"Bop Kabala and Communist Jazz" by Tim Lieder (Fiction Extra)
Ed K. drummed "wipe out" on the dash board; the engine was cranking. I smelled cow shit.
Note: I just got hit with a ton of jobs right before Pesach, meaning I don’t have time to write the weekly installments of Job chapter analyses and discussions of John Cheever stories (the next one is “The Children” which is pretty great). So here’s a fiction extra. I might write an article about writing this one. It was my first pro-rate sale to Shock Totem. And like all stories written awhile ago, I feel both nostalgia and embarrassment. Like did I really have characters casually tossing off gay slurs? These aren’t loveable characters but still that’s a bit much.
I met Ed K. in circumstances of glorious abandon. I was in a supermarket outside Hibbing smoking Camels. I asked him for change and he blessed me with Marxist doggerel. I thought he was Chinese but he said he was Korean. The next time I saw him, he was playing a tenor saxophone in a church near Brainard. He squeaked and squawked. His rhythm was spotty. His tone was weak. Ed K. was a convert to the road, to the life, to the random eventuality.
I'd see him many times afterwards, always in extreme unexpected places. I'd go to a Russia tea room with a girl that I couldn't stand. Ed K. would be at the next table playing chess. I'd find myself at an after hours party in a bar catering to fraternities and Ed K. would be hitting on the blond waitress with green streaks. I was once in Chaska selling hot dogs from a push cart and Ed K. came up and stole one. He even dated my cousin. My old college roommates loved him; he had been their main supplier.
Ed K. smoked too many cigarettes and drank too much coffee. He was tall for a Korean. I think. When he wore leather, he owned it. When he wore a suit, it wrinkled around his arms; made him look cheap. There were weeks when he'd push the macrobiotic vegan diet. Other times he'd pull the mandatory 28 days. He was Ed K., the musician, the poet, the prophet, the Communist, the seeker, the drug addict and the preacher.
His preaching ultimately brought the trouble. After I'd known him for a year, I was driving him to preaching gigs in Stacy, Sheboygan and Nimrod. I felt obligated because I was in his car outside Stevens Point, Wisconsin, when he wrapped it around a flag pole. Long story and you don't want to hear it, but I was in the back seat fighting and fucking Virginia. She's married now. I hear she's happy. I can't say if he crashed it when we were fucking or fighting. Probably the former because I bit Virginia's tongue.
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