Background Noise

By Peter DeMarco

BACKGROUND NOISE is a collection of interwoven stories that capture the alienation of suburban life, and take the reader inside the head of a troubled loner. The writing is sparse, the imagery stark, and the effect powerful.

The tale of Henry Walker is told—loner and eternal victim—whose pain and isolation spur him to embark on a one-man mission to clean up his town, protect his property and identity, and chase fantasies of a better life.

Henry drifts from adolescent confusion to isolated adulthood, encountering one disappointment after another. Henry loses close family members and friends, desperately seeks companionship through unconventional friendships, holds a variety of dead-end jobs, and is a victim of extreme bullying.

As Henry seeks in vain to find a place for himself in the world, he becomes an outcast in the town that once gave him comfort. Immersing himself in his past, memories become guilt, guilt becomes obsession, until violence is the only logical response.

The narrative of BACKGROUND NOISE is deceptively simple. The characters are both seductive and repellent. The unspoken is felt, and the imagined resonates with reality. In razor-sharp prose reminiscent of Haruki Murakami, Peter DeMarco startles the mind while touching the heart.

The text of BACKGROUND NOISE also includes eight original, fine-line drawings that draw its audience further into the emotionally-intense world of its protagonist. The book has received numerous rave reviews, and one of the stories was nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pangea Books
• Release date: Feb 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781938545146

Peter DeMarco

Peter DeMarco teaches high school English and film in New York City. He was first published in The New York Times when he wrote about hanging out with his idol, writer Mickey Spillane. His stories have been published on-line in Prime Number Magazine, decomP, Red Lightbulbs, Monkeybicycle, Cadillac Cicatrix, Hippocampus, SmokeLong Quarterly, Flashquake, Verbsap, Pindeldyboz, Dogzplot, and Cinema Retro. Peter lives in New Jersey with his wife Charmaine, and two boys.

Book preview

Background Noise

Peter DeMarco

Pangea Books

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Text © 2012 by Peter DeMarco

Illustrations © 2012 Jeffrey Priester

All Rights Reserved. Published by Pangea Books at Smashwords.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—

without the written permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-938545-14-6

ISBN-10: 1-938545-14-1

Some of the stories in this book were published previously

in a slightly different form.

For information regarding permissions, bulk purchases,

or additional distribution, write to

Pangea Books, PO Box 818, 31 Vose Avenue

South Orange, NJ 07079-0818

Or contact the publisher through

www.pangeabooks.net

Dedication

To my mother, father, and the suburbs

of Commack, Long Island

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Carolyn Fireside of Pangea Books whose expert editorial eye and literary vision were critical to making made this book a reality

Contents

Vocabulary

Eraser

The Gay Bar

Background Noise

The Fire Man

The Commuter

Little League

Amsterdam

The Magic Hour

O Henry!

Illustrations

The blue shirt

The topless bar

A bouquet of flowers

Kevin’s house

Waiting for the train

Gripping the bat

The canals

The Kitchen table

Vocabulary (Spring 1976)

The bathroom of the 7-Up plant in the Bronx is an artist’s canvas for erotic drawings. A giant penis, balls with hair, vaginas, large-lettered dirty language. A perverse form of hieroglyphics. This raw, urban world is a wonderment, far away from mundane suburbia.

In the coffee room the drivers prepare for their routes. They smoke, tell dirty jokes, and read the Daily News. A skinny guy with an afro plays the song Disco Inferno on an eight-track tape player behind the window of his dispatcher’s office.

In Manhattan, Uncle Charlie double-parks the 7-Up truck in front of the Roseland Ballroom and goes inside to take their order. I swing the bay door up and pull down the hand-truck. When he comes back out he’ll tell me how many cases to get and my 13-year-old arms will get a work out. Back in school, after Easter break, the girls will marvel at my biceps.

I stare at a prostitute. She has nice legs and wears a cast on her wrist. She winks at me and I feel my skin get hot. Then she walks over and asks me what my name is. Henry, I tell her, looking at my work boots. She says her name is Nikki, and that I have beautiful hair.

An unshaven guy in clothes that remind me of my old hobo Halloween costume from elementary school walks over and says that I’ll get arrested if I go with her. We’re just talking, Nikki says, and the guy says, yeah, sure, you’re just talking, and he asks her about the cast and she says it’s none of his goddamn business. Then she winks at me again, and strolls away.

Inside the Roseland, the manager makes me an ice cream sundae. As I eat my ice cream, I tell Uncle Charlie about the guy who threatened to arrest me. He’s an undercover cop, Uncle Charlie says, he’s just trying to scare you. I say that the prostitutes in the movies are prettier than the ones around here. Yeah, well, that’s the movies for you, he laughs, they got some good looking ones in real life, but you have to pay a lot for them.

Uncle Charlie tells me he used to go dancing at Roseland when he was a bachelor. Big band music, he said, that’s when people really knew how to dance.

Before we leave, Uncle Charlie dances with an imaginary partner in the empty ballroom. He is surprisingly graceful for a guy his age with thick gray sideburns, nearing retirement.

All the girls wanted to dance with me Henry.

Did you have a girlfriend when you were young, I ask him.

I had lots of girlfriends, he says as we get back in the truck.

Our next stop on Uncle Charlie’s route is a small grocery store. The owner gives him a bag full of magazines, which Uncle Charlie spreads out on the front seat of the truck. Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, Oui. The face of a blond with red lips stares back at me from the cover of Playboy. There’s the trace of a smile, but there’s something about it, like it could betray you in a second.

________________

Two summers before, my neighbor Marilyn and I waited for her mother to pick us up after a matinee. We sat in a field behind the movie theater. She blew some cotton grass seeds out of a fluffy white flower. Then she asked me if I wanted to finger her cunt. I wasn’t sure if cunt was the same thing as vagina. She asked me if I’d ever done that, then laughed, and we just stood there and watched the floating white seeds disappear into the empty blueness. When school began a week later, I overheard another girl ask her if she liked me, and she said that I was too small. They both laughed. He’s so small, she said, that he’s almost invisible.

On my walk home, I wasn’t really seeing, I just followed some instinct, like a bug that relies on its antennae to guide it to a desired destination. I told my mother what I’d overheard. She mussed my hair and said that when I became a movie star those girls wouldn’t matter anymore.

________________

After dinner, my mother’s sister Aunt Marie knits, and Uncle Charlie has a martini and plays big band records. We watch a couple of cop programs and then I fall asleep on the couch, a Spider-Man comic in my lap. In one issue, Spider-Man’s girlfriend, who had been killed a few issues before, has mysteriously come back after being cloned.

I think about the possibility of my mother dying from leukemia, which she has been battling for a year, and what I’d say to her if she came back to life. I’d promise her that I’d be in the movies.

I have a hard time falling asleep because I can’t wait to get back to school and tell the kids about Nikki the prostitute, and her compliment about my hair, hoping

Reviews for Background Noise

[iamindeed · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Occasionally there are books that manage to worm their way into your head and leave you pondering, sometimes even expanding your understanding of issues that are common in the real world. Peter DeMarco manages to do just that with this book, in a series of vignettes that trace the life of Henry. In a style that is very reminiscent of the southern stortyteller, and invoking a spare and often decidedly masculine voice, this glimpse into a life that is slowly sliding from ‘odd and alienated’ to unreservedly mentally ill and prone to violence.

While the vignettes are separate and distinct, there is an underlying commonness to the stories – a lack of solid caretakers or real interest all lead him to avoid ramifications for bad behaviours, while somewhere it comes to the reader that he knows he’s just incidental to the lives that seem to be so ‘perfect’. When his limited self-control finally slips, the violence almost feels surreal, no one who knew him was believing him capable. Isn’t that all too typical after the multitude of catastrophic shootings we have seen in the past several years?

This is not a light and fluffy read, although it is gripping and beautifully crafted. In a smoothly conversational style, DeMarco manages to lead you to make your own conclusions while guiding readers through a series of events, each capable of being the straw that broke the camel’s back. Disturbing in that it brings mental health and the unpredictability of a person’s capacity to withstand traumatic events into the forefront, it is a read that will leave you thinking and wanting to know more.

I received an eBook copy from the author for purpose of honest review for the Indie Authors Rock promotion at I am, Indeed. I was not compensated for this review: all conclusions are my own responsibility.