Literary Magazine - year 0, issue 0. Beautiful Losers

Transcription

1 Literary Magazine - year 0, issue 0 Beautiful Losers Leslie Bohem Austin L. Wiggins David E.J. Berger J.J. Campbell Paul Beckman Drew Gorman Michele McDannold Scott Wozniak Richard King Perkins II Rose Knapp detail from untitled - Federica Frati

2 Editorial When we set out to create Beautiful Losers, we did it out of love. Love for literature, love for the written word, love for poetry and stories. Love for all the writers out there that cannot sleep at night but have to bare out their soul. If you ve ever been close to any writer of any kind, you surely have heard of their successes (writers are pretty vocal about success, with good reason); for any writer but the famous ones, every success is just a little flag on a pile of failures. Writers are losers. Beautiful ones. Beautiful Losers doesn t want to be yet another literary magazine. We want to be a lighthouse to navigate the sea of words; we want to help readers connect with authors, to find the good stuff to read. The first step is what you re reading now; inside, you ll find a collection of the best writers we ve found around, a call to action for a contest, and the first BL Seal of Approval, a brand new way of knowing if a book is valuable or not. Maybe you ve been following us on Medium; maybe you re published with us. Or maybe, you ve just heard about us. Well, stick around: that s only the beginning of a long journey. Because there s an old saying that goes, a winner is a loser that didn t stop trying. With love, the Beautiful Losers Maybe because rock and roll is about being young and lost and full of yearning, and being French is about being old and lost and wanting nothing. read more from Replacement, by Leslie Bohem, at page 20

3 Contents The Outsider by Austin L. Wiggins Book Review of Flight 505 by Leslie Bohem Interview with author Leslie Bohem Heavy Breathing by J.J. Campbell Wallflower Solution by Paul Beckman Replacement by Leslie Bohem Losers All Of Us by Drew Gorman Step Up Your Gift Game with Tips from Pro Wrappers (bow not included) by Michele McDannold Barney by David E.J. Berger Looking for a Ride Nowhere by Scott Wozniak Not the Nutty Bar by Richard King Perkins II Lol Re Lax, Idc jk Jfk irl I need Xanax by Rose Knapp hands - Federica Frati

4 The Outsider by Austin L. Wiggins island - Federica Frati

5 Even the sweet peppermint and frothy eggnog of winter couldn t wash away Derek s bitter fall. Fall was disappointing the moment it started with a massive snowstorm. Derek despised snow;it reminded him of nature s indifference. Derek took a walk around the block of his apartment building. He was smiling again, slightly, but still. Christmas might not have ditched the fall, which was bitter and coarse like Turkish coffee, but the memories associated with it temporarily vanished in the holiday cheer. He walked along a sidewalk that ran parallel to the city park in which he usually relaxed. Today he wanted to walk by it but stopped. Derek heard the distant echo from fall embodied in the sound of a trombone. He forced himself to listen, but straining made him taste the grit of coffee. It was then, as he was straining, that he recalled his disappointment. He wanted to turn back immediately, but his legs carried him through the park where a brass quartet of young black men were playing jazz tunes. The trombone player, who moved the slide deftly, was the oldest of the group, a solid thirty. The trumpeter, the other trombone player, and the tubaist all looked to be in their early to mid-twenties. There was a young saxophonist,too, no older than seventeen, his notes floating on top of the carefully nestled brass band. Every note seemed to get cheer out of the audience. Even though frustration was seeping into him, he was enjoying himself. Even simple pieces like When the Saints Come Marching In became animated through their performance. Derek knew as long as he kept his eye off the tuba, frustration would remain distant and be only a dull ache. The lack of eye contact lasted about a minute. The tubaist started a solo in the middle of one of their original pieces. It was a syncopated, staccato work of art. Derek rampaged through the amassed crowd and headed home. The Pacific City Wind Ensemble held three major concerts a year: Christmas renamed to the Holiday Concert Spring, and Fall. Last year s Fall concert had been reviewed as the best the ensemble had ever performed. The mayor of Pacific City, with his white hair and shaking hands, gave the band director a certificate of appreciation for his twenty years of work with the ensemble and the masterful performance of his band. A few days later, a story about it ran in the city newspaper, Palm Weekly. The writer, Joseph Hitch, neglected to mention the ensemble s overall performance but repeatedly described masterful playing from the trumpet, clarinet and trombone soloists. Derek s only problem was that he was a tuba player. No newspaper runs an article about that. In fact, the sound of the tuba is only noticed when it s not there, much like its rock music counterpart, the bass. When he got home, Derek reflected on ending up with a ridiculous, no-praise instrument. Across the way sat the brass instrument, massive on its black metal stand. Derek started when he was sixteen; he was a saxophonist his freshman year of high school but had grown bored of it. He picked up his first sax at eight years old and felt like there was no more room for him to grow on the instrument. It was a lie he told himself to cope with being mediocre. His sophomore year, the band needed a tuba player and Derek, desperate for praise, volun- 5

6 teered to play. The gesture was congratulated with applause throughout the band but praise died shortly after. He improved greatly on the instrument only for the seldom acknowledgement. For those early years it occupied every processor of his mind. After class was band practice, and after band practice was individual practice. Even his thoughts fit comfortably in bass clef measures. By the next year Derek was first-chair tuba. The director chose pieces out of reach of Derek s ability, but he rose to the occasion. Each time he conquered the chosen piece; each time he would appear apathetic to praise outwardly but desperately sought it out as he mastered each composition. But he was a tuba player. The tuba was the backbone of the band, the spinal column of every chord that the band played. wwwthe audience expected the bass voice to do its job: to be audible enough to drive the piece but not enough to be noticed. In fact, most audiences wouldn t even care for the former part. Melody was the primary concern to the general audience; they could understand and feel the beauty of a wondrous trumpet or clarinet line. Harmony was an appetizer to the more discerning ear. The bassline? Hardly a necessity, and anyone could play it. He looked at his tuba with equal amounts of scorn and appreciation. It had taken him to places he had never seen. Pacific City Wind Ensemble traveled across the United States as well as to Britain and France. Pictures from those tours hung on the walls of his studio apartment. The low brass section trombones, baritones and tubas had a bond inspired by the bass clef that made every tour enjoyable. Derek tried to force a smile. When he saw the reflection of his crooked grin in the tuba, he had a realization: He was only attracted to things with no acclaim. He played tuba, bass and wrote poetry. He was living in accord with his nature, but his desire for attention wasn t being fed in these areas. What a load of shit, he said as he threw a shoe across the room. Derek felt an unknown emotion rise within him. He wanted to hit something, scream and cry simultaneously. Tears streamed down his face against his will. Then he sobbed. Between his outbursts Derek repeated to himself, Men don t cry. The mantra was an echo of his father. His father wasn t an emotionless man, in fact, and was very open with him. But in his childhood Derek would cry wherever the emotion struck him even in public. This prompted the phrase-turned-mantra, Men don t cry in public. But in time, false memory distorted the words. He forced deep breaths and demanded the return of his rational mind. What he was feeling wasn t sadness or any emotion similar to it; it was an emotion so dissimilar from his nature that he didn t know how to cope. It wasn t jealousy or envy, though it felt similar. He was upset for crying and disappointed that every step of improvement was met with indifference. He remembered his parents would often say, You guys sounded good. It was a gentle reminder that all of his effort faded into the background, where only ears attuned to the subtle could take pleasure in it. He felt heat in his heart, and it urged him to do something anything at all but he only cried louder. Fed up with feeling the way he did, Derek punched the wall next to his bed. 6

7 It was followed by a loud bang, then silence. It took him until mid-afternoon to regain composure. With cloudy eyes, Derek glared at the tuba and scolded it for mocking him, but the cumbersome heap of brass pipe would make no apologies. Like his playing ability, the tuba had gathered a thin, palpable layer of dust that had been piling up since Christmas. It s been two months, he said. I ve got to start practicing again. By this small, noncommittal decision, the mere spark in Derek s chest became a storm. Without dusting or polishing the brass, he picked up the instrument and pressed his lips to the frigid, silver mouthpiece. The first notes blared like a horn of war, and they didn t stop. He channeled the fury in his tempest heart, and it was only then that Derek knew he was angry. The abrupt roars from the metal beast calmed and smoothed into a short melody that he repeated. It was from his childhood; a small black-wood music box that played a waltz when wound. The waltz was normally light-hearted, but through the fiery bell of Derek s tuba it was angry and heavy. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He pictured playing in the symphony in the coming weeks, but the visualizations filled him with despair, frustration and anger. Despite it, he knew in two weeks he would be back sitting on the same black chair at the back of the band. It was a fact so well established that Derek pulled out the compositions the band would play for the Spring concert in May. He saw pieces from composers he recognized and admired like Tchaikovsky, Ticheli and Grainger. He placed the sheets on a metal music stand, started a wooden metronome, and began to play. He started slowly, making sure not to stumble on any phrasing, and then gradually sped the metronome to performance tempo. He spent the next two weeks reacquainting himself with his all-too-familiar practice routine. March 5th came faster than he anticipated, and on the evening of that day he sat in the same hard plastic chair that he had occupied for the past few years. Everyone had returned to the stage, including the trombonist Joseph Hitch claimed as one of the greatest living concert trombonists. Derek clenched his fists when he saw that Donald, the trombonist, had stapled the article from the Fall concert onto the interior of his case. What a prick, he thought. He also had thought the first practice of the season would go much faster. Not only was he mistaken, but he had been so devastatingly wrong he wished to have never come at all. The clarinetist whined about some triviality and Donald, with his ballooning ego, played with no regard for balance or volume. The stage lights had been so unbearably hot that Derek was sweating. All the while he played the same note for hours on end. He was furious. I ve wasted my life learning how to play this damn thing, he thought as he rocked back and forth impatiently on the ridiculous chair. My whole life of effort for this and without any but before Derek finished the thought the director dismissed his band with a feeble flick of his wrist. Maybe he felt it, too, Derek thought. He wanted to quit. He had at last become aware of the ensemble s pretentiousness. The trombonist s super-superior mentality, the clarinetist who whined that pieces were too easy, the 7

8 flutist who meant well but always had a snide comment about non-traditional musicians. When the ensemble went to Chicago for a performance, Veronica the flute player verbally degraded a street violinist for being unable to read music then walked away sharing giggles with the clarinetist, the trombonist, and the oboist. This was the group he had been playing music with all along. Derek recalled his time in high school band and noticed the same things: the egos and the haughtiness. These were present in a great deal of his friends and even within himself. Becoming a professional hadn t created the egomaniacs, but it deemed it necessary and ostrichsized all others. Derek wondered, though, why his ego didn t skyrocket after becoming a concert musician. In fact, his ego dropped significantly after joining the group and never made a recovery. Derek attributed the lack of ego to his undying connection to reality that others would often call him a cynic. If someone were to tell him that he played well at a performance, he would say that he did okay. He did it not because he was modest, nor was he confessing that everything was shit, but simply because his performance was riddled with micro-errors. No ego-stroking newspaper could change that. He continued showing up to practice week after week, but it was different. He was an outsider to the group more than he had ever been before. Derek never joined in on the conversations about great composers and never chimed in on theory discussions about instrumentation. Now, he saw it for the self-indulgence it was. Conversations were like how they practiced: only to hear themselves and not to listen to others. Derek was now the foremost expert on the traditional musician in its native habitat, but he d rather see the whole society of theirs collapse. Practices got better, though. The ensemble started listening and responded to the ebb and flow of the music. This wasn t out of choice, though; it was purely a necessity to produce good music. The goal of every musician is to interpret and reproduce the composer s message in the most eloquent and organic way possible, but the goal served different ends. Most were like the trombonist, who wanted the praise. But some did it to connect with something greater than themselves. Putting on a performance was a transformative experience for those who tapped into the beyond. The proud cried and the silent sang, all releasing emotions and expressions they were otherwise unable to access. Derek remembered his first performance as he was packing up for the day. He was in elementary school and entirely too nervous to get on stage. His hands wouldn t keep still and the saxophone rattled as he held it. Then he noticed all the other kids felt the same way, even the ones who had just gotten off the stage. They also shook and felt nauseous. He took a deep breath like his parents taught him when he felt any negative emotion and marched onward to the stage. It wasn t a prodigious performance, but he had conquered an emotion he never could deal with before. He realized a lot of people who go out on stage must be nervous. He played out memories in his head, like how his principal couldn t get calm enough to stop stuttering during a speech or how the winner of the spelling bee had a constantly wavering voice. 8

9 Even knowing the possible transformative experience that lay ahead, he was still ready to quit. He looked at the flier for the Spring concert in May and realized that time had breezed by him. He had spent most of it carefully researching the group he played music with and began to take pride in his otherness. With one week until the concert Derek decided it wouldn t behoove him to quit. Until the concert, Derek decided to play as if each time his mouth touched silver he was performing. He would imagine the reverberating sound from his bell reaching hundreds of ears. Hopefully one of them would hear that message. The happiness he would get from these imagined scenarios was constantly cut short by the blare of a trombone or indiscriminate whining. Practice was a balance between the divine and the material hell of pomposity. But he endured. The day of the concert came fast. The rainfall from April, aside from some sparse floods, was ignored by flowers that still refused to bloom. The hot wind, a reminder of summer s approach, blew through the leaves of tall oaks. Derek sat outside a glass building, looking toward the sun. The anger hadn t left him, even after all these months. It was a sleeping predator, passive but ready to attack at the slightest irritation. The last ninety days of music had been stressful enough to cause grey hairs to appear on Derek s head. The inner voice that had once told him to become a musician was now telling him to leave it behind right there and then. But Derek steadied his shaking hands and breathed like he was taught and re-entered the building. The practice area was filled with women and men in their finest formal attire: black suits, silk ties, elegant black dresses and elbow-length gloves. Each musician talked with those who played the same instrument as them and never deviated from their circles. This forced Derek to try to mingle he was the only tuba player but no one wanted to talk to him. He was the other, the outsider in a group he had once cherished. Somehow they knew he was judging them. Maybe it was instinct. They began to perform warm-up exercises individually, creating a chromatic cacophony. Derek closed his eyes to fight the spell of dizziness caused by the dissonance but was immediately aggravated by the appearance of Joseph Hitch. He wore a black tuxedo vest and slacks with a carefully placed crease. His ill-fitting and anachronistic fedora was placed purposefully off center, and he began to introduce himself to the trombonist. He was doing an interview with him. They talked for ten minutes and likely only asked simple questions, but Derek s imagination took off with their meeting. To him it was sinister. A near-silent plotting against a man who could never have an ego like they had; a deliberate attempt to pay him and his ability no mind. Hitch made his rounds to a few other musicians, then left without ever speaking or making eye contact with the outsider. Derek s anger broadcast itself to the world. It was so fierce it scared the first flowers of spring to bloom and the rest of the world felt in themselves a profound rage for a single moment before it passed. But Derek still trembled and shook. He fought back tears and wanted nothing more than to run away from the pretentious people who made a wonderful feeling so poisonous. He especially wanted escape the parts of himself that still wanted to be 9

10 like his company. More than anything, he wanted to punch the trombonist in the face to make sure he didn t play tonight. He entertained the idea for a moment and started for the lanky man who had just finished his warmup. Derek walked slowly, clenching his fists in a way he had never felt before or since. He wasn t trying to stave off an emotion. He was trying to vent it onto the person who deserved it more than anyone else. He hated that man s face. Donald, with his constant smile and egotistical gait, never showed weakness or vulnerability. He was just ten feet away. He wanted to run and tackle him but maintained his brisk walk. He was face to face with Donald now and they stared at each other. Before he threw his punch, Derek noticed a change in the man. Actually, none of his features transformed, but something about him certainly changed. Then the director called the band to their seats. There s no sense playing now, Derek thought. I m distracted, I m pissed. I couldn t play well out there. But he played the group warm up and waited for his fate anyway. He knew he had to play this concert. It wasn t in a trivial manner that he knew, either. He didn t feel obligated to stay simply because he was the only tuba player in the ensemble. It was the vague calling of destiny that promised something to him, but that something was never clear. Five minutes before showtime Derek started to shake again. He was still nervous after all these years, but he wasn t the only one. People playing every instrument battled their nerves some visible, some not. They walked calmly onto the stage, fooling the entire audience into believing they were confident. The director said a few words Derek couldn t make out and then turned to the band. The music began gently, an utter contra-testament to Derek s rage. It floated to the ears of the audience and softly nabbed their attention. Derek used all of his will to play in a way that was faithful to the composer, even if it hurt to lie to the audience. The melody and harmony danced in Derek s head and offered him to dance. Stubborn, Derek refused to mingle with the muse that called him but kept playing. His notes had no meaning and were just sustained nothingness that all the meaning was carried on. That was his expected role. The hardly audible and hardly acknowledged support of meaning, like the comma and period in punctuation. As Derek played he became more disheartened at his realized meaninglessness. The notes seemed to fall right in front of him, not reaching a single ear. Derek cried as he played. Anger and sadness became one and melded with absurdity. His tears opened his heart another time to the beckoning muse. Melody and harmony twirled together like ballroom dancers and asked that he join them. He accepted the offer and danced. It was on the wings of that inspiration that he might reach the audience or even that one unsuspecting person who was receptive to his anger. The dancers moved with the audience s hearts, and he learned of all the lives they lived. The disasters, heartache, triumph and glee that each member of the audience experienced and endured, and he was identical to them. He wasn t an outsider but another piece of the human empathetic puzzle that connected him with everyone else. It was the human condition of being fragile but not daring to show it. He talked with their hearts about his sadness 10

11 and anger and loneliness and didn t leave out detail. Then they fluttered among the musicians for reasons Derek couldn t understand. He then became one with the sublime and at once realized his mistakes. His heart danced with Donald s, who wasn t after public acclaim but a different acceptance altogether. His parents never wanted him to be a musician and told him so multiple times, even after becoming a professional, that he should pursue a real career ; he played for their acknowledgement alone. The article he kept in his case was the first time they had said anything positive about it. They read it in the newspaper and called their child and simply said, Good job. But it was enough; it was all the approval he needed. He danced with the high-status flutist. She was conditioned to hate those who were different by her parents. She was a product of two concert clarinetists who despised any form of music outside the realm of classical. Derek felt his sense of self fade away, and he became the wind that carried the music. He was free to float where he pleased, but he always found a way to a listening ear. That s the way it worked, though, Derek realized. Whenever music pours from the soul there will be an ear, no matter how insignificant, to listen to it. He was the conductor, the trumpeter, the euphonium player and each percussionist. Each with their own story and path to music that was as vibrant. People of various backgrounds and various classes played music from composers of different centuries and decades, and all of that variance was sure to create a wholly unique experience for the listener. It was then that Derek realized what he had noticed in the trombonist. For a moment, he realized that that man had a myriad of experiences and reasons for doing what he did. Nothing that he had done had been malicious, and he was completely innocent in any emotion that he drew out of Derek. He was no longer shackled to those emotions; Derek felt free. The concert finished and was followed by the customary applause. They took a bow and left the stage. The band went back to the waiting room and started chatting with each other and were visibly more happy than before. Mr. Hitch, whose fedora somehow still managed to stay teetering on the side of his head, entered the room and interviewed the same people, asked questions similar to those he had asked in the fall and left. Derek walked to the conductor, shook his hand and smiled. I quit. The old man demanded an answer and perhaps the Derek from last fall would have given him one, but he was a free man.

12 BL Review: Flight 505 by Leslie Bohem When you re young, anything s possible; in middle-age, fulfilling your childhood dreams is understood to be a far more impractical proposition. Leslie Bohem s *Flight 505* paints a picture of the diverging arcs of three boyhood friends once united in their goal of achieving rock and roll stardom. Al balances a job as a repairman and the standard domestic life of a father and husband in suburban SoCal. Mickey is still fighting a lifelong battle with the worst drug**-**related excesses of the rock and roll lifestyle, and is an excon to boot. Billy Sunday, unlike his childhood compatriots, made it, achieving a regular spot on rock and roll radio s rotation, the ability to bed any woman he chooses, a band comprised of yes-men willing to do or say whatever they think he wants, and all the loneliness that comes with having the world at your feet. Desperate in their middle age to have one last chance to make it, Al and Mickey travel from California to New York, lured by the potential of reuniting with their long estranged friend on the stage at Madison Square Garden, just like Billy hoped for the band during their early years. A musical insider himself, having been a member of Sparks and Gleaming Spires, Bohem captures with piercing authenticity the world of rock and roll s larger-than-life stars, its washouts, and all the assorted components that make up rock s ecosystem. Utilizing these three men and their wildly different stations in life as exemplars par excellence, Bohem is able to navigate us through the fundamental nature of the human condition in its inability to be satisfied, its constant longing for meaning, and the crushing power defeat holds. Regardless of your connection or lack thereof to the world inhabited by musicians, *Flight 505 *is a highly recommended read for all readers fond of the raw edge that marks realism s literature of desperation. *Flight 505 *has earned the *Beautiful / Losers Seal of Approval*. idols - Federica Frati -Alfonso Colasuonno, Editor, *Beautiful / Losers Magazine*

13 Interview with author Leslie Bohem Q: What was like to be a part of the legendary early 1980s LA rock scene? Well, like all scenes, you don t know you re a part of anything until years later. But it was fantastic. Los Angeles has rarely been able to sustain a club scene. We re so spread out, and the drive home drunk from a club some thirty miles from your house can kind of take the fun out of an evening. Uber has changed all of that, but there was nothing like that then. And yet, somehow, for a few shimmering years, we managed to pull something together. We were all just young enough to still have dreams and just old enough to have memories a lot of the joy came from that. We thought the music of our formative years was a million miles away and really, it was just a (backwards) shot away. We were discovering our roots and the commonalities of our youth all at once, on stages, in studios. My fondest memory is of a taco stand at a carwash on the corner of Sunset and Alvarado in Echo Park. It had no name and was open until three or four in the morning. We all just called it the Car Wash and a lot of the bands would wind up there after gigs. We all were very opinionated, but we had the night and the stages and our dreams in common, and, at The Car Wash, we would sometimes come together and talk about what we d done that night, or who we were listening to, or what new guitar one of us had found in a pawn shop. Years later, the Car Wash stand finally got a name. The called it, in a fit of true inspiration, El Taco. A short time after that, they tore it down. Q: The song Are You Ready For The Sex Girls by Gleaming Spires was featured in the iconic 1980s films *Revenge of the Nerds* and *The Last American Virgin*, as well as being played in regular rotation on LA s KROQ. Did the success of this song catch you by surprise? Totally. It was meant to be a demo to go to the record companies. We recorded it in Stephen Hague s home studio. David and I had joined Sparks by then and we were recoding Whom That Sucker in Munich. We were out of town for our fifteen minutes of fame. My wife would call from L.A. and hold the phone up to the radio. By the time we got back home, our moment was gone. I remember calling Jed the Fish the great KROQ DJ, and asking him if he could just please play it once more so that I could hear it on the radio. Q: Your novel, *Flight 505*, contrasts the lives of three archetypal rock and roll figures: the unparalleled success; the drug-addled waster; and the reformed family man. Where did the inspiration for these characters come from? Um real life. There s a bit of me in all of them there s a lot of my closest friends in all of them and then, as I wrote, they became new people. 13

14 Q: What was like to be a part of the legendary early 1980s LA rock scene? Well, like all scenes, you don t know you re a part of anything until years later. But it was fantastic. Los Angeles has rarely been able to sustain a club scene. We re so spread out, and the drive home drunk from a club some thirty miles from your house can kind of take the fun out of an evening. Uber has changed all of that, but there was nothing like that then. And yet, somehow, for a few shimmering years, we managed to pull something together. We were all just young enough to still have dreams and just old enough to have memories a lot of the joy came from that. We thought the music of our formative years was a million miles away and really, it was just a (backwards) shot away. We were discovering our roots and the commonalities of our youth all at once, on stages, in studios. My fondest memory is of a taco stand at a carwash on the corner of Sunset and Alvarado in Echo Park. It had no name and was open until three or four in the morning. We all just called it the Car Wash and a lot of the bands would wind up there after gigs. We all were very opinionated, but we had the night and the stages and our dreams in common, and, at The Car Wash, we would sometimes come together and talk about what we d done that night, or who we were listening to, or what new guitar one of us had found in a pawn shop. Years later, the Car Wash stand finally got a name. The called it, in a fit of true inspiration, El Taco. A short time after that, they tore it down. Q: The song Are You Ready For The Sex Girls by Gleaming Spires was featured in the iconic 1980s films *Revenge of the Nerds* and *The Last American Virgin*, as well as being played in regular rotation on LA s KROQ. Did the success of this song catch you by surprise? Totally. It was meant to be a demo to go to the record companies. We recorded it in Stephen Hague s home studio. David and I had joined Sparks by then and we were recoding Whom That Sucker in Munich. We were out of town for our fifteen minutes of fame. My wife would call from L.A. and hold the phone up to the radio. By the time we got back home, our moment was gone. I remember calling Jed the Fish the great KROQ DJ, and asking him if he could just please play it once more so that I could hear it on the radio. Q: Your novel, *Flight 505*, contrasts the lives of three archetypal rock and roll figures: the unparalleled success; the drug-addled waster; and the reformed family man. Where did the inspiration for these characters come from? Um real life. There s a bit of me in all of them there s a lot of my closest friends in all of them and then, as I wrote, they became new people. Q: ou are the screenwriter of *Dante s Peak *and the Stephen Spielberg co-produced miniseries *Taken*. What made you try your hand at screenwriting? My parents were both screenwriters so it was in the blood. But I d never thought about doing it. Or more 14

15 accurately, I d written a couple of scripts with no real purpose in mind and my father, then retired and my mom, long into another line of work, had no idea how to help me. But in the wake of the Spires moment and the fact that I was in Sparks, a friend of mine was able to get me jobs writing scripts about rock and roll that never got made. One day I looked up and I wasn t in a band and I was in the Writers Guild. Q: Do you find that short fiction and novels allow you to tell different types of stories from what you create for the screen? Absolutely. Movies and Television are, obviously collaborative and, like being in a band, the creation often gets better as a result of that and it always gets different. Short fiction, a novel, that s all me, for better or worse. But that s not really answering your question. Different types of stories. Yes I can go to different places, I can tell smaller stories, and I can tell darker ones. And I m a man who likes it sad and bleak. Q: In *Replacement*, as well as in some of your other short fiction, characters visits to foreign countries are accompanied by feelings of isolation and loneliness. Is there a reason why you often flip the conventional perspective of travel being a joyous opportunity? I d never notices that and I have an entire collection of short stories about displaced travelers. I guess it s a feeling I often get when I travel. I mean, travel inevitably heightens your roll as an observer, and you re left in your own head quite a lot. And in foreign places things are foreign. And then, of course, too much Paul Bowles at an impressionable age. Q: Taken *and *DMT*, your novella published by Popcorn Fiction, feature elements of the metaphysical. Do you personally believe in any theories (e.g. extraterrestrial life; psychedelics opening up doorways to alternate dimensions) generally viewed as fringe? I was a creative Mythology major during some of my college time and I ve always found a certain comfort in the fact that we all tell the same stories. Extraterrestrial life? Of course there is somewhere, but the idea that little grey beings with almond eyes travelled light-years to stick things up our butts not so much. Psychedelics I think are a bit of a cheat, the way westerners have approached them like Instant enlightments now you too can attain the state it took a Spiritual master their entire life to attain in just a few short moments. Take this pill now. You fuck with that, you get the part of Medusa that turns you to stone more often than you get the phoenix. Q: Who are some of your favorite authors? What impact have they had on your writing? Well, I already mentioned Paul Bowles. But here s a somewhat exhaustive chronological list. As a kid it was Ray Bradbury and Rod Serling. All the way. A bit after that the inevitable Salinger phase. Then in my late teens, early-twenties, Pynchon and Terry Southern, big time and a while after that, the hard boiled. Chandler, Hammett, Cain, and Cornel Woolrich I always had a soft spot for him. Horace McCoy all 15

16 Heavy Breathing by J.J. Campbell the phone rang just as i started to masturbate this afternoon the guy trying to get me to switch my long distance didn t appreciate all the heavy breathing i didn t exactly care for his high pitch southern drawl either 16

17 detail from loop - Federica Frati

18 Wallflower Solution by Paul Beckman detail from remainings - Federica Frati My wife said, If you re going to just stand in a corner alone with a drink in your hand all night and not speak to anyone there s no sense in our going to this party. You can only spend so much time looking at their photos and paintings and pouring over their book cases like you re a CIA agent. You ve got to talk to people because they know you re avoiding them and they think you re rude and you think you re better than everyone else. You know that s not how I think, I told Elaine. I m no good at small talk and somehow when I get in these situations I feel inferior and awkward. I do talk to people when they come over and say hello.

19 Well, that s the point. You need to make the effort. Last time we went to the Klein s you studied their books and then read for most of the night. That was rude and if you keep being rude and stand-offish we are not going to get invited to any more parties and then what will we do? *** Well, Mirsky, you really did it this time. I m afraid to show my face after the performance you put on tonight, Elaine said after our silent car ride home and when we finally got into bed. I don t know what you re unhappy about. I spoke to everyone at the party like you wanted me to. I didn t look at the artwork or books and stayed away from all of the corners. In fact, I stationed myself in the center of the living room for a good part of the evening. We were at the home of an artist and a rare book collector, Elaine said. You ignored both the art and the books and spent your time making the smallest of small talk. You re an embarrassment. The next party we go to why don t you fill me in on the things I should and shouldn t look at and the topics I ought to discuss and the ones I should avoid, I asked. I want to do this party thing right and please you. Telling a woman her dress shows off her cleavage perfectly is not a way to start a conversation, Elaine said. I ll make you up a crib sheet of conversation openers and current events and even compliments for you to keep with you and then you can go into the bathroom every once and a while to refresh your memory. It s better than talking about the weather which I refuse to do. There are other things besides weather and cleavage, you know. Actually I didn t know. I will use your crib sheet the next time we go to one of these cocktail parties. *** I don t know how you did it, Mirsky, but you were wonderful at the Levine s tonight. I saw you mixing with groups and singles and smiling all night. What were you talking about that got you out of your shell? It was easier than I thought it would be, I said. Elaine hugged me and told me how proud of me she was. What do you think made the difference? she asked. The crib sheet, I said. Did you memorize it? Wow, who would have thought that writing a few notes down would be the catalyst in changing a life-long behavior pattern. The next morning at breakfast Elaine answered the phone and call after call came in so she never had a chance to eat her eggs before they turned cold. I ate and read the paper feeling good and looked up at Elaine and smiled as I heard her talk to each caller about the party. Elaine wasn t smiling back; in fact, had her face look going. Finally, during a lull in the calls, Elaine told me that all the calls were about me and how personable and funny I was. That s nice, I said. For you maybe but not so nice for me, Elaine said. You showed everyone the crib sheet and asked them to pick a topic, she said. So all of the laughter I saw going on with you was about me is that it? They thought you were a riot, I said. And they re looking forward to the next get-together to see my new set of instructions. 19

20 Beautiful Replacement Losers by Leslie Bohem 20 Petrucciani - Federica Frati

21 Annie woke up screaming this morning and it was her screaming that woke me up. I had been dreaming. In my dream, there was an egg-shaped lump in my groin. It was tender and hard under the skin. Annie was shivering, her body covered in sweat. I checked my groin and there was no lump. I think that Annie has been replaced. I don t know who would have done this or why. I ve been trying to figure out exactly when they might have made the switch. I ve thought it through and I can think of several possible opportunities. The most likely is one night about two months ago when I went out alone to the movies. I went to see an American comedy. I was homesick and I wanted to hear American voices. They could have replaced Annie then and, as I said, I ve thought of several other opportunities. Or they could have done it at another time that I haven t thought about at all. My Annie s not the same girl now. That much I know. She screamed and the scream brought her out of her nightmare and woke us both up. I lay there in the dark next to her while she shivered. Then she stopped shivering and I could hear her breathing become slow and regular as she fell back to sleep. I did not go back to sleep. It was early morning and soon the light came up outside. I got up and went into our kitchen. I made coffee. When the coffee was ready, I brought the cups back into the bedroom. Annie was sitting up in bed now and I handed her a cup and sat down facing her on the bed. We drank the coffee and we talked. Annie didn t remember anything about her dream, just the scream that had awakened us. Before the change, Annie always remembered every detail of her dreams. We would sit on the bed facing each other like this over coffee, sometimes for hours, while she told her dreams to me as if they had been actual events. There was never an exact moment when I noticed the change. When I think about it now, it seems that one day she was there and then the next day it was all wrong. Once it was wrong, it might have been wrong for a very long time. Now I look at Annie and I feel like a soldier who knows that one of his men has betrayed him. I think about soldiers a lot these days and about what it must have been like to live in a city like Paris during a war. I think that this business with Annie might be even worse, because, unlike a war, it s a secret fight, but it seems to me that really it s just more of the same. Suppose that someone had mistaken me for another person. For someone important. A thing like that could happen. A powerful man would have enemies who could afford this sort of thing. I wonder what they did with the body. Annie has a job in the *Seizieme*, teaching the children of rich families English. In the evenings, she teaches an advanced adult class in an apartment near the Place des Vosages. It is good that she has the two jobs because I haven t been able to find work since we came here. Paris has never been a rock and roll town. You can go backward, find *le Jazz Hot* or the Cabaret music from before the War. You can listen to the Hip Hop that has been a radio mainstay since MC Solaar hit in the early 1980s. There s bad Black Metal and even a wretched little indie scene, but there s nothing vital. There never has been. There is something antithetical to the French sensibility in the rock and roll ethos, if there is such a thing. Maybe because rock and roll is about being young and lost and full of yearning, and being French is about being 21

22 old and lost and wanting nothing. This is why I moved here. To get away from rock and roll. I sold my guitars and brown tweed Fender Deluxe that I d had for twenty years. It was the envy of every guitar player I knew and I d used it on those last demo sessions before all of that fell through. With the amp and the guitars sold, we had enough for our tickets and rent for our first three months. I had expected to find work easily because it didn t matter at all to me what I did. Of course, I had more trouble with the language than Annie did, but even after I had learned enough to get by, I wasn t able to find anything. I thought about going back to the States, but it seemed so far away, and Annie was so happy here. She loved it in Paris. She loved what she called the feeling of trespassing in someone else s world. There is a joke about an American musician who comes to Paris. It s a very sad joke. A tenor saxophone player, Tony something, gigged around New York forever, couldn t get anything going. Guy was really gifted, but the shit he was playing was too outside for the labels, the club owners, whatever. So his friends chip in, buy him a ticket to Paris, a city of Jazz hopes and dreams. He gets this beautiful apartment, view of the river, the whole deal; he can t make it happen there either. Can t find the gigs, the guys to play with, nothing. This is not the city of Bud Powell, Dexter Gordon. This is a big, modern city with a cold heart. Finally, fuck it, he s going to kill himself, jump right out the window of his apartment. He goes to the window. It s been raining and there s this rainbow over the river. And he thinks, One last tune. Gets his horn, starts to play Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Not outside at all. Sticking to the melody. He s playing clear and clean and beautiful, but when he gets to the verse, he can t remember how it goes. Perfect. He thinks, I ll just go back to the beginning, play my way up to it. If I get to the verse again and I still can t find it, out I go. He starts again. By now, a crowd has gathered. This time, he does take the tune out a little, and the crowd goes with him, digging it. After all these years, he s finally got an audience. He gets to the verse, still can t remember it. One more from the top and that s it. Now he s wailing, the frustration s there, the pain, the beauty. The crowd is getting bigger. People are moved. They re running to get their friends. There s an agent on vacation, calling back to New York, get him booked into the Village Vanguard or some shit. He takes it up to the verse, you know, the someday I ll wish upon a star part, and nothing. Story of his fucking life. That s it. He throws the horn out the window, watches it fall. Then he joins it, throws himself right out the window. Now he s lying, stretched out on the pavement, every bone in his body broken, and he hears the ambulance coming to get him. When you tell the joke, because this is really a joke that should be told out loud, you make that two-note phrase that French ambulances make. The same two notes as the verse of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. The, Someday I ll wish upon a star part. Da da da da da da da da. I used to think about that joke a lot when we first got here. I would find myself on a street, humming that da da. But I didn t have any friends but Annie; there wasn t anyone to chip in and try to save me from myself, I hadn t brought my guitar; I d sold it, and Paris may have been a jazz town, but it was not, as I said, a city for rock and roll

23 I generally spent my mornings in one of the smaller cafes around St. Germain. It didn t matter which. I didn t like the weekends, when the British and American tourists came and crowd the streets to watch a juggler or a fire-eater or a gypsy selling wind-up toys. On the weekends, I would go somewhere else. This morning after Annie had gone to work, I walked across the river towards St. Germain and I thought about the happy walks Annie and I had taken in the city and about our plans. We had come to Paris to be in love. No one should be cheated of that. Whoever made this terrible mistake should know that. I thought about Annie and about the way it had felt to get into bed with her on a cold night those first homesick months here. To nestle against her warming skin. Annie made our life here. There is no other way to see it. She learned to speak French and she found a job and then a second job. She found a better apartment than the one we d found together when we first arrived. Life was matter of fact to Annie. She was never afraid. She held on to nothing. Nothing was ever a problem. If they came while I was at the movies, did they bring some sort of machine with them? What do they have? Machines we can t even imagine. Or something small, something you can hold in the palm of your hand. It could be a device like that, a device that works to change a person s atoms, or the sub-atomic particles themselves. It might be something that happens all at once, a replacement, as I said before, or it might be something slower, something like a virus. But I don t think it s like that at all. Nothing slow or gradual. Not a becoming or a biological mutation. I believe that Annie was replaced. Maybe they got to her while she was at work, Beautiful Losers or it could have been on her way to her evening job. Not knowing what it is they ve done, or how they went about doing it, I can picture almost anything happening and I can make myself believe it. Of course, I have pretended not to notice the change. I try to act as if nothing is wrong. For a while, I even found the idea of making love to a stranger exciting and I tried new and exotic techniques. But I think that Annie suspects. A distance has grown between us. Sometimes now she hurries to work in the mornings without waking me. I lie in bed, hearing her, pretending to sleep. To me, it sounds as if she is escaping. Once I know that she is gone, I get up, get dressed and go out. I generally follow the river to the Pont Neuf and then cross, coming up on the Rue Dauphin and walking up to St. Germain. This morning, although I don t know why, I decided not to cross the river at all. I walked instead towards a cafe in the Marais, not far from our apartment. On the Rue des Blancs Manteaux, I saw two people kill a cat. They were teenagers, a boy and a girl, dressed in baggy red sweaters and torn jeans. The girl s hair was straight and parted so that it fell over into her face. The boy s hair was nearly the same. They held the cat by its legs and pulled it apart there on the street. The cat screamed and the scream seemed to continue after it was dead. The two teenagers were covered in blood and they laughed, rubbing the blood along each other s bodies as if they were playing somewhere in the mud. It was still early in the morning and there was no one else on the street but an old woman who turned to look at the two young people and then kept walking, keeping her eyes on the sidewalk where the next step would fall. 23

24 I was standing across the street and a bit away. I felt an ache above my groin, where the lump had been in my dream. I yelled over at the teenagers to stop. They looked over and laughed again, then they dropped the pieces of the cat and they began to run. I had to wait for several cars to pass before I could cross the street and follow. I wanted to catch the two of them very badly, although I had no idea what I would do once I caught them. I supposed that I would hit them. It seemed to me that I might keep hitting them for a long time once I d started. I was vaguely aware that I would have trouble explaining, in my bad French, why I was beating up two teenagers on a street corner. Ils ont tue un chat, Ils ont tue un chat, I kept practicing to myself as I followed them. As I crossed the street after them, I stepped in the gory pieces of the cat. My shoes stuck in the blood. Ahead of me at the corner, the two stood, laughing, daring me to follow. When we had moved to our second apartment, the one Annie had found, she d wanted to get a cat. I refused. I told her that I hated cats, which was not true at all. I was never sure why I hadn t wanted Annie to have a cat. Up ahead, I caught a glimpse of red sweater as the teenagers ducked into the Metro. I followed, bought a ticket, and went through the turnstile. I couldn t see them, but I could hear their laughter. I followed the sound and reached the platform just as a train came. I saw them getting into the car ahead of me. I stepped onto the next car and stood by the door. I was sweating and trembling and the ache from the lump above my groin was very painful. At every stop I got off and stood on the platform, watching for the flash of red from their sweaters that would mean that they too had gotten off the Metro. At the *Arts et Metiers* stop they did get off and I followed them through the network of Metro tunnels to another platform and another car. They got on and I got on the car behind them. Then it was the same. I would get off at every stop and watch. Finally, at the *Pere Lachaise* stop, they got off. I saw them look back at me, and I was positive that they were checking to make sure that I was still following. They caught my eye, then they raised their blood-covered arms and laughed again. They disappeared out an exit. I had to push through a crowd to follow and when I came up out of the Metro, I couldn t see them at all. I was in a section of Paris where I had never been. My sense of direction was confused, coming up from underground without a familiar landmark. I turned around slowly, looking for a glimpse of red. I began to wonder if I should give up the chase, take the metro to *St. Germain*, and have my coffee as I usually did. The wall of the Pere Lachaise cemetery rose up on the hill across the street from where I stood. In among the graves I saw the red sweater moving and above the sounds of traffic I could hear the awful laughter of those two teenagers. I ran across the street and up the steps that led into the cemetery. There was an old, uniformed guard by the entrance. He reminded me so much of our landlord, the man from whom Annie had let our second apartment, that I must have stared at him rudely. He had a stack of printed sheets at his feet and next to the stack was a plate on which there were several coins. He reached down and handed me one of the sheets. 24

25 *Vous avez vu deux adolescents avec les bras sanglants*? I asked waving away the sheet, which appeared to be a map to the graves, at the same time. He looked at me with a dull, indifferent smile. It was a face I had seen our landlord make on more than one occasion. *Non, monsieur*, he said. I hurried past him and went up among the graves. Stones and tombs litter the hill of *Pere Lachaise* in an untidy array so that there seems to be no scheme or order to the burial sites. I followed a brick path that led, I believed, in the direction in which I had last seen the red. The path led up a hill and at the top, finding nothing, I stopped. It was late winter and the trees here were still bare of any leaves. Large black and white birds screeched in the empty branches and flapped their wings without flying. The day was overcast with the steel grey shine a Paris sky can sometimes get on a winter day. It is a shine that can be almost blinding. I heard laughter behind me and I turned. I was out of breath now from hurrying up the hill. I went along another path, following the laughter. There were very few people in the cemetery. Several young men loitered in various corners, looking up casually as I passed and then looking back down when I didn t stop beside them. I passed a group of Japanese men in pinstriped suits. All held iphones. They were taking turns taking each other s picture in front of two raised concrete caskets and a monument: the graves of La Fontaine and Moliere. The monument was familiar to me, although I had never been in the cemetery. Annie had described it to me. One morning sitting across from her on the bed drinking coffee, she had told me about one of her dreams. This monument had been in the dream. I walked the winding paths of the cemetery for what seemed like hours, following the laughter and the occasional glimpses of red. Everything that I passed was familiar, something out of one of Annie s dreams. At times, the incident with the cat in the Rue de Blancs Manteaux seemed to fade until it too might have been a dream, but there were many cats living in the cemetery and, as I passed them sunning themselves or preening, they would turn to look at me and they would glare, as if I had been the one who had torn that other cat apart. Then I remembered another of Annie s dreams. In it, she had had a lump, like the one that was still throbbing above my groin. The lump was in her left breast, and she had suspected a cancer. But when she felt at the lump, it came open in her hands, and an army of red ants began to issue forth, stinging her viciously as they came out from inside of her. The memory of Annie s dream scared me and, finding a private corner of the cemetery, I pulled down my pants and looked. There was nothing there, no lump at all, just a reddish patch that might have come from some unconscious scratching. Still, I could not shake the feeling now of something small and unfriendly crawling across my body. I hadn t had a glimpse of red or heard any laughter in a long time when, on one of the cemetery s hills, I came on a fat man who was taking a photograph. I stopped so that I wouldn t get in the way of his picture. He looked up at me. He was holding one of the guard s maps to the cemetery. Piaf? he asked, pointing at the map. 25

26 I could hear that he was American. I don t know, I said, answering in English. Moliere and La Fontaine are somewhere over there. I had been silent for a long time with the ringing of silence in my ears, and my voice sounded flat and metallic, like something being played back on an old cassette tape. I ve spent hours looking for Edith Piaf, he said. His voice was southern and effeminate. Oscar Wilde is right up there on the main drag, no pun intended. You should see what they ve done to him. They always write in English, have you noticed that? To Oscar, with love, scratched into the stone of his monument, and someone wrote Bury me in all my favorite colors. It was a quote from a My Chemical Romance song, but I didn t think that would matter to him. I heard the laughter off in the distance and I looked at the man to see if he had heard anything. His face showed nothing. It s like Dachau, he said. I was there last week. In the ovens, people have crawled inside and written their names. But that s not just English. They ve got every language in the world. Russian, Spanish, written their names in the ovens and on the walls of the gas chambers if you can believe that people would do that. Up past him, disappearing among the graves, I saw them then, the boy and the girl. The boy looked back at me and caught my eye. His smile was cold and the laugh that followed it came from somewhere far away and dark. I have to go, I said to the fat man, and hurried off after them. I was very afraid, and not at all sure that I wanted to catch up with the young murderers. I didn t mean to offend you, the fat man shouted, his voice pleading for me to come back. I 26 was just making an observation. I was thinking about the need that people seem to have to desecrate. I was already moving quickly up among the graves. The chase grew quicker. The flashes of red and the laughter were with me all the time now. The glare of the sky seemed to have grown even brighter until it was as if the whole day were made out of metal. A thought came to me and stayed. I scared myself with it the way a little boy scares himself in a dark room until soon he is too frightened and cries for his mother to come and turn on the lights. It was the thought that the two people I was chasing might somehow be connected with what had happened to Annie. I began to think that they might even be the ones who had done the actual replacement. I was passing an open space on the hill, following the laughter back among the graves. Ahead of me on a tomb were spray-painted the name Jim and an arrow pointing in. 6th grave was written above the arrow. On another grave, someone had written Twentieth Century Fox, also in spray-paint. Three people dressed in tie-dyed shirts and purple jeans were standing in the middle of the plot of graves. Two young men and a woman. They looked liked hippies time-warped out of a San Francisco love-in. They were staring at a small, unmarked mound. They spoke quietly in German. The woman held a flower in her hand. She seemed to be looking for somewhere to set it. Two other girls came walking up from behind me. They spoke and I could hear that they were Americans. Just a lump of dirt, no marker or anything. I ve seen a poster with a picture of a marker. Maybe someone stole it or something,. The German hippie girl stuck her flower gently

27 into the mound of dirt at her feet. I was never really into the Doors, the first American girl was saying. I mean, they were like my father s favorite band. But I guess he was really cute. I think it s really neat that he was buried here with all these famous artists and stuff, her friend said, but my friend Jeffrey says he s not really dead. He d be like seventy or something. Still. Maybe that s why he doesn t get a marker or anything. Her friend was looking past her now. She seemed to be staring right at me. Or maybe they just take his marker away because they don t think he really belongs here, she said. Maybe it makes them angry or something. I had turned to watch these girls and now I felt something cold on my shoulder. I looked and there was a hand resting there. The hand was covered in dried blood. I WAS face to face with the teenage girl in the red sweater. She smiled and there was something ancient and carnal in that smile that made me ache in a way I had never felt before. I closed my eyes. I felt the girl s hand caress my shoulder, moving down from there slowly, moving towards the place above my groin where I had looked to find the lump from my dream. I waited, my eyes closed, for this strange girl to finish her caress. I felt that something awful might happen, but in that moment, I didn t care. There was a slight breeze. I opened my eyes. The boy and girl were moving away up the hill from me. They were skipping. Holding hands. I followed them and we went into a section of the cemetery now where the tombs were very cluttered. The couple stopped in front of a tomb, waiting for me. I stopped too. For a long moment, none of us moved. They started to laugh again. I had to make that laughter stop. I started towards them. They went inside the tomb. I followed. The distance was a bit further than I d thought, but I sprinted to the entrance of the tomb into which they had disappeared. I stood there staring into a cool darkness that didn t glow like the day outside. The little room was empty. Two wicker chairs sat, rotting into decay in front of a dirty altar. They were rocking chairs and they might have been moving, just slightly. On the altar were some objects that looked like carpenter s tools, or tools that might have been used in some kind of metal work. Air came out cold and musty and, although I felt drawn to go inside, I did not step into the tomb. I went back down the hill quickly. I walked past the German hippies. The boys sat on the unmarked mound of Jim Morrison s grave listening to Morrison Hotel on an iphone, while the girl stood swaying to the nearly invisible music leaking from the phone s small speaker. The sky had lost its metal shine, and it began to rain. Above me in a naked tree, one of the large birds screeched. Apart from that screeching and the sounds of the rain and the faintest hint of music from the Germans iphone, the day was quiet. There was no sound of laughter at all. By the time I left the graveyard, I think I already knew what I would have to do. It was a long walk back to our apartment and it took me most of the afternoon. When I was finally home, I fell asleep I was still sleeping when Annie came home. I woke with a start when she came in, but I made myself lie still, pretending to sleep. 27

28 Annie went into the bathroom. I heard the water running. It stopped and she came back out. I had the knife ready in my hand. I had fallen asleep with it under my pillow. As she pulled back the covers and climbed in next to me, I felt a nostalgic moment of sadness, in spite of all that I knew had happened. Her warmth and her smell had been duplicated that perfectly. I brought up the knife and drove it deep into her. There was a scraping sound of metal against metal. Her mouth began to move and strange noises came from her throat. Voices. Annie s voice. Too slow. Too fast. Digital stuttering. Her eyes opened and shut. Electrical static. Digital squeaks. Then she had stopped. I had broken her It has taken me nearly two hours to clean up the mess. I ve put all the parts into a large plastic bag. There was nothing sub-atomic, nothing more complicated than a simple replacement, just as I had thought. But she was incredibly well made, I have to say that. The soldering alone must have taken days. I don t want to throw the bag into the river. I might be seen by somebody and questions would be raised. I know a quiet square just off the *Pont Neuf *on the *Isle de la Cite* where there is a little park. I ll go there in the morning just before the men come to take the garbage. If someone sees me, I will just be leaving my trash. Maybe I ll keep the chip with Annie s voice on it. It s completely mangled and it could never be played, but I think it might make a nice memento. But maybe it would be better to throw that away with the rest. To forget this whole awful mistake, if it really was just that, a mistake. Maybe it s time to go home. 28 untitled - Federica Frati

29 Losers All Of Us by Drew Gorman Beautiful Losers The sunlight is vivid and warm on my face and hands. Across from me is a guy, maybe named David, who looks misshapen under his too-large dark green shirt, his strained cargo shorts, lumpy sneakers. He pushes tangled hair out of his face to say Can I get a hit? and I pass to him and watch him hold it delicately, like something rare, and his eyes screw up and his mouth puckers, and he looks so much in pain that I almost pity him for being probably around thirty and alone and so much lacking in style and beauty that of course he is. Not that I m much better. But I m younger and maybe just as alone but I still have time, and maybe so does this guy. But looking at him with his narrow eyes and chapped smile, I think, Nah, David s done for already. 29

30 idol - Federica Frati

31 Step Up Your Gift Game with Tips from Pro Wrappers (bow not included) by Michele McDannold what do i write anymore but epic craigslist masterpieces that get flagged for being impossible actionable items only please the holidays came and went mourning for the dead mourning for the living we eat til it hurts even if it already did missed connections misunderstandings the world s a mess but there s always the clearance aisle 31

32 Barney By David E.J. Berger cat - original piece for Beautiful Losers - Federica Frati

33 Hold on to your whiskers, folks, because today is the day. That s right. These paws of mine are finally stepping out of this dump and into the unexplored wild! Now, don t get the wrong idea. I m not some frightened, clawless housecat who s finally worked up the gumption to enter the big, bad world. On the contrary. I ve been the scourge of world s varmints since I fit into my owner Kevin s pant leg. A tomcat through and through. But since Kevin and I started living in this new place with his fianceé (gagging on a hairball as I say it) Carolyn, I ve not been a pet but a PRISONER! Starting today, though, things are going back to the glory days of You see, long before Carolyn sidled into our lives like an unwanted stray, Kevin and I were doing just fine. Let me run you through a typical day of Kevin and Barney, bachelors at 3AM: Starved, I opened my eyes and started my day with my patented piercing bellows 3AM 5AM: Kevin knocked me repeatedly off the bed while he pretended to still be 5AM: Kevin stumbled out of bed to feed me. A full can! 8AM: While Kevin prepared for work, I pranced for him. Really strutted my stuff. (My mother always taught me if you ve got the socks, use them.) 8:05AM: Cue Kevin s bearded smile of appreciation. For me alone! Followed by some 8:30AM: Kevin left for work. (Leaving the TV on!) 8:30AM 5:30PM: I d have the place to myself all day to just chiiiiillllll. A nap here. A nap there. A little tumbling. Some somersaults. Or just go to town on my scratchpost. Do whatever the fuck I wanted really. (One time I pissed on Kevin s bed and I wasn t even mad at him. I was just like, Fuck it. The box is toooo faaarrr. ) 5:30PM: Kevin returned from work. Dinner time! Another full can! Hell yeah, Kev! 6:00pm: Poop. (Even to this day, I always make sure Kevin is home so he doesn t miss it. 6:15pm 9pm: Time to prowl! I headed straight for the door. Kevin opened it perfectly timed so I didn t even break stride as I pounced into the courtyard and went to work. (Oh that wonderful, green courtyard! Being free to roam made me felt like a real tomcat. It was glorious! If I had a patch of that grass in front of me right now I d eat it whole, I don t care that it made 11pm: Bedtime. Kevin and I. A bed to ourselves. (I m fighting back cat tears thinking It was better than a bastard tomcat like me, who never got closer than third from hind tit, I didn t like Carolyn from the moment we met. Kevin introduced me and she laughed. She said, Barney? Really? And then this shrill chuckle escaped from the walking Why is that so surprising? Barney is a great name! You know what s surprising? That Kevin would date a woman with the same name as his dead step grandmother, Carolyn! Then she scratched me under my neck with her clammy hands. She said, Growing up, Well guess what, Carolyn? I m not them! The indignity of these people who insist on rubbing other people s cats as they do their 33

34 own is so insulting. How about trying to get to know MY rub spots? (I m a butt rub type of cat, thank you very much!) Disturbingly, Kevin ENJOYED her presence. He had that bearded smile (my smile!) plastered across his face. I shook my whiskers in disbelief. This was bad. I feared she d be a recurring visitor like a clever mouse you d yet to catch and squeeze the life out of. Unfortunately, I was right and Kevin and I s life started to change. First, it was the trips. The weekends used to be some quality me and Kev time. Hell, sometimes Kevin wouldn t leave the couch at all. (Butt rubs for dayyyzzz!) And there was pizza boxes and leftover food bins to dig through everywhere. It was great! But Carolyn got it into Kevin s head they needed to go to wine country. Kevin loves drinking so it was an easy sell. Much to my dismay, wine country was a smashing success and led to Palm Springs and Ojai and Joshua Tree. Each time they d leave me here with fuck all to do but eat the two days worth of food they d crammed into my dish really fast and then puke it up on this stupid jute rug Carolyn got Kevin. When she gave it to him, she kept saying that word jute over and Doesn t the jute look great? she said. I think jute is such a great material. The jute adds so much life to the room. I had no choice but to scratch her. Kevin was so pissed he got the water bottle. But I took my sprayings with my whiskers up because it was SO worth it. Shortly after that, Carolyn made a peace offering. She bought me a hunk of white plastic that was supposed to resemble a mouse with a swinging neon tail. (About as unrealistic as it gets.) She told Kevin it was battery operated and cost $25. She was sure I d like it. And once Let s get one thing straight: I m a simple tomcat. I like shoe strings. Paper towel shreds. A flash light on the ground. Maybe she needs a battery operated $25 toy to make her happy, but not me. She didn t get me at all and I realized she never would. After that, more changes came fast and furious. (Kevin and I s favorite movies, by the way. Carolyn, on the other hand, likes foreign movies with subtitles. I m a cat. I can t fucking read, Carolyn! It s like she wants me to get bored and lick my butthole in front of them.) One day I cried really loud in confusion at the presence of this pink blob wandering around our place, but then I realized, Holy shit, that s Kevin! I d never seen him without his beard and I can see why. He looked terrible! But SHE liked it, of course. Then, Kevin and I s diets came under Carolyn s scrutiny. So, his went from eighty percent ham sandwiches (with which I d see some delicious windfall) to eighty percent greens based. (One time he fed me something called kale and it tasted so bad I wouldn t even feed it to my runt brother. Who I hate.) And after Carolyn s urging to take me to the dreaded vet out of concern for my weight, it was determined I should be reduced to only a can and a half per day. 34

35 Worst of all, Carolyn kept being around. No longer did I have the place to myself when Kevin was at work. She d be there on her computer with the TV off. When bedtime came, Kevin and I had to share it with her. Every. Single. Night. Finally, I realized what I think I knew deep down already but didn t want to admit: Kevin and I were now LIVING with this woman. While I thought that was the worst day of my life, I was wrong. It came later. Moving Day they called it. The apartment was empty. I m suddenly roused into my carrier. The reassurance that I was not going to the vet did little to calm my nerves. Something was up! And oh how right I was! Because then I was in this terrifying new place. Their fixer upper they called it. Gone was anything familiar including our couch, which I had worked tirelessly tearing the backside of in an oh so perfect way. In its place was a hulking new one I wasn t allowed to lay a claw on. I was so upset I didn t come out of the bedroom closet for a month. Over time, I slowly granted them my company again. The place wasn t so bad. Much bigger than Kevin and I s place. There are two bedrooms! And an office! The kitchen has enough room for some expert level prancing while Kevin washes the dishes. But after while, one yearns for more. And I knew what I needed. I needed to go outside. To feel like a real cat again. So one night after dinner and a poop, I galloped straight for the door. Only Kevin didn t have it standing open as planned. In fact, he wouldn t open it no matter how piercing I bellowed. It s not safe out there, buddy, Kevin said, blocking the door. Outside is a no go. A no go? Please. Did he know who he was talking to? I ran that courtyard before! Birds, moths, mice? You name it. I killed it. Outside ain t got shit on me! Thinking Kevin had a minor lapse in judgement, I pressed the issue. I bellowed EXTREMELY piercingly loud every night. Only to be rejected time and time again. I m so sorry, buddy, Carolyn patronized after once. I scowled. This was her fault! I went and pissed on her precious guest room comforter. I ve laid low since then. Not because I gave up the issue. Far from it. In fact, I ve simply been watching them. Studying them. Calculating the right opportunities like all skilled tomcats. And today is the day! It s what they call laundry day and what I ve seen time after time is Carolyn going out the backdoor with their laundry basket and leaving it wide open until she returns a few moments later. She always checks to make sure I m napping before she does this, but ho ho! I m far from napping. I. See. Everything. So here I sit, fake napping in the guest room. 35

36 Patiently waiting. Carolyn pokes her head in the room and my eyes are closed so tight it s as if I m headed to that big litter box in the sky. In a flash, she s gone and I m up on my socks. One paw slowly in front of the other into the living room. I turn my head to the backdoor. It s standing wide open as planned! I can taste the I use all my might and hurl myself out of the house and onto the concrete. I haven t gone this fast in months and fail to stick the landing, tumbling over a bit. Barney! Carolyn screams. Get back in the house! Shit. I ve been spotted. No matter. It s Carolyn. I don t listen to her anyway. I recover my balance and dash around the corner of the house. Walking slowly along the house now, I m taking it all in. Oh man, smell that air! And there s so much dirt and trees and grass. Over there, I see some weird berry things I m definitely going to have to try. Over there is an ant trail I m going to absolutely destroy. I can t believe they re keeping me from this. Those DICKS! Oh and look across the street! There seems to be some sort of brutish animal roaming about. Maybe another tomcat, bandying about on his own, being a real cat like me? Focusing in, the animal seems to be a bit bigger than most tomcats. It swings its head and I see why. IT S A FRIGGIN PITBULL! It locks eyes with me. (And I swear to Cat God I think it s smiling.) The next thing I know this thing is all teeth and spit and growling through the fence gate. I rise up on my socks, arch my spine, shriek, and bolt to the What s going on?! Carolyn says as I pass her. Holy shit! It only took a few more steps for her to answer her own question, but by that time I was in the bedroom closet. Safe and The next day, I m in the closet once again, sulking. Hearing Carolyn recount my tale of terror with the pitbull to Kevin when he got home from work the night prior, I came off as a real scared y cat. In all likelihood, it irrevocably damaged my case for outside access. Hey, maybe being a frumpy housecat isn t so bad. It happens to us all at some point sooner or later, right? It s inevitable. But my time was cut down so soon. I just hope they let me keep my claws. Ugh. If only I could go back to the days of Barney and Kevin, bachelors at large. Now, we re a stupid Barney, Carolyn says, opening the closet door. Come out here I want to show you Fuck it. What else am I doing? I slither out of the closet and sit next to her on the bed. Clearly, you really want to go outside. But this place is not like Kevin s old place. It s Lucky for you, I solved the problem and you ll be back in the fresh air in no time. Finally, she s making some sense! She can redeem herself for EVERYTHING right now if she comes through here. She reaches in the bag and pulls out a some type of leather rope. I stand there for a moment in disbelief. This woman...wants to walk me. I lower my head onto my paws. Carolyn, you really are THE FUCKING WORST. 36

37 Looking for a Ride Nowhere by Scott Wozniak Beautiful Losers She had the devil in her eyes and smelled like Orchids. She was the perfect combination of crazy and jaded that tugs on the strings of my sickness. To every question she asked I gave the wrong answer. For once I was happy not to taste the flames a woman like her could offer. 37

38 in bed - Federica Frati

39 Not the Nutty Bar by Richard King Perkins II Beautiful Losers His sexual innuendo usually fell flat even if he didn t. When he walked into the kitchen she asked him to grab her something sweet to eat so he came back with a Nutty Bar and his tumescent cock covered in powdered sugar and offered each. The cellophane and empty calories remained intact and they both laughed at the white confection circling her lower face. 39

40 Lol Re Lax, Idc jk Jfk irl I need Xanax by Rose Knapp LA may be a little lala but it s laid back, chill, dope, and happy NYC is very neurotic n lala it s not your fuckin friend or bourgeois utopia but it s where people go to find dope and define dope 40

41 dancer - Federica Frati

42 In memory of Leonard Cohen How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me? Finding a name for a literary magazine or anything, really is very difficult. Unless you re one of those people that doesn t care about meaning, naming something is giving it a destiny; nomen omen said the Latins, which translates to A name is a prophecy. So when we named the magazine you re reading now Beautiful Losers, we did it with good reason. And one of the reasons was the book by the same name written by Leonard Cohen. It s not the most famous one amongst his fans the ones that actually know he was a writer first - because it s a complicated book; it is filled with symbolism, oral sex, religion, obscure pagan references and, most importantly, people struggling with their obsessions, people not able to lead a life without the true love they long for. But the real appeal of Beautiful Losers the novel resides in the fact that, to this day, is not completely understood yet. Cohen wrote it in two 8-months runs, aided by amphetamines, fasting stints, with The Genius sings the blues by Ray Charles on repeat, while living on the Greek island of Hydra. Leonard had the soul of a poet; Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. 42 Beautiful Losers is his second and last novel to write it, he almost died; he exhausted himself so much while crafting this book that when it was over he weighed only 116 pounds. So he said Fuck it, lit up a cigarette, and moved to be the suc-

43 cessful singer and songwriter that we all know. Everything after Beautiful Losers is history. Beautiful Losers, to me, speaks of the people that are not understood in their time. It speaks of breaking the rules, overcoming the conventions, challenging the status quo no matter what. Cohen didn t leave the literary world because he thought music was easier, but because there was nothing more for him to write; he did it all, he wrote the final novel, something that probably we will understand fully fifty years from now. He mastered literature; now he needed a new challenge, and this challenge was music. We are ugly but we have the music. The words that you re reading weren t supposed to be here. We decided to release number Zero many moons ago, and a part of me secretly hoped that this little bundle of incredible literature would make its way into Leonard s hands, and make him smile. But fate decided to take old Jikan (Cohen s name as a Buddhist monk, meaning Silence ) before the release day of our number Zero. And yes, it broke my heart, and it will leave a scar forever, but A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh. So I think of this magazine as the words made flesh, in honor of Leonard. Many people will remember Cohen the singer; I remember Beautiful Losers. That book is a testament that literature exists to move our souls forward. And those words are just a homage to the man that gave us our name; and with it, our destiny. So Long, Leonard. DC 43

44 Contest We at Beautiful Losers Magazine are issuing a writing contest on the advent of our first PDF issue. Considering recent events, there isn t a more apt theme for us to begin with than Beautiful Losers. Part our own namesake and part tribute to the late Leonard Cohen, the contest theme is meant to highlight what it means to be a beautiful loser. Spoken word poet Shane Koyczan explained it best in his poem To This Day : We were freaks Lobster claw boys and bearded ladies Oddities Juggling depression and loneliness playing solitaire spin the bottle Trying to kiss the wounded parts of ourselves and heal But at night While the others slept We kept walking the tightrope Winners will be announced on February 1st, 2017 and our three prize winners and two honorable mentions will be published in our next issue, due out on February 8th, sisters - Federica Frati

45 Contest Details The Rules: Compose a short story on the topic of Beautiful Losers. Our only rule is that your entry must be under 3000 words, otherwise feel free to elaborate on this theme in whichever fashion you feel will make the most compelling entry. The Winner: The winning entry will have the following qualities: exceptional attention to literary craft; an intelligent understanding of the psychology of the character/s; and a clear link to the theme. Judges: All finalists will be chosen by the Staff of Beautiful Losers Magazine. Three finalists will be submitted to the final round of voting. The order of winners will be determined by the Staff of Beautiful Losers Magazine. All decisions regarding contest winners are final. 1st Prize: $100 2nd Prize: $50 3rd Prize: $25 2 Honorable Mentions: $10 each Prizes Entry Fee: Entering the contest is free, unless you would like to send multiple submissions. If you would like to enter more than one story for our contest, a charge of $10 will be applied, paid through PayPal on our website. These payments are used to directly help fund our magazine and contest. Please state the name of your story as a reason for payment. If you fail to pay the multiple submissions fee, all of your submissions will be invalidated. Deadline: All submissions must be received by January 15th, Notifications: Beautiful Losers Magazine will keep a log of our Top 5 stories. If your story falls out of the Top 5, we will notify you via a rejection letter. In that situation, you have the opportunity to resubmit for the $10 fee. Rights: All rights revert back to the author upon publication. Submission Guidelines: All entries should be submitted between November 16th, 2016 and January 15th, Entries can be ed to submissions@beautifullosersmag.com. Please start the subject of your with Contest followed by the title of your story. All entries must be written in the body of an , as attachments will receive automatic rejections. Multiple stories can be submitted at one time. No simultaneous submissions or previously published stories are allowed. If your story was simultaneously submitted or previously published, you will become ineligible from the contest and your entry prize shall be forfeited. By submitting your entry, you are acknowledging that you are the sole author of the work and it has not been previously published, including on blogs, websites, social media, or elsewhere. By submitting, you agree to all contest rules.

46 Uncle - Federica Frati

47 literary outlet / submissions@beautifullosersmag.com EDITORS IN CHIEF Alfonso Colasuonno Austin Wiggins Dario Cannizzaro EDITORIAL STAFF Rairigh Drum ART DIRECTION Nico Carone CONTRIBUTORS Drew Gorman MARKETING & SOCIAL [your name here] Hey! If you made it this far, you ve an eye for detail. Do you want to be part of the staff of Beautiful Losers? We re looking for a Social Media & Marketing expert. If you think you can help us shine, contact us at beautifullosersmag@gmail.com and put SOCIAL MEDIA in the subject of the . Copyright 2016 by Beautiful Losers Magazine. Some rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Beautiful Losers Magazine is protected under Creative Commons.

48 Featured visual artist Federica Frati Every quarterly release of Beautiful Losers Magazine will feature original artwork from an indie visual artist. If you re an artist and would like to be featured, please reach out to us at com to the attention of our Art Director, with a short bio and your thoughts on Why you would be a great featured artist. Please do not send any artwork via unless requested so by our staff. For our first release, we featured the gorgeous, mesmerizing work of Federica Frati. Federica Frati was born in Brescia in She graduated from art school Foppa where he learned the main artistic techniques. After two years of attendance at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera she graduated in art at the University of Milan. Since 2009 Federica creates engraving prints at the Luciano Pea laboratory. In parallel to the works of engraving, the artist produced, from 2010, paintings following models and techniques of medieval painting: the synthesis and the solemnity of some frescoes, the non-descriptive urgency, the glimmers of gold, and verdaccio backgrounds, mark the pictorial production of Federica. The sign becomes prevalent and predominant in her paintings as in her prints, so often the paintings and engraving prints were exhibited together. Shows October 2010: e la porta fu chiusa - UCAI gallery, San Zenone all Arco, Brescia, Italy April 2012: Segmenti - Mimesis gallery, Calvisano, Brescia, Italy September 2012: group show IM-ESPRESSIONI - Soncino Press Museum, Cremona, Italy October 2012: group show Civiltà Contadina, a tribute to Luciano Cottini - church of Santa Maria della Rosa, Calvisano, Brescia, Italy June 2013: third place at Lidia Anita Petroni competition with the work Mother and son August 2013: group show at Biennale di Soncino, a Marco - fortress of Soncino, Cremona, Italy February 2014: group show La memoria del corpo - Spazio Duina, Paitone Area, Brescia, Italy April 2015: first place at the XXXVII edition of the award Matteo Olivero, painting section, Saluzzo, Cuneo, Italy April 2015: second place at the XXXVII edition of the award Matteo Olivero, graphics section, Saluzzo, Cuneo, Italy February 2016: Giro di stella, gli incisori di Pachiderma studio - Spazio arte Duina- Cascina Balocchi, Lonato, Brescia, Italy April 2016: solo show Impuri - Fondazione Amleto Bretoni, Saluzzo Arte, Saluzzo, Cuneo, Italy July 2016: Oggettività- Soggettività, group show curated by Maria Novella Gennari - associazione culturale Il Movente, Brescia, Italy