The Wake-Up Bomb, by Tom Dinard

I look good with my drink-eat-no-sleep, take-a-leap longevity
I get high on my attitude, latitude … I’m in deep
My head’s on fire and high esteem

Klay settled into his reserved seat, alone. A week from his twenty-ninth birthday, and here he was, finally watching his favorite band, R.E.M., play a concert. So many times before he had missed them, for so many stupid reasons, but nothing held him back tonight. Seventeenth row, center, at the Shoreline Amphitheatre. And even though he had to sell his extra ticket for twenty bucks less than he paid for it in the parking lot right before he walked in because nobody at work wanted to go with him, that minor hit didn’t deter him from easing back and watching the musical gods from his high school, college and young adult days as they launched into what he was sure would be a night of sonic salvation.

He looked at Michael Stipe, the lead singer, the mysterious, mystical pop impresario and politico. He gazed at guitarist Peter Buck, rock’s consummate underplayer. And he watched Mike Mills, the expert bassist with the candy harmonies to masterfully match Stipe’s guttural groans. He had reached the top of some sort of personal musical mountain, and he had nothing left to do but smile.

The music played and Klay noticed a few unoccupied seats in his section. He silently mocked all the idiots who still didn’t believe in the power of this band. Sure, a good fifteen years had passed since R.E.M. burst onto the scene from Athens, Georgia, and helped define “college radio,” which would eventually be known as “indie rock.” Their knife edge and critical “importance” might have dulled a bit in that time span. But as Stipe wrapped up a cut from their latest album and after he had jump-started the crowd once again with the requisite greeting and bombastic conclusion of “Pop Song 89,” all was well.

Speakin’ in tongues, it’s worth a broken lip
Your hate clipped and distant, your luck, pilgrimage
Rest assured this will not last, take a turn for the worst
Your hate clipped and distant, your luck a two-headed cow
The pilgrimage has gained momentum

The sun had been strong over San Francisco at high noon that day. The American flags on top of the buildings sagged lazily in the unseasonable heat as the Bay sent fetid fumes wafting South of Market straight into the heart of Multimedia Gulch.

Inside the old warehouse, the glitter of the era sparkled: exposed, sand-blasted old-growth fir beams, custom-fabricated, polished black steel rivets, Eames desks, Mies van der Rohe chairs and leather beanbags for the rare 15-minute break.

Framed, autographed photos of American Olympic heroes gazed from the earthquake-retrofitted original brick walls at the team members, settled into Herman Miller Aerons with Sony noise-canceling headphones pillowing their ears as the keyboards clicked and monitors hummed — the crickets and birds of the percolating, pulsating data stream.

Klay was two months removed from the daily task of putting together the back page of the sports section of a newspaper whose editor had called him into his office, patted him on the shoulder, and congratulated him on his long-awaited and long-requested raise: Seventeen dollars a week.

Soon after, he was seemingly magically transported to the Internet, that place of boundless energy, bottomless pockets and limitless vision. He would edit copy for the official website of the television network that would broadcast the Olympic Games. He would write stories, produce sport sections, and likely make a shit-ton of dough with his thousands of stock options.

The mornings were full of meetings. The managing editor would come in and stitch together sentences using words and terms Klay hadn’t heard in his ink-stained pre-revolution days.  There was the “net-net,” the “win-win,” and “wysiwyg.”

That particular workday had brought a special guest to the office — the CEO and founder. The dashing Australian former America’s Cup yachtsman who brought his unique vision of sports coverage on the internet — personal audio and video accounts from athletes while they were competing in events, biomechanical analyses and breakdowns of the athlete in motion, story text minimized to promote enormous colorful background images.

“Compete with ESPN?” Klay heard during a particularly dramatic pause in his rah-rah concluding statement. “We’re gonna buy ESPN!”

It’s these little things, they can pull you under
Live your life filled with joy and thunder
Yeah, yeah, we were altogether
Lost in our little lives
Oh, oh, oh, oh, but sweetness follows

Two nights before, she had called Klay to her house at an odd hour of the night. He drove the forty minutes out of obligation. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices to get laid. He arrived and she opened the door in nothing but a negligee, smiling but silent, this 20-year-old girl with the pierced tongue and lower-back tattoo taking his hand and leading him to the living room, where candles and champagne awaited. His stomach soured. She stopped him, hugged him, looked into his sunken eyes, and whispered, “I wrote this song for you because I want to tell you that I love you.” She sang.

A  little lamb
Courageous, stumbling
Fearless was my middle name
But somewhere there I
Lost my way
Everyone walks the same
Expecting me to step
The narrow path they’ve laid

Klay was entrenched in his reserved seat, reclining as R.E.M. rolled through a track off the new album that he didn’t recognize. He noticed the arm of the person next to him rubbing against his shoulder and it was enough to make him look over.

The kid was about eighteen, Klay thought. Probably a local tweaker who had scored a free ticket and was just there to have a place to get high. He wore a Volcom sweatshirt with the hood pulled tightly over his ears.  He stared off to his left, then darted back to his right. The only place the kid didn’t look was straight ahead at the stage. Then he looked down and stayed there. The sudden motion toward the ground got Klay to look. Positioned for balance above the descending floor of the amphitheatre while leaning forward in his seat, the kid held his penis for aim and let go, darkening the concrete below. The stream cascaded down, flooding the seats of the closer rows.

Klay looked twice to make sure he was correct about what he was seeing. He thought first of the jarring twitch of the back of naked heels as an unknown liquid started to seep through sandals. Then of someone’s light cotton sweater, possibly passed down from a late, beloved relative, that had fallen in the crack of the seatback and was now stained with the salty stench of society’s scum. Then nothing. Just freshly torched, roaring, all-encompassing rage.

Klay turned to him and looked him square in the eyes.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

No answer.

Klay turned back to the stage as R.E.M. sang “Walk Unafraid.” This was not difficult. Without looking at the kid for another second, he shot up, shimmied through the row to the aisle, moved up ten rows, and effortlessly folded into another open seat.

The concrete broke your fall
To hear you speak of it
I’d have done anything
I would do anything
I feel like a cartoon brick wall
To hear you speak of it

Ten minutes passed. Stipe kept the gospel going and Klay got to listening again, absorbing the familiar tones of “Man on the Moon” as the crowd buzzed anew and the melody crept back into his ears. The night had gotten cooler, more pleasant. He sat back again, put his hands behind his ears for better sound and closed his eyes, traveling through the corridors of Stipe’s mind. He needed to read more about Andy Kaufman, he thought. He needed to rent old tapes of “Taxi.” He needed to do a lot of things.

The row rattled as someone plunged into the seat next to Klay’s as if landing from a skydive. The late arriver settled into the chair hurriedly, twitching. He and Klay turned to each other with the urgent instinct of an unspoken greeting.

It was the kid in the hoodie.

He stared into Klay’s eyes, emotionless, searing. A hint of a grin began to curl up on the kid’s face, like he’d be perfectly fine with staying in that position all night.

Blinding heat overtook Klay’s body, a feeling he hadn’t felt since he was six years old and someone pushed him into the deep end of the pool.

Five seconds passed and that was enough. Klay turned away while rocketing out of his seat, ran up the aisle, looked back and saw no one behind him. He maintained a determinedly brisk march to the venue’s main concourse.

Take a picture here, take a souvenir …
Rewrite the book and rule the pages, saving face, secured in faith
Bury, burn the waste behind you

Klay walked past the concession stands, free and cooler now without the heat of humanity surrounding him. The vendors packed up their stock and cleaned up for the next show. He exited through the entry gate and traipsed through the ghost town of a parking lot as he recognized the muffled tones of Mills’ opening riff for “Cuyahoga,” one of his favorite songs off the album “Life’s Rich Pageant.” That song played almost daily over the stereo of his Honda Accord and helped get him through a breakup in the second semester of his junior year. He walked to the beat, pausing for a second to look up at the stars.

“Fuck” is kind of an inflammatory word, he thought, and then his mind moved elsewhere: to possibly ignoring the 101 and heading out through the forests to the ocean for the slower ride home. To the big news story from his youth that still stuck – the one about the guy who walked into a McDonald’s and opened fire.

“Cuyahoga” ended and Klay heard Stipe go right into, “That’s great, it starts with an earthquake,” commencing what would surely be the final number.

Yeah, he felt fine, too. And why wouldn’t he? The next morning he would be back in that brand-new office, helping change the way people think and feel, and maybe getting rich while doing it.

He found his car, got in and started it up. He put an R.E.M. tape into the deck and took a drink of water.

He steered off into the great beyond.

***

(All italicized lyrics written by J. Michael Stipe)

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and Tom feels …

Past work on FlipCollective.com.
To follow him on Twitter.
To befriend him on Facebook.