Saturn in Retrograde I 1:1

Note: the following post is taken from the novel Saturn in Retrograde, which I wrote in 2004. It is part 1, chapter 1.

Part One

One

It was the pounding down force of the music that seemed to rock them all to a sort of religious ecstasy. Wasn’t it, after all, the tribal drumbeats of certain native African witch doctors that were supposed to call forth the spirits from beyond? He wasn’t sure; he could hardly see now why it even mattered. There were an assortment of skinny young girls here; all clad in the same regulation black, scuffed jeans, worn gray at the seems by the endless moving of the material up shapely, skinny young hips. It was a real gasser to look at. Tanner was so drunk he could barely stand up. He kept walking around the room, minutes passing by in the firmament of time, making the late evening into the early morning. He passed some drunken man who was busily rubbing the crotch of a hopeful amour. In the kitchen, the guitar player was having a heartfelt conversation about beating up some of his classmates at a young age. Tanner sincerely hoped he didn’t, tonight, decide to demonstrate his technique upon the weaker ones assembled. The air was heavy with the smoke of cannabis, marijuana, dank...call it what you will. He took a regulation puff. He needed to make these people feel calm. It was a communal thing amongst grass smokers to pass a little...but don’t bogue the joint, and for god's sake don’t fink on anybody’s weed. It was beyond the pale of what could be considered proper etiquette to do such a thing. Tanner was what a generous person might call “socially inept”.

It is never a good idea for the socially inept to be intoxicated in a room full of testy egos all vying for the attention of young ladies of loose virtue. It is never a good idea...but Tanner rarely had good ideas. More often than not, he had trouble. When he had tagged along to this affair, he was, it assumed, still sober enough to maintain his social composure in front of the assembled. He had assumed that, at least. Unfortunately, it was failing to be true. Already, he had bumped the swelling breast of the bustiest maiden at the party. It had been completely unintentional, but I was the fact that, while it was happening, he had been too astounded to even move. Hell, he was sure he didn’t even vibrate for a moment. The tit in question had been kept snugly in a rayon boustiere affair that must have dated from at least 1970, but his bare hand (or the back of it at least) had swept down the curving slope of that unseen breast, to the pugnacious erection of the nipple in question. The breast that that nipple was attached to belonged to a body that was little, well-proportioned, and gabbing drunkenly with a great, imbecilic oaf of a man that must have been the boyfriend. Tanner, before he even knew it, was being verbally assaulted by a series of harsh, barking voices calling him a plethora of nasty, suggestive names.

“You fucking asshole, why dontcha---”

Her gapey little face suddenly shot into a million particulates of infinitesimal disgust. Her bonehead boyfriend leaned over, and slurred, “Hey dick face, do you want to meet me outside?”

Tanner turned drunkenly, and suddenly a group of several anonymous strangers seemed to stumble between them, cutting Tanner off from almost certain death. But it would not last. A young guy in a tie came ambling into the room. He had blood all over the front of his shirt. Suddenly, Tanner Benjamin felt an icy jab in his ribs. A great explosion of pain sent sparkles flying across his field of vision. He had been sucker-punched, and had been too drunk to see it coming. He fell backward into a loping retreat, past drunken sweaty faces, past bony female faces adverting displeasure at the young body hurling itself through space and across the living room floor to the battered screen door that promised a mode of escape from Big Authoritative Jock Boyfriend. Outside, some wilted teenage co-ed was busy throwing up dorm food onto the otherwise nice white driveway. Fresh air hit him like a soothing balm, and he took one deep, shuddering breath to still himself. You could probably hear the music inside several blocks away. He walked, or rather, stumbled off the porch, past the assembled friends of the puking girl, and ambled out into the darkness of the yard. Suddenly, behind him loomed the Darth Vader visage of his assailant; a massive, quarterback-style silhouette that was making it’s confused way outside to finish the job it had begun. Tanner realized he would have to hustle away from this ogre quickly, lest the scent of blood arouse the rest of the pack. He began to try and disappear down the sidewalk, weaving in and out between people coming from, and going to, the party. The ogre simply stood on the porch, following him in the darkness with drunken eyes, and holding out one meaty fist, saying: “Yeah, that’s right little boy, you better run. Know you’ll get your ass kicked. Messing with my girl...” He shouted in short, declarative bursts of bully lingo, but at least, Tanner sighed, he was going to let Tanner go. Then, the icing on the cake. The one event of the evening that, somehow, made everything, seem a little bit better. The fast approach of the lighted squad car. The party was over, for all of those who hadn’t been sucker-punched, at least. Tanner awoke the next day with his head feeling as big as a basketball, and a growing, steady depression related to the fact that, in just a few hours, he would have to go to work. It was never good going to work with a hangover. No matter how hard you tried, no matter how much Tylenol you took, no matter how concentrated nice you tried to be, for some reason, everybody still knew. They could smell it linger on you, like a dog pissing on a tree. Alcohol marked it’s territory. It was eerie. Worse yet, the world around him and outside his window seemed as gray, as joyless as the onset of old age. He moved tired bones. He promised he would never do it again.

He lied.

He knew damn well he would. He ambled out of bed and went to the wash basin. In the basin, he looked at his haggard face in the cracked bathroom mirror. Hooray for living. Hooray for fucking life. As he saw it, it had fucked him in the ass before he even knew it had its blood up. He had been born to be the Quasimodo of the social set: a pariah, a dork, a nerd, a “young insignificant or inexperienced person”. In other words: a four-eyed punk. A runty troll. A guy that would never make the chess team, let alone the football team. He applied a huge swell of lather to his chops, and commenced shaving. It was going to make it more endurable, he decided, to be cleaned up. To be free of the sweat and funk of first the bar and then the horrible party he had wandered into.

He smiled.

The party had gotten busted just as he was forced to leave. He could still see Darth Vader standing on the porch, his over-developed arm extended in a threatening finger-pointing gesture that must have really turned his girlfriend on. “ Cocksucker...fucking jock. Jocks think they own everything, just because they have muscles on their muscles. Fucking cock.” Tanner was so enraged for a moment he wanted to crush his own image in the mirror. Then he decided that this was probably bad luck. More bad luck he didn’t need. He started to scritch scratch the blade across his face. It felt good to be getting the stuff off his ample cheeks; nobody liked a pudgy dwarf, but they didn’t like them even more if they had beard scruff. So. He didn’t cut himself. The way his head was swimming it felt like he was destined to cut himself. Scritch scratch. Scritch scratch. Scritch scratch. Whoosh. He rinsed the blade off, looked at the tiny molecules of growth floating in the dank water. He looked in the mirror at his eyes. Mhm. Totally bloodshot. Totally alien. Hose eyes held a lot of impotent rage this morning. Those eyes had not been loved since those eyes could remember. Those eyes looked out upon the world that most people thought of as beautiful, and J. Tanner Benjamin thought looked like a pile of fresh dog shit. He walked out of the bathroom, and looked at the phone. How much did he have in savings? Couple hundred? Enough to pay another month’s rent? He had always been a conscientious saver. Call-off. Call-off. Better yet, just call those bastards up and say, “fuck you I’m outta here!” Boy that would be rich. Boy, that would be a lot of fun. Did he have the nerve? He approached the phone slowly. His rumpled, cool covers looked as inviting, as enticing as anything he had ever seen before in his life. He wanted to desperately crawl in between them, pull them up over his head, and forget about the maddening pace and confusion of the world. If he went into work it was going to be busting his ass until one o’clock in the morning, washing dishes for a bunch of jock animals that he hated anyway

...a bunch of drunk frat guys and their slutty, cyber-babe girlfriends. It was damn loud in that sports bar, what with Karaoke and shouted conversations, and even back in the kitchen it was so loud, sometimes, you felt like you had just stuck your head inside a wind tunnel and hit a button labeled “hurricane”. Could he take it? Could he deal with it feeling like he did? Call off. Call off. Call off. It was a quarter to two. If he dialed them with some lame-ass excuse now, they would (a) can him when he did come in tomorrow, (b) demand he bring in proof of his illness, like a doctors slip, in which case he was back to (a). It was Saturday night, too; it would be busy as all-hell in there, and with no dish-washer, and no notice, really, and, and...

He knew he was making up excuses to be a chicken shit. What would dad do, in this case?, he wondered. Plainly, dad would have done his American Best, as dad always did. Dad would have gone to work, toughed it out, been a man, did his best for God, and Country, and the I.R.S. Dad had been an athlete in school. Dad didn’t much understand his quiet, bookish boy. Tanner sat down naked on the bed, with only a robe wrapped around him. His fingers trembled as he reached for the long, snaking phone line. It felt evil coiled in his grasp. He pulled it toward him, finally, with a mounting sense of conviction.

It is imperative that I manage, somehow, to retain a sense of my sanity. If I go to work now, I will be filled to the brim with malignant rage. I will be noticeably, mentally unhinged. We can’t allow that to happen. We won’t allow that to happen. If needs be, I have sufficient savings to fall back on in case of dire emergencies, I can make it. I have never called off before. They will understand.

As he picked up the phone, his first words were, “ H-h-hello. This is Tanner. Tanner Benjamin. My father just passed away.”

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