Track 2 – Confessions of a Futon Revolutionist - The Weakerthans

Jake was on his way to work, but we’re not going with him. We’re going to stay right here for a minute.

Jake’s apartment was number nine-oh-six, but the six would spin around, and his neighbors kept fucking with it, and people would show up at his place looking for the party upstairs on the other side of the building. This would be the most talking he would do on a given night:

“It’s upstairs, on the other side of the building,” and then, “You’re welcome,” as the door was already on its way closed.

A college town like Barker, Texas, is full of shitty apartments and shitty neighbors. Somewhere in town an ex-president has a library, and just recently that library brought in a Gutenberg Bible in an unmarked rental truck which is now on display in the wing that no one really ever had an excuse to go in before. But Jake wouldn’t see it because apathy ruined his grades.

I’m not talking about the real Barker, Texas. The real Barker, Texas, is supposedly a tiny little town outside of Houston on I-10 that I didn’t bother going to or even looking up until way too late in the process. This one is mine, but some of you have been there anyway.

The college is fake too. Let’s call it Texas A&M University. But not the real one. The real one which is so weighed down with tradition and drunk-mouthed loyalty that to include it here would feel like parody. So I changed some things. No more Corps of Cadets walking around in their fresh haircuts and pressed pants and their six-hundred dollar boots. No more MSC, no more Fish Pond. I changed the mascot from the Aggies to the Rangers. I kept the long, hot bus rides across campus, the gleaming statues, the pro-life rally with its posters of abortions blown up so large you can feel outraged from space. I kept the stupidity and got rid of the pomp. I excised all the pride and anything to feel good about, and I’m calling it Texas A&M University mostly so I won’t have to call it Large State-Run School University.

Let me tell you something if you’re going to keep reading: If God came down and said that the whole world was actually a mental hospital, He would reveal that college was the sedative He prescribed to even everyone out. Apparently His image is middle management in a Fortune 500 company. Be normal, go to college. Be homogenized, go to college. Be a success, damn it!

All Jake ever did in class was doodle. Doodle. It’s a funny word. It wasn’t ADD or ADHD or any other fancy acronym for the fact that shit is boring and you have to sit there for two hours straight, four times in a row. There just wasn’t a point. Jake was smart, and college pissed it right out of him.

Meanwhile the town filled up with giant pickup trucks featuring pictures of Calvin (syndicated cartoon, not philosopher) pissing all over rival schools while praying to Jesus. Jake stayed awake at night imagining for himself a plague of lawyers to come down like locusts, suing every fraternity t-shirt and beer label rip-off in sight. Isn’t that the American way?

Here’s the situation, then: the future of this nation is beer bonging its way into history, hopefully leaving a legacy of just the smarter ones. More likely everyone will pull themselves together in time to become senators and CEOs.

None of this story takes place at school.

Anyway, the efficiency is the king of shitty apartments. Efficiency was the most pleasing word they could come up with to describe one small room for four hundred dollars a month. Jake called his apartment complex a sheetrock prison block. He always had things like this to say to no one. The management called it North Shore. It was over two hundred miles from the Gulf of Mexico or any other body of water larger than a bathtub. I am exaggerating. This is the tour.

The back wall was the kitchen and the front wall had a door and a large window covered in aged yellow blinds. One of the other walls was covered in promotional posters found or given away or bought for a dollar or two apiece. They were arranged to say disarray, overlapping, not straight, just kind of thrown up there as they showed up. They were for different bands, the ones you’ve never heard of. The ones you mostly won’t like.

Through an unknown and unimportant series of events, Jake’s apartment didn’t have a bathroom door. There used to be a shower curtain there, but it seemed pointless so I wrote it out. The walls were white in most of the apartment, but in a clear violation of the lease agreement, patches of greenblack mold were growing in the bathroom, making a slow creep across the textured drywall one tiny hill at a time. Over the toilet, in a quiet homage to John Samson, who you’ve probably never heard of but that’s okay, was a high school diploma. The sliding glass door to the shower was closed. It squeaked. The tub was bone dry.

The whole apartment was built around substitutes. There was a futon, not a bed. There was a card table, not a desk. There were cinder blocks and planks, not shelves. There was a computer, not human contact. The television was a window into everything hateful and wrong with this eighteen-by-twenty-five foot room: everything outside of it. The video games were escapism. The music was emotion. The books were thoughts, and largely went unread.

The real world intruded into this unlit room through flickering television rays. The shades kept the sun out, the roof kept the rain out, the door kept the people out, and so on, but that weird poisonous culture we’ve made for ourselves kept getting in anyway. Television rays cause cancer. They tell you who you are. They tell you what you like. They tell you that at the end of the day everything will be the way it was. They tell you you’re not good enough. They tell you everything you ever need to know, according to television. I wanted to make Jake into a better character by taking the TV out of his apartment, but then I’d be lying to you.

The north end of the apartment was covered wall to wall with CDs, tapes, and records. In the corner was a stereo. This was Jake’s life, right here. All that shit I described before you can forget about if you want. On the wall were his friends, his feelings, his self-expression, his everything. It was life support, his last tenuous connection. There would always be new CDs to listen to, new favorite bands. It was as good a reason to live as any.

It really doesn’t matter that Jake isn’t here right now—he adds very little to the atmosphere. There’s a mouse, Fernando, that lived under the fridge that was a much more animate presence. Jake didn’t mind him so much because of the way he wiggled when he ran. Right now he’s gnawing on a bag of animal crackers in the pantry. There are roaches that sometimes crawled across the television screen in the dark while Jake was drinking the fifth or sixth beer past midnight, the big roaches in Texas that fly and are like tiny machines and the sound of paper rustling. These were big events in Jake’s life, these roach encounters. The only things that really changed in the apartment were how many empty beer cans there were or whether or not the trash was taken out and how tall the stack of dishes was. Whether or not the coffee was still hot. The position of the futon. Jake was barely a presence in his own life.

Every night after work, Jake would put a few new albums or old favorites on the stereo and just listen. He would sit down with the lyrics sheet, or look them up on the internet if there wasn’t one, and listen. Sometimes he would sing along, but not loudly enough for anyone to hear through the thin walls. He knew they would be able to hear him because he could hear them fucking, sometimes.

Some nights, he would go back and forth between the wall and stereo, plucking out this song or that and putting it on a blank tape. When he was finished, he would take the tape with him and listen to it a few times, then put it in the box with the others. He never touched them again. One day he would be satisfied. For now it was missing something.

They were labeled different things. “Death,” “Hate,” “Love,” “Despair and Ineptitude,” towards the bottom, and closer to the top of the box just the word “Jake” and then the date. It was obviously the kind of thing that young men do, the kind of thing they think is important. He was obviously getting close.