Chocolate Truck Band

 

            She was jumping up and down in the living room, waving her phone back and forth in the air. She screamed with the bloodcurdling excitement only teen-age girls can muster. A sort of mix between an alarm on a submarine and the whine of the siren on a dive-bombing airplane. 

            “Oh my god what,” I asked as I plugged my ears. 

            She continued to jump up and down as she responded to my stupid adult question. 

            “DaAaad…, Chocolate Truck Band is playing at The Prairie Music Jamboree Emporiumpinada this year,” she condescendingly explained, “They are my favorite band of all time, duh. I play them all the time.” 

            I nodded and smiled, still holding my hands over my ears. I considered her musical choices as I left the room to hide from the continued screams and joyful expressions of youthful exuberance. I don’t remember ever hearing a band by the name of Chocolate Truck Band. Sounded like a stupid name to me. Then again, my generation had stupid band names too. Probably more stupid music too. 

            I went to the basement. Which was even further removed from Celeste’s happy screaming to see if I could get something written. Some little story that I could submit to some dumb short story contest. I sat at my flimsy Swedish designed writing desk, which was too tall for a regular chair and somehow also too short for an office chair. I had an adjustable stool on which to sit. It did not have a back, so I could not recline. I believed that if I reclined too much, I’d never get anything written. I am mostly starting to believe that the stool is irrelevant. 

            I looked up at the underside of the floor above me. I could still hear Celeste pounding her excited heels into the floor. A curious thud, thud, thud that had a cadence and rhythm all of its own. I wondered why she was so excited about that band. Was I ever excited about a band like that?   I couldn’t remember the last time I was that excited about anything. I started to lean back on my stool, trying to remember when I liked anything at all, before I realized there was no back on the stool and hastily grabbed at the edge of my flimsy Swedish designed writing desk, scraping my knuckles on the sharp corner, which elicited an even sharper curse word, before I regained my balance on the stool. The damn stool. The damn desk. In this cramped basement with old plastic junk piled up everywhere because I simply don’t have the heart to throw anything away. 

            I took a deep breath and looked at my knuckles. A small line of sheared skin was now starting to bleed ever so slightly across the middle knuckles of my index and middle fingers. I did what we all do and immediately put my wounded knuckles in my mouth. Which stung, but in a strangely satisfying, medicinal sort of way. That sting that lets you know the medicine is working; much like mother’s spit is the most superior cleaning agent on the planet. We know that none of that is true, but believing it seems to make it work. No less crazy than clapping to bring a fairy back to life I supposed. 

            Now that my knuckles were wounded, typing seemed like too much of a hassle. I sucked on them again for a brief moment, inspected them carefully under the poor fluorescents, and decided they weren’t too badly maimed for life. I could continue on my Quixotic quest for literary masterwork after all. 

            I continued sucking on my knuckles as I looked at the old IBM Selectric typewriter and the last few words I had typed on the paper jammed inside. I flicked the power button on.  I liked the hum and whir of the old typewriter. There was a whole Naked Lunch thing to it that often crept into my head when I slid my fingers across her keys. Probably more the movie version than the written one. 

           The last thing I had written before quitting last night was, “She loved him…”. 

            “Meaningless,” I muttered. 

            She loved him…, what did that even mean? The story wasn’t even about love or romance. It was about eco-warrior type millennial terrorists whose causes were sort of all over the place; taking a fancy millionaire’s party hostage demanding something be done about global warming, the wealth gap and some other nonsense I no longer personally believe in. They were going to kill a hostage every hour until their demands were met. I thought it was a sort of funny idea when I started but now, looking at it on the page, it had become something else. 

Maybe it was becoming a love story. Maybe the main character did have some sort of redeeming qualities that were deserving of love, or even expressing that love to another human being. Perhaps I was wrong about it. I started where I left off. 

            “She loved him, in spite of her passions for social justice, all she really knew was that she wanted him. She wanted to love him more than… than…,” I typed.   

            I slouched on my awkward stool. I put my hands on the edges of the bad Swedish designed writing desk. I looked up at the underside of the floorboards again. Celeste had stopped jumping up and down. Her joyful screaming had quieted. 

            “Chocolate Truck Band,” I said. I snickered, which evolved into rapid, chuckling nasally breaths until I was laughing out-loud. “Chocolate Tuck Band,” I said again, laughing harder. Tears forming in the corners of my eyes. 

            “Stupidest name I’ve ever heard,” I said to the flickering basement fluorescents as I continued to laugh.  I got off my awkward stool and left the typewriter humming idly. I went up the stairs still holding my belly as I continued to laugh, now audible “Ha-ha-ha’s”. 

“Celeste,” I called out as I reached the kitchen. I wiped the corners of my eyes.

“Yeah Dad,” she said.
            “Do you want to go to that concert?”