My Life in Heavy Metal

Further Praise for
My Life in Heavy Metal:

“Every once in a while somebody comes up with the ability to describe the mechanics, the emotions, the raw energy of sex in such a way that you get a soaring—and sometimes searing—experience of it. Steve Almond is the latest somebody. …
My Life in Heavy Metal
will leave you gasping, gulping and guffawing from beginning to end.”

—Michael Alvear, Salon.com

“The best fiction I've read this year. Almond has a master's touch. His stories—about a generation caught in a whatever world—are sexy, touching, funny and gorgeously written.”

—Jan Herman, MSNBC.com

“In twelve lean, emotional stories, he limns lust, passion, loss, betrayal, and office crushes. Essential reading for the man who loves too much.”

—Janet Steen,
Details

“Almond's riffs on love gone wrong are tinged with melancholy and humor as well as a robust enthusiasm for sex. … His stories capture out-of-control moments with the measured skill of a writer twice his age.”

—
Playboy

“A glittering collection. Mailer and Roth are aging, and we need somebody out there willing to report on the existential pleasures of sexual engineering. Almond is just the man for the job.”

—Roger Gathman,
Austin Chronicle

“None of these stories is anything less than thoroughly entertaining, and the best of them are funny, touching and disquieting. … Underneath all the sexual frankness and clever descriptions, there's a moral sensibility at work that gives
My Life in Heavy Metal
a real potency.”

—Rob Thomas,
Madison Capital Times

“A right hook from the fist of reality … You'll laugh out loud, cry to yourself, blush once or twice, and end up thanking your good fortune. … [Almond's] prose crackles with electricity, as if his sentences are plugged into massive amplifiers, shaking the readers' rib cages, urging them to rock on in the still of the night. And under it all is the ironic drone of the modern world.”

—Greg Lalas,
Boston Magazine

“
My Life in Heavy Metal
is an auspicious, audacious debut, absolutely confident in its tone and subject matter and boldly provocative in its ideas.”

—Stephen Deusner,
Memphis Commercial Appeal

“[A] gifted storyteller … [Almond] writes with a loose, anthropological humor.”

—Claire Dederer,
The New York Times Book Review

“
My Life in Heavy Metal
is an amazingly intricate and complex collection that takes on territory once home to F. Scott Fitzgerald—the confusion of desire and the sweet derangement of urban romance. In story after story, Steve Almond gets into the heart of American youth to portray the pleasures and terrors of contemporary intimacy with beauty and regret, humor and surprising tenderness. A brilliant, sexy debut.”

—Stewart O'Nan

“These stories are passionate, sexy and resonant. They look at relationships and dissect them without making them rosy or disgusting, heartfelt or horrible. They just show them as they are.”

—Jonathan Shipley,
Oklahoman

“[Almond's] stories mostly deal with the tumultuous topography of modern-day relationships, but they come at it from a range of characters and settings. … Almond's writing is riveting; the characters rise from the page emotionally bared. They fumble and make mistakes, desperate for physical and spiritual connection.”

—Clay Risen,
Nashville Scene

“Read this collection for more honesty and humor than you'd ever hoped to find about the hopelessness and redemption of men.”

—Erin Flanagan,
The Omaha Reader

“The short story speaks to us like no other literary form, and Steve Almond is among its latest champions. I read these wonderful stories with awe, envy, and delight. Almond is a writer to watch.”

—Rick DeMarinis

“Almond's gift is the way he confidently and almost immediately conveys the tone, setting and personalities of the twelve stories.”

—Erin J. Walter,
Austin American-Statesman

“Steve Almond's subject is the emotional terrain between lovers, and he nails it. These are dynamite stories: sexy, stylish, full of nerve and moments of uncanny wisdom. This is a writer to watch.”

—David Long

“An accomplished collection of stories … The prose is often startling.”

—Mindi Dickstein,
St. Petersburg Times

“Almond has a keen ear for dialogue and an eye for the absurd.”

—Marc Mohan,
The Oregonian

“Almond excels at capturing the pinwheeling physicality of sex, and he does so with a devilish sense of humor.”

—Damon Smith,
Boston Phoenix

My Life in Heavy Metal

STORIES BY STEVE ALMOND

Copyright © 2002 by Steve Almond

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America

FIRST PAPERBACK EDITION

The stories in this book have appeared in the following places: “My Life in Heavy Metal” and “How to Love a Republican,”
Playboy;
“Among the Ik,”
Zoetrope: All-Story;
“Geek Player, Love Slayer,”
Missouri Review;
“The Last Single Days of Don Viktor Potapenko,”
Another Chicago Magazine;
“Run Away, My Pale Love,”
Ploughshares;
“The Law of Sugar,”
The Denver Quarterly;
“The Pass,”
New England Review;
“Moscow,”
North American Review;
“Valentino,”
Other Voices;
“Pornography,”
Boulevard;
and “The Body in Extremis” in the anthology
The Ex-Files
.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Almond, Steve.

My life in heavy metal : stories / Steve Almond.

p. cm.

eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4789-0

1. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3601.L58 M9 2002

813′.6—dc21 2001055638

DESIGN BY LAURA HAMMOND HOUGH

Grove Press

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

To my grandparents—
Irving and Anne Rosenthal
and Dorothea and Gabriel Almond
—whose sacrifices have allowed me the luxury of art.

My Life in Heavy Metal

Among the 1k

Geek Player, Love Slayer

The Last Single Days of Don Viktor Potapenko

Run Away, My Pale Love

The Law of Sugar

The Pass

Moscow

Valentino

How to Love a Republican

Pornography

The Body in Extremis

I slept but my heart was awake.
Listen! My lover is knocking.
—
THE SONG OF SONGS

Josephine Byron chased me all through college. Nobody could figure this out, not her friends, not mine, nor the frat boys who watched her wag across the wide lawns of our school. She was one of those women invariably referred to as
striking,
a great big get-a-load-of-that: gleaming black hair, curves like a tulip. Snow White refigured, made warmer, more voluptuous. She was also utterly convinced of herself, her good taste in clothing and men, her beauty and intellect, which she unfurled in earnest, vaguely Marxist jeremiads, while the rest of us gazed at her lips.

In the dim, yeasty haze of after parties and the stoned vistas of Hope Hill, on the cruddy avenues of our college town, Jo came to me bearing gifts, a fresh-baked loaf of bread, a Mardi Gras necklace, bearing her sly smile and plump white breasts. She let me have my way with her, though I was never quite sure, in the end, she wasn't having her way with me. At night, she kissed my body all over and in the mornings made me omelets. It was like having “Happy Birthday” sung to me each day: ecstatic and deeply disquieting.

A few months after graduating I moved to El Paso, where the daily paper needed a clerk. I lived alone, in a basement, and ate fried chicken
from boxes. The shower in my place was like being spit on, so I got in the habit of showering at the YMCA, where I swam a few times a week. The lifeguard was a quiet woman who wore clunky glasses and a red Speedo one-piece with a towel wrapped around her lower body. If I stuck around long enough on Wednesdays, she took off the towel and led kiddie classes in the shallow end. She was good with the kids, teasing them in Spanish, holding their bellies while they flailed. Her face was round, bookish, somewhat drab. Even without the glasses her eyes seemed far away. But she cut the water like a nymph.

I spent hours at the paper, hoping to distinguish myself. I sent Jo long, maudlin letters. I wanted her to love me again. I had been wrong to treat her with such disregard. At dusk, when the sun relented, I wandered El Paso's ragged downtown, wallowing in a sadness I considered sophisticated and insoluble. The plaza was always emptying:
vendedores
and day maids trudging back to Juárez, the sweet stale scent of lard punching out from El Segundo Barrio, the thrum of swamp coolers fallen away. Later, the smelting plant would fire up its chimneys and smoke would drift over the Franklin Mountains, which shadowed the city like a row of brown shrugs. To the east lay the trim, eerie avenues of Fort Bliss. To the west, the terraced estates of Coronado, where the swimming pools glowed like sapphires.

For seven months I handled weddings and obits. Then the pop music critic quit, and the managing editor, lacking other recourse, allowed me to sub. El Paso was, still is, part of the vast spandex-and-umlaut circuit that runs the length of I-10. I reviewed virtually every one of the late-eighties hair bands at least once: Ratt, Poison, Winger, Warrant, Great White, White Snake, Kiss, Vixen, Cinderella,
Queensryche, Skid Row, Def Leppard, Brittney Foxx, and Kiss without makeup. At my first concert, Metallica, the band's new bassist introduced himself to the crowd by farting into his microphone. This was the heavy metal equivalent of a
bon mot.

Because we were a morning paper, I had to bang out my copy by midnight. I operated on a template involving an initial bad pun, a lengthy playlist—
adjective, adjective, song title
—and a description of the lead singer's hair. The rest was your standard catalog of puking yayas, flung undies, poignant duets with the rhythm guitarist back from rehab. I loved the velocity of the process: an event witnessed and recorded overnight. I loved the pressure, the glib improvisation; I loved seeing my byline the next day, all my pretty words, smelling of ink and newsprint.

And the truth is I loved the shows. I remember standing in the front row as Sebastian Bach, the lead singer of Skid Row, screeched “Youth Gone Wild.” Bach was the quintessential metal front man, a blond mane and a pair of cheekbones. He strutted the stage like a drag queen, while the lead guitarist yanked out an interminable solo and the drummer became a shirtless piston. It was formulaic and mercenary and a little pathetic. But when I stared down the row, I saw twenty heads banging in unison, like angry mops. These were kids lousy with the bad hormones of adolescence, humiliated by the poverty of their prospects, and this was their dance, their chance to be part of some larger phallic brotherhood; the notes lashed their rib cages, called out to their beautiful, furious wishes.