Will Eivers writes comic books, not necessarily for a living.
The Short Story of a Middle Aged Man Who Recently Moved Back to Brooklyn from Des Moines
By Will Eivers
Telling this story may be the only effective way to get through to you. Yes, you’re in a slump. You’ve been here before and you’ll manage to be here again. All of your choices have been made for reasons that only the moment you made them can explain. Sure, you struggle to find purpose and you only react to the waiting as if the waiting were the purpose. Instead, manage your fears as if they were bunny rabbits in cages mating and breeding more bunny rabbits. Let them go. Let others, the zealots, keep their own caged bunny rabbits. Yours will be free; and even when they procreate and more baby bunny rabbits come into the world to eat Timothy grass, those baby bunny rabbits will be free too. No more bunny rabbits to use as excuses.
*
You’re 46 and growing a beard for the first time. The patchy scruff doesn't look anything like the Colonel Sherburn whiskers that float up and down Little East River. The ingrowing curls are so uncomfortable on your soft, fat face. No doubt about it, you’re shaving tonight.
*
Your apartment is a floor through in a townhouse in Brooklyn. You have your own entrance on the ground floor and sole use of the backyard. You’ve been living here for three months, since May 1st. You garden, mostly fruits and vegetables… a few sunflowers. There is a fig tree and a raspberry bush, both seriously neglected before you arrived. You have three televisions, one stereo, two fish tanks, too many books and comic books, and the remainder of your childhood that you keep carting around. You wear +1.50 reading glasses, but you should be wearing at least +2.00.
*
You sly fellow. You’ve been receiving cards from yourself on a weekly basis and reading them with the “insane” in you. [Phrased exactly as you mean it.] Where is your youth? Married away to the parts of you that no one sees. Act IV? You find little sense in the continuation of this correspondence.
*
Dylan’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan came out 7 years before you were born. Thank you for reminding yourself you were born.
*
You apologize for your failure to communicate. You should’ve responded months ago; but, as you know, you lack discipline. You’ve been feeding your foot to yourself, seemingly willingly, and writing personal essays that address themselves. You’re not entirely interested in publishing anymore, but you need to. Your new position demands that you publish; so, you’re writing about how English teachers in the Midwest create and compile curricula that is easier for their students than those created and compiled by West coast teachers… which reflects poorly on you because you had been teaching in Iowa and now you’re about to start your first semester at a community college in Brooklyn. You don’t know what to do. You realize this is a lousy topic and way too impossible to support. So, you’re writing about it from your experience and you’re making yourself more unqualified than ever for your new job.
*
The random nature of this place is leaving you in the care of children… the children being the more responsible ones… except they all have beautiful beards and various degrees of body odor or awful haircuts and various flavors or body odor. There is little left to report since moving back to Brooklyn. This place isn’t what you remembered – it’s all oak barrels, glass bottom mugs, Gowanus crawdaddies, and put on Hunter syndrome. You want to be “in courage,” but you don’t think this place plays to your better self. So, you have to ask, “Did you give up Facebook because no one liked your Trump rant?”
*
You almost sent another card but you were too busy thinking. Some bald beardo offered you .75 cents to dance, but, as expected, you declined. Were you the one who threw the brick first?
*
Today is a new construct and you have many snorts in the back of your throat and in your nasal passages. Well-wishers and beards; crystal balls and beanies; a swollen uvula and a very expensive cheese shop that sells tea; Television, the band, and Transgression Auto Pilot, the pickle makers; swollen glands and faux faux fur which is real fur but not quite because it’s “faux”; Mets are more fun than the Yankees, thank goodness, and a coed game of dodgekickMickeyMinnieiPhoneVine; and expecting mid 50s, which in unseasonable, and the boys down the block are dressed for a fish tank. This is not not what you expected.
*
Was supposed to be windy and rainy. That’s what Weather Underground said. There was even a red exclamation point for severe weather. Instead, it is 35 degrees warmer than yesterday, sunny, and whoozy [is that a word?]. It’s “global jerking us off.”
*
“Stop wasting your time reading these cheap comic books.” That’s all you could read. The older, the better. No other rot smells like aged comic books – it’s not book musty; not newspaper mildew. Any comic book printed before the late 80s and survived the fresh kill of parentage and personality, sealed, boxed, bagged, boarded, exposed, all smell the same, all smell like what you smell like whenever you try to make eye contact.
*
The weather is the weather. Fall classes start in three weeks and you lack the focus and shy away from your own advances. Teaching is like being a dishwasher, dry cleaner, dog walker, polka dancer, candlestick maker, convenience store clerk, retired merchant mariner, and pariah all rolled into the semblance of a man who is too unhip to live where he is living and too Izod for his campus.
*
Everything that these 20-and-30-somethings are doing here you and Sheila did back in Des Moines 25 years ago. Now its expensive and bearded and ribboned in hair and musk and carries itself like an uninspired advertisement with politically correct censoring; and three months into this affair, before even teaching your first class at your new job, you are feeling sick again and lonely again; and what does this say about you? You’re still in Des Moines, she was from Des Moines; you were from Brooklyn, but after three months after moving away you are your own false hope.
*
Are you well? This how you imagined it? You 1,111 miles away from your comfortable world of porches and corn and smiles and beards that look like beards and not fuzzy beaver tails? Are you happy I’m gone?
*
You’re too old for Brooklyn.
*
You were feeling sick again? Too much rosé? Too much chèvre and flax seed crackers? You were making chocolate bonbons sweetened with stevia. How’d that turn out? That what made you sick? You are molasses, you are honey, you are maple syrup… but you certainly aren’t corn syrup. You are dark matter and Bedford matter and Garfield Place in the 80s. You are DUMBO cheese and false hopes. You were Obama’s, now you’re Hillary’s, but only because Bernie has no chance in hell. You are a fussy, minor character in your own story. You are alone in a ground floor apartment teaching at the only community college in Brooklyn. You are overweight. You are 45 years old and your beard is red, white, and blue. There is no one in New York City your age to date… But Peaches are finally in season. So, you eat a lot of peaches and shoot yourself raw.
*
You have 15 varieties of chili peppers growing with names like Carolina Reaper and three varieties of tomatoes, all with blossom end rot. You’re convinced that if the dystopian future you’re secretly hoping for actually happens, you could sustain yourself off of what you grow in your back yard. You would last, maybe, two weeks.
*
You took all the big box televisions from the basement of your old home because she wanted the flat screen LG that you purchased together three years ago and you didn’t have the balls to take. So, you took the ones in the basement, one with a dvd player, and you carted them, despite taking up unnecessary space in your UHaul, plugged them all in only to discover NYC doesn’t have broadcast television anymore. Everything is cable. You don’t plan on watching television anyhow.
*
The fish tanks are your television. The smaller tank is full of rapid breeding guppies; the larger one has two Oscars that you feed the guppies to. This is just how it worked out. Back in Iowa, the tanks were in different rooms – autonomous aquacultures. Now they’re right next to each other and the Oscars are getting too big for their 20-gallon tank. You think about eating them instead. You think about joining the hipster invention market and buying more tanks, more Oscars, feeding them more guppies, smoking the Oscars and selling Oscar fish jerky.
*
You are a lonely man and you’re going to remain lonely in Brooklyn.
*
Brooklyn is for lovers… lovers who want to be seen. You don’t want to be seen.
*
This is not the Brooklyn you remember. The Brooklyn you remember had Italian bread and saw dust on the floors not for the sake of it and good bad coffee and payphones and shower caps and cherry cars. This Brooklyn has flax seed crackers and saw dust styles and bad good coffee and cracked screen iPhones intentionally cracked and political statement hoodies and cherry cars that don’t seem so “cherry” any more.
*
If Brooklyn weren’t so aware of itself it could be Des Moines from 25 years ago; but Brooklyn is busy in the mirror and the only mirror you have in your apartment is in the bathroom. You would rather not look at yourself, but Brooklyn is kind of making it impossible to avoid yourself.
*
You don’t like what you see.
*
You write one more postcard with an image of the Brooklyn Bridge: “Today, I jumped.”