This story is taken from VICE magazine, v29n2: THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. To subscribe to four print issues each year, click here.
Maggie was away in Miami last weekend for a bachelorette party. Normally these solo weekends plunge into a pitiful malaise—hovering over the sink at 10 in the morning eating cold pasta, posture like some ancient drifter. Letting the dishes pile up all day long just so that at night I can, in a grand ceremony, work through them all toward the meager victory of a clean done thing. Living like a dog. Watching Public Enemies but not watching it, pausing it to look up the real-life address of John Dillinger’s Chicago hideout, telling myself I’m going to stroll by tomorrow, get up nice and early and go find it—a little adventure, wouldn’t that be nice? And then instead I am scrolling my phone for 40 minutes in one gluttonous, uninterrupted session, never finishing the movie, never visiting John Dillinger’s hideout. After dark I marvel at all the crusty old flies mummified in the spider web that the spider never got around to eating, thinking ‘this is just like capitalism’ and deciding I can count an idea like that as a whole day’s work.
You buy a six-pack of beer for the plain beer of it all, of course, but there is also the comfort of just knowing they are in the refrigerator, all your little beer army men standing guard, waiting for your command whenever you’re feeling dimwitted and bored and that it’s time for WAR against those things. And this can be another way you disappear into those late hours, this will-they-won’t-they romance with just one more bottle of WAR, and it can fill an entire night if you let it. You might even arrive in that late-night casino-like nexus where you decide that 1AM is not so late after all, that it is actually the very beginning of this other day within a day, something perverse that’s so hard to resist, the graveyard silence, a chance to reckon with all your defects on your own gentle terms, free from all that merry commotion going on out there in the daytime that can sometimes feel like an attack.
But I woke up and had a Pretty Good Saturday instead. I made coffee in the moka pot and toasted up some frozen waffles. I called my mom and dad and felt afterward like the great profane ruckus that sometimes sits in the mind had been hushed and cooled. I dumped baking soda and vinegar down the kitchen drain and watched it burp it all up. I put the scuzzy bed sheets through the washing machine with some kind of super-detergent Maggie had bought off the internet, and later as I hauled them out crisp and shaving cream-white I felt for a moment very solemnly awed by the potency of American chemicals.
I watered our convalescent rubber plant and praised the tiny leaves cracking out from its barren spine, back from the dead with big ambitions now. I cleaned the blades of our ceiling fan and took in proud, giant lungfuls of the Good New Air like I was a fugitive art thief living in the Caribbean with a fake name and an airtight alibi, pleased with all his plans.
I jogged across the city to the lake, out to the sour, grubby stink by the marina and back, three and a half miles, till my undershirt was sticking to my chest, till my cheeks had that kind of swashbuckling gleam and I was a body humming with real voltage, a man in his prime again, making his own way. And in the distance was the chug of lawnmowers, the occasional solitary pop of a cheap-shit firework, and the scattering voices of teenagers burdened by nothing.
There is a voodoo thrum in a city at the turn of the season, on the first night that is warm for real, that holds the heavy heat in the pavement even after the sun goes down, something on the verge and then there it is, this kind of beautiful passion in you has thawed out, come alive, and it feels so good and mighty it almost breaks you down. And all those aches and agonies in a thousand other people out there have been muted at once too, and when you’re with them you may come to think of the 1AM couch casino as a most foul place, some awful hospital that you have escaped from, and now all of us are ready for a bit of action, headed together out toward a call.
And coming down from the train tracks there was a herd of bloodshot bros barking and making a greedy racket, passing through us all in their own humid little weather system. There were busboys zipping around patios and back inside to the low-lit jangle of the dining room, shaggy and lean and balanced on the razor’s edge of a thousand micro-tasks to complete in silence. There were jumpy scammers in T-shirts with gnawed-up collars standing on the corner trying to sell you baseball tickets and overpriced parking. Little boys racing toward a patch of dandelions and guillotining the yellow heads off with one kick, making hee-hee-hee sounds to each other. Girls in raggedy denim shorts they cut themselves standing outside the bar and smelling like artificial citrus and vanilla. And sitting at the top of a long stoop there was a man outside his apartment in a faded Hawaiian shirt, saying nothing, cheeks covered in white stubble and his whole face in the leathery pucker of someone who’d just driven a wagon through a storm. He was holding a slice of pizza and a lit cigarette, legs splayed apart like he was on the toilet, all his fucked-up veins in a lumpy purple crawl around his calves. And the young drunks were clomping in and out of the bar next door, faces shining and laughing up from the belly as he just sat there, breathing easy, listening to all this power that’s been waiting in your human heart.
“There is a voodoo thrum in a city at the turn of the season, on the first night that is warm for real, that holds the heavy heat in the pavement even after the sun goes down, something on the verge and then there it is, this kind of beautiful passion in you has thawed out, come alive, and it feels so good and mighty it almost breaks you down. And all those aches and agonies in a thousand other people out there have been muted at once too, and when you’re with them you may come to think of the 1AM couch casino as a most foul place, some awful hospital that you have escaped from, and now all of us are ready for a bit of action, headed together out toward a call.”
I bought some fancy pickles and came home and put on an Anita Baker record and made a fat-ass cheeseburger in the frying pan that stunk up the whole apartment, thick wedge of onion fried right in there with it. Game 4 between the Nuggets and Clippers was tipping off in Los Angeles, and something unbelievable will happen at the end of this one. A Nuggets dunk at the buzzer that rips the life out of a whole stadium, drops it dead; they will slow the replay footage down to the individual frame to make sure it was on time and it was, it’s all over, and now the rows and rows and rows of Clippers fans all the way up to the ceiling are just standing there in this quiet holy pause, like after a fresh snow has just fallen, and down there in the light all the Nuggets are chasing after each other, galloping in crazy kicking strides, going airborne over the television wires and looking so pretty; school is out forever.
And a couple hours later there was a moment that I have been trying to explain. After dark; pan on the stovetop with all the beef fat sludged up in there. I opened the front window to let the air in and outside in the road there had been an incident, this groaning old car was diagonal across both lanes, and a man was leaning out the side of it shouting at another car. All you could see was the shape of him. And then he said, “You dirty rotten cock-sucking motherfucker!” and my god, what a jackpot came bursting out from the seams of that ‘rotten.’ ROTT-en! It cracked like a lion tamer’s whip when he said it; it felt like a baseball pitcher letting loose with two strikes and all his guts behind it, and somehow the whole confrontation between the cars was stilled and solved by it. They both idled there for a few seconds and then they cruised off. There is within each of us something that may briefly sound like a song.
Follow John Saward on X @RBUAS
This story is taken from VICE magazine, v29n2: THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. To subscribe to four print issues each year, click here.
The post The Eternal Glory of a Pretty Good Saturday appeared first on VICE.
