The Case for the Hermann Hesse Lobotomy—Ep.1

a short story on DIY brain surgery

***bare with me, my beautiful early supporters—I’m testing doing whatever the hell this is as an ongoing series of flash fiction. feedback is appreciated, but please love it. thank you so very much. Ily***

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Rules don’t apply inside the Oceanside Flea Market. People sell and eat finery and drugs and dance with critters and do things out of accordance of laws and physics. Some of the vendors are friends. One of them, Jo, drives a 1991 Ford Ranger that can fly and float and do Pirate-y things. With it, he collects different trinkets of art from the creative world and sells/shows them there at the Oceanside Flea Market. '

Ferryman Painting by GC Myers

Ep.1

Louie stopped at the entrance of Jo’s booth with a clear glass bottle in his hand. He gently rolled his head and shoulders to the music playing. Jo didn’t look up. He sat next to the green, floral couch in a folding camping chair in the back of his booth with a book in his hand. “Whatchya reading?” asked Louie.

Jo looked up. In the sight of Louie, he bowed his head slightly to the side and his mouth broke open a little in a way that said hello my dear sweet bastard friend. “Nothing now,” Jo replied with a shoving smile.

Louie stared back and gave a couple of knocks on the bookshelf with the bottle. Clear fluid with a slight blueish hue sloshed around. The flea market voices of reason and barter and debate percolated under the marine layer around them, giving the short standoff some static.

“Get in here Lews,” Jo said with a wave of his hand.

Louie danced and tiptoed around the ceramics and stacks of paintings and cassettes and piles of stained papers and random stripped bolts and kept bobbing to the music and through Jo’s flee market booth that was somewhere between fifteen and forever feet long. Once he made it to Jo, he stepped over him with a passing hand on his sitting shoulder before throwing himself on the couch.

“Do I get a commission if you sell this?” Louie threw a thumb toward the old cassette player that played the Exuma, the Obeah Man album he had shown Jo a few weeks earlier.

“If I get commish for your tomatoes,” replied Jo as he folded his book and placed it in his lap.

“Oh, yeah?” replied Louie while untwisting the cap from the clear glass bottle.

“Yeah, I pee in your garden sometimes and flick my fingernails and boogers into it.”

Louie smiled and handed Jo the open bottle. Jo took it and brought it to his nose with a quick sniff. His eyebrows and lips peeled back, trying to run away from his nose.

“Hee, heeey,” Jo wheezed.

Once his face snapped back, he looked at his wrist at a watch that wasn’t there and looked back at Louie. Louie held his cheek in his hand, with strands of his dark hair falling off his forehead. He looked at Jo with skillfully bored eyes. Jo took a swig. After he swallowed he pulled his lips back and gave a couple of quick, ticking breaths.

“Just traded it for a bunch of radishes,” said Louie through Jo’s wincing.

“Mezcal?” asked Jo as he returned the bottle to Louie with a twisted face.

Louie didn’t answer or move for the bottle. He just rolled in his lips and bounced his eyes from Jo and to the clear, blueish fluid. “It’s 8:30 in the morning. I’m not drinking that.”

Jo sat back as a small smile fought its way through his sigh. He placed the bottle and the book of Japanese death poems he was reading on the ground before crossing his legs and lacing his fingers around his knee. Louie noticed the book as he placed it down. Jo liked to use the Japanese death poems as a net whenever his thoughts turned a little rambunctious. For whatever reason, the intermittent haikus of Zen monks begging for more life kept his thoughts from straying too far.

“Mace did the grossest thing to me today,” said Jo, referring to their friend, Mason.

“Yeah, I can tell. You look like shit,” answered Louie.

“The dude handed me his brain. His gray fleshy brain. With puppy eyes, he pointed to a hole in it and asked me to fill it…with a pretty please.”

Louie lifted himself and reached into the back pocket of his loose jeans and pulled out a zip-lock bag with a grinder, weed, and some rolling papers inside. The vegetable booths on a Sunday were a less welcome place with all the bickering seagulls and people with opinions.

“Did you take a bite out of it?” asked Louie.

Jo stared at his knee. Louie laid out a paper on his thigh and started twisting the grinder.

“He asked me for a book,” Jo said.

Louie froze for a second. “That’s what you want, right?” He flexed his eyes toward the overstuffed bookshelf in the front of the booth.

They met Mason surfing through a mutual friend. He was a little younger than them. They liked him because he laughed when others didn’t and he had excitement for things when they didn’t and he had an originality that helped them fight boredom.

As time went on, Mason started spending more time around Jo and his flea market booth of collected art. At first, it was because the booth seemed to catch things like mezcal and weed and fun people, but slowly, a genuine curiosity about the booth’s contents developed. After marinating in Jo’s weird microcosm, he started to see the creative world as something more than just an accessory to his strutting style.

Mason asked for the book earlier that morning while helping unload things from Jo’s magical 1991 Ford Ranger. Jo knew the question went beyond making small talk about props, so he told him he would think of something.

And so Jo spent the rest of the morning thinking about it and wrestling with how much weight to give the decision. He understood that Mason wanted to stop living by the seat of his pants, to stop ending up in places and with things. He wanted to start participating and engaging, to start thinking for himself.

It was kind of the whole point of Jo’s booth. He craved a community fat of bleeding, articulating minds. He started his flea market collection of weird creations as a way to bolster and celebrate and contribute to the arts, to the parts of humanity he cherished most.

Louie and Jo exchanged books and music and art all the time. But their momentum was set. They met each other while spiraling way off in the weeds with their brains already bashed open. There wasn’t a lot to change. But with Mason, a well-placed book could completely alter his trajectory. It was well-timed books that built Jo’s presence there.

“What’s the weapon of choice when somebody wants to have a look?” asked Jo.

“The Alchemist is the easy answer,” Louie replied as he carefully crumpled the rolling paper around the crutch and ground buds.

“Yeah. It’s hard to say anything bad about that book,” said Jo as he let go of his leg and shifted his weight further back in his chair, crossing his arms. “I just think the job is done. Mace has already made the decision to go on his little journey. The Alchemist is better for helping people make that first step. But our little Mace is already asking questions. He’s ready to run. Poor guy.”

Louie lifted his eyes towards Jo as he licked the paper and sealed the joint. He had a nudging lift to his cheeks and brow.

“Must be something in your tomatoes,” said Jo.

Louie flicked the joint around in his fingers. “What about Dharma Bums?”

“It’s good, but I think he might get lost in the weeds with that one. He doesn’t need any help consuming or humping things.”

After lighting his joint, Louie made a testy inhale while looking at a shopper lazily glancing over a box of drawings on the ground by the booth's entrance. “Just give him Thoreau if you want sober fun.”

“Not Thoreau,” said Jo, twisting his body more to face Louie. “Hesse. Siddhartha. If somebody really wants to fight themselves, get to know who’s behind the wheel, then Siddhartha—that’s the weapon. I think.”

Louie’s joint blossomed red. He exhaled and then held it towards Jo, who distractingly waved it off. Louie leaned back into the couch. “I remember when you gave me that book. It made me slow way down for a couple of days. I started talking to seaweed and shit.” Louie laughed before lifting the joint to his lips again.

“Yeah, and I feel like it’s well-known enough but deserves more somehow, you know? Like it should be up there with The Alchemist as one of the books that shuffles a young spirit’s hair best,” said Jo before readjusting in his chair and leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “I don’t know, though. There’s some sneaky bastards in there.” Jo tapped his temple with his pointer finger. “A part of me thinks I’m a coward, and I’m just giving myself these justifications because I know I will sleep easier at night knowing it’s only the effects of Siddhartha rattling through Mace’s head. Worse that can happen is he’ll start humming to trees.”

“Or he’ll call you god,” said Louie, leaning into Jo’s worry.

“Heh,” said Jo in half chuckled sigh. “I prefer mommy.”

“I’m kidding. Let go. You’re choking this thing, man. If not you, somebody else,” said Louie.

Jo lifted his head and smiled, his eyes drowsy and knowing. Louie clicked his teeth and smirked back before something caught his attention near the front of the booth.

Standing up quickly, Louie stretched out his large arms with the smoke of his joint disappearing into the overcast skies. “What’s up, Mace! You got a rat's nose. I knew you would smell this thing.”

Mason picked his way through the booth. Louie stepped past Jo, placing a hand on his shoulder before reaching the joint out to Mason’s eager hands.

***if you decide to purchase any of the books mentioned above, please remember to support your local bookstore. if you live in the US, you can search for yours here. HAGS