When Justin Timberlake exposed Janet Jackson's nipple in front of millions of Super Bowl viewers, I could see where things were heading with the NFL It was about as accidental as the later event with the Latin bombshell Shakira putting her crotch right on the camera lens and shaking it as if she were having a seizure.

        I thought about writing a movie script that night, one about the childhood joys of playing football on a playground in the coolness of a sunlit Saturday morning in Autumn. I thought that America needed that story. I still do. I don't think that I have ever been as consistently happy as I was on one of those mornings after catching a pass or even running the football across an imaginary plane proscribed by the end of classroom on one side and the fourth fence pole from the road on the other. Joy is too weak a word for that feeling. I felt good about myself, about my choice of friends, and about how we lived our lives, and it has been approximately the exact time from one of those moments till now, since I could honestly say that.

       Arnie Lofton passed away this week. He was my neighbor back then. In my mind's eye, he would have been the center of the story. He was the best pure athlete that I've personally known. I've watched sports ever since Arnie and his family moved next door to us back when all the neighborhood kids attended Mark Twain Elementary School. It was him who brought sports into our neighborhood. He had a football, and he knew the basics and the rules to all the games. He showed us, the kids who lived on the southern ends of  all streets like Letts, Estes, and Van Dorsten, how to play. His dad Hank used to sit out on the porch and listen to Giant games in the evening, and that more than anything else is why I hate the Dodgers.

         I've coached basketball for thirty-five years. I've been around some truly amazing athletes. The reason why I would say that Arnie was the best pure athlete of all those who I have known was his love of the game. As far as I know, he never played a single sport in high school and was never corrupted by a win-at-all cost mentality that so much of our sporting culture espouses either overtly or otherwise. He liked to win, don't get me wrong, but he loved playing even more.

        He was the one who showed us how to play basketball, and he had great corner jumper which, for my money, is the hardest shot to make, and he didn't panic when you rushed at him, and with a simple flick of his wrists, he'd get you up in the air and drive by you talking smack all the while. I always thought he could have played pro-baseball had he desired. He had such a great swing and did everything on the diamond so naturally. 

         But it was in football, as a pocket passer, where he became the Legend of the Southside.  His huddle presence was  direct, "Gilbert, you go long. Carlyle, you cut across the middle. Adrian, you wait over on the left as a safety valve. Harold, you snap the ball and block." As simple as it gets, but the complexity, and the thing that made it beautiful was that Gilbert Martinez was the fastest human being who ever ran in a pair of street shoes, and no matter how fast he ran, Arnie would put the ball exactly in the one place where it needed to be. I don't think I ever saw Gilbert stretch to make a catch. He would run as if he were being chased by demons, hold his hands in front of him slightly below shoulder level and the ball would land there as if by magic. 

         Yes, I said, "as if by magic." Humans make mistakes, it's the most fundamental rule of our existence. We screw shit up. That's what we do best. Legends, on the other hand, defy rules, they find ways to circumvent logical explanations. The guys who I grew up with will all tell you that Arnie Lofton's deep passes were the most perfect thing we've ever seen, and the most consistent. I mean Albert Einstein could have plotted the velocity of the pass (VOP) and calculated Gilbert's rate of speed (ROS) and then drew an X in the sky five feet from the ground and about twenty yards from the front leg of the swing set where the ball should end up, and that damn ball would end up there every time. (Or at least enough times to convince us that we were seeing something special.)

          The Sixties hit our neighborhood pretty hard. I am ashamed when I look back and see the role I played in leading some of my friends astray. We bit hard at the lure that the movies, magazines, and the music they dangled in front of us using our budding sexuality to tempt us unto paths that led us away from the innocence and the ball fields of our youth. As far as I know, Arnie and his friends stayed true and never got caught up in that culture. I took the rest and left.

        Our paths diverged, but we often combined our efforts in adult leagues later, and Arnie was always the "great equalizer". We would lead us, a ragtag bunch of misfits into battle, and provided us with moments that we will talk about with reverence all of our lives. He gave us hope that we could be better than we were.

          It took me several years to overcome the damage that the Sixties inflicted upon my life. It hinged on the discovery at some point where I could no longer avoid the fact that everything bad that ever happened to me was the result of my own bad choices. A lot of people never understand that the future changes the past. Looking backwards from a higher ground changes how you should remember things and makes you realize how much that you got wrong as you were going through them.

       Justin Timberlake has a lot of fans. He is considered by most to be a legendary performer. To me, he is always going to be one of the douches who corrupted football. He willingly participated in the halftime event that told the world that this is how things are and are going to be from his point on. I've always believed that it was more of a staged ritual than an accident.

         A few years ago, I ran into Arnie's best friend, one day at the Kings Drive-in, and he told me about this project that him and Arnie were working on rehabbing a living space for a handicapped friend. That's some salt-of-the earth shit right there, and that night as I thought about it, I realized that I had never in my life done anything as altruistic as that for anyone.

          I got into coaching because I wanted the kids like me to avoid the all the mistakes I made. I wanted them to understand that you shouldn't depend on others to select your heroes for you and to allow them to use those heroes to sell you a false reality. Most real heroes never make the paper, they live right next door to you; they fix your cars at a reasonable rate, they teach you how to read; they make your breakfast, or pay for the food. They never get close enough to someone like Janet Jackson to unbutton her blouse in front of people, and left with the decision would ultimately think, "Actually, that's probably not such a good idea."

    And being in such close proximity, it should allow us to tell them that we appreciate how they inspire us. 

        I ran into Arnie one time much later in life and tried to tell him. He just shook it off.

        
         

              
                

      I've been trying for the last few months to write a story.  Yet, this is one of the only times in that period that I've actually sat down to write. Problem is, ideas no longer come to me with the fluidity that they once came when I went a little crazy. I mean there was a time when I could see a dead dog lying in the middle in the road and come home and write something about what it meant in relation to the human condition. I was admittedly living on the borderline; it was in the time right after my father and ex-wife died within a few months of each other. It was a time when I was first afflicted with tinnitus and didn't get a good night's sleep for months. It got to a point where I was spending way much too much time living in my subconscious and rarely venturing out into the material world.

     I wrote a story about being amphibious and able to keep my eyes above the water while the rest of me remained below the surface. I wrote another one about being someone who kept poking his head above the grave to see what was going on, too afraid to come out. It wasn't a fun time in my life, and writing was how I tread water. There was never a shortage of ideas then, as everything seem to be alive, craving attention. and sending out signals that read, "Hey you! Pay fucking attention to me. I deserve some respect!"

     I no longer feel like that. I mean I still feel like all the small things that we constantly ignore are important and therefore deserving of our attention, but in a different, somewhat healthier way. I don't know if it was the lockdown, the paradigm destroying, mythic summer of 2020, or just the fact that I'm getting old so quickly, but seems to me that I've lost a whole lot during this time, and I need to regain some of it, to glean through the rubble and keep what's important and discard the  fakery, and since it also seems like I've been inhabiting the overgrown, ruins of a lost civilization ever since my wife left me, I need this new life to begin with a proper foundation. My first incarnation was never based on fact; it suffered greatly because of it, and sputtered and never seem to overcome the fact that it was built on so much self-delusion.

      In truth, it was almost impossible for someone like me to be genuine back then because the world around me was so loud and never made much sense. There is so much absurdity in life that at times it makes it all seem like some weird  tragedy mixed with elements of fantasy, but also always contains the essence of truth in our every moment and situation, our freewill being that faculty within us that allows us to decide how we choose to interpret the narrative flow like we are just movie critics. We either grease the wheels, or we mine for truth; make no mistake, we all do one or the other, and usually come up with a mixture of both.

      Christ said that he despises lukewarm people; and for someone who usually spoke in parables, he made this one thing very, very clear. "I'll spit you out of my mouth," he said. I think he was saying what's the point of spinning your wheels. If you only go in half ass all of the time, you are never going to get anyplace in life, or ever acquire any of the things needed to develop a understanding of what it really means, and if you choose to approach truth-seeking with an unfocused mind, you will always travel in circles and never, ever come close to finding that magical place in back of the wardrobe.

       Searching for truth though is lot like hitting yourself in the head with a mallet. Every time you raise a new barricade, build a wall, create a levee, or stumble upon a new belief that offers up some certainty, you soon find new information that either tumbles it down like an adobe house in 7.0 earthquake or maybe reduces it to the substance of a windblown ash.  Ingesting too much truth at once is like taking an iron pill on an empty stomach. It makes you gag and burns your vocal cords.

       It's hard too. The effort to grasp reality can cause internal bleeding, lots of anxiety and perpetual confusion, it makes you walk around in a cloud of dust that partially obscures the world like the Pigpen character in the Peanuts cartoons. but what else is there really to do? I have this story in my head about a guy who reads both War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov and finishes both on the same day. He puts down the books and for a brief moment allows himself to concentrate on reducing both to the single theme of "Life is a Shit Storm; buy a raincoat and forgive everybody as it was never meant to be personal." And as the guy concentrates, a friend rushes in a says, "Hey I got a video of two fish fucking. Want to watch it?"

      "Sure. I'm not doing anything important."

      It's kind of understandable though, most of us can't focus on that theme too long. It's too perplexing and grisly, and you can't really dance to it. Instead, most of us would rather close our eyes and listen to the Kardashian sisters debate Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg on the merits of Marilyn Monroe's wardrobe knowing full how much of a waste of time and total dodge that would be.

       I was having trouble thinking what to write about. Then tonight I saw a new movie called North Hollywood, and it was a good movie. The scene where Vince Vaughn as the father has a Come-to-Jesus meeting with his son made me almost cry because of how well it documented the great missing conversation I never had with my dad. Well written, well acted, and well filmed, it reminded me of all the feelings that I've kept repressed for most of my life. It also reminded me that the things worth writing about are the things we keep below the surface. The movie reminded me that it is best to be as truthful as possible and say things instead of boiling them in a pot with all the other resentful shit. There is a whole warehouse of memorable scenes in each of our lives that we remember only because of how outside of the box they played out, or because they made us pout, but, like a scene from a Tarantino movie, they don't ultimately mean crap. The only ones that are important are disguised, buried, or placed into darkness where they smolder and burn, big vibrating boulders embedded in our psychic landscapes; they never go away, no matter how much we wish they would.

     Mining such ore for inspiration is hard. You have rise early when you want to sleep in. It requires learning how to kill, gut, and skin zombies, how to face down the fear of spiders and snakes, and worst of all, it requires that final, cathartic, ground-shaking, freedom inducing facedown, while standing in front of your mother's bathroom mirror,    locked eye-to-eye with the glowing image of who you were really meant to be. It inevitably leads to a moment in time when we are forced to quit deluding ourself and have to come to grips with a whole bunch of terrible truths, the stuff that we hid and pretended didn't matter, the lies we've invented since childhood to cover up the fact that we knew the answer to the ultimate question well before we even knew how to phrase it. The failure of not trying is way too horrible to even contemplate.

        I love good movies and books because they move me in ways that few things can; they help illuminate the darkness, and in many ways are the very voice of God.  I am going to try and write some stories about wrestling with such truth, stories about breaking chains, climbing out of quicksand, and fleeing from the past, stories about betrayal and moral failings. I'm going to try and write about how love makes life worth living, but at the same time, is capable of a wounding greater than a knife with a serrated blade.


    

         

      My marriage ended badly; I ain't gonna lie, but I often find myself adding things to the litany of reasons why things went so very wrong. I still loved her, and I like to think that in most respects, she still loved me.

      I recently purchased a book entitled The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread by Harold Bloom the eminent Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and noted Literary  critic who passed away in 2019 at the age of eighty-nine. It cost me thirty-five dollars, and let me tell you that every speck of my deceased father Bill White ( who also plays the Ghost of the Dust Bowl Past in my family's version of the Dickens's Christmas classic) contained in my DNA was screaming, "Are you out of your fucking mind?"

         I calmly answered in reply, "Dad, it's 516 pages long? Do you know how much effort goes  into writing anything that long? Besides, it contains Bloom's take on forty-eight of the world's great novels. That's like getting an entire university course in Literature for only thirty-five bucks plus taxes." That silenced the screams; my dad, who was forced by economic necessity to quit school after the eighth grade, was always respectful of education, or book learning as he called it.

           I was reading Bloom's review on Jane Austen's Emma when I ran across his amazing insight on the fictional after lives of Austen's famous feminine protagonists. What he mentioned was his doubts about whether they were truly happy after marrying the man of their so-called dreams. He points out the fact that they always seemed to settle for the best man at hand and not the one who would cause their bosoms to heave, whatever the hell that means. (Just joking. I think I know. In fact I think I've done it a few times.)

           I was kind of a bad boy at one time, or at least pretended to be one. I tried to live according to the masculine ethos that was called for in those days. I smoked Marlboros before I entered junior high, and, because I didn't have a horse, I rode a bike with high handle bars with the cigarette pack rolled up in my t-shirt sleeve, and with a pair of dark green aviator sunglasses and a sneer.

         I continued to project this facade right up until about a year after my wife had plucked me from the herds of other self-projecting young mustangs stampeding down the streets of Corcoran, which we all know was the center of the whole damn universe back then, as least as far as its inhabitants were concerned. I also said fuck a lot, I still do. It meant I was rebellious once. I don't know what it means now as I try not to think too hard about it.

         She chose me because of the way I looked in those damned sunglasses. She actually said, "I really like the way those glasses look on you." So, I wore them to the breakfast table, mowing the yard, in the shower and even tried to come up with some justification to wear them to bed at night. (Remember this was long before the night she told me that I wouldn't half bad if I took off a few pounds, back when the bloom was still on the rose, so to speak.)

          She really chose me because I had some potential, I was kind of funny, somewhat intelligent, not completely hideous to look at, and, hidden somewhere deep inside, I had a streak of kindness. She brought out the kindness part out of me as I had hidden it so long I forgot about it. She blew the dust off of it and shined it up and placed in on the coffee table where others could see it. I was never as much a narcissistic dick as I was back during the sixties and early seventies when the media and American culture seemed to demand that I be one.

         Basically, she settled for the security and the lesser evil as did Elizabeth Bennett and those other Austen women. I did too. I mean she wasn't Olivia Hussey, the actress who played Juliette in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliette, but she was pretty, sweet, funny, and pretty hot looking in her white bikini. Mainly, she picked me and in those days, that was the ultimate of aphrodisiacs to the male ego. It was also the thing that hurt the most when it was over, when I had to come to terms with the fact that she no longer picked me.
 
         What Harold Bloom noted that made me wince a little was the knowledge that in life we too often settle for what we think is the best deal that our situation allows. It's kind of like depending on our credit history to decide what car or house we want to buy. And a lot of time, things actually  turns out for  the best and becomes the thing that the universe itself would offer us if we paid all of our bills, gave a lot of money toward charity, relentlessly gave of ourself and went to work  smiling the whole while.

           We don't often know this though at the time; we always want to believe that the grass is greener somewhere. What I also didn't know was that because of this "settling" thing I was also under an obligation to recreate the world anew for her every morning, to fill her heart with wonder and amazement, to never let her for moment doubt the beauty and power of her own imagination, and mainly to prove to her that at all times she was the very epicenter of our universe, not only of my individual world, but of the part of the universe that we created together.

            Damn, I wish I had read Bloom way back when before I had settled into the ruts of domesticity (hell, the book might even have been a lot cheaper then). Better yet, I wish my dad had read it in the seventh grade, and his father before him.

             
             
     

      I know grief. He and I are on a first name basis, his is George. We are always talking about some weird shit or the other.

    "Hey, George. How you doing today?"

    He always shrugs first thing. It drives me nuts. He always looks at me all serious like Jason Robards looked in All The President's Men. He shrugs, then attempts a sad ass smile that ends up looking like he just bit through the sugar coating of dog turd. He then raises his hand up sideways and shakes it twice and says, "Meh."

    He stands behind me when I shave, frowning like I'm doing something wrong. He is the single most, stupid ass, lying, conniving, piece of shit, sorry excuse I know, and in this pandemic era where your willingness to lie can make you the leader of the free world, that's setting the bar pretty fucking high. But I can't ever seem to break it off our relationship because every so often he reveals the truth in ways that no-one else can.

      This morning I got up and started reading Joan Didion's novel Play It as It Lays which one critic described as being a ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s. The book is about the main character's relation with her own grief. She gets up in the morning and relentlessly drives the highways around Southern California  in search of things to make her forget the fact that her mother died alone in a car wreck and was partially devoured by coyotes before they discovered her body. The main character was partying with a rich boyfriend when it happened.

    I've done that, not the rich boy friend partying, but the relentless driving. My father, and my wife had died and God punished my failures as a husband by giving me tinnitus, a classroom full of kids lacking self-control, and a sense of hopelessness that often resembled a tear-stained photograph of a harsh Martian landscape. 

      That's the thing. Grief always hangs out with these two wormy little fucks named Guilt and Self-Loathing. They always show up late and ring the door bell and wave around an empty bottle of Champagne and say let's party while they're standing there in your doorway, but the moment you let them in, they gang up on you and make you feel like shit.

     One summer, I drove from Tehachapi to Merced along the eastern edge of the valley, sometimes with my mom in tow, trying to keep from thinking too much, always hoping that what I discovered on such journeys would be so new and important that it would wipe away the bloody footprints and chalk outlines of the past. The road trips never did help that much, but the demands of the  unknown road ahead sometimes kept me from staring too hard at the image in the rear-view mirror. 

     This morning I got up feeling more than a little discouraged. I read the book I mentioned for an hour and only put it down when the insanity of the main character's outlook on her grief filled life started sounding  suspiciously like my own. I went to get another book from the back seat of my car and I found a funeral announcement from a funeral I had recently attended and spoken at. I saw the date under the picture; she was barely 30 years old and was known throughout our small community as someone who had decided to fill her short life with as much love, live, and purpose as she could muster.  I think of her like one of those movie characters who put way too much stuff in their suitcase, then have to sit on it to try to make it shut. Her attitude was summed up in the term Beast Mode.
      
     I saw her smiling in the picture and got pissed off at myself for feeling down just because I pretend to have the luxury to waste my time that way. I went in the house and did a sink full of dishes, cleaned my toilet bowl, and washed and vacuumed my car, things I had been neglecting to do. It helped. Doing the things you need to do are often just as vital as love and laughter. Feeling sorry your self is not.

     I read now with the same urgency like I once drove across the valley floor in an endless search of shit that I can use to blot out the memories of my shortcomings, flaws, and moral lapses. Someday, I would like to get to the point in the story where on some lost, desert highway I come face to face with a long gray haired, bearded, shabby looking stranger drinking water from a burlap covered glass jug, smoking a Salem. Someone who looks and sounds a lot like Sam Eliot.

        I would pull over and park on the other side of the road, look over at my mom and tell her I needed to talk to this fella, and I would  be right back. Then I would get out and slow strut to where he sat on a rock covered with a red and blue Navajo blanket, and I would say,

        "What can you tell me, man? I read a lot of books and traveled miles and miles both inside and out, fought off demons, and bled real blood. I've come so far to talk to you. I wouldn't even have even known which way to come, but I saw the mark you made on that stop sign back at the four corners. I could really need use some help, Man. Not knowing is driving me crazy."

         The man would look me over, take a long drag off his Salem, exhale the smoke making it form a series of concentric rings and then take a drink from his jug, and I would notice that it looked like water coming out of the bottle's mouth, but turned into a dark, red wine as it seeped out of the corners of his mouth. He would burp and mumble, "That's some good shit," and drag his sleeve over his mouth to wipe it. Then he would tell me,  "You got every thing you need in that there car, son, your mama, some good books, and a tank of gas. I can only assume you got a CD player playing Kind of Blue and a good GPS app?" I would look at him like of course and on cue Mile's coolest riff from Freddie Freeloader would float out of the car's open windows. 

        At this point, I would get mad, It would develop slowly as I checked off all of the shortcomings of the unresolved situation, and truth be told, the anger was really being fed by a sense of frustration, the kind that comes from knowing that I was no closer to any kind of permanent understanding than I was when I first started asking why. I would stare at the stranger with great disappointment, both hands open, facing upwards and outstretched and hanging in the air, a gesture of irrational, disbelief,  "That's it? After all that driving down dust, deserts roads? Swimming in rivers of ice? All the searching, the thinking, the arguments and face slaps? The saliva on the front of the shoes? After the dark thoughts, the reading, the rereading, the situational compromises? That's it? That's really all you got to offer?"

           He chuckled as he pulled a strand of long white hair behind his right ear, then pointed his finger at me and smiled with a big, ass goofy grin. "One other thing; son, you gotta get rid of those three little assholes you've been hanging with a lot."

              "Huh?"

              "You know, Grief and his buddies."

              "But how? How do I do that?"

         He reached down on the other side of the rock and pulled up a dust covered, white painted board. He blew the dust off and handed it to me, "Hang this sign over your door."

           I looked at the sign; it had a big picture of the sun rising carved  in the wood and colored red and yellow. And in big blue letters, it said, "No Grief Allowed Here. Get Your Sorry Ass to Stepping!"

         I would look at the sign, think about it a bit, and after a while I would arrive at a unique understanding. I would suddenly realize that it was the Monday after Easter Sunday. That would be enough to send me into a short  trance-like state as I tried to place the realization into some category where I could process it, and I would smile and nod at the guy, looking somewhat like a lunatic, I would look back to check the anxiety level of my mom, turn back, grab the sign with both hands, and run quickly back to the car, carrying the sign, eager to show it to my mom.

        


   

     Sometimes I fall into the mistake of thinking that I haven't been writing lately. I have, but I haven't been sharing a lot of it. I have developed such a deep distrust of a lot of the media platforms because of the blatant dishonesty they put on full display at the end of the year.  I was looking back at some stuff and while pleasantly surprised by some of what I did write, I also noticed that it was also full of so much longing and regret.

The View From Mt. Fuji

"I knew you guys would come. Or, I knew someone would. I figured the universe couldn't be so cruel as to leave me standing there with my thumb up my ass in front of a prison where I was locked up for five years."

           The van was old, rusty and noisy, and they had to raise their voices in order to talk. Lola took a deep last drag off of her Salem and flicked it out the window and then slowly exhaled the smoke out of the window too. "That's where you wrong, sonny boy. The fucking universe would have let you stand right there until the guards came and locked your goofy ass right back up. It was your mother who picked you up. Remember that. I ain't gonna lie though: it was Carla reminded me. Otherwise, I woulda just gone down to Hanratty's and gotten drunk like every other day. Not that I wouldn't have come, of course. I had just forgot."

Old Dudes Fishing

   The shiny, new Lexus backed out of the parking slot and straightened its wheels so that Rodney, sitting in the back seat, was level with where Geezer and Pancho were standing. His head and shoulders were slumped over, and his head was barely above window level; he looked up sadly and barely raised his hand and waved as the car pulled forward.

             Pancho and Geezer stood right where they were and waved long after the car turned left on Derry and drove out of sight toward the outskirts of town.

           After a long while, Geezer turned to his friend and started to say, "Maybe Big Larry's right. It might be good for. . . ," he then noticed that Pancho was crying, "Are you crying? You damn crybaby. Two tours of duty as a helicopter gunner in Nam just to come home and start bawling outside a shit hole restaurant.. Knock it off, Pancho. We ain't freaking snowflakes! We real men remember. The last of a dying breed and don't you ever forget it!"

           Pancho turned toward Geezer and smiled through his tears, "Said the same dumb ass fool who cried all night when Jerry Garcia died. I'm gonna miss that fool, Geezer. He didn't talk dumb shit all the time like you."

So You Want to Shag a Movie Star?

    "Do you honestly mean to tell me that you think that your answer was appropriate for a high school literature class?"

   "That's a different question. I answered the question he asked me, and I answered it honestly. It's not my fault that Mr. People's is a hypocrite."

    "So, your deepest desire is to sleep with a Hollywood movie star?"

       "There you go to changing the question again. I didn't say it was my deepest desire. My deepest desire would be to be able to function in a society where I didn't have to lie or modify my truth in order deal with the inability of others to accept it as such. In response to your question, I would just say, how could it be otherwise? That's why those stars exist, to create desires where none existed before. They use our desires against us, to sell us stuff, including false realities and untruth."

        Ms. Stephens started coughing at that point.

The Languages of Trees

   The memory of Petey's death strangely made me think of the image of my dad kneeling down and scratching the words, "Petey Our Beloved Puppy," into the wet cement slab he had placed on the dog's grave and then just as quickly, that old memory morphed in the newer memory of my brothers and I standing at the side of my father's grave. I had thought of Petey's funeral on that day too, wondering who had etched the words into my father's headstone. It was a cold, breezy day the middle of an unusually warm Autumn.  My brother Cody had selected Elvis's Peace in the Valley as the music marking the end of the ceremony.

       My childhood friend Hobo, real name Larry, came up afterwards and hugged me tightly. He whispered, "Did you pick out that damn music?"

       "Naw. That was Cody's idea. He loves Elvis, man. He'd sang it hisself if we'd let em."

       Hobo pulled back and said earnestly, "Good fucking choice though. I always said that if'n the King can't break you down, you can't be fucking broken down."

          I laughed, "Shit, fool. Don't be making me laugh. It's my dad's funeral for Christ's sake." I then thought about it a minute then said, "Hell, the song was a lot better than that damn preacher though."

         "Ain't that the damn truth! Where did you guys get that mealy mouth motherfucker, out the Yellow Pages? Sound like he was trying to sell us a car."

           I laughed again, "Knock it off, I said. Damn, dude. Jennie said that if we used Old Penrose she wouldn't even come. Glen came up with this dude."

           Hobo pulled a package of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket, lit a one, and exhaled slowly, "Well you know what they always say. Same shit, different suit."

The Man With Half a Heart

   And, oh yeah, she took half of him with her. The left half. He suddenly felt a lot lighter, so he looked down and noticed that she had sliced him neatly in two, starting at the top of his head and exiting below his crotch area. He was just starting to wonder just how the f**k she could done the thing so neatly and so swiftly when he remembered that Delia wielded words like a highly trained samurai wielded a katana blade, and she also had a natural gift for turning his own words into weapons that drew blood.

        As far as the people eating at the surrounding tables knew, he was okay. Sure, they had witnessed the tossed napkin and the storming out, but to the outward vision, he was still in one piece. He played along with the charade, paid the bill, and slowly made his way into the restroom where he stood before the marble counter and carefully surveyed and listed the real damage.

        Anybody knows that possessing half a heart is damned near as worthless as having no heart at all. But a lot of people do not understand that the heart is also a seat of memory and the hub of all emotional activities. So, all of his emotions now entered in a limbo after discovering the hub was missing. They wandered about the halls of his consciousness lost, lonely and confused, sometimes hooking up with the half baked ideas that were still being emitted by the still intact right side of his brain. This resulted in a lot of strange behavior on his part. Sometimes he fell in love with an episode of CSI, at other times he would rage at the sight of cute squirrel eating a peanut in the park.

Mourning in April

  I started thinking that life comes at people like a fastball thrown by a hall of fame pitcher while we are looking for the curve. The ball gets up on us so quickly that we swing weakly and miss it by a mile. We know we can't quit though, it wouldn't be right, so we tell ourselves on the way back to the dugout that that motherfucker gotta wear out sometime, and sooner or later, he'll  hang that curve right over the plate. Trick is being in the batter's box when he does and still having your team close enough for it to mean something. I was of the mind that after striking out three times, I was fixing to get pulled for a pinch hitter anyway.

      
     It's been over twenty-five years since that star flew across the moon that night and almost the same amount of time since Gladys crushed my hopes like a bug on the first day of seventh grade year.

      You'd figure that those two events should have been deeply buried in the sediments by now, far enough beneath the surface of the water, rusted and forgotten, that they couldn't possibly affect me anymore. But you'd figure wrong.

     And it's always those deep, forgotten, rusty things that hurt the most.  

The Secret of the Sliver Moon

   Lazarus Russell died all alone on outskirts of Concord, a small, judgmental town full of people who often carved their presumptions out of stone, yet had a hard time scratching the surface of the obvious. Lazarus had lived there so long that he had become to seem of no more substance or meaning than a barely noticed tree, or a warning sign posted on a certain corner that no one ever heeded.

       It was cold and bitter the night he died lying on a dirt embankment beneath the railroad bridge along State Route 23. He looked up at the  slight, blurry, sliver of silver hanging in a dark black sky then lowered his gaze toward the brackish water pooled below the railroad bridge and saw the same slivered moon undulating lightly on its surface. He then closed his eyes, mumbled something toward the shadows, exhaled and surrendered.


Matchsticks

   Kevin Cash ran through life like his tail was on fire. Looking back, I often wonder if he didn't have the right idea. Life is like a big assed wool blanket and if we stand still long enough, or worse, just sit and watch, it will eventually smother us all.

     Standing there by his grave, all his friends were gathered at one end, clustered in between a flower arrangement that spelled out 'Go for it!' in red roses at one end and one that said 'Tell Johnny I Said Hello' in blue and yellow roses at the other. The picture his sister Sharon took of the sad looking group looked like the after picture of the whole Sixties era, and, in perfect truth, captured the essence of those confusing times as they played out in our dusty, little town in the great San Joaquin Valley. I can't help but wonder though how many other such photographs exist and how many 'What the Fuck?' responses they would one day engender.

       We laughed that there was nothing inside that shiny walnut box but the ass end of big joint in a roach clip. We joked about it because we had all seen it coming, and, each in our own way, had tried to warn him. We always presented ourselves like a stoic bunch of sad-eyed losers but a little bit deeper down, underneath the thin layer of epidermis we passed off to the public, our hearts were drowning. It was like being at the funeral of Icarus. All of us got a little sunburned, but it was always Kevin who flew the highest.

The Ride

    "Pop, is there anything about your God forsaken life that you actually regret?"

     I saw that the question hit him right between the eyes, and he flinched for just a second. For as long as I had known him, my dad had never, ever looked backwards. He even told me once that he had taken the rearview mirror out of the first car he owned. When I asked him why, he surprised me with his answer.

    "A old man I knew, Guy Mitchell, used to be a Professor back in Arkansas, once told me a story about a mule sitting equal distance between two bales of hay. He said that damn fool mule couldn't make his mind up which bale to eat and starved to death. There's only one way to go, Son. Forward. And because life is hard on your ass trying to run you down you gotta move fast, so you got no time to sit cry in your fucking beer."

     "Regrets, Pop? You got any?"

     He looked out the window as the town he had lived in for over sixty years flew by like the moving back drops in the old Western movies he loved so much. After a minute, he turned back and looked me in the eyes. He wore thick lenses, and they magnified his eyes so that I could see that his bottom lids were damning the flow of the only water I had ever seen in those eyes.

   This man had cracked jokes at my mom's funeral. He complained so much about her cooking, that I had to threaten to kick his ass if he didn't shut up. It was only now though, in sudden flash of insight, no doubt helped along by the shock of seeing those damn tears welling up, that I realized the jokes and the complaining was all facade. I knew that he was hurting, maybe even feeling guilty as we sat there by the side of my mother's grave.

    "You can't live life the way I"ve done and just up and start feeling guilty or ashamed. It wouldn't be honest. My old man use to beat my ass every day. Right up till the time I took his belt away and turn the tables on him. The way I see things, I only have two regrets anyway."

   Pop stopped mid thought. I waited and waited and the answer didn't seem to be forthcoming. "And?"

   He then gave me the saddest look I had ever seen, "I regret in taking the pretty offa your mama. She was the prettiest girl in this county at one time. . . . . .then she had the bad judgement to take up with me." He chuckled sadly, "I used to parade her up and down this very street like I was toting peacocks."

   With that, he grew silent and turned and looked back out the window. I could tell though that what he was seeing in his head sure wasn't really out there now.
​
    "Pop, you said you had a second regret?"
The words came out simply, hard, fast and resigned, "My greatest regret is turning that belt on my daddy. I should never have done that."​




  

     I was 10 years old when I first thought about death. I was standing in the darkened kitchen of our old house on the Southside of Corcoran, looking through the doorway into our fully lit living room when my mom and dad returned home from my uncle Raymond's funeral. They were dressed in black and I instinctively knew that something serious was happening. I wasn't quite certain what all it involved, but I knew that I would never forget that moment as long as I lived.

    Then the day after school ended my sixth grade year, my best friend at the time drown while swimming in an irrigation canal out by where the prison is today. I heard the news from a kid that I didn't want to see at that moment for whatever reason. When I heard that he was looking for me, I ducked beneath my neighbor's grandpa's truck and was lying facedown in the dirt in the darkness staring out at his sunlit feet when he told my friends to let me know that Billy had drown. I had a dream that night that Billy was running through the hallways of Mark Twain School calling for me to come out and hang with him. Then I woke up into the extremely bitter realization that he was gone forever.

     About a year later, there was a thunder and lightening storm that hit Corcoran, and my mother in a rush to pick my brother and I up from his football practice, forgot that our beloved family dog Pepe often slept in a rut behind the left rear tire of our family car. In the darkness my brother Tim and I didn't even notice that my mom was crying until we walked out of darkness of the night into the house and saw my dad sitting in the middle of the couch crying with his head haloed by a ceiling light coming from the kitchen through the same doorway that I had once saw them coming home from my uncle's funeral.

     My dad, trying to spare us the grisly knowledge of death had hastily buried Pepe before we had even got home. We made him dig Pepe up and place him in a wooden coffin lined with an old towel, and we held a ceremony for our pet the next day and placed a headstone on the grave that is still there to this day.
   
       I learned that time that it is inevitable and certain that all the people and things we love will one day pass away, and that is a heavy knowledge to place upon the shoulders of someone young, or for anyone for that matter. Throughout my life, I've often caught myself holding back and keeping my loved ones at arm's length in the hope that death won't notice my love for them and spirit them away.

      I'm certain that everyone who reads this can substitute their own images of death that they will never forget for as long as they live. And I believe that if they search their memories that they will also notice the role that the demarcation beneath darkness and light play in their memories too, for Death is the great illumination that most clearly defines our very existence. So often, it pulls us up out of the darkness and our sleep and thrusts us into the harsh light of reality. REALITY. As in the world as it really is.

       We humans often resort to such ridiculous measures to avoid the certain  knowledge of our own impending death. Most of us, if we are being perfectly honest, would be more willing to watch every stupid ass show there is on Bravo in an endless loop than to ever take the time to carefully examine those acid-etched memories in an effort to squeeze out every ounce of possible meaning that we could gain from such an effort. We would rather become diehard Detroit Lion fans, or even pretend to love the music of a dip-shit like Marilyn Manson rather than sit for a minute alone with the deafening silence of the simplest most enduring Truth of our existence.

       Recently, a young lady I knew and loved passed away after a courageous battle with cancer. She was given a timeline that pretty much told her when her life would come to an end. Her response was to try and prove her doctor's wrong. And the thing that was most amazing was that she always had a smile on her face right up until the very end. People my age live in daily fear of receiving such knowledge. And I don't even want to speculate on how well I would handle such news.

         I read a quote the other night in a book that I was reading to learn more about another book I had already read. The author was trying to come to grips with the tragic death of a close friend, and it said, "It is a parent's job to love a child into the belief that life is worth living." I was struck by the stunning truth of that haunting sentiment. How different our lives could be if all our schools operated on the belief that it was their job to love a child into believing that life had meaning, or if all of our politicians understood that it was their chief responsibility to give us hope instead of behaving like the silly twits to which we have become accustomed.

        What a great parent this young lady surely must have had to have her believe so strongly that life, no matter how bad it might seem, was worth the living. What a lesson for us all, not in how she showed us how to die, but in how she showed us how to live.
         

      Johnny 'Buddha' Aguayo walked out of the prison gate with no expectations. He had put absolutely zero thought into figuring out what would happen upon his release. His mom knew he was getting out, so he figured she might be the one who showed up to pick him up, but over the years, he had learned many painful yet valuable lessons, each slightly varied in their particulars, but all with the same theme; it would be totally insane for him to place his trust in his mother. So, he left it up to the universe to deal with, the same mental practice that had helped get him through most of his childhood and the five years he had just served in prison.

     He just stood there adjusting his stance from time to time, a tall, well built, light skinned Mexican-American with a graying goatee,  staring off at the horizon. He had short, reddish-brown hair parted on the side and a light scattering of freckles across his nose. It had been the one thing that he had missed the most while locked up, a clear, unfettered look at the horizon, one that didn't have the walls of the prison obstructing the view.

      Johnny stood perfectly still for at least ten minutes, not saying anything, or displaying in any way that he was impatient or the least bit anxious. The guards watching his every move would never be able to understand how much his mind was instantly comforted by seeing the horizon from outside of the walls.

      In the distance, a solitary cyclonic cloud of dust appeared to be following the single road that led toward the front of prison. After a while, it became apparent that the cloud of dust was being created by Johnny's mother's van. Johnny could tell by its purple coloring and bright, yellow trim. His mother Lois was the leader of small tribe of diehard Laker fans and nearly everything she owned exhibited the same color scheme. The van also had a wheel-chair lift on the side that distinguished it from most other vans. It sped by the first entrance and slammed on the brakes only after passing the second entrance by about fifty feet. It backed up, turned into the driveway, and came to a sudden, grinding halt facing the way that it had come surrounded by the dust cloud and announcing its presence with the cacophony of a heaving bucket of rusty bolts. The rear door  opened and Johnny threw his back pack in and jumped inside climbing over the rear seat. The door slammed, and the dust cloud began its journey back to where it had started.

         Lois, heavy-set and heavily made-up wore her long gray hair braided. She wore leather sandals and a white, peasant's blouse bare at the shoulders. She turned in the driver's seat and questioned, "Hey, Mijo, you starting to get worried? We woulda been here earlier except your fucking dad had to stop and pee at the 7 Eleven." She looked over to where his father Big John sat in the passenger seat across from his son.

        His dad's nickname was all lie. Big John had never weighed more than a hundred and sixty pounds in his whole life, and he was only five foot six. He was a thin, passive man who had labored in the fields on the outskirts of the city until his back had given out and dealing with t his wife caused his last testicle to wither up and die. He rarely spoke unless in response to a question, and his most worthwhile contributions to his family was his silence, his stoic sensibilities and the disability check he received once a month. Big John gazed at his son, smiled, and nodded.

      "Hey, Pop. Long time no see," Johnny said. Big John's smile revealed he had lost his front teeth, shook his head sadly.

     "Hi, Johnny, we're glad you're finally out. You're mom's been making tamales for your first meal home." This came from Carla, his mother's girlfriend. She smiled at him, looking somewhat like a cartoon raccoon with the heavy black eyeshadow she always wore. Her hair was dyed black but her blonde roots were showing adding to the raccoon look. Carla had grown-up in a well-to-do family in Pacific Palisades, but she had left home at sixteen when her parent's drinking and her father's gotten attentions had gotten completely out of hand.  She had dropped out of college and ended up dancing at a strip club where Lois was dancing too. Johnny had been fully prepared to hate her when she first showed up at the house, but her naivety and natural goodness quickly won him and his brother over.

        "Oh, I knew you guys would come. Or, I knew someone would. I figured the universe couldn't be so damn cruel as to leave me standing there with my thumb up my ass in front of a prison where I was locked up for five years."

           The van was old, rusty, unreliable and very noisy, and everyone had to raise their voices in order to talk. Lois took a deep last drag off of her Salem, flicked it out the window and then slowly exhaled the smoke out of the window too. "That's where you wrong, sonny boy. The fucking universe would have let you stand right there until the guards came and locked your goofy ass right back up. It was your mother who picked you up. Remember that. I ain't gonna lie though: it was Carla reminded me. Otherwise, I woulda just gone down to Hanratty's and gotten drunk like every other day. Not that I wouldn't have come, of course. I had just forgot."

            Johnny raised his chin and almost shouting said, "Thanks, Carla. You too, mom. And you too, Pop."

         Lois, happy that he had included her, couldn't stop herself from asking, "Whatya thanking him for? He never does nothing but smile that same stupid ass smile all day, and you gotta drag every word he says out of his ass with a pair of God-damn vice-grips."

          "Yeah, well then I'm thanking him for smiling everyday and not saying shit." After that, the conversation died. They drove back to city with no-one saying anything. Lois was listening to radio KRTH and her and Carla would sing along every time a song came on that they liked. Johnny looked at his dad who was looking straight ahead out of the front windshield but also seemed to be looking into a different dimension. It reminded Johnnie of the times when he was younger, back before his brother Eddie got shot, when Big John would stare at the television set but looked straight past it seeing God only knows what.

        It was late afternoon when they finally got to the house that Lois had bought with the money she was awarded from a lawsuit she had brought when she was injured at a packing plant. It wasn't painted  Laker colors, purple with yellow trim, when she had bought it, but she persuaded her boy friend at the time and his brothers to paint it for her. Johnny walked in and went straight to the bedroom he had shared with his younger brother Eddie. He could tell that his mom, or probably Carla, had recently cleaned it.  Even the record he had left on the turntable the day he had last walked out of the room had been dusted and shined. He walked over to the twin bed he had slept in, took his shoes off, and lay down.

    He couldn't keep from thinking about how eerie it was that how little it was unchanged from the times when he and Eddie would lie in bed and talk into the wee hours of the night. He looked up at the ceiling and was pleased to discover that the poster of Mt. Fuji that Mr. Cyrus, his seventh grade English teacher, had given him on the last day of seventh grade was still there. He recalled the many hours he had stared at the picture and pretended that he was standing on the top of the mountain where he received the special magical powers that would transport him to any place in the world that he wanted to be. He also remembered how Mr. Cyrus was the only teacher who had ever said anything nice to him.

       "Johnny, you got a real gift with your reading ability. You need to nourish it, and it will do good things for you."

        "I don't know about that Mr. Cyrus. It's a rough place where I live."

        "It's rough everywhere. Sometimes, it don't look it but life's tough."

         "It don't look too rough on the other side of the freeway over there, Mr. Cyrus. Them people got their own swimming pools and stuff."

            "I live by some people who have swimming pools. They are some of the dumbest people I know. I mean it, they are some seriously screwed up people. I grew up poor myself. My dad was executed by the state of Arkansas right after I was born. I could read well though. I earned a scholarship to go to college. I've taught here for the last thirty years. I've long since faced up to the fact that most of the kids I've taught didn't learn much."

          "Why you keep doing it?"

        "I don't want a none to five. I want to try to make a difference. I've had a few kids come through that wouldn't made it without my help. Besides I like coaching basketball."

          "That's cool."

      I'm retiring this year, Johnny, tired of talking to myself. My brother-in-law is an investment banker; he makes fun of my teaching career. You know what I tell him?"

             "What do you say?"

            "May not be enough for you, it's enough for me."

           Before Johnny got locked up, he had heard that after Mr. Cyrus's wife Beatrice died from Ovarian cancer, he had ran a garden hose from the tailpipe into the cab of his blue Chevy 150, put Miles Davis's Kind of Blue on the stereo, and sat there till he died; the paper had used the word asphyxiated. He wondered who, if anyone, had attended his services. He also decided he would visit the grave.

           Johnny slept deeply for two hours then awoke to the sound of Carla and his mom preparing his welcome home dinner. The TV was blaring in the kitchen and they were laughing over a joke someone had made. He got up and walked out the back door onto the patio. Big John had just finished spraying off the concrete and was busy trimming the ivy which had clearly taken over the yellow wooden lattice work that separated the patio from the vision of pedestrians walking by. The patio furniture his mother had bought on her forty-fifth birthday was still there. There were four metal scalloped back chairs with white legs. The chairs were once red, blue, green and orange, but she and Carla had painted them purple and yellow. Everyone in the house except Johnny got to pick a number of their favorite Laker to paint on the front of the seat. His brother Eddie was real artistic and made the numbers look real. There was #23 for Lois's favorite Magic Johnson, #42 for Carla's  James Worthy, Big John's #33 for Abdul-Jabbar, and #21 for Eddie's choice of Michael Cooper. Johnny hated the Lakers and often wore a Piston jersey with Joe Dumar's #4 just to piss his mother off.

       He walked over to the set and pulled the #21 chair out and sat down. A rush of memories flooded over him. He remembered the nights of a patio full of neighbors and friends drinking, arguing, and laughing loudly. Life for the most part growing up had usually been a real shit show; it wasn't always bad.

         His mom, or more likely Carla, had pulled out all of the stops for dinner. There were tacos, carnitas, enchiladas and tamales. There was even fresh baked pumpkin pie with whip cream, his favorite.  A case of Pabst Blue Ribbon bottles sat covered with iced down in a yellow and purple cooler on the kitchen counter. Lola was drinking one of her Laker Bombs, a concoction she had created consisting of a bottle of Jose Cuervo mixed with Grape Kool-Ade and slices of lemon. Johnny could tell by her flushed face that his mother had been drinking them for a while

           She slapped her hand on the table and said, "Hey everybody, I want to make a toast to my boy Johnny being home."

         They all drank the toast. Then they all made made a toast, one by one, to Johnny's homecoming, even Big John managed to mumble something out.

           After Carla's toast, Lois added, "I only wish Lil Eddie could be here to see this." 

           "Amen," said Carla.

        The statement triggered something in Johnny, a resentment, that had been building up for six years; he sat his beer down on the table, "Maybe he could have, mom, if you hadn't had him standing out on that corner where they shot him."

        There was a very tense moment of silence, and Johnny saw the always present smile on his dad's disappear."

         The gist of what he what he said finally managed its way through Lois's drunken haze, and she exploded in anger, "What are you saying? That I caused him to get shot that night? He was my son. I loved that kid. I didn't do nuthin!"

         "You beat up Pedro Verdado's grandmother because she said something about Carla. You put the old lady in the hospital with a concussion, and then you threatened their whole family saying that your boys would take care of them."

          "Fuck that bitch. She deserved what she got; she called Carla a puta. She told me, 'Your fucking lezzie whore thinks I owe her some money.'"

         "And then later that night, Pedro and his cousin Felix shot Eddie who was down on the corner telling everybody he was looking for Pedro. So, I then had to shoot Felix."

          Carla was trying to run interference for Lois, "Yeah, but it was self defense what you did."

         "Naw, that's what my lawyer said, and the jury believed him. I had to shoot him first because he knew I was Eddie's brother."

           "Then how's that my fault, Johnny. I fought her with my fists. Besides, me and Yolanda had bad blood for years. I beat her ass up at least three times before that night. Eddie had go out there acting all bad."

            "Yeah, but he was doing it for you, Ma. You put him up to it, always trying to please you and show you how tough he was. That wasn't really him. That was never him. All he really wanted to do was paint and draw, but you always called him a sissy for wanting that."

            "He needed to be tougher, Johnny. He wouldn't survive out there unless he got tougher."

            "Tough enough to get shot, I guess."

            His mom hurled her beer bottle at him. It missed and exploded on the wall behind him. She stood up and pointed at him in anger, "I didn't do it. You think I wanted him to get shot down like that, like a dog in the street. He was my baby boy. I loved him the most! You're just jealous." She collapsed back down into her chair and put her head down on the table sobbing. Carla tried to comfort her. Big John had slipped out of the room like he always did whenever tempers began to flair.'

           Johnny breathed deeply and slowly exhaled, "I'm sorry, Mom. Something made me say it. It's been building up in me for years. I didn't mean to put it like that. It didn't have to happen. We could have left and moved somewhere else. Shit, we could've painted another house all purple and gold.......It's just that I had too much time to think about that night. I read a lot of books and it took me a while, but I learned to understand that most of our troubles start when we are too young to know how things really are. I know how tough you and my tias had it growing up. I understand that you did things you probably wouldn't have done if your dad had been a real man instead of some Irish, asshole drunk. But there are consequences, Mom. There is always a price people got to pay for not playing by the rules. Sometimes, you don't pay it yourself and someone else has to pay it for you. I realized that maybe your dad had it rough too, and probably his dad before that and on and on. It made me realize that our lives are mapped out years before we even get a chance to live them, and unless something happens where the universe decides to throw us a rope, we live out our destinies paying for the mistakes of all those who came before us."

             He got up from his seat and went and kneeled before his mother and placed his head into her lap. She stopped sobbing after a while and leaned over him and placed her head on his and her hands on his back. "I'm so sorry, Johnny. I never meant to hurt you guys. I ruined it all for you and you were such a smart kid. You could have been a doctor or a lawyer." Her words made her start sobbing again, "It's crazy. I love you guys so much, but I do such stupid shit. I don't even think before I do it. I even love your dumb-assed dad, wouldn't know what I'd do without that goofy bastard."

          That night, lying in bed and staring up at the poster hanging on the ceiling above him, Johnny summoned the magic from the picture and took himself back to the night where he and Eddie had talked about the future. He told his brother he had wanted to be a writer and to write a book like Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, his favorite writer. He related the outlines of the story to his brother. Then Eddie had told him about his wish to become an artist.

         "Keep it on the down low, dude. I don't want them assholes like Julio and Ernest laughing at me like they do with Joey and his wish to be an architect."

          The week before, Eddie had finished painting a mural of Magic Johnson driving for a lay-up inside the taqueria of one of Lois's friends named Hercule Perez. He had also painted a picture of an Abdul-Jabbar skyhook on the outside wall facing the busy street. On the inside wall, behind the counter, Eddie had painted a picture of Napoleon's flagship The Orient burning and sinking after the battle of The Nile River.
            
         "Why? Why the hell would you do that?" he had asked his brother.

        "Because Hercule gave me my choice, a hundred a fifty for both paintings, or a wall to paint what I wanted. He got mad when I finished  because it didn't match the theme, and he tried to pay me to cover it up, and I told him, "Fuck you, Dude, we made a deal, so he let it stay up. People liked it too."

          The very next night, he and his girlfriend drove up on Eddie lying bleeding on the corner of Fifth and Galveston in front of Hercule's place, then later that night he hovered over the body of Felix Garcia lying at his feet facedown in the gutter in front of Mercury Liquor with the puddling red blood from his head wound reflecting the colors of the traffic light. He remembered setting the gun on the ground and standing there and waiting for the police to arrive on the scene. The night and the street corner were noisy as hell, but the only sound he remembered was the broken breathing of his girlfriend Cathy crying as she stood beneath the streetlight clutching his arm. She married his best friend Benny while he was on trial. He had given her his blessing, not that she wanted it.

      "Your blessing? Who the fuck are you, St. Francis all of a sudden.What the hell I need your blessing for, asshole?"

        "I didn't mean it like that, I was thinking in case you were feeling guilty or something. I mean I was your fiancé before all this shit happen."

           "My fiancé? This is the first time I heard about that? Were you planning on telling me? You were a good lover, Johnnie; that's about it? Besides, all you ever did was boss me around."

              "Boss you around? Girl, no one could ever tell you shit. That's always been your fucking problem. You do such stupid shit. You're still beautiful as ever, Cathy, but you never listen to reason. Now, go on and get your sorry ass out of my face. Marry that fool."

           She pushed away from the counter with a look of rage contorting her features. He couldn't resist one last dig, "Yeah and don't worry, I want tell Billy whose kid that is as long as he don't ever take a math class. Benny couldn't count to nine with out taking both shoes off!"

       The next morning was a typical LA morning with the sun trying to fight its way through the dull,, gray haze hovering over the freeways. Johnnie rose feeling refreshed and took his first free shower where he didn't have to keep his butt cheeks clenched and his eyes furtively searching the area in the back of his head. He asked borrowed his mother's van and took them all, Lois, Carla, and Big John to Denny's for breakfast. His mom got in the passenger seat without the customary heavy make-up she always wore in public. He kissed his her and Carla and hugged his dad before they entered the restaurant.

        "Damn, Ma. I think this is the first time I can ever remember you going outside without your make-up. It's a good look for you, especially  going without all that purple eye-shadow."

          Lois turned and flipped him off, but it was clear that the remark made her happy. Her eyes smiled more so than they  ever had in all of his childhood memories, maybe with the exception of the years that the Lakers had won the championship. She was always toasted on those occasions though, This time she was sober, and the smile was unexpected. Big John agreed with him, smiling broadly and nodding, "She's pretty this way, huh?"

         When he dropped them off later, Lois asked him where he was going, so he answered, "Going to see Eddie. What else?"

          "Well, don't do anything stupid, Mijo. Think about yourself first, son." He turned his hands inside out on his lap. He meant it to be a reassuring gesture, but Lois only noticed the sharp red outline of a scar that ran all the way across his left palm.

             It was a long drive from one end of LA to the other, but it gave Johnny plenty of time to think. It was a somewhat  beautiful day with a slight breeze that had driven away most of the haze, and he cruised along at highway speed with the window down and his arm hanging out, the wind rustling his hair. He thought about how many times he had driven down this same stretch of road and had taken the moment for granted. He put the radio on and War's classic Slipping into Darkness came on. He helped out with the chorus.

            It was about an hour later when he turned into the long, oak lined driveway that led into the pastoral grounds of the Heavenly Home for Assisted Living.  He recognized his brother Eddie as soon as he stepped out of the van. Eddie was sitting in his wheel chair in the middle of group of other wheel chair bound artists. He was the exact opposite of their father. Even in his chair, he looked tall and his mother's Irish side stood out more in his face and complexion. Eddie was showing his wheel chair bound audience how to paint oak trees, easy to see because he was in front of huge easel with a large canvas with a beautiful sketch of the tree before which they were seated.

        Fifteen minutes later, after carefully securing Eddie and his wheelchair into their mandated slot, Johnny and his brother were flying down the highway toward a third destination. For the first ten minutes neither said a word and only the wind whistling by and highway noise filled the van. It was only when they flew by the Now or Never Amusement Park they used to frequent as kids that Eddie spoke.

            "Member that place Johnny, the go-karts?"

        Johnny shook his head sadly before answering, "I remember Diego getting us kicked-out for good?"

          It was Eddie's chance to shake his head sadly, "That poor fool never had a chance? It was wrong what his mom did, pure fucking evil?"

            It grew silent again, except for the road noise and the wind whistling, otherwise the verbal silence ruled for about as long as it took for the brothers to rethink the fate of their long lost friend.

            Another five minutes flew by before Eddie urgently looked over at his brother, "You bring it, Johnny?"

            Johnny answered Eddie by nodding toward the glove box.

           "He urinated on me, Bro. While I was lying there, he took his dick out and pissed on my fucking head."

            "I know. And Felix laughed too, and he told Pedro to leave it to him and he would take care of Mom and her little lezzie friend." He looked back at his brother, "I made you a promise, Eddie. You don't have to worry about me."

          "Never have, brother. I always known that I could count on you. But I'm sorry about how much crazy shit I've put you through."

           "Don't be, Eddie. Fate or whatever put me into the role. We can't pick our parents. Neither could they. Besides, if I hadn't been fighting with Ma, I'd probably been there instead of you, and we woulda probably switched places. Are you sure you wanna go through with this? Looks like you got yourself in a sweet set-up back there. I mean all things considered."

         "I'm in a fucking wheelchair, Johnny. There's nothing sweet about it; stuck in a prison of memories of being pissed on and handicapped. I  piss in a bag, Johnnie. Besides, Lucy was there in the car laughing as he did it."

          "Word in the joint was he had her killed too."

        "I know. All the more reason. She was my girl first. Then he got her strung out on that shit." Eddie paused for a moment and traveled back in time for a bit. "You know, as much as Ma and I usta fight, you'd think that shit he said wouldn't have bothered me so much."

       "Maybe if he hadn't spray painted it across your mural of Kareem?"

        Eddie chuckled lowly and smiled grimly, "Maybe so."

          "You do know, don't ya, that in reality Ma started the whole thing over some comment that Pedro's grandma said about Magic Johnson. You know after he got AIDs." 

        "I didn't know it for reals; I heard the whispers and just kind of assumed," Eddie answered as he took the pearl-handled .38 that his brother handed him and placed it into the pocket of his Laker jacket.

         They found him sitting outside of Azule's  Bar holding court with a bevy of young ladies. It took a few minutes before Johnny could extricate Eddie from the lift. He then reached into the glovebox and handed his brother the pearl handled gun. Eddie stuck inside his jacket and off they went.

         Afterwards, they waited by the van breathing heavily.

         "What the fuck just happened, Eddie?"

         "Damned if I know. I had the gun out when that tall waiter dude ran by me, pushing me aside. He just started blasting away, Man. I seen a bullet go though Verdado's eye; then he shot the dude next to him. Next thing, I know we getting the fuck out of there."

            "Well, what we do now?"

           "Scram, fool. Get me up in there and let's roll!"

         While Johnny pushed Eddie into the lift. A long black SUV slowly rolled up, and two tall, serious looking types in black uniforms got out. They weren't cops, but the Uzis they were carrying and the earpieces they wore signified something else.

            The one who stepped out of the passenger seat, a six foot, well built, young black guy with a shaved head spoke first, "You guys really shouldn't be hanging around here. That dude who got smoked has a lot of friends."

             Johnny was confused but before he could wrap his head around what the first guy had said, his huge, Caucasian partner added, "I know you're displaying a handicap sticker on that thing, but I assume that you can load this non walking gentleman up and get the fuck out of the area."

               Eddie started to say, "But what about.....?"

           The first guy shushed him, "We'll handle it, don't worry. That fucking dude was a scum bag who had a hell of a lot more enemies that he had friends. Let's just say you got beat to the punch and leave it at that."

          Johnny's mouth tried to work, "But the women, the other  people...?"

         The giant shushed him too, "Just get your ass in the van and scram, Dumb Ass!"

           Johnny got the message and quickly loaded Eddie up. The SUV started up and pulled around to where they were. A darkened window slid down and the man driving called out, "Ain't that @Lois#1Lakerfan's van?"

          Johnny shut the side door, took a deep breath and muttered, "My mom."

        The driver looked at his partner and nodded. The window slid back up into place and the SUV rolled away across the parking lot like it was being driven by an older couple looking for a place to eat. Johnny started the van, put his sunglasses on and drove off slowly.

         Miles away when they finally felt themselves  beyond the grasp of the event. They pulled over in a 7-11. Johnny looked over at his brother and cracked a small smile. "Damn, Eddie that was intense."

         "I know. All the shooting..."

         "Naw, fuck that. The universe, dude. The universe just saved us both from what we perceived as our fate. You had the gun out and everything, Man!"

         "Now why would it do that, for us, I mean? Why not just some random thing?"

           "I don't know, Eddie. Maybe because it knows that, at heart, we are not bad people. I really don't know."

         Eddie laughed, "You know what I was thinking just now? I was wishing for the presence of mind to have emptied my bag on that fool."

         Johnny looked at his brother and started up the engine, "Your call. I wonder if it's too late though?"

          Eddie laughed again, "They'll be an opportunity at his funeral."

         "I don't know from what that guy said, they'll probably be a line."

             

    "Look over there. That's Danny Dozier. That man ain't been right in the head since Jeannie died four years ago."

     "Damn, Judy. He still look fine though."

     "It's them jeans, Karla. Every man looks good in Wranglers and boots. Who's he think he is with that long hair?"

        "Member back in the day when he always wore his hair long?"

        "Hmph. Just trying to look younger than he is."

        "Well, you might not like it, but it's working for me. You just mad because of that one night you were trying to flirt with him, and he left with Jeanne."

        "Damn it, Karla! Why you gotta go bringing that up? It happened almost fifty damn years ago. Besides, I just have never cared much for him. Too damn, opinionated for one thing."

          "Hell, I remember when all you did was talk about him!"

           "Well, Penny Kayser, I don't remember inviting you into this discussion. This here's between me and Karla. She's been telling everyone for years that the only reason I don't like him now is that he jilted me at the homecoming dance and took off with that mousy little Jeanne."

              "Saw it with my own eyes!"

            "If you don't mind, I like to add my two bits to this story."

             "You know your contributions are always welcome, Deena. Hell, God knows that you are the only one of these girls who actually makes some sense."

             "F**k you, Judy!"

             "Yeah, f**k you. There ain't never  nothing ever come out your mouth but gossip and innuendo."

           "All I want to say is that I warned you not to make friends with him. Once a boy regards you as a friend that's all he'll ever see you as."

             "I lived next door to him for eighteen years. It's kind of hard not to become friends with your neighbor. Besides, what you said ain't necessarily true. Bernard has been my best friend ever since we married."

              "Ugh! Like making love to your brother."

           "Ain't that the truth. I bet ol Bernie is as reliable in that regard as one of them oil rigs on the road to Bakersfield, up down, up down, up down." 

            "Shush now! You shut your mouth. How we been friends all these years is beyond me. You only say that because it's your own failure of imagination how doesn't allow you to supply the twist and turns that'd turn your own husbands into world class bull riders."

          "That's cause we're still ladies, Judy, unlike some women I could name."

               "You're lucky I don't slap your face Karla. If it wasn't for the fact that you've been my best friend since we were in kindergarten, and that I know you're lying about being a lady, I'd still might."

           "Or maybe the fact that I'm at the other end of the table and you'd have to get your fat ass up to do it."

            "You guys quit your bickering! Danny's coming this way!"

           "Well, hello ladies, Judy. I was sitting over there talking with Slim and I couldn't help noticing that you were looking over at us and smiling. So, I thought, well, hell, I could use something to smile about, so I came over to see if you would share a smile with me."

           "Well, me and Penny were just remarking about nice your butt looks in them Wranglers. Just like the old days."

            "That's right, we were saying that maybe we needed to do  your workout for ourselves."

            "Well, I do believe you ladies done made me blush. How bout you, Judy, you don't think my butt still looks good?"

              "Well, it ain't your derriere that matters now is it? You always did have a too high opinion of yourself Danny, and you know it. I was telling that it was wonder to me, how your head could still fit into that hat. It's only holds ten gallons, don't it?"

         "There's my smile; now that's the Judy Villa that I remember. I was talking about you with my dad about you just the other day." 

                "Me? Now, that presents a conundrum; what could you and JT possibly have to say about me?"

                 "We were tearing down his back fence and replacing it. We got back to the part that was in the back corner, remember the place that was just behind your window. My dad told me, 'I don't know why, but I never could keep them three boards right there in place. I was always nailing them sumbitches back up, but I'd come out the next morning, and they'd still be hanging there loose. Made me think of you for some damned reason."

                 "I don't know why that'd cause you to think about lil ol me."

                 "There's a mystery involved. One night I remember coming home late one night and them three boards were glued in place. I remember being puzzled by it, cause they was always hangin loose. I noticed that Blaine's Robert's truck was parked in front of your house that night. I've always wondered if he had something to do with it."

                "Well, maybe my daddy didn't like the ascetic of them loose boards no more than your daddy did."

                 "Shit, you know better, that whole damn fence coulda fell down without Gus ever noticing. Well, look at that. It's already one o'clock. I have to run. You ladies have a good day. I'd tip my hat, but I'm afraid I couldn't get back on this big old head of mine."

                 "Well, I hate to see him leave, but he sure looks good walking away."

                  "I was just about to say..."

                 "SSH! If you two, old biddies say another f**king word, I'll stab you with this here fork!"


                 

               

                  

   A shiny, new Lexus pulled into the parking lot of the Breakfast Kingdom, Concord's best and only breakfast place. Geezer Jennings with his long gray hair pulled back into a pony-tale was sitting next to the large window that faced the parking lot, pointed the car out to his buddies, "Somebody got money. That there Lexus right there cost at least $80,000."

    Big Larry, sitting across from Geezer, twisted to get a look and whistled, "Damn, that's a lot of money for a car."

    From behind him, Geezer heard Rodney Bennett say in almost a whisper, "Ah man, they're here already."

       Geezer turned ready to ask Rodney who he was talking about when he saw the expression on his friend's face. It was beyond sad.

        Geezer was going to ask Rodney what was wrong when his next door neighbor and life-long best friend Pancho Romero said, "Dang, man, ain't that your boy Donnell, Rodney?"

        Geezer whipped his head around and sure enough, a tall, well built young black man in an expensive looking tailored suit got out of the car followed by an elegantly attired and very pretty woman.  "Damn, that is Donnell and Daisha. Hell, Rod, I ain't seen them since Marlys's funeral. What they doing here?"

         Rodney didn't answer. Instead, he waited until his son and daugther-in-law entered  the dining room. Pancho was the first one up to greet them, jumping out of his seat and embracing them both, "Damn, Donnell, you get bigger and better looking every time I see you. And who is this, your daughter? Hell, I thought you were married to that old hideous looking ragged looking Roberts woman?" 

          Daisha flashed him a huge smile, "You know perfectly well who I am, Coach and don't try to butter me up with all that daughter crap." She hugged him and kissed him on the cheek. Pancho had coached them both in the intricacies of baseball and softball once upon a time.

      There were lots of hugs, handshakes, smiles all around. Geezer noticed though that even though Rodney was smiling, he didn't look very happy. There was a immense sadness behind his eyes. Donell waited for the small talk to die down before asking his father, "It was great seeing guys, but we got to travel. I have a big meeting tomorrow. You ready, Pop?"

         Rod looked like he wanted say something to the guys but couldn't. He turned back to his son, "Ready as I'm likely to be. Gotta swing by the house to pick up my bags.

       "Bags? Ready for what? You guys going on a trip. can I go to too?" Pancho blurted out. Tall and lanky, Pancho was always the impulsive one, the joker, the one who would always say what was on his mind. Although he had meant his words as a joke; it didn't take a genius to notice that they were much too heavy to float.

         Donell looked surprised, "You didn't tell them, Pop?"

    All the eyes swiveled and fell on Rodney who was looking at his shoes. There was a long tense pause.

        Geezer broke the silence, "Something wrong, Rod?"

      Rod slowly straightened his shoulders raised his head, "This is it, boys. I'm out of here. Donnell and Daisha have graciously invited me to come live with them."

       Pancho blurted, "In Oakland?" Donnell looked at him and shook his head yes.

       "I know you guys been looking after Pop and driving him to the doctor and all, and we're grateful and everything," at that point he started choking up, " The optometrist's office called us and let us know that some of the issues with his vision are going to get worse, and......I.., uh,.. we just need to have him closer."

        Daisha added, "Donell got a big promotion, and we've moved into a bigger house that has a small apartment in the back. This way he can watch his grandkids grow-up, play sports, and all that stuff. Besides, with Donnell's new job we aren't going to be able to get down here as much." Although, all of the men present loved Daisha and Donell, her words didn't move them much. They were too stunned.
 
      Big Larry spoke first, "Damn it Rodney. You should have said something. We coulda had a party or something."

       Rodney just stood there looking chagrined. These men were his life long friends. When his beloved Marlys had died of a heart attack while Donell and Daisha were out of country on a business trip. It was Pancho and Geezer who had handled everything till they got there. When he couldn't pass the driver's test and lost his license, it was Geezer who made sure Rodney didn't miss a doctor's appointment.

      Pancho walked over to him and gave him a big embrace, "Damn, Amigo. I ain't gonna lie, this shit don't even feel real. Hell, we been eating breakfast here every Wednesday for what twenty- five years, hell, every weekday morning for the last five. Don't seem real."

         Rodney struggled, "I know, Panch. It don't. It sure doesn't seem real."

        Geezer was up next. He threw both his arms around his old friend and spoke lowly, "Hell, Rod, you should have said something, gave me some time to process this and all. Who am I going to fish with now? You know, I really looked forward to driving you to Hartford so I could flirt with that little fat nurse."

          "I know, Geez. I just couldn't though. I couldn't even say it to myself without wanting to cry, and I know how you start bawling like a little girl bout nothin."

        Geezer held his friend at arm's length and looked into his eyes. "This here ain't about nuthin, Rod. This here's some deep shit. Sides, you know I ain't never cried."

       Rod laughed sadly, "You a lie. You cried last week when the Dodgers beat the Giants. Didn't he Pancho?"

           "Hell with you both. I was crying about that twenty-dollar bill I lost. I don't cry when it matters. Do I, Larry?"

           Larry was too busy stuffing the last of his fries into this mouth and didn't answer. Daisha smiled grimly, "Sorry guys." She walked over and took her father-in-law by the arm and started to walk him out. Donell, overcome with emotion, had already gone out to the car. Rodney paused at the door and said, "You guys got my number. Call me and I'll give you my address, and we can write or something."

         Geezer couldn't resist one last joke, "Rodney, what in our history makes you think that Pancho and Larry could write a damn letter?" Rodney smiled.

       When the door swung close behind them, Big Larry offered, "Might be for the best, guys. Rodney's lost lots of weight lately, and I bet he ain't shaved in at least three days. Remember when Marlys was alive; he was always the sharpest dressed man in this town."

        Geezer was too busy watching Rod walking toward the car and didn't answer, so it was up to Pancho to tell Larry to shut up," Be quiet, Dumb Ass. Rosie'd woulda kill me if I didn't see that he was eating regular, and who gives a damn if Rodney missed a shave or two? I do that shit myself." 

         Geezer couldn't take it and got up and quickly walked out the door and stood on the curb. Pancho was right behind him. Larry stayed behind and polished off his food. Benny the Bugle, another friend of theirs who had been listening in, ran and slid over to seat by the window and watched.

       The shiny, new Lexus backed out of the parking slot and straightened its wheels so that Rodney, sitting in the back seat, was level with where Geezer and Pancho were standing. His head and shoulders were slumped over, and his head was barely above window level; he looked up sadly and barely raised his hand and waved as the car pulled forward.

             Pancho and Geezer stood right where they were and waved long after the car turned left on Derry and drove out of sight toward the outskirts of town.

           After a long while, Geezer turned to his friend and started to say, "Maybe Big Larry's right. It might be good for. . . ," he then noticed that Pancho was crying, "Are you crying? You damn crybaby. Two tours of duty as a helicopter gunner in Nam just to come home and start bawling outside a shit hole restaurant.. Knock it off, Pancho. We ain't freaking snowflakes! We real men remember. The last of a dying breed and don't you ever forget it!"

           Pancho turned toward Geezer and smiled through his tears,
"Said the same dumb ass fool who cried all night when Jerry Garcia died. I'm gonna miss that fool, Geezer. He didn't talk dumb shit all the time like you."

      Geezer took the insult in stride and gave Pancho a grim smile,"Hell, I know. I'm going miss him too. Hell, we all been sidekicks since we were in first grade. When Arlene left me for that preacher dude, and I wouldn't come out of house, it was Rod that coaxed me into going fishing. Probably saved my life by doing it."

        As they turned back to the comforting embrace of the Breakfast Kingdom, Pancho put his arm behind his friend's back and said, "If I remember right, I tried everything I knew to get your ass out of that house."

          "Yeah, you did, but you're a damn Dodger fan, so that shit don't count."
             
       Later toward evening, Geezer stepped out on his front porch to smoke a cigar and saw Pancho sitting outside on his own porch. He lit the cigar and headed that way.

          Pancho saw him coming and called out to him, "I thought you were going to come over and listen to the game last night."

            "I planned on it. Then my son-in-law came over and wouldn't leave."

              "The dumb one?"

           "They're both dumb Panch; you know that. You gonna have to be more specific."

               "Jenny's guy. What's his name, Roger?"

         Geezer shook his head, "Yeah. That's him. Wanted to talk politics all night. I hate that shit. He thinks like just Jenny do. Hell, I wouldn't doubt she tells him who he gotta vote for."

        They looked at each other and didn't say nothing for a bit before Pancho said, 'I was thinking about this one night with Rodney. We were at bar uptown when Ferdie Jenkins came over where we were and sat down. You knowed that dude ain't never liked you."

            "Well, I never liked him a lot more than he never liked me."

          "He started telling me and Rod why we hung around with you. Said you was stupid, two faced and a bunch of other shit."
 
            "That fool never got over the fact that Ceecee Moore liked me more than him.'

              "Rod got mad and held his hand up and said, 'Don't ever come over here and be starting shit when they're ain't none."

            Geezer took a long drag off the cigar, blew it out, and said.  "Screw you, Panch. You told me that before, and you're just telling me that shit now trying to get me to cry. You gonna listen to the game tonight or what?"

              "You'd think I'd miss the Giants getting their ass beat? It's your turn to the bring the beer, remember."

           "Shit, glad of it. That way I don't got a drink that horse piss  you drink. My cousin gave me a couple of Cubans. We'll smoke them up." He started to walk away but then turned back. "One night my mom started to worry about me, and she sent her preacher out to talk to me. Me and Rodney had been out fishing all day. He got here as Rodney was leaving. We sat down out on the porch, and the preacher started to saying a bunch of shit about me being with Rod. I was shocked. I mean this was supposedly a man of God and stuff, but I told him in no uncertain terms to go fuck himself, and I got up helped him off the porch." Geezer waited a while to see what Pancho was going to say, then added, "Damn it! I Almost got ya! Your eyes are kind of wet."

         Pancho shook his head and laughed, "You didn't get nothing. I ain't ashamed to say I cried all that shit out already. Tell me something though did that really happen?"

           "Yeah. It happened, and if he'd said another word, I'd choked the living shit right out of him."

           "Damn. I'd liked to been there when Mama Alice found out you told her preacher to go fuck hisself?"

         "Shit, she went to church that night, walked right up the aisle to where he was standing and kicked that fool in his nuts. Caused a big mess, man. Damn near got herself arrested. I had to go down to the church and help straighten that shit out." 

         Pancho was bending over, slapping his knees and laughing hard, so Geezer kept going, "When the cops finally showed up, they asked me what mama's side of the story was, so I told him what had happened. He looked at his partner and told him, 'I don't know George, but kicking a slime ball preacher in the testicles hardly sounds like much of crime to me.' His partner looked at him and said, 'I know. It seems like she should a got a medal.'"

       Later that evening when the game ended, and after Geezer had gloated for a full ten minutes over the Giant's victory, Geezer and Pancho, drunk on Modelo Reserva, sat silently in the dark, smoked a couple of Cuban cigars, and tried to not be too obvious as they cried a little for their missing friend.

         About twenty minutes later, Pancho snubbed his cigar out in the the green neon, glow in the dark, ash tray that sat on the  small wooden table at the side of his chair. "You know, Geeze, they're right. He needs to be close to Donell and Daisha."

         "Don't make it any easier though. What's next for us. It'll be you or me next. What'll either one of us do without a true friend. I mean you got Rosie, and she's great. I ain't got nobody else. There's the girls, but I'd just get in their way. Least with you guys around, I can make some kind of stab at having some kind of life. Without you guys, it'd just be Bingo and wheelchair polka at the home." He drained the bottom of his last beer and took a last hit off the cigar. He started stoking his beard. Pancho knew his friend was elsewhere when that happened. An old memory of Geezer doing it back in 1972 just after his Dad died flashed into his mind. They had talked all night when that happened, Geezer, Rod, and him. It was great night that cemented their bond forever. They had talked about all the deep issues that no-one ever seems to talk about anymore. They shared their intimate thoughts and feelings and discussed their fears and the things that caused them anxiety. They were still awake and talking, sitting on the rear gate of Geezer's dad's 1957 Chevy pick-up, when the sun rose up over the horizon.

         "We got go see him. Give him a month to get adjusted and then go up there to see how he's doing."

          "Oakland, Pancho? You forgetting that neither of us is that great a driver. It's been a while since either one of us has driven on real freeway. You think maybe we oughta fly, or take a bus?"

          "No screw that. Me and you on the road to help a friend out. Like the old days. Think of all the shit we could see and do. Think how good it will make Rodney feel."

            Geezer stopped stroking his beard, "You know I ain't got no-one to talk me out of doing something this stupid, so you better be serious. What about Rosie? She's gonna kill you."

          Pancho laughed, "No, she'll be so glad to see me when we get back she'll forget all about killing me. We'll have to take your car, so she don't catch on though."

            "No problem, but we'll have to stop when I need a bathroom break. None of that handing me bottle over the back seat and telling me to fill it up like you guys used to do."

        For one brief moment, the fires of youth and friendship reanimated the men's ever shrinking imaginations.  A little jolt of energy created by anticipation flowed through their aging systems. Geezer, sitting on the porch step, turned and looked at his buddy.

       "Hey Pancho. Do you remember the night my Dad died?"

       Pancho laughed, "Funny you should mention it; I was just thinking about that night."

​        "That old thing drove like a tank." 

      While Destry Lewis was sitting in the administrative office hallway of Robert Bellarmine High School, he stumbled upon his reflection in the door window of the counselor's office at the end of the hall. He looked small and lonely, even a bit broken which for him was highly unusual. Normally, he was generally known for his confident manner and defiant attitude. Most of the kids who knew him would probably say that he was overly confident and too defiant. He looked at the reflection and at once knew that it perfectly captured the small, old man who lived inside his head, the one he was always at pain to hide from everybody else.

        He was also thinking about the imminent discussion with this father that would most likely occur about five minutes after his expulsion from the school, his third in two years. 

         He didn't have long to contemplate on the subtleties of the reflection as he heard the sound of footsteps approaching and turned to see their source. As he feared, it was Vice Principal Lorinda Stephens, a large formidable looking African-American lady who possessed all the stature and the gravitas of one of those old large majestic  ocean-liners of the past. For a second, Destry looked beaten. Ms. Stephens rarely smiled in public, and it was perfectly plain that this was not going to be on the rare moments when she did. He looked back down the hall and saw his defeated reflection and quickly straightened his back and arched his shoulders, and when he did, some of the fiery personality that he was known for returned.

         She didn't say anything as she walked past him, just extracted her keys from her coat pocket, unlocked her door, opened it, and gestured for him to enter. He didn't exactly sneer as he walked past her, but it was close enough. She beckoned him to take the seat in from the large dark oak desk sitting in the rear of the office.

        He walked slowly toward the chair, back and shoulders straight, and sat down and crossed his legs. He admitted to himself watching her walk to the throne-like chair behind the desk that the lady radiated sobriety and rectitude. It was a rare thing for him to acknowledge, as, in all his other experiences with administrators, he was much more accustomed to sensing the unctuous quality of people only pretending to actually possess any real solemnity of manner. He dialed his defiance back a notch accordingly. It was the very first time.

         He watched apprehensively as she picked up his file, placed her glasses on the end of her nose, and looked over its contents.

         "Mr. Lewis, it says here that you stood up in class and loudly announced your desire to "shag a movie star"? Is that the case?

            "To be honest, Ms. Stephens, I didn't use the word 'shag'. Mr. Peoples probably put that it that way in the interest of being slightly more decorous than I was. But, yeah, basically it was what I said."

             She sat back into the chair, "So, you admit to the intent?" He nodded, and she continued, "Why on earth would you do something like that?"

         Destry took a deep breath and fought off the the involuntary inclination of shrugging before speaking, "Well, it was part of the assignment."

             "Mr. Lewis, I'm fairly certain that Mr. Peoples, who I have known for over fifteen years, did not have an assignment which instructed his students to openly share their hidden sexual desires."

               "I didn't say he intentionally intended it be so, but he did ask us to relate, to stand up and relate that is, something that we really wanted to do but that most people didn't know about."

                "And you thought it was appropriate to say what you said?"

               "Like I said, maybe by his standards it wasn't appropriate, but then he shouldn't have ask such an open question. If he didn't want complete honesty on my part, he should have said so at the start."

                "So, you were just being honest?"

               "Absolutely. You see we are studying Cyrano de Bergerac in class. And I like that dude a lot, Cyrano, not Mr. Peoples, he sucks as teacher. Cyrano, on the other hand, values personal honesty and courage more than anything else."

                "Yet, he lies to Roxanne."

          "Yeah, but that's what the play is about; that's where the dramatic tension comes from. Here he is the bravest of the brave, yet he can't master the self doubt he has because of his appearance and because of love."

           "And Mr. Peoples was what, asking the class about hidden desires?"

              "In a very clumsy, offhanded way he was trying to get us to think about how our inner self is different from the image we present to the public."

                "What compelled you to say what you said?"

             "I think he signaled me out because of this reputation I have  of  being brash and self-confident. He was trying to say I was a phony. So, I decided to answer him honestly using the first thing I popped into my head."

           "Do you honestly mean to tell me that you think that your answer was appropriate for a high school literature class?"

                "That's a different question. I answered the question he asked me, and I answered it honestly. It's not my fault that Mr. People's is a hypocrite."

               "So, your deepest desire is to sleep with a Hollywood movie star?"

                  "There you go to changing the question again. I didn't say it was my deepest desire. My deepest desire would be to be able to function in a society where I didn't have to lie or modify my truth in order deal with the inability of others to accept it as such. In response to your question, I would just say, how could it be otherwise? That's why those stars exist, to create desires where none existed before. They use our desires against us, to sell us stuff, including false realities and untruth."

           Ms. Stephens started coughing at that point, and Destry got up and darted to the water dispenser and brought her back a paper cup of water. She drank and nodded her head in thanks. When she recovered from the coughing spell she asked one final question, "I'm going to give you one last chance to convince me not to expel you. I'm looking at your record here, and I have to say, it is troubling. Why should I trust you to not be continually causing these kinds of disruptions in the future?"

             "I've been expelled from two other schools. But no one has ever taken the time to really examine my so-called crimes. In one school, my history teacher asked my opinion about the Cold War, and I gave it to him, but it wasn't the 'my opinion' he wanted, so he picked a fight with me. I don't back down in such situations. It would probably save me a ton of grief if I did, but I can't. There is this father issue I have. You'll meet my father, and you'll see what I'm talking about. He's a politician in every sense of the word. I don't think he's never said a honest word in his entire life. If he told me the sky was blue, I'd have reason to doubt it. At the last school, I was reprimanded several times for giving honest answers to dishonest questions. Let me ask you, what would you do if someone asked a question and you knew that they wanted the answer that they always get and not the answer that you want to give? It happens everyday in my world. We sit there like prisoners all day and listen to them blather. Then they ask us questions that have no meaning and expect us to spit out only the words they want to hear, but not the words we want to say. Then they get mad. Frankly, I'm sick of all the lies and pretense. I couldn't care less if I'm expelled. At least, I won't have to listen to Peoples butcher Cyrano."

          She leaned forward and started to answer but stopped and sat back in her chair. She thought about what he had said for a long while. She then thought about all of the polite answers she had given in order to get where she was, and she also thought of all the people with the big fake smiles who had asked them. Destry stared at his hands while he waited. After a long while, she picked up a pen from its stand and wrote him a pass back to class.

              "Here, take this pass and get back to class. Tell Mr. Peoples I'll talk to him later."

               He stood up and took the pass from her hand, "He's going to have a sh.., I mean, he's going to be very angry, Ms. Stephens."

                "You let me worry about him. You need to worry about how you are going to start answering people honestly without making them angry. It's a little thing called tact. I suggest you learn how to use it. Now, you can get out of my office, Mr. Lewis."

            He started to leave, but turned back at the door, "Thank you, Ms. Stephens. That the first time I ever had the chance said those words to anyone in a school setting. Usually, it's just 'So long'."

            When the door closed behind him, she allowed herself a small smile and wondered what it would've been like to tell one of her teachers what she really desired. She reflected on what it meant that none of them had ever asked. Then she wondered what it would have been like to have told her father the same.