Rookerville is hometown U.S.A. to some really talented people. It’s been a very fortunate situation to bring all these people together in one place. With that we’ve been developing a way for our readers to see our creative types outside of captivity. In the next week we are adding a calendar of events you can use to see when fellow Rookers perform in their varying capacities and a new section known as “Rooker-made” where you will find posts on anything and everything the Rookers are doing outside of the site. And no better Rooker to start with than Ted McLoof who was recently published in “Diagram”. You’ll find an excerpt below and a link to continue reading.
Home Sweet Home
By, Ted McLoof
So my plane gets in early and there’s zero to do in my home town—which I haven’t visited in three years—but I remember that if there’s a place to be on a Saturday night in Midland Park, New Jersey, it’s Legends. You know, Legends. Every town has one. Not Legends specifically but a townie bar of its ilk: shittily lit, oak tables, dance floor dimpled and pock-marked like it’s got acne. I take a look around the place and I recognize not a soul, which, to give you context, when I was coming here nightly for those few years after high school when I didn’t have my shit together and I was living in my mom’s attic—during those years we knew everyone at Legends, this place was like our living room, actually I probably knew more people at Legends than at my own house considering how seldom I knew the names of the guys my mom brought home. But since then the crowd I used to go with has gotten older, traded in their Irish car bombs and beer bottles for German car dealers and baby bottles, so anyway I don’t know anyone here right now and I’m about to 180 and put a Ted-shaped hole in the north wall when I see Horse at the end of the bar, watching the game. Horse: former Midland Park High School quarterback. Horse: who had more sex our freshman year of high school than I’ve had my entire life. Horse: who’s right now sitting alone, slumped in his chair, waving me over like he’s been expecting me.
What have you been up to Horse I ask, and he smiles like it’s all one big joke, and it is, life, for him. Getting thrown out of ex-girlfriends’ houses he says. Getting thrown out of bars. You know how it is. I don’t, but I half-smile anyway, making sure not to fully smile since it’s difficult to forget when Horse was twelve and it wasn’t girlfriends or bouncers turning him away but his own father. It’s easy to surmise that Horse’s life has been basically a series of getting kicked out of places where he thought he felt home sweet home.
It’s a small shitty bar in a small shitty town where everyone knows everyone else’s shit, and I wonder momentarily if Horse knows what I’ve been up to, and it’s like he can read my mind because he says How’s it out there? ASU right? and I say U of A to the TV screen where, sure enough, the Wildcats are showing the Sun Devils what’s what up and down the field as we speak. The cameras pan to a shot of the cheerleaders and Horse says The chicks must be smoking hot at that school, huh? And I say Well they’re my students, in a tone where I may as well be saying they’re my daughters, So it’s not really like that. He raises his hand at the bartender like a man hailing a cab. Smokin hot he says, and flicks my sternum to punctuate each word. I insist that he not pay for my beer, I mean I’m not exactly planning on staying here with him if you get me, but there must be some secret Jerseyan handshake I’ve forgotten because the bartender’s already popping the tops off our beers before I can say anything, so I say You smoke and he goes Cigarettes? and I nod, and he’s already grabbing his coat with one hand and patting the small of my back with that quarterback’s mix of fuck-you and good-to-see-ya as we walk out.
About Ted McLoof
Ted McLoof is a writer at Rookerville and teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gertrude, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, The Associative Press, and elsewhere.He's recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. He is very cool and very handsome and he'd like to buy you a drink.