All My Sins

by

Craig Ryan

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts & Letters

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Masters of Fine Arts

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, FL

May 2019

Copyright 2019 by Craig Ryan

ii All My Sins

by

Craig Lee Ryan

This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor, Andrew Furman, Department of English, and has been approved by all members of the supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts.

Andrew Furman, Ph.D. Thesi Advisor

Eric L. Berlatsky, Ph.D. Chair, Department English ~ ~A? LA Michael J. }jidrswell, Ph.D. Dean, Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters Apci\ 17, '2.019 Khaled Sobhan, Ph.D. Date Interim Dean, Graduate College

111 Acknowledgements

The author wishes to express sincere gratitude to his committee members for all of their guidance and support, and special thanks to my advisor for his persistence, patience, and encouragement during the typing of this manuscript. The author is also grateful to the

English Program faculty for all their faith.

iv Abstract

Author: Craig Ryan

Title: All My Sins

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: Andrew Furman

Degree: Master of Fine Arts

Year: 2019

All My Sins is a collection of short fiction. The stories feature characters from

Florida struggling with family, sexuality, masculinity, ethics, and themselves.

v

Dedication

I would like to dedicate this master’s thesis to my family who’ve given me all of my stories, and to the workshopers, professors, colleagues, and students who’ve given me the courage and intelligence to tell them

All My Sins

Introduction ...... 1

The Master ...... 6

Infinity...... 15

My Brother Sweet Joy ...... 27

King Zero ...... 35

My First Driving Lesson ...... 49

All My Sins ...... 64

vii

Introduction

We live in confusing and desolate times. I say that not out of jest or to make light of my situation, nor to justify to you, the reader, the absurdity of my thesis, which I do believe to be at least a little bit absurd (what great art is not a little absurd?) but to explain, right from the onset, what you’re in for, which is a series of stories that delve so deeply into my personal life and my personal thoughts as to (I hope) make us friends. My writing is always, inescapably autobiographical, and, in this sense, one may get the feeling, coming into this graduate level thesis, that I am a nonfiction writer, but I think that to be an oversimplification. No, this is not nonfiction, and, in fact, most of it could never have happened on this real world (although such a blanket statement is always up for debate). Rather, this is simply what I see when I close my eyes. I’m trying to make that stuff come alive on the page.

Maybe that’s all any great writer (or aspiring great writer) does, or tries and fails to do. There’s nothing hopeful inside of me that makes me think that any of this succeeds in life—for we could debate on that word all our lives (the sweet irony!) but I do think that the heart beats in it occasionally with all my breath. I think it writhes—is that close enough? I think that my writing squirms, I think that it reaches. What I hope a piece of my writing may do before I die is grab, snatch, snare, bite, tear, and rip! But that’s neither here nor there.

I write the people I love. My father, my mother, my brother, my friends (what few

I have left!) my professors, my students and myself. Oh, I’m a great lover of myself, in

1 spite of the enormous insecurity, and the occasional nihilism. I write myself, in the great spectrum of myself that has existed since I was a little boy. It’s my belief that each piece is a little part of not just my own existence, but my own perspective, and it’s with that hope that I send these pieces your way, dear reader.

For you see, a lot of this never happened. Or, if it happened, it happened after I wrote it (my brother, for example, in “Sweet Joy” was actually beaten up with a baseball bat, though that’d happen months after I initially submitted the piece to my first workshop in 2013). Or, it probably happened completely differently than I remember it

(which is why I’m not entirely convinced I should ever be trusted with the label

‘nonfiction’ in my title. Then again, I’m not entirely sure I should be trusted even with a grocery list!) and thus I submit it, in tandem with stuff I feel comfortable calling ‘fiction.’

I write the working class, blue collar, edge of nowhere gritty surrealism that has been my experience these thirty years in South Florida. I no longer concern myself with questions like ‘truth.’ My truth is infinitely different from yours, and vice versa (Ralph

Emerson: “There are no facts, there is only art.”) It’s my belief that every human on this planet carries with them a truth, incalculably different from day to day, and in the overarching narrative of their decisions there is something intrinsically unique about them—even those who’ve never contemplated a single introspective moment in their lives (perhaps more so in the unexamined life does this phenomena occur!) in that they’ve never had a moment to question their existence and thus have led something close to absolute purity: the monkish purity of the drone! Those who’ve given their lives over to hedonism, to self-sacrifice, to religion, to work, to money, to companionship!

2 I write about those people, because they are my people, the people I love most in the world. I can’t help it (can anybody truly help who they love?) that I love wanton reckless abandon. That the question of their lives being a farce never enters their heads just makes them that much more endearing. There’s something majestic in their pursuits.

There’s something glorious in their achievements and in their failures.

I’m speaking of course, again about my family. My terrible, broken, loving, kind, angry, vengeful, distraught, psychotic, enabling, tender, beautiful family. I could go on.

Whoever escapes their past? I tell my students that fifty years from now they’ll still be caught, unwittingly at a grocery store, in line someday, bored out of their mind and staring at the back of somebody’s head and wham! There it’ll come. A memory from when they were five years old. The smell of somebody’s hair or scalp will do it. They’ll remember holding their father’s hand, and the way he smiled down at them, nudged them forward, and caught them with a little joke: “A little day-dreamer, aren’t you?”

Really, it’s a combination of memory and fantasy that has crafted them together. I try to write with all of my enthusiasm, with all of my zest, with all of my heart and brain and groin and guts—everything intrinsically “Craig” so that the distinguishing of what actually happened and what I’ve made up is so interwoven that even I can’t distinguish the two apart anymore. That’s what I think a writer has to do to bring to life these blank pages. You’re a bit of a conjurer, a bit of a magician, a bit of a necromancer (if you’re one of those who believes that the past is gone forever) and a whole lot of showman.

But which is better? Memory or imagination? That’s the question these three years during my MFA has kept bringing up (I never wrote a word of ‘nonfiction’ before this MFA). If I had to choose one, I’d choose imagination. Why? Because it’s your own.

3 Real life belongs to the world, real life belongs to the events and to the factual (as best as you can remember) real life belongs to those dry, drifting pages, which sit still as concrete, still as tombstones. But imagination has wings, has feathers, has stars and blood and beats and pulses and rages! A writer with imagination needs nothing else.

Besides, people read to get at the secrets of events, not to get at the factual. People read to fall in love, to be swooned, to be swept off their feet and left stranded. People read—do you not—for escape, but also to be entrenched and entranced, and I’d argue that there’s nothing more powerful in the world—no great showman or politician, not great scientist—as there is who’s able to capture the imagination.

And so I’ve drifted, during my MFA, into the realm of nonfiction, into writing my life as it actually happened. I don’t regret my decision by any means, because I think that the other thing a writer or an artist needs is to live without secrets or shame. A writer’s life is bared naked on the page, free and unencumbered. This often has drastic consequences (we are not a species that ever particularly trusts anyone who’s unencumbered—take a good look at any of your favorite artist’s lives, nor are we a species that’s ever particularly comfortable with ourselves, take a good look at what our favorite artists have done to themselves) but it is non-the-less a crucial one. I gave up the secrets of my brother, and of my girlfriend, and of myself in those vulnerable moments.

Telling the truth is a powerful thing hence why the Catholics still hold confession. I think there’s something naturally uplifting and cathartic about confession, I think that the very act of confession is absolution, and we just attribute this feeling to God, but it’s really the weight we’ve given up by telling secrets to strangers. But there is another truth that I

4 think even more powerful, and this is the secret truth of what we imagine to be happening out in the real world when we’re alone. That's what I'm trying to get at.

Hence, fiction.

5

The Master

My earliest memory is of my mom’s car, a copper-red ‘69 Camaro, being set on fire after a group of hoodlums tried to steal it. They tried to hotwire the thing, then gave up and just tried to set the dashboard and the cloth seats on fire, which they’d also failed to do, just smoked it out, so that it smelt like a forest fire thereafter.

Twenty-odd years later, after working their fingers and their backs to the bone, my parents saved up enough to buy a three-room condo in a gated community, but not fast enough to save me and my brother from the damage that the old neighborhood had done to us.

I knew this as I sipped on a beer late at night in the living room, watching nothing and thinking nothing, when I heard a car crash outside. I knew right away that it was my brother who’d endured the worst from the old neighborhood. The screeching wasn’t like the sudden impact of a car against metal, but like an enormous claw digging against glass and metal chalkboard, very slowly, and I pressed the beer to my head and said his name:

“Brandon.”

Five minutes later, he stumbled through the door. He was drunk, and I didn’t need to look at him to know he was drunk because he immediately asked me: “Bro, whatchu drinkin’ on?” slurring his words like a painting in the bottom of the ocean, almost indistinguishable from one another.

I said I had a beer.

“Save me one of those, Imma need it after this shit!”

6 A boy was behind him, screaming in a cellphone: “Yeah, we crashed it! We fucking crashed it! Totaled! I said: “To-taled!”

They went upstairs, and then Brandon came immediately down, staggering.

My brother looks exactly like me except that he’s a hundred pounds heavier and six inches taller. Even seven years younger than me, he looked like the older brother, baby-faced but with heavy eyes, blue and grey rimmed. A red face, that now looked like a lightbulb, ready to explode in crystal shards, and fat arms that dinosaured out of his extra-large black t-shirt. He would normally be silent, methodical, seething in his anger, but when he got drunk he was nasty, stupid, staggering, nonsensical and violent. But right now he was scared shitless.

“Come look at it?” he said. “Come look at this shit!”

“Your friend is gonna wake mom up,” I whispered, still holding the beer to my head.

“I already told him to shut the fuck up!” he screamed as he opened the door and stumbled outside.

We circled around the house. My brother walked to the front to pop the hood of this two-door Camaro, dark blue in the streetlights. I could tell just from the sound I heard inside while it was pulling up that it was undrivable, that no mechanic in the world could fix it without heavy machinery and a ton of cash to supplement the parts. And I could also tell that my brother had been involved in a hit-and-run, that that was why it wasn’t working, because he was scared and very little scared my brother except the thought of doing hard time. Of course, right now he’s looking at a long stretch up the

7 road at the Florida State Penitentiary, which, even at fourteen, we all knew was coming.

Scenes like these weren’t uncommon. Nothing could have saved him.

While he walked to the front, popped the hood, and stared blankly at the smoke rising from the engine, I walked around the car, and halted.

“Bro,” I said, “I know what’s wrong.”

“What?”

“There’s no tire over here.”

“What?”

“This car has no tire.”

Sure enough, the rim was bent and scraped. It had been driven to the point of becoming almost a triangle, jutting out underneath the car. Behind it, leading right out of the neighborhood, to a gate that had been stuck open (I suspected my brother of having destroyed the gate weeks earlier) and right down the street were two lines where the two edges of the rim had touched the road and dug it up. A track leading right to the car that stood between us.

“What?” he said again.

“You need to get out of here,” I said. “The cops will be coming soon.”

Doing something practical wasn’t my brother’s forte though, wasn’t in his style.

He slammed the hood, mumbled to himself: “Fuck!” and went back inside. I knew that whatever happened for the rest of the night would be a disaster. Another train wreck in a long line of train wrecks, which, like dominos would finally collapse and send my brother off to prison and my family back to the poorhouse, and all I wanted was to escape, so I

8 finished my two beers and got into my own car and headed to a friend’s house. As I pulled out of the neighborhood, I saw a police officer creeping, following the very obvious lines in the road, right into my neighborhood.

See, it’s different knowing what’s going to happen and watching it happen. I knew my brother was always doomed, but seeing that cop creep very slowly with her light pointed at the ground, I knew I had to go warn my brother. It’s the same compulsion in all of us Ryans that had doomed Brandon to his fate in the first place: our need to protect him, because maybe if we’d just let him get eaten by the wolves early on, like at age fourteen when he’d been stopped by the cops for drinking a bottle of vodka and skipping school or when he’d punched holes in our walls and stolen my mother’s jewelry and money out of my father’s wallet, or when he sold all of his own possessions—The

Xbox, the IPad, the video games, the movies—or when we all had to live like prisoners, watching our stuff all the time, keeping all of our possessions tucked underneath us as we slept, keeping things pushed against our bedroom doors so that he couldn’t pry them open with a butter knife and go creeping through your room, if we’d have just let him face the consequences one time, maybe, just maybe, he wouldn’t have ended up where he is right now.

I went back to the house to warn him. I parked at the end of the neighborhood and tried to walk nonchalantly by the cops, tiptoeing while a group of them pointed flashlights at the car, wondering how far the owners must have got. I creeped upstairs and knocked on my brother’s door. I felt like the perpetrator. He answered, looking even drunker than I’d last seen him.

9 “Yeah?” he slurred. Behind him, his friend sat on my brother’s mattress, still screaming into the phone: “Fucking crashed! Do you understand?”

My brother’s face hung in the doorway, and his body swayed lightly. His eyes were blue and empty of all thought. His shirt was off, and he had breasts and tattoos on his wrist reading, Family, like he’d refused to forget what he’d done to us (or maybe it was a gang-name, his other family, the one he’d always wanted to be adopted by).

“Cops are outside,” I said.

He stared blankly. “Okay.”

“I just wanted you to know.”

“Thanks,” he said, and closed the door.

My brother’s capacity for lying, cheating, stealing, and just all around scummy- ness was almost insurmountable. When he was fourteen he’d created a website designed to entice pedophiles to give up their credit cards information for the chance to look at images of my brother’s classmates—a false sale, designed to entrap them, steal their credit card information, and, to top it off, it came with the promise that if my brother went to jail (he bragged about this to my mother, when he was caught) they’d surely go to jail, too.

He was a master of manipulation, perhaps the Mozart of the simple con, but beyond the genius of a plan like that, of paper work and programing and telling people what they wanted to hear, acting dumb when he was caught, or belligerent, besides his capacity for bullheadedness in the face of confrontation, he was useless. In a fight, if he was drunk, he’d try to take on ten guys, he’d laugh when they beat him to the ground

10 (though he was big he couldn’t swing his fist to save his life) he’d spit blood and ask if their girlfriends taught them how to swing.

Anyways, Mom woke up of course, cursing, slamming the front door, middle of the night, and walked to the screened in front porch to smoke a cigarette, getting ready for yet another confrontation with my brother, knowing that something was up. He, again, feigned innocence, marching out behind her, asking her why she slammed the door, and that he was trying to sleep. Then, when the cops started walking around the house, with their flashlight beams circling, he went out to confront them. Still, shirtless, still drunk: “Hey, I heard a car crash out here. Is everything all right!”

He was a master. By age fourteen he’d gotten his own credit card, and by age sixteen the credit was so bad, he’d gone through so many banks and taken out so many loans, that he’d have to declare bankruptcy. Still, he’d ended up finagling a car.

It was a Lincoln town car, a tank. Something practically indestructible, and my brother would later destroy it with his drunk driving and his incessant need to press the pedal to the floorboard. (He was the craziest driver I’ve ever seen, he’d try to get in accidents at the end). He’d get into drug deals and get his car shot at. He’d drive his car through a house his first week. How he survived and stayed out of jail so long I’ll never know.

But even a Lincoln has a limit. The car would finally careen into the guardrail of an overpass along i-95 and the doors would cease to open. By this time, he’d have whiplash, and hardly be able to move. He was working at a bar in Jupiter—owned by one of our father’s friends—and he’d need a ride from me to get to work. I gave it to him

11 because it was a legal dollar, and I wanted him to keep the job because without it, we both knew what he would go back to. The same thing he never left.

I remember that day, it was twilight. My brother’s speech was starting to blur even when he was sober: his brain was stuck in a fog of despair. He had to force himself to complete a sentence. He asked me, as politely as he could, if he could smoke in my car. His arm was still hurting him from the car crash. He was mad that Dad hold told his boss that he was a drug addict and not to serve him drinks.

The drive was largely silent, though. I still loved my brother. I still remembered him as the kid who loved playing video games with me, loved to laugh. I stared out the windows. We had a rapport, in our silence we understood each other better than anybody else I’ve met my entire life, and I suspect it will always be that way. When I die, and I’m lying on my deathbed, I’ll know that there were only two people that ever understood me in my silence: my father and my brother.

At his work, a dingy bar full of old geezers smoking cigars in the dark, my brother shuffled along. It was small, quiet, and full of men. On the jukebox: Hank Williams. A sailor bar, and I wanted a beer after the long drive. Wanted a Hemingway cigar, wanted to relax. I got myself something strong, listened to the old stories of broken men, and tuned out for a second, while my brother mopped up.

In the corner was a pool table, and a couple of rednecks had just finished a game.

One of them—this squat fellow with a double chin and an accent so thick you had to lean forward to hear him—had just ordered a round for everyone (the place was that small, you could order a shot of fireball or Jameson for the whole crew and not even have to

12 break a fifty). In his excitement, he raised a glass and my shuffling, quiet brother had to squeeze past him to finish mopping. The man lowered his drink and bellowed:

“Hey son! What’s your name!”

“Brandon.”

“Put’er there!”

My brother shook his hand.

“Squeeze it like a man, boy, hell!”

“I am a man, whatchu mean?” My brother said, laughing with his open smile. He tried to squeeze harder but the man didn’t even flinch.

“I said put’er there, boy, hell!”

“I am!” my brother still laughed. But I’d gotten up out of my seat.

“Shake my hand,” I said.

“What!”

“Shake my hand.”

The man’s hand was iron. It was smaller than mine, but thick, and it was a clamp.

I felt my bones vibrating. My knuckles dug into each other. Some might have crossed over.

“Use both your hands, boy!”

I put the other around his hand, and squeezed. His face showed nothing. The music crooned and by now everyone in the bar was watching us. Sweat poured down my face. Smoke drifted by us. Somebody giggled. Finally, I broke down.

13 “Get him a shot on me,” I said. Everyone laughed. I’d lost, but I’d accepted it gracefully. We all raised our glasses. My brother had long since shuffled away, back into the dark.

“Boy won’t jack off for a week!” the man said, raising his glass.

“Maybe I can get you to do it,” I said, and everyone laughed again.

I found my brother by the bathroom, still mopping up. I shook his hand. I looked into his eyes—the boy I loved, the only person who could ever understand me. I told him to squeeze my hand and look at me. I told him not to crash his car, that his car, a car, was the one thing a man always has to own and treasure if he’s going to call himself a man.

His grip was still weak under mine, even though I could barely feel my fingers—which were swelling.

For a long time he said nothing. Then he asked if I could order him a beer.

14

Infinity

The first thing Abdul wanted to know was if I knew a secluded spot around campus. I thought he wanted a quiet place to read, and so I pointed towards a trail that led to an overpass where the trees blocked even the sunlight, which was fierce that day. I told him it was quiet, secluded, and, so long as he didn’t mind the all-around beauty of the place, probably the best spot on campus to get his reading done.

Abdul smiled at me and said: “What about smoke?”

“Then your best bet is the smoker’s pit, right next to the area.”

“What about weed?” he said.

“I admire your candor,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck. “For that, I’d recommend the parking lot.”

And, with that, I’d hope to go about my day of teaching. But he blocked my path and continued smiling, and that was the first time I really looked at him.

He was middle-eastern, young, dressed in a track suit, scrawny. It fit him too well, and made him look like a teenager. He stood too close to me, and started babbling a mile a minute about how he liked my candor, and my vocab, and was I an English major, and what was my favorite book, and what classes was I taking, and where was I walking and did I smoke weed? Not even a little bit? Come on, bro, just come hang with me.

I told him I was walking to get some coffee. I was an English teacher, I said, and he stepped back, open-mouthed.

“A teacher!” he said, clapping his hands. “Wow, how old are you?”

15 “Twenty-nine,” I said, walking.

“Shit, bro, I thought you were my age! I’m really interested in English studies, actually. I write every day. But I’m also really into math—I’m actually a senior here, and

I tutor on the side for a private company, but I’ve always wanted to take a poetry class— do you teach poetry? Man, I fucking love poetry, bro. But, you see, I graduate in the summer and it sucks because I’m trying to apply to med school and it’s the spring right now, you know? So that means that even if I get in it won’t be for another year, so I’ve got to work in the meantime!”

We were walking. His elbows bumped into me as he spoke. It was a familiar bump, as if we were intimate, as if we were lovers, and it occurred to me, briefly, that he might be coming onto me, that this might be how people in the twenty-first century approached one another. The desperate salesman. Maybe I’d have more luck if I were like him, always trying to meet strangers, to offer them marijuana, to get them to open up about themselves.

“But you see, I love math! That’s my passion. I love math with a purpose but the problem is that there’s no practical purpose to math, you know? Nobody, except a math tutor, gets paid to solve quadratic equations. And that’s not even anything. That’s basic math. Like, okay. Do you like math?”

This was my chance, I thought, looking at him again. Tell him that math blows.

But I couldn’t. He was so desperate in his attempts. His face was deeply scarred, like he’d been burned, and his bright white eyes shined in his brown face. His hair was cut to the scalp, and he looked at me like he really wanted me to say yes.

“It’s been eons,” I said.

16 “Then we’ve got a lot to talk about,” he said, following me.

We walked along the breezeway, where students passed us turning their heads at his loud, boisterous chatter. It was fascinating. He didn’t stop, he didn’t get discouraged, he didn’t slow down, and he didn’t lose track of what the train of thought was—albeit a very tangential and strange kind of logic that he was using. I myself only interjected to keep him onto the original strain, which was simply that he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. The problem, he said, was that he wanted money. A lot of it. I told him: Why bother with math then? Why bother with anything other than finance? That’s math, after all, right? He said that he wasn’t cut out for two hours of sleep, twenty-two hour days. Well, I said. Then you’re definitely not cut out to be a med student. He said that was different. He loved helping people. He loved medicine, the human body, he loved seeing how it worked, and treating every new patient like a story, a puzzle that had to be solved.

“Maybe your future is being an internist then,” I said, shuffling into the food court building, and heading for my coffee. He kept right at my feet like a little lapdog, ignoring the people walking past us, bumping into them. I pushed my speed up to keep him shuffling. He didn’t notice.

“I love people. It’s because—“here was the first time he slowed down with his speech. He even stopped walking so fast, and something hit him in the chest because he also got really quiet. “It’s because of my sister. She’s autistic. She’s twenty-three years old but she can’t speak any language. We speak Arabic at home, and English. She can’t talk. She’s got the mind of a three-year-old.”

17 Even I had to slow down for that one, and look at him.

“I left New York to come help take care of her. Her bills are through the roof.

And mine are going to be, too, if I become a med student. I’m trying to take out a two hundred thousand dollar loan.”

I kept walking. What was this kid’s problems to me? He was just like the rest of my students. His life was wearing him down, wearing him to the core, and here he was confessing his problems to strangers. And looking for what? Reassurance? What could I reassure him of? That his life would get better? That things were looking up? That one day everything makes sense, everything clicks, and all of your problems become manageable? Maybe I’d better tell him to start believing in the tooth fairy and liberty, justice and happiness for all?

But I couldn’t hurt him either, I couldn’t tell him no. I’d gone through it at his age, too. I’d had girlfriends that cut themselves, that laid down in the middle of the road and waited for cars to pass. I’d had a mother who’d try little stunts like that for attention, tried cutting her wrists and hanging herself. I’d seen it all and I’d done it all, and even though it wasn’t the same as leaving your future to come back and take care of your sister, who’s ailments (I suddenly started imagining her. Lying in bed. Drooling.

Speaking in a childish form of vowels. Pointing and crying and throwing tantrums. The smell of fecal matter. God, I needed a coffee!) were after all, not self-inflicted, and thereby more warranting of help. But what could I have told him!

“You’re a stronger man than I,” I said, strangely.

“Thank you,” he said. “I admire you, man. All teachers. I know I look like an idiot. I know I’m just a babbling fool, but I admire the hell out of anybody who’s willing

18 to forgo the wanton search for hedonism just to teach the cads and the clods a thing or two about literature! By the way, what’s your favorite book?”

I gave him something, just to shut him up. But it was becoming more and more clear that saying anything to this kid was just giving him license to talk more, to open up more to me, and it was becoming more and more clear that maybe he was somebody like my mother, who needed to be ignored, who needed to be avoided. I imagined her, at the house, alone, staring at the walls. My father had cheated on her for the whole marriage.

I’d discovered the condoms in his car, heard his pitiful excuses, until he didn’t feel like giving them anymore, until he started telling me flat-out: “I’m leaving her. I’m getting a divorce. I don’t deserve this.” Now, my mother would probably be at home, watching her favorite gameshow, The Price is Right. She talked to herself, just like this kid did.

I walked towards Outtakes, the coffee shop, and offered to buy him a cup, but he refused. He’d been talking about Camus. He wanted to know what I thought of the ending of The Stranger.

I said that I thought it was a beautiful attempt at explaining what happens inside of the man on the edge, a man convinced that the only thing that matters in the world are the tangible facts. Kind of like a man, I thought, who’d given himself completely over to math, to the provable facts, but Abdul corrected me.

“Basic math,” he said. “You said it’d been eons. You know that there’s different kinds of infinity? That’s where I’m at right now. Like, the measurable and the immeasurable. Like, you know about how there’s an infinite number between even one and two, right? Well, you put two numbers on a graph and if the two numbers, the two

19 lines, they correspond to each other, than you have a measurable amount of infinity. But if they don’t correspond—“

He started walking to catch up with me. I was halfway down through the store, had grabbed my coffee and downed it, and I was thinking of excuses to leave him already. What did I tell my students? Actually, I rarely had this problem with students.

Usually, they just wanted to know what grade they got on their last essay, and when was I going to post them online, and was it really important that they come to class today.

My second semester there, and I’d gone home every day to my mother, who’d be pacing the living room, red-eyed, or sleeping on the couch. When I came home, she’d follow me like Abdul was doing now and I’d be the one lamenting things, about how much easier my life was when I was just a student, about how I hated teaching, about how it was more fun just to hand out flyers promoting car shows or coupons for pizza joints. And my mom would just follow me saying, “It’ll get better, Jamie. It’ll get better,” and I’d have to suppress my rage, as I was doing now, picking up my snacks from the little snack counter. Abdul rattled off about his love affair with numbers, about how when numbers get this advance, it’s not a science at all, it’s more like an art.

All at once, he stopped and said: “So you think that the narrator was a madman, huh?”

I didn’t know how to answer him. I just stepped forward in the line.

“Don’t you think he felt helpless? Don’t you feel bad for him?”

I paid for my coffee and smiled at the register worker. We both shared a glance like, Jeez, some people.

20 “I feel like he was triumphant at the end of the novel. Like he’d finally found his purpose. That’s what it means to me.”

“I wish you were one of my students,” I said. We were outside again, back into the daylight, back into the bustle of human bodies and I was headed towards my office and away from this insanity. You answer one question and all of this happens!

But at the same time, I thought, I meant what I said. If just one of them had been this curious about my lectures! If just one of them needed my confirmation this much!

And what had I done to make them need it? What could I do to make them need it?

“That means a lot to me,” he said, and looking at him it all became clear to me.

He was lost. He was so lost that he was on the verge of something.

We’d made it outside. He’d stopped, stared at me. He was waiting for something.

His lips trembled.

“Are you like that narrator? Are you trying to find something of substance?”

“Let’s talk about it over weed.”

“I don’t smoke. Answer the question.”

“I want purpose,” he said, looking away—that hateful, don’t-touch-me, kind of glance in his eye. I stepped towards him, put my hand on his shoulder.

“Think about it this way, man. You do have a purpose. Your sister, right? That’s what led you to this spot. That’s the infinity—your love for her, and her tragedy. That’s your story. Camus’ character couldn’t find it, but you have!” He was smiling, wiping tears from his eyes. “You have, dude. Why are you so upset?”

He took my hand, leaned forward and hugged me. I felt ungodly awkward. I saw every student walking past, and how their faces turned.

21 All in all, though, I felt better about my day. I taught my students, who, by now, had learned to only half-listen to my lectures. A few of them, though, glanced up from their cellphones as I spoke. I didn’t just go through the prepared speech. I stopped and walked through the aisles of their desks, and tried to look at them. I tried to speak to them. A few of them tucked their cellphones away. I went through ethos, pathos, logos, I talked about the counter-argument, the infinite depth that writing takes, and while I walked I felt a charge passing through me. I started talking Camus. The Stranger. I let myself get carried away! When I looked up, I saw what I’d never seen before: all of their eyes on me, and their attention! Then, just after that, I looked at the clock at the corner of the room! I’d spoken five minutes past the end of class!

Dismissed! I said, feeling better than I had since I’d started Grad school. “Read your Camus!”

I drove the ten miles to the house, singing with the songs on the radio. I remembered that Abdul had told me he’d played the guitar, that he loved music. I remember that he said he couldn’t stop loving things, couldn’t focus his energy! Well, who the hell needs focus! Let the goddamn energy soar, I say! I hit the gas, going seventy-eighty miles an hour. When I got home, I parked in a guest spot and damn near kicked the door down to my mother’s house.

“Mom!” I said. “I’m making waffles!

She was on the couch, silently watching television. She got up immediately, and started following me around the house.

“Waffles and syrup!”

“I haven’t seen you in three weeks!”

22 “Waffles and syrup, mom! We’re eating today!”

“How’s classes been?”

“Mom, I hope you’re hungry!”

“You look changed,” she said, standing back.

“Mom, how have you been!” I said to her. Then, I looked at her, my energy waning. In the kitchen, which was eye-searching peach in color, and cramped, I tried to calm down. “How’s life? Were you ever good at math, mom?”

She looked at me, like a crazy man. “Your father,” she said.

“I’m asking about you!”

“He did it,” she said, slamming a cupboard. “He always did it!”

“Mom,” I said, following her as she stormed outside. “Mom, I’m talking about you!”

“Leave me alone!” she screamed, stepping out into the porch. “Leave me the hell alone!”

I walked outside, and told myself: You’re a professor. You’re a goddamn lecturer.

People admire you! It was twilight by now, and the cherry of my mother’s cigarette glowed red in the half-light. She was standing in the dark, and facing away from me. She stood only five feet tall: a little shadow smoking a cigarette. I looked where she was looking—towards the punching bag set up on a stand in the middle of the screened-in front porch.

“You ever hit the bag, mom?” I said.

She inhaled the cigarette without saying anything.

23 “I met this kid today. A student. Not of mine—but he, we had a talk. Right?”

She exhaled smoke.

I started pacing the front porch. I thought about everything I could say to her, everything I could say to everyone. How life was just one big story—and there were all these theses—all these counter-arguments we walk around with every day and how we’re always trying to fight with eternity and the infinity and how connected everything is and how it’s all a fight against loneliness and how silly that sounds because we’re never alone and we’re never not lonely—it’s just part of being human and how short the time is that we have on this planet and how lucky we are to be born healthy and how nothing matters in the tiny little space you have between the infinity of death and the infinity you have before you were born and it’s never enough time to do anything that you want to do and how much I loved her—how much I was dying to love her and to let her know that as a son all I’d ever wanted to do was make her proud and how today was the first day I’d ever been a teacher I’d ever really felt like I’d taught somebody something and how good it felt and how I felt on top of the world and everything suddenly seemed so possible! I felt all of that raging inside of me and she said:

“He had a small prick, your father.”

I looked over at her in the dark, still smoking.

“You inherited it from him.”

I moved towards her. “What?”

“He couldn’t keep it up for very long, either. It always was raging, but it went away just as soon as he stuck it in.”

She ashed her cigarette, let it fall to the ground, stomped it.

24 “Mom, I’m trying to tell you about—“

“I hope whoever she is, that she was worth it,” she said, walking inside. She slammed the door in my face. I’d been trying to follow her inside.

I saw Abdul just once more. I was in the library, on the computers, and he was walking up and down the halls listening loudly to music, which he’d been humming along with. His hair had become ragged, and his shoes were muddy. It’d been raining all week, and he was leaving little brown footprints on the library floor. His music was so loud that a few of us, on the computers, looked up at him, but he was beyond caring about it. He was beyond caring about anything.

Grades were due, and I was submitting them in the only quiet space I knew of.

They’d gone terribly. Six F’s. I had to submit papers along with each grade justifying it, showing proof that I’d emailed my students about their absenteeism about their missing reports. I was sitting there thinking about my future here at Florida Atlantic College, when his music switched to a phone call.

“Sis. Sis, it’s me. I need to go back into rehab. I need you to get your insurance together. Or give me their number, let me call them. Because! Because I’m . . . I’m thinking about . . . Yes! Yes, all—all the time! No, please? Please let me tell them. No, you can tell it to the insurance people! Tell them I switched to Oxys, and I’m tired of living this way. No! No, I can’t go back to school, I’m at school right now! Yes, well, I realize that. Only two weeks left! Who cares if I’m . . . I’m sorry, but I speak candidly when I can!”

25 He stopped walking and leaned against the wall. Then he fell into a crouch, and started speaking Arabic. I got up, walked past him and he didn’t even flinch. He’d forgotten me.

I made it towards the double doors of the library and stopped. I saw a library attendant walk past him, stop, look back at Abdul as he screamed in Arabic. Then he turned around and continue walking.

I thought about everything I could say to him outside. About how life gets better.

About how my mother had found herself in a hole, and couldn’t dig her way out of it. To think about his sister, about how smart he was, about how far he’d come in life already, about what it meant to be alive, how—if you want to talk about infinity—here’s something immeasurable: death, the infinity of death, about how whether you live two seconds or two hundred years nothing compares to it.

I thought about all of this outside. I thought about holding Abdul and what it might mean to him, what it might mean to me.

Then I called campus security and let them deal with it. I had grades to turn in.

26

My Brother Sweet Joy

Me personally, I liked the backyard games best: baseball before the sky got dark, the trees we used for bases, mom pitching, the neighborhood kids coming to watch, spit, rub their hands with dirt, give it a twirl. “Y’all call this a game?” And we did! My bro’d slouch away from second base while mom kept an eye on everything, the crack of the ball making the back of my knees buckle, and we’d form lines behind home plate, while dad cooked steaks on the grill, his belly flung past his waist, rubbing his bald head! Don’t tell me you don’t remember? Shy around the kids, Derrick—my little brother—,he’d just grin and laugh, whisper how to hold the bat, to stand a little wider, cock the bat so that the ball went up, or how to throw a pitch! Even mom had to step back, look at his fingers as he explained it.

“Mom? Where’s your elbow at? What’s it doing way over there?”

We didn’t even argue at this point. How could we? His knees, cocked, the pivot of his foot as he swung, the expression on his face when we hit a neighbor’s window once, playing by ourselves: devious, elated. As I looked back at him and heard the crash, I saw one eyebrow arc to his hairline, like: Dear God, Big Bro. Did that really just happen?

“What do we do now, tough guy?” I said, running down the block, trying to make him stop and laugh.

“Run faster!” though we were already inside our house, feigning ignorance with sly smiles and eyes that everyone could read, especially mom, when the neighbor showed

27 up with a baseball that looked suspiciously like it’d been signed by my bro’s entire baseball team.

“Who do I have to thank for this?” she said, and I hesitantly rose my hand, but he stepped forward and said, “Nah, don’t listen to him. It’s mine.”

Man, my little brother, it’s like he never stopped growing, more built for football than the pitcher’s mound, or a bat, too big to let the older kids push him around, even me.

I caught him at the bus stop with his first cigarette and I wanted to give him a good slap, but he wouldn’t have it. “What? I’ve seen you smoking them, too!” And showing up later, at the house, both bloody and bruised, dirt hanging off our kneecaps, mom shaking her head, asking what we’d done, what was the reason, and we both said nothing, but when my eye caught his, he raised an eyebrow and said, “What?” and we were at it again, this time her between us, a squat woman with a mullet and a mean arm. And she slapped me in the face for being the older brother. “What?” she said, and I knew where he’d got it from. “You goin’ hit me too now?” she said, face burning, an open palm poised to strike again. I walked past her, saying nothing, past his room, saw the height measured, the dates that dad marked every birthday with a permanent marker and realized my brother had gotten bigger than me, and still had a long ways to grow.

Then, he knocked on my door, a baseball in his hands and a grin beneath a swollen eye. “Buck up, Big Bro. Let’s play a game! What? What’s a fight? You got me good, but now it’s over and I’m not mad. How long can I be mad? What am I, huh? A mook?” and I sat looking up at him, from the floor, setting down the video game controller, like goddamn, he’s the younger one? Really? And he put his hand on my

28 shoulder as we slid open the backdoor, apologized, put the bat in my hands. “Try not to break any windows now,” he said, and before I could point out that it was him who knocked them clear of the box elder we used for second base, into the rows and rows of white duplexes that lined our little block, with wide windows and glass doors dying to be smashed, if only we could hit it that far, he was suddenly out there, in the dying light of a

Florida winter, begging me on. “You hit this one, I’ll give up cigarettes for good! I’ma join an anti-ad campaign! Destroy all traces of tobacco from the earth! The scourge of all nicotine will be squashed! Come on! This one’s got a lil spit on it! Don’t tell me it’s too dark to see the ball either, I’ve heard that one before! If I can see my hands, you can see the ball! What? Don’t tell me the fight got to you! If I can play, you can play!”

I tapped the bat on the grass by my swollen foot, which he’d fallen on top of and twisted. “Right here, tough guy! I want the ball right here!”

He whipped his hand across his face, a fist as big as the pitcher’s mound. “I ain’t even seeing you! You sucker punched me! Where you at? Huh? What? Am I playing by myself? You string bean! If you ain’t have a sucker punch you wouldn’t have nothin’!

Got me good!”

I laughed and lifted the bat to my right shoulder, let it hover, gave a few ghost swings. “Yes, I did.” Then, I spit. “And still, you won.”

Then, with a shake of his head, he raised his knee and flung a ball past my face with more speed than I’d ever be able to hit, though I tried, again and again, until the night wore out, until everything went dark and all I heard was my brother’s voice, begging me on, Hit this one, big bro, hit this one! What? Come on! One more, one more.

29 Thing was, he was always getting into fights and it got to the point, I walked out to the park, and saw him on top of some kid, pummeling him, I’d swallow and start humping it over, ready to push them both aside.

How many times did I feel my chest go weak, strutting between crowds of other kids, pushing them, squeezing through, as they crowded along the swings and the slides, up on the platforms of the playground, cheering, cars slowing down to watch? How many times did I have to catch an elbow in the face as I pressed my way on through, not even seeing the kids fighting, because I didn’t have to see, I just knew, felt instinctually, that there, just along the sand, I’d find him, fighting two or three kids, over-powering them, lifting one of them into the sky?

“I’m just tired of it,” he said once, walking off from a fight. “They think I’m big and soft. They think I’m stupid. Am I stupid? You my big brother, you supposed to tell me these things. Am I soft? I ain’t the best in school. I’m okay. My science teacher called me something today, I ain’t even hear em much. But the class laughed. Something like:

‘Mr. O’Hara, have you even deemed fit to break the plastic on your textbook or am I just being delusional: the thought of you breaking open the plastic on anything besides a box of Twinkies?’ And the class starts laughing. ‘I broke it in. Here’s my homework right here,’ I whispered, and you know, I’m hot, my face is burning. ‘A blessing,’ he says, and the class is laughing, just cracking up. ‘Oh sweet, sweet joy, my night is complete! Class, look! O’Hara has given me his homework!’ Now they calling me Sweet Joy. The whole class.” My brother grinned, blood in his teeth and gums. “I made somebody happy today, at least.”

30 “We gotta clean you up before mom sees you,” I said, brushing off his pants, the leaves tacked on his kneecaps, the dirt in his hair. He kept fidgeting, you know how he could get. “Mr. Lancapsul? He’s the worse. Need to fire him. He’s an asshole.”

“That’s some nickname, huh? Sweet Joy? ‘Here comes Sweet Joy O’Hara, off to the mound, gonna knock it clear of the park. Ladies and gentlemen, now would be the time to protect your vitals, that ball’s liable to shoot clear of the stadium. I’m protected by glass, ladies, don’t think my booth isn’t open to you.” My brother pushed the hair out of his eyes. “What?” he said, and smiled. He musta saw the look I was giving him. “The announcer’s always lonely in my dreams.”

How can you argue with that? How can anyone argue with that? A group of kids—roughnecks, surrounding him at the bus stop, you’re damn right I was there, busting a beer bottle, waving it around, screaming: “Come on, come on!” red lights of the bus flashing, kids sticking their heads out the windows. And even my brother stood shocked,

“Jesus, Jimboy, where you really gonna use that thing?”

When the school called and said he got knocked out by some football player, I was there in the parking lot, circling the fence, asking who knew Captain so-and-so, like my puny ass would have ever won the fight. The school police ushed me off with a warning, but I was getting fed up. And when the neighborhood showed up on my front steps, baseball bats in hand, a scowl on every face, I knew what happened. He’d finally hit the wrong kid. Simple as that. The bus that screeched to a stop, that was him, in the back, a fist arching up, slamming down on the wrong kid.

31 “What?” I said, to the crowd just outside my house, kids in white t’s, wearing scowls, cracking their knuckles. “What? You want him? Not a one of you would fight him one on one! Not a damn one of you! You want to fight him? Why? Cause he’s so big? You need a bat? You need a weapon? What happened to manhood? What happened to fighting fair?”

“You got about two seconds,” one of them said, and I was already on the ground, feet trampling over me. Feet and knuckles, and a baseball bat. Teeth. Copper. Screams, the room spinning, the sky spinning. Someone yelling “Cops! They calling cops!” and being left on the front stoop, laughing. I laughed, I kid you not, because I sent my brother running long before they came, to hit the canals, trail out of that godforsaken neighborhood. “And don’t come back!” I shouted, not at the gang stomping away, but to my brother. I laughed when the police picked me up, a crowd outside my house, shaking their heads, trying to put their hands on me, ask if I was all right, and I laughed when the nurses wrapped me up (just a few lousy broken bones) and I stopped laughing when my brother showed up at the hospital, my leg strung up high in the air.

“Guess I’m going to be riding the bench for a while,” I said. He looked forlorn, defeated, as if my defeat had hurt him more than his own.

He touched my cast, signed by our mother and father and no-one else, like it was unworldly.

“Hey, Sweets, Buck-up,” I said. “Come sign my cast! What? What’s a little fight?” but he still didn’t smile, and I saw something in my brother I’d never seen before.

I saw anger. He looked down at me, with his thin lips slightly open, and an expression so blank that I had to repeat myself. “What? What?”

32

Man, he was fast. For a big guy he could take off, book it straight down the block like a guy half his size. Before I even yanked myself off the bed, he was halfway down the hospital corridors, up the stairs. I made phone calls—my parents, my friends, even, begrudgingly, the police. He had taken off though. Shuffling down the street, sunlight in his eyes, barely breaking a sweat, cursing himself, lightly. “I ain’t gonna allow that shit.

He my big brother!” Then what? Me trying to shuffle myself out of the hospital room, and look like a fool. Orderlies like linebackers, grabbing me by my wrists. “Where you goin’?” A nurse, with a tiny mouse-face, flicking a needle. Screaming. My mother and my father in the room, later that day. A look on their faces—a look that they both shared as if they shared the same face, a mask. My brother, running down the block. The sun gone down. Screaming. How many did he take? Pushing, shoving. A fist. My parents not more than two blocks away. The neighborhood lined up so that screams echoed, people standing in the threshold of their doorways, with blank expressions (some of them, I know, calling the police, some of them muttering to themselves, ain’t none of my business, ain’t no problem of mine, they do it to themselves) and my brother getting up off the ground, in this crowd, shirtless boys surrounding him. Spitting blood onto his shadow, saying (I can hear him) “He’s my brother! He my brother!” They’d let him rise to his knees before hitting him again. Let him get up, let that bastard get up. You stay down boy, ya hear? You stay down. He getting up, he still wants it. I don’t care if they callin’ the cops, he wants it. You want it, big boy? Sweets? You good? He still wants it.

Then hitting him, kicking him. That boy still wants it now. Get off me, he wants it. And my brother rising, both arms in the air. What? That all? That—then nothing. Then, a club

33 to the back off his skull, and the sirens blinking in darkness, a pitch black, and the faces of neighbors strained. And the faces of my parents, in my room. A face they shared. And my face, looking at theirs. Not saying a word.

***

Anyways, that was all a long time ago. He stood six foot five at the end of it, before he was to become what he was to become, before he rose from the ground that day and all that was left of him was his anger. Taller than my father, who’s started to slouch in his old age, and my mom is a shrimp, like me. We don’t talk about him much. He passes silently through the house, his anger palpable, and out into the world, where he does God knows what. Mom occasionally talks about the backyard games. It must be hard, every time she walks out for a smoke: there’s the field, the neighborhood that curved, where everything echoed. She lights a smoke, and there he is again, a little kid hitting the bases, one after another after another.

34

King Zero

Daniel speeds down Lake Osborne. He passes me a Black and Mild. I can’t stop looking at my face in the visor of his Volvo, thinking I’m a horrible boxer.

We slide in the rain, roll up on low curbs. He told everybody at work he’s buying a motorcycle, that he wanted to take me home and enjoy his last week driving a cage.

Todd told him he’d lose five bucks off the top of his tips for leaving early, but Dan just rolled his head and wagged his finger. Todd couldn’t say anything to that.

“Come on, Bus’um, cheer up! I never seen a more beautiful pie-face in my life!

The trajectory on that fall may have defied the laws of physics!” Dan says, through smoke, making a left turn that slides the car so fast my head tilts out the open window.

“You wanna drive? Hit this black again! Shit, relax!”

“I should have kept my hands up,” I say, licking my busted lip.

My left eye has swollen shut. The cooks actually left a frying pan full of salmon burning to study the purple bruise, held my face against the florescent lights, and decided

I needed to go home.

“Your hardest punch wouldn’t have hurt him,” Dan says. “Not in a million years.

Never should’ve happened.”

“I heard Jessica wanted to box me next.” A lisp has formed ever since my lips started swelling. “Everybody had their money on Jessica.”

“You’re real popular at the Stankin’ Anchin’. How’d you get this job?”

“My father.”

35 “They’re hard on the busboys.”

“Dan, I think that light was red . . .”

“Hey, they were hard on me when I was a busboy! Til I started scaring them!

Carrying two bus pans at the same time! Smiled at ‘em! Took those bus pans back so fast they ain’t even know they had dirty dishes, hell! Cleaned those damn tables so fast they saw their own faces in the polish!” He grins into the smoke, passes me the black, and his face changes. “Shit. I hope your parents ain’t too pissed. Tell ‘em it was an exercise in durability. Or you walked home and got jumped or somethin’. They’d buy that.”

“I’ll go to sleep before my dad sees me.”

“Eric comes at you again, come find me.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m serious.”

“One day I’ll repay you,” I say.

“Bus’um,” he says. “Your stops almost up.” He slams the brakes suddenly, and I brace myself against the door. “You okay?”

“Yes.”

“You sure?” He offers me the black again, smoldering between his massive pink fingers.

“The lights in the living room are off,” I say, looking across the dark lawn. “Do you want a beer? I owe you for the ride,” my voice trails off, “and for breaking up the fight . . .”

36 The car engine dies. We’re both in khaki’s, but he’s donned a Hawaiian shirt, red, crisp. His blonde hair is cut to the scalp of his narrow head. His skin has reddened in the

Florida sun, and even this late at night, as the rain dies down he moves with gust, popping the trunk, unhooking my bicycle, twirling the wheel back on, helping me chain it to the fence in the back porch. I peel off my blue collar in the darkness of the house, motion to the kitchen, for him to grab a beer from the fridge. My father is so sure I’d never grab one. I haven’t.

“I’ll be there in a second,” I say, shuffling towards the bathroom. When I hear the fridge open, I turn on the bathroom light.

In the mirror, over the sink: every bruise I count on my face is another reason not to show up tomorrow: the left eye, swollen, bluish-purple from a right hook that came too low to see in the flickering streetlights outside the restaurant; copper-tasting split lip that twists my mouth into a grimace from a quick rabbit punch that slipped between my guard—the one I pie-faced. I reach for the drawer marked “Medical supplies” (everything in my house is labeled) and rub iodine on a q-tip, touch it to the hill on my head that’s been forming ever since I slammed it on a dumpster. I flinch, curse under my breath.

“The shit is this?” Dan says, standing in the doorway, his arms up, elbows pressed to the doorframe, an expression on his face like I ran over his dog. “What? You trying to be the next goddamn Audrey Hepburn?”

“I look like a horror show,” I say. “Customers are going to lose their lunch tomorrow.”

37 “Have a beer. They’re battle-scars, Bus’um. Be proud. And, hey, let’s get out of this house. Fucking gives me the creeps. All these labels? Why is there a spot marked in the fridge for beer!”

“I ain’t one to judge,” Daniel continues, outside, leaning against the hood of his car. “Should see my house. I hear gunshots every night! People bucking off and I gotta fall to the floor!” He crooks his head at me, lifts my chin. “Damn that’s a nice shiner.

You look like you’ve been in a fight finally!” He sighs. “I done told ‘em not to fight you,

Bus’um. I’m like, ‘It’s James. James. The fuck? Box me! I’ll get the gloves out right now! You peckerwoods!’ Ya’ll ain’t wanna box me! Wanna pick on the smallest guy at the store!’”

“I heard you broke one of Billie’s ribs the other day,” I mumble.

“Listen, James. You hearing me? You’re small. And skinnier shirtless than I thought a guy could be. Bout my size when I was ten! But hey, you got speed on ‘em.

That’s what I don’t understand. I see you over there polishing silverware all day, off in no-man’s land, and I want to punch you! Motherfucker, you’re the fastest person we got on staff! Make some money! Get promoted! Buy my goddamn car!”

“Is it true?”

“What? Billie? Hell, Bus’um, I barely hit the guy! Everybody wants to make a pageant out of everything!” He finishes his beer, and tosses it into the garbage can. “Tell your dad I said thanks for the beer. And show up tomorrow! You scare ‘em with your enthusiasm! Work your balls off! Be like: ‘Yeah, ya’ll beat me up, but y’all still ain’t nothing! Motherfucking looked good falling down! Ain’t nothin’! And guess what? I’ma be back tomorrow, too!’” He grabs my hand, squeezes, glares at me so intensely that I

38 feel my chest constrict. “If I don’t see you there, I know where you live. Don’t make me come looking for you, Busboy.”

II

The Anchor Inn resides on the waterfront, beside Lake Osborn, a squat building, faded blue. A haze hangs on the parking lot from the heat, where I lock up my bike.

Daniel’s white Volvo sits in the dirt parking lot, right where I boxed the night before, and it takes a great deal of willpower not to run off, unhook the bicycle, quit the job. In the front window, Dan appears, headphones on, bobbing his blonde head, leaning on a mop.

He knocks on the glass, presses his middle finger to the window, grins, and it’s all over.

He’s seen me.

Inside, it’s murder. The whole crew has gathered in the kitchen. King Zero, they’re calling me, because of the big black eye. “Zero! Thou holy squire! How is your

Excellency this fine afternoon! Back from the land of pie-faces and dirt naps?” Eric says, patting me on the back.

I flush, throw up my shoulders. “Everything was spinning,” I say. “You got me good.”

“Show me your lips!” Billie says. “God, it looks like a cold sore!”

“I still wanna match,” Jessica says, grinning. “I was mad when they let you leave.

I saw you strapping your bike in Dan’s trunk and I’m like ‘No! What the heck is going on?’”

“Why do you want to fight me?”

39 “I don’t know,” she says. “I could win. I think I could win.”

“I got her throwing crosses the other day,” Billie says. “Jessie’s a mean fucking fighter.”

“I don’t want you bussing tables looking like that,” Todd says. “You can bring the bus pans to the dishwasher and polish silverware. Help the prep cook cut carrots or something.”

“Leave the little busboy alone,” Dan says.

“You know,” Billie says, pulling a tray of ribs out of the oven, sweating hard already, “back in the day it wasn’t boxing. It was wrestling. Dirty Dan there used to be the one getting his ass kicked. I’d put him in a full nelson and he’d scream—serious— and I’d be like, ‘No! Tap out!’ And this kid—dead serious, he’d start shouting in that hillbilly accent: ‘No! You peckerwood! I ain’t tapping out! You gon’ have to kill me!

No!’ And I’d have to break him. Put him in a sleeper hold to finally shut him up.” His face winces, and he reaches for his back, thinks better of it, and tries to smile. “Of course, he was a lot smaller then, too.” Billie says. “Puny, really.”

“Was built like a frito,” Dan says, opening the flapping doors to the hallway.

“And, hey, Work used to get done back in the days too! Anybody remember that?”

“Somebody needs to buy him a motorcycle, and fast,” Jessica says, watching the flapping doors, Dan’s back as he disappears down the hall. “Every time he pulls out in that Volvo my chest leaps. He’s going to kill somebody.”

“Did you really have to choke him out?” I ask Billie.

40 “Why do you think we stopped? Man, was he pissed! But it started getting bad.

Last thing I need to do is give CPR to some kid whose gone limp. I mean, I like the guy!

Moxy! He had moxy!”

“They don’t want any more boxing,” Todd says, gesturing with his head, meaning the owners. “Liabilities. And if I have my ass canned there won’t be any gloves next time. That I promise you.”

“I see a white streak on my car, I know who I’m looking for,” Jessica says.

“That’s all I’m saying. Who’s liable for that?”

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Todd says, pointing at me. “Work did get done back in the days. It’s one thing I do miss.”

***

Daniel walks up to me at the waiter’s station where I stand, polishing forks, alone and pokes me in the ribs, middle of the night. “Bus’um, ain’t you tired of this? The way they treat people here?”

“What?”

He sits down against the shelf, shoves a bus pan over. A full restaurant is just around the corner, he has to whisper. “They’re taking bets, Bus’um. They bet on everything. A dog squats against the pavement, they bet on how long it’ll take to shit.”

I run my tongue along my split lip.

41 “Eric. Todd. All of ‘em. There’s been a bet going around. How long will it take before Dan kills himself on his bike? Funny, right? Just like they’re betting on how many punches you’ll get in, before Jessica knocks your ass in the dirt.”

“Wow.”

“They’re just going to tell me this, to my face.” He opens and closes his right hand. “Grease stain. One big grease stain.”

“What are you going to do?”

“We. What are we gonna do.” His eyes flare. “I don’t know yet.” He stands up, rolls his shoulders and does something strange. He points to his temple. “Hit me.”

“What?”

He taps his temple, purses his lips, stares at the floor. “Right here, Bus’um.”

“Are you crazy?”

“They said I’m going to hell when I die. Ain’t that funny? Right to my goddamn face.”

“I’m not going to hit you.”

“If you don’t punch me right now I’m going to break your fucking arm.”

“Dan . . .”

“Do it!”

I swing, punch him so hard that my hand throbs and he grins and laughs as I shake it, muttering to myself.

“That was good, Busboy.” He rolls his head, pumps his powerful shoulders.

“Okay. Now to face table twelve again. Smile. Gotta smile.” He grins at me, flashes his yellow teeth and for a second I think he’ll hit me. But instead he says: “I hate it when

42 everybody has to split the check. Eight ways? Like I’ve got all the time in the world to be swiping cards!” He grins, walks casually out into A-room, his hands locked behind his back like he’s in handcuffs and I hear his southern twang ringing: “Yes, ma’am. Oh, no problem. Y’all want to split the check? No problem at all.”

Twelfth street. Hip hop throbs through the open windows of passing cars. Daniel stops next to a dirt road, a tow truck sitting in the drive way, let’s the engine idle. He hasn’t spoken the whole ride, driving slowly, methodical, has taken pulls from his cigar without offering it, and now, finally, he looks at me, his face hanging, a deep breath, like he regrets something he can’t define. “I don’t want you to feeling bamboozled, Busboy,” he says, then takes a long drag on his cigar. “Your father is waiting for you at home. It’s your call. We’ll swing out of here right now.”

I say nothing, sitting on his slick leather seats, staring at a ripped spot between us, the white Styrofoam pouring out. Two Rottweilers gallop to the fence, let their tongues drop, bark.

“Just remember you had a chance,” he says.

“What exactly are we doing?”

He opens his door. “You are getting the boxing gloves out of my trunk. And try and look mean. Scare somebody! Lesson one!”

“Wait, is this your house?”

43 “Trunk, Busboy. Boxing gloves. We’re going to figure some shit out tonight.” He turns away, peels off his Hawaiian shirt. “And don’t you look at me like I’m crazy! I got you under control!”

Outside of work, he’s dressed in a black tee, jean shorts. I’ve seen him sweating over orders all night, rushing to the back to grab bus pans (my job), lifting thirty pound trash cans into reeking dumpsters, taking back a whole table, cups, plates, silverware

(One trip, Busboy! One trip! You ain’t got all day!) but he’s still throwing his arms around, holding my wrist, telling me how to stand, to tuck my chin to my chest, look out the top of my eyes. His boxing gloves were sweaty before I put my hands inside them, hot, stuffy. “Left hand in front of your face, just below your eyes. That’s it. Now the right one beside your ear, like you’re on the phone.”

His red face hangs in the street-lights. Gravel pops under our work shoes, his

Rottweilers bark against his chain-link fence. They leap on their hind legs as we move, lift their enormous heads into the sky, bark so loud you can feel it behind your knees, on your neck, as manic as Dan himself, who’s eyes pierce you, never blinking, never turning away.

“Okay, now the point is to hit the guy without being hit! So the first thing you gotta learn is how to defend yourself. Throw a punch, but keep that right hand up to your ear. You’re on the phone, okay? She’s your girlfriend. You wanna get laid at some point, right?”

I squeeze my fists, throw a punch to his naked palm.

44 “Okay, good. Now, let’s try throwing a punch that might actually hurt somebody!

Stay loose, Bus’um! And if you keep that guard up you might stay pretty too! Come on!

Another! That’s it! Punch! You little fucking busboy! Twist that back leg, throw some weight into it! Hit me! Punch til you knock me down!”

The dogs bark as he yells and I’m swinging. Jab, jab, cross, jab. Hands up. Duck his slow counters. A neighbor’s music throbs through the ground and we step to the beats. If a hand falls from my ear Dan smacks me, hard, in the face, the corners of his mouth turning up as his hand connects.

“You’re a motherfucker,” I laugh, swinging back at him.

“You dropped the goddamn phone! She was in her underwear, Busboy! A phone call this late? Don’t you know anything?”

When we’re finished, he hands me a beer and we lean against his grandmother’s

Volvo, my legs wobbly, ready to crumble into a puddle.

“This is to the Stankin’ Anchin!” He knocks my bottle. “Look at you! Startin’ to feel it already! I seen it before, a kid starts looking people straight in the eyes, his chest puffed out. Then he’s got a strut in his walk! Pretty soon you’ll be swinging your dick and spraying testosterone everywhere! People’ll be slipping in the hallways!”

“This is some neighborhood you live in,” I say as a passing car’s headlights fall on us. “Are we really going to train here?”

“Among other places.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means keep your fucking eyes open, Busboy!” He raises his fists in the air.

“The world is a dangerous place!”

45 I no longer polish the silverware. Back is too exposed. Dan’s liable to come up, punch me in the kidney’s, and I’m left squirming for five minutes, some waitress walking over, leaning over me, her eyebrows cocked up, like, what the hell? If a table needs clearing it gets cleared, one trip. Bus pans are flying back and forth. I keep an energy drink handy, right up on the shelf where the glasses dry on their rack. Todd pulls me aside, as I’m running a bus pan, grabs my bicep, stares hard at me. “What the hell is this?” Dan told me to smile, shrug it off. “Jessica tells me she’s seen you on the ground, writhing. Writhing. Rare that I hear that word used at work.”

“Back spasms,” I say. “Won’t happen again. Excuse me, I have a table to clear.”

Billie nods behind his sweat rag when I come back to the kitchen. “The King!

What brings your sire to the empty oppresses of my humble kitchen?” He stops.“God, is that another black eye? What the hell is going on with you?”

“Nothing but good things going on, sir,” I say. “I wanted to run food, and bus tables but Todd’s being Todd and has banished me—his word—to the kitchen. You need any produce cut? I’ve got some time on my hands.”

Even Jessica’s started to notice a change. It’s always the cool brush off with her, but now there’s her head turning, the profile of her chin, pointed, intrigued. “Back spasms, huh?”

“I’ve been working out,” I say, holding a thirty pound garbage can.

“You’ve been fighting.”

“It’s just to get in shape.”

“Just don’t let him drive you home. Guy is insane. He scares me.”

46 Eric doesn’t say anything, just let’s his shoulder bump mine in the narrow hallway between the bar. That’s okay. I can feel something changing. I lift the garbage can into the dumpster out back, the silage, so familiar. The cool wind, the dirt. This is where it happened, I say outloud.

“Where what happened?” Todd says behind me. “Who are you talking to?”

“The fight,” I say. “And no one.”

“You got their knobs tied,” Daniel says. He’s donned his own gloves, doesn’t even hold them up to his face. He fights barefoot, shirtless, his body so pale it hurts to look at, taking wide steps, his long arms swinging. “They ain’t know what to do. Would fire you but you’re working too hard. Might give you a promotion. See if it levels things out.”

“It’s strange having energy,” I say. “Everything feels different.”

“Just the beginning,” Daniel says. “All just the beginning.”

Everything else gets said through our hands. A jab to his side, and he counters, a spinning back fist that nearly breaks my nose. Either keep jabbing or step outta my range,

Bus’um. You smaller than me. Smaller reach. What? Physics! I dropped outta high school and I know that! Shit! A cross to my face, like a battering ram splintering open a wooden door. Goddamn, that girl’s sad tonight! That’s twice you dropped the phone!

Two times! What? You scared of pussy or something? An uppercut as I stand up, that lifts me off my feet, making my stomach leap to my throat. Shit! You think I’m feeling sorry for you? You little fucking busboy, I ain’t even seeing you! I stand up again, on wobbly feet, outta breath, outta stamina, gravel falling off my knees. He lowers his guard,

47 bobs his head, laughs a sickening laugh. His dogs Harley and Buster wake up, leap against the fence, barking. I knew you ain’t have it in you. Gonna start calling you bitch’um. Not even fit to carry my bus pans. Get the fuck outta my face. Go home. Go stare at yourself in the mirror. King Zero, huh? Give me a fucking break. Ain’t even the zeros calling you king. I raise my hands. I swing. Back him off. Light on my toes. I swing and swing and swing.

“I want to buy your car,” I say, afterwards, holding a beer so cold I have to rub it along my forehead. “Is it still for sale? I’ve got some money.”

“I thought you might.” He sips his beer. “Treat her good, busboy. She’s all I got.”

“James,” I say. “My name is James.” I grin, lift my beer to his, glowing amber in the streetlights, like man’s last defense against the world. “And I will.”

48

My First Driving Lesson

I came back home a few hours later. It was dark, but in the porch light I could still see the skid marks I had left. The leaves from the hedges were still blown on the asphalt.

The car had been moved back to its parking spot. If I walked over, I knew I’d be able to feel scratches on the elm tree. The girls were still playing jump rope ‘round the corner, in the dark, measuring their jumps from the beats of their song “You hit a little switch and the girl hops up, up, up, up!” and the wet smack of the rope against the ground. There were no cops, no sirens, the neighborhood had died down and so I felt safe enough to go home.

I walked inside. My brother was reclining on the couch, watching television. He didn’t look immediately at me. His hair was still wet from the shower, he lay in a baby blue shirt and a pair of gym shorts, barefooted, his arms on the back cushion. I knew he was waiting for me by the way he didn’t look up, and since he didn’t immediately spring to his feet I knew he wasn’t ‘bout to whip my ass because he never had any qualms ‘bout getting right down to it.

“Listen,” I said, with my hands up—defenseless—“I know I fucked up and I know you’re probably super pissed and I know I deserve anything that you’re about to do and I just wanted to say that I’m sorry, more sorry than I’ve ever been and if you want to kill me that’s fine but know that I ain’t mean to crash it on purpose it’s just that the goddamn thing’s gear shifter got stuck, I guess, I don’t know and if you want to hurt me you have every right but know that I’d never break anything of yours on purpose and that

49 I’m at your mercy right now just don’t tell me that I did it on purpose because that ain’t fair and if I have to spend the rest of my life to pay it off, I will ‘cause that’s my responsibility, I know it and I love you and I’m so so so so so sorry.

“You wanna drive?” he asked after I was done crying.

“I just—“

“I want to teach you to drive,” he said. “Today. Right now.”

One thing ‘bout my brother, he don’t waste no time.

We took our first tour that night. He sat down in the passenger seat and I tried not to look at the back bumper of the car, because I knew it was all dented and scratched up.

It was a Grand Marquis, a car my brother had worked for four years to buy and had only gotten the chance to drive to his job once in. A tan car with a black soft top. A big car for a big guy and now I’d ran the goddamn thing through the hedges, trying to show off. This was after having snuck his keys out the house and put the car in reverse and slammed on the gas to no avail. My foot had been on the damn clutch. The car had roared and roared, but not moved, till I lifted my foot. Then it went through the hedges and through a stop sign and into an elm tree. And I’d done what any sixteen year old would’ve done after having screwed everything up. I’d had run off. Now, my brother was teaching me to drive instead of beating my face in, which I felt I deserved. I sat in the car with the A/C on, rolled the windows down, feeling the cool air against my eyes—still swollen from crying—and waited for him to say something.

“Explain to me what you did the first time,” he said.

“I put the car in reverse.”

50 “You went through my pockets.”

I cringed. “I’m sorry.”

“And snuck the keys out. Then you put the car in reverse.”

“I was going to bring it back.”

“Well, anybody could have told me that. Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”

“I thought you’d go right to sleep.”

“I might have, actually, if I hadn’t heard a car’s breaks outside screeching to high heaven.”

I moved my feet. “Mom taught you how to drive. She won’t teach me.”

“I’m teaching you right now.”

The A/C was picking up and my face felt cold. I felt the cold on my arms and my fingers, as I lifted my foot off the brake. I started shaking.

“Crane your neck so that you can see behind you. When you go in reverse, things come from behind you. And use your right foot for the brake. One foot. That’s all you need to drive.”

“Why are you teaching me?” I asked, as I backed up, then slammed my foot on the brake. The pedals were long. The steering wheel felt like it could turn forever.

“Safer,” he said.

Another thing about my brother: he’s goddamn handsome. Shamefully handsome with his Roman nose and hazel eyes. He even has the prominent chin of an actor. Even his male friends comment on it and it showed right then and there, as he was sitting in the passenger seat. His profile was a silhouette against the window, where streetlights blared.

51 I imagined the girls playing jump rope, giggling as we drove by, pointing to the car and saying “There he goes. My lover. He’s whisked away again,” as I’m sure a few of them did, at least once or twice.

He’d gotten to start acting weird lately, though. He’d stopped working, stopped eating. He was losing weight, and withdrawing in on himself, not talking to anybody, not working on the bikes in his room, which was what he did to pass the time. He used to throw tools against the walls when he got pissed. When he first started, I’d go into his room and there’d be bikes hanging all over the place, bikes on racks, bikes on hooks, wheels lying against the door, inner tubes, socket wrenches, ratchets. His fingers were lined with grease. I think he loved to work on things, even when it pissed him off.

Now he just sat all vegetative on the couch, staring at that stupid noise box TV. It was good to see him outside, and I wondered if I hadn’t done the right thing, trying to steal his car. Sometimes that can happen in life. You do the wrong thing and it sets everything right. Like the time he punched dad for getting drunk and obnoxious. Dad’s face blew up like a balloon the next day, and even though dad kept getting drunk, he didn’t come picking fights with anyone. He’d just raised his glass and said, “Well, hey there, David,” making sure we’d really looked at him, seen how swollen his face had gotten, how big and purple. Maybe I’d done something similar now.

Outside, Lake Worth was hot and empty. I was driving, shakingly, past laundry mats and pawn shops, gas stations, and my brother was staring at it all blank-faced. He’d give me little pointers. Driving the Grand Marquis like this felt good. I felt like a damn king. The car handled like a boat, all massive, roomy. It felt like I could’ve held my hand out all the way and not been able to touch my brother, who sat at the other end of the car,

52 staring off into space. He told me to stop two car lengths behind the car in front of us when we came to red lights, cause I couldn’t anticipate the lurch forward when I pressed on the gas.

“What’s wrong with you lately?” I asked him, at the red light. We were on Kirk road, where we used to live, where he’d taken me walking plenty of times when we were growing up.

He looked over at me, and smiled a big fake smile. “Nothing.”

“I steal your car and you ain’t even mad.”

“You stole and wrecked my car. Into a tree. And I’m not mad, I’m getting even.

I’m teaching you to drive.”

“Why ain’t you just hit me?”

He looked at me and I sped up a notch. “Listen, if I’m going to teach you to drive than you’re going to stop talking like you’re an idiot,” and after a minute, he said:

“Anyways, what would hitting you have done? Made you more inclined to steal it again.”

“You’re starting to sound like Dad now.”

“He was right about a lot of things, especially being passive.”

“You used to hit things a lot. Nobody’d fuck with you.”

“Everybody fucked with me,” he said. He said it like he hated the word.

“That why you stopped?”

“Do you know what the definition of insanity is?”

The light turned green. I waited for the car ahead of me to move, and then I tapped the gas. I was thinking about the time he’d beaten up a kid on our old block, broken the kid’s nose, and the kid’s father showed up threatening to arrest my brother,

53 the cops putting my brother in handcuffs. He refused to cry but I cried and screamed, and our father told the cop to do what he had to do. I hated them all that night. The boy with the broken nose finally told the cop it was just a scratch, things got out of control, and as

I stood out on the front lawn the cops put me in handcuffs and told my father that if he didn’t shut me up they would. My father said again: do what you gotta do, I wipe my hands of these children, but my brother had given me the look. His dark eyes squinted at me, which may have been what I was after the whole time, and so I shut up. The cops thought they had scared me, but I wouldn’t have been scared of them, even if they drew their guns at me, because I wanted so badly to impress him. Afterwards he told me to keep my goddamn yapper shut when the cops were around.

“Don’t you remember fighting that one boy, what was his name? And you broke his nose?”

“I wish I could forget,” he said. “You kept screaming at the cops.”

“I thought you’d never lose a fight, I thought you’d go to jail and raise hell. And so I started raising it first.”

“You don’t raise hell in there unless you want doomsquad to come stomp on your head. Then they take you back to the front and give you a whole new list of charges.

Then they send you to the shitty part of jail with all the bars and the rats and the roaches, and all the inmates are either coming from prison or going back . . .” He stared off. “God, don’t bring that stuff up anymore. And ease up on the gas, you’re not racing anyone.”

“Did you ever lose a fight?”

“Sure.”

“When?”

54 “I lost plenty,” he said.

I drove on, and waited. I knew he’d tell me. He couldn’t let things simmer in the air any more than I could, and so I just coasted. The car handled like a cloud.

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll tell you.” He ran his hand through his hair. The tips looked dyed blonde, the roots dark, but it was just bleached from the sun. He was starting to get shadows under his eyes, I noticed, when we came to a red light.

“I guess I thought I could fight when I was a little younger than you,” he started off, “I was real chubby and hard-knuckled, and the thing about me was even when I fell down I bounced right back up and kept fighting until there was nothing left. They’ve got a name for it, in dogs, when they fight until they’re dead rather than limping away, but I forget the name. But that’s what I had, even though I was more squirrely than a dog.

Faster, but not tougher. I was a fast fat kid. Anyways,” he was trailing off. “Remember

Estephonie?”

I drove on, remembering watching my brother from between the picket fences where he’d be playing basketball on the front drive-way, shooting hoops, and some little brown girl came up, riding on a bike.

“You had lots of girls,” I said.

“No,” he said. “But she was the first. She had black hair—she must have been twelve and I was thirteen. She was like you—always spying on people. Mom said she saw her through the windows looking into the house, looking for me.”

“I don’t spy on people,” I lied.

55 “Anyways, one day she kissed me on the cheek by the mailbox, and I kissed her on the mouth. My first kiss. She was so surprised—but I was surprised too. And mom heard about it right away. That’s a red light right there by the way.”

I went flying through it, hearing the horns blaring behind me.

“Nice,” he said. He looked over at me. “You keep your eyes on the road or I’ll never finish the story.”

“The goddamn yellow light was too fast.”

“Anyways, she was walking with me one day, and it was always something. First, it was her little sister. Her sister walks up to me and says, ‘You’re ugly, he’s so ugly, why are you dating him?’ And Estephonie laughs, but I was hurt. Back then I was fat, remember? And freckled, and gap-toothed. I couldn’t say anything to the sister, but when

I asked Es about it she said, in her eleven-year-old-wisdom, “Who are you dating? Me or her? I think you’re cute!’”

“This is a real pretty story.”

He was silent for a minute. We’d reached the beach by now. A1A, where all the mansions and the condos were. The high rises and pent houses and hotels with balconies.

A long drive but an even longer walk, which we used to take back when we hung out all the time as kids. He’d point to them when the fights got real bad between our father and mother and he’d say: ‘One day I’m going to get us the fuck outta that house. It’ll be just us. Even if it’s the rats and the roaches, they’ll be better than them.”

“You get older and those little things mean more to you than all the other shit,” he said.

56 “What happened to her?” I asked, rolling the windows down, smelling the salt of the ocean, hearing the waves, staring up at all the lighted rooms of the hotels and condos and trying to remember.

“She just disappeared one day. Moved. Maybe her parents found out about us. I always thought the little sister told on us. How we were holding hands, how I’d kiss her on the mouth when we left. I kept trying to feel her tongue with my tongue but she’d keep her mouth closed, and I’d slip past her lips but never her teeth. That’s a lost fight, right there,” he said.

“You’re impossible,” I said, and rolled the windows up.

“You ever kiss a girl?” he asked, as we hit Lantana where he used to take me to get my hair cut by the Haitian barbers. Only guys in the world who could get a low-cut fade cut just right, the tape so perfect you’d swear it was done with a laser. The motel neon lights cut through the street lights and now you’d see women strolling around in old green skirts, denim shorts, smoking cigarettes. Detect cops looking for John’s he used to say and I’d ask him how he knew and he’d just say he knew the prostitutes from the cops because the cops had no shame. They could afford not to have shame cause they thought they were doing good in the world, and a prostitute has more shame than she can handle cause she was actually doing good in the world, giving lonely men and women the chance to touch and be touched, but the world had twisted them up, and the prostitutes thought they were the ones doing wrong.

“Sure,” I said.

“Who?”

57 “Samantha.”

“The black chick?”

“You against black chicks?”

“I’m against my brother lying to me.”

“She kissed me. I didn’t kiss her.”

“Why’d she kiss you?”

“She said she’d only kissed a boy half white before. She said she wanted to kiss a full-fledged white boy.”

“So that’s why you tried to steal the car?” he asked me, smiling now.

“We were going to meet at the bridge. On the intercostal. She’d stolen some of her father’s vodka. We were going to make screwdrivers. She says they’re delicious.”

“Worst drink in the world,” he said. “That’s what dad used to drink.”

“I was just going to do shots.”

“And how were you going to get home?”

“I wasn’t going to do too many.”

“You don’t even know how to drive and you were going to drink shots at the intercostal with some strange girl—and hope and pray to god that you didn’t crash the car or kill yourself or get a DUI and go to prison, all on the off chance that some girl you barely know would be under a bridge?”

“Well, I crashed before I even got out of the drive way. Put a stop to the plan real quick.”

Funny thing: this is all a lie. I just wanted to drive, to coast, to remember when he’d just bought the car, when we’d go driving around in the rain, taking wide turns, and

58 he still didn’t know how to work the a/c because the car was still new. It cost more money than he’d ever saved in his life and he spent it on this boat of a car, then lost his job but told our parents he’d never sell it. He’d go to prison before he sold it, which he ended up doing, but before then we’d listen to rap music, just turning in the rain, and how yellow the yellow lights looked through the foggy windshield, the street lights in the mist, how lightning struck a power box once and we were both so scared that we just laughed and laughed. How happy he was then.

“You’re a real fucking idiot sometimes,” he said.

I considered telling him the truth, then realized how sappy it sounded, and I just coasted, thinking about how close we once were.

“Do you wanna stop the lesson?” I asked.

“You don’t know anything,” he said, and it felt worse than if he’d punched me in the stomach and sat on my chest—slamming blows like he’d done once, until my whole chest was yellow and grey. “You still don’t even know how to do a U turn.”

“Sure I do,” I said, and then hit a perfect U turn, anticipating the lurch of the car, swinging the steering wheel all the way to the left, letting it go once I’d crossed the threshold of the turn, and straightening out the car.

We were headed back home. I’d let him be angry with the lies I’d told. All I’d wanted, I realized, was to get my brother angry because getting him angry meant getting a reaction out of him, and if he was angry he’d be liable to hit me and then he’d wake up.

He’d come out of whatever spell he was in. Whether it was some girl or some battle he’d lost or something some employer said to him, or something that happened in jail which

59 shook him still, I didn’t know. He’d been working at a restaurant when he got the car.

He’d put down his anger and learned how to smile at people, how to handle customers and how to move with grace. Then lost it all and learned how to build bikes, how to put the gears in, spin the wheels so that the spokes were straight. Then given that up and if there’s one goddamn thing nobody wants to see it’s their older brother giving up everything.

“You don’t have to go back yet,” he said, finally. “I’m sorry. We haven’t completed the lesson.”

“You want to know something?” he said, after a minute. Traffic was dead here, the street lights were sparse—it was dark and windy—the sky was a deep shade of blue and marbly and now he had finally woken up it seems because he was looking at me, his voice was getting to a whisper.

“Yes,” I said. I tried to keep my eyes on the road, watch the yellow lights before they turned red.

“I was standing on the lip of a building the other day,” he said. “It’s funny. You wanna know the reason?” He inched closer to me, lifted the armrests up. “Let me tell you something. I met a woman. She had red hair and peach skin and she was springy—always happy. She had these beautiful sunglasses she’d wear and she was always smiling in them, flirty—even though she was married and I fell for it—fell like a complete sap—just like you were about to today—fell like a goddamn comet and I thought it’d work— because you always think it’ll work in the moment—that’s a good lesson for you— anything’ll work for a moment, until the next moment comes along, and then it’s like a car crash. How’s this for losing a fight?” His voice was starting to crack. I slowed down,

60 kept coasting. “I lost her. Maybe she only did it to get rid of her husband—that’s what she told me anyways: “I’m sorry, David. I love you but I used you, I used you to lose him,” and I cried up there on that fucking roof top and I tried to tell her where I was but she couldn’t hear me through all the sniveling and the wind up there. And I looked down and saw the sidewalk and I coward, Jay, I coward like a fucking dog. Is that losing a fight? I’d rather be beaten up in prison again, jumped in the shower and shanked than feel that shit again.” His voice had risen a few octaves, and he was holding the edges of the seat as he sat beside me. “Christ, some days . . . Sometimes she’d invite me over to where her and her husband lived—in a condo in Deerfield and we never fucked in their bed but he’d come home—middle of the night, and he’d see us talking to each other on the couch, and he didn’t even say hi to us, he just walked to his bed and went to sleep, or to the bathroom to shower and she’d not even acknowledge him coming in and I couldn’t see it—I’d ask her: “Should I leave?” like an idiot, not realizing that was the point was for him to see us. It must have been so obvious to everybody. She can do that to him . . .”

He put his hands on the dashboard—the little lines of oak around the ventilators, and I tried to look for a place to pull over. The traffic lights here, I swear, were blinking yellow.

“She can do that to him, and I didn’t think she’d do that to me! For fuck’s sake, sometimes I’d sneak her into my room when mom and dad were asleep and she’d be stepping over the bike parts, running her hands across the frames hanging from the walls—and she’d be on the phone with her husband: “I’m staying at David’s tonight.

He’s showing me his bike collection. He’s so good with his hands, honey, you should let

61 him work on your bike! I hated myself so much! And she wouldn’t even listen, Jay, when

I was on that building! What’s the point? What’s the point?”

It was at this point, I had to pull over to the side of the road, and let him cry. I held him in my arms, my brother—held his head. He shuddered every once in a while, and I tried to soothe him, tell him everything would be all right. When he leaned forward,

I could finally touch him.

Anyways, you probably want to hear about the drive back. What he said to me in the drive way, where the basketball hoop still was, though it was a different drive way now, a different house. Our parents had traded the old house for a new one, hoping that it’d do some good for David and me to get out of our old environment, but the truth is that my brother could never change. The truth is that even when a person realizes their folly they don’t always make the necessary changes in their personal life to give up that folly and my brother landed himself back in jail—which was what I was scared of, and when I went to see him behind the glass—I’d taken the bus—he got real mad. his head was shaven and he was wearing his blues and he didn’t start screaming or punching the glass but he’d sure enough put the phone down for a second and looked off—still looking as goddamn handsome as ever—and picked the phone back up: “Why the hell didn’t you take the Grand Marc? I taught you how to drive, didn’t I? What did I spend all those lessons for?”

“It’s your car, David,” I said, getting ready to leave. “Not mine. I’m going to have my own someday. And yours will be outside waiting for you when you’re ready.”

62 “I don’t give a damn about the car,” he said, behind the glass, getting ready to scream. “I don’t want you taking the bus.”

“We work for the things we have,” I said. And then I put the phone down, stood up, got ready for the guard to escort me out. I didn’t want my brother to see me cry anymore.

63

All My Sins

These were lonely times. I’d just broken up with my girlfriend Luke and the life that I’d spent three years creating had dissipated, like the relationship, along with my sense of pride and purpose in the universe, and I was left drifting, alone in the void of

South Florida. I’d taken on a job as a sign holder for a local strip club, but what I needed in my life was something else, besides loose change in my pocket to keep me going.

The strange thing was even though I was desperate for human companionship, I was also full of virility and poise and ambition. I’d go into writing classrooms I hadn’t signed up for and talk to girls after class, trying to pin down the ones with talent and the drive to really learn. I’ve never seen anything like it before this time in my life, not even a need for sex or relationships so much as a need to probe the depths of these girls’ hearts and find out who still had humanity lurking in them.

Somehow, it worked. Don’t ask me now how it happened. Maybe a character like me had never appeared before these people before. I had an instructor mentoring the workshops before it had vanished, like a finger snap, and I borrowed from his repertoire of masculinity all the tricks I’d need to at least pull these girls from their days for an hour before going onto their next classes, to talk some serious writing.

Palm Beach State College didn’t offer classroom space to college kids who were just looking to talk craft, but I did manage to pull together a room in the library that I’d been eyeballing, a conference room with glass walls and a big table. Each seat on this table was full of a Grade A beauty. It was like I’d hand crafted each seat. There was

64 Michelle, the little squirrelly girl who’s still in college today, about to get her Bachelor’s, there was Laura, Jon, Jen, Tyler (who’s now a mortician) and Faith and Kaytlin Jones, the girl I’d eventually go on to date. She’s the one who’d cause a lot of the ruin that I see in myself now. Or maybe she didn’t cause it, maybe she just held up a mirror so that I could see it for myself. My cast of girlfriends isn’t exactly something anybody’d be proud of.

Kay had been in the Air Force before blasting her way through her associate of arts, earning the degree in record-breaking year and a half. Five classes per semester and acing every one of them, while raising a two-year-old little girl, as (nearly) a single mother. I’d met her in another workshop still running one the fringes of the original and decided that though she was a little crazy she was useful. Kay had this thing about her, she couldn’t look at people. She stared at the poem or the story in front of her and never looked away from it, except to check her phone. She spoke in short, terse, sentences, like a Hemingway piece, and would scoff openly at any opinion that sounded highfalutin or forced. She had a little button nose, a bow-and-arrow set of lips, a stud in her nostril, and tattoos on her arms. She was plump, but not fat. She had a heavy set of thick hair that she tried to crop short, but always sprang up like a raccoon tail in the back. She also had brown eyes with a snatch of red on the left.

She was, at first, a terrible poet, writing about lions and mermaids (she had a thing for mermaids, wore them on her shirts, backpacks) and she took to heart the criticism launched at her, standing up right away and leaving the room. I decided that though she could critique, and though she’d read the classics, she was hopeless. If you can’t take it as well as you can dish it out, you’re hopeless, not just in writing but in life.

65

Man, you should have seen me running this workshop. Sentences flew from me like lightning bolts from Zeus. I had more energy than I knew what to do with, sitting at the front of this conference table and always trying to squeeze the doors closed, while the librarians came over and opened them up, then told us we had to keep quiet (don’t ask me what the logic of that was). I’d never seen it before in my life. I talked philosophy, I talked history, I talked society, I talked craft. I fitted everything into roundabout lectures so smooth and so charismatic that these kids didn’t even realize they were learning until afterwards. The purest form of a performance, I launched at these kids all of my theories, not just on writing but on life. I could feel their attention on me. I could feel their admiration. Even Kay, who’d left in a huff the day we broke down what a bad poem her mermaid poem was, had come back to spar some more. I encouraged them all to speak their minds, to reason through their own opinions, to think for themselves, which is—and

I’ll defend this till I’m dead—the first and last lesson of any college. Not just thinking outside the box, but thinking for yourself and trusting that your emotional and logical reactions to things have a purpose in this world.

Where did this energy come from? Where has it gone since? I don’t know. It burst from me like a gusher, like I’d been waiting all of my life to have an audience, and, though I was absolutely terrified every single day to have so many eyes on me, I reveled in the fear and the chaos and used it to improv my way around the hour we spent together. I’m convinced to this day that the real learning gets done outside of class.

What else was magical about it, perhaps (I’ve learned this from teaching classes of my own over the years) was that everybody brought something to the table. We were

66 all looking for a group of people to socialize with, because we were all terribly unsocial.

Jen was getting over her heroin addiction. Laura had spent her whole life in her room, taking care of her father, who was a closet case. Tyler wanted to spend her life taking apart dead bodies, dressing them up, and getting them pretty enough to be put in a casket for the wake. Ryan was living on a porch at the time. Leal spent her days working at

Subway. A room full of wallflowers, we were suddenly given the chance to speak. This is what’s so precious about writing workshops, a group of people who’d never had anything in common with most of humanity is now suddenly surrounded by people who read and write, who’re interested in telling stories about their innermost secrets, and learning how to make their lives have purpose. How could we not become close? How could we all not fall in love with each other?

Jon and Laura sat to my right, at the conference table. It was amusing just looking at their faces while I lectured. They’d never seen this side of me. I knew that because I’d never seen this side of me, and they both stared while I carried on some long, spiel (dare I say hilarious? I don’t want this to sound overly pompous, but I could feel the current running through me like putting your mouth on a battery!) like I was an alien.

Where the hell had this kid been? I didn’t know. My eyes were wide and I was smiling. I had two hundred thoughts burning through my head at once, but in the midst of them was this look I tried to convey while I was lecturing, like, Yo. Check it. Pretty fucking cool, huh?

The truth was that eighty percent of the energy was coming just from having so much talent in the room. Tyler had stories about men taking off their skin like suits, like

67 human suits, and fitting them with hangers, to go to sleep, finally, as skeletons. They talked to their skin suits as they hung them, “You need a good washing, my dear!” a very formal, astute sounding skeleton. I’d had a little crush on Tyler that went nowhere because she was a lesbian. We still had chemistry, though, and I still admire her to this day (I could very easily see myself in her shoes, working on dead bodies, pampering their cold, granite faces, smoothing their hair. Does she pry apart the ribs of children when she removes the organs and fills them full of embalming fluid or is that somebody else’s job?

Either way, we had a lot in common).

We started drinking together sometime during the summer that year. Before their classes ended, we’d all found an excuse to meet up at the beach with a couple bottles of rum, a couple bottles of fireball, Bacardi, vodka (Stoli-O!) and beer. My reasoning with this went that to be a writer you had to live stories. The waves which lapped up at our feet were still warm and foamy. We met after dark, staying long hours, peeing in the bushes and laughing while we passed a bottle around, telling stories about our life, our loves, our parents, where we’d come from. I hadn’t planned it like this—I wasn’t some kind of

Hawk that could see past the fabric of time into a world where I’d suddenly have a group of female friends. I’m convinced that I’d just wanted to scope out the hearts of my fellow humans.

Needless to say, at one party, I’d get my chance. This wasn’t at the beach, but was at Michelle’s house while her parents were away. Michelle was dating this guy named

Tom, who was pure republican. He wore a fedora and a blazer, had a beard, and a pair of bifocals, and was a former high school actor. A really charismatic guy, who greeted me at

68 the door, shaking my hand and introducing himself as “Michelle’s flame.” I immediately liked him.

I had to scoot past the white piano in the living room. Apparently, Michelle’s parents were music enthusiasts as well as aspiring astronomers and hippie surfers. There were pianos of all shapes and sizes and colors, telescopes with the lenses pointed straight down in the corners, and surf boards hanging from the walls. A beer suddenly appeared in my hand, as they are oft to do, and I walked around the house, marveling at the environment that produces writers in the twenty first century.

A cat as big as a couch stretched its legs, its body dwarfing its head, and crawled back into another room, away from all the party animals.

About this time in the story, Laura had gotten pregnant with Jon’s kid and the two of them were on the outs. Jon appeared at the party for all of five minutes, before looking at his phone, saying: “Fuck!” and grabbing his helmet, to rocket away on his motorcycle.

Another beer appeared in my hand, I shrugged and said to everybody’s inquisitive looks:

“Fucking poets!” raising the bottle.

Kay and I got drunk, while the rest of them just nibbled on their alcohol. I don’t remember much about the party, except this conversation that got started in the driveway—a conversation that’d never fly for two seconds as the boyfriend of Kay, but one that, as a mere friend, she found hilarious. It had to do with the nature of pedophilia.

Let me start by saying that, apart from beers magically appearing in my hand, I am one oft to say stupid, insane things just to see people’s reaction to them. The more beers, the more absurd the jokes. What was great was that even the workshops hadn’t primed these guys for this level of insanity, though, of course, I hadn’t let anybody be

69 invited to the parties that was square enough to really get offended. So, I started talking about the benefits of dating a seven-year-old girl. Everybody took their drinks away from their faces, and got ready for it. “Best part is, when she comes out of the shower and slicks her hair back, she looks six!”

Even Kate, who was the biggest prude, started laughing there in the dark driveway. When she laughed, she quenched her lips like a kiss she was trying to hold in, and her eyes sparkled. I kept going:

“My girlfriend the other day called me a pedophile! I said, where’d— “

“If you have a girlfriend, why isn’t she here?” Kay demanded.

Truth was, Luke was off in a treatment center and texting me the whole time about what life was like for her now. Vines grew through the floors, she said. She kept going from halfway houses, where guys sexually molested her, to treatment centers, to living in her car, to couch surfing. Part of her blamed me for these troubles. I knew that at least one of the halfway houses had kicked her out for selling drugs. Luke was somebody who had to use drugs to get by in the world, but, more than that, she was somebody who got off on being offensive. I’d heard stories about her masturbating in the living rooms of these places, using strange things like plastic severed arms to get off. When she took her meds, she was near catatonic, when she didn’t take her meds she was high strung, like a squirrelly lab rat. I drank a beer to her at the party, just hoping that she’d be okay, out there somewhere safe.

Somehow, me and Kay ended up alone in the kitchen together, looking for more beer. We’d killed everything in the house and were still roaring to go. She’d become so

70 happy that she was pink. She picked up random beer bottles and wagged them to gauge how much liquid was left at the bottom. We shared the last beer, that I’d found tucked in the fridge and ended up leaning on each other in the living room, while I told a long story to the rest of the workshopers left, who weren’t listening to me, just wondering why these two people, sitting on the couch, had their arms on each other’s shoulders.

There’s something strange about South Florida that I should mention here, in terms of permissibility. If you’re not from the area, then you probably don’t know about it, but in South Florida it was not uncommon to be doing shady stuff and have no conscience about it, nor any fear of airing your business in public. I was going to school at the time, and running this workshop. I had a car, a job, I had ambition and prospects.

Nobody said anything about the fact that I was shit-faced hammered and had a woman in my arms who was due to get married in a week. Nobody pulled me aside and said:

“Craig. What the fuck? What are you doing?”

This goes far beyond Kay, in fact, it goes all the way to Luke, to the job that I was now starting to work (No longer merely holding the sign for the strip club, I’d started flyering, smut-peddling, and driving the strippers from their houses and hotel rooms to the club, doing rails of coke right before class). It’s a very strange sentiment, but in South

Florida these things aren’t uncommon. You didn’t even think about it. It was merely something that was. Oh, it’s a bright and sunny day. Look, the moon’s still up. Craig’s drunk and driving Kaytlin home, to her fiancé and her daughter. Let’s go grab some coffee and go back to sleep.

71 I finished the story I was telling, about a fight I’d seen the night before with my boss and his roommate (and left out the part of me running like a coward) and the party was dying down. Kay said she needed a ride. I volunteered. Like I said, nobody said anything, but I do remember their faces, that slight look of hesitation, the pulling away from me, something that I hadn’t understood at the time. What was the big deal, right?

We drove in near silence. The streets were a little hazy, the lights blurred, but not so badly that I couldn’t steer the car within the lanes. I yawned and thought about my life.

My thoughts went back to Luke, as they often did, and I wondered why we’d gotten so close in the first place, and how. What was it that drove her to me? What was it inside people that drove them towards each other? Kay was unusually silent, and for a second I forgot that I was driving her. I just tried to steer the car, just tried to keep my eyes open for the streetlights.

She put her hand on my elbow and asked me to pull over. I thought she was going to be sick. She was so drunk that she swayed in the seat. Her knees were pressed together, she was wearing tight light blue jeans and a white shirt. I parked behind a McDonalds and asked her what was wrong. She pointed to her lips, and said: “Do you see this?” Her eyes were slanted shut. Then she leaned forward and kissed me in the seat.

I’ve never in my life (to my knowledge) turned away from somebody trying to kiss me. No matter how deranged, how vicious, how ugly. And Kay was none of those things. She was beautiful, and sweet in that moment. Her mouth tasted like cigarettes and chewing gum, and beer. Her hair smelled like coconuts. She unhooked her seatbelt and climbed on top of me. I fit two fingers in her pants, while she grinded herself on me. For a few seconds, I swear, I didn’t even think about Luke.

72 Then she climbed into the backseat. “I want you back here,” she said.

There was a couple of reasons we didn’t do it that night. The first, and most honest reason was that I was too drunk to get a hard-on. I felt my loins trying for it, but nothing responding in the way of my penis. This problem is one that plagues me, I love making out with drunk girls, I love being the wild and crazy dude at the party, but after a certain number of drinks, my equipment just doesn’t work. The whole body is numb, and it’s like watching yourself from outside your own body. Meanwhile, two feet are up in the air, and Kay is trying to unhook her jeans.

“I can’t,” I said.

“I want you inside me.”

I straightened the seat out. “No.”

She pulled my hand backwards, and put it inside of herself. “I’m wet.”

“No.”

She climbed to the passenger seat. Her shoes were off. “Why not?”

“You’re getting married.”

“That didn’t stop you from kissing me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t think I can be monogamous,” she said. She started laughing.

“Humans weren’t meant to be. But we shouldn’t do it like this.”

She shook her head, still laughing. “Take me home.”

We made out some more in the parking lot of her house, with her child and her soon-to-be husband asleep two stories above us. She lived in a gated community in

73 Boynton Beach, a little HOA condo-turned sublet apartment complex. She reached over, kissed me, and I kissed back so hard she’d have a bruise the next day. I’ll remember till I die the advice she gave me, when she pulled away: “That hurt. Is that what you want me to remember when I think of you? You hurting me?”

My need was strong, though. This was worse than pulling skin, watching her open the door to my car, straighten out her shirt and jeans, and walk up the steps to her apartment. As much as it hurt, though, it felt good, like life was starting again. Like the chains that had pulled me to Luke and the mess of her life had suddenly unlatched, and I was free. I blasted the music I had on (Eminem’s “The Monster” a song about going crazy and embracing your crazy, which was my secret song of this moment of freedom) and roared down the streets. I even sang along.

The odd thing about Kay was that, as a secret girlfriend, she was the best I’d ever had. She was sweet in the affair stages of our relationship, damn near the perfect person you’d want in a scenario like this. She was sensual, kind, funny, she was open with her life, and a little mischievous. She’d tell stories about her father, about the air force, about different guys she’d slept with, while sharing camel cigarettes. The sneaking around was like playing hide-and-go-seek as a little kid. She enjoyed (if you can believe it) the nefariousness of the acts, the depravity. And, to be honest, it got me off.

It got me off that she had a kid at home waiting for her, that her husband was still asleep. Do you want me to lie and say that it didn’t? That I did it and hated myself for the whole thing, that we hated each other for doing it? For dragging each other down to this low level? The truth is that cheating is fun, hence why people do it. Being a piece of shit,

74 being the lowest of the low, and getting away with it, the very acts of criminals. It wasn’t the money that drove people to rob banks, and it wasn’t the orgasm that drove married people into the arms of strangers. It’s the sneaking around, it’s the sense of danger. I’d already cracked the vault, and I had blueprints. Now all I needed was time and space and opportunity. My hand was on a gun later that night, when I got home and my equipment

(Damn you, penis! Where were you thirty minutes ago!) started working. I fired warning shots into the bed sheets, aimed it at my chest and fired more, like an act of suicide. Then

I fell asleep and dreamed of her.

She got married. To the father of her child, Sadie. A man named John Gobel, another air force vet, who’d gotten himself on disability because of his BPD.

I can imagine it. Her hair was dyed black at the time. She’d actually send me pictures of her in her wedding dress—a gorgeous number that she looked perfect in. Her eyes looked black in the photograph, like she was Spanish, tan skin, a sad look on her face. She must have known it wouldn’t even last a month, I don’t know why she did it.

All that can be said of her motives is that I don’t think even Kay fully understands why she does the things she does. A normal person looks at the series of steps that it takes to achieve a goal, and, even if they’re a bad planner, they can usually predict what steps will lead where, and they’re usually self-aware enough to gauge what they really want vs what they really need. But Kay’s wants and needs were so sporadic and conflicting that I think a majority of her life was spent in complete chaos. A majority of her energy was spent trying to hide a lot of this chaos from the outside world.

75 I mean, in the end we all want the same things, right? A person to love us, a happy family, order, a nice job, a sense of security, a place where we can lay our heads down at night and feel safe, a job with a future, something to be proud of. Kay wanted these things, too. But what was a nice job to her? Where could she feel safe? She was terrified of bugs and of bug spray, of poison. She had compulsions that lead her to shopping sprees, how could she ever have financial security? She was 40,000 dollars in debt when I met her on credit cards alone.

Where did I fit into all of this? I think what she also wanted was friends. It’s the only power that I had over her. I could talk to people. Very little offended me, and I had very little inhibitions when it came to my peers. I’d talk sex, I’d talk politics, I’d talk family, I’d talk philosophy, and, what’s more, I was funny. I’d forged a writing club from nothing but my long-winded spiels, and energy. She wanted these things. She wanted a group to hang around, to validate her life.

The wedding itself may have been her last attempt at that. It was in a church; her grandparents were there. Her father and her mother were both dead, of separate suicides.

I imagine Sadie sitting in the front row, just two years old. Kicking her feet against the pews. Kaytlin must have looked at her, her long blond hair, John’s pug nose and pale skin, his round face in her features. Kay’s mania coursing through her two-year-old body while the preacher carried on his congregation, the rings slid on the fingers. Why couldn’t she feel good about herself? Why couldn’t she just say, this is my life now? I’m going to try to be happy.

76 Across town, I was driving strippers. Plastic boots slid up the thighs, while faces scrunched and cigarette smoke exhaled through nostrils. My life wasn’t going much better than the girls beside me, who’d tell me all about all the marriages they’d destroyed.

We didn’t hold any secrets from each other, me and these girls. They’d offer free advice: wear a condom. Bitch is crazy. Going to end bad, Hun. Help me with this boot.

Driving the strippers around town was, in a strange way, a great preparation for the amount of needs-servicing that I’d have to subscribe to if I ever wanted to date

Kaytlin, and, in fact, a great way to understand my psyche of the time. You have to know right now that I come from a family of damaged, deranged, violent men, who’re constantly battling all sorts of addictions of their own, and the things I’d do for money during this period, strange as they were, were not uncommon. My father was the one who got me involved in the strip club business. My first job was working for them, at nineteen years old, as a night-watchman at a club that’d be raided by police within my first couple months of working there. M16s were held to my father’s head, and he suffered through a very minor heart-attack while the DEA raided the club. I’d get a call from him at the hospital later that night, talking friendly to the cop assigned to guard my pops, while he was handcuffed to the hospital bed.

“Yeah, they raided it. Guess we’re both going to have to find new jobs.”

I was at home, my shift not starting until 3am.

There were always other strip clubs, though, just like there are always new strippers. My father was a huge, bald, funny guy, who loved the women and loved the energy of the place. In his own way, his charisma and his ease was something else I borrowed when I started running the workshop. To see his comfort in the club, where

77 other guys would shrink like cold, tiny penises, he’d grow, he’d relax. A cigarette looked like a matchstick between his enormous fingers. He shot his cuffs to look at his watch, cocked an eyebrow up to his forehead, asked me if I wanted to pick up Jen, or Wild Nick, or Cowboy Mike, or Superthug, or Taco. The sheer amount of work that needed to get done all the time insured that I’d never be in need of money again.

So, I was always driving, always scheming. Girls were constantly texting me for rides, for favors. That, plus the friends I’d made at the workshop meant I’d never have another introspective thought again. Luke called, suffering from all kinds of aliments.

Sometimes, she’d be out in Delray handing out homemade sugar cookies to the homeless people five o’clock in the morning. Sometimes she’d be dancing at a club, trying to hit on the singer of a live performance. Luke had this completely androgynous face, it was hard to tell what sex she was. Usually, she’d try to pass as a guy, with her head shaved clean to the scalp, her chest taped down, long, baggy pants on her short frame.

God, what times. It was like trying to stand still in a current, all the drama constantly going on, all the compulsions flowing through me. Inside the current were hands, clutching, mouths grinning, eyes wide with fear and rapacious need. A normal person would have tried to find shelter, I tried to delve deeper into it. I thought somewhere at the bottom of this I’d find some truth and write about it, I’d tell about it,

I’d give some of this enormous suffering meaning. But I think it turns out that a drowning person can’t be saved. Am I drowning now? Is this confession my attempt at pulling you down to my level? Why do you keep reading then? I tell you right now, nothing you hear

78 further on is going to make you love me more. It can’t. Its part sympathy, I understand that, but it’s going to be part voyeuristic sadism.

The parties didn’t stop. The parties never stopped. I’m twenty-eight right now, four years after most of the events in these stories have happened, and the party still has not stopped. Nor have I stopped drinking at them. No matter how much I got shit-face- hammered, no matter how banged up I’ve been, I still refuse to put down that last shot of tequila, burning amber or clear in the shot glass, like a lit torch in the hazy darkness of my world.

The parties, were, however, moved from the beach to Laura’s little apartment.

She’d just gotten herself a place in Boynton Beach, just by the railroad tracks. A cool little one-room studio, that she filled with drawings her and Jon did. They’d put up posters of Lana Del Ray and Eminem, from Album covers, they’d bought a record player and played cool Jazz or blues. Jon started working on bicycles—a compulsion he’d developed to help deal (I think) with the death of his older brother, the turbulence of his home life, and as something productive to do in the long, insomnia-driven wee hours of the night. Bike parts, inner tubes, tools, and spare frames hung all over the apartment.

Laura’s bed was in one corner. Next to it was a couch I’d salvaged from a street corner, leather, split at the seams, sewn again by Laura, who was excellent with a needle.

Above the couch was this portrait of Laura shirtless, with a cigarette in her mouth, typing on a typewriter, this look on her face like a photograph had been snapped that she wasn’t expecting. Kind of surprised, and dead-tired at the same time. The cigarette looked like it

79 was going to fall from her lips. On the couch, usually yawning this big yawn was the dog,

Lady, an Italian Greyhound mix, who looked just like a baby deer. Opposite the bed: the rabbit cage, where Anakin hopped about, indiscreetly, having seen more of our sins than

I’d care to remember.

We tore that place up with parties every other weekend. We were college kids with license to do anything, with no older adults in sight and nobody staying sober, we never heard a dissenting thought like: Hey, you’ve had enough. Or, hey, who’s DD? Or, hey, you guys shoulder do that. Never.

Kay kept showing up. I tried to resist a few times. At least twice. We kept our distance, but her need and my need were obvious. We wanted something painful. We also wanted it to be kept a secret. But I wouldn’t push the issue over the phone, nor would she, so, one day, at one of the parties, a couple weeks after she was married, I went into the bathroom with her. She did say no at least three times. Then she kissed me, hard, and we didn’t say anything.

I don’t know how long it took the crew to figure it out. These guys were privy to a lot of secrets that lurk behind most people. But most people are good at reading other people, actually, even uneducated ones. We spend the greater part of our lives trying to analyze and reanalyze where we stand, our values, what little gestures mean, when electricity currents hang in the air. And sex changes relationships so much that even the mere thought of pretending it didn’t happen is comical. If you’ve ever had the privilege of watching two grown adults pretend something didn’t happen that did, tell me about it sometime.

80 They can’t look at each other, they can’t talk to each other, without it hanging between them. And in a room full of people, you’ll notice the ones who can’t look at the other ones. All of our little socialization and perhaps all of our civilization is built around our cocks and vaginas, so that we can establish who’s sleeping with who, and who isn’t.

You shake somebody’s hand, that’s some sort of agreement: “I won’t fuck your woman if you don’t fuck mine.” Two women hug: “I won’t fuck your man, so long as you’re fucking him enough for him not to want to fuck me.”

Maybe this is just the ravings of a madman (quite possibly) but it seemed to me that everybody knew right away. And it’d always been like that, even with Luke. You steal away, into the corner of a house, behind a tree, kiss, touch, hug, taste each other’s breath, and come back straightening out clothes like nothing ever happened, and it’s comical—it really is—to everybody around the little charades you try to play.

Except maybe Kay’s husband. He’d gotten a whiff of it too, but, as I’d learn myself in the years to come, Kay was somebody who, as she said, couldn’t be monogamous. It was something to do with her life, the trauma she’d gone through, her distrust of men, her jealousy, her rage, her wanton desires, her own enormous level of sex appeal, her misunderstands of what friendship entails, her need to have her life validated.

And somehow these things became an element of sympathy for me. I can’t stand to see women in pain. Few man can, I think. Only the most jaded of us look at young, beautiful women and feel nothing, even when we know the problems of their lives are an absolute result of the piss poor decisions they’ve made.

Her biggest problem was that she had a near photographic memory. It was always fun to get her to look at two pictures, side by side, and point out the flaws inside them. It

81 took her only a few seconds to memorize both photographs and point out: “That dog has no bone in this picture. The bush is smaller. The bird is yellow in the second one.” Her fundamental understanding of shapes, of color, was startling. She could walk into a room and know exactly what had been misplaced.

She was obsessive-compulsive, she had mood swings on the dime, she had fits of rage so blinding that she’d call the cops on herself. She’d break furniture, she’d scream until she wrapped herself up into a ball and cried, her daughter Sadie, hugging her and trying to comfort her.

But that’s all to come. Right now, I was just the man holding her, feeling, as usual, alone and lost.

Once the act was cemented, things became a little easier. By this time at the strip club I’d been given the prestigious title of club-bitch, and it was my job to do everybody’s little errands, my most favorite of which was running bank. Running bank meant going to the bank with a check, and a stack of hundred dollar bills and getting it washed and replaced with stacks of singles. They gave me a beaten-up grey sack to get the money with, with a broken zipper and smelling terribly of liquor and cigarettes. The sack seemed to soak up all the evil of the club, and it was often amusing to see the tellers and the clerks and the bankers faces when they dealt with it.

The other funny thing was that the orders were almost always wrong. The club would order 15,000 in ones, 3,000 in fives, and 5,000 in twenties, and the numbers the bank would hear would be all wrong. So I’d stand there, while the tellers were on the

82 phone, trying to get the orders right, everybody in the line behind me looking at me like I was a bank robber. It wasn’t a hard mistake to make. I dressed the park. Dark sunglasses, a motorcycle jacket, gym shorts with socks pulled up to my knees, black tennis shoes. I had a shaved head, a perpetual five o’clock shadow, and dark circles under my eyes. I’ve never been one to think myself handsome, my face is red. I’m Irish in Florida, I used to say. It’s like putting a fork in the microwave.

Kay’d come “hangout” with me at four, and after we were finished, I’d usually get the call to go pick up some money. Sometimes I’d have five different banks I’d have to hit. We looked like Bonnie and Clyde: her with the aviators on, her legs hanging out the window of my Rav4, me with the motorcycle jacket, the sport sunglasses. Two crooks who didn’t owe anything to anybody, who wanted nothing to do with civilized society, who took what we wanted from the world and left the rest to all of you, who try your hardest to be good people. But what is a good person? The people behind the registers at the banks? The ones who—whenever they found a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, put their noses up?

“You guys couldn’t see this? My four-year-old daughter could tell this was fake!”

“It’s dark in the club. Is your four-year-old daughter a stripper?”

This wouldn’t amuse Kay, but I’d get a kick out of my own frankness. The club was dark, and the things that went on—it was like another world. Sex was the least of it, drugs were the least of it. When a girl grabbed my dick in the club, it wasn’t an invitation to fuck, it was just for the simple joy of violation, it was to get my attention: Craig, check it out! Look at how much money I’m making! Come here, Mr. Hardon, let me buy you a shot!

83 Round and round it’d go.

There were more parties, too. All of them either at the beach or at Laura’s apartment. She wasn’t doing so hot after the abortion. She was already damaged goods.

When I’d met her—just before me and Luke split—she was already a wallflower of the highest order. I’m talking somebody that made the rest of us look like socialites. She’d go whole days without speaking to any of us—and not out of an unkindness but just because she was terrified to speak. Like you had to ask her a direct question to get a very whispered response.

She had this really curly hair, and really pale skin. She was as tall as I was, with a pretty, slightly-mannish face. Her gums showed a little bit too much when she smiled, but she was gorgeous in a way, and I don’t think she’ll every realize that. The way women look vs the way they think they look vs the way they want to look—who knows what it all adds up to, right? I think most women want to look like Kay, but out of the two of them, I’d pick Laura any day now, though her shyness, especially in the beginning, would have probably made me murder her.

Anyways, it was her house, but it was mine and Jon’s party. She’d drift through the crowds, drinking red wine, and occasionally laughing at one of the comments we made, holding her hand to her mouth.

There’s a very fine line, I’ve come to realize, between what happens at these parties. It’s like the fabric of a good time is held together by strings, and the more drinks you add, vs the more trauma you’re going through, the looser the strings become. Before

84 me and Kay started fucking, before Laura’s abortion, before me and Jon both lost Luke, before all the fighting and the tears and the secrets and lies, we could have all got shit- faced hammered and wound up in each other’s arms, laughing and crying into eternity, never with any malice towards anyone. Of course, you’d have to take away all of the trauma, not just what we’d done to each other to make ourselves easy targets for drunken vengeance. You’d have to give Laura back her mom, make her father find his backbone, and raise his children right, you’d have to go back to Kay’s childhood, make her father less bi-polar, more functional. You’d have to take away the pills he’d become addicted to, the car crash they set her mom over the edge. You’d have to take the needle out of

Jon’s brother’s arm. You’d have to take the gun out of my brother’s hand.

But, even all of that aside, you’d have to put something pure in our hearts that maybe was only there for a brief second, like a candle flame—that pure love and joy with the world.

It was a strange party, on New Year’s. We’d all brought hard liquor. Kay brought

Kahlua, Jon brought Captain Morgan, I brought Sambuca, Laura had red wine, Michelle brought gluten-free beer (she was celiac), and everybody else brought something, too.

Music was playing, we were all dancing, doing shots. I dragged Kay to the patio, did a flaming shot of Sambuca, kissed her hard on the mouth, while the ball dropped and 2013 became a distant memory.

Back inside the house, there were faces I didn’t recognize. There was this little

Asian girl, whose face I thought was perfect out in the dark, but inside, even very drunk, I realized was caked with makeup, hiding her enormous zits. She had pretty brown eyes, though, and a slender frame, and one of those voices that you hear, as if calling through a

85 tunnel—what was being said behind her words: “I need, I need” and I tried not to look at her.

There was Che—this really annoying kid, a little too fat, with a nasally voice, like he suffered from a perpetual cold. He was smoking pot out of a frog pipe and dressed in a black t-shirt. He’d started the party talking about black power, and I put my arm around him and said: “Che. I know you’re technically half-black. But, listen to me, Bro. No.

Okay? No. Just, no.”

The Asian girl laughed and confirmed: “Yeah, dude. NO!”

“But,” Che said, stepping back, gesturing to his over-sized black Tee shirt, like it answered anything.

“Nope!” we all kept saying.

Inside, Kay was talking to a group of people about Laura’s ass. They were trying to “twerk”—such a college thing, I thought to myself, smiling. I liked to watch the girls talk amongst themselves. My life was caught in the void of masculinity. Kay always had this thing for Laura, who was her opposite, in a lot of the ways me and Jon were opposites. Laura had innocence, Laura had a quiet kind of wit, a calm, rational voice to all of Kay’s mania and turbulence, and what Kay had was experience, was gumption (she pointed right at Laura’s ass, hidden behind thick sweat pants: “I’d give anything for an ass like that! You guys ever see that video of the girl at the bus stop? Just dancing?”) And

Laura just blushed hard, her white face turning as red as the wine in her glass. She sat down, her lips bunched up, her legs crossed, a line of people in front of her, watching

Kay dancing.

86 I also had this moment occasionally, where I just stood back and watched them all. It was beautiful. I’d created this, I thought to myself. I’d found all these guys, and they’d found each other, and now none of them will ever be the same. Their lives are forever altered. Even back then I knew they’d be friends for life. All the turbulence, all the drama, none of it mattered in the long run because I’d created something, and even if it was just a club of tweens drinking and talking poetry, that’s still something. For a guy like me, who’d spent his life driving strippers around and stealing from people, to have created this thing, it was and still is heart-wrenching.

Kay turned her face to me. When she was drunk, she was happy. Her green eyes sparkled with mischievous lust. She had a smile pursed up, almost like Laura’s. I called everyone into the kitchen to do a shot of Sambuca. When every hand (I think I counted ten of them) had a shot glass in it, I lit mine, but couldn’t see the flame. The lights were on. It was too bright. I kept trying to light and relight it. Then, when I finally saw the blue, I held my hand over it, and felt the burn, searing a circle into my palm, and my eyes widened. I was drunk, but not too drunk to feel it (you could even smell the flesh burning) then took the shot, burning my lips. It tasted wonderfully like syrup going down.

Some strange things happened after that. I remember seeing Jon and the Asian girl in the bathroom, then Laura freaking out. I remember the Asian girl breathing into my breathalyzer, finding out she was only nineteen years old. I grabbed her by her throat—in a rare moment of terror, and told her not to tell anyone. Then I let her go and apologized

(we were alone in the kitchen) and saying: “I don’t know where that came from.” I remember Laura, screaming, full blast, lying on the porch outside, and me and Kay

87 comforting her: “No, Laura, you didn’t kill your baby. No, Laura, listen, you’re going to be a great mother. Your life is just beginning. No, Jon wasn’t kissing anyone in the bathroom. No, Laura, we were both right there.”

Mostly, though, I remember Luke texting me: “Happy New Year’s, you fucker. I miss you.” And Kay wanting to borrow my phone for something. Then she looked through my texts, and started marching off, down the dark streets.

I guess inside of all of us, there’s a brick wall. Beyond the wall, a psychic force, is everything your subconscious is holding back from reality. I’m talking all of the trauma, all of the irrational fears, all of the memories, all of the self-doubt. But manifested into images. I don’t think we drink to get to this place, usually. Most people drink just to loosen up the social standings that all of you put in place, to have a good time. But that’s not how me and Kay drank. We drank to hit bottom. We drank to see everything.

Before she started marching off and screaming, Che was trying to hit on her. Che was trying to hit on everybody at the party, actually. For a big guy, he was soft, had breasts, but he was plenty good looking enough. He had a round-face, a shaved head, a pug nose, and a double-chin, but he was also philosophical and well-versed in history and religion. He was talking to Kay, who was laying down on the ground on the front porch.

Mosquitos and moths were circling porch lights. Kay was lying in darkness, and Che was sitting next to her, fiddling his finger around her stomach. She wasn’t protesting, and the two of us had an agreement—we wouldn’t talk about what we’d done in front of other people. So I just sat and waited.

“I’ve never been one much for Judeo-Christianity. Seems to me that God, in all his infinite wisdom—that if he’d wanted anything to do with us, he’d have been here a

88 long time ago. Before the Atom bomb. Maybe that’s God. Maybe we owe it all to the splitting of particles. A liver from mud—that’s cool, plus all the volcanoes and floods.

But a blast radius a mile long?”

“People always think that,” Kay said. Her eyes were closed. Che’s hand went up a fraction of an inch. “My father could never decide what he was. Buddhist, Jewish, or

Christian. We buried him in a Catholic church. I don’t think that’s what he’d have wanted though. At the time, he was convinced there was a power in stars.”

“Didn’t he— “Che stopped himself, word-wise, but kept his hand moving.

“I don’t think it’s a mortal sin. I know what the bible says, but if God created man in his image, you know? That whole thing.”

“Hell was just something the church invented. Keep the people coming into the gates.”

“He was so beautiful.” Kay had fallen asleep. Che’s hand grazed her breast, and, in a rare moment of chivalry (or jealous rage) I grabbed him in the dark and threw him.

We were all scrambling. Kay pushed Che away from me, then went inside the house to lay down. Che went in after her, and I stood outside, trying to control myself. I’d just pushed him—I kept saying. Nothing to call the cops about. Neighbors opened their doors—stared at me—went back inside. It was dark, just the ping of moths slamming head-first against the porchlights.

Che opened the door, and stood in it, like a thick wall. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Craig. You’re being very volatile right now. I think you’d better go home.”

89 My hands leaped out in front of me, grabbed him by his throat, and pushed him against the wall. I squeezed until his face burst like a lemon, then put my head on his chest and started apologizing, for the second time that night (where had that Asian girl gone, I thought?)

“I’m so sorry, Che.”

Jon appeared in the doorway, took my hands carefully off of Che’s throat. “Let’s calm down, Craig. Let’s calm down.”

Then Kay was calming down Che, putting her face in his, an inch away and telling him: “Its fine. Me and Craig are going outside. Che, its fine. Look at me. It’s fine.”

Kay was outside, in the dark, a little black silhouette. We could finally kiss. I pressed myself against her, felt her body through her clothes. I wanted to get into my car and fool around. My pants must have been vibrating, because she asked to see my phone.

Somewhere in the dark void of my brain this must have seemed like a good idea.

She looked at it for two seconds, her face flashing in its blue glow, then threw it over the roof and stormed off in the dark. I followed her, asking what her problem was.

I’d underestimated how drunk she was, because she punched me, full-on, in the chest and screamed: “FUCK YOU!” right in my face.

She marched with purpose. I kept trying to grab her shoulders: “Just tell me what’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong? What’s wrong? I’m going to fuck the next guy I see! Leave me alone! I hate you!”

90 She marched right over the gravel and the railroad tracks. Every time I tried to grab her, she swung at me—long swings that carried all of her body weight, like she wanted to knock me out. I was drunk. Even walking was tough. Everything was spinning.

Then I ran back to my car and followed her. She hid behind a building—a dry cleaner’s—at the end of the street. Her back was pressed against the wall. Her eyes looked like she was drowning in the headlights. Then she started marching off again.

Before she made it ten feet, she collapsed. I lifted her into the passenger side door, drove back to Laura’s house, and fell asleep in the driveway. The sunlight woke us up.

I guess what Kay’d seen on my phone was Luke’s picture, asking me how the party was. It’s very strange the animosity that developed inside of Kaytlin for Luke—a person she’d never meet—throughout the course of our relationship. I think what it had to do with was first love, which Kay, on some instinctual level, knew Luke was.

That and the poems I wrote constantly about Luke, and tried to hide. Another thing about Kaylin’s psychology was that she had a fundamental distrust for her close friends, especially men, and went looking through their phone messages, call logs, and emails, not to mention my book bag, my notebooks, and everything else I’d leave at her house. Every message, every call, every poem was more full for the fire, more reason to hate Luke. She’d try to reason with me to cut her out of my life, but I just couldn’t do it.

It was this attachment, this conniving, narcissistic guile, that would eventually save me from Kaytlin, forge me into something of a man.

91 Something funny about all of this was that even after having sex in her closet, even after all the drama of the night, even after the stroke of midnight kiss, Laura still didn’t know that me and Kay were “dating”. She’d hint that we’d make a cute couple, though, and me and Jon would smile secretly, looking away from each other.

Gah, what great times. Jon, Laura, and I were a tight-knit little group, separate from the main tribe of the larger workshop. Jon and I knew each other from way back in the day, and even with all the drama of Luke, and all the soon-to-be drama of Kay, we’re still friends to this day. Sometimes in life, God grants you a semblance of understanding, made whole and actual through another human being. It still makes me smile to think about those two fuckers, Laura and Jon. Little Ladybug, the Italian Greyhound, yawning on the couch, prancing up to me in the doorway, trying to lick my face, jump on me, her long legs like stilts, holding up her little body. She was more like a spider than a dog.

It was nice. Can’t a moment in life be like that? Can’t I just stay here, in this memory, and talk about the vinyl records, Lana Del Ray, Eminem, Bob Seger (who always made Jon cry)? Cooking She-Crab soup, and getting fuck-drunk on good beer.

Passing out on the couch I’d delivered to them, the worn, grey leather. I have this thing, I can wake up, fully cognizant of where I was, like I’d just closed my eyes for a second. It creeps people out. I’ll shoot up, after five hours: “Good couch. Not great for sleeping, but good.” And they’ll be so surprised they’ll start laughing. I miss those times.

I woke in my car, stumbled to the door to check on everybody. On the bed, and I saw them holding each other. Everybody else was passed out on the floor, but I couldn’t stop looking at the two of them. I’d heard them have sex before, I’d seen them make-out, but none of it affected me the way the image of them holding each other affected me.

92 Ladybug was lying on top of them, Jon had his enormous leg wrapped around her, and

Laura had her face buried in his chest. I rubbed my eyes, wished them well, and walked out of the house before they woke up.

In the car, Kaytlin was still asleep. The sky was busting with color: pink amethyst, the South Florida sunrise. I knew what I was getting into and I hated it. This was my life. She groggily said: “What’s up?” and I said: “Nothing, babe.” Then, already seeing everything, already knowing where it was going to go, I put the car in gear and started driving.

93