Katie’s elderly aunt slept in the sun while her dad recited Red Fox punchlines, trying but failing to keep his voice down, although the remainder of the partygoers, resentfully sober 7th Day Adventists, retreated from the heat into the house where a gray bearded man in rainbow suspenders twisted up a miniature zoo of balloon animals. I couldn’t tell if it was the beer, the sun, or the air of religious judgment, but I began to feel dizzy. I tasted metal. There was a buzzing in my ear and my head felt like it was full of cotton. I caught a whiff of hot maple syrup, then putrefying garbage, both from an unknown source. Katie’s dad’s topic of conversation shifted from Red Fox to Rudy Ray Moore. I excused myself from the table. I opened the sliding glass door and was hit in the face with a delicious gust of cool, dry air, as well as a burst of excited voices. Sitting cross-legged in a semi-circle, children squealed in delight as the balloon man manipulated his cache of multi-colored latex, while the adults focused on gossip. I located the bathroom, closed and locked the door, and splashed cold water on my face and neck. I rinsed my mouth with water from the bathroom faucet. I could hear the screams and laughter and electricity of the party on the other side of the door. I didn’t want to go back out there to all of those faces and mouths and teeth, all of those ears and eyes. I flicked off the light, sat with my back to the AC vent, and decided to take a nap. If they wanted me, they would have to come and get me.
My partner recently told me that she can tell I was mostly raised by my grandparents. She called me the oldest young person she knows. Or was it the youngest old person? Either way, her point was made. And I can’t deny it, as much as I’d like to try. I do appreciate a quiet night at home, devoid of surprise run-in or unscheduled interruption. Even when I make plans, well in advance, no matter how much I’m looking forward to it, whether it’s a concert, a baseball game, a poetry reading, or a live pro wrestling event, when the day of the show comes, I’d rather stay at home, and even after I’ve convinced myself to go, no matter how much I enjoy it in the moment, I’m happiest when it’s over. Katie told me that I lack spontaneity, and my response was that I experienced enough spontaneity in my childhood to last me the rest of my life. Katie rightfully groaned and rolled her eyes, her response whenever she felt I was playing the victim, and I said, “I lived in 20 different houses before I was sixteen!” My mom and my stepdad were spontaneous, spontaneous with their jobs and their bills and their fidelity and rent, and as a result of their spontaneity, we would spontaneously move to two or three different apartments in one year. During the first grade, I attended three different elementary schools (one of them twice that year), a fact that still makes my mother cry when I bring it up. All three schools were within the same school district, in Holmen, Wisconsin, a village with fewer than 10,000 people, but for a first grader in the mid-1980s, they might as well have been on different continents. For one of the schools, I was only enrolled a couple weeks, while I temporarily lived with my maternal grandparents (hardly the first or last time). I barely remember anything about it, except for pissing my pants one day because I was too shy to raise my hand and ask for permission to be excused for the boy’s room, but it turns out that my brief presence evolved into a bit of an urban legend for my classmates. One evening, in my early 20s, I was approached by a group of drunk college students (granted, I was also then a drunk college student) and asked if my name was “Josh Sather.” And, well, the answer was yes. “Sather” was my legal last name before I was adopted by my stepdad, when I was in the second grade, but for these strangers to know me by that name, it meant they would’ve had to know me before then. So, yeah, I am Josh Sather, I confessed, and my answer was met with an explosion of laughter and profanity. “Holy shit, where the fuck did you go?” one of them asked. “What the fuck happened to you?” another slurred. “I told you he existed!” said another. As it turns out, this gathering of intoxicated individuals had all gone to school together, from kindergarten through their senior year of high school, and my two weeks in their classroom, in first grade, was like a blip in their collective memory, like a shared delusion. The weird, quiet, ambiguously ethnic apparition who showed up, unannounced, in the middle of the school year, and then vanished without a trace, just a couple weeks later. Did that even happen? they’d joke amongst themselves, Was he even real? And finally, it was confirmed, like the existence of Bigfoot. Josh Sather lived. “And that,” I proclaimed, “was the result of spontaneity.” Katie just looked at me and yawned, and then so did I.
At the Drive-In
I told my mom that Katie and I were at the drive-in, and she had plenty of romantic advice to give. “Buy her some popcorn, put your arm around her shoulder, hold her hand, and kiss her on the cheek,” she told me, as though this was our first date, and Katie and I hadn’t been together for over 18 years, and raised two kids and a dog. I read my mom’s text to Katie, and she sarcastically gave me the finger.
“Do you remember when you took me to American Werewolf in London?” I asked my mom, and she immediately began to apologize. When I was about 2 ½ years old, my mom took me to the drive-in theatre, with her then boyfriend/friend who was a boy, to see John Landis’ American Werewolf in London. I was obviously too scared to watch the whole movie, and almost immediately began to cry at the sight of Rick Baker’s groundbreaking, Academy Award winning horror effects, but it was one of the most formative memories of my childhood, and likely why I’m such a horror fanatic to this day. “Your grandparents weren’t always so perfect,” my mom said, attempting to change the subject. “They took me to the drive-in to see The Graduate when I was 7 years-old,” she said. She said watching the love scenes in the car with her parents was one of the most embarrassing experiences of her life, and she still hates Dustin Hoffman for that very reason. “That’s great,” I said, “you should ask grandma about that,” and once again the texts began to pour in. “You can never do that!” she said. “Grandma would be so mad. She would deny it. Don’t ask her about it. Promise me you won’t ask!” she begged via voice-to-text, and I promised her I wouldn’t ask.
“What a shame,” I said to Katie, “to be almost 60 years-old and still not feel comfortable talking to your only living parent like an adult … Remember when Jackson puked at the drive-in?” I suddenly recalled. Our son was barely one year old, and we had taken him and his then 6-year-old sister to the drive-in theatre, to watch Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Katie had just finished feeding Jackson a bottle, he had just recently stopped nursing, and when she sat him up on her lap, to be burped, his entire stomach full of breast milk emptied onto the dashboard. Perhaps needless to say, we didn’t stick around to watch Johnny Depp’s performance as Willy Wonka, with Katie and Jackson soaked in hot, curdled breast milk, and his sister, Gabriella, throwing a crying fit over having to leave the movie early.
Well, on the night of July 3rd, Katie and I didn’t have any kids with us at the drive-in. It was just her and me, our first movie together, alone, in god knows how long. It didn’t even really matter what movie was playing, it was just good to be out of the house. “In the car, but out the house,” Katie posted on Facebook. All around us, even while the movie played, thunderous fireworks lit up the horizon. “Next time we’ll bring booze,” we promised each other, and sighed in relief when the credits rolled and it came time to crank the air conditioner.
Josh Olsen is a librarian in Flint, Michigan and the co-creator of Gimmick Press.
I was headed towards a garbage can, to throw away an empty cup of coffee, and suddenly caught a strong whiff of mint. Before I even saw the young man brushing his teeth over the garbage can, I had smelled his toothpaste, and there he was, in faded blue jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, a full backpack slung over his shoulder. “What are you doing, you fucking bum?” an assertive male voice inquired from a distance, and the young man brushing his teeth took a swig from his water bottle, spit a mouthful of foam into the garbage can, and laughed so hard he nearly choked. “What the fuck does it look like?” the young man replied. “You’re gonna be late for class, dude!” the distant voice chimed in, and the young man who had been brushing his teeth jogged away from the garbage can to catch up with his classmate and disappeared in the crowd.
With the garbage can no longer occupied, I dropped my empty cup into the foamy puddle of spit that had already begun to attract bees. Several of them lazily flew up out of the can, and when I felt something crawling on the lobe of my right ear, I tried, at first, not to panic, but being deathly allergic to bees, couldn’t stop myself from swatting wildly at my head. Luckily, it was only a ladybug. “Another fucking ladybug!” I said out loud, to myself. They were coming off me like spores. Already that day, I had found at least five of them on me. Or maybe it was the same one, returning after I brushed it off the sleeve of my moth-eaten sweater.
Later that afternoon, while walking with my partner, one of those rare moments when we were able to synchronize our schedules and grab lunch together, I mentioned that ladybugs were flying out of my orifices and was deftly corrected. She said that they were more than likely Japanese Stink Beetles, which didn’t sound nearly as magical, but did, in my opinion, seem more appropriate. “And speaking of bugs…” I grumbled while nudging KT’s elbow and nodding my head in the direction of a large, white truck being loaded up by men in coveralls and rubber gloves. Two by two, they paraded from a student apartment complex a series of twin-size mattresses wrapped in plastic. “Bed bugs,” KT gasped. “Ugh, that’s gonna give me nightmares,” I said, and it did.
—
Josh Olsen is a librarian in Flint, Michigan and the co-creator of Gimmick Press.
I said, “I hope that’s a sign of good things to come,”
& he replied with a hearty, “Hail Satan.”
On the 5th Anniversary of Taking My Daughter to Warped Tour 2013
“Sell out … with me, oh yeah” – Reel Big Fish, “Sell Out”
I was informed at the gate that I wouldn’t need a ticket to enter, because I was accompanying my 14-year-old daughter, & several of her underage friends, so I tried to sell my extra ticket at the door & was almost immediately arrested for scalping, but thankfully, I was not apprehended, which allowed me the opportunity to witness a Stefan Struve doppelganger get knocked out cold in a parking lot moshpit fistfight, while Reel Big Fish covered A-Ha’s “Take On Me.”
the big rig ladder
[found/erasure poem]
some people weren’t cut out to be cooped up
maybe you’re one of them
you want to climb the big rig ladder know what it is like to swing up into a big rig cab
show it who’s boss make those 855 cubic inches of raw diesel power behave
tame them
drive trains transmissions braking systems
move on to the real thing
three tough weeks on the driving range & on the road
backing docking coupling reverse serpentines
then taking the big rigs out on the interstate
you got what it takes to take on the big rigs?
if you want to climb the big rig ladder start with the pros
Source: Ryder Technical Institute mail-in advertisement, 1975
—
Josh Olsen is a librarian in Flint, Michigan and the co-creator of Gimmick Press.
I bought a western shirt in Nashville
I now refer to as my “Nashville shirt,”
because it’s so resplendently ugly
it should only be worn in Nashville,
but I’ve taken to wearing it in Detroit,
because Detroit can appreciate
an ugly shirt, too.
Our last night in Nashville,
outside the hotel,
there was a highly intoxicated woman
in an NSYNC t-shirt.
“I ain’t got no shame,”
she was saying to the doorman.
“I like to party.”
The next morning,
we saw her at the hotel
continental breakfast,
clearly drunk from the night before,
and still in her NSYNC t-shirt,
but silent now,
and stuffing her mouth
with scrambled eggs.
On the drive home,
from Nashville to Detroit,
we paused at a truck stop
in Lebanon Junction, Kentucky,
where I saw a t-shirt that read
I’VE BEEN HAULIN’
SINCE YOU’VE BEEN CRAWLIN’,
and I desperately wanted to buy it,
but didn’t feel like I earned it,
having never been a long-haul trucker,
just an adjunct writing instructor
turned academic librarian
who drives 140 miles per day
to work and back.
My first day back to work,
at a library in Flint, Michigan,
I proudly wore my Nashville shirt,
but no one commented
or asked about it,
good or bad,
which made me think
it was probably even more ugly
than I originally thought.
—
Josh Olsen is a librarian in Flint, Michigan. He’s the author of two books, Six Months and Such a Good Boy, and the co-creator of Gimmick Press.
Back Patio Press 