Downey's "Classics" Presents: Thanks, Buck

Apparently, the best way for a writer to make a name for himself today is to do various writing jobs that doubles as an advertisement for his blog until he is ready to write a novel, which pays more than a job writing for a magazine. Sure, the writer could just skip a step and write the novel right away, but that shit is difficult, and without something resembling a cultivated audience, it would arrive in bookstores to general apathy. And that's even if it makes it into stores.

So, the writer of this rarely-updated-but-not-bad blog is trying to get back into the swing of blogging. This requires putting up a post a day. Rather than write something off the top of his head, though, he is burning "back catalogue", or material he wrote for classes that would get underappreciated, because he is tired on this day. Hell, he's been tired all week. OR HE'S BEEN WEAK ALL WEEK HA HA HA HA HA. Below is a short story that he wrote 4 years ago that has aged better than he thought it would, considering that it received a negative reaction in the creative writing class he shared it in. Enjoy.

"Thanks, Buck"
by John Downey


Negative. That’s the word you were looking for. “The night looked like its negative”—“it” being the day. You weren’t so much talking to yourself as you were grasping for an apt way of describing the night. It wasn’t a bad night, though. You were still underdressed for the conditions, and you had to look out for black ice, but compared to the past week’s negative temperatures with 30 mph winds, it was a good time to be outside. Negative, though, was still appropriate. At 1:00 in the afternoon, the ground was dark and the skies were bright grey. Now, with the snow still coming down and the sun setting, the ground was bright and the sky was dark. If it weren’t for a few coffee shops and night shift fast-food places, the picture would have been complete.

Maybe you were right when you decided that you were in no condition to drive. Nobody drives themselves hours removed from the death of an 8-month relationship. She didn’t end it; you did, by accident. She suggested a break, and maybe she was right, but you argued that breaks often turn into breakups, so “Why not just speed the process up?” (You’re an idiot.) She called your bluff. She still had your copy of “Perks”, but you were in no rush to get it back.

You did tell yourself, though, that you would start cramming for that World Civ test at 10:00. You started your walk at 12:30 without opening your notebook. You got good at not keeping promises; that’s probably why she wanted a break.

Maybe you were right when you said that you were in no condition to drive. How you decided that walking around downtown, alone, after midnight, then, was a bit of a stretch. In the end, you figured that this would be a good opportunity to form an opinion on T. Brooks, a rapper from Canada that the blogosphere had declared its new king. A friend of yours had given you an advance copy of his first official album. Illegally, but you promised yourself that if it was really good, you would buy yourself a copy when it came out.

Brooks had talent, that much was apparent. He wasn’t the problem. Your issue with his album had to do with his producers. A few songs had producer and performer meshing perfectly. Most songs had a beat that was technically good, but didn’t really suit Brooks’s flow. Then there were the tracks that sounded bad because the producer came up with a complete turd and Brooks was too inexperienced to salvage them. “A sensitive song shouldn’t have a ‘pretty’ piano arrangement undermining the song’s purpose,” you heard yourself mutter, “and sampling anything recorded after 1985 is lazy. The album’s not that bad, but the backlash from the hipster crowd is going to kill him.”

“Pulp Fiction” came on at 2:00 on Showtime, and you wanted to stay up for it. You examined your surroundings, taking in the big lights that signaled which eating establishment you would be landing in. Burger King let you walk through the drive-in, and Dunkin Donuts had a nice something-chino with your name on it. You decided on Denny’s, though, due to its proximity to your dorm. Your knees weren’t what they used to be.

Walking in, sitting down and ordering (milk, two sugars) were all autopilot by this point. You weren’t the only person eating there. Just a table away, a group of kids, high-schooled age, were chatting about things that you didn’t particularly care about. You suspected that they had started talking about you—something about “the guy with the hair”—so you put your head down, pretending to study the kiddy crossword puzzle that had already been started by a spelling savant. Apparently, G-E-W-S was a word.

You were about to start looking for Arthur—in a “Where’s Waldo?” type of puzzle—when you heard something crashing into the seat in front of you. The sound didn’t match the sight, though. You were expecting to see an elephant looking back at you. Instead, all you saw was a girl, maybe 17 years old, with her hair bound in a side ponytail and her smile set to ear-to-ear mode.

“I said, hey!” She knew how to be polite.

You said hey back, expecting her to return to her seat after winning a talk-to-the-freak bet. Instead, she said, “You know who you look like?”

You thought you were ready. You weren’t.

“MARCO FROM DEGRASSI!”

You didn’t know what a Degrassi was, so you didn’t see the humor in her declaration.

“You’ve got the hair, the soul patch, the eyes…wait, are you gay?”

Her friends bursted out laughing. The girl showed you a screenshot from the television program “Degrassi: The Next Generation” that she had on her iPod, or her phone, or some other complicated contraption that you couldn't immediately place. You did share a resemblance with the character, though he had much better fashion sense and was Hispanic.

“Marco is Italian; he’s not Hispanic!”

Well, then. You asked for the name of the actor who portrayed Marco. She smiled. “Adamo Ruggiero.” For once, you were wrong.

You happened to hear one of her friends say something about “claps from “Think””. You asked for him to repeat what he said.

“Well, we were just on an inspirational early morning breakfast binge. I just spent the last hour or so messing around with some drums I got from my parents’ records.”

You asked what kind of drum machine he used. “SP 1200. What else?”

You were blown away. You weren’t on the up and up as far as drum machines went, but you knew what the SP 1200 was capable of. Any drum transferred from vinyl onto the 1200 would sound so crisp, you could almost bite into it. You asked the guy if he did any rhyming.

“I’m a behind-the-boards kinda guy. What about you?” You simply said that you were an English major. “Well, then, you wanna make some music, Mr. Del Rossi?”

You thought about your World Civ test. Then you remembered that it was at 4:30 the following afternoon. You had time.

As you got out of your seat to sit with them, you almost fell over. The girl sitting across from you helped you regain your balance. “Bethany.” She smiled again. So did you.