My Life in Heavy Metal Read Online Free PDF

too.
Poof.
There was only a stain on the bed. I checked the bathroom, the closets, everywhere. And then it occurred to me what had happened: she had jumped out the bedroom window. There would be her body, on the sidewalk, and the police would want to know what it was all about.
    But this was only some gaudy male fantasy. There was nobody down below but the cop, standing outside his squad car. He looked mean and confused. His hand rested absently on the butt of his gun. And somewhere farther off in the desert, a radio was playing, Axl Rose’s tiny voice reaching out, singing:
Take me down to the Paradise City where the grass is green and the girls are pretty.
    And now you listen to me, you people with your poise and careful judgments: These are the things I did. And I was punished for them, as we are all punished, in the end, for the degradations we inflict upon those who love us. Sorrow waits, with the patience of a psalm, for the infidel.
    Though what returns to me now is how I felt afterwards, on those certain evenings, driving home toward Jo, sweet Jo, still a little drunk, bearded in the smell of Claudia, weaving the empty lanes of I-10, the warehouses sliding past, El Paso’s downtown like an isle of dinky lanterns, the Rio flowing black, and beyond, the speckled blue lights of Juárez. How full my heart was of gratitude!
Thank you,
I wanted to call out.
Thank you! Thank you!
    And if, as was often the case, a cassette were playing, the dumb blunt exuberance of the band, the howl and drub of all those fierce desires would gather in the night above me and become one desireand merge with my desire and confirm that I was doing something even noble in the eyes of youth, radical, kickass, seeking love on all fronts, transporting myself beyond the reach of loneliness and failure, into the blessed province of poontang.
    It is in these moments of tender and ridiculous nostalgia that I know something inside me is still broken.

Among the Ik
    Rodgers was a nervous man and now, with his wife dead, he was even worse. He had a story to tell but kept insisting he was no good at stories. His hands flapped about like loose cardboard. His tremendous nose, which might have made another man feel powerful, bloomed red with agitation.
    â€œThis was, oh gosh, this was back in the sixties. Is it that long now? Yes. It must be. We’d just graduated from the University of Chicago and we were looking for work.
I
was looking for work I should say. This was before Connie and I, before we were married. I went to some conference or other and met this nice old fellow and, you know, everyone was looking for work back then. He said I should send my material along, would I do that, and a few months later he called and asked if I would like to teach at Newton College. There was none of this business of search committees, interviews. I was twenty-three years old, maybe twenty-four. A silly age.” Rodgers giggled tentatively. He was speaking to a friend of his daughter’s, a tall fellow named Ken who had arrived that afternoon in a gale of slightly forced cheer.
    They were at the kitchen table, regarding one another over the leavings of dinner: crumpled napkins, bits of risotto stiffening on flatware, a shank bone whose joint shone faintly blue under the tracklighting. The table itself was yellow pine, a stern piece of furniture Rodgers had once hoped to extend with leaves and move into the dining room. As he spoke with Ken, he envisioned running his hand across its surface, though the wood had dried and gone splintery in the last few years. That was the problem with yellow pine.
    Rodgers’s three children were in the living room, sitting around the fire, peeling tangerines and playing with his baby granddaughter. They had descended upon him for the holiday, an intended gesture of support that filled his house with ruckus.
    Connie’s death had not been sudden. But Rodgers had somehow experienced it as sudden, not quite