Mike Heppner
Mike Heppner was born in Rhode Island in 1972 and grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. His first novel, The Egg Code, was published in 2002, and his second, Pike’s Folly, in 2006. A collection of short fiction, The Man Talking Project, was be published by Another Sky Press in 2012. His essays and short fiction have appeared in Nerve, Esquire Online, Poets & Writers, Golden Handcuffs Review, and The New Guard. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts and teaches at Emerson College.
Statement:
I get angry over the least little things. Face grows hot. Pulse thuds in the sides of my neck. The rest of the day ruined. Once I (almost) got in a fight with a mover who was being an asshole. I remember him standing on my front steps, the other two guys holding him back. A hat, a painter’s cap, Skoal Tobacco. I gave him many chances to act like a decent person. I don’t go looking for trouble, which is why even my closest friends sometimes don’t hear from me for months at a time. My loftiest hope for the day is to rise in the morning and (fall?) in the evening without once needing to raise my voice or even change my facial expression. And it happens, sometimes. I don’t want to fight. I’m not a volunteer, a — what do you call it? A career soldier.
I’d just like to drink my beer, thank you. I’d like to get from here to the grocery store and back without wanting to yank out your esophagus. I’d like to watch golf on TV at three o’clock if you don’t mind, please. Days should be quiet. A modest, stay-at-home existence. These are my three pairs of pants. These are my two pairs of shoes. This is my jacket — I wear it when I go outside. I don’t sign petitions, I don’t know why. I resist the temporary rush of participation.
The mover was mad at me because he felt I should pay for the hour that he arrived at my old apartment and decided after some delay that he didn’t want to move my belongings because it was the end of his shift and there were so many stairs — too many, my fault apparently, why did I put in so many stairs when I built this three-story apartment complex back in 1922 — and then he left me standing with my stuff all in boxes, drove to his warehouse twenty minutes away, was reprimanded by his supervisor for acting like an idiot and told to drive back another twenty minutes across town, which he did, raging inside and listening to nü-metal on the radio, and when he and his partners finally finished the job and presented me with a bill not only for their hours of work but also for the extra hour of wasted time, I refused, which incensed the man even further and prompted him to charge at me as his partners held him back (both reasonable guys if
I remember right, though this happened eleven years ago) and his Skoal Tobacco painter’s cap went tumbling across my yard. Little things, little, little things. I do not provoke, and yet I am provoked. When I was twenty-three I wrote a entire novel listening to the same Hüsker Dü album over and over again. And now I’m here.
