Another Way Round

A House Divided

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I bleed the sweet saltiness of Monster Energy. It’s sharp bubbles tear through my veins and prickle the hair on my arms. It makes me stand up, puts me in a higher gear. I become the Monster, a small steel wool fluff of neon green with three sets of sharp teeth and three round black claws on the ends of my two little feet-hands. I scratch through walls and through the chests of all haters. I chew them up with my hidden chompers, all silver like the inside of the soda cans and, yes, they can chew metal. I can swallow an entire can of Monster Energy without anyone noticing. I could chew up a case. I am Monster Energy.

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I ain’t a Rockstar. I know that. David is the Rockstar. He comes into my house and brings that Rockstar in here like he’s some sort of god damned Sunset Strip fag. I own this house: you’re staying on my own aoccord. The Rockstar bows down to the Monster in this house. It’s not any other way. He walks around in his pants that have all these little mirrors on and sewn on stripes, embroideried on like a quilt. Faggot shit, I tell him. He puts on this top hat made out of towel material and he tells me he’s a Rockstar. This is the Rockstar life, he says. He doesn’t even play any god damned instruments. He just wears sunglasses that are too big and walks around like made up Tommy Lee — but not Tommy Lee from Mötley Crüe. Tommy Lee now, reality show type celebrity. The one with the big hats and the necklaces and a stripe of facial hair under the lips. He thinks he’s so special.

 

I want to rip him apart. I want to jump on him and take my claws and slice up his Kiss shirt. I want to take my rounded long metal nail and slice right through Gene Simmons’ rockstar face. “How you gonna be on Family Jewels without a dang voice?” I growl, drooling into his open wide mouth. Gene will shiver, shake, and die in my hands and I will eat his face. I’ll even eat Paul Stanley’s face. Fucking cock stars. They can’t come up to a Monster. They don’t know what it's like to be green with anger and envy and be full of bubbles inside of you every day, living life like you got a poison inside you. They don’t know. Rockstars don't know in their little make-upd, diamond-jeand world. They can’t survive.

 

That’s the thing about David: he comes into my house, stocks half my fridge with Rockstar, and he acts like this is his house. After a week of him doing that, I took them out of the fridge. I stocked the Monster in there. I put a sign on the front of my cans (Just green Monster — none of the Lo-Carb, Absolute Energy, or Unleaded: I want the regular, the original full throttle. You’ll only find green Monster in my fridge.) that said, “THIS IS NOT ROCKSTAR NATION.” David came in that night after work and yelled his little head off, all “Where is my Rockstar?” and I told him they all disappeared. They must have gone on tour. He punched me in my shoulder and I jiggled some and I said he better stop with the attitude or he was going to be out on the street. This is a Monster House. If he wanted his Rockstar, he could put it in a cooler in his room. I’m not having that in my fridge. I already grabbed one by mistake and I spit out that fucking sparkle sweet shit. I had to pour five cans out to make me feel better. I drank three Monsters in a row after and it burned my throat. It was exciting. It felt good to be a Monster again.

We don’t talk most of the time. Laura Ann usually has to come in and settle us. She makes dinner and she calls for me and David to have dinner and we sit — me with my Monster Mug full of it and him with his wine glass of Rockstar without any ice in it — in front of the television and we split our stares between plates and Pawn Stars. Pizza again, Monster food. Laura Ann passes us our plates and she says we “have to talk.” We’re brothers. This is what you do when you live together. Don’t we remember from growing up? “I don’t want to think about that,” I tell her. I don’t say shut up but I think that Monster thought. She continues on to David and me that we ought to be friendlier and kinder. What would our parents think? I don’t know. They’re dead and, because they’re dead, I have to put up with this Rockstar. Then, with some kind of pent up courage, Laura Ann reaches over and she takes--takes a sip from David’s glass. What in the actual fuck?

 

I stand up and I’m furious and I look at them both: Laura Ann, Rockstar; Laura Ann, Rockstar; Laura Ann, Rockstar. “What the fuck has gotten into you, Laura Ann?” I scream. “You know this is a Monster house. Why in the fuck would you do that?” I throw my pizza, face down, to the floor. The plate of cheese sticks on top of the car magazine stack on the ground. Some pizza sauce splats on the carpet, Italian paintball hardening onto the fluffy floor. She looks up at me all sad and I want to reach out and pinch her little chin, that little button separating her face from her neck. It’s so cute. I stop being mad.

But then she says this thing that makes me turn into the Monster again. She goes, “What, Joseph?” She does a pig laugh, a snort ha-ha. “They taste exactly the same.”

 

She and David laugh and I start grinding my teeth. I bite my lip and it bleeds a little, I think, and I tighten my fists and I bang them onto the wall and I growl. I am the Monster. They stare at me. “MONSTER IS NOTHING LIKE THAT FAIRY STUFF,” I yell. “MONSTER IS NOTHING LIKE THAT STUFF. MONSTER IS NOTHING. LIKE THAT. STUFF. MONSTER IS NOTHING LIKE. THAT. STUFF.”

I bang, bang, bang around the room. I bang the couch and I bang the television and I bang the pile of car magazines and I bang the pizza box on the ground. Laura Ann crosses her arms over her chest, resting on her upper boob shelf where she usually places her arms when she wants to rest them because her boobs are so big and long and floppy that she can do that. She has this frown at me and she’s mad but I’m madder. I’ve become the Monster and she knows better than to talk like this, especially about Monster. “I think we should get dinner elsewhere, David.” she says. The two of them leave and they stare at me and I growl and I spit and I watch them go but I want to go with them. I wasn’t done eating. But I stay in spite. They slam the door and leave and I stomp all over the pizza and I pick up the cheese sticks and I eat them, dipping them in the carpet food paintball. I pour out two cans into my Monster Mug and I mix in some Barton’s and I sit in the recliner and I look for that movie The Purge, which I buy on demand. Laura Ann pays for that shit so she can deal with it. She made this happen.

I wake up in the middle of the night in the recliner. I must have fallen asleep. I didn’t have my sleep machine so of course I woke up gagging. The TV is off and I get up and I stumble up the little stairs into the bedroom and I get into bed with Laura Ann and I put on my mask and I go to sleep. I’m the Monster — part man, part machine — when I sleep. David doesn’t have that. David just sleeps on a cot in the bonus room. That isn’t Rockstar life. He doesn’t even know the half of what being a Rockstar is.

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Monster life is not easy in the presents of the Rockstar. I come home from work and I am covered in car grease and all I want is my Monster and my TV — but Laura Ann has an idea. She calls me into the kitchen and I’m like, hell, I don’t care. I just want to put on South Park or wrestling or anything else but this. I turn on my phone music just so I can get a little something relaxing in. I’m not at work, I don’t need this. Laura Ann has this smile on her face. It’s a giggly smile. When she’s trying to hide that she’s laughing, she puts that giggly smile on, where her lips are all tight like and her lower stomach bounces and gives away that she’s laughing. I know she’s about to pull a trick on me.

 

“What?” I ask. She points to the kitchen table, which is just a card table because I keep forgetting to buy a table. There’s a little box on it. “What’s so funny?” I ask again. I walk to the fridge and I grab a Monster, I pop it open, I drink the sweet salt, and she walks up to the table and points at the box. She makes a gesture and she pokes it. She says I should open it. It’s a surprise. I look at her and I’m like what the heck. I hope it’s tickets to Rockville but I know it’s not because that shit wouldn’t come in this box that’s the size of frozen food. It would have been in an envelope type of thing.

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I walk up and I pick it up and I shake it. There’s only this hollow rattle. It’s something big—like the size of the box but it’s light and long. What’s this, I ask. “Just open it,” she says, and she hands me a fork to rip the tape. I place my Monster down and I hunker into the box, unstitch it like I’m a doctor taking apart a zombie which reminds me that I want to watch that Evil Dead show later instead of South Park or wrestling. There’s white paper inside of there and a receipt and I unwrap it and there is this green and yellow shiny license plate frame. I hold it up to the kitchen floresent lights and I read what it says.

“A HOUSE DIVIDED,” is on the top of barbed wire letters. The bottom left — on the green side — has the scratched green Monster M and on the bottom right side — the yellow side — has a white star with the gay ass double R Rockstar thing from the can. I look through the frame and I look at Laura Ann and she is smiling a smile of a bad child about to be in trouble. “What the hell is this?” I growl. “I had it made for your car, for the license plate,” she says. I know what it is, Laura Ann, but why would you make this? I throw it to the ground. Her smile changes to a straight line and I can feel the Monster inside me. I walk over to the kitchen countertop and I point to all the empty Monster cans on the counter. Do you see all these?, I ask her. The black cans are all lined up and in the sink and on the floor and I open the fridge and I point to the rows of black and green. To Monsters. Does this house look divided to you? I sure do see a lot of Monster and no Rockstars, I tell her.

She places a hand on her knee and bends down and picks up a can from a pile next to the trashcan: it’s a black Rockstar. She smiles and says, “I’m pretty sure this house is divided.” She does that bad child giggle.

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Oh, I get mad. I become the Monster. I start throwing things. I start taking out cans from the fridge and I throw them onto the ground and they pop carbonated spray all over the place. I stomp and I scream and I am that green steel wool fluff that is the Monster and I think about clawing at Laura Ann but I don’t because she’ll get mad at me and I love her, most of the time. I’m mad at David because he did this to her. I’m mad that he brought that stuff into my house and that he lives here with us. He’s lived here for months and he should be moved out by now. He brought Rockstar to my Monster house and he did this to my wife, he made her question the Monster. He bubbled her up with ideas. Does he think he’s better than me because he has to wear a tie to work? Because he works at a god damned bank? Does he think that makes him something special? That makes him a pansy, to me. That makes him this little faggot star snowflake that needs to be squished. You get to touch money for a living. Big fucking whoop. I make cars. I fix cars. I can fix him. You watch. I’m the Monster.

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I pound up the stairs and I huff on past my room and the bathroom and I go up the small stairs to the bonus room and I look for David. I’m going to rip his long ass in half. I’m going to find him and I’m going to kill him. The Monster is here and the Monster wants his bright red blood. I rip through all his stuff that he’s scattered out onto the floor. I throw cans at the wall and their little yellow sweet piss spits around the room and tinkles down the walls. I throw his Bank Of America name tag across the room and I rip off a poster of these two girls in gold bikinis with Rockstar stars on their boobs and I take his Hustlers and I throw them and I yell through my teeth. I flip over his cot and there are boxes and I rip through them. One is full of clothing. One is full of papers and old checks. One is full of unopened Rockstars, which I open and pour onto his clothes. There is a small shoebox. I open it and it’s photographs of mom and dad and David and me and I yell at them, at all their smiley faces, and I scream until I’m sitting and the Monster gets quiet. I got the green steel wool fluff scared out of me and I can see it behind me, laying on the floor: the Monster jumped and left. He’s watching me now. He doesn’t know what’s happening and neither do I.

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All the photos are from big days like graduations and band concerts. There’s one from Laura Ann and me getting married. There’s a photo of David and his one girlfriend Andrea at a dinner we had at Piccadilly back when mom and dad were still here. There are lots of photos of them, of him, of mom and dad, of home at the old place, where David and them used to live, before they left. Dad went first. He was bed-riden at that point and only 55 and too fat. He just laid in bed and he disappeared. It was like you left the cheese out for too many days and the flies came and the mold came and everything came to touch it until it just slid off onto the damn ground. He didn’t want to get up or nothing from that bed. Mom could walk at least. It was a side-to-side, shuffle-two-three-four walk — but she could walk. She looked after him and David gave her some things to do to keep her busy like organize checks. He’s always been a tall, lean buck-fifty. The only one. She started dropping pounds and getting better but she still couldn’t escape it. She died in her sleep one night. Just clear stopped breathing. It was like someone unplugged her. When they went, the house went. They couldn’t pay for it no more and since they both were on disability the government let them keep the house until they died. Then it got absorbed by the state and, low and bee-hold, David now lives here. It was immediate-like. It was like he was living with them and then he was living with us. It hasn’t even been a year but it feels like decades, each day longer and longer than the last. Time went from this long sheet of paper into this folded up accordion paper. It just happens to us when things are hard.

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I walk down the stairs really slowly and I can feel my heart ripping my chest. The Monster. He’s here too, following behind me slowly. I can feel the spiky green hair through my work pants. I don’t feel the mean green in me anymore: I just walk down all the stairs and go back into the kitchen and stare at all the cans. I grab a Monster from the fridge and I drink the drink. I grab another Monster and I drink the drink. I grab the Barton’s and I pour it in a Monster. Laura Ann is down in the TV room in her recliner and I sit next to her in my recliner and I grab for her hand and we touch, our little fingers tickling the ends of each other.

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“The license frame is nice,” I tell her. She doesn’t smile but she nods and she stares into the TV, at the Ice Road Truckers. I can feel the Monster crawl up and sit underneath my foot rest. He’s like a cat now, timid and small. I know the Monster will never be the same again. Something happened. I know that Monster isn’t a monster anymore because it turned into a tamed thing just like that, fluff. The green doesn’t boil in me anymore. It just sizzles down my face, a quiet tear when no one is watching me. My claws and my teeth have been shaved. I’m still puffy, in my own way, but I’m not mad. Laura Ann and I continue tickling each other’s fingers and the men on the television talk in the cold and you can see their breath.

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I fall asleep in the recliner and I climb up the stairs in the middle of the night, the Monster walking behind me. I tell him to be quiet because I can see the yellow glow from underneath the door of the bonus room. I don’t want him to wake the Rockstar.