Groan. You can’t give yourself a nickname, dude.

* * *

I’m hitting the Stop button here on the boombox (purchased in 1991, weighs almost twenty pounds, and the sucker still works) and the Eject button. I think we need a different CD, because I am attuned to my readers. I hear you: Where’s Mercy, Punk Art? Where the fuck is Mercy? (I imagine you with a thick Jersey accent, for fun, while assuming you have a certain level of emotional acuity, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading a memoir novel. Unless you’re a sociopath studying human behavior to become more human-like.)

Fine, we’ll skip ahead to more Mercy. Though I’m not crazy about the idea that I’m transforming into my own story’s secondary or supporting character. Perhaps it’s my lot to be the rhythm guitarist in the punk/post-punk/indie band of life.

Well, a vampire is supposed to steal your life, yeah?

I did play, briefly, in a band called Life. I quit after two rehearsals because the tyro vocalist insisted we stop playing our instruments in the middle of a song to allow for his free-verse vignettes about Jesus Christ attending, and ironically enjoying, one of the summer’s WaterFire events. For the uninitiated, Providence’s WaterFire is a mix of festival, performance art, and pagan ritual, free to the public, featuring New Age music and eighty-six anchored braziers (metal thingies that hold burning logs) floating aflame within the rivers that flow through downtown’s Waterplace Park. It’s a lovely take. In the summer of 2005, I briefly had a side gig captaining one of the Brazier Society WaterFire guest boats until one sweaty August night I bumped (which is almost an exaggeration) one of La Gondola’s authentic Venetian gondolas. When “the skilled oarsman practiced in this ancient art” (according to La Gondola’s website) attempted boarding my vessel to share his practiced displeasure, I retaliated by dumping his sizable oar into the river.

Yes, I know, I’m stalling. I’m stalling because even though my adult years are more recent and more noteworthy in terms of things done (not necessarily accomplished), my memory of them is muddier than the memories of my childhood and teen years and requires a reading-tea-leaves level of interpretation. Our adult years pass so quickly, and for many of us they pass without the obvious markers of time we are provided as children (our first pair of Spider-Man Underoos, kindergarten, Santa isn’t real, elementary school, fight(s) with a bully, middle school, first of many crushes, puberty, first kiss, high school, graduation, and all the mini moments between). It’s as though my adult years were never really there. And that terrifies me more than anything else that has been detailed in this book so far.

Just you wait! Sorry, being, um, cheeky as I’ve had a smoke and some wine.

* * *