The guys didn’t blame me when I sold out. But fifteen years later a loser with a man-bun and spray-on jeans is singing my song at this lame show that has something to do with food trucks. There must be a thousand e-brats in here, jumping and hollering and even crying. Silly chicks with clown hair and red lipstick. Ridiculous dudes with eyeliner and Fitbits.

When I wrote that song I’d been stripped down to nothing. I’d lost my parents in a car accident and my girl had ditched me and my best friend was dying of bone cancer. I wrote that song when I was on the beach after taking my dad’s credit card out of his blood-soaked wallet. I’d taken a Greyhound to Miami and left a big mess for my sister to clean up. I wrote that song and it healed me for a while. Thing is, these gen babies think they like angst and rage, but they’re afraid of the scars. Their parents are alive. Their friends are alive. They don’t know real pain or death or insanity, they just admire it and sing it.

Me and the guys, we had that day when it was all over. We burned Jake into the gold death canister that sat in my file cabinet for five years because he picked this miserable Florida beach as his last place on earth and it took me this long to get here. “Just dump me in the water,” was all he’d said. The guys made a joke about pollution, but he was too sick and spaced out to even smile. Lifting the gold can out of the file cabinet ripped me raw. Drew a Saturn with a Sharpie.

Now these little posers think they understand my song and I’m getting bugged out on their youngness. There’s this girl in front of me, glittering pantyhose and bandage skirt, she’s waving her hand around like my song means something religious to her. I move closer to see her face. She’s a sweet doll, eyes closed, a little bead necklace in her throat hollow. The final chords swell out from loser’s mic, so I shout HEY into that moment between songs and land it just right. All the lame-asses turn to look at me — a gray-haired guy sweating in a motorcycle jacket. Dead man in my car. I ask them if they want a real song. They don’t want a real song, I can see by their stares. I’m Saturn Box, I tell them. That’s my band. You want a real song?

Lead-singer loser starts up again. The crowd smells like boiled tofu and legal weed and sex candles. What the hell happened to the world? It’s like life is a thing you can buy at a stand or download onto a phone or inhale through a vape. I’ve got a remedy for that, kids not kidzz. Yeah, I spell things the right way, without Zs or extra letters or asinine hashtags, and I don’t ever change. I’ve got a bottle of something cheap in my car. I’ve got a plan to walk into the ocean, hold that gold can over my head and speak calmly and carefully to the Jesus I don’t believe in. My old friend Jake, he’s fish food tonight. Hell, I’ll step on every foot to get out of here.

Saturn Box!

Someone screams it and they’re on me. Hot bodies, girl claws, strobe lights like a seizure. This is crazy, totally fucked up. I’m up in their arms, butter on popcorn, a duckie on bathtub water. Mosh lives, and yeah, I can even laugh about it. Thank god this show is finally getting real.

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Anne-Marie Yerks is a fiction writer, essayist and digital journalist from the Metropolitan Detroit area. Her novel, Dream Junkies, was published by New Rivers Press in 2016. Her short fiction has appeared in Juked, among other literary journals, and is forthcoming in The Penn Review. She loves attending writing conferences and traveling to literary destinations. Find her on Twitter @amy1620. Anne-Marie is represented by Vicki Marsdon of High Spot Literary Agency.

Photo: Jan St?echa