Decline and Fall of Alternative Civilization

By G. S. Oldman

June McClunaghan, a luckless waitress and ex-flight attendant, ends up in Seattle in the early 1990s after a life of post-Joycean, Cubs-style defeat, and learns to play bass guitar at the height of that good ol’ coffee-swilling “Grunge Mania.” She loves coffee, hates grunge, so she and her friend Dedra Fatiuchka try to start a trashy garage band instead. No dice. But...

...Dedra, a talented singer and computer geek who is disillusioned with the digital revolution, pranks together an impressively bogus press kit for the band and, in conspiracy with a studio-geek friend, her voice is overdubbed onto the dead tracks of a defunct band (that couldn’t pay their studio bill) and presto! A demo tape! No one the wiser, the whole shebang is sent to the offices of South By SouthWest in Austin, TX as a joke. SXSW, however, respond by offering the band—which doesn’t exist—a high profile showcase at the 1994 edition of the great, ballyhooed music conference. With the help of two guy friends, a guitarist and a drummer, they manage to slap together a functional combo and then embark to the big event only to lose their showcase by running afoul of one of the head festival honchos who pointedly yanks the rug from under them. But...

...another disappointment in June’s doggedly optimistic life, they begin the long trek back to Seattle. When inclement weather forces them off the road, June gets caught in a flash flood incident that leaves her stranded and injured in the middle of nowhere. Rescued by a mysterious hot-rodder, she is thrust into yet another post-Joycean world with even more surreal elements. Here she begins to sense that this strange but benevolent character may actually be the fabled “Seattle Capper” himself—the unseen phantom responsible for a history of distributor cap thefts—and the same one who stole their cap in Arizona while the band was enroute to Austin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: G. S. Oldman
• Release date: Mar 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9780997443905

G. S. Oldman

"Decline and Fall of Alternative Civilization" is G. S. Oldman's debut novel. He won't reveal the number of Midwest motorcycles and skateboards he's destroyed, but he has published poems and essays in zines that barely existed, wrote for newspapers, contributed to journals like Thrasher, No Mag, Forced Exposure, Flipside and Option. Filling spaces in X-rated prose and film scripts, however, convinced him not to take his clothes off. In the 1990s, he served time in the backrooms of arts and music promotion in Austin, TX (since someone had to write those blurbs, bios and phony reviews) but after Hurricane Katrina, he escaped back to the heartland where all hell did not break loose, and no one could claim the wreck of the Deepwater Horizon was his fault. Mr. Oldman now lives somewhere in Michigan searching for secret U-boat bases.

Book preview

Vorspiel

There were two stories on the same road. One fast, one much slower, the slower being more likely by the laws of destiny to smash into the tail end of the faster. This defied the laws of physics, but not the laws of chance. Little Red Riding Hood was victim to the laws of physics but she was saved by the laws of improbability, as were Job and Jonah.

In a Velikovskian world, Newton may need to make a daily trip to the 7-11 to check the results of championship wrestling. And no matter what those results were, the square was a circle, the circle was a square, the referees and umpires the only carpenters with tools capable of measuring the action. Even instant replay would be disallowed as a means of decisive validation.

Oh, inadmissible evidence.

By June of a train-specific year, some damned angel would blow a damned horn in the middle of traffic and sometimes flag a ride in a perfect imitation of Robert Johnson.

Instant replay would only satisfy those who didn’t grasp the inadequacy of the chariot race that slowed an already slow life down to a reluctant juror’s crawl. Remote control would fill in the blanks if there were no more bullets to occupy the specific gun; and where science had sinned, it was just a judge’s decision so the court could be adjourned to get on to other matters. He was being paid by the concerns who supplied the bread and wine, and in the latter days, the beer, chips and soft drinks.

The physicists were damned but not convicted too harshly since they knew the formulas that held up under the scrutiny of belief. It’s simply that they found the ideas that just weren’t planned.

Though holy moments expanded to hours, years, immeasurable millennia, they were shattered by light that struck them and, of course, someone kissed in a night made unholy, and the world stopped like a contradiction only love would know.

Inertia then became power, kindness begat force,

and the question begged after the energy source.

But the sky crawls on to its next disappointment.

So as the sun, the moon, they eclipse

to crawl along an eternal ellipse

where nothing is holy, nothing ever the same

and as worlds collide, oh, let’s play a game.

Who can hit softest. Hurt me again.

I think it’s a draw but it feels like I win.

Yet hearts still beat to a cloud’s silent dance

and pain moves on as though in a trance,

inert with knowledge, a world grown scared

to admit that love=mc²

We came, we sinned, we saw the eclipse

in our holy moment, in our holy ellipse

caught and suspended between very real fire and very solid ice,

caught and suspended…

•

Decline

On the decks where marbles roll,

two stacks of cards;

one being shuffled, the other being cut.

I

Water, water, every where, nor any drop to drink.

—S. T. Coleridge

i

Sounding like an old Boeing 727 before takeoff, the roar of the big silver fuzzbox made June McClunaghan cringe. Closing her eyes, she saw an old WWII bomber lifting from a dark runway, starting its climb to 35,000 feet and there she was, strapped in to the jump seat and wearing a vintage airline uniform, winds of mortality raging around her.

Mayday! Level off!

Dishes! Dirty dishes!

One final attempt at the bass riff she was practicing. Again, failure.

A full hour of this malarkey and she still didn’t have it.

Stop. Just stop.

The big girl opened her eyes, reached behind the amplifier and found the switch. Click. Done. Power tubes sizzled to silence, the bass was set against the wall. Round, owlish spectacles frowned at the box on the rug and disconnected the cords that joined it, the bass, the amp together. Her friend Bryan had loaned her the battered contraption hoping she would buy it. Standing, she twisted her torso one way, then the other, and stretched arms out to both sides in a perfect imitation of the crucifixion. Oh, why have I forsaken me? God…………dammit!

Playing the bass seemed easy enough at first but with time it was just as difficult as anything else she had undertaken. She had routinely failed at sports, was mostly tagged out at base in the sour world of relationships, and a college education had her still waiting tables. June was philosophical about everything. Especially about dirt and all it signified.

Dirt: the most misunderstood philosophy in the western world.

Civilization: the attempt to disregard the futility of cleanliness, that ideal supposedly next to godliness.

Once cleanliness is marked down, liquidated, and washed away, it only follows that the scrub bucket of history will deal with the pockmarked stains of godliness next.

Out of the catalogs and into the gutter.

The next rub of the cosmic washcloth might smear the psychic Lysol which doesn’t live up to the job at hand since the maids carrying the scrub buckets of herstory hadn’t yet dealt honestly with the spotted panties of goddessliness.

Spare the sperm and spoil the laundry.

There would always be sinks full of dishes and beverage cans on living room floors. At least no one was having a heart attack in the aisle of a jetliner. She picked up a beer can and gracelessly punted it through a dark doorway as the phone rang.

Fuck you. It rang again.

Just won’t listen, will you. Rang a third time.

The machine blared its incoherent message of noise, TV dialog, beeped, and hey, june, it’s wendell. hey lissen, i don’t think i’ll be able to rehearse tomorrow. i gotta buncha things i really…i think i really need to do, uh…maybe this weekend looks better, huh? anyway, gimme a call, ok? ok…bye and clicked and beeped off and flashed and flashed again.

Goddam fuckin’ dreadsuckin’ loser. A windup, a pitch, a soda can followed the beer can into the kitchen, an attempt at an imaginary out. She followed after the aluminum impact, switched on the light above the sink and studied the mess for a worshipful moment. The baptism of dirt where grrrls always end up doing the dishes. It wasn’t so bad today, really, but she still had to do them. No one else would. Or had yet. Maybe someone—Dedra or Jerry—would do ’em later. No, probably not. Losers. It was easy to be judgmental. So be it. Let the flood rage. Hot water spewed down and into a large, bean-encrusted pot while she sang, These are a few of my favorite things…

Dirty silverware. Everywhere.

Paper plates on a crumb-infested table.

Water steamed toward the brim of the pot beating out the rhythm of a sluggish hornpipe and she danced around the kitchen clutching the cutlery between her breasts, humming the familiar melody. The refrigerator chugged on in accompaniment. Right foot stepped squarely on the soda can that clamped fast to the sides of her shoe. Left foot found the beer can and repeated the action. The hornpipe spattered down to a sloppy reel, she scraped out a waltz pattern, still singing, …these are a few of my favorite tunes, the moons, the spoons, buffoons and loons…

Clopping over to the sink, splashing the wad of utensils into the water, she removed and set down her glasses, pressed her eyes with the heels of both hands, closed the tap. Gripping the edge of the counter, she leaned forward with a Gaelic shudder and gripped tighter until the veins in her wrists wanted to burst in a death-cartoon frenzy of love, rockets, and water balloons on a black Fourth of July.

I won’t be stupid. I won’t be stupid. I won’t be stupid. She chanted through clamped teeth hovering in the steam rising from the pot, won’tbestupid won’tbestupid won’tbe… then smashed her face into the scalding water, bubbled a scream, reeled back to the middle of the room, "OOOoohhhhhh…god…………dammit," and like a great evergreen being felled, collapsed backward onto the floor. Even without her trademark lenses, June’s could have been the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. No longer blue, they had transplanted through time and into an optional future to be re-embodied in dusky hues of chestnut, staring at a cluster of spots on the ceiling. The refrigerator whined patiently. It whined and whined and stopped, the sound of a solitary plop of water coming from the sink. Another plop. From outside, the sound of rain, more rain, the kitchen floor quiet against her back.

ii

Knowledge—the outbreak of all and nothing:

After multitudes of notes plucked on her bass, June’s life was still a long round of batting practice, most of the thrown pitches being curveballs or sliders and having so often been told: But you have great form, kid! This lie was the biggest defeat of all. The girl with the foghorn mouth who was usually too tall and clumsy for her own good and had an unnatural adolescent grip, she amazed the boys by picking up basketballs with a single hand and routinely outdid the girls by hefting more full glassware than was physically normal. With no category in the Guinness Book of Records for such, it guaranteed her employment in the restaurant field. If she had been pretty she would have been admired, perhaps forgiven.

Adding put-down to penury, she was a diehard Cubs fan: the Ultimate Optimist.

Big Junie—aka Big Mac—had tried. Little League softball told her to go away. Not even a chance to be a relief batgirl. Hitting 5'10", she was blessed to find Daniel, the new six-foot-two’er in the neighborhood, the shy sports ace who never seemed to have a girlfriend. He lived a block north of Waveland Avenue, the street directly behind Wrigley Field, and once, from where she sat inside the park with her dear Uncle Kevin and his friends, she picked out his face on a rooftop. Unable to concentrate on the game, the ivy-covered outfield wall popped her eyes up like a fly ball headed out, over and across the street, and there he would be. During the seventh inning stretch she waved to him and there was no response. The Cubs clinched the season in defeat and a long Winter trudged behind another disappointing Fall, like an orphaned child with no game souvenir, listening to beer cups being crushed beneath retreating feet.

The next Summer she’d have her face pressed against the chain link of the playground where he shot hoops with friends. One day, finding him alone, she boldly, wordlessly joined him. She sucked even worse at basketball (and, ironically, shared a birthday with Michael Jordan) but it was the icebreaker that led to awkward conversation and the next month’s equally awkward movie date. Very little happened in the dark theater, leaving her to gamble a goodnight peck to the cheek on the walk home.

A week later, beneath evening’s floodlights, she did something right. Her heart skipping one, two, and another beat, she sank one. Finally! He led her to the ecstasy of his mom’s big, comfortable bed—she was out of town visiting relatives—and panic stricken, they awoke the next day under her stern glare. She had returned early. Oh boy. The best laid plans, and there they were trapped on teenage death row. The evidence was ironclad; her son was no longer a virgin. She could have screamed. The court had every right to scream and slam-dunk a verdict on both of them but, red-faced, the woman demanded her bed back and she wanted these undignified youngsters to put their damn clothes back on. She was tired, she was hungry, she would fix them all breakfast and she insisted that June stay and make the biscuits.

Ah, Optimism.

Daniel had a friend who lived on Sheffield Avenue, which gave them occasional access to the classiest seats in all of Cubbiedom. In the off-season, those rooftops and that vantage point were utterly priceless. Winds blowing in off the lake, stars like chrome dust beckoning night travelers onward to firmaments where no man or woman had gone before, where no grand slams had been driven until just this fainting, orgasmic burst of light and bells clanging in skies all over and beyond this world. Oooooh. Myyy. Godddddd. Or maybe they would sit quietly against the backdrop of a Chicago whose boys of Summer needed no lights.

Two years later, classy as a bleacher bum disturbing a ball in play, a petite-sized witch weaved a magic against both of them to prove herself. Just like that. So much for faith in man and for faith in woman. Bleacher bums could be ejected from the ballpark and it was done. Misdeeds of petty bitches would be blamed for her inability to hit a full 6'0" (and she would forever suck at basketball). Even admitting his mistake, beseeching her forgiveness, she refused to take him back. She had her pride. He had his breathtaking jump shot. So much for stupid, foolish, goddam pride.

God…………dammit!

But Optimism. Uh huh.

iii

A series of small bumpings and ratchetings ended in a loud, low thump that sent the front door crashing open. A gaggle of voices scrambled in and an arctic wash of air swept over June’s scowlings. The voices—two male, one female—lurched around the perimeter of the room, something heavy bumped down onto the carpeted floor, and there was the rasping of headstock and tuning keys against plaster.

Heeeyyylookout.

Shit.

Her body stiffened and eyelids clamped shut. From the other room came ninja whooshings of saving the day, then a voice cried: Jesuschrist!

Another awkward bump.

Dude, June would kill you if you broke her bass.

Man, I didn’t see it there!

Well…be more careful next time.

Her muscles relaxed, eyes reopened, icy air massaged face and hands. The door sounded shut, something smaller hit the floor, and behind footsteps of commotion, moving this or that about, a voice ended a phrase with …probably in her room. A metallic opening-night prayer was dwarfed by footsteps coming closer, closer that halted in the doorway. Oh. There you are.

June’s eyes were fixed on the spots on the ceiling. They looked like dried ketchup. Dedra’s shadow, carrying a bag of groceries, eclipsed the light above the sink. She placed the bag down, reclipsed the light, and whirled round to the other side of the room to pick up ruined paper plates and drop them into an overflowing trash can. She mumbled something, then, June?

Nothing.

June? Are you OK? She hovered directly over the aluminum can dancing shoes. The two eyes pointed straight up, unblinking. Unable to avoid the obstruction, the girl stepped over her several times moving things from the bag to the table to the fridge, before stooping down next to her. What are you doing?

Dishes. She blinked.

Rain slashed down in a giddy torrent of noise. The girl dropped her head into her hands and dragged fingers that pulled lips and lower eyelids down grotesquely.

Will you stand up again? said June.

Should I ask why?

So I can look up your dress again.

Dedra stood up, one knee popped, she declared, Why, I oughta— and stomped out of the kitchen.

Gets me so hot.

"—You freak."

She in there? asked one of the male voices.

Yes. Another opening-night prayer sounded.

What’s she…

Don’t ask.

A burp and a subdued conversation continued. June didn’t move as the mechanical whirring clacked into a beep. Voices crackled information and stuttered questions and numbers and, hey, june, it’s wendell. hey lissen, i don’t think…

The conversation dropped into a wisecrack that Dedra shushed.

"…anyway, gimme a call, ok? ok…bye"

The ketchup spots blurred.

Think she heard that? The same voice then decided, I guess that’s a dumb question.

No argument there.

What’s up with her, De?

June pulled a leg back til her canned foot scraped along the linoleum, lifted herself up and heard, Ooooh, she’s a real fruitcake right now. It’s like…band issues, y’know.

They all watched the auburn-haired jester emerge from the kitchen and clop down the dim hallway. She called back from the bathroom door, I’m not a fruitcake, I’m a banana scone. Shutting the door, she peed, flushed, examined her eyes in the mirror, grabbed a tube from a basket on a shelf, stroked a dark red on her lips, pressed them together, sloppily kissed her own image, and stroked more dark red around and around. Lipstick spilled from lips to chin to cheeks to nose. She hung a string of pearls around her neck, clopped away from the mirror, and she walked on down the hall.

In the living room she sank to her knees before the 12-pack and extracted a cold can, rubbed it against her body, working it from crotch to torso to breasts to neck to face, squeaking ooh and aah. It lingered on her cheeks and she informed it, I’m going to suck your blood, popped a sudsy prayer and cooed like a Transylvanian tart, Oh, my lite prince of darkness. Finally. You are mine, bared her teeth, bit the can, and gargled back a huge gulp. Ooooh, swallow swallow swallow!

Dedra drawled, Dammit, June. Don’t you have dishes to do?

The two men struggled to keep their liquid down; June fell back yowling, her long legs knocking over the 12-pack, helplessly drooling thin streams of beer.

iv

Enlightenment—the fire in the cup:

The healing of damaged lives is not an occupation. It’s a wish that serves those seeking to climb the eternal mountain of hope. With no shortage of fools populating the planet, the perpetual optimist, like a wise Sherpa, settles to warn travelers:

Beware, there be snakes.

Mind, barbed wire there.

Step lively, quicksand ahead.

Think fast, fly ball deep center.

Growing up in the Windy City, June was aware of everything cold and rusted. Clawing toward adulthood, not even a Bulls championship sweep could melt dirty ice that clung to the heart of a latter-day Dorothy Parker painting the Sears Tower in wisps of courageous whiskey—skewering a shish kabob-ed Jesus to its horns with fancy terrible pain and a burning sacred cocktail—an incinerating messiah and ashes of burning flesh aflake and aswirl in the streets. A fire failing to warm her heart, it revived her ability to laugh come hell, high water, cheap whiskey, heavy, heavy flow, or flames on the city of her birth, no placenta buried under a tree. So, burn the manger. Pour gasoline into the river. She would make friends with Mrs. O’Leary’s cow. And screw the Bulls! Screw the Bears! Screw the Sox! Screw the…uhhh, maybe she’d give the Cubs another chance.

But Seattle—where the bitter grounds produced a bitter brew? Like an air played on the low strings of a fiddle, a viola-toned inflection, the native Irish rebelling against an unfortunate English tongue, June was poised on the brink of jailbreak. Goddam Wendell had fried his milk and it was time to kick the fool’s ass without worrying if anyone kicked back. He could kick the bucket as far as she was concerned, and he’d never have to worry about his habits.

Roads to heartbreak are lined with snack stands. Sweet values that feign nourishment and whose inflated prices only serve to deflate emotional pockets. And no one cared to hear the confessions of a former flight attendant who had flown hundreds of thousands of miles, levitated tens of thousands of food trays, poured and served as many beverages, smiled! smiled! smiled! until the day she could no longer smile about anything. The indecencies of life, the insecurities of death squeezed her dry as airline crackers. Like Icarus, blasted by wing-melting heat and fallen from grace with flight. Unlike the son of Daedalus, there was a nasty divorce, the loss of her beloved brother, and the crowning dive from a plain blue sky without fanfare or myth. As Icara, she landed on terra firma like an old, messy joke that no longer excuses itself with a groan and gets kicked under a pile of yesterday’s punch lines.

1993 and 30 years old—not a single piece of classy furniture to her name—it was Seattle, the Alternative Music Capital of the World, where an old-fashioned Atlas shrugged two, maybe three times a day, and self-reconstruction was possible amongst the scraggly denizens.

Now she was a stereotypical grrrl bass player.

She had once been a Philosophy student.

Curveballs.

Her last flight set down at SeaTac one drizzly evening in February, 1991. The Gulf War was raging pretentiously and she was jobless. The flight incident made her a desperado and she could never work in the sky again. On Southwest Airlines she worked for peanuts; on Continental, peanuts gave way to little wrapped morsels on neat little plates. At sea level, there were toilet bowls and shit stains for the next occupant to scrape, dump, splatter, and puke right on the ghost of Flight 5591.

Arrival. Touched down and screeched to a halt at Destination: square minus one.

City of meticulously shielded amenities, she fit in without wearing black. On every corner was an espresso bar; between the corners, a bicycle shop. Homeless, she walked in circles, a lost pawn, god…………weeping…………dammit.

A flight attendant she had trained with, Kathy, gave June a couch at her apartment near Salmon Bay. Kathy’s boyfriend was a Starbucks supplier who pulled strings that got her a job—no questions asked about the airline fiasco. She already knew how to pour a good cup o joe, thanks to her dear Uncle Kevin. She hated Starbucks and all the fizzy pop foo-foo that fazzled forth from it, but a job was a job and it got her a miserly Denny’s gig before landing at a restaurant where tips were relatively decent. A local coffeehouse shift enabled her to kiss toilet bowls goodbye with the exception of doing her sidework.

Kathy was a magpie; her beau was perfectly, superficially becoming. Eminently good humans, they went overboard to lift spirits and c’mon! cheer up! June’s friendly-dyke cleaning partner allowed the straight girl to move into her spare bedroom. The live-in girlfriend was perfectly, meaningfully befitting. Eminently good humans, there were a few too many female visitors to be coincidence, and one unhinged afternoon, as straight girl emerged from the shower, the girlfriend was not subtle at all. Oh boy. June heard the traveling music and took her exit cue, the gay grantors having reintroduced her to the loud, the irreverent, the punk, the rock. Much of it sucked the big pelican turdpie, so…what else was new? Lots of it in the pre-alterno ’80s did too, which is why she turned to the gruffnesses of Tom Waits and the damned limey Pogues. The difference—punk bands in the ’90s didn’t just suck, they sucked up. The oil corporations owned everything, and here was a whole new herd of second-string dinosaurs to make sure virgin youths were slaughtered and fed to the engine room of the Exxonpalooza Valdez.

A decade before in Chicago, bands like Naked Raygun, The Cramps, Minutemen, Joy Division, and good ol’ Flipper made it onto tapes that played through lonely nights of studying and fitful sleeplessness. Clubs like Oz and The Metro (and the drunken, druggy haze that helped her forget about Daniel) gave her corrosive, short-haired guys in leather jackets. They were the best and the worst of reasons and, not wanting to sleep through the ’90s, she no longer trusted drugs other than the infrequent cannabis salad. Beer and whiskey would do fine, thank you, and it was easier to tell the great fully dead from the grungeful dorks from the grossly dreadful from the garagely dumb when you weren’t so groveling dull. Some of these poor suckers had made sense to her philosophically scrambled brain. The alterno-grunge scene rekindled a flame of abandon and she was more comfortable with the club and coffeehouse crowd than she was with Kathy and her upstanding social circle.

Then there was George.

A masterful drummer, she admired him from a distance. The day she spied him at the drugstore on Broadway he was reading a Preparation H box and didn’t see her. A few nights later he was standing alone in the crowd at a show—he had military posture. She swallowed two years of post-divorce fright, chased it with a swig of beer, rose to full height next to him and, between songs, asked, Do you have that much trouble sitting on drum stools?

Huh? What do you mean? He squinted up at her. His perfect posture made him appear taller than he was. Who sent you?

A gerbil.

Which gerbil?

She hadn’t smiled in ages. It was suddenly like basketball.

Later that night over coffee, she explained seeing him in the drugstore. He explained a souring relationship with a girl. They exchanged numbers when he tried to drive her home—she was back on Kathy’s couch—and she made him stop the car. They sat talking dumbly for a while before one of them dared to touch the other. He admitted his girlfriend had moved out and the Preparation H was for his mom. The car turned around and she moved in with him less than a week later. He had an old Gibson acoustic guitar and fancied himself a folksinger—something he sucked at and knew it gave him license to drunkenly disrupt open mic nights with off-key songs that would make a British comedy troupe not nod nod, wink wink, but definitely say no more! She loved his guitar and persuaded him to teach her to play it, which was tantamount to a blind man leading a blind woman. A few hurtful chords later, she could fret some unsure melodies on well-out-of-tune strings.

At one of his band rehearsals, she picked up an idle electric bass and examined it. Heavy and huge, through the big amplifier it sounded so formidable and when her fingers remembered a small, clumsy Juneism, this time in tune, the fat strings barked like a fatigued piano and…omigod. It sounded like music. Real music. The air pushing out of the speakers besieged her and made her heart jump (Music) and something made a flash of sense (Real Music) that settled down to an indrawn horizon of breath.

Oooh, Magnolia Blossom, maybe you can play dat ding, he said.

June sat with her hand on the neck, her other hand fidgeting at the strings, the windings against the skin of her thumb. She fumbled a two-note riff on the smallest string; tried the same on one of the bigger, deeper ones; then she felt silly. I…I…I don’t know.

That night at the restaurant was a preoccupied haze of botched orders and pitiful tips. She gabbed endlessly about the instrument in bed that night. Shuddup, willya, he groaned from under the pillow. A million girls in this city and I have to find one who thinks she wants to be a musician? Gross!

She strutted