“on black sabbath and masturbation”

Andy presses pause on the half-working portable CD player he found on the street and rigged up to a pair of speakers he paid twelve dollars for at the pawn shop at which his cousin works. He can hear the phone ringing and so he presses the button and the music stops three minutes and eleven seconds into “Falling Off the Edge of the World” from the the mob rules album by Black Sabbath. It’s the second album they made after Ronnie James Dio replaced Ozzy Osbourne as the lead singer and he loves it even if when he’s at the bar with the other guys he makes fun of it because only the shit with ozzy is pure, man. At the bar they talk mostly about music and all have agreed that the three greatest bands in rock and roll history are Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and AC/DC. Secretly he worries that this makes him unAmerican because the first two bands are British and the third is Australian.

He has a tattoo on his upper back of a pentagram that he apparently got in 1985 one night out in Memphis after a Motley Crue concert but he has no recollection of the needle ever making contact with his skin. He considers Motley Crue the fourth greatest band ever but if they guys at the bar wanted to bump them up a notch he’d go along with it.

i woke up at a stranger’s house, He told his mother three years later when she accidentally saw him in the midst of changing because on the shirt he had planned to wear to the dinner table he discovered a hole that Roger had burned in the collar with his joint two nights before. someone slipped me something and when i woke up i had this awful tattoo… Denial is a powerful force; she chose to believe him.

He woke up that morning in 1985, seventeen years old, following an after-party that Roger had gotten him into and the two of them looked upon their good fortune as the start of the bold lives for which they were destined. The after-party featured no members of the band, just two roadies who were there to buy drugs off the host’s brother, and only six women, but they rationalized this away, content to start small and work their way to the fortune and glory that was sure to be theirs. He woke up that morning in a pair of shoes that weren’t his, leather shoes a size and a half too big, his first tattoo still bleeding on his thin-skinned back, and sought out Roger. Roger was sleeping naked on top of a counter in the kitchen with a hand towel covering his genitals. Roger had an erection as he slept; the towel hardly concealed it and it was the largest penis he had ever seen, way bigger than his own. He stared at it for a moment, briefly questioned his sexuality, then grabbed a blanket from off the sleeping body of the man who owned the house at which the after-party had been held and threw it over his friend. They ate breakfast an hour later at a Waffle House and he never mentioned the fact that he saw Roger’s cock.

The Black Sabbath CD is paused and he’s looking for the cordless phone which he won’t find in time to answer. It’s between the couch cushions and the sound is muffled.

He hasn’t seen Roger since 1994 and he doesn’t expect that he ever will again. Roger joined the army at twenty-three in an attempt to give his life direction and he never got over the feeling of rejection that this caused. His mother was grateful; she considered Roger to be the bad influence even though Roger just went along with it when he was offered by his friend his first joint, his first bump. Roger lives in Waukeegan, Illinois, is divorced, has no tattoos, and doesn’t know that Andy is the only person outside of his immediate family, his ex-wife, and the doctor who delivered him to see his penis in person. Occasionally for a weeknight thrill Roger takes photographs of it with the digital camera he stole from the auto insurance agency from which he was fired and posts them on Internet personal ad websites. He expects, and receives, no responses to his ads.

Andy briefly considered enlisting when Roger did but decided against it; he got Roger into weed and coke, he got Roger into Sabbath and Zeppelin… his ego would not allow his own decisions to be dictated by the friend who he secretly considered to be his sidekick. He stayed out of the army to prove a point. Now he’s a cook. There’s a diner eleven miles away where he works the morning shift. He makes hash browns and scrambled eggs and little else; he brews the coffee most mornings and it’s always too weak. He has sex sometimes with a waitress who works mid-shift if he comes back when she’s getting off or if she comes in early, but he has a fantasy that the woman of his dreams will someday walk into the diner when Arlene, that ugly hag of a morning waitress, is sick with whatever the hell she has that makes her cough so much. He’ll take her order and they’ll have a conversation about some of the things he never gets to talk about, and she’ll know nothing of metal bands or weed and she’ll be just passing through, not a local, on her way maybe to Nashville for a business trip, or maybe to catch a flight to Paris where she’ll go to the museum that he’s taught himself how to pronounce correctly in his head but which he knows, given a reason to say aloud, he’ll call the loover and hate himself. His fantasy is so rich and textured that he knows that this woman, clearly out of his league, will not merely be charmed by his mannerisms, will not merely fall victim to the maxim opposites attract that he’s certain is bullshit anyway because every goddamn person he knows is married to someone just like themselves. He’s had to incorporate complications into his fantasy, car trouble of some sort, and he’s not great with cars but it’ll be something he knows how to fix so the two of them will get in his truck and drive to Wal-Mart and pick up the parts that will be required to fix the problem. On the way, cautiously, she’ll reveal to him the past she’s escaping that has led her to a Tennessee diner one morning and he will tell her not to worry about the part, he’ll straighten up whatever mess she’s in and the two of them can drive the fuck out of town together.

The phone stops ringing and the answering machine picks it up. Whoever it is doesn’t leave a message. He moved out of his mom’s house three years ago when he buried her so he knows that it wasn’t her. Roger doesn’t think about him at all these days, doesn’t even have the Black Sabbath records the two of them stole when they were in high school anymore, wouldn’t have any reason to call anyway except they’re all so goddamn lonely. The guys at the bar hardly know his name and there’s not a game on so it can’t be them, the waitress from work doesn’t know his phone number, and it doesn’t matter much anyway. He leaves the CD on pause, imagines one of the variations of his fantasy- maybe the woman dialed the wrong number but would hear the kindness in his voice, the yearning to be something more, and beg him for help - and grabs a tissue from the box on the arm of the couch. When he finishes masturbating he drops the tissue to the floor, unpauses the CD, and tries his best to fall asleep, knowing that when he wakes up tomorrow he won’t even remember that anyone called.