Outskirts Press, INC.

In Zerocuse we follow Jimmy who’s lost his family and his sense of home as he heads back to his twenty-year high school reunion to reconnect with … something, anything. He finds an unexpected cast of characters from his old high school whose names he can’t remember, his first girlfriend, and his old buddy Hogan  – now sober – who’s as cool as ever. Both elegiac and lighthearted, Zerocuse is a multi-layered story about the relative value of nostalgia, the unreliability of memory, and the power of reconnection.

As I looked around I again noticed everybody in there was having a great time. Red eyes, loud belly laughs, hugs everywhere. Several people were playing air guitar to “Sweet Child of Mine” and over by the corner a group of guys I sort of recognized (maybe the baseball team guys? Soccer team guys?) were standing in a circle screaming the lyrics. Behind the bar Rock poured a long line of tequila shots, maybe twenty in a row, and hands reached in from every direction to grab them. A loud “Cheers!” and down went the shots and a huge roar of hoots and hollers clashed with the loud music and, for that moment at least, I was totally and completely present. I decided to stay.