Incident at the Charging Station

New York, a new Das Damen reissue & a new short story

Greetings from Brooklyn!

It’s my last day in New York. In fact I’m flying back to San Diego today. It’s been cold and rainy here in the Northeast with fallout from tropical storm Ophelia whipping up the wind and spitting rain the last four days. It was so rainy yesterday I bit the bullet and bought an umbrella as I wandered around Manhattan. An umbrella!

Today the sun is out and I’ll take one last walk along Shore Road to the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge before heading to JFK. I’ve traveled quite a bit this last week.

After spending a few days at my father’s house in West Virginia I visited my brother and his family in Haymarket, Virginia. Highlights included bad football, great baseball, fried seafood, and long walks with my brother. Then it was off to JFK. I’m getting to be a pro at navigating the Jet Train, Long Island Railroad, and the N & R trains to Brooklyn. After spending the weekend in Connecticut (Hi Jen!) I returned to Bay Ridge where my cousin has been spoiling me with her great Italian cooking.

When I’m not traveling I’ve been devoting most of my time to a work-for-hire project that will be wrapping up in a few weeks. I’m in the home stretch and looking forward to sharing it with you when it’s announced later this year.

In the meantime, a bit of SST-related news. Yesterday I met up with Lyle Hysen of the mighty Das Damen in Manhattan and we talked about the band’s reissue of its debut EP. The record was originally released by Ecstatic Peace and subsequently reissued by SST in 1986 (SST 040). The new reissue features a ton of bonus tracks with Dez Cadena, Gary Lee Connor, and Thalia Zedek and comes with a zine with an oral history of the band edited by Brad Cohan and interviews with Thurston Moore and Tom Scharpling. You can preorder it now. That interview will be published here in a few weeks so stay tuned.

Speaking of SST, I was featured in a brief interview in Dying Scene earlier this week. The interview went down at Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago a few weeks ago and features some great photos by Fleurette Estes. I also had to come up with five favorite punk and hardcore records on the spot so there’s that.

Also, I discovered a pristine box of hardcover copies of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records here in Brooklyn that I’ll be bringing home with me. If you’d like a signed copy for you or a friend let me know.

Today I want to talk about a short story I wrote that was published last Friday in Uncharted Magazine. It’s called “Incident at the Charging Station” and is about a lot of things: violence, gentrification, drug addiction.

It features an unreliable narrator named Hank who used to be in a punk band in Washington, D.C. (not that Hank) who lives in his car in a part of San Diego called North Park. Hank has issues. He’s a chronic substance abuser. His best friend is a drug peddler and a Suicidal Tendencies fanatic named Cyco. And his pet rat has gone missing.

Hank’s life changes when an electric vehicle charging station appears in the Bank of America parking lot across the street from where he usually parks his car. Suddenly, all these wealthy people who don’t belong on this street start showing up to charge their  electric vehicles. As he observes the shifting dynamics of the street he’s sucked into a series of events he’s powerless to prevent.

I got the idea for the story when I was at the charging station described in the story early one Saturday morning. When my wife and I bought an electric vehicle the year before last I was baffled by these charging stations. You had to connect to the machine via an app on your phone and they glowed with an otherworldly light. Then you had to wait up to 45 minutes for your car to charge. It was weird and different and new.

It occurred to me that I’d stumbled into a kind of liminal space. The parking lot had been transformed into a hub for a new kind of transaction. When I’m charging the car I like to walk around. Red Brontosaurus Records, Verbatim Books, and Dark Horse Coffee are all a few blocks away from this particular charging station. One night I plugged in my car and went to go see TSOL at the North Park Observatory. When the car was finished charging I got an alert on my phone. I left the venue, walked back to the charging station, and went home. This was technology I could get behind.

Some people, however, sit their car and because I’m always wondering, “What if…?” I figured it’s only a matter of time before someone sitting in their expensive electric land yacht gets ripped off, robbed, or worse. So I wrote a crime story about it.

Is it the first crime story set at an electric vehicle charging station? Let’s say yes, yes it is, so if nothing else it has that going for it:

Hank isn’t a thief. That’s not him. He doesn’t remember closing his eyes, but when they open, Cyco is in the car with him. Again? Still? Hank can’t say. Cyco spends so much time in his car Hank should charge rent. 

“I’ve crunched the numbers,” Cyco says.

“Oh?” Hank has no idea what they are talking about. Cyco got his name because he is a Suicidal Tendencies fanatic, which is an unfortunate thing for a grown man to be.

“The US government could give every person on the street a place to live with one simple trick,” Cyco says.

Hank is only half listening. He’s come across a snag in his beard and is pretty sure he doesn’t want to know what it is, but he can’t leave it alone.

“What’s that, Cyco?”

What’s that indeed? It’s a quick read and I hope you’ll check it out. If you like it say something in the comments!

Stay safe and see you next week.