took off the towel and led kiddie classes in the shallow end. She was good with the kids, teasing them in Spanish, holding their bellies while they flailed. Her face was round, bookish, somewhat drab. Even without the glasses her eyes seemed far away. But she cut the water like a nymph.

  I spent hours at the paper, hoping to distinguish myself. I sent Jo long, maudlin letters. I wanted her to love me again. I had been wrong to treat her with such disregard. At dusk, when the sun relented, I wandered El Paso’s ragged downtown, wallowing in a sadness I considered sophisticated and insoluble. The plaza was always emptying: vendedores and day maids trudging back to Juárez, the sweet stale scent of lard punching out from El Segundo Barrio, the thrum of swamp coolers fallen away. Later, the smelting plant would fire up its chimneys and smoke would drift over the Franklin Mountains, which shadowed the city like a row of brown shrugs. To the east lay the trim, eerie avenues of Fort Bliss. To the west, the terraced estates of Coronado, where the swimming pools glowed like sapphires.

  For seven months I handled weddings and obits. Then the pop music critic quit, and the managing editor, lacking other recourse, allowed me to sub. El Paso was, still is, part of the vast spandex-and-umlaut circuit that runs the length of I-10. I reviewed virtually every one of the late-eighties hair bands at least once: Ratt, Poison, Winger, Warrant, Great White, White Snake, Kiss, Vixen, Cinderella, Queensryche, Skid Row, Def Leppard, Brittney Foxx, and Kiss without makeup. At my first concert, Metallica, the band’s new bassist introduced himself to the crowd by farting into his microphone. This was the heavy metal equivalent of a bon mot.

  Because we were a morning paper, I had to bang out my copy by midnight. I operated on a template involving an initial bad pun, a lengthy playlist—adjective, adjective, song title—and a description of the lead singer’s hair. The rest was your standard catalog of puking yayas, flung undies, poignant duets with the rhythm guitarist back from rehab. I loved the velocity of the process: an event witnessed and recorded overnight. I loved the pressure, the glib improvisation; I loved seeing my byline the next day, all my pretty words, smelling of ink and newsprint.

  And the truth is I loved the shows. I remember standing in the front row as Sebastian Bach, the lead singer of Skid Row, screeched “Youth Gone Wild.” Bach was the quintessential metal front man, a blond mane and a pair of cheekbones. He strutted the stage like a drag queen, while the lead guitarist yanked out an interminable solo and the drummer became a shirtless piston. It was formulaic and mercenary and a little pathetic. But when I stared down the row, I saw twenty heads banging in unison, like angry mops. These were kids lousy with the bad hormones of adolescence, humiliated by the poverty of their prospects, and this was their dance, their chance to be part of some larger phallic brotherhood; the notes lashed their rib cages, called out to their beautiful, furious wishes.

  I’d spoken to the lifeguard a few times, about holiday hours, lane dividers. I imagined having sex with her constantly. I did the same thing with the newsroom prospects, though with the lifeguard it was always more exciting, because we were both almost naked.

  Her name was Claudia, pronounced in the beautiful Spanish manner, as three distinct, rolling syllables: Cloud-i-ahh. She lived by herself, in an apartment not far from the Y.

  Every couple of weeks, I took her to some show or another. The idea was that some spark would leap between us. Then we would sneak into the Y, fuck on the squeaky tile, with her bent over a stack of kickboards, or underwater. But she was impossible to read behind her glasses. Our dates were like the ones I had in tenth grade, the tense drive to the mini-golf place, the exhausting formality, the burps unburped.

  She spoke in the manner of a kindergarten teacher, softly, a bit too clearly, though when she took up Spanish her lisp blossomed and the tip of her tongue danced along her teeth. I felt sure this animation was a sign of some secret life behind her reticence.

  What were we, exactly? Friends, I suppose. Companions in a certain lonely, postgraduate phase. Markers of time.

  Besides, there was Jo, beautiful Jo, who called me every other weekend, who seemed to be remaining, in her final year of college, faithful to me, assuredly against the counsel of her friends. And who, true to her word, did appear, just a few weeks after her own graduation, marched up the jetway in red suede boots and nearly tackled me. Everyone just stared.

  How nice it was to have a beautiful woman tackle me, to feel the eyes of the world upon me again, to have a long, soapy body over which to kvell. And how romantic I made El Paso seem. The plaza! The dollar movies! The oceanic desert! I took her to the lookout point at the top of the Franklins, where we necked and, amid the high schoolers and clumps of creosote, made the sweet foolish talk of love renewed.

  A few days after she’d flown back East, Jo called. “I bought my ticket,” she said.

  “Your ticket?”

  “I’m coming out there. To live.”

  There was a pause, during which I tried very hard to recall whether we had discussed this plan, while also recognizing that I was expected to make some perfectly spontaneous sound of approval, thanksgiving, hosanna, and, in fact, even as I grasped this, grasped that I had failed, let the moment pass and would now be held accountable, asked to explain, possibly more than once, why I hadn’t, didn’t I love her, hadn’t I wooed her for a year solid, questions which seemed perfectly reasonable but which I felt incapable of answering because my head was full of pudding.

  That Sunday I took Claudia to the Metalfest at Bayshore, an artificial lake in the middle of absolutely nowhere, New Mexico. Children tended to drown at Bayshore. No one knew why. The lake was only three feet deep.

  Heavy metal is an indoor genre. It requires reverberation, darkness, forced proximity. Without these, the crowd loses the sense of itself as a powerful tribe. The elaborate fantasy world of smoke and tinted lights and catwalks just doesn’t work on a stage overlooking scrub.

  The headliner, Jon Bon Jovi, seemed to recognize this. He took one gander at the pallid crowd and began casting about for a trap-door. His bangs frizzed in the heat; his tights bunched. His falsetto drifted up and away with the dust. The show felt forced, and, in the way of such things, a little sad.

  Afterward, I drove Claudia back to town. “So anyway,” I said, “it looks like that friend of mine from college, Jo, is going to be heading out.”

  Claudia looked down into her lap. “I guess I won’t be seeing you as much, then.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “Why shouldn’t I see you?” We hadn’t done anything, after all. We were just … whatever we were.

  “She’ll be living with you?”

  “Yeah. That’s sort of the plan.”

  “When’s she coming out?”

  “Next Sunday,” I said.

  There was a difficult pause. Claudia stared out the windshield. The tops of her ears looked tender from the sun. �
�It doesn’t seem fair,” she said finally. She glanced at me and smiled a little. “You know, you get something, and I lose a friend.”

  “I don’t know why you’re saying that,” I said. “It’s not like that.”

  Claudia called me at work the next day. She wanted to have dinner on Saturday night.

  “Sure,” I said. “Where do you want to go?”

  She giggled. “Why don’t you make me dinner?”

  Claudia showed up in a black dress and blue eye shadow. Her voice seemed oddly pitched, a bit too exuberant. She gulped at her wine and let the hem of her dress ride up her legs, which looked polished. I didn’t have much to say. Nor did she. We were just waiting around for the alcohol to spring our bodies.

  We moved to the couch, where we leaned and leaned and finally fell against one another sloppily. I slid my chin down her belly.

  She was so much smaller than Jo, almost delicate, but when her knees slipped behind my head they clamped me so hard my bottom row of teeth bit into the underside of my tongue. I could taste my own blood and this mixed with the slightly acrid taste of her. Gradually, her legs sagged to the bed. Her pelvis vaulted into the air. I followed her up, pressed harder, and suddenly there was a warm liquid coming out of her, a great gout of something sheeting across my cheeks, down my chin, splashing onto the comforter. I figured, at first, she had urinated. But there was simply too much fluid coming out of her. By the time Claudia had regained her wits, and lowered herself to the bed, the puddle on my comforter was two feet across.

  “Are you okay?” I said.

  Claudia nodded bashfully and stumbled to the bathroom.

  My second theory was that, as a lifeguard, pool water had somehow accumulated inside her and been released when her internal muscles relaxed. But the liquid was as tasteless and odorless as rain.

  And you know what? I was goddamn thrilled. It was such a freakish thing she’d done. Claudia, this quiet little mermaid, with her spectacles and her lisp, with her dull brown eyes, who never so much as touched herself so far as I could tell, had not only surrendered her body to me but expelled, spumed, ejaculated some mysterious orgasmic juice all over my face. I felt like doing a victory lap around the puddle.