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2005 Distances: A Collection of Stories Quentin James

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College of Arts and Sciences

Distances: A collection of stories

by

Quentin James

A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Art

Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2005

Copyright 2005 Quentin James All Rights Reserved

The Members of the Committee approve the thesis of Quentin James defended on September 26, 2005.

______Julianna Baggott Professor Directing Thesis

______Elizabeth Stuckey-French Committee Member

______Mark Winegardner Committee Member

Approved:

______Chair, Department of English

______Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract iv

I. Distances 1

Happenings 2

Cadillac Car 9

Besides a Dream and a Tree 19

The Funeral of a Stranger 35

Okay Days 49

Men Among the Plenty 54

Biographical Sketch 68

iii ABSTRACT The stories in this collection depicts the lives of young men coming of their age as they struggle to find contentment within themselves. They are unlikely journeys of self discovery that help them find this contentment. The central figures in these pieces find themselves weighing their lives against the vast array of eccentric characters that they encounter. Satisfaction and happiness with their place in life is what the people yearn for, but ultimately what I think these men discover is that sometimes no matter how far you travel you often simply find yourself only in a different place.

iv

I. distances

1 Happenings There was a paper sign taped to the doorbell that said in handwritten Sharpie, Come on in, but I knocked and waited anyway. It was the day before Christmas Eve, a cold rain was gently falling, the temperature was nearly freezing, and Nessa had invited me to a party at her parents’ home. Up until that day winter had been slow to make its appearance. I hadn’t seen Nessa in a while. When she opened the door, she looked good, she was smiling. Her hair was up and out of her face, a tight white sweater clung to her chest, there were silver bracelets around her wrist and a silver necklace around her thin neck. I gave her a hug, but it was graceless. My arms felt like wire hangers. Hers felt small, as if they belonged to a child. I walked in, and I think it was Grant Green’s guitar on the record player. For certain, I can’t say, but he always seems in a pleasant mood. This house was a big house. Nessa hadn’t lived here since high school. There was a lot to decorate, and they had been thorough; tinsels and wreaths astray. It was a decent party, fairly crowded. I followed her through the front door, and she pointed both artificial Christmas trees out to me as we made our way to the dining spread. There was an emerald star atop the one in the hallway. On top of the one in the living room a white angel dressed in white, and I pictured her climbing a footstool, her arms stretched towards the peak. We nibbled at squares of cheese and crackers and listened to the chatter of conversation, even made some small talk of our own, “Pretty cold out there, isn’t it?” she said. My reply, “Pretty damn cold.” She asked me if I wanted something to drink. I said a Sprite, and she smiled and left me alone among the small huddles of people. I think most of them were her family and her father’s co-workers and their families. They were all wearing nice sweaters, sipping on drinks, laughing. Nessa’s younger brothers and cousins were running around down in the game room. There was a ping-pong table, a card table, a dartboard. I could play darts forever. And then I suddenly decided that I needed to find Nessa’s father. He had always been a clever old man, giving these extra firm handshakes and looking me in the eye. One time Nessa and I were kissing a little bit in the basement of this place when we heard his loafers on the hardwood stairs. He called out to Nessa about a phone call. He didn’t catch us, making out I mean. We hadn’t gone that far, my hands weren’t yet wandering, and Nessa had quickly thrown me off of her and flicked on the TV set with the remote. She went past him up the stairs, and he stood at the base of them, his hand resting on the banister. “How ya doing down here, Mr. Sonny?” “Just watching a movie.” “Oh, yeah,” as if he were really interested. “Whatchya watching?” “This Tom Hanks movie,” I said because I saw Tom Hanks on the screen. I think it was Splash, but I didn’t say that because I wasn’t for certain. “Is that so?” he asked, but he’s no fool. We were only kissing down in that basement, but who knows what was dancing around in his head. I don’t think it would have settled right with him if I had made it out to their party after being away for so long without finding him to say hello. But I couldn’t bring myself to ask where he was because that old shit could smell a brown nose, and I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. So I just kind of wandered among the clusters dodging in and out of conversations. A group next to the hallway tree talked about the Redbirds. Trade Lankford, someone said, so I kept on walking. Another talked and laughed about the Price is Right and how they would bet one dollar every time, how old Bob Barker was 2 getting, how he still was probably sleeping with all of his models, the wonder of Viagra. I made my way to the small bar, but Nessa was nowhere to be found. Another group spoke about the war overseas and how brave those fighting people must be, and another discussed New Years celebrations. “Lots of boozing that’s for sure” or “I doubt I’ll even make it to midnight this year. Whew, I’m getting old.” And this one group of about four, I remember, right next to the fireplace was talking about the rain outside. There was a fire crackling and a woman said to two others that her son, Carter, had asked Santa for snow on Christmas. She said that when it started to rain he asked if there was any way he could mail something to the comment and complaint department in the North Pole. That was a pretty cute thing for a kid to say, pretty funny, so I laughed. As a boy I thought the merriment of the entire month could be in the snow alone. The group opened up a bit, and I took that as an invitation to speak. I said, “Santa’s little people probably confused Carter with some little boy’s letter on the desert. There’s probably a blizzard in the Mojave.” And then I started laughing again. I was the only one laughing, and some guy with a tan jacket was next to me, and he said, “You called the elves little people, but elves are way more fantastical.” And I started to chuckle a little bit at that, and he chuckled too, and his sounded fake, and probably mine did as well. I said to him, “I just refer to all of those little people as ‘little people’. Safest way to go,” and then they started talking about something else. One of the ladies turned to me and introduced herself as Carly, Nessa’s Philadelphia cousin, and I said, “I’m Cranston. Good to meet you.” “Oh,” she said. “You’re Cranston,” and she said it in that tone, you know that tone, not accusatory, just surprised, like she was expecting something else. It was very polite. “I’ve heard a lot about you,” she said and I had guessed by her tone that that was coming next. I had already prepared myself to reply, “All good things I hope.” She smiled and nodded and said, “I heard you play a mean piano.” “No, no,” I said. “I only play nice ones,” and everyone briefly laughed and Carly excused herself because her cell phone was vibrating. I didn’t hear it, but it could have been. Nessa and me had a rocky go at it, but I hoped she hadn’t been using her e-mail to broadcast our business to places like Philadelphia and all other corners of the world. I thought about going down to toss some darts with Nessa’s brothers and cousins, or giving another search for Nessa’s father, but I decided I needed a smoke and went outside on the balcony to have one. The rain outside made the white Christmas lights on the framework of the house seem brighter than they were. Her balcony looked over the driveway and a wooded area out back. Lots of land. Probably half a mile down to the right was a pond, but you couldn’t see that at night. It froze over one winter and we skated in our snow boots. The gate in the yard squeaked when you opened it, slammed shut when you let it go. In high school, before I left town, this balcony was where Nessa, Victor and I used to get high when her parents went out of town and she had parties. I used to play Hendrix on my guitar. Victor always liked sleeping in his own bed, so he’d drive home in the middle of the night. Nessa used to look at the moon and say what it was that it reminded her of. One night she said it was a pregnant mother’s belly, and I almost cried because I was stoned and she was exactly right. I always used to say something like a headlight or a spotlight, and she would laugh and roll her eyes, because that’s what I said every time. So I was outside in the cold having a smoke and thinking about all those memories because it seemed like such a long time ago, and I heard Nessa’s bare feet kissing the asphalt, and I thought to myself, Good God, she has the greatest toes I’ll ever 3 know. She put her lips on the back of my neck and exhaled. She wasn’t acting like this before, and I assumed she had been drinking inside. This is how she got when she was tipsy. I turned to face her, to spread some distance between us. A glass of rum in each hand, she extended one to me. “You disappeared on me,” I said. “My mother says hello.” “That’s nice,” I said. Nessa was an adopted only child. Her real mother had died a few years ago of cancer. Nessa hadn’t even really known her until the very end of her life, when she searched and found her. I envy her for making a decent effort in such a short time at forming a relationship. Her real mother’s death was around the time we drifted apart. Her new mother, I never knew to say much to Nessa, at least not when the two of us were together. One time she visited her sister in Georgia, and didn’t come back for three months. Nessa said nothing of her absence the entire time she was gone. She returned on the night of our Four Hearts Dance at school. I rented a fifty-dollar tux and offered to pick Nessa up on my brother’s moped, but she offered to drive instead. Her mother walked us out of the door, smiled, took six or seven pictures of us, gave me a hug, and whispered in my ear just before we left, Have the world tonight. “Who’s that guy with the tan jacket?” I said taking tiny sips of my drink. “What guy?” “I should give him a beat down, trying to embarrass me in there.” “Oh, Sonny,” she said and shook her head and smiled like she missed me. We both knew I wasn’t going to fight anybody, but she looked towards me as if talking about kicking people’s asses was what she loved most about me. So we were just sitting under one of those big silences where all you can hear is the sound of the night shifting with the wind, and we were looking out over the treetops and far far away were the lights of our city and the highway. It was cold, but the awning blocked the rain from our heads. Nessa was leaning on the rail reaching her hand out to catch the drops. She said out of the blue, “The leaves rustling remind me of the ocean hitting the shore.” Her thing was that she would try and say profound things out of the blue. She knew I’d never even been to the fucking ocean. I’d only seen it in movies. I didn’t know what saltwater tasted like. Once, back when she had just finished school, I suggested we go to Florida for a little weekend getaway. She graduated from some performing arts school close to downtown. This girl was a beauty. She sang and danced and looked like somebody who could be famous one day. I had some money saved up, and I wanted to treat her to a trip. We were over on the south side at Gus’s eating some pretzels and I said, “How about a trip?” And she said, “Where to?” I said, “The beach.” And she said, “Which beach?” and I said, Florida. “Well, which beach in Florida, Sonny?” And I go, “Orlando,” and she started laughing and rubbing the back of my neck like you would a six-year old if they said something too cute. She said to me, “There’s no beach in Orlando, baby. Just Seaworld and Disney and golf courses.” Then the laughing died down and she said, “And I’m not going to any beach in Florida. When we go to the beach we’re going to Hawaii or some island and drink margaritas and tequila through straws on the sand.” That sounded nice and she was right, so instead we went to Nashville. We played putt-putt and drove go-carts and went to a show and saw the music hall and ate at buffets for every meal. We walked outside 4 the stadium during the Vanderbilt game and listened to the low roar of the crowd. I sang Stevie Wonder at a karaoke college bar. We made love several times in our hotel room at the Comfort Inn and twice in the Jacuzzi. What I remember most is missing the place the minute we got on the highway to leave. It was a good weekend, a good trip. Fact remains, though, I’ve never seen or heard the fucking ocean. When I finished my drink, I just decided to say something because neither of us had said anything in a while. “Do you think it’s going to snow?” “No, I don’t.” She was right, it wasn’t. You could usually feel snow coming. The sting of the wind awakened your lungs with every breath. I said, “Do you think this rain’s going to be ice by morning?” She sighed and said, “This rain won’t last,” like it had been coming down for days and she was sick of seeing it, like she was annoyed. Like she was daring the rain to continue and could somehow make it halt. “You’re probably going to catch a cold,” I said. She was wearing jeans, a white sweater with fuzz, her hair was stuffed in a blue hat, and she wasn’t wearing any shoes. Rain in a cold December was something you didn’t want to get caught up in. Sometimes the day after the world would be iced over. It always made me think of futuristic things. She took my glass and when she came back she had two fresh drinks and she was wearing shoes. We eased our way into real conversation. I asked what she had been up to. Singing in her church choir and working at Six Flags. A dancer in a variety show that was performed four times a day in the Bugs Bunny Pavilion. She asked me if I was still traveling. I told her I still played, but mostly at local spots. I had started teaching music lessons to grade schoolers. I had moved out of my old apartment and into another one. She asked about Victor and his poems. She was always calling his raps poems. “He’s doing good,” I said. “That’s good,” she said. She raised her glass to her lips and finished her drink and turned to me to say, “So…who’ve you been sleeping with these days?” This was how she let me know how low her expectations had become. I told Vic about this later and he told me that she had a right to know. Victor, he doesn’t say much, but he told me that some women deserve more than we can ever give them, and I almost understood exactly what he meant. At the time, I just didn’t feel like going though that with her. Not so close to Christmas. She looked off into the sky. I remember we were fighting one time in her bedroom, I don’t know what about, but it was long ago, and it was one of the worst ones, and I had said aloud to myself in exasperation, “What do you want from me?” And she screamed back “Nothing! I want nothing from you!” It was the loudest she had ever gotten. I was young and stupid and didn’t feel like being yelled at, so I said, “Jesus Christ,” and then just up and left the room. On the balcony, I ignored her little question about my personal life. I finished my drink and said, “It was nice seeing you again, Nessa. I think I gotta go pick Slick Vic up.” That wasn’t a lie. Victor was waiting for me at his apartment. We were going to go to Duggies Pub or Patty O’s to toss some darts around. She chuckled. “I don’t care, Sonny. I don’t even care who you’re with. It’s no big deal. I’m sorry I asked. Just have one more drink before you go.” I didn’t believe her. She did care, she wasn’t sorry, but I stayed because I didn’t come around often, I didn’t know when I’d be coming around again. She grabbed my glass and left and came 5 back with it refilled. She asked for a cigarette and when I gave one to her she said to me, “I think I’m heading to Chicago right after the holidays,” and then she tried to light the cigarette with a match but the wind wouldn’t let her. I lit the cigarette for her with my lighter and asked what for. “For good,” she said. “Just to live.” Then I lit a cigarette myself, because I didn’t know what she wanted me to say. I didn’t know why she wanted me to come to this party. All I could manage was, “Chicago, huh?” Then she took out a small green and white striped package from her pocket and handed it to me. “Merry Christmas for you,” she said. “I didn’t get you anything,” I said. And she said, “I didn’t expect you to.” It was tightly wrapped, perfectly wrapped, and I took my time in unwrapping it. It was a case for glasses, inside was a pair of sunglasses. Brown lenses with a gold wire frame. They really seemed like cool glasses. I said thanks, and she said that now I could look as cool as I acted. “When you go out with Victor those women are going to be all over you.” “Sunglasses in the winter.” And she replied. “The sun doesn’t go away just because it’s cold.” I’d never worn sunglasses before, I don’t think in my entire life. I finished my drink and we hugged goodbye and she walked me out. Now it was Sinatra singing his version of I’ll Be Home for Christmas. I noticed the presents under each tree, many wrapped in the same green and white striped paper my glasses had been in. I knew that those presents were mostly only empty boxes wrapped for effect. Nessa’s present every year was a shopping spree anywhere she pleased. The men were hovering in the great room; there was a football game on television. The women were near the spread; someone had a newborn baby and they took turns holding it. The driveway was slick and the rain was coming slowly in thick drops. I opened my car door to get in, but she hugged me goodbye again, and I couldn’t figure her out, so I said, “Tell me what it is you want from me, Nessa.” I don’t think I sounded aggravated. This was something I was truly curious about. She asked me, “Why didn’t you play for my cousin?” “What?” I asked. “The piano for Carly.” “She didn’t ask. And I don’t like to play for strangers anyway. Unless they’re paying.” “It would have been nice if you would have played. A nice gift.” I wasn’t going to hug her again. We stood out in the rain waiting and I was wondering how to say goodbye. “I want you to call me on Christmas day,” she finally said. “Call me right at midnight. The minute that Jesus was born.” And we laughed because this is how she got when she was tipsy; she didn’t drink often. For a second I thought about Chicago, I was thinking about her smile. It was getting cold. I didn’t think too hard about what I said next. I didn’t think if it would upset her or not. “We can’t always get everything we want.” And then she slapped me in my face. Hard. That was something she probably didn’t think too hard about either. Damn, I thought, she just slapped me in my face, and I wondered if she’d remember tomorrow that moment. I stood and waited for an apology, but it didn’t come. In fact, she said, “I’m not going to apologize for that,” and she was crying. I should have just gotten into my car and drove away. I should have left her in the rain. That may sound harsh, but let me tell you this: 6 there are two sides to this coin, but even more than that I was just tired of making of her cry. I wish I could explain it in words, but I assumed she would eventually stop if I wasn’t around. I grabbed her by the hand and led her back up the driveway. It would probably be iced over by morning. My car door would be frozen shut in a few hours, I just knew it. Nessa, she was too good for all of this. She was still crying. “Don’t do me any favors, Sonny,” she whispered. And I said, “Nonsense, Beautiful. I’m going to play you and your family a song. It’s not worth crying about, okay? Let’s go have a good time. Let’s go get some more of that rum. Okay? And then tomorrow at midnight I’ll give you a ring, all right?” Then we went inside, and I’m sure it looked pretty obvious that she had been crying, but forget all of those people because even though I hadn’t seen Nessa in a long time, all it felt like I was doing these days was getting slapped in the face. She found her mom, and her mother hugged me hello. She smelled like shampoo. While getting a plate of food, we ran into her father, and he said, “Long time no see there, Mr. Sonny. Where have you been hiding?” “Here and there,” I said. Then I asked him, “How’s the business, sir?” “Just fine, just fine. How’s that music thing?” he said, and before I could answer, “You let me know when you put out that first record so I can grab a bunch of copies.” “No, no,” I said. “You’ll be the first person I send a free copy to. No question about it.” And then I laughed, and he did too, and then I winked at him, and he scrunched his eyes like he didn’t understand. What was there to understand, old man? It’s Christmas, that’s all you need to know. I beat a couple of kids in a game of darts in the game room, and even helped clear some of the glasses from the dining spread. Everyone said what a wonderful helper I was, and the women teased me about what a wonderful husband I’d make someone. I could feel Nessa in every room. They took a photo, the whole lot of them, and I watched and smiled and finished two more glasses of rum while they got organized. I stood behind the photographer and smiled real big with lots of teeth and held my hands in the air and yelled, “Cheese!” and the entire party echoed my call. When they opened presents I opened my eyes wide for every one, and said, “Wow. Nice shirt,” and “Where’d you get those knives? Is that a turquoise handle? They don’t sell those knives around here, do they?” Nessa sat by my side and she would giggle because she was drunk, and other times she would pinch my sides because I was bringing too much attention to myself. Afterwards I called out to Nessa’s father, “Where’s that piano, old man? I got something I’ve been itching to play.” “Well, my boy, go ahead and play it.” The whole place gathered around the baby grand as I played a little song I had been working on called ‘The Battles and the Wars’. Nessa tried to fit some song about Chicago into the music. She sang about how much she missed it; I didn’t know she had ever been. She sang, The streets were thick as thieves, but stripped people everyday. Like sweat from the rag to the brow, ’Good old’ Chi-town—that’s what they’ll say. Chicago’s a showy city. I hoped no one ever called it Good old’ Chi-town. But her mother, who had been downing wine like it was water, cried, and everyone held still until she was done, then they clapped for her. And I guess a little bit of it was for me as well. Then I moved to Christmas carols and there were laughs, cheers, and I don’t even know how many pats landed on my back. Soon the whole place was singing along. My sleeves were rolled up, I was standing, sweating, and I swung my head back and forth. I put on my new sunglasses and pretend to be blind. Jingle Bells and Batman smells, 7 Robin laid an egg. Chestnuts on open fires and mommies kissing Santa. I knew them all. Everyone seemed to find Rudolph fun. We screamed at the top of our lungs, and I couldn’t stop laughing. During Silent Night, Nessa’s dad was looking into his wife’s eyes singing like they were alone. A group of women formed a semi-circle around some little kid who was singing into a hairbrush that we were supposed to believe was a microphone. Nessa didn’t sing. She sat next to me at the piano on the bench, her head on my shoulder. Even the group of football watching men ventured over during kick-offs and commercial breaks. They were all loving Christmas at that moment, each other and the music, and I was in the center of it all. Even the guy with the tan jacket was there next to me. He put his arm around my shoulder and arched his neck and sang like a wolf to the moon, Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. The whole lot of them. Raising their drinks and swaying back and forth. Then it was time for me to go, because my cheeks were sore from smiling and I still had those darts with Victor to attend to. It was Christmas for us, too, and he was my best friend. I called out to everyone, “I know who I’m calling if I ever need back-up singers,” and there was laughter. They realized I was through, and they clapped. Nessa was well past sober by now. She only got drunk on special occasions. I said goodbye to the good people I had met--the tan jacket guy, Carly, Nessa’s brothers and cousins, and I gave two thumbs up to her dad who flashed a peace sign my way. Maybe he was loosening up. Or maybe he was glad to finally see me go. I didn’t think too much about it at the time. Someone had put on Natalie Cole. I asked Nessa if she had any mistletoe and before she answered I grabbed the back of her neck with my right hand, pulled her into me with the left, and kissed her on the lips with my tongue and all the passion I could muster right then and there, before all of those merry eyes. She didn’t pull away at first. At first she gave it right back. I squeezed the small of her back because I knew that was what she liked. I could taste the warm rum running from her breath. Her lips pulled at mine. It was good kiss until she remembered herself and lightly nudged me away. I wonder what those people thought of that. I wish I would have looked at the looks they must have been giving me. I didn’t though. I turned and kept on walking straight to the front door. Nessa followed and opened the door for me and I said, “You have a good time in Chicago, okay?” All she said was, “I’m sorry, Sonny.” “Me too. Me too,” I said; and then, “Are you going to miss me?” But she had already turned and closed the door and there was no answer. I got to my car and decided to put on my sunglasses as I drove away, just in case she was looking, just to give her the satisfaction. And of that what I remember most clearly is the moon turning pale to orange, much less brighter than before.

8 Cadillac Car The day my dad came home was the first time I had ever been in a fight. A real fight. I’m not counting the times with Micah because she’s my sister, and it’s not a real fight unless you can punch, and punching your sister is crossing the line, even if she is as big as a rhino and strong as a dude. It was raining outside that morning, and Micah was bragging about passing her driving test, which she had just done the day before. Grandma didn’t let us outside in the rain because we caught cold easy. There must of been a million raindrops on our front lawn, a million more on our porch floor. Streaming down the street sweeping branches and leaves into the gutter. It was the first time I think I’ve ever seen a million of anything. “Grandma,” I said. “You ever seen a million of anything?” “A million silly questions you ask me everyday.” She was rocking next to me in her chair like old people do. Raindrops made her hair frizzle so she always stayed inside. The high school bus always came first and Micah waved goodbye and jogged to it. Her new plan was to save up for a car. A white Mustang 5.0. Grandma had just bought a new Cadillac--beige with a maroon interior. Micah didn’t have a job, so I guess instead of money all she was really saving was wishes. I’d been saving wishes since my fifth birthday cake. That’s not including shooting stars and single headlights on the highway. I had enough wishes to last me a good while. Grandma was blowing at the top of her coffee. She turned to me and said, “You know Little Sammie’s coming here tonight, Pookie?” “Yes, ma’am,” I said. Dad had been gone for so long I didn’t know what else to say. Grandma called him ‘Little Sammie.’ He was in the middle of her three children. It had probably been six months since I had last seen him. That’s a long time to go without seeing someone, especially if you’re used to seeing them everyday. Actually, it’s only long until the first month or two. After that it’s just normal. Big Yella pulled up to the corner and I kissed Grandma and ran to it. The rain felt like hour old bathwater blowing in my face. We called the school bus Big Yella and the big fat black bus driver Big Fella. He was so freaking fat it was funny. I hated school. Whenever I said that, Grandma would say, “Hate’s a strong word, Pookie,” and I’d say, “I know, Grandma, that’s why I used it.” Patterson Elementary looked like a prison; I’d never seen a prison before, but I swear it did. There was a fence and gate, and it was just a building sitting there on a corner with square windows and a playground. Fridays were cool because it was like Saturday was a town we could see in the distance and we’d been traveling for five days to get there. On Fridays I felt like a gunslinger. It was okay to step outside of myself. There was a music class with Ms. Calhoun, and our main assignment was to make a rap out of a nursery rhyme. It was pretty corny, but I think everybody secretly liked it. We stood in a circle and pretended to be too cool for this shit, but when Ms. Calhoun started banging her tambourine we all clapped our hands and went-

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Short and stout he wasn’t that tall. He’s made of eggs and the eggs are raw. Will he-WHAT? Will he-WHAT? Will he-WHAT? Will he-FALL!”

We screamed the word ‘fall’ as loud as we could and we all threw our hands in the air and jumped one time. Ms. Calhoun said, “Wow, the roof must really be on fire. We’ll 9 let it burn, but just for today,” and then she laughed and shiggled her tambourine. And we laughed too because it was Friday and all we really had to do was sing. My turn to make one up was the next week, and I asked Ms. Calhoun if I had to base my rhyme on a nursery rhyme, and she said, “No, but I’ll have to approve it first.” Friday’s always went quick, too. We had an art session with Lynne (she didn’t like us using her last name), and gym with Mr. Duke, and of course music. Those were our only sessions. Probably because those teachers knew we couldn’t concentrate long enough on a Friday for math and science. On the way home, we were on Big Yella and Sarah Vaughn had to sit next to me because there was no room anywhere else. The bus was packed everyday, but usually after a couple of stops the seats opened up and everyone spread out. After not too long there was an open seat across from us and another one behind us, but Sarah didn’t move. Our knees kept bumping and touching and my foot was falling asleep because it was in an awkward position, but I didn’t want to move it because if I would have moved it Sarah would have thought that I was moving it because I didn’t like her knee bumping and touching mine. Then this punk redneck kid, Manny Jackson, started shooting paper clips at me with a rubber band and making fun of my hair. Those damn paper clips hurt worse than anything I can think of. When the first one plunked the back of my neck I had to use every single bit of my strength to keep from crying. “What’d you do with your hair, Victor,” Manny called out from the back of the bus. “Just put a bowl on your head and start cutting?” And all the kids back there started laughing. He was so loud; I knew he wanted everyone to hear it. I didn’t sit in the back, ever. They just got into trouble back there and threw things and tried to kiss girls. But when he said that about my hair I stood up. He was almost exactly right. Manny, that little punkass. Grandma used to wrap a rubber band around my head and cut everything below it with her clippers. She cut it almost all the way down to the skin. A ‘Night and Day Fade’ that’s what Micah called it. Above the line there was my bushy hair, dark like night, and below was my skin, light as day. We had tried using a bowl one time, but the rubber band worked better. When there was a wedding or a funeral and on Easter and Christmas, I went to the black barbershop, but that was halfway to downtown, which wasn’t close at all. I wasn’t really ashamed about my hair, I just didn’t like the sound of Manny’s voice, like it was something I was supposed to be ashamed of. I said to him, “Well, I don’t got the money for Custom Cuts, Uncle Scrooge.” Scrooge McDuck. He’s the first rich name I could think of. I couldn’t think of any rich non-cartoons. Manny acted like being called Uncle Scrooge was the worst thing ever. He raised his eyebrows like he couldn’t believe his ears, and he raised his arms, and it occurred to me that we could soon be fighting. “My momma cuts my hair,” Manny said. “Your momma cuts your ear,” I yelled back. One time Manny had come to school with a white band-aid over his left ear, and when someone said something about it he said his momma had accidentally cut him with scissors while trying to give him a haircut. He was lying. Cranston Haynes lived next door to Manny and he told me that Manny’s brother had cut him with a Swiss army knife or a butter knife or maybe it was a pair of scissors. Maybe it was his momma, too, who cut him. Cranston didn’t know for sure, but he knew it didn’t have anything to do with cutting hair, and there was no accident about it. That ear cut was nothing serious, but I remembered it, and that’s how lies can come back to get you in weird ways sometimes.

10 I knew I shouldn’t have started talking about mommas. Manny kind of just lunged at me when I said it. It was the first time I had ever had the wind knocked out of me. I couldn’t breath, and everything slowed down; it felt much more painful than it was. He stood over me and yelled, “At least I have a momma. And at least I have a daddy, and my daddy ain’t dodging sandniggers’ bullets, either.” Me and my friends used to do jokes about “Your mama” like on Def Comedy Jam. I didn’t have a mother, so I never understood why some of the boys always got so upset. But I did have a dad, and I had no idea what a “sandnigger” was. Blacks from somewhere where there was sand, I guessed. My dad was stationed in Long Beach, California, where I knew there were beaches and probably deserts close by. My dad wasn’t black, but it sounded like Manny was making fun of him. The kids were hollering, and I was wheezing, trying to catch my breath. My body got all hot. I’d never been in a fight before, so I wasn’t for sure what to do or if this feeling was normal. Me not being able to breath. I just grabbed his head and tried to squeeze it and rip it off of his neck. We wrestled around, and I remember somehow he had my face under his arm and his armpit smelled like a wet dog. I guess he got me good in the nose because it was bleeding when we were done. And I guess my cheek too, because it was sore. There must have been scratches and bruises on his stomach and back, because I was mostly going at the body. Cranston Haynes held Manny off of me. Big Fella pulled over the bus and made his way to the back. Manny and me both sat down real quick and tried to blend in with the rest of the kids. Big Fella looked like he hated getting up. It looked like getting to his feet was the most bothersome chore in the world. His big ass barely squeezed down the aisle of those vinyl seats. He saw my bloody nose and turned and leaned over to talk to Manny and the crack of his big black bootie snuck out of his pants. Cranston pointed to it and whispered to me, “It’s a black hole.” We had been learning about space in science class. “Which one a y’all bloodied that boy’s face?” Big Fella said, and before anyone could say anything I hopped over the seats and pulled the lever to open the door and ran to my house, which was only about two blocks away. I hoped that punkass, Manny, had to sit in the front the rest of the way home. For the rest of the entire school year. When I got home, I went to the bathroom to clean up. My nose had stopped bleeding, and my cheek wasn’t that swole. Nothing that anyone would notice. I dried my eyes too because I had been crying. I wondered if Sarah Vaughn had seen me crying. Micah was watching television, eating something, bragging to Grandma about driving, and Grandma was ironing clothes when I walked into the kitchen. “You need a ride somewhere, Peabody?” Micah said. She called me that because she thought my head was shaped like a pea. I went to the pantry to grab some cheezies. Micah was Grandma’s only granddaughter, and they were close, but that’s okay because I think that’s only because she was a girl. I don’t remember much about my mom, but after she got the heart attack and died, and before Grandma lived with us, Dad, me, and Micah all lived together in a duplex on the north side. Micah had a room to herself, and Dad and me shared a room until I was seven. We shared a bed. Micah used to cry a lot. She would call for Dad, and he would softly crawl out of bed so as not to wake me, but I always woke up anyway and pretended to still be sleep. He would go in her room and lay with her and I would try to listen to them talk. Sharing a room with my dad, that wasn’t weird for me at the time, but it was the same enormous bed he and my momma used to sleep in. He slept on the couch a lot. 11 We were in Grandma’s Cadillac headed downtown to the bus station when Micah said to Grandma, “Grandma, when are you going to let me drive this big girl?” Grandma said, “When pigs fly.” I said, “When doves cry,” but no one laughed. Grandma’s Caddy was an old Caddy, the kind that reminded me of a boat. Micah said it was too big, but Grandma said, “You gotta own the road, sweetie.” Back then I thought I might have wanted a Cadillac when I got older. The seats of that car were like felt, and I swear I could almost lay my entire body down in the back. I got the impression from my family that it was always important to drive around in a nice looking car. Before he left, Dad had a midnight blue Ford Bronco. He had bought it new. It was black and a four-wheel-drive and we all could fit in it easy. When he made his decision to join/to leave, Grandma moved into our place. She sold that Bronco, and we made enough on it, along with Grandma’s savings, for a new small house in the suburbs with a two bathrooms and a room for each of us. That was the best part about him leaving. I got a room to myself. “Listen to this rhyme I gotta do for school, Grandma. Ready? Are you listening?” “Yes, Pookie.” “Here goes--People think I’m kinda crazy, people think I’m a fool. Because I care about the world and I can’t stand school.” “What do you know about the world?” Grandma said. “He didn’t make that up, Grandma.” Micah looked back at me as if I were annoying her. “You didn’t make that up. That’s a song.” I said, “I could of made it up. I’ve never heard that song, before.” “What’s for dinner tonight, Grandma?” Micah said. “Why’re you always thinking about food?” I said. “Why are you getting into fights on the bus?” she yelled back at me. “What is this about a fight?” Grandma asked. “I didn’t get into any fight on the bus,” I said, and from behind her I could see Micah cheeks raise in a smile. If Grandma weren’t right there I would have hit her. Me and Micah used to hang out, and she used to play basketball with me, but she didn’t make the high school team, and ever since then all she did was eat and giggle into the phone. Sometimes I teased her about it. “You’re the only black girl who tried out,” I’d say. “How’d you not make it?…you’re a disgrace to the race,” and that used to start a fight, but lately she’d just rolled her eyes. Grandma said to me, “You better not be getting into any fights on the bus.” “I don’t know what she’s talking about.” “You two…” she said and exhaled, and this meant that she was tired and it didn’t matter what was going on or whose fault it was, only that we should stop. “I hope one of you isn’t lying to me.” Grandma mostly let us do whatever we wanted, but that’s only because neither one of us really wanted to do any crazy things. She didn’t punish often, but she was good at it. She punished us so hard, that neither me nor Micah ever got punished for the same trouble twice. We learned our life one lesson at a time. “Tonight,” Grandma said. “We eat wherever your father wants to eat?” The bus station was a sad looking place. Plastic orange seats in a row, white tile ground. All the people did was sit and stare at it. And it was cold in there. Honestly the bus station looked like the end of the line. And the floor was so sticky that every time I picked my feet off of the ground it would try to grip the soles of my shoes. Shcwetch, 12 shcwetch, shcwetch. A bus finally pulled up. A bunch of older young people filed off and lit cigarettes and stretched. People from college. Ball caps, goatees, bangs, and braids. The boys had baggy jeans; the girls wore tight ones. In gym class that day, we were doing our stretches and Manny Jackson had started laughing and pointing at Sarah Vaughn’s white frilly underwear which we could see if we reached our hands down to our feet and pretended to stretch. This one black girl with a hat like Panama Jack hopped off of the bus and another girl ran up to hug her. Then they started kissing like Maria and Tony from Westside Story. I could catch glimpses of their tongues and Grandma nudged me when she caught me staring. I wouldn’t even know about Westside Story except that it was Micah’s favorite. I think that’s because she had this crush on Jamie Wilson, this white boy who lived two houses down and played on the basketball team. Micah stayed in the car because she said she wanted to listen to some music, but she was being stupid. The first time Dad left was around three years ago, and Micah was mad, and she had told Dad that he was “nothing but a chump,” and she had tried to fight him with punches and everything. Grandma said I was too young to remember, but I was in my room and the heavy footsteps in the kitchen sounded like clumsy bears dancing. Like they couldn’t keep their balance. There was an Amish family that hopped off of the bus, and then a normal family with two parents, a baby, and a set of twins, and another family with a mom and two boys goofing around behind her. One guy was humming as he hopped off of the bus. He had a hole on the side of his leg of his Dickey’s about the size of a cantaloupe. Every time he took a step the hole widened briefly then closed like a mouth opening and closing. It was kind of scary, but more funny than scary. He was real tall, and his hair was knotted up in dreads, and he looked like he was from Fragle Rock. I heard that all you had to do to get your hair to look like that was stop cleaning it. Grandma said, “Well, if that’s true, then that’s good enough reason to take a bath every now and then.” And then I saw him standing there; I had not seen him get off. He was smiling and smoking a cigarette. He had gotten rid of his hair, and he looked good bald. Like he played basketball for a job. I thought to myself, ‘That’s a look I might try. I might get rid of this rubber band technique.’ Green button-up shirt, some jeans, a duffle bag. You know what? He looked different. His skin was getting tan. He looked so big and strong. I wondered what he had to carry everyday on that ship to make him get so big. Anchors maybe, or missiles. Something heavy. Grandma called out, “Sampson. Little Sammie. Here we are, sweetie.” Dad had really always been strong. He used to grab me and pick me up over his head when I was a younger and give me big wet kisses on my cheeks as I squirmed to get away. He’d say, “Here comes Numus,” and run after me and I’d try to run away laughing and squealing like he was a monster. Numus sounded like a plant, so I was never scared. It never took much to make Grandma cry and she was already crying. She kissed him, and he slapped my hand five, gave me a hug, and he was smiling real big like he was embarrassed. “Quit all that crying, Mom,” he said and rolled his eyes at me as if we couldn’t take her anywhere. She clutched at his arm lightly and said, “It’s good to have you home.” We walked back to the car with his arm around my shoulder. He didn’t pick me up anymore. He could have if he wanted, but we both knew I didn’t need that. Micah sat in the backseat pretending to sleep when we got to the car. Dad sat in the front and said, “Hey, baby.” “Hey, Daddy,” Micah said. 13 I reached my arms around the front seat to grab his shoulders. “Dang, Dad. You’re getting big.” He chuckled and motioned for Micah to come closer. She put her head between the two headrests and he kissed her on the cheek and held her close and tight and whispered loud enough for all of us to hear, “You know you’re starting to look so much like your mother it’s amazing.” Dad said something like that to her every time, but Micah smiled and turned maroon like she always did when she was embarrassed. The bus was crowded, he said. There had been a band from a university traveling to Detroit for a conference. He asked them if they would play, but they didn’t have their instruments with them. Except the flute. The flute player played from Denver to here. “She said she carried her flute with her everywhere she goes. Nothing beats a little flute playing on a long bus ride…’cept a harmonica. Nothing would have beaten a harmonica.” Micah laughed lightly, and when dad asked her what was so funny, she said, “Daddy, you just sound so hokey.” Grandma asked him how it was on the ship, and he said. “Crazy. I’ll be glad when it’s over.” Then he chuckled to himself. “Good people, though. Some bad, but mostly good.” Then she asked when he had to go back and he said, “I don’t want to think about that, Mom.” Then Grandma started fidgeting with her new car. She turned on her wipers despite there not being any rain. She turned to quickly look at him and asked him “Are you going to head over there to fight?” and quickly turned back to the road. My dad shook his head, but said, “I imagine so. I don’t imagine this thing will be over soon.” Grandma shouldn’t have asked that right then, but I guess that’s something she needed to know. But at this moment all I needed to know was it was Friday and we were going to Old Country Buffet because Dad wanted a little taste of everything. I didn’t know how places like that stayed in freaking business. There was so much food-chicken, spaghetti, roast beef, fish, and tacos. I was on my second or third plate when Dad asked, “What’s going on with you guys? Tell me something new.” Grandma said something about nothing changing since the last letter. She sent a letter every week. “How’s school?” Dad said. “Micah’s too cool for school,” I said. “Peabody gets into fights on the bus,” Micah called out and hopped out of the booth to get more food. Since she stopped playing basketball she’d been eating like a damn zoo animal. “Shut up, Micah.” I said. “Don’t tell you sister to shut up, Pookie,” Grandma said. “You fighting on the bus, Slick Vic?” Dad asked me. “A little,” I said and took a bite of macaroni and cheese. “Pookie!” Whenever her voice got high like this it meant she wasn’t happy. “Is that how you got the shiner?” Dad said. “What shiner, Pookie?” “He’s got a little bit of a shiner there,” Dad said. I said, “I had to beat this punk Manny Jackson.” “What? Why? Don’t call people ‘punks,’ Pookie. What shiner?” She was staring at me. I’m not proud to say I had lied to Grandma plenty of times in the past. But it wasn’t until I saw the way she was looking at me right then that I realized that wasn’t 14 something she was aware of. Dad’s eyes were on his plate; he was poking at salad with his fork. “Mom, some kids are just punks,” Dad said. “You know how school is.” “That school…” Grandma said, and rubbed her hands together as if she weren’t able to talk and rub her hands at the same time. She was probably the smartest person I knew. “That school is not like the school you went to, Sampson.” Dad said, “It wasn’t the school, Mom. It was the people in it. Straight down to the janitors” “Not every students had problems there.” She sounded tired. “The janitors, Mom. Listen to this, Slick Vic. They would see me and your mother coming down the hallway holding hands and they would pick up their ‘Wet floor’ signs and hide them behind their backs.” My dad knew how to blow up a story. “They would all groan when we didn’t slip.” Grandma chuckled and then she got quiet and it was easy to tell when she was about to cry. Dad put his arm around her shoulder. “What the heck are you crying for?” She said, “I missed you, sweetie,” and then I left because they had just put out some pizza at the buffet. When I got back to the table, Dad was teasing Micah through an invisible mic he held to his mouth. “Clear the roads, ladies and gentlemen. Clear the roads. Miss Micah is legal and on the loose.” “Shut up, Daddy,” she laughed. Dad let his mic fall to the floor and turned to me to say, “So, why’d Mandy Saxson beat you up.” “Manny Jackson, Dad. He’s not a girl. And I beat him down. He was making fun of my hair.” “He was?” Then he thought quietly to himself. “I tell you what, Vic, the next time you find yourself in a little scrap here’s what you gotta do. Look the guy in the eye, or girl in the eye-” he extended his hand toward Grandma. “Heaven forbid it’s a girl, Mom. But some of these ladies can have a little dog in ‘em too, just like the fellas.” Then he looked back at me. “Look ‘em in the eye and say, ‘I like my hair just the way it is, and I don’t think it’s any of your damn business how I keep it.’ Most of the time they’ll realize you’re for real and they’ll just try to save face and walk away. What’s a matter, Victor? Look at me, son. What is it? You like your hair, don’t you?” I looked down towards the ground. “No.” “You don’t like your hair, Pookie?” Grandma cried out. “Of course he doesn’t like his hair, Mom. Look at it.” “I cut his hair, Sampson.” “I can tell, Mom, jesus,” Dad said. “What are you doing? You’re getting my boy beat up at school. Please. Take him to Willie’s.” “Willie who?” “Willie the barber.” Grandma shook her head and said to herself, “Stir the pot then leave the kitchen. Have the nerve to call it cooking.” Dad put his hand on the back of my neck. I leaned in real close to him. He whispered, “Okay, until you get yourself a good haircut I want you to remember this one thing for the next time some punk is trying bully you, and you don’t think you can win, this is something that I’ve never told you before, but now I think you’re ready to know. It’s a surefire tactic, Slick. Nobody will be able to touch you again. You ready for 15 this?…When your in a scrap all you have to do, Vic, is just remember that you’re invincible.” “Sampson!” Grandma said and shook her head, but I could tell she was amused by all of this. I dropped my jaw. “You mean nobody can see me?” And then Grandma chuckled. “No, buddy,” Dad said. “Not invisible. Invincible. Nobody can hurt you.” “He didn’t hurt me to begin with.” “Well, if he ever messes with you again, just say, “Hit me, punk.” And either he’ll think your crazy and serious and he’ll walk away, or he’ll hit you, and you’ll walk away because you’re invisible and no punk can hurt you.” “For real?” “Try it,” he said and nodded. He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed as if I were falling and he was holding on. He started to shake his hand as if he were transferring his powers to me. Grandma looked nervous and she started talking about other things: bingo and the city council meeting and some women from church who had been asking about him. Anything to change the subject. She looked old next to Dad. Dad looked too strong and Grandma looked too old. Micah looked fat standing next to the mashed potatoes pouring brown gravy onto her plate. I don’t know how I looked, probably stupid with a big fat shiner under my eye. That night all we did was eat and laugh and talk and sometimes just chew and look through the window of the Old Country Buffet. I ate ice cream until I almost exploded. In the parking Grandma said, “You like the car, Sammie?” “It’s nice.” “Yeah, it’s all right, isn’t it? Thought I’d treat myself.” “You deserve that.” “Sixty thousand miles.” Grandma winked. Dad whistled. Just before we hopped in to head home, Dad said, “How about Micah drive?” And then this thought popped into my head: Micah is going to get us into an accident. It wasn’t a wish; it was just a premonition. I didn’t make anything of it because most of my premonitions never came true. I suppose I could have used one of my wishes to make sure nothing of the sort happened, but I don’t know how she found out about my fight, and she didn’t have to call me out in front of Dad. We hadn’t even left the parking lot. I said, “Dad, listen to this. I have to do a rhyme for music class and this is what I’ve got. Let me know what you think-

Candy, bubble gum, boomboomboom Put your hands in the air and shake the room

Bubble gum, firecracker, Cadillac Car, We’re not as dumb as you think we is

I knew it wasn’t that funny, but I think it was just that they weren’t expecting much. All of them laughed a little. Dad said, “M.C. Slick Vic. My boy’s a rapper.” Micah laughing the hardest. She shook her head at me and turned to pull out onto Thomas Ave. The wet street wouldn’t let the Cadillac tires grip it, and they screeched and screamed as they tried. The canary yellow Oldsmobile caught us on the rear. If it 16 had hit us squarely it probably would’ve crushed Dad, for sure me. I pictured a fullback crushing into a linebacker on TV and Dad slapping my hand howling, “Good shot, boy,” as we watched it. Because I wasn’t wearing my seat belt (only dorks wore seat belts in the backseat) my head slammed into the felt maroon headrest in front of me. I grunted or moaned or made some sort of noise. It didn’t hurt as bad as I thought it would. I was tossed onto the floor, and then it was over. I wondered how the groan sounded. It was more the anticipation than anything else. Micah pulled the car to the side of the road. Grandma was reaching out to me. I quickly got back to my seat. “Everyone allright?” Dad asked. He sounded like Johnny Rambo. As if he was expecting casualties. My nose was bleeding again, and Grandma held a handkerchief to my face. I thought about telling her it was the second time my nose was bleeding today, but then she’d get mad at me for not telling her right when I got home from school. Micah was crying, and Dad was rubbing her shoulders. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Grandma.” Grandma said, “It’s just a car, Micah,” and she looked off into the sky. “Maybe it’s not so bad,” I whispered to her. She wasn’t happy with me about the bus fighting and the haircut business, but she hugged me anyway. Cadillacs used to be built like tanks. There were two young black guys in Canary Yellow. Baggy jeans and Nikes. One wore a Clyde Drexler Trailblazers jersey. Clyde the Glide used to dunk the ball like it was nothing. Like dunking the ball was easy. Like the rest of us were the freaks for not being able to glide. This guy didn’t seem to have any hair, but I couldn’t tell for sure because his straight-billed Cardinals hat was pulled low over his eyes. The other guy’s hair was in a box. He had a white tank top and a thin gold chain. These two guys looked at their car and cursed loudly. The bumper was hanging off of the back of ours and the right panel looked like crumpled paper. Micah was still crying. Maybe I should have felt guilty about this, but just minutes before I had predicted this moment. Maybe I did have a super power, and I couldn’t stop smiling. I didn’t want to make Micah think I was laughing at her, so I tried to make a joke of it. I walked behind her and put my arm on her shoulder. “I guess you owe Grandma a hundred dollars.” “I fucked up, Victor.” Grandma didn’t hear her, and neither did Dad. I dropped my hand from her back and put it in my pocket. I don’t think I’d want anyone touching me if I felt like I imagine she did. The two black guys came up to us. My dad started adjusting his belt buckle and tucking in his shirt. He said to the two boys, “You two fellas allright?” “Look at my car, man,” the Clyde Drexler guy spoke. My dad’s voice didn’t rise. “Relax, now buddy, relax. These things happen.” Then the guy pointed his finger at Micah and said. “You trying to kill somebody? Where you’d get your license? A Cracker Jack box?” Micah started bawling again, and we all just froze like that. Micah cried a lot when we were younger. Momma died at Christmas time and Micah used to cry at night because she was having dreams with Santa Clause and trees and dolphins outside of her bedroom window, and it scared her, and Dad used to hold her and rock her while I pretended to sleep in my bed. I never did ask her if the dolphins were floating across the air or if our house was somehow underwater. Dad asked the guy to settle down. “You guys are going to have to settle down,” he said.

17 “How the fuck did she get a license?” Drexler said. He was pointing at her like his finger was knife. Then Dad asked Grandma to take Micah away. “Take Micah to the car, Mom,” he said, and Grandma quickly did. Not Victor. Nothing was said about putting me in car. He didn’t want me to leave; he wanted me to be right next to him. Maybe he wanted me to see this; maybe he wanted me to help. I was feeling pretty strong, feeling pretty good. So good that I couldn’t remember what it felt like not to have this feeling. I forgot what it was to fear. I had invincibleness. I said to that ugly bastard, “Don’t you point at her,” and my dad put his hand on my chest and pushed me behind him. I had never seen Micah cry so hard before. She couldn’t catch her breath. The Drexler guy looked at his friend, his friend shrugged his shoulders and chuckled, and Drexler looked back at me and said, “I’m getting scolded by this little mutt. You better recognize who you’re talking to,” and then his buddy laughed. I felt the knot form in my throat. Kids would tease me now and again about the color of my skin and Grandma always told me that no matter how much cream and sugar you add, it’s all just coffee in the end. Dad turned to me and said in the softest deepest voice, “Go wait in the car, son.” But I didn’t, it was too late. I took a running start at Drexler and reared back my leg and swung my foot between that motherfucker’s legs. He dropped to his knees holding his peter calling out, “My nuts. My fucking nuts.” I stood over this guy and shouted, “You’re a sandnigger,” and then, to be honest, I thought of America’s Funniest Videos. If only we had a camera and my foot had been a stray golf ball. No one was laughing, but I didn’t care, it was funny. I didn’t care about this guy. When I looked at Dad he was looking at me. His hand was raised above his head. For a second he looked like Grandma did at church when she was about to feel the Holy Ghost. He brought his hand down across my face. It wasn’t the force that brought me to my knees, but my attempt at dodging his blow. “What the hell is your problem, Victor?” I wondered if Grandma and Micah saw that from the car. “You don’t go around kicking people in their jewels.” Drexler’s buddy was laughing. Dad bent down to help Drexler catch his breath. That guy probably just had the wind knocked out him. I remember thinking that he’d get over it, he’d be allright. My nose was bleeding for the third time that day. The blood dripping down my lip and chin like rain from rooftops. I imagined the sidewalk three days from now a dried brown continent stained forever. I could hear sirens coming from somewhere, but I just started walking back towards Old Country Buffet. “Didn’t hurt,” that’s what I called out to him over my shoulder, but I don’t think it sounded too convincing. After the police left, we drove back to the house in silence. Dad came to my room that night to apologize. He stood in front of my bed for what seemed like an hour, but I barely remember anything, minus what he said about life being rough, and how rough it’d been for him, how each day a little rougher than the one before. When I heard his tears get caught in the back of his throat, I told him that I understood. The wet sound of his voice reminded me of the cold sharpness of his hand across my face, it was hard not to understand. That all I said, “I understand, Dad.” When he, left I made a wish, the last one I would ever make (I quickly stopped believing in those type of things), that that day had ended simply with ice cream-- where my stomach was full and my family was laughing and me and my dad were nothing short of invincible.

18 Besides a Dream and a Tree It was a chilly Saturday afternoon that I was throwing darts with Victor over at Del Sol, this tiny Mexican restaurant in the middle of town. Victor worked for UPS and wanted to celebrate the pay raise he had just earned. It had been a while since I’d last seen him; Toni was pregnant again, and he had been putting in extra hours at work. Del Sol never was too crowded--a decent place to remain low key. A couple of unassuming couples were flirting at a center table. A group of girls sat in the corner and drank yellow drinks through straws. The Hispanic bartender was eating ribs at the bar watching a soccer game on the television overhead. I watched a bit with him. Some little guy jumped up and knocked the ball into the air with his head. The bartender turned to me and said, “They’re just feeling each other out.” The entire time Victor tried to convince me to challenge the girls in the corner to a game of darts, but we played against each other instead. He won the first game, so I bought a couple of drinks for the both of us. After the next game, which he also won, he bought me a drink because he understood that I probably wouldn’t win one all day. Then he started talking about his dead brother, Clarence. It wasn’t the most comfortable of conversations, but Victor never did say much, and I’m not the type of guy to shut a guy up when he’s talking about his dead brother. The thing was, I didn’t even know he had a brother. Back when Victor was real young, around the time his mother died, Clarence had apparently one day decided to leave, and Victor had never said a thing to me about him. Early Wednesday morning, Vic had received a call notifying him that Clarence had fallen asleep while driving across I-64 over on the Eastside. Just about the only reason anyone goes over there late at night is for the nudie bars. Victor said that one of Clarence’s friends had said it was suicide. “The slow kind. He’d been killing himself for years.” I asked Victor what the guy meant by that and Victor said, “It meant Clarence didn’t have any friends.” It was when we switched over to pool that Trevio Tripp in his black shades and black leather coat walked into the place. I knew it was a new coat, because he didn’t look quite comfortable in it yet. He was smiling smugly and pulling at the sleeves. He shook my hand, bought me a drink, and said, “You feel like getting out of here?” “Get out of here where?” He looked like he’d been drinking, but I didn’t know for certain; I had never before seen him drunk. When I answered him, he started laughing. His laugh was a smile and a deep hee said repeatedly in quick breaths. I pretended to ignore him and focused on my shot. Pool was difficult for me just because there was so much room for error. Victor and I were trying to build up the nerve to start challenging people for money. I told him that we needed nicknames; he’d be The White Rollo and I’d be Pockets. You can’t hustle somebody without a snappy nickname. My shot ricocheted off of the side and missed the ball completely. Victor snickered, but Trevio grabbed the cue ball and lined up the exact same shot. He grabbed the stick from my hands, squeezed it between his legs, and sharply thrust his hips towards the ball. The stick scraped against the table. He turned to me with his hands up in defeat and said in all earnestness, “Your way is better, my man.” I tried not to laugh, but it was funny. Trevio was crazy. My cousin went on a date with him, and the following day he called me and asked if I wanted to play with him. “Dana said you can jam,” he had said, “and I want to see if your cousin knows music.” People often asked him where he was from, and no matter where we were he’d toss one hand across the air and answer, “Here.” He was large and dark, he took his time 19 when he talked, and his accent was as rigid as his forehead, although I never did find out where it was from. The black sunglasses permanently covered his eyes, to hide the fact that his right one was missing. Victor didn’t like Trevio, and he walked away shaking his head. Trevio cared very little, or he didn’t notice, and I believe things like this were the reason Victor disliked him in the first place. “What would you say,” Trevio began again, rolling his head around his neck, “if I said to you, Memphis is beckoning?” “Not tonight it’s not,” I said. “That is what you’d say? ‘Not tonight?’ But how about that word? Beckoning,” he said slowly. “A beautiful word. Say it with me. Beckoning. Memphis is beckoning.” We went on like that for a while, him saying “beckoning” in my face and me trying to escape him. “Beckoning. Beckon-ing. Beck-o-ning.” Someone told me his mother was an artist whose art went for a good amount of money. When he was a child, she would sculpt him and his siblings posing in the nude, then give the tiny statuettes away as gifts. They say she was engaged to some Haitian who would eventually stab her in the neck with an x-acto knife. Trevio claimed to have been to every continent. He said that he was once a kicker with the New Orleans Saints, but hurt his leg trying a field goal from 85-yards at practice. He claimed to have been in the beginning phases of training to become a pilot in Belgium before some accident and he realized that “if my people were meant to fly we would have done so long ago.” His brother was in the National Guard. A dark Bond, he called him. His great-grandfather had invented something similar to Jell-o, but called it something else (he couldn’t remember what). He once almost hooked up with Madonna in Montreal, but didn’t pursue it because it was before she was famous. On numerous occasions he would remind me of all the amazing things he could do as a boy. Fly, for instance, for longer times than humanly possible. And when he was younger, vodka was his spinach, but gin his kryptonite. And although he had only one eye, the vision in it was so perfect he said he could see the words pushed from people’s mouths. I don’t know how he came across a set of drums, but he was the best drummer I’d ever heard. He was so fucking good that when people asked, I couldn’t think of any other way to put it. I finally grew tired of his beckonings and walked away. I found Victor at a table next to the washroom and we talked for a bit. The Cards had just signed Willie McGee to a one-year contract. In six months Victor told me he would be promoted and perhaps transferred to the Denver branch. I was teaching piano to the daughter of one of our former teachers. “Mrs. Calhoun’s got a daughter,” Victor said. “I bet she’s cute, isn’t she?” Trevio’s hiss from across the bar interrupted us. “Have you ever been to Memphis?” he said. He was walking towards me grabbing onto stools and chairs within his path. His one eye I felt burning me from behind his sunglasses. “Have you?” The first time he and I played together was in the garage of some upright bass player named Paulie. When I walked in Paulie was facing the corner, playing on his bass, and Trevio was sitting with his shades on in a lawn chair, eating a sandwich. He said to me, “I’m going to go on and finish this sandwich, my man. Go ahead and do what you gotta do.” I set up my board and ran through some keys. I tried to play off of Paulie, who continued plucking with his back to me. He was good, but probably only because I wasn’t expecting much.

20 “Allright, allright,” Trevio finally said chewing on the last bit of sandwich. He was behind me when I turned, his head tilted toward my fingers. “Don’t hog all the fun,” he said and made his way to the drum set. We played opposite a garage door, and it spit the music back into our faces. By deep into the first number I couldn’t control my fingers. None of us said barely a word the entire time. People this good usually didn’t play with me. It’s a high I’m still struggling to come off of. A few patrons in Del Sol glanced sideways at Trevio, but most ignored him as he approached. “Do you know what’s in Memphis?” he said to me when he reached our table. “What?” I replied. He acted as if my question made no sense. “Come see for yourself.” The word was that there were a bucket load of heady musicians down there. They just appear when the sun went down, like bats at night. I always wondered where I would fit in among them. They said that Memphis was less a city than a very large town, and the only thing that you had to concern yourself with was the moment you found yourself in. I was suddenly and urgently curious to find out what I thought of that place. Why not Memphis? It might as well have been. I had no reason not to go. It was a good chunk of money we would be traveling for, and Trevio’s drums were already in the back of his station wagon. We went to my place so I could grab my suit, my board, and a toothbrush. Victor didn’t play an instrument. He said that he’d go to Memphis with us only if he could front us with one of his raps. When we were younger all Victor used to do was make raps, but it wasn’t something I thought he still did. I asked him what Adalia would think of him leaving town, and he told me she was in Little Rock visiting her cousin. He didn’t answer my question, but I didn’t push it because I was sure he’d be hearing enough of it from her when we got back. “So,” he said. “Are you going to let me flow?” If I were to have answered him honestly and said bluntly, “Nope,” he would have ridiculed me for taking him seriously. That’s just the way Victor was. I simply put my hand on the back of his head so he would know that I meant no offense by what I was about to say next. “Words kind of defeat the whole purpose. You get it?” “So you say,” Victor said. “So you say.” He was smiling and shaking his head with his eyes closed, as if to say to me, You’re not even worth my eyes being open. But he came along anyway. We drove south on 55, the three of us smoking cigarettes, and listening first to A Tribe Called Quest and then to some Miles Davis’ recordings from Germany and Paris. We stopped once at a rest stop just past St. Louis because we needed to relieve ourselves, and Trevio wanted to smoke a joint, and again in Cape Girardeau for milkshakes and French fries. Soon after, Victor fell asleep, but Trevio was better than the radio at keeping me awake. The guy was never content with silence. Sometimes the music wasn’t even enough to keep him from talking. He told me a group of businessmen had cleaned up an entire block in Memphis and dressed it with restaurants and a club, a theater and two art galleries. Paulie had lined us up with a private party at a place called The Candleman. Trevio then went on and on about some woman he had sex with on the elevator on the way to the top of the Arch. I asked him what he was doing at the Arch and he said, “Having sex with some woman, my man.” Then he started talking about some night years ago when he sat in with Jaco in Kansas City. Jaco was the boss on the bass. Everyone I knew agreed that he was pretty much the best there was. It was just that he 21 used to do things no one had ever done before. Sounds no one had ever thought to make. “Their man started getting pains in his stomach and they needed a drummer. So I hopped on and tried to keep up. Sixteen years old, my man. You believe that shit?” I shouldn’t have believed it, but Trevio stopped talking for a while and I thought he had forgotten that he was in the middle of a story. He lit a cigarette, looked out the window, and nodded his head to some beat I couldn’t hear. It was already too dark to see beyond the reach of the headlights. “Then what happened?” I said. My voice was rusty, and I cleared my throat; maybe it was that I hadn’t said anything in a while, or perhaps I was anxious. I’d never seen Jaco play. I’d never known anyone who had played with him. “I dunno,” Trevio answered. “Maybe he gets real drunk and falls asleep on some railroad tracks. You need more of a story? What I told you ain’t enough?” Stories said that’s what Jaco used to do. Get drunk and wander the train yard. They said he never remembered falling asleep; just waking up sprawled on a random set of tracks. He died a while ago, long before I started playing, and I’m not sure what from, but my guess is the music got to him, as it can do if you hang onto it too tightly. That’s how it is with everything I think; sometimes you just have to loosen the reigns. Trevio’s bit about the train tracks just wasn’t funny. I told him that it wasn’t. He said, “Maybe it was supposed to be, my man. Maybe it was to Jaco.” Then he abruptly started talking about other things--spaceships, pirates, taxes, and a dream he had where all the people were dolphins, and another one where he lived in a mansion on the moon with an indoor swimming pool and a glass roof. He liked the ‘what if’ game. “What if a pack of lions started chasing the car right now?” “What if I won the lottery? We’d be taking Memphis by jet.” “What if there was no money? And we walked around just shaking hands.” “What if farts were green, and you could see them? Man, that would solve a lot of whodunit mysteries.” “What if I ran for mayor, man?” “What if instead of cars, people went every morning to work on three wheeled bicycles?” “You mean a tricycle,” Victor said from the back. “Whatever you say, my man,” Trevio said, and he sounded dejected. He put his head against the window and fell asleep (although that’s only something I can assume as the permanent sunglasses prevented me from seeing if his good eye was closed or open). Victor sat up and put his feet between the two front seats. We listened for about forty minutes to whatever it was Trevio had put in the tape deck. A lot of horns over a steady bass line. The thing about Victor and I was that both of us were just fine with silence. There’s a comfort in that. “Nessa’s moving to Seattle,” I said, and the only reason I said it was because it was the only thing I was thinking about. “What’s that?” Victor answered. “Seattle. I think I’m going to miss her a bit.” “Seattle?” We made eye contact through the rearview mirror. “If you haven’t missed her by now, what difference is Seattle going to make?” He, Nessa, and I had known each other since before we were grown. Not enough can be said for history among friends. I wanted to tell him Seattle would make all the difference in the world, but instead I felt like crying. Highways at night used to do that to me. “You should call her,” he said eyes straight ahead. Nessa never really cared for my music. She liked it only because it was me playing. When I played records for her she would say things like, That sounds like the 22 last song, or This one reminds me of Annie Hall. When I told her that as a boy my mother and I used to sit in the park and listen to Stevie Wonder on a little boom box as she read and I colored, she said, I can’t wait to have kids. We were about thirty miles from Memphis when the wagon stopped accelerating, and we were forced to coast a quarter of a mile to the next exit and into a Chevron. Trevio punched the dashboard with first his fist, then his head. He yelled, “Piece of shit quitter of a car.” Victor said, “What if we treated people like we treat cars? And the day they can’t move anymore we beat them up,” but Trevio ignored him. We got out and circled the car, looked under the hood, moved some knobs around. We were to be playing in Memphis in just a few hours. Trevio patted the hood in appreciation, seeming to come to terms with its demise. It wasn’t yet the brunt of winter, but I knew we wouldn’t last long in this cold. The mechanic on duty met us outside in his blue jumpsuit ceaselessly wiping his pale hands with a red rag. After a brief inspection, he said he didn’t have the part we needed to fix the car, which was fine with Trevio because it cost more than he had on him. “Even if I did get that part,” the mechanic said, “I don’t know if it’ll be able to go and fix what seems to be wrong with you all’s wagon.” Then Trevio tried selling the car to the mechanic, but the guy knew either way we were leaving it on his lot. “Now what?” I said to Trevio. “Now what, you ask me?” Trevio replied and raised his hand in the air. “What do you want--to sit here and watch the stars?” That’s what we did for a bit. Trevio lit another joint and passed it to Victor, who inhaled, then offered it to me. Trevio said it would warm me and help me relax. I declined because he was smiling, and it felt like I was his entertainment. The heat in the car didn’t work, but the radio did. We sat on our hands and listened to tape of Marley singing some song about some girl and a fisherman and a random day in school. It wasn’t long before Trevio said, “It’s like he’s changing the color of the sound,” and Victor nodded. “We should probably do something,” I said tapping my fist against the window, which shielded us from an infinite dark field just next to the station. There was a pick-up pulled next to a pump. Trevio went over and after not more than five minutes he waved us towards him. We loaded our gear and sat in the bed the rest of the way to Memphis. Those two put their jackets over their head. I sat with the wind to my back, cows and signs zooming by. In Memphis it was even colder. Our breath floated in front of our faces. We blew into our hands and flipped up our collars as we took the instruments from the truck. I bought hot chocolates for the lot of us from some guy selling it on the street. Victor said, “At least there’s no snow.” “Fucking snow,” the vendor said. We still had a bit of time before the party started, so we found Buster’s, a corner bar a couple of blocks away, and played darts and sipped on Long Islands until it was time to go. A group of middle-aged men and women were eating nachos and chicken wings and laughing right next to the entrance. Every time our waiter came by Trevio shot his finger at him as if it were a gun and winked, asked him what it took to get a free drink around here. The waiter smiled and cleverly said, “Two dollars,” or “Boobies.” I think he was annoyed that we didn’t order food. Victor got real drunk.

23 “Cecil Sutherland-” he said and put his feet on the table. Since he doesn’t say much, when he talks, I can’t help but to listen. “-Is this guy in South County who had been molesting little kids, taking pictures and whatever. So they put him in jail. This was a while ago; I read about it in the paper. He swears he didn’t do it. Eight years he was in jail before they let him out, and they give him a job cutting grass or something at the minor league ballpark down south, and not more than three months into it whaddaya think he does?” “He did it again I bet,” I said. When Victor asked me a question he waited for an answer. It was one of the things I liked most about him. Trevio was sitting there listening. Every now and again he would chuckle or grunt and adjust his chair toward the group near the door. “That’s exactly what he did,” Victor said. “They say he got this little girl and little boy in the bathroom. That son of a bitch is sick, right? I mean little kids.” “Hell’s too nice for that guy,” I said. “Well, get this. He doesn’t get a lawyer. He asks for the death penalty. He said he’d rather die then spend that long locked up. Can you believe that?” “A park? All the little children running around there,” Trevio called out. “It’s like making a big fat man work at Old Country Buffet.” “Exactly,” Victor said and then none of us said anything for a while. Trevio finished his drink and said, “Have I told you about the time Marvelous Marvin Hagler took a swing at me at a Reno casino? He’s was a strong bitch, but I didn’t go down.” Victor finished his drink, and I could see his eyes magnified through the bottom of his glass. I finished my drink and paid our tab, and then we walked back to The Candleman. I guess Victor was feeling good, because he said, “I’m feeling grand.” He wouldn’t keep quiet. “Here’s the plan/I don’t know if I can/soar like a pigeon, because I can barely stand.” These were his raps. “Eat and nibble/at the seeds and dribble/in gutters and cans/or hands from the man.” They didn’t get much better when he was sober. The streets were deep with people, and we weaved in and out of them. There was a bum on the curb with a cardboard sign and a tin bucket half full of change. On his sign was scribbled ‘Please Help,’ but none of us did. He stared briefly at everyone who passed, but I didn’t look at him because if I were a bum on a curb I wouldn’t want people looking at me. Victor said to him, “Hey Stan. You need a hand?” The wind felt like a hawk hovering. It’s then I realized that I was walking in Memphis. The bum was happy sitting and singing-- drinkdrink…drink drink yourself drinkdrink…drink drink yourself if you don’t drink, I swear it’d be somebody else

A little further down there was a big and jolly trombone man with a halfro. He wasn’t fat, but huge, dressed in a vest and purple boots, reminding me of funk. He kicked his feet and pushed his brass towards a girl who was sitting at a nearby table as a plate full of sandwich waited to be eaten. She fiddled with her cell phone and the trombone man’s cheeks poofed. She wasn’t huge, but a little fat with a pretty face and dimples. Distinct lashes. Chubby cheeks. She jiggled when she giggled. The horn teased her--

Whumpa-vroooom---Vroompawummma-wum-wum 24

Inside the Candleman, there wasn’t a vast amount of people, but everyone there was having a time. Dressed in their best and smiles all around. The lighting was low, and it was warm. The walls were brick, and it smelled like fresh dough. We were stuffed in a corner, the music being an added incentive for the people, not the point of the night. Not a large crowd, but a number of characters, great characters. A group of men in fedoras smoked cigars in the back. There was a woman in a gentle gray sweater sitting alone and getting tipsy off of the countless drinks bought for her by flirting men. An elderly couple shimmied on the dance floor the entire set. I don’t know how long we played. Onstage there was no such thing as time. Trevio was all business. One time I had asked him why he beat his drums so hard, and he told me “these drums beat me in past lives.” I’d look at him and he’d either call out a tune, or just start playing. His tongue would peak from his mouth, and he’d dig into it with his teeth while nodding his head and keeping the beat. Paulie would casually find his way into the music. He slapped at the strings and looked at the crowd occasionally as if the music were above its head. The two of them would try and up each other with solos, and my job was to keep up, keep it simple, help make the music accessible to the listeners, allow them to realize how ahead of the game these two were. The crowd clapped briefly after each number. There were no tunes floating across the air, but only a few small waves they left behind. Some danced to our music up front, others bobbed their head while in line at the bar, and most sat in the back and dipped their tapping toe into it between conversation. I chose the piano as a boy because the music pulled me to it, and I could, if I pleased, put my back to the crowd. Those were the best nights, when I forgot about everything. When I couldn’t think of anything. When all I could do was hear. The only thing that mattered were my fingers, and how they always seemed to find the right keys. Nessa once told me that she wanted me to smile the same way with her that I did when I was playing. I tried to, but apparently it was something I couldn’t fake. After the first time Trevio and I played together, I told him, somewhat apologetically, that piano was just a hobby. I told him I wasn’t trying to make it. He looked at me and very genuinely asked, “Make it where?” After a while we took a break. We found Victor smoking cigarettes at the bar, even more drunk than before, talking to the bartender. “The trucker pulled him from the wreck, and held him, and tried to shake him.” He saw us and smiled, held up his glass, then put his cheek into his hand. Trevio and I settled into a couple of stools next to him and ordered some drinks. A very short woman in relatively long blue skirt approached. She was so short that as she got closer I decided she might have even been a midget. A couple of buttons were open on her sky blue blouse. The stool was probably at her nose level, and she struggled to climb onto it. I didn’t like watching her struggle, but I didn’t know if helping her would seem degrading. Trevio looked over and said, “They make these stools too tall sometimes,” and he held it steady with his foot. She ignored him, but as she continued to struggle, she grew embarrassed and started to walk away. Trevio noticed this as well. He hopped off of his stool and grabbed her under her armpits and picked her up into the air. “Upsy,” he said and plopped her onto the chair. Then he settled back onto his stool and continued drinking. That was uncomfortable for me to watch, so I could only imagine what the tiny woman was thinking. “If you’re going to embarrass me the least you can do is buy me a drink,” she said. “And you should probably take off those silly sunglasses. What have you got to hide?” 25 “I will buy you a drink, baby, but my glasses are staying on.” She shook her head, “My name is Sally, butch.” Trevio said, “You can call me Butch, baby.” “Well, sunglasses aren’t for the nighttime, Butch,” she said. “Sometimes, they aren’t for the sun, either, baby.” “You’re not going to show me your eyes?” she asked. “That’s impossible.” “Why?” “Because I only got one. I plucked the other one out.” “Did you really?” She seemed to enjoy playing along. “I did it for the gods,” Trevio said. “And if thine eye offended thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be sent into the hellfire—You know where’s that from?” “Where?” “The bible. You know how I know that?” “How? “I’m not sure. I’ve never even read it before.” “I wouldn’t have even guessed you had,” she said, and I walked away to the corner where Paulie and I tried something a little more mellow. A dozen or so remaining people wanted to dance, and they didn’t want to dance to what we were playing. Some guy, I believe he was the owner, told me, “I think we’ve had enough, I think we’re going to let our DJ play.” I found Trevio whispering something in the midget’s ear. I told him what the owner told me, and he yelled to the bartender, “Where is this owner?” When he was ignored, he hopped out of his stool and disappeared into the back room, leaving me alone with the midget. Victor was nowhere around, and standing there alone with the midget was awkward. I said to her, “Sally, right? Are you enjoying the night?” “I'll let you know tomorrow.” “I ‘m not going to be around tomorrow,” I said. “You see, my friends are I are just in town for the night. I’m in the band. How do we sound?” “You’re doing all right.” “Just all right?” “It shouldn’t matter what I think.” “Well, I’m trying,” I said, to be polite, my attempt at ending this conversation. “You’re certainly trying,” she said, and finally tilted her head toward me. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find her sexy. She was very sexy, in fact, with a confidence to her that let me know she knew how sexy she was. Her hair was blond and her skin was dark. I hadn’t felt it before, but quite simply it was beautiful, and that scared me because most midgets I knew were just little people on movie screens. I pictured us naked together, maybe even making love. It’s a sincere affair we share; the proportions somehow even out. She’s an elementary school nurse and lays her clothes at the foot of her twin bed before going to sleep. We spend evenings walking down the street with locked arms. She loves raisins and eats them like popcorn. Sometimes, just for fun, or maybe for romance, I carry her up the stairs of my apartment on my back like she’s a nine year old. What I like most is the swollen feel of my knuckles after I’ve smashed them against the faces of the assholes who tease my Sally about her size. She leaves me in the middle of some night, and there’s a part of me that’s happy for her, that she is confident she could do better.

26 Trevio returned smiling. Paulie in his footsteps. “Mr. Owner said one more song, my man,” Trevio told me. He turned to Sally and said, “You staying, baby?” and she nodded. We took our places in the corner and prepared to play. I looked at Paulie, and he was looking at Trevio who was scrambling on the ground around his set, searching for something. “I can’t find my sticks,” he said. There was an accusatory tone in his voice. All of us were at fault. He stood and called out to the room, “Who stole my sticks?” The place was quiet. “I can’t play without my sticks.” He pulled a chair next to him and stood on it. “Which one of you stole my sticks?” I’d never seen him like this, and wondered if his breaking point had been reached. He began to sob. They were just drumsticks, but he was crying, so they must have been more than just drumsticks. He finally stormed off and into the back room, only to emerge less than a minute later with a wooden hanger in each hand. His cheeks were glistened with his tears. “Somebody stole my sticks,” he called out above the murmur. “So I’ll have to play those drums with these two wooden hangers.” And he did. He started slow to get a feel, but made his way into our song. And then he started getting into it. He pounded the drums, punished the hangers, and the boom and the bang was intense and relentless. He started singing, which was much more like howling. He put his chin to his chest. We gave him a solo, and he ran with it, twirling the hangers in his hands, standing up, alternating hands behind his back. I saw Victor in the center of the room dancing like a puppet. Like there were strings pulling at him. I made eye contact with Sally shaking her head at the bar. The people were just watching. I think they were mesmerized at the spectacle of it all. It didn’t sound particularly good. Pretty much like you’d imagine wooden hangers on a drum set would sound. But I can say in all honesty I had never seen or heard a thing like it before or since. Afterwards, Sally waited around, but Victor had disappeared again. We packed and got paid, and Trevio whispered to me, “You like the little one.” His eyebrows raised in reference to Sally. “There’s nothing more exotic, my man. Am I right?” I asked him if he had seen Victor. He hadn’t, but said, “Let’s go find him,” as if Victor were a treasure or a yeti, and I had not planned on doing so. We went back to Buster’s, but he wasn’t there. We ordered rum and cokes and the bartender gave me mine free of charge. Trevio found this funny and laughed. I’ll never forget this next part because it’s the first time Trevio called me by my first name. He said, “Sonny, my man, give me a what if.” I didn’t hesitate either. I remember it being like I was ready for him to ask. “What if this is as good as it gets?” And I was proud of myself after I saw the look on Trevio’s face, the smile his mouth curved into. He wasn’t expecting that. The little midget was, however. She barely hesitated as well. “But what if this is as good as it gets?” she said, and although they were the same words she had changed to cadence of the words. Trevio liked that, and they both started laughing. I felt on the outside of an inside joke, so I went to the dartboard to toss some darts with some guy in a suit named Earl. Victor never showed up, but we closed the place down because when you’re lost (or looking for a lost person) I heard that you’re supposed to stay in one place. The bartender forced us out, but told us to meet her in the side ally if we wanted “the good stuff.” Outside, we found her standing in front of an

27 open trunk. For six bucks she could give us three hot dogs. And she was selling straws for a dollar fifty, but that’s okay because each one came with a free soda. “Two dogs,” I said. “One straw.” “Do you have any chips?” Trevio asked. “Potato chips,” the bartender said. Trevio replied. “I want to stack them on my shoulder and stare at people when they notice. I want to put everyone in their places, and wipe the smile off their faces.” When the bartender laughed it sounded like sandpaper on brick, and it reminded me of November, but the year had already turned. I wondered how far south you had to go to not be so cold. The bartender handed me a couple of hot dogs and a soda. She said, “You know what I want, honey?” I didn’t say anything, because I was certain she’d tell me even if I didn’t. “I want to be a painter. I’d paint our stomachs full and draw tiny words of our heart at midnight.” Her eyebrows rose and I started to laugh because I thought that’s what she was trying to make me do. Trevio and Sally began walking down the street. I finished the first dog quickly. The bartender continued. “I’d paint the rivers red. I’d paint the sky green. And me and you would both be blue with miles in between.” “Miles Davis?” I asked. “If that’s what you want.” It sounded like that lady would have been a good painter. Later, on the bus ride back home, Trevio would tell me that she was hitting on me, but I didn’t believe him. She was just having fun, selling hot dogs. That bum we had passed earlier was still singing and blaming the sun for I don’t know what. Only this time instead of the trombone man, by his side sat Victor tapping his toe, his cheek resting in his palm. It was funny seeing him. A relief. I think the midget knew the bum because she called him Bobby Bird and they started talking about something. “What’s the word, Bobby Bird?” she said to him. “It’s silly, Sally. Same as always,” he answered. Trevio, Victor, and I each lit a cigarette in a circle off to the side. “Here’s the thing, man” Trevio said and waved his hand over his head as if the thing was over his head. “Little miss Sally isn’t interested in me. All she’s talking about is you.” “Really?” Victor said. His eyes were shut and his head rested on the back of his neck. “I’ve never been with a little person before.” “Not you, my man.” He waved the back of his hand towards me. “You. You want a go at it?” It disturbed me that he asked. In fact, it was almost too much for me to bear. He and Victor stared at me waiting for me to speak. It’s hard for me to say how I felt, but whatever it was I was feeling, it seemed like I was feeling it at their expense, so I declined. Trevio snorted then said he was going to walk her back to her place. I told them that I was going to return to The Candleman so I could get my keyboard. I watched the three of them walk away down the street and listened to the bum sing another song. A couple of couples passed us, and they were holding hands. Then a few other young looking men in torn baggy jeans and dirty hooded sweatshirts. And next a cute pair of middle-aged women. They carried shopping bags and looked like lesbians. The bum sang-

28

Tell you a story, and I ain’t lyin’- Tell you a story, and I ain’t lyin’. If you don’t start living, Nigger, you better stop tryin’.

When he was done, I started clapping, and I was the only one clapping, but I cared very little, because he was good. Not as good as he was earlier, but that’s because the trombone man wasn’t around. That bastard was probably hooking up with that pretty little fat girl with the sandwich. Without that trombone man the bum looked dirty and sounded lonely, but that might be just because it was night. We were just about in the very last drops of the night. I looked a ways down the street and saw Victor a step behind the mighty Trevio Tripp walking with silly Sally. Hand in hand, mister and misunderstood. I decided to catch up to them because the only thing worse than sitting alone in Memphis next to a bum in the middle of a cold night is sitting alone in Memphis next to a bum while you’re watching your friends disappear around a corner. When I turned the corner, I saw them disappear around another corner. When I turned that one, they had just turned another corner. When I reached that one, they were gone. I did a three-sixty, scanning my surroundings. A group of three or four people cut across the street far away to the right. “Victor!” I yelled and jogged towards them, but was embarrassed when I realized they were only a bunch of glaring teenagers. I saw someone loading things into a trunk a couple of blocks away. I thought it was the bartender with the hot dogs, so I yelled “Hey, hot dog lady,” and sprinted to catch her before she drove off, but as I got closer I saw that it wasn’t a lady, but an Italian guy with a mustache. “You need something, brother,” he said as if we weren’t strangers. I shook my head and asked him where The Candleman was. He gave me directions, but it just sounded like a bunch of lefts and rights. I didn’t really start feeling too bad until the guy tossed me a worn beige jacket and said, “Go to the shelter on Madison.” Then I realized it was snowing, I was cold, nothing around was familiar, and to the world I looked like I didn’t have a place to go. I saw the bum sitting on a bench on the other side of the street and went over to sit next to him, see what type of song he was singing. As I got closer he looked up and said, “Welcome back,” but it wasn’t the original bum. It was some other bum, or maybe he wasn’t a bum at all, but just some guy from out of town who was lost in Memphis. Maybe he was both, and we could share a smoke and talk about it. “I’m looking for The Candleman,” I said to the new bum. “I’m the Candy Man, bitch,” he said flatly, and pulled up his sleeve to reveal a tattoo of a candy cane and the word ‘Candy Man’ written in cursive. “I don’t want the Candy Man,” I said real fast. “I just want to go home.” This was funny to the new bum, so he chuckled. I was scared shitless, and I didn’t know why, and that scared me even more. I hurriedly walked away with my hands dug into my pockets and buried under my stomach. My fingers felt like they were going to break off. The sky was littered with flakes, and with every breath more and more of the cold filled my insides. Each of the snowflakes began to look like angels parachuting to the ground. They stuck like a layer of confetti. And then it occurred to me as bright and clear as the snow at my feet, and I to this day I don’t know why. I am going to die. They, these snowflake-like angels, were here to take me away. I wondered if I should just sit and let it come. The world was suddenly an unplugged pinball machine. Dark buildings, dim 29 lampposts, no people. Maybe I was already dead. It felt inevitable and unrelenting, and I must say there is a certain relief that accompanies such knowledge. There was nothing more to be done. Yet there was a phone booth standing alone on a corner across the street. It had no business being there, and I was convinced that it had been an act of God that they decided to put it right there when piecing this town together. I dialed collect. She accepted the charges, and then said hello. She sounded tired; there was probably somebody next to her. “Merry Christmas,” I said. It was early January, but that was an inside joke I hoped she understood. She asked me if I was drunk. “I don’t know,” I said, but I probably was. “And that’s the truth,” I said. “And the truth will set you free. Do you know where that’s from?” She thought it was from Luke. “Yes,” I said, but again I really didn’t know for certain. “You’re exactly right. And I haven’t even read Luke before. Can you believe that?” She asked me what was wrong, if everything was okay. I said, “Nothing’s wrong, baby. Everything’s okay.” And that too was the truth. Then she asked me not to call her baby and told me she had to go and to be safe wherever it was that I was. “You, too,” I said. “You be safe in Seattle. I’d been thinking for a while that I might want to go to Seattle. You know? Try something new. I’m in Memphis now, but I don’t think this city is for me. It’s like a big huge little town. With people and bums everywhere.” She said goodbye and hung up, but I stayed on the phone, wondering why I had called her, daring myself to call her back. I didn’t. I sat down on the curb and laughed. I pictured a smile frozen on my dead face. I pictured men in uniforms poking my frozen body with the soles of their snow boots. If I survived this night, I asked God to make me a promise. That’s all I wanted to be was a promise. I looked up to the skies and now the flakes looked like stars falling coming closer--not endless, but heavy. “Hey, motherfucker,” someone yelled, and I looked up and down the street for the Candy Man. This was a battle I was ready for. I would fight him like a starving dog for meat, like a gladiator for his life. There was only a slight disappointment when I spotted Trevio leaning out of a second story window across the street. When he came down to meet me he was laughing. Long gulping gasps of laughter. This man laughed like it started from his toes. He was on something, although I only say that because I had never before seen him like this. He said in between gulps of laughter, “Giant Victor whatchyamacallit friction sleep rocket sugar,” or something like that, but I figured out he meant that Victor had passed out in the midget’s apartment and he wanted me to go get him. I made Trevio sit down, then took the stairs two at a time. In Sally’s apartment I remember there being no Victor and no television and no chairs at the kitchen table. Sally was there in her blue blouse and skirt. Her hair tan like sand. Her skin like wet sand. She asked me to sit down which I did, next to her. I apologized for some reason. She said, “What are you apologizing for?” and patted my arm. I became conscious of how cold I was and of the old beige jacket the guy had given me earlier, my thin windbreaker underneath it. “Where’s Victor?” I asked her. “Not here.”

30 On the wall in front of the couch, where a television would be in a typical living room, there were two paintings split by a cracked window. Simple paintings. One of multicolored shapes and circles. The other of a two stick figures playing violins. “So what do you do,” I said, “just sit here and stare out the window all day?” “Sometimes,” Sally said and left me for the bathroom. I flipped through her CDs, but hadn’t heard of many of the names. I went to the window to see what it was she looked at all day. It faced the front of the building and other buildings. I saw Victor eating a candy bar, sitting on the curb next to Trevio, who was sleeping in the snow on his back. Vic waved, smiled, and shrugged his shoulders as if he were looking at me from the back of a bus I had just missed. Trevio woke up said, “There he is,” like he had spotted me in a crowd. He then balled his hands into fists and threw a couple of combos towards me, jabs and hooks to the body. “We tricked you, my man,” he called out and then went back to sleep. Sally came back out wearing a yellow tank top and blue boxers; her make-up was off and she had a simple face with smooth features. Her legs were like ice cream cones. I asked her what she was doing in Memphis, and she told me a story about college in Charlotte and a small business she started where she made and delivered homemade meals to people’s doors. She made anything and everything, she said. “It was affordable too. They told me what they wanted, I told them how much I thought it would be and I’d be there in an hour later with their dinner for the night.” The business failed, though, and all I could think about was how she managed to drive a car. The real story then came out about some guy who she followed here. Then there was something about a circus. Something like, “Sometimes I think I should just join the circus. That’s what I used to want to do when I was a kid.” “Like a tight-roper or something?” “No, like a clown--in the freak show, or something. I could be in show business,” she said. I thought she was joking and pictured her sandwiched between the bearded lady and the person whose gender depends on the profile you’re looking at. “They would boo you off the stage,” I said. “You’re too normal.” “You don’t need to do that,” she said, and I apologized. She asked me, “What are you apologizing for?” “I’m sorry for being sorry.” Then, and I’m still trying to figure out why I was the one she told this to-why this moment seemed appropriate for such a story, she told me about how she had awoken in the middle of some night and had heard someone’s presence in the room. Footsteps around her bed. She said she didn’t scream or move, just closed her eyes and pretended no one was there. She said it seemed like weeks before the sun came back out. Eventually she woke up and she said there was no evidence that anyone but she had been in the room. “I could have dreamt the whole thing.” I didn’t know what to say after a story like that, and I think she was a little embarrassed afterwards as well. Finally, she said for me to go. “Go where,” I said “Reciprocate.” “Reciprocate?” “This is how conversations work. I go then you go. Trevio said you had little clue.” I’ve never been told how conversations worked. I just thought they did or they didn’t. But since she asked I just started talking about how I tired I was. How I was 31 outside and almost dying in the snow. I told her about Candy Man. I told her it was probably the scariest thing I’ve experienced in a long time, although I don’t know how true that was. I told her about Nessa. How there was a girl named Nessa in Seattle who once thought I could rule the world. “Well, at least you made it,” she said. Then I asked her if she wanted to kiss me, and she said, “No, not right now,” and that was that. I went to the window to see what Victor and Trevio were doing. The most unexpected thing. Trevio spinning and karate kicking the snow. Victor sitting in front of him on the curb crying with his head in his hands. “What are you guys doing?” I yelled down to them. “I’m kicking the shit out of this snow,” Trevio said. “That guy is just having one of those nights.” The snow was inches deep and there was no indication of it slowing. Sally called out the window, “Butch,” and Trevio stopped cold as if he were suddenly frozen. “What is it, baby?” “Take off your glasses.” “Why?” “Because I want to see how it looks.” He reluctantly pulled the glasses from his face, and it looked hideous. It angered me that he had not prepared me for such a thing. Where his right eye used to be was an open’s catcher’s mitt, a brown hole in the middle of his socket that got smaller and darker the deeper you looked into it until it was nothing but a fine black point, an endless black gap in a brown valley. I refused to believe anyone could survive such a wound. “Does it hurt?” “I get headaches.” “That’s the liquor.” “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” he said. I didn’t feel right after seeing something like that (it’s been years and I’m yet to rid my head of the image), so I decided to leave. She walked me to the door, and when I hugged her I felt like a giant. She said, “If this is how you’re leaving then I was right for not kissing you,” but I told her I would see her again and went down the stairs and out the building. We picked up our stuff from The Candleman and called a cab for the bus station. On the bus ride home I remember Trevio making fart noises in the pitch-black bus and eating jerky at a gas station. He smoked a joint in the tiny bathroom on the back of the bus, and when the bus driver stopped the bus to accuse him, Trevio pretended to be blind. I remember the sky turning more shades of blue than I knew existed; yet I recall sleeping through the sunrise. And just past the Missouri boarder, when we passed this woman sipping on a mug, wearing a thermal top, sitting in front of a small, pretty, yellow house with an unkempt yard and children all around playing in the snow, she waved. A simple acknowledgement, and I don’t know if she saw us, but I gave a wave right back. I remember asking Trevio what the deal with Sally was, and he said he would tell me later. A couple of days later I remember we were playing together at a local spot downtown, and he told me that Sally was his sister. I remember believing him, having guessed that exact thing. But before all of this, just before our journey had reached its conclusion, while sitting in the terminal waiting for the Greyhound to arrive, I remember asking Trevio

32 what happened to his face. Why no eye? He almost told me, too. He said, “You know Jaco?” Jaco, the bass player. “I was playing some funky mess with him, and he started playing something crazy that I hadn’t even heard before. It was whiny and loud, but he kept if funky. And I had a hard time keeping up, my man. No shame in that. I was just hitting things. Whatever I saw I smacked it with my stick. Smack. Pow. Tat. Bang. Whomp. There were hundreds of flies on the drums, and I was killing them one by one. Everything was happening so fast. But the thing is, it sounded good. And I was beating my drums, my man. I was beating them so good. I could feel the beat through the ground into my body. Those drums had beat me in a past life, I was paying them back. It was the best I ever sounded. Then, now this is where I get freaked out, stay with me okay, I know you’re not going to believe this. The drumsticks jump out of my hand, my man. I swear to the gods. They start beating the drums on their own, and I don’t know what to do. Should I grab them? Should I just let them play?” Trevio Tripp. I got a story about him for every hour of the night. I lean back in my seat and pretend not to listen because I’m tired, but he doesn’t notice me. He keeps on talking. “I do neither. I start screaming. It was scary, my man. I yell because it’s like a ghost is playing drums or a demon. And I’m a little high, I’m not going to lie. You know Jaco. Either way, the gods or the demons have taken over my sticks, and I remember Robert Johnson, and I think that’s what I’ve done. It was the best I had ever played, my man. I’ve been playing that good ever since. I was selling my soul. Then Jaco looks over at me during this and real cool-like he says something like, ‘Get a hold of them sticks, chief.’ And I reach for them. Then there was a bang and a flash, and the next thing I know my right hand is clutching a stick, my left hand is empty, and a drumstick is sticking out of my eye. It hurt like nothing I’ve ever known, my man. But I didn’t feel it, you know what I’m saying? Not at the time. You want to know what I did?” I didn’t answer him. “I started bobbing my head up and down, hitting the stick against the snare. I kept the beat going. I finished the set.” He lit a cigarette, and directed his gaze towards the tile floor. People were scattered throughout the terminal, nobody seemed to notice anybody else. Considering how drunk he was, I thought Victor was sleeping behind us this entire time, but he was awake, and he was listening, and I had never heard his voice sound so harsh before. It was disgust, like he had tasted filth. He said, “What do you mean you kept the beat going?” This upset Trevio. “What do you mean, ‘What do you mean?’ I kept the beat going. What more do you need to hear, my man? That’s what happened.” This upset Victor. “What do you mean, ‘That’s what happened?’ The story was supposed to be about your damn eye, not about some goddamn drunk musician.” In that terminal, the three of us were bleary eyed and sleepy. Victor voice was getting deeper and louder, so Trevio stood up. Looked him through the eyes. “I’m not some fruking drunk musician. I’m the best drummer you’ve ever seen. I can play with hangers, I can play with branches. I can play a set with my big, black penis, my man, if need be.” He was yelling. Grabbing at his crotch and pulling at his pants. “And all those people would still be on their feet dancing to the sound of my thingy pounding those drums. You want to see?” He reached down the front of his pants, moved his hand 33 around, and pulled out two drumsticks. It was confusing. Victor grabbed the sticks from Trevio’s hand and laughed like a three-year old. He tapped the back of my seat like a drummer boy unable to catch his breath. They had been down his pants his entire time. I tried not to laugh, but it was funny. Trevio Tripp was crazy. He now plays the snare drum behind some crooner on a guitar at Café Gautier some new restaurant on Park Street, and he looks just a little bit older. I heard he was back in town and I jumped at the chance to see him. It’s been a while and any sign of aging would be excused, but his hair has only a smidge of gray, he wears a moustache and, instead of sunglasses, an eye-patch. They take a break and I buy him a drink. When I ask him how things are, he tells me he’s been living on a boat in Sarasota for four months, and before that he said he tried to a stint in the Navy but was released on account of his eye. Before that he was in LA making jingles for commercials. “The one with the dog who can’t get a bitch on the account of his bad breath. That’s me.” He has returned to find a number of local spots that hire him on a weekly basis. I tell him I’m teaching music to grade schoolers, but have long ago ended my traveling ways. I tell him how Victor drowned in his bathtub just over a year ago. He looks sad, but I don’t think he remembers who Victor is. There were a handful of out of town jobs we did after Memphis, but that’s the only one we really talk about. Sally, the Chevron, the hangers. We drink, and he laughs like they’re jokes he had never heard before. He says things like, “That’s something to think about when I’m giving bread to birds,” and, “What? Me? I couldn’t have done anything like that, my man.” But I want him to talk about it with me, just to make sure that it all really happened and I’m not making it all up. So I ask him over and over if he remembers, and he tells me it all, even if it’s not exactly like how it happened, and I allow myself to believe him even if only for the moment.

34 The Funeral of a Stranger You awake from a dream this morning and the gold of the streetlight peaks through your shades. Initially you mistake it for the moon. Although it’s still dark outside, it feels as though you’ve gotten an entire night’s rest. Your sheets are at your feet, and your shirt and pants are on the ground besides the bed. Your fiancé, Toni, is soundly sleeping beneath the comforter at your side but wakes when you sit up. What’s wrong? she says. ‘Why does something have to be wrong?’ you think. She always wakes at your slightest move. In a couple of hours she leaves for her trip, just a little something for her to get time to herself. That of all places she could have chosen it’s Charlotte is suspicious (“What does North Carolina have to do with anything?” you asked when she told you), but she claims to have an old college friend to visit, and you don’t question it. She’s not happy with life right now, and when she is not happy, rarely are you. You tell her nothing is wrong and then ask her why you’re naked. “I don’t know. Your shirt’s probably on the floor.” She turns away and begins to talk about the odd things you often do in your slumber. Things you never before knew you did. Slurping and talking or kicking off your socks or sleeping on top of the spread. She is still talking as she drifts to sleep. She says nothing of sleeping in the buff. You become very aware of her laying besides, her form. Back when you still worked the road, back when she was working at the Red Lobster, she would read her poems to you over the phone at night, and her small raspy voice would speak of cutlery, the crust around waking eyes, storytelling gypsies in Romania, the way stamps taste, road burns from bike accidents, spider webs on foreheads, a sea diver’s first taste of water after being under for hours on end, the color turquoise. She would raise her voice or pause during certain sections, or whisper for effect, and you would listen. They were great moments—you alone with only her voice in a muggy dim motel room. Almost better than the times you were actually together. You wanted to pull her through the phone and would tell her as much. She said she could imagine the two of you destroying the room in a craze. “Listen to the dream I just had, baby,” you say to her and wait for her to respond. “It was about this funeral I think. Very weird. I had wings I think. I think there was a banjo.” Manny’s mother is being buried today; it’s her funeral you are speaking of. “Other people’s dreams are boring,” Toni says, which is just as well because you don’t entirely recall it anyway. The harder you try to recollect this dream the further it burrows inside your head. That you feel no need to relieve yourself really should be the tidbit that tips you off. You cannot recall a day in your life where you have awoken and not been met by this instant and unrelenting urge. But there you are sweating and bare in the dark, too awake to sleep, the lamppost pretending to be a moon through your purple shades, and your privates showing no signs of life. And rather than try to make sense of this dream you’re just content with the mere acknowledgement that your mind was in some place it had never before been. - Three days ago, in a meeting at work, Jenkins went on and on for twenty or thirty minutes about something, you’re not entirely sure what. Jenkins is the type of boss who wants results. You once went three full months without even seeing the man because he was getting positive results from you and there was no reason to meet. At this particular meeting your attention was fading. The central air in the meeting room was down and everyone in the small office was sitting uncomfortably 35 around the rectangular table in the lunchroom. The men were constantly wiping their palms across their sweaty faces; the women were fanning themselves with manila folders. You were actually thinking about water; everyone was taking tiny sips of it from their mugs and white cone shaped cups, and you were thinking about all the phrases embedded in your brain surrounding this plain liquid. Water off a horse’s back. Water under the bridge. Like wine for water. The next time someone said something about it to you, you decided that you were going to say, “The water’s up to my chin, and I can barely swim,” and then you’re going to see what they think of that because it only makes so much sense, but you liked the way it sounded and thought it could catch on. At one point Jenkins chuckled and everyone started laughing, so you started laughing as well because you know from personal experience that laughing is just easier than being the guy not laughing. The guy not laughing in this particular circumstance was Manny. It didn’t take long for Jenkins to notice this, and he sat with his cheek resting in his palm as the room quieted down. The quiet lasted a couple of seconds before it registered with Manny that Jenkins was staring at him. “You hear me, Mammal?” Jenkins said. Everyone there calls him Mammal. He is a stout man, not extremely tall, but thick, with thick black hair and eyes like walnuts. He usually makes an effort to look people in the eye--when he is talking, when he is listening. They call him Mammal because he sometimes on his lunch break goes to the utility room with the broken printer and curls up in the two chairs in the corner like a bear hibernating in a cave. You call him Mammal, too, but never to his face. In the meeting room, Manny made eye contact with you, and you couldn’t help but find it odd and somewhat admirable that of all the possible things to look at in that moment it was you he chose, but also there was guilt because in your head you said, I want no part of your daydreams, friend. Friend is not far-fetched, and although you’re not the best of them, you’re the best either has at this workplace. Although there’s not much you have to talk about, of the things that come up most of them you agree on or can share a laugh at together. “You said it, Mr. Jenkins,” Manny finally said and nodded. This satisfied Jenkins enough and the meeting continued as if it had never paused. Afterwards, while walking to your cars, you joked with Manny about his lapse. “Where’s your head at?” you said. This was when he told you about his mother and her dying. You said you were sorry, it was the first and most natural thing you could think of, and Manny asked you why you were sorry. “Did you do something to her that I should know about?” he said. “Because if you did...” No, you say, but you don’t take the apology back; you think it’ something worth feeling sorry for him about. You ask how she died and Manny said, “Slowly. Like we all do.” It was a rough conversation. The man’s soul seemed cold. You asked him if there was anything you could do to just let you know, and this is when he gritted his teeth, loosened a bit, showed a little bit of his heart. “Sure,” he said. “I guess that’d be okay if you came along to the ceremony.” And you quickly agree, because even if you had planned on saying no, there was no appropriate way to decline. - Before you even meet Tino, you know that’s his name. You arrive at Manny’s duplex before the funeral, and this man with a tight ponytail and a goatee is wearing tan khakis and a blue blazer while painting a picture on the garage of a crow playing the bongos. He

36 looks at you, and you say to yourself, “There’s Tino,” no second thoughts about it. This initial glance is all you get; afterwards, he acts as if he’s alone, just keeps on painting. Manny emerges from inside of the house and he looks normal, like this day is no different from any other. You and he shake hands, and he says to the man while motioning to you, “Tino, have you met my friend, Victor?” and Tino nods and looks away, and you do the same. Not more than two minutes on the way to this funeral a couple converging onto the highway in a green Explorer cuts Manny’s Rabbit off, and Manny slams on the brake pedal as if it were a roach scampering under foot. The music in the Rabbit is loud; some lingering electric guitar by its lonesome, and it seems to suit the lady in the passenger seat of the Explorer well. Both she and the driver are talking into cell phones, and Tino says, “They’re probably talking to each other.” Manny puts a sarcastic thumb up when you pass them. Tino says, “This used to be such a nice neighborhood,” which gets a chuckle out of you because he’s trying to imitate the lady’s voice despite obviously never having heard her before. The funniest part about it is that it’s exactly how you imagine that lady to talk. And although she looks like music, she sounds like noise. High pitch and scratchy like a record. That voice reminds you of Miss Skettlebohm from fourth grade, which makes you think of the day she caught you drawing a cartoonish picture of what you imagined a naked girl to look like, which leads you to the day of your first arousal, which occurred later that same year when you were square dancing in music class with Kiddy Samwood, the ugliest girl in the school. And this all leads to the day your most recent sexual escapade, which was with your fiancé in the shower before work two weeks ago. When you pulled back the curtain she was facing away from the spray rinsing the soap from the back of her left calf. She smiled and let you kiss her. She let you hold her and let you take her, and when you finished she kissed your cheek, stepped out, and dried off without saying a word. These thoughts streaming on your head, you wonder how appropriate they are to have on this day, but you are excused because this world you’ve surrounded yourself with, the one you keep in your mind, seems to be getting smaller. You try to think of a ways to incorporate water into this notion, but no phrases come to mind. The couple in the Explorer has moved even with the Rabbit. They quickly pass, and the lady, in response to Manny’s sarcastic thumb, graces the entire car with a flick of her straight and slender middle finger. “That’s sexy,” Tino says. He’s beginning to reveal himself. “She wants to have sex with all of us.” You don’t know how seriously this guy is taking himself, how seriously you are supposed to take him. Manny accelerates violently to catch up to the Explorer, but his Rabbit shows no cooperation as it sputters and struggles to adhere to the weight of his foot on the gas, and you picture the three of you-Manny the Mammal, Tino the Mexican, and Victor the stranger-walking on the side of the road waiting for someone with enough edge to help a lot like you out. “GOTTA GO GOTTA GO,” Manny hollers, and it excites you in a way that makes you feel like a child. Now his behind is on the edge of the seat, his chin over the wheel, and he’s a cowboy with Tino next to him, and that could work too because there’s no need at all to change the nicknames. The last push is what you think this should be referred to, but you keep quiet because you know this day has nothing to do with you. The only thing that matters right now is that you don’t stop, that you catch whatever it is that lies ahead of you, and, “C’mon, baby,” Manny pleads, and of course, his car obliges,

37 and you make it to the church because you feel you know exactly how this day is going to end, which is to say not right here and not right now. - Months go in between good blazing Buffalo wings. So when you drive to The Corner Pub instead of Mori’s Sushi for an early dinner one Sunday afternoon she doesn’t say a word. She just sits there and drinks water, and you are unapologetic as you devour the wings one by one. You love blazing Buffalo wings, and she will just have to sacrifice for once and go without her sushi. You rip the meat from bone and make sure to slurp. She is not going to ruin this meal. At night, you hear her stomach growl, but she still does not eat. Around the time she usually sleeps, she reads a magazine in chair besides the window, still yet to speak to you. You kiss her on her neck, and she lightly nudges you away with her head. You rub her shoulders, her arms, her chest. She looks at you as if you’ve stolen something. You say, “This is great. I can’t touch my fiancé. Thanks you so very much for having a great attitude about all of this. I’m glad that you are being an adult. It makes me feel so good that my love can realize how much blazing Buffalo wings mean to me and let me eat them without feeling guilty. The maturity level in this relationship should have books written about it. Wow, to think how admirable it is of the love of my life. Sacrificing sushi for one day just for me. That’s love. I love sushi. Lord knows I do. I eat it every fucking week. Let me ask you this, are you never going to eat again? I hear your stomach. It’s begging for a sandwich. But that will show me, won’t it? Man, your stomach growling is really killing me. It’s giving me sympathy pains. Well, it’s a good thing I have that doggy bag full of blazing Buffalo wings. You can have some if you want. Oh wait, I forgot. You’re too good for blazing Buffalo wings. What do you want me to do? Do you want me to apologize? Okay, you’re right. I’m sorry for liking blazing Buffalo wings. How dare me?” When she says, “Stop,” you don’t. “Stop what? I’m just talking. Now you want to talk to me. Before you couldn’t even hear me. Can you hear me, Toni?” You are in her face, inches from her cheek. You see yourself very clearly, as if watching from a corner of the wall, and you look hideous. Honestly like a nine year old. But despite yourself you continue. You want to see what she’ll do. You want to see what will happen. “Can you hear me? Do I exist? Oh shit. I’m invisible. Toni! Can you hear me? Can you see me?” Inside you know that you actually want her to hit you. Is that something you are capable of? You’re ready for it, the slap of her backhand. Let it be hard. Let it sting. Don’t let me forget it. But it doesn’t come. She flips the page of her magazine. “Let me know when you’re finished,” she says. “I had enough caveman at dinner.” You try to laugh, but it sounds like a soap star following commands on a script. You say, still trying to keep the facetiousness at a high level, “Ohhhh, you’re not going to put up with me. Well, excuse me. I don’t want to be something you put up with. If you don’t want me to act like this then--” Now she laughs, and she’s won because hers is real. “Then what?” she challenges you, and both of you wait for the other to speak. You wait for her to raise her head, to look at you, maybe even to smile, but of course she never does. Just keeps flipping the pages of her magazine. -

38 You make certain to not look Manny in the eye. Let him mourn without an audience. Windows of stained-glass loaves of bread, doves, and grapes surround you all. Besides Manny’s mother’s urn there is a photograph of her in a yellow bandana, rose tinted shades, and sandals. One by one the people stand before the church and share a story or a memory of his mother, and she sounds like a special lady. It’s easy to picture her doing the things these people profess her to do. The church is so crowded that the place becomes thick and soon every struggle is a breath. The preacher is sweating profusely, almost comically, and says the word “Amen” so many times it almost loses its significance. At one point he says, “Amen, Jeezuhs, and amen to anyone else who would like to spread a prayer across heaven, amen. Tto the soul of our dearly departed Brenda—thank you, Jeezuhs and amen.” And he skims the crowd, and you’re four pews deep, but your eyes seem to lock. He’s wearing thin black rimmed glasses, a purple robe, and you swear he’s fixing his gaze onto you, and you’re looking back somewhat determined not to break it. Finally, he lowers his head to lead a prayer, but you don’t. You’re fixated on Manny’s dad because he looks like shit. He sits next to Manny in the front pew with red eyes and a dopey look. The black suit he wears is too big and makes him look even worse. You notice something tiny and bright green is in his hair, and when it moves you realize of all things what it is: a grasshopper. Dear, God, you pray, why does that baby grasshopper have to be crawling in your house? How did it get into this church? Did it hitch a ride in his crop? With heads bowed, no one else seems to notice it and he doesn’t seem to feel it. You consider saying something or maybe just swiping at it. Instead you stare. You feel the rumbling building in the pit of your chest. Your cheeks flex and forehead tenses. The way it moves its stick legs around his ear. The laughter takes on a life of it’s own. The manner in which it perches, as if it has found a home. It’s not exceptionally funny, but of course, the fact that this is one of those times in life when laughing is most inappropriate only makes it that much funnier and that much harder to keep it in, and you are reminded of Sonny Haynes, a good friend to this day, who used to try and get you to laugh in seventh grade by pooting during the Pledge of Allegiance. You hold your breath; your stubby hands covering your face as it turns maroon and warm. When laughter finally escapes, it’s quick, short, and in a burst. Your shoulders heave as you try to push it back inside of you. You feel people in the church shift towards you, but your eyes remain closed. Tino, he briefly puts a heavy, hairy arm around your shoulder as if consoling you, as if you’re crying. Perhaps there are many who mistake your laughter for tears. He gives a pat, a solid smack on the back, as if his intentions are to snap you out of it, and he sits there without saying a word. This is ridiculous. Get a hold of yourself. The outrageousness of the situation sinks in. You are on the verge of laughing uncontrollably at a funeral. You try to think about other things. Death and the Mammal’s mother. Her ashes in the urn. Then you make the mistake of glancing back at the grasshopper. It’s now on the back of his dome, and its fluorescent eyes appear to be watching and taunting you, putting on a mini-show. The more you think about it the funnier it becomes. A grasshopper in the hair. You couldn’t make something like that up if you wanted to. You try to think about war, Len Bias and Hank Gathers, Schindler’s List, but every thought returns to the grasshopper, and what it would look like if it started hopping back and forth from shoulder to shoulder. Anything now to maintain it--sad and depressing. Starving children in Africa, bodies hanging from trees, your aunt who was in the second tower that collapsed, the memory your mother shared at the funeral. What if there were two grasshoppers and they started dancing together? How funny would it be if they 39 started hopping in synch? Something terrible, something dark. Skaters falling through cracked ice, grandmothers being buried alive, seals being clubbed, the blue bloody beating heart through the open ribcage, Jiminy Cricket whistling as he climbs through the Mammal’s dad’s hair with his cane. Think about how laughing at a funeral would make you the worst person ever. Remember pain. That one boy calling you a faggot before you knew what one was, then hitting you in the arm with a baseball bat. Guilt; shame. Remember how Kiddy Samwood overheard you calling her the ugliest girl in the history of the world. How about when you spit in Principal Callens’ face for no reason. Don’t picture yourself in this moment, the battle you are immersed in. The edge you are teetering on. Get a hold of yourself. Remember the picnic in Albuquerque with Summer Alexis when you were thirteen and smashing the ladybug when it landed on your arm and Summer’s eyes, and how she ended things between you and her that very night, and her insisting that the murder of the ladybug was nowhere near the reason, and you never believing her, never being able to understand. Remember the time you asked Bobby Hackly, the cool kid in high school, to be your friend, and how he told everyone and then put a banana peel in the hood of your jacket, and it stayed there until fifth period. Remember breaking his nose, his nose a bright red disaster, but his eyes big and vacant like a broke television. Remember eyes. The eyes of Toni, when she says the word, fuck. The lifeless eyes of your dead dog Buckets staring at you when you found him succumbing to old age on the back porch two months ago. “Buckets is dead. Buckets is dead,” Toni cried and you held her even though in her voice was blame. The weird part of this entire thing is that it works. There is no more grasshopper, no more laughing; you find yourself actually crying, almost weeping. Tino’s mumbling something in your ear about his father living in Fort Collins, Colorado and not seeing him since he was eleven and staying strong, and although he says nothing of the sort, you imagine his mother a postman and coming home from work and hugging him everyday. The tears now flow, and Tino’s heavy hand is welcome. People are now filtering out and pretending as if you don’t exist, and that’s fine because you’d rather stay hidden or perhaps just disappear. - At Armstead’s two days ago you tried on three suits--all of which looked the same to you except for the color. Every time you emerged from the fitting room Toni said, “Very nice…very very nice.” The tall skinny salesman with the ascot, however, could not decide. “I don’t know, sir….I just don’t know.” He made you walk and stand and crouch, and when he told you to turn around and “Freeze,” Toni scoffed. “Then which one should I get?” you said to her, and she said, “They’re all very nice.” With no offense intended towards this salesman, you wanted a woman to honestly tell you if you looked attractive or not, so you asked if anyone else was working, but he claimed them all to be on lunch, and Toni scoffed again. Finally you just asked the salesman for his suggestion. “Which one would you wear to the funeral of a stranger?” you said. The salesman took a moment, felt the first one, ignored the red one, and then pointed to the navy blue one. It was the least expensive of the three, and that seemed like bad business so you became suspicious. You said, “Why would you point out the least expensive of the three?” And Toni exhaled loudly, “Who cares what that lady thinks of you? She’s freaking dead, right?” 40 She wasn’t entirely serious, just bored, and trying to make you laugh, and it worked in that regard, but if this was to be a suit you owned, you wanted it to be a suit sharp enough to prick the eyes of all who set theirs upon it. So you picked out a fourth suit. It was dark solid gray and the salesman said, “Oh, a Dortmier,” and you knew he was impressed. “Or perhaps you can get two of the previous ones.” Which all brings flushing back to you a dream you had where the mixed girl who works behind the counter at the Burgertown in your neighborhood was trying to have sex with you. She was willing to give you a second apple pie for only fifteen more cents, and in your dream you took that as flirting. The fry machine sputtered and where the overhead menu should have been was a surveillance video of the two of you glistening and ready to take each other on the counter. She stopped to take an order from the takeout window, and in the dining area you notice that everyone in Burgertown was getting busy. Naked bodies flailing and rubbing in the plastic seats and tables. Even on the Burgerplaytown slide out back On top of this you quickly realized that the pies at this place were always two for a dollar, and when you called her out on it, she shrugged her shoulders. It was so disturbing that all you could do was wake up. - The reception, which was held above some Italian restaurant a friend of the family owned, features a party-like atmosphere. You and Tino are introduced to Manny’s brothers and sisters and few of his cousins, then the two of you sit alone at a circular table in the corner piling parmesan chicken and mostaccioli on your plates. “Good chicken. This is some damn good chicken.” That’s all Tino wants to talk about--the chicken, and you sense he’s acting weird on the account of the crying earlier. But despite the awkwardness that surrounds you two, the party-like atmosphere prevails. A couple of hundred people sitting and conversing among the string music, pale yellow flowers, and white candles. The Mammal’s smiling and shaking hands at a table near the front next to couple of poster boards with photographs and poems all dedicated to his mother. Before the cancer had gotten too bad, she had been a French teacher at a private high school close to downtown, and she was good at her job. There are a few awards for teaching on the board and a number of her former students are roaming throughout the place as if they belong. No one at the reception appears sad. There are few tears. You turn to Tino and ask him what he thinks of this, if he thinks something crazy is going on inside of their heads. “That’s not something worth talking about,” Tino says and starts up about the chicken again. Towards the end when it is only his close family that remains, you gather your Dortmier jacket and prepare yourself to leave. With your fiancé gone all you have is an empty apartment waiting for you, and you ask Tino if he wants find a place around here to grab a drink. Before he can answer, Manny approaches, a giant cigar hanging unlit from his mouth, a pitcher of soda in his hand, and he thanks the two of you for coming. He owes you big time, he says. He welcomes you to stay. He insists you drink the cola, and upon your first sip you feel the spike of gin within. Manny leaves the pitcher on the table and returns to his family. His dad still looks dopey. It could be his natural look and this day could have nothing to do with it at all. An hour or so passes with you and Tino quietly sitting at the table refilling each other’s glass. The two of you make for an imposing corner, the only two who don’t seem to know anyone but each other, but Manny keeps bringing new pitchers and you continue drinking them empty, and this helps you relax. Not weary or sleepy, just heavy, you feel anchored to the chair. A few 41 cousins come by and ask to refill their glasses; a few of the high schoolers do the same. No one mentions it, but everyone knows it liquor, and you all drink fast like it will disappear if you do not. One of Manny’s aunts tells about how Manny used to sing on the toilet as a boy. He used to sing, “I’m singing on the toilet.” Another woman smokes a cigarette and asks you how you knew Brenda. Tino says that he’s a cousin. You almost just admit that you didn’t know Brenda. You almost just say, “I know no one here.” Instead you tell her that you’re a friend of Manny’s, and the woman smiles and says, “Did you know that Emmanuel was the size of an orange when he was born?” You grimace slightly, which you hope looks like a grin. You want to say to this woman, Why would I know something like that? That’s not something anyone just assumes. Manny suddenly approaches. You recall a work related barbecue on Independence Day where he ended up drinking too much and being in jolly spirits. He was slapping people on the back and laughing too hard at simple jokes. Now his head is at a slight angle and his face is frozen in a bare state. “That’s true,” he says in reference to the woman’s comment, “an enormous orange.” He looks as if there is nothing going on inside of him. A drunken slate. It’s now that he suddenly decides to pull you and Tino into him and whisper into each of your ears, “You want to go look at some ladies.” It’s not really a question, and Tino says, “I’m nodding my head to that.” If we were a band of outlaws, that’s what we would call this guy. ‘Tino’ or ‘The Mexican,’ and he wouldn’t mind either way. It wasn’t your suggestion, and you’ve never been to a strip club before, yet you know somehow you will be to blame for anything that will occur tonight. You are behind he wheel; you are the getaway driver. - It’s a story about an uncle named Scooter that might have started the relationship’s descend. He pulls you aside during family functions, offers you swigs from his flask, and tells you stories about Vedad, a second generation Bosnian that he buddied up with in the first gulf war. What Vedad used to do during sandstorms or how Vedad bested some chump from Virginia in the barracks. Scoot told you that Vedad would tell stories on dull nights about this feeling he used to get when he was nervous, a premonition of him being old and limbless. This happens a lot--Drunken Scooter telling stories about Vedad and the war. One night you fall asleep in your bed, your fiancé next to you, and when you wake you’re not in your bedroom. You’re with Scoot and Vedad in the desert. What do I know about the desert? It looks like a Roadrunner cartoon, only it’s not, because this feels so real. When you tell this story, which you have on only two occasions, you always describe the landscape’s surrealness with something like, “You know how dreams are,” or “I mean, no one will ever be able to know exactly how this looked in my head no matter what I say.” That lady who runs the hot dog cart in Soulard was there, too. As was Terry Tiddlebrook, some jokester you hadn’t seen since ninth grade, when he was still a boy. You’re all in fatigues and smoking cigarettes sitting on the sand in an oval. There were lizards or snakes or something that Scooter was rounding up for something. Vedad was boiling spaghetti over an open flame. You keep trying to tie your boots, but your hands feel as if you’ve never used them. Everyone in the group tries to up each other with random tales of their lives. Terry once branded himself with a red-hot fork and shows you the scar. Four straight violet scab lines on his tricep.

42 The hot dog lady, who you call Lulu, although you’re not sure why you’re so sure that’s her name, once all by herself finished a handle of Darby’s Vodka while at the beach on a Monday. Scooter played high school football against Randall Cunningham and even sacked him once despite playing with two broken fingers and shin splints. Vedad once swam into the DeLucille Lake to save a dog that was drowning despite knowing that the mutt was to be put to sleep later that week. Terry once baked and ate a pigeon that he had killed on accident with a badminton racket. Lulu once ate navy beans for one solid month straight. Scooter once ate an alligator’s eyeball in New Orleans on a dare. Vedad- a cow’s testicle in Lisbon. Lulu was twice married, but claims to never have known love. “If you can love then you can hate, and I can’t do neither.” Terry said he’s going to spoil the hell out his girl, whoever that is, and can’t wait to find her. Scooter’s love making was so soft that it could be done on a bed of bubbles without a one of them bursting. And then Vedad says, “Sometimes, I tell you, and I know I am revealing my colors here to you now, you have to give it to her like a stranger. So she doesn’t start to wonder what’s it’s really like. And sometimes, my lady, she’d do the same to me.” The first time you told this story it was to Toni in the middle of some Sunday morning, and the both of your legs were woven within each other under the sheets. “Is that something he really said?” she asked in a whisper. It was one of those Sunday where you would have been happy to have missed it completely, too busy lying around in my bed. It was the peak of you, exactly how you wanted it to be forever. “No.” “Then where did it come from?” she asks again. “It’s just a dream,” you say. “Dreams don’t mean nothing.” “But if he never said it…I mean where else do dreams come but from inside of you somewhere,” and this is the moment, that point on amusement park rides where your body begins to fall just before your insides. Your insides are still on the rise as your body begins to fall. Her skin seemed to drop ten degrees right there. The second time you tell this story is now, on the way to the ladies with Manny and Tino surrounding you. They say nothing, which makes the air uncomfortable, so you look at each of them to make sure that they’re still around. They both are looking at you like your supposed to go on. Like in real life Scooter should end up saving Vedad’s life. Or Vedad should become a war hero and then a senator. Maybe they should get separated only to reunite years later on the beaches of Mexico and open their own small hotel, fix boats as a hobby, and play chess or checkers until they are gray and old. Or the two of them should fight over a woman that both have fallen for. Perhaps suicide or a parade from one of them ten years later. You say softly that they were just two men who people tell stories about. “Two guys with guns talking about love.” Then drunk Manny says, “That’s better,” and you all sit in silence as calm as the road you travel, waiting to arrive at the ladies. - It’s a dingy gentleman’s club called the Pink Cadillac with no windows and three stages-- two in opposite corners and one in the center. 43 When you walk in the bouncer says, “No kissing, no touching.” Manny says, “No shit,” and you sense that they’ll be fighting later. Tino is nodding his head at the ladies as they pass, quietly staring each of them in the eye. He asks Sizzle, the dark blonde bartender, what her real name is, where the real people are in this place, if she wants to get some breakfast at Denny’s when she gets off work. She tells him that she just serves drinks. You slip all forty-six of your dollars into Manny’s hand, because you thought that’s what was supposed to be done. He looks at the money and then says, “What are you giving this to me for?” The question embarrasses you. You’re merely looking after the mourning friend. Helping him gets his mind right. You don’t say this to Manny because you thought this was obvious, and because it’s not it now sounds absurd. What you say to him instead is, “Hold that for me. Make sure I don’t spend it.” The three of you sit at a table against the wall. The drinks you’ve drunk have made you quiet. At the reception you watched Manny hug his father goodbye and whisper something into his ear. In response his father smiled a small smile, circled his index finger around his temple, and mouthed, “Cuckoo.” Eventually Manny stands and strides to the stage, and Tino returns to Sizzle at the bar. These men prefer to be away, and since you don’t know what to say to either of them, you accept this. You have promised yourself not to enjoy the time on account of Toni in North Carolina. A green- eyed girl wearing only clear high heals thrusts herself into the Mammal’s face. She grabs the back of his head with both hands and presses him to her. He has hands like paws. Teddy bear paws, de-clawed and soft. When he wraps them around those dancers pink thighs, they look like prey. His paws around the pink thighs, the glistening of his chin and upper lip, the sexy curl of her lips as she mouths, You like that? One by one the dollars disappear into places that dollar bills had no place being. A woman with a red tube top approaches and asks you if you’re lonely. You are concentrating on sobering up because you’ve drunk much more than you’ve intended, which is obvious since you hadn’t planned on drinking at all. She has red hair and red boots and her name is Fyre (although you only assume it’s with a ‘y’). “You lonely?” she asks again. “Everybody in this place is lonely,” you say, and she laughs. “You want something from me?” And you don’t say this because you know it’s impossible, but the only thing you want is to go home, you want someone who can take you there. - Fyre sits atop you and grinds your privates. Grinding. Never has the word been more appropriate, and you’re trying to not show how uncomfortable it is, but she is sitting on the evidence (or lack there of) and continues questioning your manhood. She asks if you’ve drunk too much, if you’re a homo, if you have a problem. She asks if you are feeling guilty, and that if you are then that is normal. “Do you have a lady at home?” she asks. “I don’t know.” “Liar. You know. Well, you come in here with that sexy look and your crazy friends. You just come here to watch? Do you want to talk or something?” “You’re the first person to ever call me sexy. That’s why I don’t believe you.” “Well, that’s a shame. You’re so mysterious. I bet you’re the president of some company, aren’t you? You’re the man in charge, aren’t you?”

44 You try to think of a clever response, but cannot and instead say, “I’m a traveler,” and you wave your hand across her face. She watches it intently and it’s like you both expect something to disappear or reappear or some sort of magic to occur because on any given night… “Trying to have your fun with me,” she says. “What happens now? Do you want to take me in the back?” - Fyre’s thick and hanging breasts. She calls them tits. She arches her back to try and make them look perfect. You know that no two pair of breasts are alike. But this woman has a mole on her chest, just off center, just like the breasts of your fiancé. Your fiancé’s dark peach bosoms and grape nipples. Your fiancé onstage with you coming alive before her. Her head dancing atop the swelling body of Diamond, the dancer in the white lace on stage number two. Your fiancé’s chicken legs attached to the tiny waist of Margarite as she wraps them wonderously on that chair in front of the bar. The next time you see your fiancé you will be sure to say something about a dream you’ve always had, which is to see her bare back, arms, and hands twirling around and around the pole, upside down and around again. Her telling you that you’re sexy is sexy. To love you like it’s her job. - Fyre keeps trying to convince you that four minutes of her dancing is worth thirty of your dollars, but, although the ramblings of your interior monologue will never be divulged, you tell her no thanks. You have no money, and for this you are happy. She leaves you, and suddenly you find yourself relentlessly content. It’s the booze, the time, the bright white coating that surrounds your heart. To leave and fall in your bed, and remain there until your fiancé returns whenever that may be. Manny runs out of bills, so he peels labels from beer bottles and sticks then into the women’s G-strings. They don’t like that, and one of the more petite ladies while onstage kicks him in his lip with the toe of her boot like a rattlesnake striking and retracting. Tino laughs at that, and Manny does too. The bouncer grabs Tino by the arm and Manny grabs the bouncer by the throat. Your imagination assumes a gun is in the bouncer’s hand. You’re a fallen tree, grasping in the darkness. In death there is always time to make right with God, and since this is not your day, it is definitely not your day to die. You tackle that man and push his face to the sticky floor. That was to be it, it is something you are immediately sorry for, except for Manny and Tino who relentlessly kick him in his back and gut. You stand back and watch and wonder if they possess the ability to stop. - You drive around town with the two of them for hours afterwards, looking for something, you’re not sure what, but it could be around any bend, down any corner. Manny the Mammal has taken over driving responsibilities. His knuckles turn white on the steering wheel; he grips it with both hands as if he’s holding on for dear life. Dear, life. What’s up? It’s been a long time. How have you been? And you’re not trying to kid, here. Tino is making you nervous. He now looks like the villain. You wonder which side of this tale you are on. To be this quiet is unnatural. Home. You think of ways to end this time. “I was shot before,” Tino says. “Right here.” He motions to the back of his neck. “It was in a dream. Before that, I never been shot before in real life. So all it felt like was a Charlie horse. A Charlie horse on the back of the neck.” Manny says, “Other people’s dreams are boring,” and the quiet returns. 45 They have casinos on the outskirts of the city and Manny tries to make it there because he says he feels a jackpot coming on, and if you let yourself, you can feel everything changing as well, but soon you’re lost and simply driving around. Manny realizes that he doesn’t have any money, and Tino is too drunk to not make a spectacle of himself, yet still the two of them aren’t ready to sleep or go home, and you almost say something about how nice your bed would feel, how you want to wrap pillows and sheets around you, but your mother is alive in Dallas and you don’t know how he feels, so you’re in for the long haul, and you wind up on the roof of some parking garage sitting between the two of them on the hood of the car. It is there that Manny asks you if you think he’s crazy. If you think he’s an asshole. There’s a lump under his eye from the stripper’s pointy toe that is starting to turn blue. You tell him he’s not an asshole. He says he knows he not an asshole, but he just wanted to hear you say it. He tells you that he likes your suit; he respects the fact that you dressed so nice for this funeral. You tell him that she sounded like a good lady. Tino agrees. “She was, she was a great lady.” Then he says, “But that doesn’t mean you aren’t a son of a bitch,” and the two of them laugh, and you do as well because that’s just easier. Then you tell them about your fiancé in Charlotte because this might just be a day for sob stories. “What the heck is she doing in Charlotte?” Tino says. “I don’t know. She said she would call me when she got in.” “And she hasn’t?” “I bet that phone will ring any second,” Manny says. “Just wait.” And it does. Right at that moment, your cellular phone starts buzzing. They look at you and you at them, but before you can make sense of this it buzzes again and you pick up. Months, maybe years after this night you will recall this conversation, unsure if it happened how you remember, or if it actually occurred at all. She asks you where you are, and when you tell her The Pink Cadillac and what The Pink Cadillac is, she doesn’t believe you. You insist and she says, “You’re not even smart enough to lie to me about something like that.” You ask her how Winston Salem is, and she reminds you it’s Charlotte. You say, “I know.” She then asks what color her eyes are, and when you pause she says, “Hurry, tell me, don’t buy time, right now or I’m hanging up.” You tell her you’re worried, ask her what the problem is and she growls, “Tell me,” so softly that you have to take the receiver away from your ear. You tell her sometimes they’re brown and sometimes they’re light brown, depending on the light in the room. Then she tells you a story about some boy who looked just like you at the East Market today. She was serious. “He looked just like you.” A cute little smiling kid walking with his mother. And when she approached him on the crosswalk they made eye contact. She smiled, she says, and he scrunched his nose then just kept on walking. “He scrunched his nose like I smelled. Like he had gotten the best of me. I don’t know. I liked that little boy.” Since your fiancé is a poet, when she calls in the middle of the night it’s usually just because she has something on her mind. Either that or something else, and you ask her what she is on. Tonight you think she’s lying when she says she’s sober. According to her she has “walked to the edge of her life, peered over the side, and tried to decide.” You take this in stride, but it’s not easy to hole up your discomfort. She works for the city, helping place underprivileged kids in schools, programs, and foster centers. Her 46 being a poet brings in no money, but it’s what she claims when people ask her what she does. It’s always been intriguing to you, something you will never be able to fully comprehend. The constant words, the obscurity. It matters very little that you don’t necessarily understand any of your fiancé’s poems. They are bright chaotic pictures, some of them just riddles, but you try very hard to understand. She, in return, sincerely listens to your stories from work. She remembers all of them, some even better than you do yourself. Sometimes you would be a quarter of the way through talking about “the punk kid who called security on me in the Delaware airport,” or the time you sold fifty parts to a Californian business woman while browsing at a Citgo magazine rack, and your fiancé would stop you in mid-sentence, say, “I know how this one ends,” or “Try again,” or sometimes she would let you finish just to see how any of it had changed in your eyes. And it’s nice being able to escape into each other like that. But tonight she calls and says this nonsense about standing on the edge of her life, and you don’t know what to do. The roots of this issue are far deeper than you can dig; so tonight you make no effort at counsel, just give her your ear. She fades in and out of comprehension, or maybe it’s you having trouble following. Apologies, sighs, whimpering. She tells you she’s tired and almost finished. Finished with what? “The edge of your life?” you say softly trying to soothe her. Although rarely are there any outward inklings of happiness, her unhappiness never seems to be real to you, just her demeanor, something on the surface. That you too are extremely tired and nearly finished and also hungry and want to have this conversation in your bed with a sandwich in your hand and her head on your chest makes you guilt and listen even more intently, try that much harder to be there. Ultimately, it’s because she is in Charlotte that none of this is to occur, and you cannot let go of this either. She’s crying and apologizing and now just moaning, and everything is too frightening. This side of her you’ve never seen, the empty apartment that awaits, the memories of Manny’s mother that are fresh in your mind despite you never having experienced them. All you can manage is “Don’t jump,” over and over and, “It’s going to be okay,” because you are hoping that it will. Months or years from now, you will consider yourself a traveler. You will hear and need to answer the question, ‘How far have you traveled? Where have you been?’ You will recall dreams of walking on the sea. Every direction the ocean, leaving you unsure of how far you’ve gone. About fifteen minutes of this discussion before the two of you hit a wall, and she elicits one loud monotonous scream. It hurts to hear, and your voice cracks and chokes, your throat loosens. This is not a part of you she has seen often enough, because everything stops-the air, the city, the static in the phone waves. She says, “Are you crying?” like there is no conceivable reason you have to do such a thing, and you picture her face so easily. With her tight lips and right eyebrow slightly lower than the left, the whites of her eyes red. You’ve never seen this face in life before, just the image of it in your head right now, the façade of it months and years later sometimes in your dreams. It’s frozen on her, absently and effortlessly, her natural state, and you wish she would try to mold your face in a similar fashion, like play-dough between her fingers. That you had no idea that something like this could occur is inexcusable to her. You can see it in her voice. “I’m not jumping, sweetie,” she says. Your ear sucks her voice in like a vacuum sweeper collecting dust. The ‘sweetie’ doesn’t make for any less of an impact. It’s too

47 calm. Too concise. That she is still cordial, that there is no one to blame. I’m not jumping, sweetie. And then this is the end. - “Hey, guys,” you say to Manny and Tino. “I think I’m dreaming.” The statement has not the effect you expected, although you do not know what you were expecting and really there is no effect at all. They silently look into the sky besides you. They were pretending as if they weren’t listening to you on the phone, or perhaps they were not. “Like now?” Tino asks. Manny acts as if he doesn’t hear. “I woke up this morning and I went to the funeral. And I’m having a hard time. And I’ve been thinking about women a lot. And when I found myself in bed this morning I was naked. But the thing is I haven’t used the bathroom at all today. Not once. ” “What about in the morning when you woke up? Did you pee then?” “Nope.” “Wow. That’s not right. You should see a doctor.” “Yeah. Or maybe I’m dreaming.” “No way, man,” Tino is shaking his head. “I think I saw you pee earlier. We peed together. I’m sure of it,” then as if conceding a bit will ease a pain you have, “I’m pretty drunk though. I think I saw you pee earlier.” Manny finally speaks without looking away from the sky. “You know what a dream is?” and then he waits for someone to answer, but you don’t say anything because you are desperate to hear what will come next. This moment is so fake, it’s real. Manny the provider of insight. What is a dream? “A place your mind goes when there is no work to be done. A vacation for the brain.” “I’m dreaming.” To say it aloud is to come to terms with it. “Have you tried flying?” You picture Tino’s dreams. Him flying like a bird, bongo drums beating in his head. You think about running to the ledge with your arms outstretched and trying to release yourself from gravity. You think about jumping, and just seeing what direction you would go it. What if it were up? - To get into the car and turn it around is staggering. To think about tossing and turning in the big bed and all of the space it provides is suffocating. The last words you say to the two of them before you leave is about the grasshopper. You tell them there was one in Manny’s father’s hair. “Really?” Manny says. His ears perk like a dog hearing a whistle. You nod your head and laughter pours out of him. “That was her. Holy piss. That was her, that was her, that was her.” He’s a boy now laughing like he can’t help himself, and whoever ‘her’ is you believe him, but of course you also believe this is a dream. Where else would you wind up with a lot like this? And there will be a day when the Mammal cries, although you will never know that for certain. Now, however, will not be the place or time. While you don’t remember exactly what his smile looked like before, the one he wears right now will do. And in your bed surrounded by the suffocating space, be damned if that streetlight slicing through your purple shades didn’t look just like the moon. When you sleep, which comes eventually as it always does, it is a regret. It’s a battle you fight to the wink. You should have never closed your eyes; you should have stayed awake forever.

48 Okay Days Sonny felt like walking, perhaps talking to someone. The urge was sudden and unrelenting. He parked his car, got out, and the cool rush of air forced his eyes to water, his lips to dry. Snow covered the lot, and his feet disappeared with every step. His tracks left zigzags in the snow, each centered by a small Adidas leaf. There was a man with broad shoulders and a drooping neck that was walking towards his car, and Sonny almost complimented him. He wore no coat, but a blue suit, pinstriped and clean, and he looked uncomfortable, as if God had built him sloppily, his head secured atop his droopy neck carelessly. Sonny could tell he didn’t wear suits often and almost felt as if it were his duty to say something, to confirm both of their opinions. And he was about to mention what a wonderful suit it was, how sophisticated and handsome it was, how proud the gentleman looked in it. As quickly as it came, however, the moment and the man passed. Sonny focused his eyes on the ground and continued walking. The snow crunched. There was always something truthful about the winter. Two blocks further he had walked before he regretted his silence. The man looked as if he hadn’t received a compliment in too long a period of time. University City was crowded that day. Early Christmas shopping. People simply walking in and out of storefronts on the Loop, sipping coffee, ignoring the weather, which wasn’t too cold despite the snow. They were remarkable, or perhaps remarkably normal. It was a nice day, an average day, and the people went about their business, all with some sort of business to attend to. Much busier than he expected it to be, much busier than he remembered that last time he was there, which was years before. He was a teenager, and it had rained. Rather hard, but not enough to make a difference. Sonny and his friend, Victor, had hung out on the corner talking to girls, counting the number of bras that they could see through soaked shirts. They reached seven before it had gotten too dark, and it was time for them to head home. Sonny remembered that Victor had wanted to stay, pleaded with his best friend to stay just a bit longer. It was a Saturday, or at least a weekend and summertime, and people would be hanging out until the early hours of this morning. Neither Sonny nor Victor drank back then, so Blueberry Hill was not an option. They were too young for tattoos, and too broke for the Tivoli, but Victor said he just wanted to sit and see and be a part of the nonsense. He wanted to just hang out on that corner the entire dark and rainy night, but Sonny’s mother didn’t want him out late in the rain. He regrets not staying, they could have stayed, should have stayed, and she would have dealt with it. Sonny’s steps were slow and deliberate. Unlike the scurrying feet that surrounded him, he had no place to be. No place that he felt the need to be. The sidewalks had been cleared of snow, and the bottom of his jeans soaked in slosh. Each breath a vapor before his face. Sonny pretended they were ghosts that he released to haunt the city. With each exhale he’d think of a person to be tormented by his hot stanky specter. Principle Davis, his boss, always making sure no one clocked in too late, clocked out too early. Manny Jackson, a middle school bully. He looked down towards his feet and the sidewalk, stepped over and on the bronze plaques of those honored by the city. Famous names that all contributed to St. Louis prominence. He breathed a breath for Chuck Berry, John Goodman. Another for Scott Joplin and the little rural town in Missouri named after him. He could barely stop himself now. Lou Brock, for getting old. Agnes Moorehead, whoever that was. He looked straight ahead directly through his spirits. Mom and Dad, for whatever. Sarah, his sister, for nagging. Victor. He paused to ponder if a ghost could haunt a fellow ghost. He was beginning to lose his breath and 49 realized that he had begun to say the names aloud. Patrons passed and he moved to the side. He wondered how he looked in their eyes, chuckled at how crazy he must seem, chuckled again when he noticed that he went unnoticed. Sonny, he envied them, those people and their feet for being the focus of something. A taxi from the Yellow Cab Company had three Asian people inside. And the cab wasn’t yellow, but a very off white. A brown squirrel scampered across the sidewalk and into an alley. It was gray on its ears and down its tail. People walked by and they were light or they were dark. And the sky would always be blue. It was his frame of reference. The white balance of the world, that’s what Victor called it. A small group smoked in a circle right to the right of the Tivoli. On weekends, at midnight it showed such classics as Cooley High and Big Top Peewee. The group’s bottoms surely soaked from resting on the ground. They were chatting about nothing in particular, music or sex, and when Sonny got close enough he realized that it was not a cigarette that each of them was puffing on. “Waiting for the show?” Sonny asked. “Nope.” A tall thin white boy answered him. He was young, late teens, but old enough to make his own decisions about drugs. A black girl and a light skinned boy sat beside him, and none of them attempted to shield their recreation. The black girl looked kind of like a cousin that Sonny had, and she tried to compensate for the white boy’s curtness. “The box don’t open until eleven.” “Right on.” When Sonny was their age he and Victor used to say ‘Right on’ all the time, and he hoped that it was still cool. Fuck it, he thought to himself. If I’m using it, it must be cool. The black boy inhaled long and smooth as if to indicate they had proceeded with their business and Sonny should do he same. He exhaled and coughed. At first it was meager, but soon turned violent. He tried to swallow, keep it inside of himself, and his chest rumbled as if to explode. Finally, it was too much to handle, and he blurted out one large hack. Saliva rested on his lip. “A whole chest full of lung.” Sonny whooped. “You gotta crawl before you can walk.” He called without looking back. The boy mumbled something, but Sonny couldn’t hear him. Between Rag’a'rama and Vintage Vinyl, a proud black man hit his snare drum in the middle of the sidewalk. One of his legs was real and the other was not. He sat in wobbly stool as another man played the sax to his beat. It was somewhat nice, and the two men almost fit, but Sonny stopped and listened as he wondered if their intention was to sound together. He stood to the side and let them play, lit a cigarette, and thought their song would never end. They played their instruments like pre-adolescent siblings being forced to hold hands in a family portrait. Not wrong at all, but somehow not right. Sonny bobbed his head, tapped his foot, and didn’t mind at all when the old man with the sax eased right next to him. “Thattaboy. That’s right,” Sonny said because it seemed appropriate to further show how much he was enjoying the moment. The saxophone man grinned and winked as he blew his tune, and shuffled and slid back to his initial place. Sonny liked that old man. Liked that he included him in on his routine. He was short with fair skin, and a skullcap pulled tightly around his ears. From that day on, every time Sonny heard a saxophone, on the radio or on the television, he would picture that man smiling and winking and shuffling his feet. Then the drummer abruptly stopped with a loud final rap of his drumstick, and the old sax player slowly followed, fading out, taking advantage of his brief solo. Sonny did 50 not feel the least bit embarrassed that he was the lone person standing before them, and he began clapping his hands loudly to show his approval. “I like the way you play that sax.” Another nod and another wink from the old skull-capped man. “And you,” Sonny said smiling, shifting his body towards the drum. “You beat that drum like it beats back. It must have done something wrong to deserve the beating you put on it.” The man behind the snare didn’t respond, didn’t even raise his head, and Sonny stood for a minute. “You know I used to jam, when I was younger,” Sonny said. “For real?” “Yep. I used to play the keys like it was what I was born to do. What was the name of that song?” A short moment passed, and the man slowly raised his head and spoke. “The Empty Bucket Blues.” The man behind the sax winked again as Sonny dropped three quarters in their Foldger’s can. Halfway down the block he heard the two musicians start up again, first the snare—tap tuhta tap tuhta taptap--and then the sax. He decided then and there that that was no song at all, but simply music, and he liked it just the same. At a small outdoor café Sonny was sitting, drinking coffee. “Hey, sir.” A thin woman stopped just in front of him. He had been staring at nothing in particular, thinking about nothing worth speaking about, and she had aligned herself just in his line of sight. Actually that’s not true he had been staring at the sky, the clouds, the whiteness overlapping the blue. But it was a fact that no thoughts resonated in his head. She spoke so casually, as if she knew him, and they hadn’t seen each other in a very long time, and ‘Sir’ was his first name. “Hello, Ma’am." “Whatchya looking at? Whatchya dreaming about?” She was a tall woman, an older woman. “Well, shit…I didn’t mean to interrupt your dream. I was just wondering if you could help me out. See, I got to go pick up my car from the north side, and this man is fixing it for me, and, see, I was wondering if you could give me a couple bucks so that I can get enough so that he can let me have it.” This woman was drunk. Sonny scratched just below his right nostril, just above his lip. His mother used to slap his hand when he did that in public. She said it looked too much like picking boogers. I hadda itch, he used to whine. “Or maybe if you could just give me some change so that I can catch the bus to the north side.” There was frankness to her voice, so Sonny pulled two quarters from his pocket and placed them inside of her open hand. “You remind me of my old husband. He was in the Navy.” “I’m not in the Navy,” Sonny smiled. “Well, my husband wasn’t black, neither, but you still reminded me on him.” The thin woman laughed a forced laugh, and Sonny followed her lead. He thought about how she said “reminded me on him,” as if his image was placed atop of her. She was tall and Sonny threw his neck back to look up into her face. Like a laser the sun beamed into his eyes, he clinched them tight, held them shut, waited for the sting to subside. When he opened them the woman was sitting beside him. “You work?” she asked him. “Usually.” 51 “Not today, though?” While driving to work on highway 40 the traffic had not been terrible. Around 170 it had slowed, eventually stopping due to an accident in the eastbound lane. One must factor in the traffic on their daily commute, so Sonny wasn’t concerned. But a man appeared dead in his car ahead. They say someone dies almost once a week due to a car accident in the metro St. Louis area. They say you’re only lucky if you’re not around when it happens, not caught in the traffic it will cause. This man’s head was down, his chin against his chest, and rather than being dead, he looked as if he were sleeping. His car had not struck a thing, but merely stopped in the inside lane of a four lane highway. Sonny passed the car, one of the few before the paramedics had arrived. There was not much to speak of, not much to see, but like everyone else he looked. He wondered where exactly this man was headed so old in his age, so early in the morning. “Today, I just wanted to stop time,” Sonny finally said. “Good luck,” she kindly replied. “Do you work?” Sonny asked the woman. “I get by, sweetie.” Underneath the seat of Sonny’s Accord there was half a bag of stale weed. He wished he had brought it with him. He didn’t want to give the woman the wrong idea, just wanted someone to smoke with. “Your place near here?” she asked. The grin would not leave Sonny’s face no matter how hard he tried, but it was not for her. He was laughing at himself, his embarrassment, the attention. His place wasn’t close; he lived on the other side of the county, outside of city limits. But he lit a cigarette, looked away, and said, “Near enough.” They had walked to his car in silence. In fact the woman had slowed her pace, followed Sonny about ten yards behind him. She was a tall woman, long legs inside of baggy jeans, but Sonny didn’t realize how long those legs were until they were scrunched next to him in the passenger seat. “You can move the chair back,” he said, and that was all that was said for quite a long time. They quietly passed a joint back and forth a couple of times until it was too short to hold between their fingers. It wasn’t until he began to roll the second joint that the woman asked Sonny where he stayed, what he was doing in the U, and if he were married. He answered, but wasn’t sure he was making any sense. The woman lowered her face, “I’m ugly,” she said and, “I can’t find a man.” Sonny could think of no correct response. She then asked him if he thought she looked good. “I look good, don’t I? Do you think I’m pretty?” Sonny wished that he could be honest. He wanted the next words to come out of his mouth to lift the woman from this car and back into life. He wanted her to feel prettier than she had ever felt before. But she wasn’t. Not at this moment at least. Her teeth were jagged, and her hair was matted, and maybe it was just the weed, but every time he looked at her, her eyes seemed to be situated lower and lower on her face. In fact, the only thing Sonny could think about was how goddamn tall she was. That’s what he said to her, “You’re tall.” He meant it in neither a good nor bad way. The woman laughed and grabbed her stomach, then hit her hands on his roof, tried to stretch her legs. She could barely stop. When she did it was to speak and she could barely be understood. “Damn right, I’m tall, honey. And when we’re nose to nose, your toes is in it, and when we’re toe to toe your nose is in it. How you like that?”

52 Sonny did like that, and he laughed. “Let me ask you something,” the lady began, but it wasn’t really a beginning. The woman looked as if she had been talking her entire life, and Sonny felt right in the middle of something. “You ever been in love?” Her eyebrows arched. “I think so.” “Once?” she asked. She tried to turn her body to face him, but her legs were just too long. “Once or twice, years ago.” Then, as if apologizing, “I was young.” “You’re still young, sweetie. First time I was old.” And Sonny thought of the seaman, her husband. “Who was it?” she asked. “Someone beautiful.” “Why didn’t it work out? She want to get married?” The woman said ‘married’ like a sheep baa-ing. “No. I’m still looking for something to blame.” “Blame the sun.” The woman said. “Don’t blame me, though. I got something here that you can blame.” She motioned or nodded down between her legs and Sonny knew to what she was referring. “You’re going to go on and ruin an okay day, aren’t you?” Sonny wasn’t really upset, but tried to disregard her. He used one hand to hold the second joint between his lips and another to light it, and the woman placed her hand between Sonny’s legs and softly squeezed. She whispered without looking at him, “I’m gonna try and help you stop time.” Sonny closed his eyes. He wanted to feel her hand, but when he looked down it was an odd sight. The unfamiliarity. The smoke hovering. He took her hand, placed it onto her own lap. “I don’t do it for you, do I, Mister? I’m too ugly.” He laughed because he realized they still weren’t aware that each had a name. Sonny leaned into the woman made eye contact. Hers were brown. He said to her, “If you were young, and I was paler, then you’d be my sweetie and I’d be your sailor. If I was brave and you were blind, my heart’d be yours and yours'd be mine.” She yelped at his completion with satisfaction. “We got ourselves a poet.” “No. I’ve just known a couple along my way.” She slapped her thigh and then still laughing slowly got out of the car. The sun was coming down, the day in the process of ending. “You leaving?” he asked. The wind had turned bitter and poured into the car as the door opened. She waved her hand at him amused, “Yeah, yeah. You’re going to get me into trouble.” She left, and he let her go. When you walk alone it’s a different type of walk, and he was aware of how her feet rose and touched the ground, just assuming that the ground would always be beneath her feet. She had no reason to break stride, slow, or wander. Sonny followed her with his eyes, and then finished the joint. Tomorrow he would wake up, brush his teeth, and drive. He would probably make it to work, and he would most likely finish his day.

53 Men Among the Plenty When Ron gets upset he bites his left hand. And when he bites his left hand, it usually means he’s going to attack with his right. These attacks usually only end after he gets tired or after he’s won. The last person that lost to Ron’s name was Mr. Jimmy. At a picnic, Mr. Jimmy wouldn’t let Ron have another chocolate chip cookie, so Ron bit his left hand and took a nearby two-by-four with his right, slammed it across first Mr. Jimmy’s wrist and then his head. Mr. Jimmy spent some time in the hospital, never returned to work, never saw Ron again, but Anne downplays this as I interview for his now vacant job. Instead all she tells me is that “Mr. Jimmy should have known better than to have something like a big old two-by-four all laying around nearby.” Ron has a form of autism in which, among other tendencies, he has periodic moments of stimulation. Sometimes his stims cause him to place his two forefingers directly in front of his face and rapidly tap them together while smiling and screeching like a hawk. This is something he does often. It’s harmless, but still discouraged by staff. No one really knows the provocation of the screeching, but everyone does know that when he’s frustrated, or he doesn’t get his way, he digs his teeth into the web between the index finger and thumb of his left hand, leaving a violent ring of violet that often breaks the skin. We’re supposed to scold him when he does this. Lightly ridicule him. What are you doing biting your hand? Big boys don’t bite their hands like that. As Anne tells me this, refers to it as “his worst stim,” tells me it doesn’t happen too often, I try to look cool and calm. “How often?” I ask. “Him biting his hand or him attacking?” “Uh. Probably both,” I say politely. She stares out the window, and I figure she’s probably thinking about whether or not she should tell me the truth. “Three, four times a week he bites. You just got to watch him, you got to catch it.” “Okay.” I act as if the next question has suddenly popped into my head. “Um…and does he go after you every time?” “No, no, no,” She acts as if it’s an unreasonable question. “I can’t remember the last time he’s gone after someone.” “Before Mr. Jimmy,” I seem to remember pretty easily. “Of course, before Mr. Jimmy. You just have to catch it. Stop him.” I try to make my face look as if there’s nothing out there that intimidates me. I broke my arm the past summer playing football in the park with my friends. There’s still some pain. It’s a constant concern of mine. I can’t carry my backpack in that arm, can’t bowl, and doubt I can defend myself against anyone; much less hand biting mentally retarded kids. I hear a young man’s laughter from outside, so I smile. “Is that him?” I ask Anne. And I know it’s probably just that I’m anxious, but by the way he laughs it seems he’s been listening to us, knows we’re talking about him. “That’s Ronnie now,” Anne says. It takes her a while to rise from the couch, but she gets up and walks to the door. She’s a bigger woman, well past sixty, straight gray hair. The door opens and there’s a continual beep. Every single door and window is hooked up to this system. If any open, the beeping will let us know. Ty, one of Ron’s four housemates, has a history of sneaking out in the middle of the night, wandering 54 throughout the suburban streets. Just about all the kids are certified mentally retarded with some level of autism. Ty doesn’t speak at all. He periodically slaps his chest, and sometimes his head, grunting and growling at, I assume, himself. The police found him in the middle of one night in his pajamas resting on the curb a couple of blocks from here. I imagine he was slapping his chest grumbling, and I picture the officers, hand on holsters, approaching with caution. Anne apologized when she picked him up from the station and blamed the confusion on a careless caregiver. She installed the system herself two days later. She’s always looking out for the kids. Ron turns the corner, throws his backpack on the floor, and deeply whines, “Ron hungry.” He plops himself down on the couch. And honestly it disturbs me a little that Anne didn’t mention that he’s strikingly large for a sixteen year old. Not obese, but just plain enormous. God graced this boy with an offensive lineman’s body. About six feet four, two hundred and sixty pounds. Almost Charles Barkley. I’m not tall—five feet eight, and I have only a slight complex about this. He smiles so I smile back and then he gets up and I follow him with my eyes. Never stop looking at him. I don’t feel right about acknowledging this, but he reminds me of bear, a little because of his mass and slow uncalculated steps, but mainly because I have little clue as to what’s going on in his head. Anne is talking, but I’m not listening. “Ron hungry!” He says much louder. “Who is Ron?” Anne responds, but she is disregarding him, not looking at him. Dear god, woman, I think to myself. Don’t make him mad. “Have you ever been a caregiver before?” she asks me. “No, I haven’t,” I answer. “Have you any experience with autism?” We sit on opposite ends of the couch and she is looking down writing something. “Ron hungry,” he says again. It feels like I should do something, make him a snack, tell him to hold on a second. “Uh, none. No experience.” “Mental retardation?” Ron is now sitting down besides her, his head a foot from her face. I will later discover that Ron and his housemates, all five kids who live in this house, are Anne’s passion. “Ron. Is. Hungry.” He stares into her eyes, but she continues to ignore him. She shakes her head at me, a signal in regard to Ron, so I nod lightly and lightly close my eyes as if I understand her gesture. “No, ma’am, I really don’t have much experience in this field at all,” I say. Her being relaxed relaxes me. “Well.” She finishes writing on her pad and looks up. “We need more men on staff, so I don’t think any of that will keep you from getting hired.” “RON HUNGRY!” Ron jolts upright as if he were sleeping, as if he just awoke from a terrible dream. His left hand shoots to his mouth, hangs from his teeth. I stand, and ready myself for I don’t know what. See. See what you’ve done. There is a shoe nearby, a pillow, a remote control. Weeks from now, I think to myself, they’ll blame me, say I should have known better than to have had that mop handle just sitting there. “Who is Ron?” Anne distances herself, but stoically speaks. Calmly. She casually slaps his hand from his mouth. “Get that hand out of your mouth, boy, and tell me who Ron is.” Both hands at his side, Ron sheepishly gives a laugh. “I’m sorry.” He stands. “I’m Ron.” 55 “Then who is hungry?” “I am hungry.” “Then say that then, Ronald.” “I’m hungry.” He pauses, then, as if the thought is new, “I’m sorry, Anne. I’m hungry, please.” “C’mon, let’s get a snack then.” As he eats a Lunchable, she speaks to me, away from him. “We’re trying to get him to stop speaking in third person.” She tells me that he was showing off for me and that he always does this with new people. She asks if I saw how easy it was to diffuse. I nod. I watch him for a bit that day, just to get to know him. He plays with his trucks, I ask him about his school and his likes. Occasionally, out of nowhere, he exclaims in glee, “Look, guys…my trucks are smashing,” and he bashes his toy Tonkas together. I don’t know who he’s talking to, but I’m pretty sure it’s not me. He drools sometimes and talks very slowly, but he always seems to finish his thoughts. His smile appears often and it’s genuine. I just have to give him time. Be patient. I know that Ron is going to test my patience. He asks me, “When are you coming back? Tomorrow?” Anne has told me that none of the male residents stick around for long. Most of the females are lifers, college students who majored in the field, but the males see the house on Walnut Hill as a stopover, a side job. I tell him we have to see if everything works out. Before I go, Anne takes me aside and asks if I can handle it, if I can handle Ron. She treats me like a specialist, like I’m an in-home caregiving blue chipper. “We’d love to have you, after the background check and everything works out. Do you think you can handle it?” The way Anne looks at me with her hopeful smile, tilting her head slightly up, I know she really wants me to say yes. “I think I can,” I say with confidence, and I actually believe it and am excited to begin.

-~-

I live with four guys and a girl in a gritty yellow house close to downtown Springfield. It used to be a daycare center and in front on a pole about 15 feet to the sky sits an electric sign that reads Bright Beginnings. We can turn it on and off and do sometimes when drunk or feeling silly. A yellow sun smiles and dances with cartoonish white, Asian, and black children. Official springtime’s a few months away, and we’re in the midst of winter’s worst. The rooms still get cold and seem dark when alone in one. I like my housemates. The four guys are a loyal bunch, if not a little immature. We’ve tussled on occasion, mostly for, but sometimes against each other. Not enough can be said for how close such nonsense actually brings young men together. The girl is a subleasing a room and she stays to herself. I tell my buddies about Ron over beers at happy hour. Mr. Jimmy and the hand biting. They don’t realize how serious I’m trying to take this. There’s not much we don’t joke about, and that’s fine because no one ever feels obligated to laugh. They jab on me, wish me luck, compare Ron to Frankenstein or Lenny, tell me to keep him away from rabbits, start claiming my possessions in the wake of my pending death, performing mock eulogies. 56 Soon we talk about something else. So-and-so’s pregnant, and what’s-his-name is getting married. Everyone’s interviewing for exciting jobs, making plans. A number of people are traveling to LA, NY, or back home to somewhere in Missouri or in the middle of Arkansas. The Super Bowl is in a few days and the Rams should win. Two of the guys I live with play soccer for the university, I need six credits to graduate, and the other two wander through the motions of applying to med schools. The country is orange with suspicion and we talk about this too, because it’s fresh on our minds.

-~-

There are five new employees at the two-week training period. I am the only male. The supervisors sit us around a rectangular table in the conference room of their main office and teach us CPR type things, what to do in case of an emergency. There are a couple of videos about autism, its characteristics, the capabilities of those diagnosed. We joke politely about doing laundry and cleaning tubs, cooking meals. I barely even cook for myself, or I should bring some of my own laundry and do a load or two. None of us really know what to expect. We’re supposed to give the kids medication three times a day. The pills frighten me. There are so many of them and I’m certain I’ll be the one who messes up, confuses them, mismedicates the kids. I say kids, which isn’t entirely accurate. There are five of them at Walnut Hill, and they range in age from the mid-teens to mid-twenties. Of course, age matters very little. They all attend some sort of school everyday, which isn’t really a school, but a center where they learn basic skills and participate in activities so that one day they can possibly be a part of the workforce. Most of the functional mentally retarded people in the program clean floors at fast food joints or gather carts at Wal-Mart, which is good, and probably as good as it’s going to get for many of them. For the others the center gives them something to do, an activity to participate in, something to look forward to. There are roughly six houses similar to the one on Walnut Hill, all with mentally retarded and autistic young adults, all trying to incorporate them into a residential independent living situation. A number of the kids have a tendency to get violent. At the training sessions we are taught various holds and defensive techniques just in case. If they grab our hair we are to grab their wrist and hold it to our head so that they cannot tug or pull away. If they throw punches we are to wrap them up. Get closer to them, not further away, so that their blows cannot be fully extended. One girl asks, “What if, while you’ve wrapped them up, they begin to bite?” I think she’s being funny and give a chuckle at the notion. No one else does. A couple of people look at me as if I’ve offended them. The supervisor answers, “We’ll get to that.” Later, Jack, this burly supervisor with a flannel, takes me aside for a talk. He starts off by saying, “You got Walnut Hill, well I’ve worked there at Walnut, and they don’t fuck around at Walnut. Everyone at the house is a handful. All of them.” He says the word ‘walnut’ as if he has one stuck in his mouth. The Ozarkian drawl of middle American. I think he’s messing with me, scaring me with war stories. “That’s what I heard.” I say something like, “I’m just hoping I won’t have to use any of these holds,” and really I’m just trying to make conversation. “Too bad, Slick. Ron coming after you is sort of like an initiation. It isn’t a matter of if it will happen, but it’s more important how you react.” I nod. Jack tells me that Ron loves to grab hair. He tries to swing people around by it, tear it out. He says if I 57 act scared it’s just like “blood in shark water.” When I say nothing, he continues. “They needed a man there. Usually the men are bigger, have shorter hair.” He motions towards my hair, which is longer than most. “Watch out for that.” “You fight him? I mean you can’t fight them, right?” I want there to be no judgment in my voice when I say this. No visible reaction from me when he answers. However terrible, I want to know how far he’s had to go. “I don’t hit him,” he smiles not pleasantly at all, but not to me, to himself. “I don’t think I’d tell anyone if I did, though. Shit.” And he whispers this final word for emphasis, and his voice remains in a whisper. “That S.O.B. is almost 300 pounds. He is 6 foot something tall.” He shakes his head and walks away tightly grinning. “If these holds work, Slick, go ahead and use them.”

-~-

It’s really a nice house these kids live in. Five bedroom two and half bath. A spacious backyard and front with a walk-in basement. Nice neighborhood, too, away from campus and the more raucous parts of town. The specifications regulate that there always to be at least one resident for every two children in all residential assisted-living homes. Five children on Walnut Hill means that there should be two and one half residents working at all times. When I joke to Anne about what constitutes two and a half residents she says, “One of the residents giving 150%.” Ideally, three residents are needed, but with our limited numbers more times than not only two are on duty. There are three boys and two girls who live in the house: Ron, Ty, Phil, Sally, and Bethany, therefore there must be both a male and a female at all times. My first day on the job Ron attacks me, and it is kind of a relief, not nearly as bad as I expect. Anne is around only because it is my first day and Ron is rather ornery. Anne usually has no set schedule. She buys groceries when more are needed and comes to the house when she feels like visiting or needs to do the books. However, this day she is on the clock. I follow her around and she’s giving me a lot of information and it’s coming very fast. Specifics about each of the kids, where soaps and such are kept, snack times and bedtimes. Just after we finish eating the fish sticks that I have heated, Ron sets his eyes on a pair of scissors in Anne’s back pocket and becomes fixated on handling them. “Zoning” is what Anne later called it. His eyes become dull and lifeless, his motions very slow and premeditated. I remember blaming her. Why in the hell are you walking around with scissors in your back pocket? Ron sees those scissors and follows Anne around the house, arms outstretched, soundlessly, like a mummy. Anne isn’t scared, but cannot distract him. She makes her way downstairs to the office, which is right across from the laundry room, down the hall from Ron’s room, which is right next to where Phil sleeps. Anne attempts to get inside the office, lock Ron out, let him cool down or snap out of it. But he’s, I believe, more capable than most give him credit for. She opens the door and he quickly follows her, not allowing her to shut it behind her. They say with Ron and the bigger kids the one thing you always want to make certain of is that they are never in between you and the nearest exit. You center yourself between them and the door. I don’t know Anne well enough to say for certain, but I believe she mildly panics when Ron follows her into the office blocking her only escape. Her eyes just a little wider, but serious, her motions precise. The scissors are tightly in 58 her hand, and she waves them behind her back and over her head keeping them out of his grasp. She calls out distracting him, “Ron, you want to watch a movie? You want a snack?” He shadows her motions reminding me of a puppy and how they follow a bone or ball with their head when you fake throw it. Of course, he isn’t so easily fooled, and he wants those scissors so badly that I wonder what he’ll do if he gets a hold of them. I’m standing behind Ron in the hallway watching. I don’t know protocol, I don’t know if this is normal. I want to help, but don’t know how, and I follow them partly to see what’s going to happen next. Anne throws the scissors to me. I catch them instinctually and think, What am I ‘it’ now? Is this a game?…this wasn’t part of the plan. Ron turns to me and says, “Let me see,” but I pretend as if I have nothing. I back myself into the laundry room “See what, buddy?” I say both hands behind my back, the scissors in my right. Ron turns and comes towards me, and it feels like I’m insulting his intelligence. I think this upsets him more than anything, the fact that I think I can outsmart him so easily with the old ‘now you see it-now you don’t’. Ron’s hand finally jolts up to his mouth. I’m expecting this, so I begin to scold him, tell him to quit biting his hand, but Ron isn’t responding. He grabs my hair and pulls so hard that I’m truthfully willing to let him get away with a handful if it means he’d just stop pulling. I manage to toss the scissors to Anne and I remember seeing the back of her gray head, done up in a bun, as she shuts and locks the office door behind her. It doesn’t last long, maybe five seconds. I free myself and, still holding his wrist, say much harsher than I intend to, “You better not ever do that again.” Anne emerges from the office and stands to the side watching. Things are slowing down, so I try to recall what I’ve learned. With my index finger pointing and waving I say, “Why did you do that, Ron?” “I don’t know.” “That’s something you cannot do, Ron.” Now, I have my voice just right. Ron has settled, “I know. I’m sorry.” “Sorry’s not enough. It doesn’t mean a thing if you keep on doing things like this.” I imitate my mother, the way I remember her. Take out the trash, boy. Or my father with report card in hand, Is this the best you can do, son? “I like you,” Ron says suddenly. I don’t know if this is a ploy, something he says to all the staff, or if he really means it. I come very close to apologizing for everything. I say, “If you liked me you wouldn’t grab my hair like that. Friends don’t grab hair. Aren’t you my friend?” Later Anne tells me I did a good job. This is gracious of her, and much needed reinforcement, but I don’t necessarily share the same sentiment regarding her. In fact, I feel slightly betrayed remembering how she closed the door to the office behind her, how she stood there as if rating my actions. She says that it’s more than just scolding, it’s about making sure he learns right from wrong, not merely action and consequence. We’re supposed to fill out a report whenever there is an incident. The term is rather vague, and when I ask Anne where the ‘incident’ sheets are contained, she tells me not to worry about it. “Things like that aren’t really worth it.” I didn’t know this at the time, but if Ron exceeds a certain number of incidents it might be an indication that he is not responding well to the environment. Ron gets bedded down, and I get off duty a short time later. When I walk into the Daycare, my roommates are all there watching television. I say hello and go to my room to sleep.

59 -~-

I live in one of the bedrooms in the basement. It gets very dark at night and I try to scare the others with stories of the lost voices I hear of the children that once lived in and now haunt Bright Beginnings. It is creepy down there, many things to overcome. There are no windows and the closet is full of tiny abandoned shoes. The hooks along the walls have names penciled on masking tape under each one. Mice can be heard at night in floorboards and behind walls. It sounds like toenails on linoleum. During the summer most of the students go back to their home. The town is kind of hollow for one who is college-aged. Usually, the four of us play basketball outside or video games throughout the night until we’re tired enough for sleep. Some nights we drink and talk for hours about important things like Bob Marley, Tupac, and Radiohead, girls, war, getting married or never getting married, what we want to do with our lives versus what we’ll probably end up doing, being fathers one day and our own fathers, our mothers, love, SteaknShake and sex and White Castle, soccer and football and sometimes basketball, old memories that didn’t happen too long ago, how drunk and stoned our parents might have gotten when our age, how unyoung we feel, the realization that these years are soon to be looked back on as the best ones, and we talk about other things as well. I don’t think I’ll ever remember it all.

-~-

The days are uneventful. The kids need routine. When the job is difficult, it’s very difficult, but when there is nothing, and the kids are doing their own thing, it is a rather simple way to get paid. We cook and clean, send them off to the school in the morning, get them into bed at night. Shifts last roughly seven hours, and the goal, I think the entire staff would admit, is to have the hours pass without incident. I’m actually easing my way into the routine as well. Ron has his bad days, as occasionally do his housemates, but everything is handled. He loves to vacuum, and constantly asks if he can. When he’s excited he goes outside to laugh and run back and forth in the backyard as fast as he can. It’s good exercise for him, so I sit on the porch and watch him and try to think of the things in my life that makes me as happy as this running seems to make him. Every Tuesday, I take him to the pool. I strap him into a life vest, and he jumps into the water. My feet hang over the ledge as I watch him float. It’s always difficult to get him to come out. When I tell him it’s time, he yells, “I don’t wanna.” I remind him about dinner and home, but I have to threaten him with telling Anne before he even thinks about getting out. On Thursdays, I have to plan an activity for him. Usually a drive for some ice cream and a walk around the pond. I try to talk to him, make sure he’s enjoying himself, “Look at the ducks, Ron. Cool, aren’t they?” “I see them,” he says in that deep whine and it seems like I’ve annoyed him. He extends crusts of bread to ducks and follows them as they waddle away. I follow him, but he’s enjoying himself, so I don’t speak. We both eventually end up sitting and dazing into the center of the pond watching the water stand still.

During summer days, since school’s out for Bethany who goes to an ordinary public high school, there needs to be only one staff member on duty. Sometimes she has an activity planned with a female caregiver, but on the days in which she doesn’t she is 60 not difficult to look after. She’s a character, but likeable. She cusses like a shoddy rapper, and that’s what she’ll do until lunch and dinnertime. Lie in her bed and cuss at the ceiling. Hours pass before I knock, open the door, and say, “Lunchtime, Bethany,” and she’ll reply, “What, you bastard? I know it’s fucking lunch time.” We’re supposed to ignore this, not respond, because it has been concluded that the reaction is exactly why she does it, but the first couple of times it surprises me, and I can’t help but chuckle. If at any time during the day or evening you cannot hear her cussing then something is not right. She is most likely tearing up T-shirts and underwear and stuffing the material down the vent. A bus drops Phil and Sally off in front of the house around 2:30. Phil’s the most intelligent. He always seems to be plotting, but I think this is only in my head. He’s polite, but moody and rather articulate, but no Rain Man (please, no more quips about Rain Man). He loves videos. No one else in the house has the attention span for films, so Phil usually puts in a movie and watches it quietly. The thing about Phil is that there is nothing in his closet, and if you hang something up in there he’ll quietly place it on the floor outside of his room. He comes to the park sometimes with Ron and me and sits to the side, and he’s always ready to go once he’s finished his ice cream. Sally walks aimlessly around the house. She’s a cute girl. Her head is large and round, her glasses awkwardly thick. Every now and then she sits and watches people go about in silence, but her head is constantly moving, rolling around her neck, her eyes rolling around her head. She’s a talkative one, too. All of the caregivers enjoy giving her attention, because she shows the most affection. She speaks in such a loud and proper manner. Like a debutante. When she sees a resident she plays the same game with each of us. “Say precious,” she coos. “Say precious. Precious?” “Precious, Sally,” I say. And then she explodes in laughter. She’ll make the request countless times until she goes to sleep. Sometimes, after the thirty or fortieth time, it’s more than I can stand. “Precious?” “Not now, Sally.” “Are you mad at Precious?” “No, no, I’m just tired, sweetie. Do you want to help Carla make dinner?” And she does. She loves to cook, and that will keep her busy. Carla is a lifer. She’s been here long enough to understand not necessarily why, but at least how these kids work. She knows Sally will do anything for pudding, and Phil will only sleep after a hug from her, and the trick with Bethany is to use fake cuss words with the same emphasis as real ones. ‘Sick of a goose,’ instead of ‘son of a bitch.’ ‘Mister Fudger,’ instead of ‘Motherfucker.’ Bethany periodically follows suit, sometimes making up her own ‘Duck you’. Never will Carla remain in the same room alone with Ron. Never will she not let him have anything he wants. Ty is an entirely different story. A dismal situation. There is no rhyme or reason to his actions. Aside from the guttural noises and the slapping he just lies in his bed waiting for someone to come in and direct him. He goes to a separate school for special need cases and needs to be picked up by a staff member every day. He comes home and sits in his bed until dinner, slapping himself and grunting. At the dinner table, he hates to eat. He acts as if food is bad medicine and sometimes will spit it out in mid-chew. We have to sit with him and make sure that he swallows, because he’s already so thin. Ty gets up sometimes in the middle of the meal and returns to his bed until it’s time for his bath. I pop my head in and say, “Bath time,” and he’ll strip down wordlessly 61 and walk naked to the tub. Afterwards back to his bed, where he will eventually fall asleep. He’s twenty-three, but they say his childhood was really messed up. And that’s all Anne says. “Ty…his life was really messed up.” There are pictures of his mother and brother on his wall. No dad, but that’s not terribly odd. His mother is blonde, very young looking, and not an unattractive woman. Her hair is feathered and the neckline of her blouse is just a little too low for a family portrait. My mind wanders when I look at his photos, tries to come up with conclusions. I’ve never heard of her coming to visit. Sally’s parents and Bethany’s dad are the only guardians I’ve seen. They come for weekly visits, stay for an hour, and leave despite their daughters’ pouting. I don’t try to imagine what it would be like in the situation, how I would feel. I do note that Anne has devoted her life to these kids, so it is a possible feat. One hectic day, Phil destroys his nightstand, and I don’t know why. Carla goes into his room to settle him down. Ron won’t stop laughing and doing the screeching hawk stim and I keep asking him, “What’s so funny, buddy?” And it all suddenly becomes a little much. I feel ill equipped, ill prepared for the responsibility of caring. Things settle down. I say to Carla, “What’s wrong with these guys?” “They’re just having bad days,” is what she says to me. That’s when I feel it, when it becomes clear: I know I’m not going to stay here. But the longer I do, it’s only going to make it that much harder when I leave.

-~-

One day I pick Ron up from the school and decide take him to my house, the Daycare. He’s quiet, but knows something’s not right. “Where are we?” he asks. “Gotta make a stop, buddy,” I say. I imagine this is against the rules, but it’s something different to get him outside of the house, take away hours from the day. I think I want Ron to see where I live. I think I want him to know what happens in my life when I leave him. At the Daycare, we have a white Boxer that lives with us named Prince after the featherweight boxer Prince something or other. We also have a black Doberman named Black. They’re not that close, two very different characters, but they don’t hate each other at all. They pal around in the backyard on occasion, but for the most part do their separate things. They’re the only two around when we get there, my roommates are away. Ron gets out of the car when he sees them in the backyard. He’s afraid of dogs, but whenever he sees one he gets as close to it as possible before his nerve falters. Black and Prince are friendly beings, in general. They approach him excited at the potential attention. Then, as he smiles, he backpedals away saying, “It’s a doggie,” as if he’s discovering the species in person for the first time. They bark, not in a mean way, but like they’re laughing. Ron howls back. A fence separates him and them, but he stares and watches as they clamor on top of each other vying for position and attention. We don’t stay long, and Ron seems a little disappointed when we leave.

On the way home, there is a construction site to our left as we’re stopped at a red light. I’ve been around long enough by now to know that Ron is comparing the likeness of his toy trucks to the ones he sees bulldozing in the lot. He’s fixated. Zoning. I let him zone, better on the trucks than on me. I’ve been advised not to drive him around in my Volvo. There’s a van used to transport the kids. This way administration is able to 62 determine the amount of miles posted each journey. In my Volvo, I get reimbursed for gas depending on how far I travel. I’m supposed to log the miles before and after every trip. I’m not going to lie, this is a convenient way to get a little extra income every now and then. ‘Miscalculate’ miles. However, in addition to this perk, the radio in the van is broken. The only thing I’m apprehensive about is the close proximity in which we sit. In the van, Ron automatically takes his seat in the far right corner, but in my Volvo he’s directly behind me, an arm lengths away. Anne has told me that this is something that I should constantly take notice of. He’s so close and my back is turned. Not smart on my part. The light turns green, I begin driving, away from the trucks, and in my rearview I see Ron bite his hand. I diffuse it. I’ve garnered my own way, “How’s that hand taste, Ron? I guess you won’t be needing dinner if you’re gonna eat your hand all up.” He stops biting, but I can tell he’s still agitated. “Trucks,” he whispers. There is a pleading in his innocent voice. I pull over, and he watches. “Smashing,” he says to no one. We sit for probably an hour, before it’s time to return to Walnut Hill for dinner.

At night if Ron cannot sleep, he usually rocks back and forth on his bed, and I let him, because it usually tires him out. I open his door tonight, and his eyes are open, but he’s under the covers. I tell him goodnight, and shut off the light. “Hey, guys,” he calls out. “I like the dogs and I like the trucks.” I shut the door and say, “We’ll do again sometime.” Then I leave him alone trying to figure out if he was talking to me.

-~-

My dad calls and that’s odd, because he usually doesn’t. My mother usually would be the one who called and I would talk to him for a bit afterwards. After the customary ‘How are you doing?’ and ‘Do you need some money?’ he asks me, quite randomly, what I have planned. I ask him what he means and he says very softly, “With your life and such?” “I don’t know.” “Well,” he says. “You can always come home and figure it out.” And then quietly, “You’re mother and me--we’re proud of you.” I don’t know why he says it now, what has registered in his brain. Never before was I aware that his voice was capable of cracking. That he could sound so sincere. I imagine his facial expressions matching the sound of his voice. “Thanks,” I say, and I don’t know if I should say that I’m proud of them too, as if I’m even somewhat responsible for their successes in life. “Well,” he says again. “I guess I’ll go on and let you holler at your mother. Let me know if you need anything.” This is something he always says before getting off of the phone with me. He yells for my mother, and then we wait for her to pick up in silence, never sure how the last words are supposed to go. Then “I love you, man,” he says real fast, like he doesn’t mind if I mishear him. And me instinctively real fast right back, “I love you, too.” My mother picks up and we talk and he listens for a while and then says, “All right, son, I’m going to get going.” He hangs up and in that moment I miss living in the bedroom I was raised in under their roof.

-~- 63

One day, a few months after I’ve started, I receive a call from Anne asking me to come in early. Something has happened at the school. Ron has been excused for the day, and someone needs to pick him up immediately. I don’t ask questions. When I pull in front of the building, Ron doesn’t say anything as he gets inside. I ask him how his day was, how things are going, but he doesn’t answer. He’s screeching and tapping his index fingers more than usual, but this is something I don’t notice at the time. We pass the construction site and Ron calls out from the backseat, “Look guys, they’re doing things.” I don’t respond. He’s not talking to me, or maybe he is, but a response may give him the impression we’ll stop and watch again like the times before. At the house, he plays with his trucks. Although, he never lets me play with him, he always lets me know that’s what he’s doing. “Hey, I’m playing!” It’s the attention, however minute, that he seems to respond to. I dust and then get out the vacuum and he asks if he can do it. He stands rooted in one spot moving the vacuum back and forth over the same portion of carpet, dazing at the ground. When his eyes roll to the back of his head and his head tilts back resting on his shoulder blades, it’s not a good sign. He’s looking at the ceiling fan. I’ve talked to Anne about this, and she called it his “ceiling stim.” She said his mind is rambling. More times than not it’s a prelude to the hand biting and such, so I say to him, “Ron, buddy. Move around. Get more than one spot, okay?” He responds with a laugh, moves five feet, and continues with his back and forth motion. “I’m vacuuming,” he says. “And I appreciate you vacuuming, buddy.” At dinner, Ty grunts and Phil stands up and points at him. “Excuse me, yes, excuse me.” He’s very hesitant as he tries to get my attention. Timid, but always polite. He has violent days, but never are they directed towards a staff member. “I will not tolerate this,” he says referring to the grunting. “Phil, please sit down,” I say with no intent to embarrass him. He sits. “Ty, what’s wrong. Finish your meatloaf.” But he doesn’t, instead he gets up, slaps his chest and quickly walks to his room. “I think that’s fine then,” Phil says and continues eating. “Ty, sit down and eat!” Ron says very authoritatively. I’ve never heard him like this before, and it sounds as if he’s imitating something he’s heard. “Shit,” Bethany mumbles to herself as if she too is fed up. Carla and I exchange a look and she puts her hand up as if to say, ‘I got this one.’ She follows Ty to his bedroom with his plate of food. I say, “That’s nice of you, Ron. Looking out for Ty. I think he’ll be okay.” If these kids worked together they could get whatever they want from us, and I think this is the first time I realize this, maybe the first time they do as well. Later in the night, one by one, I wash the boys, give them baths. I don’t feel comfortable actually wiping them with the washcloth, especially around their privates, which of course is the place that is most in need of cleansing, so instead I kind of direct traffic. Take your washcloth, and get your armpits, buddy…now your privates, I say to each. I do wash their hair. All of them hate getting their head wet. Ron is last. The tub is like a tiny swimming pool for him and he rests on his back, knees bent, head against the wall. I leave him alone because he always takes so long. He likes the feel of the water surrounding his body. His fingers get pruny, and when I tell him it’s time to get out, he doesn’t like that and doesn’t listen. About fifteen minutes 64 later I’ve lost my patience. I command him. “Ron. Out.” He bites his hand in the tub. I stand at the door, nowhere near him, so I still feel in command. “Quit biting your hand,” I say. And he does stop biting, but he doesn’t stop looking at me. Staring at me. I don’t let on, but when he does this, my heart beats faster. I cannot figure out what’s going on his head. “Out,” I say once again and he obliges. Usually I help him dry off and get dressed, but not today. I don’t trust him in that tiny bathroom. I set his underwear and pajamas on the lid of the toilet and tell him I’ll be right back. When I return, he’s dressed but soaked, and I lose my patience. I say something like, “Why wouldn’t you use your towel? That doesn’t make any sense.” Instead of answering me he tells me that he’s going to go to bed. I tell him that’s probably a good idea. A couple of hours later, after all the kids are in bed, Carla leaves. I’m working a double. The staff member who usually works the overnight shift has suddenly fallen ill, but I don’t buy that. I imagine she’s just tired and wants a day off. This isn’t my first time working the overnight, so I know what goes down, which is nothing for the most part. One of the kids may loudly toss or turn in their bed, sometimes they may get up for a glass of water, but this is rare. Ideally, overnights are tame, a time for yourself. There is no sleeping on the job, but I do. I think everyone does, as the chores only take about three hours leaving another four to simply fight the sleep. At night, I keep all the lights off, excluding one lamp in the corner. Without all the lights on I’m a little less visible, as if I’m not so easy to find. This house at night makes you very conscious of everything. I hear Ty grunting, but don’t go in his room. I smoke a cigarette on the back porch. I make calls on my cell phone to old friends. Once midnight passes, time is so slow. There is not an alarm clock in the house, and I know I won’t be able to stay awake. I set the microwave timer to go off in fifty-five minutes. A quick little nap that might help me though the night.

The timer dings and I wake up. Phil is standing at the top of the stairs, watching me. He seems very distracted, and I wonder how long he’s been there. I don’t know what to make of it. “Excuse me, Sir, excuse me. I’m just…I’d just like a glass of water.” I tell him to go ahead, but something’s wrong. He’s afraid, and it disturbs me. If I thought he’d let me, I’d give him a hug, because it looks like he needs one right now. I don’t, because I never have before, and now doesn’t seem like it should be the first time. He gets his water, takes a sip, pours out the rest, thanks me, and heads back down the stairs. I follow him, basket in hand, to do another load of laundry. All the lights are off downstairs. I turn the corner and see Phil disappear into his room, and Ron, the vast figure of Ron, standing at his door about twenty yards down the hall. Just seeing him terrifies me, chiefly because this is something I wasn’t expecting. He’s in his doorway, silent and motionless, looking towards me. He’s never done this before. I wonder how long he’s been standing there, if he’s just been waiting for me to come down. For a split second I imagine I’m in a bad war movie, in the jungle or woods and staring at my enemy. We speak different languages and both of us are out of ammo. I regroup and quickly turn on the lights. “What’s up, Ron? Can’t sleep?” He says nothing, but wears an odd little smile. I smile amiably, but confidently. Maybe I chuckle at his quirkiness. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t stop looking at me. Growing up all it took from my mother to put me in check was a glare from her eyes. From my dad, simply a shift in the position of his eyebrows. I try to look at Ron naturally. I realize I haven’t moved in while, so I take a step forward and say, “I’m just going to finish this laundry, okay?” 65 Ron’s face broadens into a smile, and he just begins running. Towards me. Sprinting, actually. His steps are lumbering and I feel each one land powerfully on the carpet. I realize that he’s not merely running towards me, but that he’s coming at me, and I am his purpose for this charge. I don’t even think about running. I don’t recall thinking. This boy is coming at me as hard as he possibly can. He’s not going to stop. It’s beyond fear, I believe. Primal. In the real world this wouldn’t be acceptable— stampeding a person. And Ron needs to learn that there are consequences. That there are certain things in life that are not acceptable, things that you cannot do. I want Ron to understand that if he doesn’t learn these things, then he may be at Walnut Hill forever. It took me years after this incident to realize that I was the only one trying to leave. I don’t think about any of this at the time. At the time, I yell, drop my laundry basket, and continue to yell. There is no one around to stop this, to see what will occur. His fist are raised, he’s running as fast as he can, his eyebrows high on his forehead, his tongue in the center of his open mouth. He looks not mad, not crazy, but simply like a man intent on accomplishing just one thing. I don’t know what I look like, I can’t even imagine.

-~-

The sun rises that morning and the next staff member comes in on time, which I appreciate. When I get home, I sleep. I work there for a while after that--a couple of months. Everyday starts to seem longer than the one before. Ron doesn’t come after me again, doesn’t act any different. We actually begin to understand each other. When I decide I’ve had enough of the job, decide to move on, it’s out of the blue. It’s hard to tell Anne. After showing her the scar from my football injury, I tell her that my arm hasn’t fully healed. I hover around the truth. I tell her there’s a lot of pain, and I can’t risk another injury. She says, “I guess there is a level of risk in this job.” With no judgment in her voice she says that I’ll be missed and I’m welcome to come back after I am healed. On my last day I don’t say goodbye to the kids, just scoot out as if I would return tomorrow. I try to convince myself that it doesn’t matter, they wouldn’t notice or understand anyway, but my true fear is that they actually would.

-~-

Weeks later, over beers at happy hour one of my roommates asks me about my job, why I quit my job. I don’t necessarily think it’s the reason, but I recall the event to my roommates, the night I was alone in the basement with Ron. It is the first time I have divulged this account. I tell them he was charging me and, so they’ll understand the best they can, liken it to Corky Martin, the star linebacker at our school, going full speed at a tackling dummy. I tell them he raised his arms above his head, and just as he was within striking distance, I grabbed him. “He wasn’t very strong.” I say to them. “Or maybe I’m just like Hercules,” I joke. There isn’t much we don’t joke about. I tell them we stood like that for what seemed like a good minute. Him struggling to free his arms, myself struggling to stay on my feet. Finally, I tell them that I did overpower him and brought him to the ground. “Just no balance,” I say, “He didn’t know how to use his leverage.” I know I’m not supposed to talk about the kids. Anne told me not to refer to them by name to outsiders. But the job, Anne, Ron, the house on Walnut Hill are in my past. 66 I tell my roommates that as he sat there on the ground staring up at me my arm didn’t hurt, nothing hurt, but he had tried to hurt me. My hands curled into fists. Two little balls I hid behind my backside. Let’s not do this Ronald, I wanted to plead, but I couldn’t speak. “We stared at each other and he looked helpless.” They’re listening. Quietly and intently. I could see Ron’s emotions swirling inside of his eyeballs. They looked like two perfect tiny blue planets. I tell my friends. “He looked lost.” But I don’t blame Ron, and all I really want to know is how I looked from beginning to end. From the moment I met Ron to the lonely night in the basement to the day I shut the door for the last time. Ron got up quickly and suddenly, like the ground had suddenly become very hot. “I didn’t know what this dude was pulling,” I say. “I didn’t know if it was over.” For a second none of my friends speak. I wonder if I’m through talking, if my story will go on. I miss Ron. One of my roommates asks me very quietly, but very sincerely, “You hit him, didn’t you?” I think about the type of man who possesses the ability to do such a thing. It's a ridiculous notion, so I chuckle. I should tell them Ron kicked the daylights out of me. We fought, I should say, and Ron taught me a lesson. “No, I didn’t hit him. What kind of asshole do you think I am?” But right before we order another round, start talking about something else, enjoy the remnants of our youth, I say to my friends, “I didn’t touch him. Of course, I don’t think I’d tell you if I did.”

67 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Before attending Florida State, Quentin James was employed in the warehousing and distribution industry. Prior to that he attained his bachelor’s degree in media studies from Missouri State University (formerly known as Southwest Missouri State), where he also was a member of the varsity soccer team. His influences include the writings of James Baldwin, Sonia Sanchez, and Langston Hughes; the films of Spike Lee; the general hip- hop culture; and the lives of his parents. He currently resides in St. Louis, Missouri.

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