![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yakovah posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
small_giftsTitle: Don't talk about what you don't understand
Author/Artist:yakovah
Recipient:fluorescentgrey
Rating: r
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *sex, drugs, protest*
Word count: 3k
Summary: Remus put Phil Ochs on the record player over and over. Sarge, I'm only eighteen, I got a ruptured spleen / And I always carry a purse.
Notes: ty bud seriously. hopefully this gives you at least a mild stomach ache. some sort of source codes / hobgoblins au(s)
Author/Artist:
yakovahRecipient:
fluorescentgreyRating: r
Contents or warnings (highlight to view): *sex, drugs, protest*
Word count: 3k
Summary: Remus put Phil Ochs on the record player over and over. Sarge, I'm only eighteen, I got a ruptured spleen / And I always carry a purse.
Notes: ty bud seriously. hopefully this gives you at least a mild stomach ache. some sort of source codes / hobgoblins au(s)
---
“What were you like before you were famous?” Jack asks her.
“Well I’m not, first of all,” she says. But probably for him it was just as bad.
“It didn’t make things better, if that’s what you mean.” Then, “I always did acid.”
If it was the grunge 90s, she’d do her best impressions of Courtney Love. Baby doll dresses and cropped hair. But it was the desert, so she wore pants and a jacket. Or a long flowing dress with a big hat, at least.
“Are you sad?” Jack said.
She didn’t say anything. Just held onto her hat and tilted her head back.
Maybe that was the moment when Jack began writing again.
After all “I want to make you feel better” were the opening lyrics on 1997’s Dream Witch EP.
But I don’t know how
is this enough
From the January 1996 interview in Wizarding Rock Weekly:
We found her drinking wine (pinot grigio, ice cold) with the Hobgoblins at Peppy’s and squeezed in a booth with the band after their bone-crumbling 2 Palms show. In her flowing skirts, billowing sleeves, floppy hat, and round tinted sunglasses, Jack Childermass’s best American girl is the perfect muse for these grunge-soaked expatriated Brits.
We did our research though, and Deidre Abramovitz — “Please, call me DeeDee.” — has been a force behind a number of magical artistic types up and down the American west coast, with celebrities knocking on her door day and night.
JACK: She actually had to leave LA. People were coming after her, blaming her for things. She’s a witch, plainly. But she’s an oneiromancer, so it’s complicated.
WRW: A dream witch.
JACK: Yeah.
WRW: How did you meet?
JACK: Well she was friends with Remus Lupin.
WRW: Remus Lupin was the inspiration for your debut single way back in, what was it, 1986?
JACK: “When I told you wanted to be your dog.” Yes.
WRW: But the truth is deeper than that.
JACK: Well I feel as if I’ve known her all my life.
---
Truly pungent with dope, open the bathroom door then shut. Remus holding the roach clip and looking at Sirius for a long moment before a gratuitous sort of inhale and then pass. The metal dripping wet from Remus’s fingers.
Sirius sat himself close to the tub. Really the war hadn’t started it. It was the same old problem the United States had always been: discriminating, cruel, selfish.
Remus leaning against the phone booth in Big Green talking with Jack, who’d by then dropped out so long ago it startled Sirius how much they seemed to still care about each other.
“All the things they took,” Remus was saying. Remus had been with Jack in the school of social work when he was a sophomore and Jack a freshman.
Sirius volunteered himself to go down to Dino’s Carryout to get Choc-Ola and lemon drops for Remus and whatever you want for anyone else. Walking in the street alone in the curfew after dark.
Remus put Phil Ochs on the record player over and over. Sarge, I'm only eighteen, I got a ruptured spleen / And I always carry a purse. Until Sirius went next door to Big Green to get enough dope from Jack to roll Remus a joint. Then it was for hours the Hobgoblins’ shitty practice and garbled brawling hitting the walls, the phrenetic nervous energy like in Remus when Sirius dropped his hand in the bath water, and Remus shifted his eyes, cast a look. That they could still be talking about numbers after all this.
How it had happened: Peter with his incessant nam myoho renge kyos and his little shrine and they had all tried it. Days and nights of ceaseless, pointless prayer.
“What are you doing,” Remus said.
“Thinking,” Sirius tried.
Remus scoffed a little bit, shook his head. The water moved. What could they even be saying. As if there could be any feelings or emotions left.
“I’m going to die out there,” Remus said, finally.
“You have to work on your medical deferment.”
“I’m trying.”
So this is why Remus was over at Big Green making collect calls in the phone booth while Stubby watched him from the hallway and then the couch and then the kitchen, hawk-like and suspicious-looking but probably mostly just afraid.
Jack had come down from wherever and leaned against the booth, buttressing.
“What did he say,” Stubby blurted when Remus came out of it. Jack stood up and reached for Remus, squeezed his arm and then held onto it.
“He said he wouldn’t lie for me he would just describe— just give his professional, medical opinion.”
Back in the bathtub:
S: But he said he’d do it.
R: He said he wouldn’t make shit up.
S: So what does that mean.
R: How am I supposed to know what it fucking means. Jesus.
So now it became like this in his mind every morning upon waking the certainty that he’d written the letter but that it hadn’t been enough.
Remus collecting letters for his conscientious objector packet: the astronomy professor, his friend Lily and James from childhood who were up at Kent State, Dr. Albus.
April 14, 1970
…
Naturally, as a veteran and former non-commissioned officer in the U.S. Army, I strongly disagree with his pacifistic and nonviolent beliefs, but nonetheless I am constantly forced to admire his sincerity and the depths of his compassion and love for his fellow human beings and all living things.
If I can be of any further aid in your discussions, please do not hesitate to contact me. I am always at the service of my country. I remain
Respectfully yours,
Caradoc Dearborn
Remus saying, “Don’t get it wet.”
“Why won’t you let me write one.” Sirius had tried, frequently, and his mind would wander back to the beginning: I didn’t even like him. He struck me as rude and disinterested, but over time…
The sunshine and the intermittent clouds and the sweet humidity. Jack was with them and then he wasn’t. They ran into in the tear gas again on Sorority Row and they ran into the nearest sorority house to breathe and stop from crying. The few women who weren’t themselves out heckling the National Guard stood around looking and then the house mother came down.
“You can’t be in here,” she said.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Remus said. “Where are we supposed to go?”
“You should have thought about that before,” she said. “No men allowed.”
Remus — his eyes wet and red, his chest heaving — shouldered past Sirius and back out the door. He turned around. He looked at her in the eyeballs.
“I’m drafted, you know,” he said. Then, “They killed them up there. My friends. I knew them since they were kids.”
She shrugged almost, and Sirius put his hand on Remus’s back, felt breathing.
They were running again. The gas was stinging.
---
This type of early morning wind preceded a dust storm, so they picked amongst the abandoned homesteaders’ cabins the one most boarded up and least suspicious. Jack hacked through the doorway and Stubby followed behind him. Inside Lupin and the old man were magic-ing a flame between them and over the flame in a bubbling cauldron together they were boiling eggs.
Stubby woke up to the smell of coffee in the little room in Lupin and Sirius’s flat. The plants were coming in through the windows and he could hear music in the garden. He pushed open the door and Jack looked up at him with a mouthful of bread. He was holding Lupin’s guitar, holding it up like an offering.
---
I called into Amelia Nguyen’s radio show. I think they might listen.
I’ve butchered your tapes. i love you & im sorry.
Some time in the early 1990s, say 1993, Stubby Boardman showed up at Remus Lupin’s depression flat in Amsterdam unannounced.
Nobody answered when he buzzed the doorbell. Reasonably, Stubby made his way around back so he could let himself in. Instead what he found was Lupin bent over a patio table getting, say, serviced by one Sirius Black, who was wearing a t-shirt only. They were both moaning.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in Azkaban,” Stubby said before he could help himself.
Sirius pointed at him and yelled. But nothing happened. Then he pulled out of Lupin and, holding a condom around the base of his prick, went into the apartment.
“What do you want, Ras,” Lupin said into the table. Stubby tried to explain for a while.
Sirius came back out wearing a blue towel and working a grinder.
“Do you mind if I put tobacco in this,” he said.
Stubby looked over at Lupin. The crack of his ass was glistening with lube smears.
---
Stubby on his back in a bike lane having eaten too many mushrooms after Lupin told him a story about doing the exact same thing.
---
“Do you remember the map?”
“Do you remember when I gave you that rain coat. With the stripes.”
---
“Fuck the Beatles,” Lupin said. Sirius didn’t say anything and Jack smiled. Just then the mood was changing. They were a few bars into “Wait” and then it switched over to some circus music from Sergeant Pepper’s which had never made any sense to Stubby to begin with: all the different times and places they could have assassinated Whyland and the one they actually did. Or that’s what Jack thought about. Said he thought about. When it was time to record the album. It bothered Stubby that Lupin in the meantime had acquired a lot of tattoos, but they were the same one, small and runic, over and over.
“Do you see where I’m going with this?” Lupin said. Sirius didn’t say anything and Jack smiled. “You have to start with the astronomy professor and then you have to off Rorschach and then—”
“And then,” Sirius said.
“And then you kill the unicorn,” Jack said.
“Exactly,” Sirius said. Stubby said, sang twice, hitting the chorus exactly exactly
For a long time they wandered around the loops in Amsterdam without the map because they decided it was just too… big to handle between the two of them. Stubby walked through the bathroom into another bathroom that still had no tub, only the memory of a tub: mosaic tiny tiles, all blue. A few notes clanged around his mind. When he came back out a few girls had queued and Jack was at the end of the line. All the girls were going in at once. Jack was right behind them. “Remus is rolling another spliff,” Jack said. The tile was still mosaic blue and then it wasn’t. Together Lupin and Sirius had moved tables and they weren’t even whispering or leaning into each other. Instead they were each in their own repose, necks bent back and chins cocked up. Laughing or barely breathing. “It’s hash,” Sirius said, reaching out to Stubby, pulling him onto the bench seat beside him. He tilted a pre-rolled spliff out of a tube. “The whole time I thought these were regular spliffs, but it turns out it’s actually hash.” On the other side of Sirius, Lupin mimed wiping his eyes. They smoked some of the hash while Lupin finished rolling the second spliff and Jack finished up in the bathroom with/after the girls. When Stubby woke up in the morning, Whyland was still dead and the sky was gray and imminent with rain. In the kitchen Lupin was shaking chocolate sprinkles onto a piece of bread. “Where’s Sirius?” Stubby said. “With Jack,” Lupin said. “They’re going to kill the astronomy professor." He switched to a different kind of sprinkle, chocolate shaved. He opened the top and shook the sprinkles down onto the bread.
“What if we don’t kill the unicorn,” Jack said. He was in the infinite bathtub and Stubby was outside of it, waking up. He went with Lupin to the Ten Katestraat market because there was nothing else to do. It wasn’t raining yet but it was going to. The air smelled wet and Lupin stopped at a kiosk to buy underwear and socks. Stubby was 28, 29 years old but he felt embarrassed, like to Lupin he wanted to say, actually did say, “Sirius doesn’t mind that that’s your underwear?” They were both handsome as ever and really high. The rain felt wet and Lupin said, “Buy some wine from the place over there, pinot grigio. It should be cheap.” Then he ran off to get what turned out to be bread and baba ganoush. They ate outside in the garden under the magic that seemed set up almost like a giant umbrella, and it was still cold and Stubby’s socks felt damp. Xavia. After her, nothing. That was the first song he showed to Lupin that afternoon when they went back inside and Lupin as a joke put on one of Stubby’s old silk smoking jackets over his fisherman’s sweater which was bright red and sewn through with a garish gray and navy stripe. Lupin kept holding his elbows out funny to billow the sleeves. He passed Stubby the ashtray and Stubby picked the hash spliff up out of it. He was wearing a smoking jacket too over his one dry flannel. Lupin poured from the second wine bottle and said, “Sirius and I were conscientious objectors during the war, you know.” Sirius wasn’t there and neither was Jack, they were somewhere else, killing someone. Stubby thought, “If I’m the one who introduced him to Davis do you think they have to kill me? They’d have to kill you too because you introduced me to Jack.” Lupin said, “Yeah because you asked me to.”
While Stubby was tuning and untuning and plucking his guitar Lupin’s friend Indra came over. They were both werewolves and obviously she’d been the one Lupin had gone with to break the curse. Stubby knew it was her by the length of the doorbell ring and the sound of her voice in the hallway. She and Lupin went out. Lupin left a sort of generalized indication spell that they were going for a bicycle ride in the Vondelpark and to eat pannenkoeken and he would see Ras later at the coffee shop of course so finish up that glass of wine, etc. Stubby plucked his guitar a few more times but it felt obscene and loud so he set it down on the rug and went outside into the garden. He propped up the umbrella spell and stood under it. What the rain sounded like: drumsticks dropping on a loose snare head. There was a weird melody in between Stubby’s ears and it sounded like Jack would sound like if he wasn’t trying just pushing notes around on the old piano inside Stubby’s mind. The only note in it Stubby couldn’t hear was a high E, so he went inside and hunched over his guitar and without picking it up played the note. They went biking in the rain. Rain slickers. Lupin crouching by his front wheel to set his light. What were they saying? What were they saying about Stubby and Jack and the unicorn blood and if they’d found any and if they had some. Stubby switched on the same string to a different note. Half step above, F. Whole step below, D. Whyland. Her fitted suits. Stubby let the notes carry his thoughts away for a while, up and across the fretboard then back down, ending sort of uncomfortably on a D sharp trying not to be an E flat but it was and that’s what Jack and Sirius walked back in on. Stubby set down his guitar and unlocked his bike and together they rode up the Kinkerstraat to the wizarding coffee shop. The sound the light makes as it flickers on, having taken a bit longer than usual on account of the rain. They locked their bikes together because there weren’t enough spots on the bike racks. “Do you think no one will notice?” Sirius shrugged and Jack looked at Stubby and Stubby spelled the bikes lightly. Indra and Lupin were already inside drinking tea and eating little cookies. Stubby watched as Lupin poured an entire sheath of sugar into his tea. The witch working the counter spoke to Jack only. “Can I see your friends’ IDs,” she joked. She was Surinamese Dutch and had a gap between her teeth. Stubby ordered rooibos and the hash spliff Sirius had said he liked. Hence the track “Royal Creme Roll” on Stubby and Jack’s record about their fracturing and reunion, recorded in the summer of 1996 and released January 13, 1997, on an independent label with Jack Childermass listed as the sole production credit.
---
Remus picks Sirius up in a beat up pick up truck.
When Sirius gets into the cab Remus hands him a pan au chocolat and says, “I hoped you’d be a girl.”
---
Sirius watching Remus trim the weed.
---
He’d been dreaming about the breakfast again. How Sirius had refused at first to come down the steps and get into the car to go to the airport. By now they’d been stuck up in the apartment going on three weeks and had gone through all the requisite encounters (read: conflicts) so that Remus had already buttressed himself in some room or another ostensibly to watch Twin Peaks.
“Are you even supposed to be driving when you have such advanced lycanthropy?” Stubby had said.
“Are you a doctor?” Sirius had said.
If in this case it’s a bathtub in New York
then it’s already in the bedroom
and the water pressure is strong
They were fighting again:
R: The idea here is I’m not just a vessel for your growth.
S: Stop being so avoidant.
R: I was busy.
S (pointedly): Doing low-level extermination for oneiromancers.
R (quietly): I had a life at least.
---
Notes:
- Caradoc Dearborn’s conscientious objector letter is taken from one written by a family friend in support of my dad in April of 71
“What were you like before you were famous?” Jack asks her.
“Well I’m not, first of all,” she says. But probably for him it was just as bad.
“It didn’t make things better, if that’s what you mean.” Then, “I always did acid.”
If it was the grunge 90s, she’d do her best impressions of Courtney Love. Baby doll dresses and cropped hair. But it was the desert, so she wore pants and a jacket. Or a long flowing dress with a big hat, at least.
“Are you sad?” Jack said.
She didn’t say anything. Just held onto her hat and tilted her head back.
Maybe that was the moment when Jack began writing again.
After all “I want to make you feel better” were the opening lyrics on 1997’s Dream Witch EP.
But I don’t know how
is this enough
From the January 1996 interview in Wizarding Rock Weekly:
We found her drinking wine (pinot grigio, ice cold) with the Hobgoblins at Peppy’s and squeezed in a booth with the band after their bone-crumbling 2 Palms show. In her flowing skirts, billowing sleeves, floppy hat, and round tinted sunglasses, Jack Childermass’s best American girl is the perfect muse for these grunge-soaked expatriated Brits.
We did our research though, and Deidre Abramovitz — “Please, call me DeeDee.” — has been a force behind a number of magical artistic types up and down the American west coast, with celebrities knocking on her door day and night.
JACK: She actually had to leave LA. People were coming after her, blaming her for things. She’s a witch, plainly. But she’s an oneiromancer, so it’s complicated.
WRW: A dream witch.
JACK: Yeah.
WRW: How did you meet?
JACK: Well she was friends with Remus Lupin.
WRW: Remus Lupin was the inspiration for your debut single way back in, what was it, 1986?
JACK: “When I told you wanted to be your dog.” Yes.
WRW: But the truth is deeper than that.
JACK: Well I feel as if I’ve known her all my life.
---
Truly pungent with dope, open the bathroom door then shut. Remus holding the roach clip and looking at Sirius for a long moment before a gratuitous sort of inhale and then pass. The metal dripping wet from Remus’s fingers.
Sirius sat himself close to the tub. Really the war hadn’t started it. It was the same old problem the United States had always been: discriminating, cruel, selfish.
Remus leaning against the phone booth in Big Green talking with Jack, who’d by then dropped out so long ago it startled Sirius how much they seemed to still care about each other.
“All the things they took,” Remus was saying. Remus had been with Jack in the school of social work when he was a sophomore and Jack a freshman.
Sirius volunteered himself to go down to Dino’s Carryout to get Choc-Ola and lemon drops for Remus and whatever you want for anyone else. Walking in the street alone in the curfew after dark.
Remus put Phil Ochs on the record player over and over. Sarge, I'm only eighteen, I got a ruptured spleen / And I always carry a purse. Until Sirius went next door to Big Green to get enough dope from Jack to roll Remus a joint. Then it was for hours the Hobgoblins’ shitty practice and garbled brawling hitting the walls, the phrenetic nervous energy like in Remus when Sirius dropped his hand in the bath water, and Remus shifted his eyes, cast a look. That they could still be talking about numbers after all this.
How it had happened: Peter with his incessant nam myoho renge kyos and his little shrine and they had all tried it. Days and nights of ceaseless, pointless prayer.
“What are you doing,” Remus said.
“Thinking,” Sirius tried.
Remus scoffed a little bit, shook his head. The water moved. What could they even be saying. As if there could be any feelings or emotions left.
“I’m going to die out there,” Remus said, finally.
“You have to work on your medical deferment.”
“I’m trying.”
So this is why Remus was over at Big Green making collect calls in the phone booth while Stubby watched him from the hallway and then the couch and then the kitchen, hawk-like and suspicious-looking but probably mostly just afraid.
Jack had come down from wherever and leaned against the booth, buttressing.
“What did he say,” Stubby blurted when Remus came out of it. Jack stood up and reached for Remus, squeezed his arm and then held onto it.
“He said he wouldn’t lie for me he would just describe— just give his professional, medical opinion.”
Back in the bathtub:
S: But he said he’d do it.
R: He said he wouldn’t make shit up.
S: So what does that mean.
R: How am I supposed to know what it fucking means. Jesus.
So now it became like this in his mind every morning upon waking the certainty that he’d written the letter but that it hadn’t been enough.
Remus collecting letters for his conscientious objector packet: the astronomy professor, his friend Lily and James from childhood who were up at Kent State, Dr. Albus.
April 14, 1970
…
Naturally, as a veteran and former non-commissioned officer in the U.S. Army, I strongly disagree with his pacifistic and nonviolent beliefs, but nonetheless I am constantly forced to admire his sincerity and the depths of his compassion and love for his fellow human beings and all living things.
If I can be of any further aid in your discussions, please do not hesitate to contact me. I am always at the service of my country. I remain
Respectfully yours,
Caradoc Dearborn
Remus saying, “Don’t get it wet.”
“Why won’t you let me write one.” Sirius had tried, frequently, and his mind would wander back to the beginning: I didn’t even like him. He struck me as rude and disinterested, but over time…
The sunshine and the intermittent clouds and the sweet humidity. Jack was with them and then he wasn’t. They ran into in the tear gas again on Sorority Row and they ran into the nearest sorority house to breathe and stop from crying. The few women who weren’t themselves out heckling the National Guard stood around looking and then the house mother came down.
“You can’t be in here,” she said.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Remus said. “Where are we supposed to go?”
“You should have thought about that before,” she said. “No men allowed.”
Remus — his eyes wet and red, his chest heaving — shouldered past Sirius and back out the door. He turned around. He looked at her in the eyeballs.
“I’m drafted, you know,” he said. Then, “They killed them up there. My friends. I knew them since they were kids.”
She shrugged almost, and Sirius put his hand on Remus’s back, felt breathing.
They were running again. The gas was stinging.
---
This type of early morning wind preceded a dust storm, so they picked amongst the abandoned homesteaders’ cabins the one most boarded up and least suspicious. Jack hacked through the doorway and Stubby followed behind him. Inside Lupin and the old man were magic-ing a flame between them and over the flame in a bubbling cauldron together they were boiling eggs.
Stubby woke up to the smell of coffee in the little room in Lupin and Sirius’s flat. The plants were coming in through the windows and he could hear music in the garden. He pushed open the door and Jack looked up at him with a mouthful of bread. He was holding Lupin’s guitar, holding it up like an offering.
---
I called into Amelia Nguyen’s radio show. I think they might listen.
I’ve butchered your tapes. i love you & im sorry.
Some time in the early 1990s, say 1993, Stubby Boardman showed up at Remus Lupin’s depression flat in Amsterdam unannounced.
Nobody answered when he buzzed the doorbell. Reasonably, Stubby made his way around back so he could let himself in. Instead what he found was Lupin bent over a patio table getting, say, serviced by one Sirius Black, who was wearing a t-shirt only. They were both moaning.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in Azkaban,” Stubby said before he could help himself.
Sirius pointed at him and yelled. But nothing happened. Then he pulled out of Lupin and, holding a condom around the base of his prick, went into the apartment.
“What do you want, Ras,” Lupin said into the table. Stubby tried to explain for a while.
Sirius came back out wearing a blue towel and working a grinder.
“Do you mind if I put tobacco in this,” he said.
Stubby looked over at Lupin. The crack of his ass was glistening with lube smears.
---
Stubby on his back in a bike lane having eaten too many mushrooms after Lupin told him a story about doing the exact same thing.
---
“Do you remember the map?”
“Do you remember when I gave you that rain coat. With the stripes.”
---
“Fuck the Beatles,” Lupin said. Sirius didn’t say anything and Jack smiled. Just then the mood was changing. They were a few bars into “Wait” and then it switched over to some circus music from Sergeant Pepper’s which had never made any sense to Stubby to begin with: all the different times and places they could have assassinated Whyland and the one they actually did. Or that’s what Jack thought about. Said he thought about. When it was time to record the album. It bothered Stubby that Lupin in the meantime had acquired a lot of tattoos, but they were the same one, small and runic, over and over.
“Do you see where I’m going with this?” Lupin said. Sirius didn’t say anything and Jack smiled. “You have to start with the astronomy professor and then you have to off Rorschach and then—”
“And then,” Sirius said.
“And then you kill the unicorn,” Jack said.
“Exactly,” Sirius said. Stubby said, sang twice, hitting the chorus exactly exactly
For a long time they wandered around the loops in Amsterdam without the map because they decided it was just too… big to handle between the two of them. Stubby walked through the bathroom into another bathroom that still had no tub, only the memory of a tub: mosaic tiny tiles, all blue. A few notes clanged around his mind. When he came back out a few girls had queued and Jack was at the end of the line. All the girls were going in at once. Jack was right behind them. “Remus is rolling another spliff,” Jack said. The tile was still mosaic blue and then it wasn’t. Together Lupin and Sirius had moved tables and they weren’t even whispering or leaning into each other. Instead they were each in their own repose, necks bent back and chins cocked up. Laughing or barely breathing. “It’s hash,” Sirius said, reaching out to Stubby, pulling him onto the bench seat beside him. He tilted a pre-rolled spliff out of a tube. “The whole time I thought these were regular spliffs, but it turns out it’s actually hash.” On the other side of Sirius, Lupin mimed wiping his eyes. They smoked some of the hash while Lupin finished rolling the second spliff and Jack finished up in the bathroom with/after the girls. When Stubby woke up in the morning, Whyland was still dead and the sky was gray and imminent with rain. In the kitchen Lupin was shaking chocolate sprinkles onto a piece of bread. “Where’s Sirius?” Stubby said. “With Jack,” Lupin said. “They’re going to kill the astronomy professor." He switched to a different kind of sprinkle, chocolate shaved. He opened the top and shook the sprinkles down onto the bread.
“What if we don’t kill the unicorn,” Jack said. He was in the infinite bathtub and Stubby was outside of it, waking up. He went with Lupin to the Ten Katestraat market because there was nothing else to do. It wasn’t raining yet but it was going to. The air smelled wet and Lupin stopped at a kiosk to buy underwear and socks. Stubby was 28, 29 years old but he felt embarrassed, like to Lupin he wanted to say, actually did say, “Sirius doesn’t mind that that’s your underwear?” They were both handsome as ever and really high. The rain felt wet and Lupin said, “Buy some wine from the place over there, pinot grigio. It should be cheap.” Then he ran off to get what turned out to be bread and baba ganoush. They ate outside in the garden under the magic that seemed set up almost like a giant umbrella, and it was still cold and Stubby’s socks felt damp. Xavia. After her, nothing. That was the first song he showed to Lupin that afternoon when they went back inside and Lupin as a joke put on one of Stubby’s old silk smoking jackets over his fisherman’s sweater which was bright red and sewn through with a garish gray and navy stripe. Lupin kept holding his elbows out funny to billow the sleeves. He passed Stubby the ashtray and Stubby picked the hash spliff up out of it. He was wearing a smoking jacket too over his one dry flannel. Lupin poured from the second wine bottle and said, “Sirius and I were conscientious objectors during the war, you know.” Sirius wasn’t there and neither was Jack, they were somewhere else, killing someone. Stubby thought, “If I’m the one who introduced him to Davis do you think they have to kill me? They’d have to kill you too because you introduced me to Jack.” Lupin said, “Yeah because you asked me to.”
While Stubby was tuning and untuning and plucking his guitar Lupin’s friend Indra came over. They were both werewolves and obviously she’d been the one Lupin had gone with to break the curse. Stubby knew it was her by the length of the doorbell ring and the sound of her voice in the hallway. She and Lupin went out. Lupin left a sort of generalized indication spell that they were going for a bicycle ride in the Vondelpark and to eat pannenkoeken and he would see Ras later at the coffee shop of course so finish up that glass of wine, etc. Stubby plucked his guitar a few more times but it felt obscene and loud so he set it down on the rug and went outside into the garden. He propped up the umbrella spell and stood under it. What the rain sounded like: drumsticks dropping on a loose snare head. There was a weird melody in between Stubby’s ears and it sounded like Jack would sound like if he wasn’t trying just pushing notes around on the old piano inside Stubby’s mind. The only note in it Stubby couldn’t hear was a high E, so he went inside and hunched over his guitar and without picking it up played the note. They went biking in the rain. Rain slickers. Lupin crouching by his front wheel to set his light. What were they saying? What were they saying about Stubby and Jack and the unicorn blood and if they’d found any and if they had some. Stubby switched on the same string to a different note. Half step above, F. Whole step below, D. Whyland. Her fitted suits. Stubby let the notes carry his thoughts away for a while, up and across the fretboard then back down, ending sort of uncomfortably on a D sharp trying not to be an E flat but it was and that’s what Jack and Sirius walked back in on. Stubby set down his guitar and unlocked his bike and together they rode up the Kinkerstraat to the wizarding coffee shop. The sound the light makes as it flickers on, having taken a bit longer than usual on account of the rain. They locked their bikes together because there weren’t enough spots on the bike racks. “Do you think no one will notice?” Sirius shrugged and Jack looked at Stubby and Stubby spelled the bikes lightly. Indra and Lupin were already inside drinking tea and eating little cookies. Stubby watched as Lupin poured an entire sheath of sugar into his tea. The witch working the counter spoke to Jack only. “Can I see your friends’ IDs,” she joked. She was Surinamese Dutch and had a gap between her teeth. Stubby ordered rooibos and the hash spliff Sirius had said he liked. Hence the track “Royal Creme Roll” on Stubby and Jack’s record about their fracturing and reunion, recorded in the summer of 1996 and released January 13, 1997, on an independent label with Jack Childermass listed as the sole production credit.
---
Remus picks Sirius up in a beat up pick up truck.
When Sirius gets into the cab Remus hands him a pan au chocolat and says, “I hoped you’d be a girl.”
---
Sirius watching Remus trim the weed.
---
He’d been dreaming about the breakfast again. How Sirius had refused at first to come down the steps and get into the car to go to the airport. By now they’d been stuck up in the apartment going on three weeks and had gone through all the requisite encounters (read: conflicts) so that Remus had already buttressed himself in some room or another ostensibly to watch Twin Peaks.
“Are you even supposed to be driving when you have such advanced lycanthropy?” Stubby had said.
“Are you a doctor?” Sirius had said.
If in this case it’s a bathtub in New York
then it’s already in the bedroom
and the water pressure is strong
They were fighting again:
R: The idea here is I’m not just a vessel for your growth.
S: Stop being so avoidant.
R: I was busy.
S (pointedly): Doing low-level extermination for oneiromancers.
R (quietly): I had a life at least.
---
Notes:
- Caradoc Dearborn’s conscientious objector letter is taken from one written by a family friend in support of my dad in April of 71
no subject
Date: 2017-12-14 09:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-15 06:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-15 04:01 am (UTC)And the trying to get out of being sent to Vietnam! Some shades/echoes of Diane DiPrima's "conversations" maybe? Similarly evocative of a particular gone time.
I loved the intensity.
oh look a 40-page essay about OSU and the draft ;p
Date: 2017-12-15 06:13 pm (UTC)With Kent, like, my dad didn’t personally know the students who were killed there, but it’s just so near and feels often very present and very personal. And again, right, things were already quite hot at OSU before May 4, at which point of course things just exploded. It did’t occur to me to sub in James and Lily until the very end, and it really just *does it*, huh.
It’s interesting, maybe two months ago, I met a pair of 19/20-year-olds who are out here b/c of being in Marine families, and I was struck by how just that gap in the age of our parents (and our parents’ parents —like my dad’s dad, very young, had to jump of a sinking ship in the Pacific during WWII) made this huge difference in how we perceive and relate to the entire military apparatus. The guy kiddo, who was of course wanting to be a Marine like his dad, dad’s dad etc, was going through all this paperwork to get *in* despite a serious leg injury, whereas for my dad it was filing all this paperwork about a serious leg injury to stay *out*, to stay alive. A bit rattling for me.
To lay that on top of canon, I starting thinking about how something like conscientious objection would be passed down through to the Harry generation and then to the next gen (like it’s already apparent that my parents’ pacifism influences how my sister is raising her kids, right). And how much the Order is like a draft, how Dumbledore, at least how
I also wanted to respond to Gen’s r/s draft dodger piece, which is also a way of keeping alive / telling a Vietnam story she received from a family friend. The value of this storytelling, right, and how deeply we have to bury it into something else to be able to tell it, pass it on. Etc.
—
Anyway, get outta here with this Diane DiPrima *passes out*. I think those elements come through just bc, again, in a nod to Gen who-never-used-to-really-edit-before (what do you do now Gen just mainline sugar and stare into space), I wanted to just leave this whole thing as first draft as possible, and then this is stylistically where I was when I stopped workshopping in 2012. The DiPrima/Bellamy you shared has def given me confidence in this voice, which now seems undeniably grounded and acceptable whereas before I thought it was too experimental/bonkers and was low-key horrified/embarrassed by it. So uh, thanks Plum. <33
no subject
Date: 2017-12-15 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-15 06:17 pm (UTC)Right?!
I'm so glad this landed for you. Thanks for reading.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-16 07:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-19 07:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-18 11:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-19 07:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-03 10:07 am (UTC)