By Matthew Kasper
Last Call
It was already too late to be out on a weekday night. Brent and I stopped walking towards the exit when we saw a guy we both knew slouched in the corner as if he had just been shot. He was leaning against the rusty jukebox. We were still in our early twenties, still hanging out with lots of people from when we were kids—bouncing between dive bars and cd stores. Wearing our insecurities and self-righteousness like it was some kind of designer brand.
“Jimmy, you okay?” I said to this guy.
“Jimmy Rogers,” said Brent, joining in the chorus. “Look. It’s us.”
His face was shadowed by a gray hoodie. Even though we’d known each other since forever, we hadn’t seen Jimmy Rogers since high school. But instead of responding, he just sat there, dead as a scarecrow, limbs jutting out at strange angles. A fly buzzed next to his ear. In the dim, unwashed light of the tavern, his jeans somehow shined. His chalk white sneakers with red laces looked dirty. He even smelled like half past midnight. Then this man we called Jimmy Rogers did respond. Sort of. He got up and shook his head “no” and walked over to sit at the bar. So we took our seats next to him two spots down. He lowered his hood and stared straight ahead and ordered a drink.
At this point, we were convinced it was him. Who else had that mane of Viking hair? That bulbous clown nose? That sprout of beard that curled like a little, yellow, flame? The darkest conclusion to reach, of course, was that he had gone blind and couldn’t see us. But if blind, why would he be able to watch the Keno screen above the bar? I wondered if maybe something terrible had happened to him since we last saw him. Something so terrible, he didn’t want to talk about it with anybody. From the way Brent squinted at the side of his face, I could tell he was in no mood to entertain these justifications. He looked furious. Brent stared at Jimmy until his eyes dropped to the sticky beer glass still in his hand. Then he looked up at me.
“Fuck this,” he finally said. He walked over, the wooden floor bending with each step. Brent tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey. I could do with a howdy.”
A fly landed on the bar between them. Neither made an attempt to swat it away. After making brief eye contact with Brent, this potential Jimmy Rogers looked up at the Keno again. A woman standing nearby with butterscotch teeth and a crooked hat laughed and lit a cigarette. Which was about when my young brain finally realized something: this was what happened when you were no longer friends. Or, this was what happened when what you took for friendship from a person from earlier in your life was wrong. It was always really just about shared proximity—a way to be wild and misunderstood in the same place, and same time, together.
“That’s the saddest thing I’ve seen in awhile,” Brent said, as we walked away.
I nodded my head and pretended it never happened.
All these years later, I wonder if Jimmy Rogers really did mean to cause harm. A guy I talked to at the gas station last week told me it couldn’t have been him—that Jimmy moved away when we turned eighteen and never looked back. In those days, without social media, you really could disappear.
And the funny thing is, I’m no longer friends with Brent either, though for entirely different reasons. And the other day when I walked into that bar, I wanted to talk to somebody, but nobody was around. So I decided to dress myself in strangeness the same way I might put on a big, heavy coat in winter, just thick enough to stay warm inside. When I saw a fly land on a table of abandoned plates, I went over and smacked it as hard as I could. I went back to the bar and pulled up a stool. I stared straight ahead.
Merely Players
It’s getting darker. It doesn’t matter if I’m blinking or squinting or stretching my eyes as wide as possible, a ring of white and diffuse yellow coloring remains. It’s like I’m peering through a foggy window scrubbed clean at the corners. The texture of my vision is foamy: I look down and see gray surf washing my feet; I look up and watch spilled beer in the sky, fizzing. Those are my prize-winning Mr. Lincoln roses you smell growing on the fence. In the far corner of my yard, next to that bony and bedraggled dogwood tree, is my stone bird bath. I touched it the other day remembering its soothing cold exterior. Instead, my hands came back smattered in pigeon shit. These days, most people feel sorry for me. My neighbors leave long, tortured messages offering to pick up my groceries and prescriptions. The elderly view me as a mascot for their own vulnerability, reaching out at crosswalks with waxy, wrinkled fingers, an offer of guidance or companionship that feels more like the grip of death. Some folks cringe when I walk by. I can hear it in their speech.
I try to remind myself: life is a lot like theatre. It’s mostly a tragedy or a comedy. For instance, there’s a homeless drunk guy with a smoky chuckle who lives near the Concert Hall. He used to have an ugly caterpillar moustache, and he likes to snap his fingers near my face. I used to yell “fuck you” when he did this. I guess he hates me because he remembers I never gave him money. Regardless, one day when I was shouting at him, I heard someone else cry out “oh no!” in falsetto, clearly not understanding. I must have turned crimson . Fuck me, I thought. A minor comedy. So, now I let the homeless guy with the ugly moustache do whatever he wants. Then, yesterday evening, I was walking around the block thinking of Ellen, and a big dog knocked my cane away. I had to practically crawl home. A minor tragedy.
At night sometimes, to keep myself calm, I listen to a woman with a kind voice read Dr. Seuss stories. The soothing rhymes and the singsong pitch remind me of my mother when I was little, the way she would read me books when she put me to bed, and the room was almost completely dark, and all I had left was the sound. At the end of our lives, without memory, I think we can love nothing.
The Classist Sequel No One’s Brave Enough to Make
Let me tell you, if Hollywood had any goddamn cajónes, there would be a Departed 2, and it would begin with a close up of Marky Mark’s character still scrunching around in his scrunchies like at the end of the first one, still carrying his silencer, except this time the gun would be concealed and tucked into his waistband, warm against his belly, the bulge suggestive in a kind of way. And you would watch him walking from that apartment in Beacon Hill with the killer view of the state capitol (the one where he also has just killed Matt Damon’s character) but it would switch to be a bird’s eye view. You would see Mark Wahlberg walking south of the city, using the historic Freedom Trail.
But in the Departed 2, the main difference would be this: instead of trying to zing all the criminals and corrupt cops around Boston with his witty quips and silencers, Wahlberg—I think his character’s name was Sergeant Dignam—would just be some grouchy real estate agent. His new adversary would be the bourgeois. Once he arrived in Southie from his long walk, the camera would pan back and forth showing the disgust on his face in contrast to the delight on the bright mug of the clean, Patagonia-wearing crowd. They’d all be eating avocado toast and using their phones to look up places to move on Redfin. Then the camera would show Dignam shake his little Irish-American fist at the way Southie has been refashioned into a glass palace of wealth. He would slow motion spit at the gentrified towers for the upwardly mobile, the gleaming lights ushering in giddy converts to this new concept: charming waterside condos. It would be shocking for the audience to see Dignam so enfeebled in his confrontation with new Southie real estate.
Dignam would snarl at the camera and say: “No lace curtain Irish pussies ever gonna get my commission.”
An off camera voice, which sounds like Jack Nicholson, would ask: “What if a client asks about beignet stands? gelato carts? trivia night at the wine bar?”
Dignam would say: “fine by me, long as they don’t mind the taste of metal.” But the way he would pronounce it with his Boston accent, it would sound like ‘tastametah.’
Departed 2 would be realistic about addressing the widening gap between the middle class and the top 1% and all the associated socio economic problems. Dignam would start his own podcast and Substack. He would get his revenge against Alec Baldwin’s character, Captain Ellerby—who suspended him in the first one—by beating him in a game of ‘Horse’ taking place outside a Southie car repair garage that Whitey Burger/Frank Costello used to own, but had since been converted into a fancy cheese shop.
‘Does this place seem familiar to you, Sarge?’ Ellerby would ask, completely oblivious.
And Dignam would smirk and say, “I got no idea what you’re talking about, captain.”
When Ellerby scratched his head and shrugged, he would look ridiculous. As he turned to walk away a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat would drop out of his back pocket and Dignam would say, “you dropped something, Captain Ellerby. Kind of like how your yolk got so caught up in power and sleaze, you ended up dropping the working class. Kinda like how you got duped by the promise of the Patriot Act. Now you retards think this clown can save you? Look around, Ellerby. There’s no going back to gangstas and headbangas. Hot church suppas for the poor. The white collar criminals are everywhere. Right in front of you, dickhead. Go arrest them, whydontcha?”
And then Dignam would turn and walk down a long road into the sunset, a long road, lined with lacey lingerie stores and obscure lamp designers. One camera angle would show, quite obviously, how an old rec centre had been converted into a CVS. Dignam—still in his scrunchies—would start shooting at everything around him in protest. But no one would care. They would keep strolling and licking their gelato. And because he was using his silencer, every time he fired, it would make the puniest sound.
Matthew Kasper lives in Baltimore. He has an MFA in Fiction from Pacific University. His work has appeared in The Metaworker, Bull, Phano, The Pinch Journal Online, and elsewhere.