Free The Anomalies by Joey Goebel Page A

brothers hate cops because they interfere with their drug dealing. I hate them because they interfere with my life progress since they are the muscles of The Thoughtless Confederacy. We both refer to cops as “The Man,” but I put much more weight in that term than my Neanderthal brothers do.
    As we move our band equipment to the basement of Ember’s house, taking our music subterranean so as not to disturb suburbia, I think about how my brothers’ drugs are floating around in the fine homes above. In fact, my brothers’ marijuana, acid, ecstasy, and now crack helped build some of these fine homes. The prominent businessmen, lawyers, doctors, and real estate agents who occupy these homes not only ingest the drugs themselves but also get these drugs into town in the first place and then profit by selling to dealers like my brothers who go on to sell the stuff to everyone from blacks to whites to foreigners to politicians to the elderly to the unborn to pregnant teenagers to high school principals to playground children to PE teachers to college kids to housewives to meter maids to the poor to the rich to the middle-class to the tired, poor, and huddled, to the Jewish carpenters, the preps, the rednecks, the fags, the hippies, the bold and the beautiful, the shy and therepulsive, widows, orphans, amputees, introverts, extroverts, and all of their mothers, fathers, guidance counselors, mistresses, therapists, and former best friends. The one common strain in the wires attached to their brains is my brothers’ drugs, those chemicals which temporarily make this world more tolerable.
    Those prominent upper-class good guys with their cool out-of-state underground connections introduce the drugs to our town and sell them to guys like my brothers even though they would never give my brothers the time of year, or sit at the same burgoo table with them, or let their daughters date a man named Jerome. But money is being made, and everybody is cool with it. Cool, cool, cool. Everyone feels the same when they’re making fabulous moolah and putting weird shit in their bodies. They all feel cool, and that’s the way the giant mechanical brain likes it.
    I have nothing against drugs. It’s just the cool I have a problem with.
    Our band has now safely evacuated to the basement.
    We have a gnarly practice, so rocktageous that it comes across as subversive, almost anarchic. We rock harder than a peanut butter famine. I think after this practice I can honestly say that we are the best power-pop new wave heavy metal punk rock band that this town has ever produced.
    “When are we gonna play in front of people?” inquires Aurora.
    Soon, for time is our greatest enemy in this retrograde existence. I will be working on setting up a show. But for now, I better get back to the rut I call home.
    “Don’t go! Stay the night!” Ember pleads.
    “Yeah. Y’all can just start sleeping over here if you want,” agrees Opal. “I’m sure Ember’s parents wouldn’t mind, and whocares if they do?”
    We all immediately accept the invitation since our home lives are so lonely and undesirable. I would take any chance to get away from my crackhouse home and the subhumans that live there. Ray’s family has returned to Iraq, leaving him singular. Aurora’s dad is still pissed about his Jesus statue and has really been on her case.
    We move in and become the family that none of us ever had, the family that no one has ever had, if only for the few weeks that Ember’s horrible parents have allowed us.

IX. Lonely Aliens

Opal
    It’s pretty late when we’re done rockin out, but of course, Ember isn’t ready to go to bed yet. So the five of us make fun of the TV for a while, crackin on the idiots on The Real World, the morons on Blind Date, and the assholes on E!’s Wild On. We also watch Jay Leno for a while just to see how awkward his interviewing will be.
    Around two a.m., after making fun of Roadhouse on TBS, Ember makes us play Good Morning,