I am free. I sleep and eat. I get up to move and sit again when I feel the blood in my head. It is there for a bit and quiets.

It rains outside and the streets are mirrors and the trees and the lights go on forever in the space. I walk outside onto the sidewalks and it is dark and I watch the lights and the trees that go on forever. I like the rain because I am free. It lays on me and soaks into me and it feels like love or sex laying into me.

I smoke a wet cigarette and it hisses and the smoke comes out. The strands wrap around the lights like ghosts of flies and they fly away because they are free. I can see them go out and I picture them look down. They see me and they are free.

I walk to the store in the rain. The people on the sidewalk run with their collars around their necks and the front to their face until they are blue black brown eyes peeking out. I look at them and look down then up again. I do not wish to be a voyeur. I imagine them stepping into the street. They move through the trees and they pass into the lights and their shadows fly away like the ghosts of a host of flies and they swarm around the Baltic and scoop up the sea with their mouths and breathe. Or they fly up further than the ghosts. They are ether around the Sirius star and the hydrogen burning around the sun and the essence of an equator radiating life and they are fingertips and they are bone.

I go into the store. It is blinding from the rows of lights. The people take food and boxes of medicine from the shelves. It is late and I take a coke from the refrigerator and a beer. I walk outside and I drink my coke. It is cold so I hold the collar to my neck and I whistle something because I am happy from the rain and the coke and the people I stare at look away.

-Matt! Wait – here’s Matt.

I am at Kate’s house. She lives close to me and I drink my beer. I am uncomfortable because there are many people here and they stay when I turn my back.

-Hello Kate.

We hug but I am tall and I am uncomfortable because she is pretty.

-Thanks for coming. There’s plenty of stuff so grab something when you’re finished with that.     So how are you?

-Good. It’s cold out.

-Oh god I know. Well I’m glad you could come.

I walk outside and rain in tiny streams walls up. I throw my hand out to catch a drop and I smoke and drink my beer. I do not want to seem rude so I go back in. I try to be the life of the party. I drink more. My knees hurt so I sit on the couch with a thread coming out of the cushion twisted into beads and I wrap my fingers around it and it twists thicker. People are dancing. I’m not drunk enough for that. People say I am a good dancer but I look at photos and I feel sick with shame. I like being quiet because I am free. But I feel bad and try to be the life of the party and I drink more.

I picture a scene from a movie. The woman is sitting on a bench by the ocean. The man walks up but I do not see his face because he is too far away. He stands behind her and they talk but they talk in Italian and I do not remember the words so they speak to each other. They are in love so he sits by her on the bench and I see their backs. The waves sound out to the people on the bench. They hiss and pound at them.

I will drink when I write. I will be drinking now.

-It’s like the Mastodons of the North.

I think I am drunk. I look at Kate because she is nice to look at. She is dancing and I do not look away. There are lights around the house on the walls and strings of them are falling around me. A person wraps the lights around their legs and arms and they glow red green. I shake my head and the light wraps around.

-Come dance with me.

Kate grabs my hand and she pulls me up. It is a jazz song and I like it. We spin around each other and I laugh and she looks at me.

I am sitting on a bench. Snow is on the ground and I am holding a book. It says (Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass). The earth is covered with snow full of holes and long lines where the sidewalks are. I sit closer to myself in the cold. My breath comes out in clouds. I picture myself as a noir anti-hero with a cloud of smoke coming out. He is standing in the rain or the snow and his collar is covering his mouth. He is a dot of darker color under a streetlight or in the corner of an alleyway. He is unobtrusive and he is dangerous. He is free and beautiful. Women come to him and he accepts and they try to kill him but he knows this – he knows them and he stops them with a twist or a trigger and a sharp crack. Or they love him and he accepts because he wants to free them as he is free.

So I imagine Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and Robert Mitchum and Gloria Graham and Mike Hammer and Philip Marlowe and Jean-Paul Belmondo and De Niro holding a bloody finger to his head and the perfection of the phrase ‘the asphalt jungle’ and how it is an air-conditioned nightmare and a skyscraper national park jutting out of an island whose life and ghostlife and ether are destroyed by a slow pounding of machine parts and arms entwined like shackles. And like Grass with his two old men wandering a broken city with a broken wall I am too far afield and I want her.

I am tired of dancing so I walk outside again and smoke and drink more. I like these things because my hands shake and they like to move. I move them from my side to my mouth and they are hinged this way. I speak with my hands because my body speaks when my words are quiet and unreasonable. I can see her through the window. She is bright and her cheeks are red and she is talking.

-So what’s someone like you doing in a place like this? – I say

-That’s a bit old-fashioned. Maybe start with ‘what’s going on’ or ‘having a good time’. – She says

-stock questions don’t you think?

-Yeah but I am having a good time

-Evidently. – she is laughing.

Kate has her arm wrapped around mine. We are walking through an alley and the walls around us are covered with pictures of actors. They have their arms stretched out and groups of people are looking up and their eyes are shining and the actors are wild and impetuous and trapped in stone. She is an artist so I point to them.

-Look.

-Those are terrible.

-Very but what do you expect

-Lascaux I guess.

-What’s that?

-Prehistoric wall paintings.

-They’re not that bad – she laughs and I like the sound. It is low and bursting from her.

We are going to a play. I am not used to seeing one with someone else. I like to be alone at plays so I can look at the people and feel I am on the stage. I am disappointed because the people are less real than my ghost moving through them. The building is dark when we go in. There is a hallway and two people look at us and our tickets. We sit down at our seats. Our legs touch and I look at her neck. I cannot remember the play. It has boxes that the actors are moving and changing. The boxes are chairs and buildings and guns and rooms but I look at her and I do not see them.

PJ’s in Manhattan, Kansas is one of these bars. It is also one of the few music bars in the small college town and, as such, it has a certain mystique when one first arrives. Its name is thrown around the Friday night milieu; flyers emblazoned with its name cover lampposts and windows like wallpaper. Auntie Mae’s, a bar down the street, has folk and bluegrass acts; Kathouse has the big names; but PJ’s is egalitarian and equal-opportunity – more DIY and less atmosphere. True, many cringe when its name comes up, but PJ’s seems to be both a curse and a spiritual affirmation – music is alive but has a bit of a limp it says.

The brick front hosts a marquee that can be seen from the center of the party central, aggieville. It calls out to drunks: “Purgatory Paradise, Placate, Bearded Assholes, Puke Weasel, Terror Tractor, Poirot, A Case of Bad Karma, Northern Lights, Shhh.” The names reek of locality and clear channel. The building sits across the street from a dominos and The Library, a liquor store used by college students to bolster the legitimacy of their drunkenness. “I went to the library and got fucked up,” for example.

The door to the bar is open on warm nights and on passing one can hear the muffled whine of a guitar through the flyer covered windows or the screams of a touring emo power pop group wafting through the air on the winds of evaporated hair dye and tears. On occasion, a ridiculously large trailer or bus is parked next to the door. An ill-conceived logo is slapped onto the side. “Come inside!” it says in fiery one-hundred point font, “We’re having a rocking good time and you will too.”

On moving inside, past the rotating cast of door people, the bar is split into two fairly distinct sections. There is no wall between them but as the night wears on the metaphysical boards are shored up by a clay-like crowd molded slowly into those who hate what is happening onstage and those who don’t particularly mind it. The former, in an act of visual if not auditory defiance, lean against the bar ordering drinks, giving away nothing as to how they feel about the music or the musicians. Or they play at a pool table angled toward the center of the room like an arrow. The occasional crack of pool balls reverberates through the room followed by a yelp of triumph or “shit”. Round, worn tables and stools, the battalions of years of lacquer layers and beer stains, lay like bones for the listeners. Ambitious touring bands, not yet broken by indifference and starvation, try to move the tables back for extra rock room. On average this extra bit is taken up by a single person, one foot rocking on the lip of the stage, straddling the few inches of space between audience and band. The head is flailing dangerously; rock horns optional. Behind the musicians, strung from wall to wall, is an enormous tarp Budweiser sign. It is a backdrop, a fatal reminder of illegitimacy and the money that floats ephemeral about the music industry. “Drink more and the music gets better,” it sneers.

But beyond all this, the place is an opportunity for any person to get onstage and fulfill some creative void, crushed gemlike between libido and class. Every Sunday night is open-mic night. It has turned one of the slowest bar nights into something of a tradition for PJ’s. The only requisite is the courage to go onstage and play your music or, in many cases, someone else’s.

Gerard is one of these brave souls. He is a man in his mid-twenties, built powerfully from his time in the military in simple black shirt and jeans. His head is shaved in the army style, tight on the sides, high on the top. He stands comfortably, sharing drinks with a group but drinking slowly. He seems an odd candidate to play music in front of a group, flanked on each side by his army friends who could easily fit into the heckler category. They yell PT slogans at between-song banter. Hooahs run wild as Gerard ridicules himself for ruining Johnny Cash after a turn of Ring of Fire.

“I’m glad you like it. Now fucking go out and listen to the real thing.”

He sits in the middle of an empty stage lit by a red and orange fluorescence. This is sometimes the most difficult act to listen to – the solo performance. Individuals playing at open mic tend to be nervous, stuttering out a few words between songs and fumbling through a set comprised entirely of late-80′s early 90′s rock – Sex and Candy blending into Hootie. But Gerard plays the crowd. He is self-deprecating. He understands his courage may outweigh his talent. Pointing to his friends he says:

“These are the only people enjoying this and they’re wasted.”

He is also entirely serious. Behind the jokes and the occasionally missed notes, Gerard wants this to be good. He practiced for the event, repeating the lines to Breaking the Law a million times in his head. Again and again, So much for the golden future, I cant even start I’ve had every promise broken, there’s anger in my heart You don’t know what its like, you don’t have a clue If you did you’d find yourselves doing the same thing too. Breaking the Law, breaking the law.

Blonde-Ponytail is one of the regulars. He goes on with three others after Gerard finishes. He has been coming to this event every week for years, finding it easier than getting a gig or maybe enjoying the feel of a show every week. He is a large man; around six-foot-two two-hundred some pounds. He put his fist through a window once. He is very possibly the only angry hippie I have ever met. His usual pre-show process consists of smoking dope outside in small parking lot lined by a tanning parlor and stacked apartment complexes leaning against their walkways and stairwells. He comes back into the bar with eyes glazed over in a thick red haze. When he stares, one thinks of old photos, animal eyes in the dark, Devo, and early flights, but mostly the animal eyes. He plays bass, exclusively slap. During the five minute hectic sound check, the tenor pop, slap sound reverberates throughout the room. The other members, just as drugged out but less aggro, set up their instruments while they occasionally run at full wandering gait into speaker cabs and cymbals. Each song lasts ten or so minutes. Nine and a half of that time taken up by extended solos played on two or three chord changes. C G D, C G D, C G D, the lines of triplets and wah sounds blend together like a cheap damask surface. Blonde-Ponytail, his face raised in an ecstasy of wildly fingered sixteenths, looks like a chubby desexed Maria Falconetti staring up at her judges waiting for her role of Joan of Arc to close in a blaze. His judges are the crowd, but he ignores the rolled eyes and faces hidden behind high life bottles and he looks forever upwards.

I saw Blonde-Ponytail play once before. Arthur Murphy, my best friend throughout my college years, was obsessed with the concept of open-mic night. We were playing in a band together, he on vocals and guitar, me on dissonance. Every weekend, as Sunday drew ever closer, he would hint at PJ’s laughing slightly as he mentioned it, as if the concept was both the most entertaining thing he could think of and the most ridiculous. I should preempt this with the certain role we had within the Manhattan community. Through sheer ridicule from most of the fraternity population, a small group of tight-pants, elitist music snobs, and skirt/tights combinations inextricably formed. We were the creative writing majors who wanted to be Bukowski or Miller; the conceptual artists; the atheists and the solipsists; Henry Rollins worshippers and Mascis hairstyles; reformed Magic the Gathering players; band shirts and Woody Allen blazers. A clock could be set to the frequency “fag” was thrown our way as if that should be a word we were afraid of. In effect, when I finally bowed to Arthur’s unending hints, we were already an unwanted presence at the PJ’s open mic club.

Six of us came together to play the event under the moniker Shaye Saint John, named after an internet vedette. Our drummer was a photography major with pink hair who opted for sandals rather than drumsticks, Arthur was on vocals and guitar, I played saxophone, and our maraca player played maracas. The two other people wandered the bar. We were not serious. The audience was incensed. Between songs, one or two claps and a resounding boo cleared the soundlessness, undercut by clinking glasses and low conversations. The boo’s gave us courage. After fifteen or so minutes of Boredoms-style songs, with Arthur throwing in an occasional, “Shut the fuck up! Aaaahhh!” the mics were turned off. Our turn was over we were told.

But Arthur wasn’t. He was a fairly accomplished solo artist in the town, and he had signed himself up for two sets, the second meant to be laid back and acoustic. Arthur drank too much. Upon forgetting some of his words, he would interject a smoke-induced guttural yell and strum harder. After a few minutes of this, Blonde-Ponytail walked onstage and began slapping away. The following conversation ensued:

“What the fuck are you doing?” says Arthur

“Why don’t you put your dick in my mouth!” says Ponytail

“Huh?” says Arthur

“Put your dick in my mouth!” says Ponytail

“What the hell is wrong with you?” says Arthur

Blonde Ponytail was pulled away before he could punch or sodomize my 140 pound friend into a pulp, and we were told to get out of the bar.

We were antagonistic. We broke the unofficial rules surrounding the event. I don’t think we even had good intentions, “to shake the place up” so to speak. The night means something to nearly every person who gets on the stage. They rehearse and built up a repertoire of faithful covers, each one a remnant or display of the repressed creative individual. It is meant to be an equal-opportunity event, the equivalent of a karaoke bar or hunting club, but bound by rules made by its very nature. It is a miniature world surrounded by but separate from jobs and classes, shitty housing and Pabst Blue Ribbon cans stacked all over the room. You can imagine yourself doing this all the time, touring the country, wild crowds hushed during a balladic tale of love lost or fighting to take something off during an uninhibited account of sexual prowess. Welcome to the American Dream Matthew Lesko style, where money and fame are handed to you. But the miniature world can be popped like a smoky bubble. When it does, maddened figures stream out like Maenads drunk and frenzied with bakcheia. We escaped better than we probably deserved. They lost their rockstar dreams and everyone needs a mirage.