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List-O-Rama
A
excerpt from Daniel
Incendiary,
a novel.
Part One
Seattle issues.
The laws against inciting a riot in King County, Washington are not easily understood.
The city of
Seattle had numerous cases of protests, and was well aware of what constitutes
a full-blown riot. I read stories
of kids in shorts protesting the World Bank and others trashing a meeting of
Amnesty International. What
exactly did Amnesty International do to illicit flaming garbage?
Lou took care of the cops for me.
Some of these college venues allowed free speech without hindrance or
complaint; others counted four-letter words like an umpire counts balls and
strikes. I would get another
lecture about what I could and could not scream into the microphone. I
would spend another awkward hour
with a city official and one of Lou’s lawyers. Seattle was a great
place to go to school and I loved every
minute of it. The bars close in proximity, the company intelligent, and
the girls progressive. But when it
came to subduing an angry mob on the streets after midnight, the city was just
as reactionary as any straight-
laced community in America. They only wanted to know two things: Who to
blame and when to sue.
That night in the Pacific Northwest,
as was the case in every city I visited that year, it was more the fault
of testosterone and fermented hops that pushed young man to knock each other
around and chuck bottles at
passing squad cars. I just riled them.
And I loved it. How could you
not love it?
For a brief time, I summoned fire
and lightning. College kids screamed my name and pumped their fists in
solidarity. Under the veil of entertainment, I crept into the minds of
thousands and set up shop. It was in the
name of a night away from banality, cable news, sitcoms and the same four plastic
songs on the internet.
When I was at my most thunderous, dressed in my discount polo shirt and worn
jeans, I often winced in
surprise at what rolled off my tongue. I wanted the energy back in our
lives. I thought I could manufacture
it. I inhaled the applause like mountain air. Backstage when the
house lights flooded the empty stage, I
would find a corner to catch my breath.
My second show in Seattle was one
of those nights.
I spoke. I told them everything
they already knew but forgot to stay angry about. I told them things I
thought they should know. They told me if I was full of crap or not. No
pop music, no dancing, no lasers.
Cheap seats only. I was a town crier. For that service, they would pay
to see me and make me rich. I would
be on national television. A United States Senator would quote me while
in session. I would become
paranoid.
Before it got out of hand, I opened
up for a rock band. My agent gave me the lowdown as best as he
could surmise whenever the crowds got wild or the news cameras waited outside
for something to exploit. He
took me on nearly two months ago, when I got my first bit of press in Sacramento,
at the university. Until
then I had to wait to get paid, and for a brief time, I didn’t know who
was supposed to pay.
Schooled to barter for money and coke, arrange
whores and transportation to and from venues in cities
he’s never stepped foot in, Lou was the professional I lacked in my upbringing.
After taking me on, he was
surrounded by cops, screamed at by punk college kids and served papers by local
prosecutors. Two hours
before The Hot Rocks took the stage, Lou spelled it out to me simply:
“Don’t fucking push these
people. They will do it.”
“Do what?” I sat
in my comfy chair in the RV, slurping and crunching my bowl of Cocoa Puffs.
“What
the hell do you think they are gonna do?”
“Whatever you say.”
The destiny chromosome.
“The laws against inciting a
riot in King County, Washington are not easily understood.”
This is the first sentence in the journal of Daniel Kant. He wrote it
while alone in the cramped, rear bedroom
of a $100,000 touring RV. The vehicle itself was enormous. The interior
stank of sweat, spilled vodka and
cigarettes. Couches lined either side, and two small refrigerators were left
after the kitchenette was converted
to allow more sleeping space. An outside observer would see nothing through
the coal black one-way
window. Only the seventies-inspired blue and black stripes extending from
the rear taillights to the front
door served as a sign that this was a genuine, American rock tour bus.
It was the same Daniel Kant whom the
Oregonian referred to as “the last remaining Merry
Prankster…you want to laugh but the naïve sincerity of the performance
draws in like moths to a flame.”
(Dan had to look up “Merry Pranksters”. It was rare that he ever
liked seeing his name in print. He had to
reconcile that he was “a performer”.)
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer called
Dan: “simultaneously the most irrelevant and dangerous person in
the pop lexicon.”
Dan was familiar with “lexicon”.
The thought of his notoriety as a dangerous person made him feel
uneasy. Frightened.
Although he could be found in the
accompaniment of juiced-up, three-chord angst, he was no rock star.
He couldn’t carry a tune with a gun to his head. He never attempted
the guitar, bass, drum or even an oboe.
Although the young Mr. Kant enjoyed music, mostly rock, blues and the occasional
folk crooner, he never
experimented with his own fingers. He never tried to reproduce the sounds
himself. Music is not what kept
him awake at night.
What must be told is this. Dan’s
grandfather was a piano virtuoso. Truthfully, Wilhelm Kant is
unknown to most of America and he is a distant grandfather, three generations
removed from the nervous
protagonist scribbling his story in the back of a bus. Wilhelm soothed
scores of Danes before World War I. He
never cut a record, and never had a groupie. The aristocracy of Scandinavia
likened him to Mozart and he
was immensely popular and made quite a living.
He had no idea what a bus was.
Wilhelm Mattias Kant lived to be exactly
sixty years old succumbing to a horrible bout of pneumonia in
1934. He left behind a wife and his only son. The life of Wilhelm
Kant has no bearing on our character. Only
one detail should be gleaned: Dan Kant had the explosive, sensual talent
with keys his grandfather did. With
a handful of lessons Dan probably would be happier and better off than
the clowns he found himself
traveling with. He could have considered life itself as a measure of oxygen,
a tuned piano and food. He could
have played like a god. He also had excellent reflexes, and if trained,
he had the skills of a minor league
pitcher. He could have been an architect. He had an innate sense
of angle and shape. Dan was no artist,
musician, athlete or a decent cook. He was lonely young man who talked
to himself in the shower.
Fourteen months before, on one of
the workdays Dan thought he would lose his mind, a woman
thumped her boy’s head to pull his attention away from his comic book.
Impatiently waiting at a train stop,
she sat next to her son with a soft-cover mystery novel in her hands. Dan could
determine the genre from the
giant red font in the cover. The boy’s hair mussed, he looked up
at the mother. Dan thought: “It’s just nice
to see a family reading together.”
Few people appreciate the simple act
of standing. Even fewer at 6:30 am in forty-three degree weather on a
Saturday. Dan secretly loved this time. Morning people are generally
loathed in society. Presumably they
accomplish things night owls only dream of. Dan understood the reality.
Morning larks simply enjoyed the
crisp air before the sun was firmly in the building. Nothing extra was
ever accomplished. Just the first cup of
coffee or an unmolested newspaper.
Some of his fellow commuters headed
to fun times downtown. Dan remembered the commercials for a
festival celebrating the harvest of a fruit or vegetable somewhere. Corn. Hazelnuts.
Fiddlehead Ferns. The
library featured a guest speaker, maybe a cook-off or a carnival. Sidewalk
art festival. Crafts from Seattle and
Vancouver. He expected to see fatigued kids and their whipped mommies and daddies
trudge back later with
stuffed guts and Mylar balloons on his return trip.
Dan was off to work.
He paced and the same dozen or so
thoughts danced endlessly. Although he loved the mornings, this
was the weekend. He wondered who else has to fall out of sleep and roll into
work on a sunny Saturday.
Saturdays once meant watching endless cartoon shows in his favorite Spider-Man
jammies. Cereal. Legos.
Surely adults had things to do but a kid’s life on a Saturday meant freedom.
Kids never care or notice whether
or not their parents had tasks to perform or dignity to digest.
The woman and her boy, who had an
ongoing nose-picking issue, sat on the only bench at the light rail
stop. Just the first taste of dawn, the chill in the air grabbed Dan’s
ribs and fingers like the days of
barehanded snowball fights. He increased his pace to stay toasty. He took
turns holding his piping hot
Thermos full of coffee with one hand and shoving the other deep in his coat
pocket. He counted forty steps
then about-faced. The anti-social have games to keep their eyes busy.
An old lady at the end of the platform
walked funny. Not funny like a Monty Python sketch, but
peculiar enough to draw Dan’s attention away from his own gangly gait.
Technically, he afflicted with a
limp. It was one more reason to get picked last for lacrosse and football
and the best reason to sit inside and
read too much.
The old codger entered the stop from
the east end. As she approached, for some reason only
octogenarians can understand, she skirted the edge. She did not walk to the
bench or under the canopy, she
tiptoed in her herky-jerky manner along the rim of the train stop. From
Dan’s angle it appeared to be the
slowest balance beam routine in gymnastics history. He turned to walk
back forty paces west, and made the
attempt not to feel angry at old people for just remaining alive.
Dan turned back to see the paperback
woman and her son rise and peer over his shoulder. The train.
The old woman still straddled the edge, and Dan assumed her vision must be shot.
Dan heard the unique
sound of air and metal and the vibrations of the track below him. He abandoned
his post and stepped quickly
to her as the others amble up to board the incoming train. There were
about fifteen seconds to deal with any
situation before the electric-powered passenger cars made applesauce out of
anything in its path.
“What is this old coot doing?”
he mumbled to no one.
Sure as hell, whoosh and whine of the environmentally sound transit startled
the woman and she twitched,
sending one foot over the track. Dan opened both hands, dropped the Thermos,
and just nabbed the back of
her coat. The train pulled in and came to a stop. Doors flew open and no one
noticed anything. The old
woman looks at him for a moment, because he still had her by the back of her
fading gray raincoat. She
grinned as if he only offered her a “Hello.” and climbed aboard.
She took a seat by the front of the
train and Dan moved to the rear. Maybe he expected a thank you or a
hug or the promise of a tray of brownies. Some would relay this story
at the dinner table with little reflection.
One of those things. Dan just looked at his hands. Over and over,
he looked at his hands.
It is worth noting that the woman
would have survived the spill. She could have shattered a hip,
leaving her in a wheelchair for her next nine years of life. To Dan this
was a fully awake sliver of his life. He
was responsible for that woman’s life if only for three seconds. He
resisted a tragedy, he confronted pain.
What Dan could not shake for hours, then days, and eventually the next few weeks
is that he was awake
again. Alert. At the table. Like coming to after a midday
nap, his surroundings deserved a fresh new look.
His shower conversations intensified. He bought a journal. We’re
jumping ahead.
Dan was a total failure up to that
moment and he knew it. Anyone who knew him would say the same.
The universe clicked at the train station and it was like never needing glasses
again. Or so he thought. Or so
he hoped. This could have been another delusion.
No, this was for real. Right?
Unfortunately, this invigorating new
lease on his life, (or at least his morning) would truly begin at
work.
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