The Boy Is A Boy And The Fish Is A Fish

Ernest Hemingway sucks. People talk about how great he is, but I bet they’re just saying it ’cause that’s what they were taught. We had to read The Sun Also Rises in Mr. Hartley’s English class, and it’s boring as hell �" the guy is depressed and he just drinks and never says anything about it. If I wanted that, I’d go talk to my a*****e dad. The guy in the book is miserable because he’s in love with some s**t but he can’t get it up after getting shot in Vietnam. I mean, that could be an interesting story, right? But the guy never says anything. What’s the point of writing a book about being sad if you never talk about being sad? I don’t get it.

My band, Anal Skull Fuckers, Inc., we say what we feel. We have a song called ‘F**k George Bush’ and we come right out with it �" we say that he sucks and he makes us mad. If Hemingway wrote a book called ‘F**k George Bush’ it would probably be all about how the beer was cold or the sun was hot or how he had a headache. All of our songs are under two minutes, so we get straight to the point. And people really like us. Last summer we played a show in Pittsburgh and like a hundred kids showed up. The owner thought we were so good that he invited us back to play this summer, and we also booked a show in Buffalo and another in Cincinnati, so we lined them all up together and called it the Three Holes Tour (get it?).

Anyway, at the end of the year we had to write a paper on Hemingway, and so I told Mr. Hartley what’s what. I said that the book was stupid, and that Hemingway was a p***y who was too afraid to say anything, even when he blew his brains out. We had to cite other works, so I said that the book was as lame as his other one, The Old Man in the Sea, which we had to read the year before in Mrs. Donnelly’s class. I also said that Henry Rollins was much better than Ernest Hemingway, and we should read him instead, because he knew the world was s**t, too, but he had the balls to say it.

I got an F, which meant that I failed the class and had to go to summer school, which meant I couldn’t go on the Three Holes Tour. If it were up to me I would’ve just quit school and gone on the tour, because the band was what I’m going to do for a living, anyway, but my mom said I had to stay in school until I was at least 18, which didn’t happen until August. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the band replaced me. They said it wasn’t fair to cancel the tour just because I was stuck in summer school, so they got this kid from the skate park, Stinkfinger Steve, to replace me. Me! The one who booked the shows in the first place! The one who wrote ‘F**k George Bush’!

So I had to wake up early every morning and sit in a hot classroom that smelled like disinfectant while everyone else got drunk at the skate park and my band went on tour without me. All the English teachers must have had enough sense to go on vacation, because the class was taught by one of the gym teachers, Mr. Jensen. He favored the jocks, and was always showing off his college championship ring, even though he was only a punter. He called me ‘Johnny Rotten’ all the time, but it wasn’t in a complimentary way.

‘How do you get through metal detectors at the airport, Rotten?’ he’d ask with a smirk and all of the jocks would laugh.

One night I got a call from Tom, and he said that someone from Morbid Records was at the Buffalo show, and offered to print a seven inch for us. But not for us. For them and Stinkfinger Steve. He said that they’d been writing some songs while they were on the road, and were thinking of changing the band’s name to Satan’s Foreskin. I could hear a bunch of people in the background yelling and laughing. They sounded drunk. I just hung up the phone. If Ernest Hemingway’s band ditched him, he’d probably just sit in a cafe and talk about wine.

I went to the skate park. Roland was there, drinking tall cans of Steel Reserve under the ring of the spotlight. He was skinny and weird looking and only had seven fingers, ’cause his mom drank a bunch when she was pregnant. He had lots of squiggly homemade Nazi tattoos and could always score beer or pot or coke. I told him about the band, and about summer school, and he took me back to his mom’s place, which was above the bar that she worked at. It smelled like cat poop and garbage and everything was covered in cigarette ash. He gave me a tall can and pinched some coke from his mom’s room and said it would make me feel better.

It did, for a while, but then I started to get panicky and my insides pulsed like a Joy Division bass line. I couldn’t stop smoking cigarettes, even though they were making me nauseous, and Roland wouldn’t stop talking about how much he hated Jews and blacks. The rabbit ears on his TV were wrapped in foil, and the horror movie we were watching came in fuzzy. I drank one more beer and went home.

The front door was locked, and my mom was out at the bar, so I had to crawl in through the kitchen window. I took my songwriting notebook and ripped it to shreds and threw away all of the tapes we’d recorded and hurled my bass out the window. Then I stole my mom’s wine and took all of the pills in the bathroom. Probably about seventy or eighty of them.

I woke up in the hospital. They made me drink black sludge and I threw up for a few hours, and once I was feeling better they moved me to another wing on a different floor, where the crazy people are. I’ve been here two weeks now. Doctors ask me questions all day, but I really don’t want to talk about the band, because if I talk about it, I think about it, and nothing hurts more than having to think about it here, where bug eyed crazies shuffle around and drool all over their green gowns. So I just shrug and say that the world is s**t.

F**k Ernest Hemingway.