Great and Urgent Projects of Passion, by MH Rowe
Photo by Catgirlmutant on Unsplash
Claire had been trying to get her son, Colton, to stop harassing Rod Stewart online. She took away his phone and returned it after a conversation in the kitchen during which Colton's contrition, regret, and claim that he didn’t understand the vulgar sexual metaphors he had used struck Claire as entirely theatrical. This was a ruse or ploy so transparent it made her feel like a bad mother. She and Colton stood on opposite sides of the oak countertop. Colton tried to look like he might cry as she raised her voice. Claire thought she ought to have raised a better liar than this—and felt a twinge of regret herself.
But fake guilt is what Claire had been counting on, really. Her own ploy depended on it.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay,” said Claire.
Colton took the phone and went upstairs to his room. While his phone was in her possession, Claire had downloaded onto it a monitoring program. The application was designed for remote parental control. Whenever Colton tried to post inappropriate content online—content intended, for example, to belittle and demean a British singer and stalwart baby boomer icon like Rod Stewart—he would not be able to do so.
Claire drank a glass of wine. It seemed to her that she was an unlikely candidate to defend the reputation of a British pop star who had been knighted by the queen of England. She didn’t care, however, if a neighbor watching from a darkened yard or the street looked up and saw her there, alone and triumphant, with an empty green bottle tipped over on the floor.
By the next day, the monitoring program proved no obstacle to Colton. His determination so far exceeded any effort of his at school, extramural sports, or even in his social life that Claire wondered if he had some sort of classifiable medical condition serious enough to warrant pharmaceuticals or perhaps surgical intervention. Her little specimen.
Only sixteen years old, Colton had now resumed his practice of sending venomous and provocative messages to Rod Stewart. How had he learned to be so cruel? And how had he learned so much about Rod Stewart—and why? Why Rod Stewart?
Once he had liberated his phone (and before Claire could take it away again), Colton proceeded to post a few crude insults, testing the boundaries. Then he posted an offensive meme or two, probing for invisible forcefields. Finally, and most shockingly, he posted a long diatribe recounting in unbelievable documentary detail how in 1977 Rod Stewart and his drummer Carmine Appice, after a drunken week in São Paulo during which they saw Stars Wars three times and stole a car belonging to a German attaché, had lifted the melody for Stewart’s “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” from a Brazilian folk song whose singer, Colton claimed, was later assassinated by right-wing Brazilian police officers.
When Claire looked it up online, she saw that the Brazilian singer was still alive. It seemed, however, that Rod Stewart had in fact stolen from that singer the melody for his famous disco hit, “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” Moreover, Claire felt totally insane to learn that the title of Stewart’s song did indeed render the word “do” as “da.” Da ya think I’m sexy? This detail only made her dilemma feel more authentic. Colton really had weaponized an impressive body of knowledge about Rod Stewart. Though as far as Claire could tell, the pop singer had never stolen the car of a befuddled German diplomat.
Claire again confiscated Colton’s phone, this time while he was in the shower. He tutted in disgust when he came downstairs, his hair wet, a scowl on his face, but he didn’t scream or protest. They both knew he could continue his campaign of terror against Rod Stewart using his laptop. His mother suspected, however, that despite this technological reality, Colton would post less without his phone. The phone was for posting.
A week passed. The leaves changed color. Claire had only one triumphant glass of wine.
Colton did manage one post that week. A sub-optimal effort, Claire thought. But while it seemed relatively benign compared to the crude insults or exhaustive and bitter histories of Brazilian misadventures, this post finally elicited a response. Sir Rod Stewart, or at least the official account run by Sir Rod Stewart’s representatives, began to talk back.
Colton showed Claire by turning his laptop around so she could read where he pointed onscreen.
“A knight is being mean to me online,” he said.
Colton found it funny. Claire felt concern.
An edge quickly crept into Rod Stewart’s posts. He or his representatives referred to Claire’s son as a “twat,” then as a “shit,” and finally as a “stain.” This last term in its abstraction struck Claire as the most vulgar of all. Soon Rod Stewart or his representatives began to invite others to “scrub out the stain.”
“They’re ‘piling on’?” Claire asked.
“I guess, mom,” said Colton, swiveling in his office chair.
The sheer fact of Rod Stewart was what baffled Claire. That the British singer was still alive seemed easy enough to explain. People who aren’t dead yet are still alive—fine. But the fact that an elderly Rod Stewart was engaged in some sort of internet flame war with her sixteen-year-old son bordered on the grotesque, a deformity in the image Claire had formed of her own life or of the life of anyone she knew. Not even the divorce had struck her as this perverse.
Claire tried to imagine being a little girl fantasizing about what it would be like to have a baby. She imagined herself as a child saying that when she was grown up, her baby would call a famous British man a “dick cruncher.”
And how the hell did her only child reach a point in his life, in his education, and in his culture, where he could be fixated on a musician whose persona and music were no longer remotely fashionable and not even a particularly curious or telling artifact of a prior age? He wasn’t Mick Jagger. Or Paul McCartney. He had some classic songs, no doubt, and was a man, Claire supposed, of talent. But the eyes of eternity had turned their gaze from him. Rod Stewart was not forever.
Then Rod Stewart began to post pictures of Claire’s home.
Not only on one but on two social media platforms, Rod Stewart posted photographs of the house where Claire and Colton lived. A Dutch colonial, with a maple tree in front. They lived less than a mile from a major highway exit: an entry point for humanity at large. Claire kept the blinds closed.
Now when she looked out onto the darkened street, Claire imagined Rod Stewart fans, whoever they were, drawing their silent knives and crawling through the underbrush as they muttered to themselves, “if you want my body, and you think I’m sexy…”
Claire went into the kitchen. She sat on a stool, and on her phone scrolled through the images of her house, copied from a real estate website. It didn’t seem real.
Soon Rod Stewart posted pictures of Colton from his yearbook. Next a picture of Claire from work. Finally came the calls from people with strange accents claiming they knew where Claire lived, some death threats, and other messages from vague, lost people taking directions, it seemed, from Rod Stewart. The police came to the house. They said it was “for a wellness check.” This “hoax” took days to clear up.
Rod Stewart had escalated things. Rod Stewart was in control.
“Rod Stewart,” said Colton, “is not in control.”
On a clear evening two months into the ordeal, Claire returned from a walk around the neighborhood to find Colton in the front yard. He was talking directly into his phone, which he held close to his illuminated face. Claire stood next to the maple tree and watched her son make his video. From what she could tell, his invective against Rod Stewart was not tempered but accentuated by a series of ripostes to his various harassers and bullies, those who would defend Rod Stewart, whom Colton referred to as “Sir Rod Stewart” with such peculiar venom in his tone of voice that Claire understood at once how absurd the concept of knighthood was, how absurd queens were, how absurd pop music, and even human history, were.
The question of why Rod Stewart seemed in that moment to have an obvious answer.
Great and urgent projects of passion, Claire thought, could only be accomplished on an arbitrary basis, for arbitrary reasons. On an arbitrary basis, one could only rely on faith and energy; total commitment was easier when it came to nonsense. No need for pesky reasons or motivations. No need for complex rationalization. Only the energy mattered, only the faith. It wasn’t religion. It was how religions themselves must have started.
Claire walked across the yard. Colton turned to her, an uncertain look on his face, and Claire slid a cool hand across his shoulder. It was like she was loosening the grip of a nightmare when he was a child. With her other hand, she lifted the phone away from him.
For a moment Colton seemed distressed, but something about the look on Claire’s face reassured him. Instead of sliding the phone into her pocket, Claire turned and looked into it, as if into a magic mirror. She saw her own face. The video was still live.
Later, Claire wouldn’t be able to decide if it was divine inspiration or simply her addled state of mind. Inspiration was for pilgrims, she figured, and she was no pilgrim. She only knew that she had never spoken that way before, with such acid authority and bitter grace.
Claire ripped into Rod Stewart live on the internet.
She used extraordinarily foul words. She came up with odd and memorable turns of phrase that, even as she uttered them, she knew would bewilder and puzzle her when she remembered them afterward. And Claire never paused. She spoke continuously in one long outpouring of grammatically correct abuse and objection. All of it directed at Rod Stewart.
“Do you think I’m sexy?” she said at the end.
When she was finished, Claire handed the phone back to Colton. He took it without a word. Claire was reminded for some reason of the day he was born. A man walked by the house with a dog on a leash, seeming to hurry out of sight. Claire and Colton stood there long enough that the porchlight went out. It was motion activated. Claire had bought it online last year. It had cost thirty-four dollars, and it worked perfectly. Now it was dark. They were alone. Claire remembered what her life was like. She had been trying to get her son to stop harassing Rod Stewart online.
MH Rowe's stories have appeared in Florida Review, Missouri Review, Split Lip, and Black Warrior Review, as well as been reprinted in Junior Great Books 8. He lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota.