Tim Lane's Blog, page 43

10:15 Saturday Night

And I’m sitting in the kitchen sink.

Every Novel Opens Somewhere...

Your Silent Face, coming soon on Amazon Kindle, iBooks and here.

“Your Silent Face


Earlier we had argued whether The Smith’s lyrics were over-indulgent.

“Seriously, though,” Karen whined hours later, and drunker, at El Oasis. “What the hell is Morrissey whining about?”

From the bus station, we had driven around the city, hunting for Nigel to buy some beer. Now, as it neared last call, I still had not been home.

In the mirrored alcove behind the dance floor, I leaned into Karen and sang the opening lines of The Smith’s haunting song, ‘How Soon Is Now.’

Karen wasn’t loving it. “Spare me, goon boy.”

She was totally rude. I singled out The Beautiful Ones, noticing how absorbed in the music they seemed.

Nobody danced together anymore.

On my first night here at El Oasis, during the twilight of high school, I had asked a particular girl to dance. It was my last brave act before I had gone away to college. For two whole years, this girl had been my library scope.

My friend, J Dog, in the library, while we worked on AP Physics: “Look, dude, there she is, The Italian Goddess.”

I never really understood why she had danced with me. “Would you like to dance? My friend and I have a bet that you’re Italian.”

Lame.

Her name was Farrah; Italian, not.

We had danced for two whole songs: ‘Tainted Love’ and ‘Video Killed the Radio Star.’

(I hadn’t seen her since. Not at El Oasis, the library, anywhere. It was like she hadn’t been real.)

I leaned back into Karen and tried to croon a few more lyrics of ‘How Soon Is Now,’ picking up where I’d left off.

“Not bad, hunh?”

“Barf.”

I wound my way to the center of the dance floor, drawn out of the alcove by a song by New Order which was replaced by Fine Young Cannibals which faded into The Cure’s ‘Close to Me.’ I allowed my arms to swing and my neck to bend like Ian Curtis, began to sweat, became more absorbed in the music.

“Last call, my beautiful people,” the DJ breathed, interrupting my groove.

Did I want another beer? Damn straight.

Karen was beside me. “What’s going on?” She raised her voice above the thumping bass.

A crowd was gathering near the entrance to the club.
Out of sync now, I gave up and relayed everything I could see.

“Wow, it’s Nigel,” I shouted. “He’s out front. It looks like they won’t let him back in.”

“What?”

“Oh, my, is he pissed.”

Nigel, who was one of the most passive dudes I had ever met, was giving the bouncers the most dramatic middle fingers he could summon.

It struck me as comical.

In my head, Morrissey’s plaintive voice came back around like a boomerang.”

Your Silent Face...Get Higher Baby, and Don't Ever Come Down

Fiction

Coming soon, digital downloads for my debut novel, Your Silent Face.

What lies ahead that doesn’t suck? Summer break forces Stuart Page to return home and wrestle with his fraying ties to the East Side of Flint, his memory an archive of cassettes he would like to erase. His freshman year of college was lame; more early Cure than Spandau Ballet, he might be overheard saying. More Gary Numan than Falco.

Flustered by visits from a stoic viking and fueled by an endless supply of beer, Stu picks apart an obsession with the lead singer of Joy Division and chugs the sour dregs of romance as he drunkenly veers through summer hook ups, the malignant effects of blue collar fight culture and Catholicism, not to mention the fresh consequences of Reaganomics in Your Silent Face.

My soon-to-be-self-published novel, Your Silent Face, is dropping soon on all digital formats. Amazon, iBooks, and right here. More soon. Here’s the playlist that accompanies the novel. Enjoy! You’ll be back in those 80s', fer shur!

A Snippet from Your Silent Face, Plus a Killing Joke Video

Release coming soon!

[Stuart at the Cultural Center parking ramp.]

It was a mild afternoon. Nigel had said that the parking ramp and stairwell had been painted, that none of my poetry had been spared, but I had to see for myself.

The Chevy Caprice was one of the most conspicuous vehicles on the East Side for all of the wrong reasons, especially around the Cultural Center: trimmed with rust, muffler-less roar, the dimensions of a military sea-to-land vehicle patched with duct tape.

“They can’t bust my ass for passing through,” I thought, fumbling with the radio stations, choosing classical music over classic rock. My nerves needed steadying. Was I placing a knight on the edge of the chessboard instead of a square that attacked the center? Another flying squirrel move? Discipline was a distant memory. I’d given up running; tried to drop out of school; blown my emergency money on a Thompson Twins t-shirt.

The lameness added up.

The stairwell was hushed. I surveyed the phone numbers, lewd cartoons and affordable deals on blow jobs. Who was Tammy? I was in the eye of the storm. Misty made a cameo in my imagination, sprinting lights out to nowhere on her exercise wheel, the embodiment of my racing thoughts. Somewhere on the Cultural Center’s campus, red lights glowed on hidden security cameras that were capturing live footage of me while I processed the potential of all of this fresh white space which the local vandals had yet to completely deface. (I was an artist!) I was sure that in some soulless wing of the nearby community college, security guards were being dispatched like Cylons from Battlestar Gallactica. I gauged how afternoon sounds were different from the ones J Dog and the crew and I kept track of at three in the morning while bombing trains and underpasses with graffiti.

“Think long, move wrong.”

Adrenaline raged along the expressways winding through my limbs and chest, created a mosh pit in the basement of my mind where the past, present and future met for secret meetings I wasn’t invited to. I could feel my heart thumping like an Alpine subwoofer: Killing Joke’s tune, ‘Eighties,’ with its intense guitars and percussions, the lead singer barking the vocals. I extracted the Sharpie from my sock (it was a dream, it was happening, it was real, it had already happened) and quickly wrote to The Wayward Child near the place where we had formerly left our messages.

[artifact no. 2]

Dear Wayward Child,//Risk everything,/every day. Don’t/abandon me. You/are like air.//Jim Nightshade

“Lame.” But it was there, now. I had touched the knight. “Touch it, move it.”

My shitty handwriting annoyed me.

Behind Blue Eyes

This post goes out from The Mods to The Rockers who lived on Stonehenge. You know who you are.