Open Mic

Jack Blakehood was old and ready to be done with all this horse shit. It’s not that time had gone on for too long but rather he’d just seen too many faces fresh with hope. People in their twenties and early thirties who still had the dipshit notion that there was time left. Time to go somewhere or be something. The young always draped despair on themselves like costume jewelry. Only when the bones begin to ache and doctors say there isn’t anything left to be done do those gems and beads grow red hot. They sear through the skin down into the meat until nerves no longer register pain leaving you with only their weight.

Jack was happy when the Covid lockdowns began. There was time alone. A break away from the obligation of the normal world. Time to think about when he was young. When troubles felt like they hit hard but didn’t actually leave craters. He threw himself into writing his story. A memoir. Day after day he put the words to paper. The months passed and when he looked up, he and saw that his business had failed, shuttered and bankrupt, and that soon his house would follow. He realized his memoir was nothing but an abandoned mine shaft. Cold, stripped of all value, and occupied only by corpses of jackrabbits and coyotes unlucky enough to have chased them. A pointless hole that may be slightly interesting to some, but ultimately contained no gold. He understood the only way to salvage anything and be remembered was to end it. End it and let people witness.

Videos of suicides weren’t new. Years ago, there was Budd Dwyer and his nice shot. He stood there at the podium as the clunky old television cameras filmed him pulling a revolver from a brown paper bag as a woman yelled “no”. The hammer cracked against the pin, the bang, and a dark fountain flushing from his nose. Then there was Bjork’s stalker and attempted murderer. Chubby and sweating with his face painted red and a gun in his mouth, taking several heaving breaths before blowing the best of himself away. Most recently Jack saw a teenager live streaming from his bedroom. The voices of friends and classmates chattering on the stream as he stared into the camera for a few minutes, rocking back and forth. He raised a barrel to his head and the wall behind him was sprayed black with flesh and bone. There was the scream of a girl watching the stream followed the scream of the boy’s mother who entered his room and found him.

Jack made his decision. He’d do it on a live on webcam while people were listening to the words he’d written. It was the only way they’d remember.

Friday came. The night of his suicide. The night of a weekly Zoom meetup of writers, rejects, poets, plagiarists, and Twitter personalities that orbited an underground alt-indie or however you would otherwise say “unknown” online magazine called Despair Safari. He figured that in some strange way he would be helping not only the magazine but the other writers would be immortalized. Some would go on to inflate their relationship with him, say they were closer than they were. Their own fame and social capital growing from the association. Finally, someone would wish they’d been his friend.

The editor of Despair Safari, Bill Wuryeh, welcomed everyone to the stream and spoke a bit about the theme for the evening which was “Tuesday Sadness”. He reasoned and everyone agreed that this should be a wonderful prompt for work because being sad on a Tuesday is very different from a weekend sadness or even a late weekday sadness. You could feel the excitement ripple amongst the group as people began taking turns reading their work.

First up were a couple of philosophy junkies. As usual, they read pieces with no real coherence that name-dropped philosophers no one else had read or even heard of. It was understood that if you heard a last name you didn’t recognize come from one of them, it was the author of some obscure and impenetrable theory. Over the months the Zoom readings had been going it became apparent that the two philosophy junkies were in fact dueling each other in some way that only they understood. There were a couple weeks in July when the group thought it was a contest of who could create the longest hyphenated descriptor. It was determined that wasn’t the case when one Friday they took turns reading what seemed to mathematical algorithms at one another with the words “therefore” and “as is” acting as punctuation. Since then they’ve opened every stream and their time is largely used by people to say hello and talk in the text chat until the pair have finished.

Next, the group heard a piece about dumpster sex from Delores, who always wrote about sex. She’d written about having sex in bathrooms, wigwams, porta-potties, TJ Maxx changing rooms, bookstores, elementary schools, church pews, a day labor employment agency lobby, trains (both Amtrak and public transit in Chicago and New York), the base of three confederate monuments, countless graveyards, a 1988 Chevy G20 cargo van with a 350 V8 engine and a limited-slip differential with 4.10 gears, an Ikea in Tampa Florida, four National Parks, and two Canadian provinces. There was an ongoing betting pool for when she would finally write about having sex in an actual bedroom. The pot had grown to over $400 which was more than any of them had ever made from their writing.

When she read everyone paid attention except Mike, who was not only Delores’ ex-boyfriend but also the next person scheduled to read. He always wrote about drugs and did so much in the same manner that Delores’ wrote about sex. Instead of learning where a certain sex act was performed, everyone got to hear about what drug he’d done and how much of it. Jack enjoyed figuring out what musical artists were the inspiration for each piece. The work ranged from dancing on the psychedelic fringes of Sgt. Pepper lyrics to so grossly Cobain that it was damn near theft, which wasn’t the biggest issue people had with him. If you watched Delores’ camera feed as Mike read you could see her eyes roll as she waited to give backhanded commentary.

“I feel like I’ve heard that before like it’s from an album or something” Delores said.

Bill, the editor jumped in providing his usual peacekeeping and motivational take, hoping to avoid confrontation and make sure everyone showed up next week. “Yes, I agree Delores” he’d say “It’s very familiar, like a part of you that you’ve known is there forever. Musical at its core and yet a new exploration. Very nice work, thank you for sharing Mike. Up next is Simon. Simon are you ready?”

A scrawny dark-eyed boy filled the screen. His skin was wet paper pale and his eyes were rusty from countless days of tears. Every week he wrote about depression, loss of love, and his favorite topic: voids. Simon loved writing about voids. How they could be filled, what caused them, how much they consumed, and one time wrote about voids inside of voids that had voids in them, which no one really commented on except the philosophy junkies and they couldn’t agree on if it was a good piece or not.

Jack fiddled with the revolver at his side as he listened to Simon’s poem. It seemed to start off the same as always but soon changed. The words had weight. Jack felt them slide into his ears, wrap around his mind and then cascade down his neck covering his body in a wave of sadness. This poem lacked all pretense, clichés were absent, and there was zero irony. Jack tried and failed to remember ever hearing a poem so moving. Everyone watched as small tears crawled from the corners of Simon’s eyes. His words unraveled like mooring rope falling away from a dock, letting the poem go adrift as it finally came to an end.

It was the perfect moment. Jack knew that following this poem, which was without a doubt one of the most heartbreaking pieces of verse ever spoken into existence, that he wanted to shut off the lights forever. He knew that his own writing was pointless, a muffled scream. The lowly wail of long-forgotten spirit.

Simon leaned forward, placed the barrel of a shotgun under his chin, and said “I’m sorry”. His head split apart leaving a twisted mass of red tentacles in a pile where his face used to be as his body slumped back into his chair. For several seconds the only sound was his blood, pouring in splashes against the floor. A small Chihuahua walked into the room and began licking at the pool of blood.

Jack’s skin flashed cold. The hair on his arms stood on end and his stomach turned. He swallowed back some bile as the reality of what he’d just witnessed cemented itself in his mind. The permanence of suicide, an act he had only been seconds away from committing himself, was there in front of him and he was left in the aftermath. He took a deep breath and realized that in this moment he had been robbed of his glory by that whiny little shit.

Bill the editor chimed in “You know, what I love about this piece is that the action following the words not only lend severity to the poem but the other way around, in that the act of suicide like that is somehow given more of almost a religious impact, perhaps a commentary on the Christ myth or you know any number of supernatural connections to self-sacrifice but also in terms of the long history of writers who have taken their own lives. It really speaks to me and I think that’s what really gives a kind of multi-dimensional weight to the piece. Great job. Really great job. “

“Oh my god. That totally reminds me of this guy that killed himself after we fucked. That was great. Memory lane for sure.” said Delores.

“That was fuckin’ trippy for real, like the end of his neck almost looks like some fractal shit or whatever” Mike added.

“Up next is Jack. Jack are you ready?” said Bill

“Well, I was, but now… I mean I was actually going to kill myself but Simon got to read before me, as usual, so now…”

“Wow, really not cool Jack. Like, Simon just really opened himself up to us and now you’re trying to steal his thunder” said Delores.

Mike chuckled “hehe, opened himself up”

“Let’s be respectful everyone!” snapped Bill.

“No, really, look I’ve got the gun here and everything” Jack said holding up the revolver. “I was going to read my piece and then shoot myself, but Simon’s poem was so good and then he got it to first…”

One of the philosophers interrupted “You’re saying he stole your idea?”

“It could just be a case of parallel thinking.” the other replied.

“No way, too many connections. They’re mutuals on Twitter, pretty sure they’ve workshopped stuff together before” said the first.

Delores jumped in “So it was like a suicide pact? Oh my god, that’s so hot! I’ve always wanted to like fuck someone and then kill ourselves”

Mike spoke up “Remember that time that we shot up and then…”

“The past is the past, Mike! Don’t want to rehash our relationship!” she said.

Bill jumped in “Now Mike, remember we respect boundaries here. That goes for you too Jack. If you didn’t have anything written for tonight, I would have appreciated a heads up so I could fill the slot with someone else. We all know you haven’t really written much lately and what you have shared has been lackluster at best. It’s really not cool of you to effectively steal Simon’s work because your creative well is dry.”

“Dry and boring. He’s like forty years old or something” said Delores

“I didn’t steal Simon’s idea! He didn’t fucking invent suicide.” Jack said.

Bill interjected “Whoa Jack, look. This isn’t the place for that kind of hostility. Frankly, we’ve all been talking for a while in the group chat…”

“What group chat?” Jack said.

“That’s not important” Bill continued “we’ve just been talking and weren’t sure you’re a good fit for what we have going on here based on your past contributions and honestly your outburst tonight helped make a difficult decision easier. I’m going to ask you not to join us again.”

“Are you fucking serious? You’re uninviting me?”

Then Jack’s screen read:

THE HOST HAS REMOVED YOU FROM THIS MEETING