Of Coors Light and Clones: A Story About Dave
Dave Grohl takes the final drink of a Coors Light and places it on top of a speaker as he bids goodnight, closing a 2001 Foo Fighters set in St. Louis at The Pageant. Or The Fox; you can’t remember which, but it’s a small venue on The Loop where you tread easily near the stage. Roadies come out minutes later, and your eyes are tracking beams, taking you closer to the silver can as men clear equipment. You push against the exiting crowd, lean onto the rock ‘n’ roll altar, and beg, convincing one man to hand you this precious, discarded trash and another to let you exit with the “open container,” because, Dave drank from it. It has his spit. Someday, this will be enough DNA to make another Dave.
* * *
Someday comes, so you harvest cells like seeds and pot them to grow using all-purpose fertilizer from Ace Hardware and a small McCoy planter called the Wishing Well you inherited from your grandparents. You know nothing about horticulture, but a vine sprouts. It leafs and flowers until it blooms a giant purple crocus, which discards its petals one evening, quick as quarter notes, to reveal a mini man. He’s naked. Skinny but handsome. Dark hair shortly cut with bangs flopping over one eye. He babbles nonsense. Examines his own hands for hours. You call him Tiny Dave and pocket him for the trip out West you’ve always wanted: taking a Sprinter Van converted to a camper to see the nation’s greatest hits. Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Redwoods.
Tiny Dave tucks into the outermost pouch of your backpack and rides on your shoulders during long hikes. Traveling up the coast, he loves Washington State with child-like wonder, and you think, Classic Dave, without disclosing that Donor Dave once lived there. Best not to let Tiny Dave know too much about his origin lest he should leave you—the modus operandi of most guys you’ve wanted to love but lost. Ex-Boyfriend Dave asked you to have two abortions and then played the relationship like a juggle. One moment you were the ball in his hand, and the next you were suspended mid-air as he caught someone else before you dropped from his rotation.
* * *
Tiny Dave lives a year, dying during sleep, his skin yellow, so at next planting you try asexual propagation. You root cuttings taken from Tiny Dave’s Crocus into the same dirt from where it grew. Every morning you drop in coffee grounds, and at night you pour in cooking water from pasta and blanched vegetables, letting nutrients saturate dirt from where spider roots drink to nurture the angiosperm. One morning you wake to find pale pink geraniums bunched at the top. Another man—this one nearly four feet—parts the petals and steps from the pot tapping and twirling.
Teenage Dave is frenetic. To busy his hands, you buy a house to flip—a mid-century ranch on some acres that require cleaning, a home that needs repair. But he’s still nascent, too unformed to help—happy and healthy, sure, but lacking knowledge about things like land care and renovation. Hammering a nail seems too complex a task, so you buy him a drum set to crash while you puzzle out how to tile floors. Handiwork is in your blood thanks to Dad Dave, who could re-build jet engines. But he never taught you much by way of skilled labor other than his woodworking repair mantra, “glue and screw.” As a child, you were told not to speak unless spoken to, and when you sang, he said you couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. When you cried, he called you too sensitive. So asking Can I help? as he hung sheetrock seemed like a line you shouldn’t cross, and you learned a silence you now keep like a vow, letting Teenage Dave bounce off walls as you work.
* * *
Teenage Dave falls from a ladder, and that’s fine. Not only was he half man, but he also lacked humor, so next winter, you graft the understock from Tiny Dave with the scion from Teenage Dave to meld tissue for a Third Dave made from the best of both. You layer banana peels in the dirt and drop orange rinds on top to balance sweet with citrus because you want quirky, but not saccharine. When the vine finally offers a bloom, it’s blue aster. The petals curl in, so its yellow eye peeks shyly through a space, out from which explodes a man, roped with muscle, on a lanky frame. Smiling, humming an unknown tune, and headbanging.
You backpack the world. Start in South America, hop over to Africa, wander into Asia, and cross to Europe, where you hitchhike in Eastern Europe, catching rides in beat-up trucks and VW Vanagons. For a year, you sleep on trains, in train stations, at run-down hostels, and at the houses of strangers met while day drinking at local pubs. Not only can he put away the brew, but Dave Clone the Bro becomes a social highlight. A charmer adept at vagabond life. You see how a love of endless touring anchors deep in his DNA.
Dad Dave was also a vagabond of sorts, a sailor who loved Coors Light way back in the 1960s when it sold only in the American West. It was the first craft brew, a beer with mystique Dad Dave once said he would drive for—traveling from Texas or Tennessee to Colorado to buy a case. You used to fetch him a can when he worked in the yard, returning with it opened, having taken the first sip. Don’t spill, you’d say before he could explode with rage, because the horror a soldier experiences in war never ceases. His anger erupted in wrong moments all your life, but never when you opened and drank his beer. You let him drink in the quiet you knew he liked from you.
For Dave Clone the Bro, you do something similar: smile soundlessly as he regales pub patrons, spending your money on rounds. You love his confidence. You have a crushing need to be desired. His presence consumes all. You in a side seat, agonizing over his next move, just like in high school, after you lost your virginity to Big Dave, who had a girlfriend, because being side ass was better than being nothing.
* * *
Dave Clone the Bro dives headfirst from a Mediterranean dock into rocks, and you’re okay with this. You couldn’t find the courage to elbow your way to equal space in your pairing, so instead you watch his body wash away and begin again. Ready to make Dave smarter, stronger. Still confident, but less selfish.
You graft using rubber tree understock with the scion from Dave Clone the Bro and pile the soil with nut shells for protein. Reused dirt heaped upon reused dirt—a kitchen compost of your meals, moist and hardy and very you, and for the first time you think that “me” is as good a place as any to grow another person. Within weeks, stemmed Gladiolus flowers grow in many colors, and the tallest reaches toward the sky until the week it hits the ceiling and bursts, leaving in its wake a man—perfect height with long hair hitting squared shoulders. Nourished by the meals you’ve made, he’s meaty.
Thoughtful Dave is a sponge, obsessed with Jeopardy! and jigsaw puzzles. You obliterate every pub quiz you enter, and that summer becomes one of curiosity. He asks questions about childhood since he’s never experienced it, so you teach him to play Go Fish, slurp ice cream from the broken tip of a waffle cone, and ride a bike, which you did as a kid when talking-story—chatting out loud for hours about made-up rainbow people while circling a California cul-de-sac. Motion meant stories, and stories were life, but staying still—like sitting stoically in public—took willpower you lacked at eight years old, and once at a Sunday church service Dad Dave dragged you down the aisle by the hair when you failed. The congregation sang face forward to an altar as you cried and your feet fought to find ground, and years later some of those same congregants would say, “I didn’t know Dave had four kids,” when you introduced yourself at his parents’ fiftieth anniversary party as his youngest.
* * *
Thoughtful Dave was fine, but you’re too deep, too invested, in building a better man, so you hit him on the head one night and drag him out back, where you plant his feet so he becomes a rootstock. You splice his arm and peel back skin to expose soft green tissue and fold in scion wood from a money tree. Thoughtful Dave and the Pachira aquatica fuse until new growth scabs the wound and they share a single taproot that drills the earth. Every morning you sprinkle the tree with Miracle-Gro and after lunch dump hot peppers, garlic, and onion at its base, which transforms from a twist of vines into a trunk. Each limb sprouts a flight of sunset-colored begonias that drop in succession, revealing crackled bark flaking from fresh skin wrinkled with age folds. Hair shafts, threaded with single strands of silver not unlike your own, spike all over.
Final Dave looks the part of weekend dad, more so than his child-like predecessors, and you wonder if it’s weird that your cloning conflates lover, child, and husband. Maybe, but Final Dave doesn’t need to know that he’s made from backwash and dinner scraps. Still, he asks an aimless Why, and it’s not that you have no answer, but that you have no words. And if you did and could give them life—let them run across a page or ring through a loudspeaker—you wouldn’t need poor copies of Dave Grohl made from plants.
You’re done with cloning, so you cut down Final Dave with a rubber mallet and he, a hollowed stalk, crumples. You lop off his petiole arms and hack his leafy bits into mulch you distribute to plain houseplants: the pothos, the African violet, and the Philodendron. All begin to grow unhinged—Dave’s bulk proving to be superfood—and the plants sprout anomalies. Eyes, fingers, nails, teeth, lips, and sometimes toes. You prune. You clip daily. You cut out body parts. But it’s too late. Dave is everywhere. Always in everything. A million pieces of him bubbling up as warts on stems and stalks, derma infecting leaves, hair stubble shading tendrils that wrap bookshelves, line windowsills, and climb walls until you live in a warped jungle of his overgrowth, nurtured by a yearning that you no longer want to cultivate but also can’t contain. You curl into yourself and go quiet. A trauma-trained, second-nature state of existence you’ve never been able to shake, and you rock: eyes shut, ears covered, muttering the most useful thing Dad Dave ever taught you—glue and screw, glue and screw.
K.M. McCorkendale (@GirlwSpottedDog) is a DC-based, Missouri-bred writer who manages proposals by day and writes in her spare time. She previously wrote reviews for DC Theatre Scene, currently writes features for an annual sci-fi convention, and took a seventeen-year hiatus from creative writing. During those years, she learned to speak Malagasy, shower with one bucket of water, and quilt very poorly.