Mark Rigney on Bugs and Bars

Photo by Mark Rigney

My associations with bugs — that is to say, entomology of all descriptions — have generally been benign. True, I was once chased off Colorado’s Grand Mesa by a horde of cantankerous flies, and the mosquitoes of the Boundary Waters have given me to understand, in no uncertain terms, that I am unwelcome. On the plus side, I have never had lice, the one bedbug I ever met kindly chose not infest my suitcase, and I survived a honey bee swarm intact and unstung.

My fascination with insects remains unabated, and since my imagination has a reprehensible talent for “what if” scenarios that end in macabre disaster, I tend to think most about bugs when considering future plagues. What if the boll weevil becomes immune to every developed pesticide? What happens to U.S. agriculture if “locust swarms,” otherwise known as grasshopper clouds, rise again? And what of mosquitoes? Those of us who came of age or were adults in the early nineteen eighties will certainly recall one of the stranger offshoots of the AIDS epidemic, to wit, the fear that the disease could become mosquito-borne — as West Nile virus, among many others, already is.

All these and more have tickled my fancy or horrified my sense of justice and order, so imagine my delight at discovering a journal that focuses so intently on the world of creepy crawlies.

Now imagine my confusion when the story I then submitted turned out to contain not a single insect, and fit, instead, into the more staid, blocky world of architecture.

“The Latest Incarnation of Secondhand Johnny” also proceeded from a “what if,” a kind of semi-political thought experiment. In Evansville, Indiana, where I reside, progress marches only to the slowest of drunken drummers; the coasts and more enlightened cities (Minneapolis, et al) passed no-smoking ordinances back in the ice age, but here? Seven years ago, when I wrote “Secondhand Johnny,” the concept of limiting smokers’ “rights” was a very new concept.

Speaking as a non-smoker who enjoys a nice tavern, provided it isn’t filled to the rafters with smoke, I decided to explore, in fiction, the idea that bars would, en masse, go out of business if even the most limited of no-smoking ordinances passed. I didn’t set out to write an essay — I’d already done that, in the form of a “Letter To the Editor” — never fear. What was it Samuel Goldwyn supposedly said? “If you’ve got a message, call Western Union.” Even so, an exploration of smoking legislation’s endgames is exactly what sparked “Secondhand Johnny.”

Time has passed. Evansville has at last boarded the smoke-free bandwagon. It remains the most obese city in the known universe, but at least one can now walk into a restaurant and not inherit a neighbor’s penchant for early emphysema.

And guess what? To the best of my knowledge, not a single liquor-serving establishment closed as a result.

As to Secondhand Johnny’s fate, you’ll have to read the story, published in Issue 6, August 2013.

As to why it took six years plus for this story to find a good home, well. Therein hangs a tale whose telling might well require a tavern (or two).

I must bring this to a close, so I can bear down and finish work on the sequel to The Skates and its soon-to-be-released companion, Sleeping Bear. I shall leave you with a hug — no, sorry, a bug. And a most beautiful bug it is, too, a (deceased) banded alder beetle that my boys found in a Santa Ynez canyon a few years back. A rarity, too, from what I understand.

And, to humans, harmless. So far.

Banded Alder Beetle by Mark Rigney

‘Til next time!

www.markrigney.net

~

Editor’s note: Looks like “next time” isn’t too far in the future: Mark has a story coming out on October 1st in Betwixt Magazine’s debut issue, and we’re happy to have an opportunity to publish another of Mark’s stories in our next issue, in November. This one actually does have bugs.