So I could blame it on the traction.

The sunsets here are powerful. They’re so bright sometimes that they can blind your eyes with their brilliance – especially if you’re driving along at dusk. They say that most accidents occur at dusk.

So I could blame it on the dusk.

The hills on my road are very steep. The houses on my road are spread out, and the road is about four miles long. I live exactly half way along the road, which is about a half mile past the Johnson’s and a quarter mile before the Fletcher’s. The Johnson’s live about two miles in, and their house is at the bottom of a very steep hill. You have to slow down to nearly a crawl as you approach the bottom of their hill, because it is so steep that you can’t really see the bottom until you just about reach it.

So I could blame it on the hill.

I could blame it on a lot of things, but the bottom line is that I didn’t even see it happen, I only felt it. And as soon as I felt it, I stopped the car like any person would, and got out to see what I’d hit. I figured it was at best a rabbit, and at worst, someone’s dog. A sensation of guilt began to gnaw at me. The guilt came from my brain, but I felt it in my chest.

I’d stopped the car, but a thick cloud of dust from the gravel surrounded me as I pushed the door open to get out. The dust hit my nostrils and I coughed the way I used to cough when my father would smoke his cigarettes in the front room after dinner.

My heart constricted in my chest when I first saw the tricycle.

I stepped back. I looked behind me; I saw nothing. I looked ahead of me, and I also saw nothing. I was at the bottom of the hill, and the only way to see me would have been to come down the hill from either direction.

The tricycle had a red seat and yellow handlebars. The front wheel was black and made out of plastic and it was also bent and now facing the wrong way in front of my car. Next to the tricycle lay the boy. I recognized the boy, but I couldn’t remember his name.

I called out, “You okay?”

The boy didn’t answer. He didn’t move either. He looked real small.

I was wearing gloves. They were an old pair of gloves that I’d had for many winters, and I was wearing them because it was the end of winter.

I reached out, with my hands still in my gloves, and I touched the boy’s neck. Even with my gloves on, I could tell that his neck was still warm. The boy didn’t stir.

I repeated myself: “You okay?”

No answer.

I again looked around me, in all directions, but it was the same as before. We were alone.

I felt the boy’s neck again, this time I did it like how I see them do it on TV and in the movies, using two fingers feeling for a pulse. I felt no pulse.

This meant that the boy was not okay. The boy was dead.

I stood up. My head and shoulders were shaking and I felt tiny bubbles pushing at the skin around my eyes. I was shaking, but it was cold, so I could have been shaking from the cold.

I turned around to face the grill of my truck. There was some blood, and a thick mat of the boy’s blonde hair stuck to the bottom of the grill. I turned back around to look at the boy.

The boy was lying face down, next to his tricycle, I turned his body over, very carefully, and the only evidence was a thick wound on his scalp, on the side that had been facing the gravel. Just a nick, with some hair missing, that was all.

I stood up, and I looked around again. No one.

I’m sixty-four years old. I am retiring at the end of this year. I have no family. I eat Progresso soup for dinner most nights. I never go out; most of my nights are spent watching the television and day dreaming about a life I never lived and a future that doesn’t actually exist.

Nowhere, in any of my dreams or my nightmares, do I end up being known as and hated for being the man who killed a boy with his car. It would not be fair.

I looked down at the gravel. I could barely make out three sets of my own foot prints in the shape of my boots. I walked over to these sets of boot prints and kicked the gravel around until the prints had been smeared away.

I walked in a full circle around my truck, eyeing my surroundings closely. Since I hadn’t slammed on my brakes, there were not any irregular tire marks from my truck.

I walked back over to the body of the dead boy. I’d only touched him twice, and both times, I’d touched him with my gloves. But just to be sure, I picked up a blade of grass from the side of the road, and I used it to wipe the spot of skin on the boy’s neck where I’d felt for a pulse.

Stepping carefully, as though there were grapes underneath my feet and I didn’t want to crush them, I walked back to my truck, and I got inside the cab.

I looked in the rear view mirror, and I didn’t see anything.

The sun was setting, but I didn’t appreciate its brilliance.

It isn’t my destiny to go to prison. Not now, not ever. I eat canned soup for dinner each night and I never married. I worked hard all my life and I never hurt anyone on purpose.

I started the truck’s engine, and I put it in reverse, and I very slowly moved the vehicle backwards. I then put the truck into drive, and drove around the spot where the boy and the tricycle were lying in the road, and being sure to move at a speed that wouldn’t create any tire tracks; I crawled on up the hill towards my home.

My heart was now pounding and I kept looking in the rearview mirror, but no one was there. I passed the Johnson’s house at the top of the hill, and no one was outside. Just in case somebody was watching, I tried to pretend that I was happy. I pretended that I was whistling along to a song on the radio, even though I never listen to the radio and I don’t even know how to whistle.

I got home about two minutes later, and I went directly into the bathroom. I ran some water in the sink, and I took a giant wad of toilet paper and put it under the water. I walked back out of the house and over to the grill of my truck.

I took the wet toilet paper, and I applied it to the spot on the grill that had the blood and the hair. I cleaned the grill real good. I frowned; the grill was now a little too shiny. So I picked up some gravel, and I threw the gravel at the grill. The dust settled on the wet parts of the grill, and then it looked normal again. Normal for this part of the country.

The sun had now set, it was no longer dusk. I went inside to fix a can of soup, I watched some television, and then I tried to fall asleep.

***

I didn’t sleep so well that night. I kept thinking about the state prison and the various men I’d known who had ended up there. I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t deserve a lot of the bullshit I’d already dealt with for most of my life, and so I decided, that night, that for once in my life, I was going to stand up for myself.

It was on the front page of the local newspaper the next morning. I first saw it at work because someone had left the newspaper in the break room. By lunchtime, nearly everyone at work was talking about it.

Margie, the one with the fat thighs and the stupid pictures of her nieces and nephews, she just wouldn’t shut up about it.

It was so sad and so tragic and she just couldn’t believe that someone would leave a child to die.

Fuck her. Fuck her and her fat thighs. I watched her crying about the whole thing and eating a large slice of cake with a spoon. Every time that she would sob, her fat body would ripple and ooze about, and then she would cut into the white cream at the top of the cake, with more attention than she gave to her job, and she’d spoon a hefty chunk of the cake into her mouth. I found myself wishing that she would choke on the cake.

By quitting time I’d had enough. Everyone at work, even the customers, everyone was talking about the Johnson boy. At one point, Ed walked over to me and asked. “don’t you live on the same road as the Johnson’s?” I nodded and did my best to look morose.

There was only one way to drive home, and there was no avoiding it—in order to get home each day, I had to pass right by the spot, and then I had to drive on up the hill, past the Johnson’s house.

But I got used to it. Besides, I don’t really have any friends, and I never go out, so I only had to pass their house twice a day, five days a week, and then maybe two or four more times, on the weekend, if I had to get out to run an errand or two.

***

Four days had passed the first time I nearly lost my nerve. It was just a little after work, and I’d already passed the damn house, which by now was barely visible beyond the yard full of wreathes and flowers and candles and the such. The whole town was making such a big deal out of the thing.

I was settling into my routine when I heard a knock on the door.

No one ever visits me. The last time I had a visitor it was some electric guy checking on the utilities. That was about two years ago. Only relative I got that is still alive is a brother who is ten years my junior, and he moved out west with some gal nearly twenty years ago, and I haven’t seen him since.

I heard a second knock, but I just stood there, right in my own kitchen. I could feel my heart going all crazy again. It wasn’t “pounding” so much as it was threatening to stop beating. It was going about all weird in my chest, and I wasn’t sure if this was it, if they were here to take me in, but I decided then and there that if this was it, I wasn’t going to do much about it, I was just going to stay quiet and see how things turned out.

I waited there in my kitchen, like a prisoner in my own home, and I listened to the world. It was so quiet that I could hear birds chirping outside and I could hear some feet scuffling in the gravel pathway that leads right up to my front door.

My heart was really moving about now, and I don’t know if I was more nervous about the trouble I was in, or my heart exploding. But then I heard the sound of a child’s voice.

“I know he’s there, Ma. His car is parked right here in the yard, and he never goes out but once a day to get to work and back.”

Whoever it was, it wasn’t the police, and I was suddenly able to relax.

My heart settled back into rhythm and I used the back of my hand to wipe away the small beads of sweat that had percolated on my forehead.

After hearing a third knock I walked to the door and opened it.

Standing outside my front door was Evelyn Woodbury and her son—I forget his name. I nodded. Evelyn nodded back and smiled a polite smile. I’d known Evelyn since she was a little girl and I was a young man. She’d married some man from out of town and I remember that she had been showing a bit before the wedding.

“How do you do, Roger?” Evelyn seemed a bit frightened, and I didn’t mind.

I nodded again, and then I looked down at her boy, and back up at her. She was wearing a sundress, and it was a little too tight on her. It also looked worn, and I thought she looked a little worn down herself.

“…Well, Roger, we’re sorry to bother you at the dinner hour, but—” Evelyn stopped talking but she forgot to close her mouth.

The boy cut in, saying, “—Sir, we’re holding a fundraiser for little Willie Johnson. I’m sure you heard by now about the tragedy that occurred last Thursday evening, around five thirty. Sir, it was real sad. We’re all real sad. Willie was hit and killed by a car, sir, and we’re collecting money, through the school, for the Johnson family, so that they can do up a real nice funeral for the boy, is all.”

So they wanted my money. Everyone in this god damn world seems to want your hard earned money. First the government asks for it from your pay check. Then they ask again every April, and then you have to pay them even more of it with the sales tax every time you want to buy something in a store. It goes on and on and on, so I stay at home, and I do what I can to keep to myself.

I reached into my back pocket and felt for my wallet. Inside of my wallet were some bills, and I knew exactly how many there were, and of which denomination as well. I reached for the third one over and I took it out. It was a five dollar bill. I handed it to the boy and I forced a smile.

Evelyn relaxed a bit, and she tugged at the sides of her dress, as if that could make the thing fit, or make her look better; maybe both. I don’t know; I don’t understand women very well, I never have.

They thanked me for my generous donation, and I nodded once more. I stood there, with my left hand holding the door open, and watched them as they walked back down the gravel path, and then turned left onto the main road. There were another two miles of houses going on in that direction, and I wondered if they were really going to walk to each and every home along the way, doing the same thing they had just done to me. I watched them walk on until they were just out of sight, and then I closed my door.

***

The more the papers wrote about it, and the more the townsfolk talked about it, the more I got angry about it, and what little guilt and worry I may have felt, well, it just slowly went away, like how the snow melts in the early part of spring.

They even talked about it on the local news, which I don’t regularly watch, but now I had started watching nearly every night. There was something weird about watching a mystery unfold, and being the only one who knew the answers to the questions that everyone else wanted to know.

Plus, I wanted to be sure that they weren’t going to catch me. So far, they didn’t have any suspects, but the police were making an investigation, and the case was still open. For the most part, I wasn’t afraid anymore; I was just tired of it all, and I wanted it to end.

***

The most scared I ever got was the one day that Officer Thompson came by. It was the same time of night that Evelyn and her boy had come by; at dusk. Only this time I wasn’t making soup from a can, I was cooking a microwave dinner. I know this because it was a Wednesday, and Wednesday is the day I always cook my microwave dinner.

Officer Thompson knocked real hard, harder than Evelyn and the boy did. It was a tough knock. Not an unfriendly knock, but just the right kind of knock to let you know that it deserves an answer.

I walked over to the door and opened it. Officer Thompson nodded his head, and removed his hat. I nodded in return, and stepped to the side, so he could enter if he wanted to.

He did not enter.

“Afternoon, Roger.”

“Fred.” I said.

“We’re…” Fred sighed, and then took a long while to resume speaking.

While I waited for Fred to continue, I could hear the microwave doing its thing, but now that I was worried and now that my stomach was all tight, I realized that I had lost my appetite.

Fred finally continued. “Well, we’re just combing the whole road is what we’re doing. The Johnson boy, as you know, well, we don’t have much on who hit him, but we figure that whoever killed the boy, well, he probably lives on this road, since it’s a dead end.”

He just stopped, right there. No question, just a statement. What this did was to put me on guard, it did. I wasn’t sure if it was a tactic of his, or if I was just being paranoid, but I felt sort of stuck, the way you do when your boss asks you if you’d mind staying a bit late that night, to help out. I didn’t know what to say.

Fred was my own age, and we’d gone to school together. He’d married Anne Walsh and they’d had themselves several kids. One even went on to the big state school with a scholarship in football.

I don’t watch football, but I was born and raised in this town, so I know most everything you can know about football.

Fred was looking right at me, but I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. I don’t much read my own mind, let alone the minds of other folks. Forty-six years of checking insurance policy figures has taught me very little about people and what they are thinking.

“Well, it’s sad.” I finally said.

Fred broke eye contact, and sighed again.

“Sure is.” He agreed.

He seemed relieved, but I wanted to be sure.

“I think an awful lot about it.” I said. “Some nights.” I added.

“We all do.” Fred agreed. He wrung his hat in his hands, making out like it were a bandana, rather than a state issued trooper hat. I thought he was going to permanently crease it, but he didn’t.

The next thing I did is what saved me, I’m sure of this, and I’m very glad I did it.

“The Fletcher boy. He speeds.”

Five words. That’s all I had to say. It was just like when my father had taught me how to make plants grow.

My father had been a farmer, and he had wanted me to take over the farm. But I was good at math, and my brains didn’t want me to farm, so I had taken a job with the firm instead of the farm.

But here I was, more than fifty years later, taking my dad’s profession to heart; planting a seed and then watching it grow.

***

Soon thereafter, I began to notice all sorts of things I never noticed before. Driving on the main highway, for example, I one day noticed how well aligned all the telephone poles were. They had built them all perfect and neat, spaced out just right, so that the lines didn’t sag, but also so that the lines were not too taut. And the center lines on the highway, they had been spaced evenly as well.

In town I started to notice other people existing in their own lives. One person in particular that I happened to notice was a new girl that had been hired at Betty’s Coffee Shop. I noticed that this new girl was pretty.

People at work still talked about the Johnson boy nearly every day, but now I could tune it out. The subject of the Johnson boy became about as interesting to me as the football scores and the new county highway they were building that could get you to the Wal-Mart quicker.

Only thing I really cared about was my workday ending so I could get back home where I could be alone.

***

It was about three Thursdays after the accident that I heard the big news at work.

It was Margie who I heard it from. She was in the break room, per usual, eating a doughnut and sitting on her fat ass. I wondered if she ever stopped eating and actually worked.

She was in the break room when I walked in to get a little coffee. Ever since the accident, I hadn’t been sleeping as well as I’d like, so I’d taken to drinking a cup of coffee here and there to keep me on my toes at work. The coffee at work was thin, and I didn’t mind the taste of it, but it did make me have to pee a lot.

“Oh Roger, did you hear?” Margie’s cheeks were flushed, and I couldn’t tell if it was from wearing too much makeup, or if it was from sitting and eating so damn much.

She took her thumb and her index finger and pinched a chunk of doughnut away from her partially eaten doughnut. She was careless, and some of the chocolate from the doughnut smeared itself on one of her long, pink painted nails.

She shoved her fingers right into her mouth, and I could hear her sucking the chunk of doughnut into her mouth. It made me feel sort of sick. I turned my back to her and poured myself a cup of coffee.

Margie continued, “They think it was the Fletcher boy. They think the Fletcher boy was the one that done did it. That he was the one who…who struck and killed the Johnson boy. Someone says they saw him driving home right about the time that poor Willie was killed!”

What really got me was the way she said struck. I’m not real particular about many things, but I didn’t like the way she said struck. For some reason, when she said struck, it made me very angry, so I didn’t answer her and I left the room.

It wasn’t until later, when I was getting ready to leave work that I was finally able to figure it out. I didn’t like it when Margie said “struck” the way she did because it was an accusation. It implied that the Johnson boy had been hurt on purpose, and that was unfair.

I’m not going to jail. I am too old, and I’ve worked all my life to avoid trouble. And it’s not like I tried to do what I did. It just sort of happened, the way that a storm wind can turn over your shed, or a valve in your car can suddenly break, and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it from happening.

The way I see things, things work until they sometimes break. And when they do break, you can try to fix them, but sometimes, no matter how much the thing needs fixing, and you want to fix it, you just can’t, and then, well, there’s nothing you can do.

The Johnson boy was broken, and there wasn’t anything I could do to fix him up, so I carried on. But I didn’t like that Margie said he was struck. I didn’t like Margie.

***

I was fixing to get in my car after work that afternoon, when I noticed the new girl at Betty’s again. She was leaning over a table in the window at the front of the coffee shop, and she was wiping down the red and white checkered tablecloth with a grey rag.

It has been years since I went to Betty’s. In high school, it was where most of the fellows and gals would go to socialize after school, so I didn’t go there much. Years later, I would take my brother there before he could drive, because he could talk to people which meant that he could talk to girls and such, but me, I never much went there, except when my family would go for a breakfast before a big trip to visit Grandma up in the big city.

This was all a long time ago, before Grandma died, and before my folks passed on as well. I watched the new girl scoop the rag and its contents into her other hand, and turn around to find a waste basket. Her apron was tied in a neat bow behind her back, and she was wearing a pretty colored dress that hung just right. Her hair was tied up in the back, with a white ribbon, and she was wearing some sort of silver necklace that hung around her soft, white neck.

I thought about going into Betty’s. I figured I could sit myself down and order a cup of coffee. After all, now that I was drinking coffee, I could try theirs, to see if it was any good. But what would I do with myself once I had the coffee? Would I sit there, and stare out the window? I supposed I could buy myself a newspaper, but I didn’t much like to read the newspaper.

No, it was a stupid idea. I needed to be practical at all times, and going into Betty’s was impractical, that’s what it was.

I walked to my truck, placed my key into the lock on the door, twisted the lock all the way to the left, and pressed the silver button that was set into the handle, and opened the door. I sat on the leather cushion, and looked into my rear view mirror.

From my mirror I could still see the new girl leaning over on the counter, talking to the cook through the service window. I moved my head a little, to the right, to see the rest of the restaurant, and I noticed that there was only one customer, an old man, who was sitting alone in the booth at the back of the restaurant. He was staring straight ahead of himself, no paper, nothing; just staring.

I started the car, and pulled out onto the main street that gets me to the main highway that takes me to my road, the road where I struck the Johnson boy.

I thought about Margie and I got real angry again, but then I remembered what she had mentioned about the Fletcher boy. I turned right onto the highway and I thought about how I was going to watch the news that evening.

***

In regards to the Johnson boy, the Fletcher boy was innocent. I knew that much, but no one else did. But was he really innocent?

The town sure didn’t think so. After all, the Fletcher boy had run over the Bonderman’s dog the first year that he’d gotten himself a license to drive.

And this fact was the particular item that led the town into an uproar.

Surely it was the Fletcher boy.

That boy’s always had an odd sort of way about him.

He never really fit in, even when he was young.

Why myself, I’d caught the Fletcher boy killing his neighbor’s rabbits with his own bare hands about four summers ago. His parents had asked me to look over him for a few hours on a few different weekends that summer, so they could get away, and I had agreed.

Well, when I’d caught him killing the rabbits that one day, he’d given me the kind of look that would scare nearly any woman to her death. I just shook my head and told him it was wrong, and that he couldn’t do it, ever again. But I’ll never forget the look he gave me. He was sort of odd.

The Fletcher family was poor, and they couldn’t afford a lawyer. The boy had just turned eighteen, so he was going to face the charges as an adult; as a man.

He said he was innocent, which, like I said, I knew to be the truth. But the way I saw things; better him than me. He was young; he could be taught things and he could be rehabilitated and he would get out and then he would still have a life.

What the hell did the state want with me? I was nearly sixty five years old and about to retire. I was a man who’d kept to his own all his life. I had walked the straight line, I had worked hard at calculating insurance claims nearly every single day of my adult life, so what good would it do anyone for me to go to jail and then die there?

Hell, I’d only missed six and a half days of work in the past fifty years, and four of them had been because I had to attend to a dying relative. Only two and a half had been for me; and they were for the time that I got real sick from eating some pears that I suppose I should not have eaten.

The Fletcher boy was going to be tried for manslaughter and for hit and run. All in all, the state was going to try and recommend that he be put away in a real prison, and for as long as possible.

Margie seemed satisfied with the news, and slowly but surely, she and everyone else at work began to talk about other things. It was now nearing the end of summer, and this meant that the annual town beauty pageant was coming up that Saturday. Margie thought that this year’s crop of young women was just about the most beautiful girls she’d ever seen.

I was thinking about why someone as fat and ugly as Margie would enjoy a beauty pageant, when I noticed a strange man conversing with Margie at her desk. Her demeanor had suddenly become quite professional, and after a brief exchange, she pointed directly at me, and the strange man proceeded to walk towards me.

I suddenly began to panic, real bad. This is it. I thought to myself. I could feel my heart beating in many odd spots of my body, even in my thighs. A hot, uncomfortable sticky sweat formed in my loins and my breathing became distorted and everything looked like I was looking through a screen door. Even sounds seemed distorted. They had somehow caught me. I was done for.

The man was wearing a dark suit, either navy blue or black; I wasn’t able to pay very good attention. His shirt was very white. I remember thinking that his shirt was very clean and white. Starched. Bleached. White.

“Roger McDermitt?” The man asked.

I tried to speak, but it was difficult. Everyone in the office was watching me. Most of them had stopped working, and some of them had even stood up from their desks to take in the scene. Even Flo, the boss’s pretty young secretary, who had never so much as even acknowledged my presence in the three years she’d worked there, even Flo had stopped filing her sharp red nails, and was looking right at me.

“Yes. Sir. I. Am.” The words came out the same way that the last drops of catsup come out of the bottle if you shake it hard enough; slow and messy, but they came out nonetheless.

“Mr. Roger McDermitt, Do you in fact live at the address of 2023 Dovetail Lane, in Millard County?”

It took me an eternity to get the word out, but I nodded and said “Yes.” In all my life, I’d never felt so dizzy and sick to my stomach. It felt even worse than the time I’d eaten those bad pears.

The strange man then smiled, and my panic attack began to recede. I realized that if I were going to be under arrest, they would have sent an officer to arrest me. I felt my bowels move, and I wished for a quick escape to the bathroom.

“Mr. McDermitt, I represent one Timothy Fletcher in the hit and run manslaughter trial of one William Johnson. I’m here to ask you, on behalf of the boy’s parents, if you would appear in court as what we call a “character witness?”

I was completely blown away. They wanted me to testify on behalf of the boy?

“Me?” I asked.

“Well, Mr. McDermitt, you see, the defendant is being tried by the state justice department for some pretty serious crimes, and his parents seem to think that you, well, since you once looked after the boy a few summers ago, well, perhaps you could explain to a jury of his peers that he’s, um, misunderstood.”

I smiled, and I accepted a piece of paper that he had brought for me to fill out and then sign. I was to show up to the county courthouse in three weeks time. I took my copy of the paper, it was yellow, and I folded it into a quarter of its original size, and then placed it in my pocket.

I looked at the office calendar that they kept up on the wall, the one where you’re supposed to write your name when you need to request a day off. It is the same cheap calendar that the agency gives out to all of its new customers. I walked right over to the calendar and for the seventh time in my life, I asked for a day off from my job.

I felt my heart race a little; not in the way it had when there had been a knock on my door, but in a different way, like the way it did when I saw the pretty girl at Betty’s wiping down a table or smoothing her hair when she thought that nobody was looking.

***

I only had one suit, it was the suit that my parents had bought for me when I’d graduated from high school, and I had decided to apply for a job at the insurance firm.

I had worn the suit for that interview, and then at the various funerals I had to attend in the forty some years since. Despite its age, it was still in a nice condition, and as I walked up to the stand, in order to take my oath, I felt well respected by my peers.

All in all, I was only up there for about ten minutes. First the defense asked me my relationship to the boy, and then they asked me if I thought that he was mentally troubled. I had thought a lot about what I was going to say, ahead of time. I had even practiced it in front of the only mirror I own at home. I have to say, my delivery that day in court was impeccable. I even, at one point, made one of the jurors gasp in shock.

“It is my opinion that the Fletcher boy has always been troubled. I thought a lot about what I was going to say today, since I was asked here to speak on the boy’s behalf. But the more I thought about it, the more I could not forget about an incident that occurred nearly four years ago, when the boy was about fourteen years old. It was at this time that I had been asked to watch the boy on a Sunday, while his parents were out. I was in the front yard of his house, when I heard footsteps and the sounds of branches breaking all coming from across the creek that divides the Fletcher home from their neighbors’ house. I got up from my seat on the porch and went to investigate. What I saw next, well, it still gives me chills.”

At this point, I paused, not because I actually had to think, but because I wanted to give the next part of my speech some more weight.

As I paused, I couldn’t help it, I had to look at the Fletcher boy. We locked eyes. What I saw in his eyes was not so much hatred, as it was a cold acceptance of reality. I began to think about what it would feel like to be this boy; and I realized that I knew exactly what it felt like to be this boy, for I too had lived in this town, a town that assumed everything about who I was. And I too had never been able to escape from the reputation the town had branded on me. Suddenly, I didn’t feel sorry for the boy at all.

I went on to describe the way the Fletcher boy had killed those rabbits with his bare hands, and I told them about the look he gave me when I caught him. As I said this last part, everyone in the court strained their heads to get a good look at the boy.

After I had finished, the Fletcher boy’s lawyer said he had no more questions, and the attorney for the prosecution said he didn’t need anything from me, and I was excused.

***

The trial lasted for nearly two weeks, and my testimony had been given right in the middle. It was two days after the boy was convicted, the day after his sentencing, it was on this day that I finally decided to go into Betty’s and try some of her coffee.

I left the firm right at five and walked across the street. In my pockets were two quarters, and I slipped them into a newspaper box in front of the coffee shop. I took a newspaper out of the box, and wrapped it under my left arm.

I hesitated for a minute before opening the door, wondering if I should have combed my hair or anything like that, but it was too late, I’d already walked up to the door, and now I had to go on with it.

I walked inside, wearing a carefully practiced smile. Betty herself was standing behind the café counter holding a pot of coffee. She smiled at me, and I could tell that she recognized me, but wasn’t sure exactly who I was. I looked all around the shop and for the pretty young girl, but she wasn’t there. The place was deserted, except for Betty, the Cook, and now me.

I felt like closing my eyes, and dropping to the floor I was so disappointed. The pretty girl wasn’t there, and just like every other disappointment in my life, there wasn’t anything I was going to be able to do to make things better.

I felt like an idiot, and I didn’t know what to do. Betty smiled again and instructed me to sit anywhere I liked.

I walked to the far corner of the coffee shop to the same booth that I had seen the old man sit in the day I had watched the pretty girl clean the table after work.

I sat down and Betty brought me a mug and a menu. I told her I wasn’t hungry, but I accepted the coffee.

I really wanted to leave, but I sat there anyway, hoping that maybe the pretty girl was just on break. Finally, after about ten minutes of staring at the opposing wall, I looked down at the table and I saw the newspaper lying there.

I took a sip of black coffee from the time worn mug. The mug felt sort of soft in my hands, and I noticed that it was chipped in so many places that the chips almost seemed like they had been placed there on purpose, by the potter himself.

I had left the newspaper folded in half and face up on the table. It was the most important headline that day, so at any moment that I wanted to, I could look down, and read the headline.

It was written in a pretty large sized type, and the letters were bolder than many of the headlines I am used to seeing.

It was a simple headline; unremarkable in many ways, but not so if you were me. It read: “Young man gets twenty years for hit and run manslaughter.” I read it again, one more time, as though it were like the weather, and capable of abrupt change.

But regardless of how many times I read the headline, it did not change. And every time that I read the headline, I felt a powerful sort of rush. The rush was addictive, and very pleasant. It was the same kind of rush you sometimes get in my part of the country when you watch a brilliant sunset, at dusk.

“She’s retarded.” There was no detectable emotion behind this statement. He might as well have been commenting on the weather. In so far as emotion was concerned, he had said “she’s retarded” with the same intensity as someone might say “could you pass the salt?”

She felt like crying, but she resisted and put up a fight; she was not going to show him any weakness. But she suddenly felt dizzy, and realized that the motion of the car was making her sick.

“Pull the car over. Now!”

“What? Are you crazy?” Jeff removed his foot from the gas pedal, but the car was descending down a rather steep hill, so the car’s slight deceleration was barely noticeable to Sheila, who was making an effort to focus on her inhalations in order to prevent herself from vomiting in the car.

Jeff looked over at his wife and realized that she was actually sick, and not just making a scene. He ran his right hand over the soft leather that surrounded his brand new BMW’s steering wheel, the same soft, expensive leather that covered most of the interior of his new car, and for a brief moment, he was embarrassed by the fact that he had purchased the car more for its status than for its actual convenience.

“You fucking selfish bastard!” Sheila still felt sick, but she realized that the motion of the car wasn’t the catalyst for her illness; it was Jeff’s insensitivity. “How on earth could you say that?”

Jeff was angry. He was angry with the gods that governed his fate. He’d made it through adolescence; he’d graduated from high school with the nearly perfect grades required by his nearly perfect workaholic father. He’d attended the nearly perfect second tier Ivy League alma mater of his father. He’d met “the right kind of girl;” waited until after graduating from law school and from passing the bar to marry her. And then, after his first major promotion at the firm, he’d suddenly been punished for all of his hard work and follow through with a retarded daughter. That’s right, he had said it out loud and now he could say it to himself: His daughter was a fucking retard. His daughter would look funny, speak funny, and everyone who ever met her would notice within moments her clear cut mental deficiencies.

“All I’m saying is the truth; I’m just calling out the three hundred pound gorilla that you and I have been spending months ignoring; our baby, she’s retarded.” Jeff squinted and pretended to be more involved with the process of piloting the BMW than he actually was.

Sheila had turned her body around in her seat in order to more directly face her husband. She was angered by his words, but infuriated by his body language—this was the man she had fallen for nearly seven years ago, and for him to think that after all these years she would mistake his squint for anything less than an attempt to avoid eye contact was insulting.

“You are…” She couldn’t say it. She couldn’t use the word; the word had been removed from her vocabulary within weeks of the original earth-shattering ultra sound.

The ultra sound had been the death blow to her boisterous, pregnancy-induced ego. She had felt the crushing blow the second that the doctor had stopped rubbing the humming little plastic piece over the smelly jelly on her belly. The doctor had sighed before looking up from his clip board, and in that single moment, Sheila’s motherly intuition had informed her more than any number of words from the doctor could ever have given her; something was wrong with her baby, and it was not something small.

Jeff had gone out of the room and the doctor had had the audacity to tell him first, so that he could “let his wife know.” The doctor was a coward and a sexist. Her husband was only a coward. For from the moment that Jeff had found out that his baby was not going to be extending his Ivy League legacy, Jeff had become a part-time parent, throwing himself into golf and into his work, and Sheila resented him for this.

Sheila swiveled back around in the seat to face out the window, in order to try and think about something else, but also so that Jeff would not be able to see her crying.

Jeff lowered his head in such a way so as to use the passenger side mirror to see Sheila’s face, and the sight of her honest tears tore through all of his bravado and made him feel like shit.

“Sheila—I…I’m sorry.” That was all that he could offer.

There was a strong, powerful silence in the car, and neither party felt compelled to break it. This was one of those arguments in which the less that was said, the more powerfully one stated their position, and the lines had been drawn quite clearly.

The silence was finally broken with a loud, ear piercing “WAAAAAAAH” from the backseat.

“Wah” can be a surprisingly harsh word, given the fact that its last letter is a soft “H.” It’s not even technically an English word, yet almost every human being can tell by the inflection and intonation of a child’s “wah” that something is wrong, and this thing must be resolved before anyone within earshot of the “wah” can resume thinking clearly.

Fortunately for Jeff and Sheila, they had reached their destination, and Shelia was able to grab Penny from the child safety seat in the back and within a few moments of receiving attention from her mother, the child was smiling and drooling per usual.

Penny was four months old, and she still looked like a completely normal baby. She was even cuter than most children, and received many compliments from strangers when Sheila took her out in a stroller to the park or to a grocery mart.

But the ugly secret would soon be obvious to all; she had an extra twenty-first chromosome, and unlike most things in life, you don’t want to have extra chromosomes, for in that case, more is less.

Jeff pulled the BMW into the Laudrey’s front driveway and pulled in next to the Laudrey’s own BMW. The two cars looked like a matching set; both sleek and black and well maintained. Only a discerning eye would be able to tell that Jeff’s model was less expensive, and therefore just a little bit less impressive.

***

Jeff, Sheila and Penny looked like the perfect new family as they stood in front of the Laudrey’s front door, waiting for someone to answer the doorbell. But Jeff knew that the Laudrey’s knew that in regards to Penny, nothing was perfect, only imperfect and retarded.

Peter Laudrey pulled open the front door with more effort than necessary, and the result was that his already overly-animated personality hit a new level of cartoon-like proportions. Peter was a massive animal of a man; he was six feet four inches tall, and weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds. You could tell that he had been very athletic and handsome about twenty years ago, but he had not treated his body very well, and now he looked bloated and puffy, which added to his pompous personality.

Peter feigned a hint of surprise as he surveyed the guests at his door, even though the two couples had planned this late evening bar-b-que nearly three weeks ago. He gave Sheila a long, tight hug, and Jeff watched him closely to make sure that he didn’t do anything inappropriate; such was the good natured trust that two lawyers from the same firm have for one another.

When the bear hug had finally ended, Peter, without asking, grabbed Penny from her stroller and spun her up and into the air by her shoulders. He made noises like “Wheeee” and Woooah” and didn’t stop in his antics until Penny finally responded by turning red in the face and responding to him with a trumping “Waaaaah.” Within ten seconds of Penny’s mood swing, Peter did what most men do with crying children that don’t belong to them—he handed Penny back to her mother in one swift and urgent motion.

“Wow, it’s been years since my children were at the age where crying out loud was acceptable.” Peter said. “How fun! Please, Come in, come in!”

Sheila gave Jeff an “I told you so” look, and Jeff caught the meaning of the look, but couldn’t tell which subject she was referring to; Sheila told Jeff a lot of things an awful lot of the time, and he couldn’t be expected to keep track of them all.

As the couple entered the three story suburban castle of perfection, Jeff realized that he still had many years of hard work ahead of him at the firm before he would be able to afford a similar status symbol. At least he was catching up in regards to his luxury sedan purchase.

Julie called out “hello” from the kitchen, and then apologized for not coming out to say hello in person. She was still preparing dinner, and this was good news for Jeff, because he cared a lot more about eating on time than he did about entering into an inane series of courtesies with Peter’s wife.

“Can I fix you a drink?” Peter placed a father-like hand on Jeff’s shoulder as he asked this question, and it made Jeff want to go home. Jeff wasn’t a huge fan of his own father, who was now deceased, but he would never have wished for a father like Peter. Peter drank to excess. Peter womanized. Peter was not a very honest lawyer. But Peter was Jeff’s boss, and without Peter, Jeff would probably be poor and working for city hall.

“Sure.” Jeff said.

Jeff instructed Sheila to take Penny into the kitchen so that Julie could ogle her. Jeff didn’t like the way that Peter gave orders to Sheila, but he kept his cool and smiled at Sheila as she turned around to head into the kitchen.

***

The two men entered Peter’s office and Jeff was annoyed by the ostentatious display of awards and expensive memorabilia that permeated the interior of the room. Peter turned his back to Jeff as he proceeded to brag about the quality of scotch that the two men were about to enjoy.

“You see, you can’t just go out to a supermarket and buy this sort of liquor. It has to be shipped here, directly from Scotland, and there is an actual limit to the number of liters you are allowed to import each year. It’s not just expensive, and of the highest quality, but it’s also very hard to procure.” Jeff turned around and offered Peter a full glass of the light gold liquid. Peter wanted to have some ice with his scotch, but he knew better than to ask Jeff for any. The last time he had requested ice in his scotch, Peter had given Jeff a fifteen minute lecture on how to properly enjoy scotch—apparently there were rules to this sort of thing.

Get the right G.P.A. to get into the right college. Get a high enough score on your L-SATs to get into the right law school. Network with the right legal exec’s to land the post law-school job of your dreams. Don’t drink expensive scotch with ice. Follow these rules and you’ll wind up happy and without retarded children.

Peter helped himself into his plush office chair and stared at the vacant seat that faced him from across his immaculately well kept mahogany desk. Jeff was still staring at his tumbler of scotch and stuck in a mental reverie, so Peter cleared his throat and then motioned with his hand for Jeff to take a seat. Jeff complied without a word.

“Jeff, I know we’re here as friends, and it’s the weekend, but I just want to let you know that your work in the office, as of late, well, it’s been lacking, and as a friend—not as a boss, mind you—but as a friend, I wanted to let you know that if you need any time off, to, well, you know, to adjust to things, well, that would be fine with all of us.”

“Things…?” Jeff allowed the word to spread itself along the interior of the office and enjoyed the way it floated out of his mouth and then drifted across Peter’s expensive desk.

Peter waited for Jeff to say more, but Jeff was satisfied with his end of the conversation. Jeff took another sip of his scotch and instead of speaking, chose to project an air of indifference to Peter’s conversation.

“I mean, Jeff, you know, it’s not. Well, I don’t really know how to say this, I mean our darling Lisa, she’s off at the University, and Bobby is just about to finish his doctorate, so, clearly, I haven’t had to deal with what you’re going through, I mean, what you’re going to go through…”

Peter was an excellent lawyer. This meant that he could wield the English language with the same deft as a well trained chef wields his cutlery, but this last attempt at communication had been poorly worded, and Peter hadn’t even been able to finish his own sentence. For some reason this greatly upset Jeff.

“Going to go through?” Jeff was surprised with himself, for he was cognizant of the fact that he was now employing the same technique that Sheila used with him when she wanted to draw him into a fight; he was repeating the other person’s statements in the form of a question, without offering anything new to the debate. Peter bought in.

“Well, I mean, Penny…who is just downright lovely, I mean, a truly beautiful young daughter you have there, but, well, you know that it’s going to be tough to raise her, I mean, tougher than it is for most parents.”

This was the precise moment in Jeff’s life in which he finally lost his cool. Jeff had worked hard on his “cool” for his entire life. He had spent hours of adolescence training himself in the finely cultivated art of deferring your own sense of justice to your “respect for your elders” in order to stay in their good graces, and this skill had taken Jeff rather far in life. But Penny was off limits, and Jeff didn’t care that Peter was his boss. Peter would never ever know or understand anything about what it was “going to be like” for Jeff to raise his retarded daughter.

Jeff squinted and pretended to study his scotch glass. He took an outrageously large gulp of the liquid and felt the thin hot fluid coat the inside of his mouth. He swirled this unhealthy gulp around in his mouth and then swallowed it all at once. He tried to monitor the burning sensation as the scotch traveled down his throat and into his stomach. When the burning sensation had reached its peak, he took the glass and threw it as hard as he could about four feet to the right of Peter’s head.

The glass made solid contact with Peter’s well framed bar certification, and sent the frame crashing to the floor. Jeff made sure to wait for the sounds of glass shards to diminish, and then looked Peter directly in the eyes and said, “You go to hell. You don’t understand anything. Fuck you.”

Peter’s eyes were wide, but he wasn’t looking at Jeff, he was looking behind Jeff, and into the doorway.

Jeff turned around in his chair and faced the door. Standing in the doorframe were both his wife and Peter’s wife, and both women were holding their hands over their mouths and staring at Jeff in disbelief.

“I’ll get Penny.” Sheila turned around and quickly maneuvered her way back to the kitchen.

Jeff turned back around to face Peter, but Peter and his wife were now fussing over the broken shards. The back of Peter’s neck was bright red, and Jeff knew him well enough to know that his red skin was a sign of anger, and not embarrassment.

Jeff wordlessly excused himself from the office and met Sheila in the hallway. Sheila’s eyes were a portrait of anger and resentment. Jeff didn’t seem to mind.

Jeff walked out the front door, without a word, leaving his wife and child behind him. Sheila quietly closed the front door behind her, and by the time she reached the car, Jeff was already strapped in and had started the engine.

Sheila strapped Penny into her child safety seat, and then climbed into the front passenger seat. Before she could buckle up, Jeff peeled the car out of the driveway, gunning the engine as loudly as he could.

The car ride home lasted nearly twenty-five minutes, and was devoid of any conversation. The radio was never turned on, Penny never so much as stirred in her seat, and Jeff maintained strong eye contact with the road the entire way home.

As soon as the car was parked inside their garage, Jeff got out of the car and left Sheila to tend to their baby.

***

Sheila entered the kitchen from the garage, holding Penny close to her chest. Jeff had left an open bottle of scotch on the counter, and a few errant cubes of ice were lying next to it, slowly melting and creating a puddle on the tiles that threatened to attack the floor.

Sheila shook her head and went upstairs to prepare Penny for bedtime. After she had successfully put Penny to bed, Sheila went into the master bedroom and found Jeff reading a book in bed, as though it were just another normal evening in their normal lives.

Sheila began to undress next to the closet, but her anger finally boiled over. She spun around and pointed her finger at Jeff, who she knew was watching her out of the corner of his eyes, for she had been in the room for well over two minutes, and he hadn’t turned a single page in the book.

“What on EARTH were you thinking?” Sheila asked.

“What was I THINKING? I was thinking that no one on Earth gets to talk to me about my personal, family business. THAT is what I was THINKING!”

“So, what, he asked you about our sex life?” Sheila was being sarcastic because it was usually the best tactic when arguing with her husband, the lawyer.

“No. He asked about Penny.” Jeff seemed calm and reserved, which meant that he was truly upset. This was the defense mechanism that he turned to in order to combat his own anger, but it didn’t work with Sheila—it hadn’t worked with her for years.

“So he asked about our daughter, and you decided to quit your job, on the spot, just like that?” Sheila spoke deliberately and without emotion, in order to circumvent Jeff from accusing her of “being emotional.”

“Yes.” Every iota of Jeff’s being produced the human expression known as smug.

“You are a total, selfish asshole. Your daughter has Down’s Syndrome, and it hurts your pathetic ego. Only an arrogant and conceited asshole would be humiliated by the fact that his first born daughter has Down’s Syndrome. Only a pathetically egomaniacal asshole would attach such great importance to the mental health of his daughter. You disgust me. Your boss is a total asshole, we both know this, but, and I mean BUT—He is still the man who is literally in charge of paying you to take care of your family, and tonight, tonight Jeffery, tonight you sacrificed your family for your ego. I’m ashamed to be a part of your family.”

Sheila broke her eye contact with Jeff and hurled herself onto her side of their king sized bed. She turned to face the wall, turned off her bedside lamp, and then pulled the sheets around her, creating a wall of silk and linen between herself and her husband.

Jeff didn’t reply. He instead closed his book, got out of the bed, and turned off his own bedside lamp before he exited the room.

***

Jeff was on his way downstairs to pour himself some more scotch when he heard a faint noise coming from Penny’s room.

He looked through the partially open doorway, and into her room. Penny was lying in her crib, and she was well defined by the soft pale light that her nightlight cast on her. She looked beautiful, precious, and full of life. Jeff had never seen this side of her.

Jeff pushed the door open and walked over to the crib. He looked into the crib and his beautiful daughter was making eye contact with him. Her expression was one of love and satisfaction. She was quietly cooing and her breathing was heart wrenchingly soft, precious, and fragile. Jeff felt a sudden, overwhelming urge to protect his daughter from every harm of the world—and this included himself.

Jeff began to weep. He replayed that day’s events in his mind, beginning with the fight with Sheila in the car on the way to Peter’s house, and ending with the image of his boss and his boss’s wife huddled over a broken picture fame.

Normally, a review of such events as these would make Jeff blush, and then drink more, but now, now they made him acutely aware of one fact; the fact that he was no longer just a man, trying to claim a stake in this world; no, he was now a father, and certain priorities had to be readjusted accordingly.

Jeff picked up his baby daughter and began to kiss her fragile face.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’ll never do this again. I’ll never do that again, I mean. I’ll never treat you the way my father treated me. You are not an extension of me. No, you are a part of me, but not an extension, and there is a difference. Your life will be fantastic, and I will make sure of this, for I am your father. Your mother and I, we will both make sure of this.”

“I declare here and now, I vow, from this moment on to change things. I am proud of you, Penny. And I love you, Penny! And I will do everything it takes to protect you.”

Jeff continued to stand there next to his daughter’s crib, clutching his beloved daughter in his arms for what seemed like only a moment, but was actually quite a long while. Finally, a sense of powerful exhaustion overcame him, and he tucked Penny back into her bed.

“I’ll start by calling and apologizing to Peter first thing in the morning.” He added.

Penny woke up, and smiled at her father, and then she brought him a sense of well being with only one soft spoken word: “Wah.”

Benny once said that the first time he had to sleep on the street, he didn’t mind it at all, it fit him like a glove.  But the second time he had to sleep on the street, it was awful, and he said that he cried the entire time.

The reason he cried was because even though he had three cans of beer and a half pack of cigarettes, he’d forgotten to get his hands on some matches or a lighter, and it was so cold that night that no one was out, so he couldn’t find anyone to bum a light from, and the lack of nicotine sent his heart into a turmoil he never wanted to experience again.

That was Benny for you.  Complaining about a lack of nicotine, not the fact that it was freezing that night, not because he was out on the streets in only a pair of jeans and his notorious leather jacket, and certainly not because his parents had died and left him nothing, so he had nobody to turn to when his luck was down and out.

Benny was that kid.  The kid who wasn’t a kid anymore, but who stuck around in our small little town in order to teach the younger kids how to be kids.

If you were growing up in ____ and you wanted something that required ID, then Benny was your first, and only choice.  Cigarettes, booze, porno mags—you were underage, and you wanted it?  Well, then you had better be on Benny’s good side.  Fuck, rumor even had it that Benny could get you coke or smack if you wanted it—but none of us ever really found out if this was just a rumor or not.  I mean, us suburban kids, we were trying to be rebels, but that hard shit, that sort of shit actually scared us.

Not Benny though.  Nothing seemed to scare Benny.

***

The first time that Benny got arrested, a lot of us “tough kids” took to sewing black patches with the letter B on them onto our favorite hoodies or jackets.  Some of the less artistically motivated kids, like me, we couldn’t figure out how to make patches, so we just took a sharpie pen and inked the letter B onto all of our clothing, but the motivation was the same, nonetheless.

We wore these B’s with pride, as a sign of protest against “the man,” ‘cause Benny’s arrest was “total bullshit, man!  Total fucking bullshit!”  But the funny thing, looking back, is that none of us even knew why Benny had been arrested, so for all we know, it was “totally called for, man.”  But we were just a bunch of kids, in need of a hero.

The whole patch idea seemed really cool at first, but when Benny was released from the local slammer, and he saw what we’d all done on his behalf, well, he couldn’t stop laughing.  For about two weeks after his arrest, whenever he saw a kid in town with a “B” on their clothes, he would just point at them and say “baaaah.”  He wasn’t grateful for our attention and our hero-worshipping, and by calling us out as sheep, well, shit, that just made Benny seem even cooler to all of us.

Benny wasn’t working for us, he was just living his life—reckless and careless and in your face.  Of course, this was before I got to know Benny, before I saw what he was really all about.  Hindsight ‘aint 20-20, it’s just jaded and full of remorse—at least with me it always seems to be that way.

***

I was about six years younger than Benny, but my older brother was in the grade behind him, so Benny was vaguely aware of me in a way that made a lot of the other kids in my grade feel jealous.  I liked this, as I didn’t have a lot going for me back then.

I was fifteen and full of despair.  I thought everything in the world was phony, just like Holden Caulfield thought, only unlike Holden, I didn’t have a brother or a sister to obsess over, and I didn’t want to catch any fucking bodies falling.  I just wanted to get high, so that I could stop worrying about how I was never going to get a chance to touch a girl anywhere past her shoulder.

But just ‘cause Benny would nod his head at me when I crossed his path in town didn’t mean that I was actually his friend on any level other than the imaginary.  In my head, Benny and I, we were tight.  Secret handshake tight.  Inside jokes about other kids tight.  But in reality, I was just a chump who bought ten sacks from him for the price of a twenty bag, and I always remembered to smile as I got ripped off—because Benny, well, shit.  He was cool…that‘s why.

That’s why I never understood how that whole night ever even happened.  Because unless I was actually special to Benny, in some sort of way, then why would he have trusted me, of all people?  Why would he have confided in me, and shown me the worst aspects of his life, unless we were closer than just drug dealer and drug buyer?

I’ll never know.  But I’ll always wonder.

***

I was fifteen years old, and had been so for just over a month.  I’d just taken my first job ever, at the local Burger King, and something about a real job made me feel like I was an adult, and this made me eager to experience some real, adult problems and adventures.

My parents cared about me, but they didn’t care about knowing where I was at all hours, and what I was doing with my time when I wasn’t at home playing video games and trying to set personal records for most masturbations in a day.  So at the time, they were “my fucking lame-ass parents,” but in retrospect, they were pretty chill—as far as parents go.

I was at work, “late” on a Thursday night.  I was in charge of closing down the BK and my fat disgusting boss was in her office sitting on two chairs (one for the left cheek of her gigantic ass, and one for the right.  That bitch was disgusting.)

All I had left to do before I could leave was take out three enormous bags of trash.  I had to pass the bitch’s office on my way to take out the trash.  I looked in as I passed her office and saw that she had passed out, yet again, with a half eaten burger nestled next to her mammoth tits.  I shook my head as I noticed that part of the mayo and tomatoes from her burger had slid onto her four lane highway of a belly.  She was so pathetic that it actually made me feel sick in my stomach.  I vowed then and there to never again eat another burger.

I stopped staring at the whale and made my way outside to the dumpsters.  I had a fun game that I liked to play when I closed, and this was to throw the garbage bags as high into the air as I could, so that when they landed in the dumpster they would explode upon impact.  I was fifteen—this is what fifteen year olds do for fun before they discover how to drive and get drunk and high everyday…

Well, I took that first bag and flung it over my shoulder, as high as I could, and I launched that fucker to a new record high in the air.  It came down with a huge thud, and some of the milk shake spray pelted me in the eye.  It was marvelous.

But then I heard someone yell, “WHAT THE FUCK?” and that’s when Benny’s milk shake covered head came out of the dumpster.  He looked like a fucking skeleton rising from a coffin and the image made me shriek like a little girl.

This, in turn, made Benny laugh.  Benny, as I would later discover, liked to laugh a lot.

“Relax, little Hof, it’s just me.”  He said.

Hoffa was my family name.  My older brother, Greg, he’d been called Hof all his life, and I was therefore given no choice by my schoolmates and the community in general; outside of my parents and immediate relatives, no one called me anything but “Little Hof,” and it drove me nuts.  Christ, even the teachers at school sometimes slipped up and called me Little Hof, instead of my real first name.  I wasn’t little, I didn’t want to be little, and I therefore hated my nickname.

“Benny…what the fuck are you doing in there?” I stammered.

“Snoozing, before our big night.”

Our?  Had Benny really just used a pronoun that included me with him?  What the hell was going on here?  Before I could revel any further in this matter, Benny said the only thing that made that night possible.

“Wanna get laid?”

If you are reading this, and you are a guy, then I don’t really need to explain just how momentous Benny’s offer was to my fifteen year old self.  Go ask most any fifteen year old white kid from the suburbs, virgin or not, if they “wanna get laid” and you’ll see in their eyes the maniacal expression of a frenzied gold miner from the 1800’s.  There is nothing on Earth that simultaneously excites and terrifies a fifteen year old white kid from the suburbs like the prospect of having unfettered access to a girl’s body.

I was so busy licking my lips and picturing a girl laughing at my penis that I didn’t even answer Benny.

Benny pulled himself out of the dumpster.  “Hof, did you hear me?  Now, quick, go get me some fucking towels, I gotta clean myself off, you little turd.”

He had called me Hof.  My big brother’s name.  I was spellbound.

I shook myself into action, threw the remaining two bags of trash into the dumpster, and raced inside to get Benny some paper towels.  Shamu was still napping in her office, so I snuck into the storage closet and stole an entire ream of paper towels for Benny.  I then locked up the two front doors and clocked out.  I was back outside in less than ten minutes, but Benny was nowhere to be seen.

I was used to disappointment, but this was a pretty crushing moment.  I kicked a few loose rocks on the ground, and tried to figure out how I could turn this into a really cool story to impress my friends.

Before I could really begin obsessing about the inevitability of dying a lonely old virgin, a large yellow Buick screeched into the back alley of the BK, freezing me with its headlights.  The car stopped about five feet away from me, and Benny stuck his head out the window and yelled, “Get the fuck in, Hof, let’s go!”

I ran over to the passenger side of the car, and pulled on the door, only it wouldn’t open.  Benny let me try a few more times, laughing the whole time, and then he finally reached across the car and unlocked the door for me.  He was laughing like a maniac, and I felt like an idiot.

I slid into the comfy leather bench in the front seat and handed Benny the paper towels without a word.  In return, he handed me a splendidly rolled joint.  “Fire it up, bro.”

I fished into my pants for my favorite Zippo, probably the only thing I owned that was even remotely cool.  I lit the joint, and pulled hard, and the smoke made my lungs explode into a coughing fit that convinced me I was dying of Ebola.

I tried to look cool, but Benny was laughing even harder now.  He took the joint from my skinny small hands and inhaled like a pro.  By the time his two hits were done with, he’d already smoked more than half of the jay!

I was already so high from the first hit that I could barely think, so I faked the rest of my hits and smoked the thing Bill Clinton style.

Finally, after about twenty minutes of conversation-less driving, I realized that Benny and I were out on the highway and about three towns away from our home town, nearing the big city.

Questions I wanted to ask, but I was too afraid to:

“Where did you get this car?”

“Where are we going?”

“Why were you sleeping in a dumpster?”

“Am I really going to get laid?”

“Are we friends?”

“How does sex work?”

Questions I didn’t really care about, but I asked Benny so that he would think I was cooler than I actually was:

“So, um, our town is like, so fucked.  Don’t you think?”

“Man, did you hear about Billy Epstein? Fucking A, he got kicked out of ____ High for getting caught with a hunting knife in his locker. That’s so fucked.  Don’t you think?”

Benny varied his answers to my inane questions by either laughing hysterically or just by saying, “No shit.”  I learned, that night, that Benny is a man of few words, but many joints.

By the time we pulled off the highway and into the shittiest, least safe area of the city that I’d ever seen, Benny was sparking up joint number three.

Instead of making sure that Benny had a plan, or inquiring as to my overall safety, I instead gave into my desperate, adolescent need to be “cool.”  I therefore continued to nonchalantly ask Benny what he thought about every tedious bit of small town gossip that I could think of.

Benny interrupted me at some point and said, “If you had a little sister, would you let me fuck her?”

I didn’t have a sister, little or big, and I didn’t think that if  I did, I’d have any say as to who she did and did not fuck, but I figured this was some sort of test, so I said, “Of course, Benny.  We’re bros.”

This made Benny lose his shit.  He started laughing so loudly that spit was coming out of his mouth and a thin string of snot was flapping like bubble gum in his left nostril.  He was so dirty and punk, and this was so cool to me at the time.

Benny kept driving, and I was now staring silently out the window, stoned out of my mind.

As we drove on, the houses got shittier and shittier and the people got blacker and blacker.  I began to grow afraid.  I wasn’t racist, so much as aware of the fact that skinny little white kids from the suburbs were not supposed to be in this part of the city at this time of night.  Even cooler than cool kids like Benny were NOT supposed to be there.

Suddenly Benny pulled the car up in front of a gruesomely beat up little house on a street with no lamps.  In front of the house, four black MEN were sitting on the stoop sharing a blunt.  Upon our arrival one of them threw an empty bottle into the street and then the group cheered as it exploded.  This frightened me.  A lot.

I looked down and realized that I was still wearing my dorky collared burger king work-shirt.  Benny noticed my apprehension, and without a word, he removed his famous leather jacket and handed it to me.

All my fears evaporated as I put on Benny’s jacket, and I felt an elated tingle course through my body as the momentousness of this occasion sunk into my mind.

Benny looked me in the eyes, and asked me if I had any money he could borrow.

“I’ll pay you right back, I promise bro.“ he told me as I handed him all my money, which amounted to about thirty six dollars, a lot of money for a kid like me.

Without another word, Benny got out of the car and I followed right behind him as he made his way up to the four men on the stoop.

“Sup?”  Benny said.

No one bothered to look at us, or to answer Benny, but one of the men moved his ass just far enough over for Benny to fit one shoe on the porch step.  Benny did just this, and then pushed his way into the front door.

I stood behind him, and all four men suddenly began to laugh at me.

“Shit, Whitey, you don’t wanna stand out HERE.  Best to follow your boy.”

I caught his not-so-subtle hint, and put my foot on the empty spot on the stoop and launched myself into the house.  The men continued to laugh as I closed the front door behind me.

***

The house smelled like a symphony of pot smoke, cigarette smoke, dog shit, stale beer, and there was another smell, one that I wasn’t familiar with at the time; pussy.

Inside about ten more black guys were sitting around drinking and smoking, and one of them offered me a blunt.

The last thing in the world that I wanted at that moment was any more pot, but I wanted to fit in, so I took a hit of the big brown blunt, and the smoke hung like a fire in my throat and lungs.  I winced, I coughed, and then I realized that everyone was staring at me, only it was hard to see them through the water in my eyes.  I felt my heart beating in my right thigh, and I remember thinking that this was very odd.

By the time I could see through my eyes again, Benny wasn’t there.  I also thought this was odd—or, to be more exact, I found it devastating.

The guys in the room stopped laughing at me, and returned to their aimless drinking and smoking.  I slid into a corner of the room and tried to act nonchalant, but it was hard, because no one was talking, there was nothing to do there.

A radio was on in some other room, emitting some rap song that I wasn’t cool enough to recognize.  I pretended like I knew the song well, and tried to bob my head along with the beat, hoping this would make me look cool.

Looking back, I don’t think a single person in that house gave one fuck as to whether or not I was “cool.”  As long as I wasn’t police, they didn’t care what I was.

I sat around, like a total tool, for about twenty minutes, which felt like four hours, and finally, Benny returned to the main room, holding a young black girl’s hand.

Let me elaborate a bit.  When I say young, I mean YOUNG.  This girl was younger than me, and by a lot.  If I had to guess, which I did plenty of that night, I’d put her at twelve, tops.

“Hof, this is Kinka.  Kinka, this is Hof.”

Kinka was beautiful, in that “she’ll be hot someday” kind of way.  But the operative word here is “someday.”  At that moment, she wasn’t hot at all, she was just a kid.

Kinka feigned a smile for me, but I could tell that nothing about me interested her.  All I could think about was the fact that Kinka, at this hour, should have been asleep, or at the very least, combing a doll’s hair.  Not hanging out with a bunch of druggies and drunks, and—and Benny.

Benny thrust Kinka’s hand into mine, and nodded to the hallway.

“First door on the right.  She’s all yours.”  He said.

I stood there, frozen in fear.  This was NOT how I was supposed to lose my virginity.  This was not a cool night.  There was nothing going on in this house that I wanted to be a part of.  I didn’t express any of these thoughts to Benny or anyone else because I figured that if I did, they would all laugh at me the way my classmates had laughed at the fat kid in our school for smelling like shit one day in class.  That was NOT going to be me.

So I took Kinka’s hand and let her lead me into the back bedroom.

Kinka and I had yet to speak, and we’d actually only looked each other in the eye for about twenty seconds total at that point, but as soon as she closed the door, she pressed her body against mine and began to probe my lips with her tongue.

Something else began to throb in my right thigh, and I had no idea what to do about it.

Kinka must have felt my throb, because she next began to literally FEEL my dick, rubbing it with her little hands over my jeans.

I grew very hard, and I knew what was coming next, but I didn’t know what to do about it.

Just as I was about to explode in my pants, Kinka, a real pro, she pulled back from me, and let out an insincere giggle.

“First time.” She said this.  It was a statement, not a question.

This was more embarrassing than anything I had ever experienced.  Here was a girl, way younger than me (at fifteen anything more than two years is WAAAAY young, I tell you.), and she had more experience in the bedroom than I did, and was calling me out on it.

“No way!” I yelled.  I yelled this pretty loud, I guess, ‘cause Kinka, for a split second, seemed a little alarmed.  But then she looked me in the eyes, for the second time that evening, and she could see right through my machismo lie.

“We don’t have to if you don’t wanna, but y’all still need to pay.”  She said this with the same tone and care that a supermarket clerk says, “paper or plastic.”  All business and nothing more.

My mind was racing.  I was basically weighing the odds of three choices:  turning Kinka down, and then trying to explain it to the fourteen or fifteen other guys in the house, turning Kinka down, but getting her to pretend that we actually did it, and, lastly, but least likeable of all was the option of actually having sex with her.

Why the hell was I here?  Why the hell had Benny met me at the dumpster and asked me to accompany him?  What the hell was the point in all of this?  My desire to get laid, and my curiosity about how it all worked was strong, but some part of me, a part I never knew existed before that night, was trying to speak some sense to me, and I was surprised to find myself actually listening to this anti-virginity-losing advice.

“Kinka, look—” I began.

“—Yes or no?  I don’t got all sorts of time.”  Kinka was now sitting on the bed in the room and pretending to find interest in a loose stitch that had become unraveled from the cheap blanket on the bed.

Aside from the bed and the shitty blanket on it, there was only a small table in the other corner of the room with several empty cans of beer and an overflowing ashtray.  The combination of smells was making me seriously ill, and I finally realized, for sure, that I couldn’t finish this job.

So I said, “how much?” and she laughed.

“You gots to ask my man that.  I don’t touch nothing except you.  Get in, or get out.”

With this, she threw off her shirt and  exposed her barely feminine chest.  She had tits, for sure, but they were really small and undeveloped, and I felt like a total fucking pervert just seeing them there.  I smiled and tried to think of something polite to say, but nothing would come out.  Kinka continued to play with the loose thread, so I eventually turned my back on her and left the room.

My head was swimming.  I was stoned out of my mind, and all I could think about was how fucking weird it was for Benny to be fucking an extremely young prostitute in the ghetto.  There were a million girls closer to his age in our hometown that would be more than happy to fuck him.  So why in the hell were we here?  Nothing was adding up, and I felt weary from all of the confusion.

I got back into the living room, and Benny was nowhere to be seen.

I tried to play it cool, and pretend that I had just fucked Kinka—fucked her real good, like a man would, but no one in the room was giving me any sort of attention.  I sat there for another three minutes, eavesdropping as best I could, but nothing these guys were talking about made any sense to me.  I didn’t understand a word they were saying, it was as if they weren’t even speaking English.

Finally, I got the nerve to check outside for Benny.

I can’t even tell you the sense of paralyzing fear and panic that devoured me as I went outside only to find no Benny, and NO CAR.

“What the fuck?” I thought to myself.

One of the men on the stoop, the one who had barely moved to allow me entry to the house said, “Shit, boy, you look like you just seen a ghost.  You too old to be believing in ghosts!”

This got everyone else laughing, which added to my sense of panic, and also allowed me to feel quite humiliated.

I was trying my best not to panic, but this was all too much for me.  I was now alone, in the ghetto, surrounded by older men who were getting fucked up on all sorts of shit, and I had no money, no car, and no real idea of what the hell was happening.  I would use the word surreal to describe this moment in time, only surreal sounds far too friendly, and I wasn’t feeling ANYTHING friendly at that moment.  I only felt bad vibes and a sense of confusion that only comes about from smoking too much weed in a “foreign” environment.

Finally, their laughter died down, and I managed to eek out, “You guys seen my friend?”

No one laughed this time.  The place got real quiet all of a sudden, and then the same man who had asked me about seeing a ghost said, “You don’t got no friends here.  I think you should go.”

Things were really quiet now.  No one laughed and no one stirred.  It was just like the night before Christmas, only instead of milk and cookies and holiday cheer, this night was full of weed and beer and intimidation.

I was afraid, and feeling terribly let down.  I was now beginning to wonder if Benny wasn’t a loser, and not my hero, and I was fairly sure that Benny wasn’t really my friend.

He had smoked me out and taken me to get laid, but he had also, apparently, taken all of my money, and then left me high and dry to get my ass kicked in a strange ghetto.

I wasn‘t sure what to do, so I tried to vie for a little time.

“Hey, my ride…uh, you know when he’s supposed to come back?” I asked.

All four men stood up.  A guy in the back pulled the corner of his t-shirt towards his belly button, revealing the black handle of a gun.  The ring leader then looked me hard in the eyes and said, “Bitch, All your business is done here.  You better start walking.”

“mmmm-hmmm.” his friends agreed.

I now had two very simple options at my disposal; I could walk left, or I could walk right.  Given my lack of local ghetto geography and experience, combined with how dark that street was, both options seemed like certain death to me.

What I wanted to do was to somehow marry an odd combination of desires to bawl my eyes out and to find Benny and fucking kill him, but I knew this was out of the question.

So I pretended like everything was cool; I pulled Benny’s leather jacket tight around my body and I zipped it up as high as it would go, and then, taking a gulp, I stepped off the porch and walked down to the curb.

When I got to the street, I took another long look to my left, and then an even longer look to my right, and despite all my desires to be cool, and to be a man, I let it all go, and I began to cry.

I didn’t want those men to hear me crying, so I turned left and started marching down the street on my very own personal Cambodian Death March.

Two things kept me going as I trudged down that scary-ass street:  One was a fantasy that Benny was going to suddenly pull up next to me in that yellow Buick, joint in hand, laughing, and then he would explain to me, in between his inhalations and maniacal laughter that “it was all a joke, Hof.  We’re bros!”

The other fantasy that I entertained was even better: I was going to find Benny the next day and then expose him to everyone in our town for what he really was: A good for nothing sexual pervert who paid to have sex with little girls.

All in all, I’m lucky as hell, because after walking for only about four blocks, I spotted a 7-11 and, as luck would have it, there was a police car in the parking lot.  I knew that my parents were going to give me hell for ending up in the ghetto after midnight on a school night, but I also knew that getting hell from my parents would be way “cooler” than getting killed in the ghetto, so I walked up to their car and knocked on the window.

What’s even luckier is that I didn’t have to say a word to the cops about Benny, the whorehouse, or any of the drugs, because the cops were so busy laughing at my scared little black-leather jacket wearing white-suburban-ass that they never even bothered to ask me why I was there in the first place.  Instead, as if it were a routine, the cops took it upon themselves to offer me a ride home.  They found me so comical, in fact, that they didn’t seem notice that I was stoned out of my mind either.  They just dropped me off at my home, without a threat, a taunt, a warning, or any desire to contact my parents.

***

Here’s where things get weird(er): No one in my town ever heard from Benny or saw him again.  Suddenly, he was a ghost, and I was the last person to have seen him, only I couldn’t tell anyone this, not even my own best friend, because I was too scared of being connected to Benny, in case it somehow got back to those scary men at the house, or to my parents, or to the police.  I was so scared, as a matter of fact, that I buried his leather jacket in my backyard when my parents were at work the next day.

But the talk in town was pretty impressive.  The top two rumors involving Benny’s sudden disappearance were that he had been killed in a knife fight or that he’d killed someone else in a knife flight and fled to Mexico.  Not a single rumor involved underage girls or a stolen Buick.  Your guess is as good as mine.

Years later, with the help of the internet, I tried to find out what had happened to Benny, but all my searches wound up empty.  In an odd sort of way, I almost prefer things this way.  Now that I’m “old,” and many years have passed, my entire life consists of my wife, my children, my bills, and a few different crime-mystery TV shows that all have an acronym in their title.  It’s kind of nice to be able to look back at my youth and have a few question marks, a few mysteries; to have a real ghost story of my own.

I asked my brother about Benny one year at Thanksgiving, and all he said was, “Who?”

My parents, however, had overheard my question, and my mom began to laugh—Benny style, kind of maniacal and discomforting, all at once.

“Honey, do you really remember your imaginary friend Benny?  That’s so funny.  Your father and I were worried sick when you still mentioned him halfway into your teens.  You always had such a vivid, incredible imagination!”

My father added, “Yeah.  How come you never did anything with that?”

I had no idea what they were talking about, I didn’t remember anything about any imaginary friend, and, trust me, Benny was real.  This isn’t some stupid fucking ghost story.

“Perspective,” was what he had said. That was the word that had made Linda fall in love with him. She’d been sitting in some blue collar bar in Panama City, Florida, on a hot August evening, with her shorts and sleeves each rolled up as high and tight as possible, trying to ignore the stale cigarette air and the come hither stares.

He’d been shooting pool in the corner of the same bar, on the same hot August night, wearing a loose fitting t-shirt that revealed his thick arms, full of tattoos and scars.

Linda was eavesdropping on his conversation, mostly out of boredom.

“You see, Paully boy,” He paused, in order to wind up his shot. “Pool is all about perspective.” Nick snapped his cue and sent the blue two ball flying into the far corner pocket. “You can try to take all of your shots while standing up, with an objective, bird’s eye view of the game. But anyone who knows anything about pool, knows that your odds of success go up as you lower your eye—and your perspective—to the same level as both the ball and goal. You gotta keep your eye on the level with the goal. Then you set back—” Nick hurled the cue back behind his body, and gave it a quick snap “—And you let ‘er rip!”

With many loud, succinct clicks, balls tore across the green velvet table as one solid ball fell into each of the side pockets, and another one snapped into the far corner.

Linda by this point was impressed. She had stopped eavesdropping on these two men’s conversations and turned around on her bar stool in order to watch the men play.

Nick noticed Linda’s placid, tan thighs and her dark, intriguing eyes, so he winked at her, and then continued on with his game.

“Ya see that, Paully? Any old asshole can come into a bar and wax pool knowledge and skill, but only with age and experience comes the knowledge and perspective required to succeed in the grand circuit of Florida Bar Pool. And that’s how men like me get by in this world. That’s why men like me consistently beat young hot-headed boys like you. ‘Cause we know about the importance and impact of good, patient perspective, and that’s the only real thing you ever gotta go out and get in this world.”

Linda felt her pulse thicken, and this excited her buzz. She turned around to the bar and ordered another double gin and tonic.

“Here, let me pick that up,” Nick said. “I’m Nick, what’s your name?”

***

Nick wasn’t good at second dates. He didn’t really believe in his culture’s ideals of romantic love, so he wasn’t good at pitching a clever romantic date in order to keep a woman interested in him for longer than one night.

Luckily for Nick, an old friend of his had just gotten engaged, and Nick was invited to the engagement party.

So Nick had arranged plans with Linda to come with him to the party, as his “date.” Linda opened the door wearing a smooth, tight black skirt that dipped around her knees as she walked. She wore a tight fitting (but by no means trashy) turquoise V-Neck short sleeved shirt barely tucked into her skirt, and a lone silver amulet of some sort dangled around her neck. This amulet lured all of Nick’s attention towards her well defined neck, and the way it met her sharp, attractive face.

Nick, on the other hand, was wearing his usual attire: An old Dos Equis t-shirt he’d once won at a bar contest, a pair of black jeans cut off below his knees, and a gold hoop earring in his left ear.

On the car ride to the club, Nick and Linda shared amusing anecdotes in an attempt to breach the gap that existed between their physical attraction and the biographical details necessary to ‘get to know someone else.’

Nick was finishing a funny story about his friend George, the man who was getting engaged, as he pushed open the front door to the club in order to allow Linda to enter ahead of him.

A vaguely familiar hair band song from the eighties was screeching through a PA system as Nick and Linda entered the club. Most of the room had a blue or pink hue to it, due to the seemingly endless pipe-like fixtures of neon lighting that surrounded the walls and ceilings. In the center of the club a large stage was raised. A fairly sizeable crowd had assembled around the stage.

Nick and Linda pushed their way towards this stage, and Nick thought it a little odd to be hear someone from the crowd say, “Oh man, I wish I could lick that whipped cream!”

“I’d trade licks with her, anytime!” Someone else agreed.

The frenetic energy of the club was off the charts. Everyone seemed to be uncommonly hyper and drunk. Optimism and good spirits abounded, and only Nick and Linda wore smiles of confusion on their faces—just what kind of engagement party was this?

Suddenly one of the obviously drunken patrons of this club turned around and pointed at Nick and Linda. “Hey, everyone—Georgey Boy—Look, it’s Nick! And he’s brought another stripper for us! She’s a hotty! Check her out!”

Linda blushed, and pushed her shirt down in an attempt to accentuate the fact that she was not—and had never been—a stripper. But before Nick could begin to make sense of the situation, a few of the men had already grabbed Linda, and were thrusting her onto the stage.

Two strippers surrounded George on the stage, who was duct taped by his arms and lugs to a simple wooden chair. The strippers each wore thongs, and faint trails of sticky whipped cream surrounded their tight, bouncy breasts, some of it also clinging to the ends of their long, stringy blonde hair. These girls smiled as Linda came on stage, and they both pointed to a bowl of cherries on a stool.

Linda had no idea what was going on, but she was determined not to embarrass Nick in front of all his friends. Linda felt that this moment could serve as an example of her own charming, well defined tenacity.

George’s best man in the wedding, a fellow everyone called Harrick, was now holding Linda with one hand, and one of the strippers with his other. “Okay everyone. You know what it’s time for now! It’s time for the cherry race! Which one of these two beauties can tie a cherry stem quicker, with just their tongues? Any takers, any bets?”

The entire room began to cheer and whoop, with a few men calling out for Linda to bare it all, and strut her stuff. Just as Nick was about to climb up on the stage and pounce on Harrick, Linda put up a hand of protest and began to speak.

The entire audience hushed, waiting to hear their newly found goddess speak some words of wisdom.

“Um. Hi. I’m Linda. And I am Nick’s date. I’m not sure if I was supposed to come here tonight, but I am here, and I’m glad to meet you all.” Linda nodded towards the man tied to the chair. “I’m gonna assume that this here is George, the man of the hour. Nice to meet you George!”

George nodded back at Linda, but couldn’t speak due to a sock that was stuffed in his mouth.

“So anyway, I’m sure that I am not exactly as well qualified for this challenge as these other two ladies are, but I’m willing to give it my best shot. So if you like an underdog, I suggest you bet on me!”

The crowd let out an unanimous cheer, and several of Nick’s friends began to clasp him on the back, asking him where he’d found this amazing girl. All Nick could do was shake his head with amazement, and blush and smile.

“Look at her tie that cherry with her tongue!” Someone said.

“Holy shit, man, I’d let her tie ANYTHING of mine with that tongue!” Someone else added.

An hour later, after Nick had properly introduced Linda to George, Harrick, and a few of Nick’s other close friends, Nick and Linda had left the club to get some coffee and dessert at a local diner.

At the diner, Nick still felt a buzz from earlier, and could swear that he was hearing something like bells and whistles in his head.

Linda had already begun to fall for Nick the first time she’d met him at the pool hall. Now it was Nick’s turn to gush, and Nick felt an immense relief as he swallowed most of his misogynistic pride and began to admit to himself—and to Linda—that he was beginning to feel like beginning to fall for a girl like Linda.

***

Nick was a man of his word, and so he kept his engagement promise to Linda. But who could have imagined that Linda’s dream honeymoon would be to visit some frozen river in the woods, during the middle of winter?

Marriage was supposed to be about compromises made out of love, but this camping trip seemed less like a compromise and more like a death march.

As Nick and Linda hiked down from the road and along the trail to the river, Nick was surprised to find himself feeling peculiarly calm. His muscles began to relax as he took in the sights of snow laden branches with icicles dripping like candle wax towards the ground.

His heart grew warm even though the outside air was thin and chilled his bones. Linda shivered, so he gripped her hand and gave it a squeeze. Then he helped ease her over a tall log that was magnificently suspended in a mammoth snow drift.

Nick had spent almost all of his life in Panama City, Florida, so he’d never seen a frozen river or lake before. The phenomenon sent shivers down his spine, and he felt a weighty, intense rush of pleasure, as he gazed at this majestic view.

Nick looked at the frozen river and marveled at the thick sunburst clouds of white ice that were suspended just like ice cubes over the once free-flowing river. But what amazed him most was the haunting, distant murmur of the water that still flowed beneath the thick, frozen ice that lay suspended above it. This very still picture, when juxtaposed with the rambling, babbling noises of the river, created a swelling, psychedelic moment in time that forged a strong impression in Nick’s mind.

“What’s the matter?” Linda asked.

“Nothing,” Nick said. “Everything is perfect. Just right. I wish things could stay like this forever.”

Linda smiled as her husband squeezed her hand in his. “But if things never changed, then how would you gain perspective?”

Nick tackled her in the snow. “I’ll give you perspective,” he laughed.

***

Even though he was more than fifty years old, and had long ago traded in his motorcycle for a two door economy car, Nick still dressed like a blue-collar biker. He still wore t-shirts that weren’t even popular when they were made, years before, and he rarely remembered to trim his graying twisted facial hair.

But Nick was a “bleeding heart liberal,” and his life motto was appearances can be deceiving. To know Nick was to know that he would be forever trying to prove to both himself and to the world this oft heard, but rarely realized idiom.

Nick and Linda were in New Orleans, on a vacation and standing on a street corner a few blocks from Bourbon Street when Nick saw a girl who looked as if she were barely twelve years old, smoking a long thin cigarette. The girl was wearing a fancy white debutante dress, and she seemed to be ignoring an even younger girl, who was wearing a pink ballerina’s outfit and mimicking modern dance moves with a fire hydrant.

This fantastic sight caused Nick to feel a severe pang of pity for both girls, but also a strong contempt for his society—a society that allows for young girls to go unnoticed as they smoke cigarettes on the street—a society that lacks strong parenting and a sense of communal concern for the well being of everyone.

“Excuse me,” Nick said as he approached the smoking girl. “What’s your name?”

The girl briefly glanced up at Nick’s eyes, and then looked back down towards the ground. She blew a strong stream of smoke out of the side of her mouth, and flicked some ash onto the ground. “My Daddy tells me not to talk to strangers,” she said.

Nick smiled at the young girl, and her defiant nature. Something about her body language and sense of autonomy reminded him of himself, when he was much younger. “Well, I’m Nick,” he said as he extended his hand out for her to shake. “And I guess you don’t have to tell me anything about yourself. But, you know, I just wanted to make sure that you and your sister were, um, doing okay.” Nick felt like an old man. Here he was, trying to connect with a young girl, and everything he could think to say sounded cliché, like something his own father would have said.

The girl rolled her eyes once more, and let out a sigh, as if she were now thoroughly annoyed by Nick. “Look, Nick, is there something that I can help you with? Are you lost or something? All the beads and bars are back about two blocks behind you, on Bourbon Street.”

Nick was caught off his guard. He hadn’t expected to melt all of this girl’s icy defiance in one swift sentence, but if anything, this girl seemed to be genuinely reviled by his good humored approach to speaking with her.

“Um, Nick, Look, that lady over there—”

The girl pointed to Linda, who was waiting for Nick to return from across the street.

“—I think she’s waiting for you. And unless you really wanna conduct your business with me out here, on the street, and in front of her, I suggest you get moving.” She blew out a full plume of smoke right into Nick’s face. “Go back where you belong, old man, with the rest of the tourists.” She ended her speech with a sinister giggle.

Nick was humiliated. He looked once more at the younger girl, who had not even noticed him, and then back at the older girl. He was about to try and redeem himself, when he realized that the situation was futile. This girl wasn’t just a young girl smoking a cigarette in New Orleans; she was a young prostitute, clearly hardened beyond her years by her role in the ceaseless business of selling sin. She was an entrepreneur.

As Nick walked away from the girl, he tried to pull himself together, for Linda’s sake, and for their vacation’s sake, but it was a struggle. Nick knew that appearances could be deceiving, but he had never extended this logic to the realm of innocent looking girls.

Nick took his sunglasses from his pocket and used them to cover his eyes, so that he could hide his depression and frustration from Linda.

***

“You’re drunk, Nick. You’re fucking drunk!” Linda screamed. She was sure that she was waking up most of the other campers, but she was worried that Nick was going to make an even bigger scene.

“No…Not. Not true, not true. I swear. Swear to god. Saw a boy, naked. Standing on fucking water. Not swimming, not treading, not sinking, not floating, but fucking standing on and walking on water…jus like Jesus Fucking Christ hisself!” Nick sighed and rubbed the skin that extended from his chin to his ears.

“Honey, look, you have to understand—”

Suddenly Nick began to scream aloud: “Don’t patronize me, Linda! Don’t you ever patronize me, and I won’t condescend to you. Cause I’m a man of my honor, a man of my word. I’m a man of my…” His voice trailed off as he rubbed his eyes deep into their sockets.

Nick was so concerned with being taken seriously by his wife that he was delivering each of his sentences as though he were standing trial, and these were his closing remarks.

“Look Nick,” Linda said, “I believe in you, but I just don’t think that we need to do anything about this boy you saw. Leave him be for now. We can check back in the morning. It’s getting real late, and we’re supposed to be on a vacation; not fighting like at home. Let’s both crawl into our tent and do something.” Linda attempted to rub her hands across Nick’s broad chest, and down to his belt, but he pushed her away.

“You just don’t ever fucking believe me! Ever! I can’t believe that I married a woman who has no faith in her own husband’s perception and perspective!” Linda was sure that by now, the entire campsite was listening attentively to her husband’s loud rants.

All that Linda could think about was her husband’s obsession with perspective. It was always coming back to that damn word. It seemed as if their entire lives were always revolving around the subject of perspective.

Linda began to wonder about the decisions she’d made, and their binding effects as she crawled, alone, into the tent to sleep.

Nick stayed outside. He stared intensely into the dim remains of the camp fire and he continued to explore his new perspective on miracles and their possibilities. He was so consumed with his own drunken thoughts that he didn’t even notice Linda’s absence, nor did he hear her as she cried herself to sleep that night.

***

Nick wanted to have children of his own, someday, but he knew he was going to have to wait a little longer, now. He felt that he wasn’t ambitious or selfless enough to properly handle the ridiculous responsibility that raising a child in the 21^st century would demand.

How could he teach his child about animals at the zoo, when global warming, oil spills, and other man-made disasters were threatening to exterminate hundreds of plants and animals each year?

How could he teach his child about love and compassion, when the world was full to the brim with hatred, violence, confusion, and enmity?

How could he possibly prevent his own son or daughter from making the same mistakes as he had?

What about that little girl in New Orleans and her little sister with the ballerina outfit? How could he stop his own kids from smoking cigarettes, abusing drugs, giving into senseless violence? How had he stopped himself?

Nick felt as though his lifetime had given him more than enough of what he liked to call “fucked up shit,” but his mind could barely imagine how much more fucked up the same old shit could get in the next twenty years. Could he really bring a child into a culture and a world that Nick barely understood himself?

But what could Nick do? He was a humanitarian living in an inhumane society—a society that feared more than anything else the dangers of tolerance, compassion, sharing, and love. Nick lived in a society dedicated to the principles of individuality and competition.

Nick felt trapped by everything but Linda and he wished he could tell her this. He wished he knew where to write her, but he’d burned that bridge, and no apology would ever undo the past.

Nick felt like he had finally grown up, because he now knew for certain that he had no agency for social change, and he had wasted his formative years neglecting the only agency for change that he had; the ability to change himself.

But he also knew that he had the perspective it took to see the world for what it really is: an illusion of order, an illusion created to keep most people from having to face their deepest and darkest perceptive hunches.

Nick sometimes felt as if he were cursed with the ability to empathize with others’ pain and misery. Nick could feel the post man wince as he repeated the same meaningless task for hours each day, just as Nick could see the resentment the bartender felt as he served another unhappy patron a drink that was designed to keep the blues coming, not to take them away.

But Nick wasn’t upset with the world so much as he was upset with himself. Because Nick knew that the only thing he wanted, and the only thing he ever had that was worth keeping was Linda, and now she was gone.

Nick had lived his life thinking all along that it was a journey, with no obvious destination to strive for. But here he was, unable to sleep more than a few hours a night, because he was consumed with regret and loneliness. Nick turned over one more time in bed, hoping that this new position would allow his mind to finally rest. It didn’t work, he instead rued the fact that no amount of perspective could ever prepare you for everything that lay in wait for you. Nick got out of bed and walked to the bathroom. He didn’t bother to turn on the lights because he knew where everything was.

“I dunno, we still got half an ounce hidden in the tire hub, and we could always smoke that if we get too bored,” Tommy said from the backseat.

Without a word, Keero took his eyes off the road and shared a glance with Jeff, concerning the danger of taking any of Tommy’s advice.

Jeff, who was riding shotgun, took Keero’s hint and said “I dunno, man, we’re in the deep, deep south, and I don’t think that it’s a good idea to get high and risk running into any of the backwoods hicks that live out here. You never know what kind of dirty cop or vengeful hick you’re gonna run into!” All three laughed.

“Yeah, Tommy, just cause you have nothing to fear, doesn’t mean that the rest of us can shrug off our consciences and get blazed. I’m half-Jewish, my full name is Keerian Schwartzberg, and Jeff here, well, Jeff is fucking openly gay. You really think we’re ready to meet some real good ‘ol boys and handle them, let alone while we’re high?” Everyone in the car laughed at Keero’s sarcastic, but eerily truthful wisdom.

Just as Keero was drifting off into reveries of the three boys’ spring break-road trip extravaganza, a clunking noise from the engine brought his brain back to reality. Keero looked down at his gas gauge, and to his surprise, he realized that he only had enough gas left in the tank to go at most about five more miles. Keero began to accept the absurd, newly developing situation: He was one of three boys in a car that was quickly running out of gas, driving from New Orleans back to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at 2:36 am on a Sunday night, currently somewhere North of Biloxi, Mississippi, nowhere near any open gas station.

“Umm…guys, I, uh, don’t wanna upset or scare anyone, but, well, we’re running out of gas,” Keero said. “And quickly, at that.”

Neither Tommy nor Jeff could muster the strength to share an optimistic or pessimistic comment of choice, as the car clunked a second time, this time much louder. Before Keero could decide what action to take next, the car lurched and throttled, and then the engine cut out. Keero was given barely enough time to guide the car off the two lane highway.

As the three boys got out of Keero’s Silver 1986 Chevrolet piece de mierde, they were shocked by the frigid windy weather of that March night in Mississippi. They also quickly took a disliking to the soft wet muddy swampland that the car and their feet were now sinking into.

“Fuck!” Tommy yelled into the night. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuckin’ fuckball, fuck, fuck FUCK!!!!” He yelled some more.

“Shut the fuck up!” Jeff intervened. “Dude, we’re in like a foreign fucking country, so for once, please don’t act like a little shit. We have to keep our heads cool.” Jeff looked at Keero with a pleading appeal. “Ok, so Keero, what do we do?”

Tommy and Jeff were both looking to Keero with eager hope that he could somehow remedy this ugly situation. Keero began to think, and all the while he mindlessly smoked a Camel cigarette as if in an attempt to thwart off the cold night air, and whatever lay hidden in the sky’s thick veil.

Surrounding the boys were many thin telephone pole shaped trees that stretched out in every direction along the sides of the road, eventually towering and fading into the dark sky, far above their heads. There were no lights around for miles, not even a dismal star in the sky from which to draw any hope or salvation. Visibility was limited by a solid black and faceless fog that seemed to encircle the three boys and their car. Despite their young age and good health, all three felt scared and threatened by the natural conditions of the land.

As the boys began to discuss their best plan of action, they heard a distant humming, and then saw two dim headlights from a car coming towards them from the opposite direction.

“We’re saved!” Jeff exclaimed with glee.

“Dude, we’re not fucking saved…I don’t think this is the right place, nor the right time of night for us to ask someone for help,” Keero said.

Tommy immediately jumped into the conversation. “I think we should take whatever fucking help we can get. It’s cold as hell here, and I’m not walking through these fucking backwoods to look for gas. I’m flagging this fucking Jim-Bob-Joe down, and I’m sure he’ll help us.” Tommy looked his friends right in their eyes, in order to see if they were “chicken” or not.

Keero certainly didn’t feel chicken; he only felt half cool and half Jewish, but this second half made him think about stereotypical films about the South. He was picturing stereotypical films that portray events within the first five minutes of truly nasty things happening to minorities. Things like a Jew and a black guy getting shot in the head by Mississippi policemen just for being in the South. Jeff remained more optimistic, but all the while he knew that his short spiky green and orange hair, tongue ring, nose ring, multiple ear rings, lip ring, and eye-brow piercing couldn’t exactly help him to blend in with the culture of the deep south.

               Without waiting for consensus, Tommy flagged down the car, and the three immediately began to realize that they might have made a mistake.  Of all the vehicles that Tommy could have chosen to flag down, he had chosen a large red pick up truck with confederate flags attached to its side mirrors.  

               The car spit up wet mud as it made a u-turn and then cruised to a stop in front of Keero’s car.  The boys shared glances as they simultaneously read the bumper sticker that said, “Keep honking, I'm reloading."  The two doors of the truck flew open and two very large men stepped out.  Each of the men quickly turned on their own heavy mag-light flashlights, which created a blinding swirl of light that hurt to look at, but was also nearly impossible to ignore.  

               “Howdy,” said the blinding sun to the left.  “What y’all doin out here in this here cold?”

               “Yeah,” the right swirl continued, “I reckon it’s a migh-T cold night for this timea year!  But not too cold for y’all from Penn-seel-van-ya!”  The men had to be literate, for they had obviously correctly read and recognized the state that was written on Keero’s Chevrolet’s license plate as they had pulled up.

               Before any of the boys could come up with something clever to say, the two approaching lights beamed towards the ground and revealed the site of two fully red-necked, hill-billy hat wearing, over-weight, and over-all wearing men quaking with laughter at their own jokes.  Keero quickly observed that the heavier and dumber looking man on the left was holding a rifle across the coat pockets of his hunting jacket.

               “What you all doing here?” The man on the right looked at Keero while he asked the question, but then he shined his flashlight into the eyes of Tommy and Jeff, so as to include everyone in the conversation.

               Tommy decided someone should speak, and so he said the first thing that came to mind.  “We just left mutha-fuckin’ New Orleans after our Spring Break trip, and man, we’re all headed home, all the way up to Penn, uh, P.A.!  But as you can tell, our car is pulled over here, cause we’re so dazed from the whole trip, that we didn’t realize we were so low on gas, that we ran out—” Tommy could have continued on forever, had the man on the left not interrupted him. 

               “—Now that’s a mighty poor li’l predicetement y’all got yourself into!”  Keero noticed that the man pronounced every letter of the word predicament as though each letter were actually an individual syllable.

               The man continued, “Now me and Jim-Bob over here, we can help you out jus fine, so you aint likely to run into any trouble.  Me and Jim-Bob, oh, pardon, allow me to introduce myself, I’m Randall S. Plumkin, great grandson of the famous confederate rebel Guster Van Heeblen of Plumkin.  He was one of the first Germans to come down to the South, and his cousin who stayed behind in Germany, well she ended up giving birth to one Ms. Eva Braun!”  Randall’s smile competed with the bright shine of his mag-light as he spoke of his genealogy.

               Jeff, keeping his eyes stiffly aimed at the rifle, began to edge his way to Keero’s car.

               “Hey!” Jim-Bob yelled out.  “Pardner, where ya going?” the words seemed kind, but were spoken plainly, and Jim-Bob wasn’t smiling anymore.

               Jeff continued to walk away.

               Jim-Bob was kind enough to repeat his question, “I said, where ya goin, faggot?” Randall laughed, but Jim-Bob’s face remained stoic.

               Jeff spun around and said, “What the fuck did you call me?” and then in a voice he thought was under his breath, he added, “Ya fucking hick?”

               Jim-Bob looked stunned, and Randall stopped laughing.  Randall’s plump belly wiggled as he cocked his rifle.

               “Now just what the fuck did that faggot say?” Randall asked.  Randall’s question was directed to no one in particular.  He spoke in a thunderous rage to the dark starless sky, to the ground that stunk of swamp water, and to the rotting leaves at his feet. 

               Only the crickets could be heard as no one attempted to answer Randall’s query.  Jeff continued to stare at Jim-Bob with disgust.

               “Now I’d say that’s mighty disrespectful of ya to walk away on somun that’s tryin to help ya, and then to not even have them the decen-cee to turn around when asked what yer walkin way fer!”  Randall said.

               “Come ere!” Randall pointed at Jeff.

               Jeff walked straight up to Randall’s finger without uttering a word or moving his eyes away from Jim-Bob’s face.  Jeff could smell the thick aroma of cheap beer emanating from Randall’s lips, as he stood at about an arm’s length away.

               Keero had temporarily slipped into a state of apathy, but he suddenly snapped out of it, and realized that smart, rational, and intelligent action was immediately required in order to prevent a very ugly scene.  

               “Listen, guys, I think that this is all a very big, and unfortunate, misunderstanding.  I think, what my friend Jeff- that’s him.” Keero pointed his finger at Jeff as walked up to stand by his side.  “Jeff is just really-”

               Just then, two headlights appeared down the road.  The three boys were relieved and elated as the car turned out to be a Mississippi State Police car.  The car turned around and parked behind Keero’s car.  They were saved.

               The car’s lights blinked red and blue, but the sirens were off.  The image created a disorienting and strange atmosphere in the dark night.  Only Keero noticed that as the officer stepped out of the car, Jim-Bob made no effort to hide his rifle.

               Officer Bradley, local shady cop at large, stepped out of his car and felt his thick boots slide into the mud beneath his feet.  As he approached the five men, he acknowledged Jim-Bob and Randall by taking off his hat and nodding at them.  The two men returned this salutation by smiling and nodding as well.  Keero made his best attempt to appear friendly, considerate, and not Jewish for the officer.  Jeff remained where he stood, still keeping his entire focus on Jim-Bob’s plump face.  Tommy’s focus was on worrying about the stash of pot in the back of the tire hub.

               “Hello, y’all,” the officer said.  “What y’all doing out here tonight?  Any problems?”  As he asked this final question, he looked at Jim-Bob and Randall, with a mischievous grin.

               “Good evening Officer Bradley,” the two hicks said in their best schoolboy voices.  

               Randall continued, “No, there’s no problem, just that these fella’s here seemed to be in trouble, and we were gonna help them.”

               “Were you going to help them, with that gun?” As Officer Bradley asked Jim-Bob this simple question, Keero, Tommy, and even Jeff felt a sense of relief.

               “Oh, no sir, I just always carry Betty around for protection.  Ya never know who or what the hell yer gonna run into at this time of night on these here roads, ya know?”  Jim-Bob had looked directly into Jeff’s sparkling blue eyes as he said the word what.

               “Well, what seems to be the problem for ya,” the officer asked Keero.

               “Oh, well, you see sir, I mean, um, officer, you see, our car has run out of gas, and we don’t know where the nearest station that’s gonna be open is,” Keero replied.

               “I see, well, I reckon I can help y’all.  Course it is standard procedure here in the South to introduce ourselves to strangers.  I’m Officer Bradley, and I see you’ve already become acquainted with young Jim-Bob and Randall over here…”

               “Hi, Officer Bradley.  Pleased to meet you.  I’m,” Keero paused before introducing himself.  The dilemma of being half Jewish was still beating throughout Keero’s mind.  While Keero realized that Officer Bradley was an officer of the law, he still feared his anti-Semitic stereotype of Southerners, so he decided to lie.  “I’m John, John White.  And these are my friends, Jeff Strykinski and Tommy McGee.”  

               “Well John, what say we have a little look-see at your vehicle here.”  Jim-Bob and Randall both chuckled.  Officer Bradley shot them a ‘shut-the-fuck-up’ look that worked like clockwork.  Keero was only now beginning to notice the fact that a subtle conversation, one without words, was taking place between the two hicks and Officer Bradley.  The three were trying to say something with only the use of their eyes and body language; only Keero couldn’t interpret their ape-like language.

               The fear that had been subsiding in each of the boy’s minds began to rise again as the officer walked towards the vehicle.  There was nothing to hide at this point, except a lot of weed and Keero’s fib about his real name.  But this was a lot to hide from a police officer.

               Officer Bradley first inspected the dashboard and assessed that the car was indeed out of gas.  He then walked back to his car, telling the boy’s that he would radio in for help.  

               Officer Bradley knew that he could count on Jim-Bob and Randall to help him find probable cause to search these boys and their car, but he had to leave the scene to let them do their dirty work.  But before either Jim-Bob or Randall could begin to perform any mischief, Officer Bradley leaned his head out of his car window and said to Keero, “Son, I’ll need to see your driver’s license.  Why don’t you come over here?”

               Keero offered his friends a look of deep apology for lying about his name, withdrew his driver’s license from his wallet, and trudged towards Officer Bradley’s car.

               Randall then took it upon himself to walk over to Keero’s car and he began to examine the car for himself, as if he didn’t trust Officer Bradley’s judgment of the gas gauge.  Randall next walked to the side of the car, made a clandestine motion with his right hand, near the tire, and then Jeff clearly heard the words “Oopsie doozy” slowly dribble out of Jim-Bob’s beer soaked lips.   

               Tommy looked ready to explode as he heard the sound of air rushing from the left-rear tire of the car and into the still Mississippi night.

               “What the FUCK did you do that for?” Tommy yelled at Randall.

               Officer Bradley, alone, returned to the scene.  “Look’s like y’all are in a bit of trouble, aint ya?” He said to Tommy and Jeff.  Your friend John, he ain’t no John.  Seems his real name is Keerian.  Now why d’yall think he decided to lie to me?  Y’all got something to hide?” 

               “You better check out the tire, I think it’s flat, sir,” Jim-Bob interjected with a smile.

               “Now what’s this?” Officer Bradley said.  Officer Bradley bent down to inspect the tire, and then looked up at Jim-Bob with a smile.  “Open the trunk, we’ll change this tire in a jiffy.”  Officer Bradley felt a surge of power as he dictated his authority.

               These last three words sent daggers into the hearts of Tommy and Jeff, for they knew all too well what Officer Bradley would find if he checked the inner-tire hub of the trunk:  About an ounce of fresh, Pennsylvania Marijuana in a zip lock bag, duct-taped to the tire hub.

               Tommy gasped as Officer Bradley began to remove bags from the trunk of the car.  Officer Bradley wore an ear-to-ear grin that stretched across his leathery, taut face.  Tommy felt defeated.  It would now be only a matter of minutes before the boys would be getting handcuffed and read their rights.

               Jeff had also given up any hope of avoiding arrest when a crisp, shrill electronic ring struck through the thin night air.  Jeff pulled a small Nokia phone from his pocket and pressed the talk key.  “Hello?” Jeff said.  “Oh, hi Mom, how are you?”  Jeff was suddenly smiling. 

               As Jeff talked to his mother, Officer Bradley continued to remove bags from the trunk and to carelessly toss them into the wet, clay-like mud on the ground.

               “Mom,” Jeff continued, “what does the law say about detaining individuals without reading them their Miranda rights?”  Officer Bradley stopped, mid-search, and looked up at Jeff for the first time since the phone had rung.  Jeff continued, “I mean, a cop can’t just put you in the back of his car, and then search your trunk if your car is broken down, or out of gas…can he?”  Jeff seemed to be taking control of the situation. 

               “Now just calm down there, son,” Officer Bradley said.  He had walked away from the trunk at this point, but Jim-Bob had taken over things, and was about to begin unscrewing the spare tire compartments cover.  

               Jeff quickly continued the conversation; “and if that stranger were to find something illegal, it would have to be suppressed in a court of law, even though he had broken the law, because it was illegally obtained, you know, without a search warrant or probable cause, right?”  Jeff was now beaming from ear to ear as he danced around and continued to talk into his cell phone.  “Cause even joking about your name doesn’t give an officer probable cause, right?”  

               Officer Bradley quickly pulled Jim-Bob away from the car, and shot Randall a brutal look of disgust.  He turned his attention to Jeff and said, “Listen, young man, there’s no need to get anyone else involved in this, please get off the phone.”

               Jeff politely smiled at Officer Bradley and then said, “No, it’s cool, it’s just my mom, she’s a lawyer.  She’s the assistant D.A. for San Francisco County; she’s a real big shot!  Anyway, I believe that you may be violating my rights, so I’m consulting her, as my attorney, and I believe that the constitution, even the Mississippi constitution, grants me that right.”

               Jeff resumed his conversation with his mother.  “Okay Mom, yeah, that’s B-R-A-D-L-E-Y, I believe.  Yeah, you call me right back, and we’ll talk more, okay?”  With this final statement, Jeff put away his phone and looked Officer Bradley directly in the eyes.  “My mother would like to have a talk with you before you take any further action, oh, and she’s calling her friend in the Department of Justice to inspect your credentials.”

               Officer Bradley shuddered and then shot an angry look at his two accomplices.  “Listen, Jim-Bob, Randall, you two get the hell out of here, this is official police business now,” Officer Bradley said through clenched teeth.

               Jim-Bob and Randall nearly tripped over themselves as they scrambled back to their truck.  After they had left, Officer Bradley let Keero out of the back of his car.  He didn’t apologize to any of them, nor did he bother to make any eye contact as he gruffly told them to “stay out of trouble.”  

               The boys laughed aloud as Officer Bradley’s car sped away, and then they collectively sighed with relief as they watched his tail lights fade away into the veil of fog that continued to haunt the dark night.

               Tommy looked at Jeff and said, “Holy Fucking Shit, how the fuck did you get your fucking mom to call you at this hour!  That was fucking amazing!!!”

Keero clandestinely reached into his pocket. Suddenly, Jeff’s cell phone rang again. “Hello?” Jeff asked with a knowing smile.

Keero pulled a small cell phone out of his pocket, and said “Hi, Jeff, it’s your fucking mom, now keep a cool face, and pretend that I’m a big shot lawyer, like a D.A. from California or something, and let’s get the fuck out of the deep south!

It would be quite an understatement to say that I am not a big fan of cats, but it would also be unfair to say that I hate cats; my feelings for felines lies somewhere in between these two emotions. But it is more than fair to say that I do hate the smell of cat urine. It is not just a bad smell, but I find that it actually pierces my lungs, and I liken it to stale second hand tobacco smoke, in so far as its ability to cause permanent damage to the human body.

The first thing I noticed upon my entry into the preacher’s apartment was the single most wretchedly suffocating stench of cat urine that I have ever encountered.

The second thing I noticed was the preacher himself, sitting in a wheelchair and smiling. I didn’t know a whole lot about the preacher. Actually, I knew four things about the preacher. I knew that he was an ordained Methodist preacher; I knew that he had lost the ability to walk (but I did not know how); I knew that his wife had a malignant brain tumor; and I knew that my friend was screwing his wife behind his back.

The preacher seemed like a really nice guy, which made me feel extra bad about the fact that for months on end now, my friend had been taking his wife to cheap motel rooms in the seediest sections of town in order to screw her cancer-ridden brains out.

The preacher’s wife had recently flown to Philadelphia to seek medical attention in a last chance effort to rid her of the malignant tumor. The preacher had finally grown tired of the separation, and booked a flight to Philadelphia to comfort his wife.

My role in the operation was simple. My friend was dirt broke, and loved the preacher’s wife, so he had agreed to help her paraplegic husband move out of their decrepit apartment, and to give him a ride to the airport. My friend had no car, and so he had enlisted me to drive the preacher to the airport.

Prior to my arrival at the preacher’s apartment, my understanding was that the preacher had already packed up as many of his belongings as he could manage to do from his wheelchair, and all that was supposedly left for me to do was to put his bags, his wheelchair, and his two sedated cats into my trunk, and then to drive him to the airport.

The preacher’s apartment was intolerably dirty. Flakes of dried paint seemed to float about in the air like snowflakes, and the carpet was stained with cat piss, dried catsup, and soy sauce and they combined to create a disorienting pattern that resembled art from the abstract expressionism movement. But the aesthetic dilapidation of the apartment was not nearly as unnerving as my visceral reaction to the stench of cat urine.

Even in some parallel universe wherein the free market had dictated a profit to be made from producing and bottling cat urine, I somehow doubt that any sort of cat urine factory could have manufactured a smell as powerful as the scent of the preacher’s apartment.

My best theory in regards to how the preacher’s apartment could smell so awful was that it was due to a perfect combination of the preacher’s inability to raise himself out of a wheelchair to do any rudimentary housekeeping, the fact that the apartment was air tight with nary a window opened, and the fact that the apartment was barely large enough to fit one human being, let alone two adults and two cats.

As my nostrils flared from the assault of the ammonia odor, I looked around the apartment and was surprised to see two cats darting around the apartment, un-sedated and unpacked. These two animals seemed to be playing a game that involved a dried-out cat turd and a long string of used dental floss.

I realized then and there that I had been deceived by my friend; I had not just been summoned to drive the preacher and his two drugged cats to the airport, I had unwillingly been enlisted to help prepare the two cats for airline travel.

Another thing that I do not like about most pet cats is the fact that they are fiercely independent, and I therefore see no point in attempting to domesticate them. It has always seemed quite apt to me that cats are relatives of the mighty lion, and they therefore have no interest in being ruled by any other animal in our kingdom, and this includes us human folk.

The preacher’s two cats were no exception to this feline stereotype of mine. The preacher pointed at one of the cats—the black one—and he called it some name that I do not remember. The preacher grinned and said, “He’s going to be the more difficult one to drug.” I decided then and there to drug that cat first, because I’ve always been a big fan of frontloading hard work.

I could tell by the preacher’s instruction that he assumed that my friend had told me that I was going to be helping the preacher to drug his two cats. Like I said, the preacher seemed like a really nice guy, so I didn’t have it in me to tell him what I thought about cats, or the idea of having to do anything interactive with either of his cats.

Breathing heavily through my mouth, I approached the task of holding the cat down with the same will power that I use to convince myself to wake up on time for work each morning.

Despite my dislike for cats, I appreciate all living things, and I don’t have a cruel bone in my body. This trait of mine made it quite hard for me to get into the idea of attempting to pin a cat in place in order for someone else to inject it in the neck with a man-made sedative.

Glancing at my wrist watch, I realized that the three of us had less than half an hour to put down the two cats, pack them in their bags, and get the preacher to the airport in order for him to make his flight.

The black cat squirmed and wriggled with great force as I attempted to hold it in place. It hissed and moaned and threw its claws at me, and even though I think it’s unnatural and somewhat cruel to ‘de-claw’ a cat, I was okay with the idea of ‘de-clawing’ after the damn thing drew blood from my left wrist as my friend successfully squeezed the syringe into the cat’s neck.

The preacher took his thick glasses from his face and wiped them in his shirt, but the effort did very little to remove the thick crusty film that seemed to cover the lenses. I noticed that without his glasses on, he looked a lot younger. The preacher caught me staring at him, and he made a face that conveyed to me that he had felt some sort of intense, empathetic moment of despair with his cat.

I wanted to explain to the preacher that this was no fun for me either, so I held up my bleeding wrist and asked the preacher if he had any paper towels.

“Oh, man, that’s a zinger!” he exclaimed. “There might be some towels in the kitchen.”

I walked into the kitchen and was assaulted by a new odor; the mixture of cat urine, cat feces from an over-filled litter box, and the not-so-faint odor of six trash bags full of rotting food. I doubled over from the sickening, gaseous stench, and I forgot all about my quest for paper towels as I quickly rushed out of the kitchen to return to the living room.

The second cat, the so-called “friendlier one,” was smaller than the black cat. It was mostly white, but it also had some odd splotches of orange hair mixed in. This cat was thinner than the other one, with well defined ribs. It made me wonder if the other cat was eating its portion of their shared meals. The “friendly cat” was now hiding underneath a plush armchair in the far corner of the living room, hissing at my friend, who was bent over on the floor, making odd noises and calling for the “kitty” to come out and play.

Another reason I think that cats make for lousy pets is that they are far from stupid, which means that they cannot be trained very well. I don’t think that cats cannot learn their own name, nor do I think that they are incapable of following directions and taking orders. I think that they actually understand all of these things, and that they are smart enough to realize that if they don’t let on to us humans of their cognizance, then they won’t lose any of their autonomy, and they won’t end up doing stupid tricks for our amusement, like most dogs do.

My friend remained in the prone position, calling out to the second kitty. I turned my attention to the black cat, which had obviously been overpowered by the sedatives, for he had curled himself up on a spot not too far from the preacher’s wheelchair to take a nap. The preacher noticed my appreciation for the sleeping cat, and smiled at me.

“So, uh, you’re a preacher?” I figured that this was a good time for small talk, for small talk could perhaps enable me to build up enough rapport with the preacher to ask him a few of the burning questions in my mind; namely: if you are moving out of the apartment, for good, then why is the place a total mess, why do you not have any boxes packed, and why is the room still full of furniture?

“Oh yes I am, indeed!” He replied. “I graduated from seminary school nearly five years ago.” His smile was authentic, but it also seemed dull and unintelligent. He seemed like the kind of guy that a woman could easily cuckold. This made me feel even worse for him.

“Well, that’s cool. Where do you, um, like, preach?” I had never in my life been to a church, and I had absolutely no clue what a preacher really did. I figured that they probably preached, which is a verb that means to deliver, advocate, or conduct a sermon. I wasn’t even sure what the difference was between a priest and a preacher. I only knew that my friend had referred to him as a preacher, and not a priest.

“Oh, I don’t actually work as a preacher. I just got the degree. When Eleanor and I were married, I was working as a video store manager. But then when God took away the use of my legs, I figured that I would devote my life to God. So we moved to Houston, where I got the seminary degree. But then we moved up here to Portland because Eleanor was offered a job that could support the two of us. After we moved here, I applied to a few church placement programs, but they didn’t hire me.” He told stories like Forrest Gump; straightforward, without a sense of irony, and they always ended with a smile and a nod of the head.

While the preacher had turned to face me and answer my question, my friend had managed to grab the second cat by its paws and forcibly drag it along the rug and out from underneath the armchair. The cat had scowled and shrieked during this last move, but the preacher had failed to notice, and now my friend was pressing the cat’s left ear into the ground, quite hard, and forcing the syringe into its neck. I felt pretty bad at the blatant animal abuse, but I was also happy to see that the task had been successfully completed without my help.

Now that the two cats had been successfully sedated, my friend and I had to pick them up and put them in their “traveler’s bag” for the trip on the airplane. I felt pretty bad about tossing two sleeping mammals into a black duffel bag with a few air holes.

I began to hum out loud—which is what I do whenever I’m nervous—and I think my nervousness was arising from the fact that I was privy to the knowledge that my own friend had been screwing this kind preacher’s wife behind his back. I mean, the poor guy was a paraplegic who had devoted his life to God, and so my sense of guilt began to fester.

I noticed that my forehead was beginning to ache, and I was starting to feel dizzy, and whether or not these were symptoms of my guilt, or symptoms of the choking aroma of cat urine, I couldn’t be sure. All I knew was that I needed to get the hell out of that house.

I stopped humming and said, “Okay, well, the cats are packed, and your plane leaves really soon…so…everyone ready to go?” I was trying to sound casual, but I think the tone of my voice was clear: I was ready to leave, and I wanted to leave now.

“Oh, gosh,” the preacher said, “I guess we just need to grab my two bags from the back room, and then get everything into your car!”

Without a word my friend jogged into the back room and returned with two gigantic duffel bags that were long enough to carry a set of skis. They looked extremely heavy, and they seemed to be larger than my trunk.

My sense of dizziness returned. There was simply no way that the three of us, those two bags, the wheelchair, and the two cats were going to fit in my two-door Hyundai. I shot my friend a look that tried to communicate, “Hate is a strong word, and I think that I may hate you after this.”

My friend pretended not to notice my look, and instead he asked me for the keys to my car. Feeling utterly defeated at this point, I tossed him my keys, and I watched him lumber towards the front door with the two gigantic duffel bags.

I looked back at the preacher, in order to suggest that he grab “the cat bag” and we follow my friend.

But before I could speak, the preacher looked me in my eyes, and with a sense of candid kindness said, “Hey, I really want to thank you for all of your help. I’ve never met you before and you took the time out of your life to help a total stranger during a time of crisis. You are obviously a good person, and you have made my life easier through the kindness of your actions. I have no money to offer you for your time and trouble, but I’d like to offer you anything from my home that I am not taking with me to Philadelphia.”

“Oh, no, really, I am fine, I am just…” I was trying to politely refuse his offer, but just as I had begun to stammer a denial, I noticed a beautiful painting hanging in the corner of the apartment. The painting was a barren tree, set against a pale yellow sunset. The painting was simple and unremarkable, and those very traits made the painting remarkable to me.

The preacher smiled, and turned his chair around to face the painting. “Do you like that painting?” he asked. “I got it at a garage sale, the same day I found out that Eleanor was screwing some asshole behind my crippled back.” The painting suddenly became even more remarkable to me.

The preacher did not turn back around to face me, and continued to stare at the painting. “I never did find out who the asshole is, but I know for a fact that Eleanor was screwing him up until her very last day here in Portland, and I know for a fact that he is someone I’ve met, because when I confronted her about it, and asked her who it was, she refused to tell me, which she would only do if I knew the asshole.”

I felt like the preacher wanted me to respond to his sermon, so I asked him, “So do you want to know who is screwing your wife, or do you simply wish to leave town, and leave it all behind you?”

The preacher wheeled himself over to the painting, and removed it from the wall. He then spun around and wheeled his way over to me, and handed me the painting. Our eyes locked for the third time that evening, only now, his expression was not one of candor, or kindness, nor one of dull, unintelligence. Forrest Gump had turned into Dirty Harry.

“You know him?” he asked.

Before I could answer, the front door flew open, and my friend came back into the house. The preacher’s face reverted back to a portrait of innocence, and he smiled at my friend. “Did you get the bags in the car?”

My friend returned the smile, “Yep! And we still got plenty of room for you, the wheelchair, and the cats!” He then grabbed the bag full of cats, and once again left out through the front door.

The preacher made no delay in returning to our conversation. “It matters not if I know who the man is. It only matters to me that if Eleanor survives this bout with cancer, that she either asks me for a divorce, or that she promises never to commit adultery again. I am not a fool. I understand that when the two of us agreed to stay together in sickness and in health, that the thought of lower paralysis never really entered her mind. While I am still a man, genetically, physically, I can no longer perform one of my manly roles in the context of a marriage, and this is probably very difficult for Eleanor to bear. But I expect someone who loves me to be honest, and I therefore remain angered by the fact that she waited until I confronted her to admit her infidelity.”

I nodded in agreement, and in an attempt to change the subject, I thanked the preacher for the “interesting” painting.

A smile returned to his face. “Don’t mention it,” he said. “Like I said, you are a good person, and you deserve something in return for your help. It was especially kind of you to help out with the cats, given your obvious distaste for them.”

Before I had time to open my mouth and compose a lie about how I really liked cats, and about how his impression could not have been further from the truth, the door reopened, and my friend motioned for the two of us to follow him back to the car.

***

It took about five minutes for us to lift the preacher’s limp body out of the chair and to fix him into place in the front seat of my car, and then it took another ten minutes to figure out how to successfully fold up his chair and maneuver it like a Tetris block into the back of the car. Somehow, though, we did manage to fit everything in my car, and as I turned on the car, I noticed that we were leaving the house with just barely enough time to get the preacher and his bags to the airport curb, where I was informed that some airline professional would meet him in order to assist him to his flight.

I drove us as quickly as I could to the airport, making sure to take the turns slowly, just to be sure that the cats weren’t moving around and hitting each other in their duffel bag. Unfortunately for me, my friend is a total idiot, and he had mistakenly only given half the recommended dose to each of the cats, and so while they were groggy, they were not fully unconscious, and both of them managed to piss all over the bag, which in turn soaked into the left rear car seat.

After we dumped the preacher and his bags at the curb, my friend moved back into the front seat and lit a cigarette. I was surprised to discover that I did, indeed, prefer the stench of his second hand tobacco smoke to the poignant odor of cat urine.

As we drove, my friend thanked me several times for all of my help. I told him about the gift of the painting, but I left out the conversation about infidelity. My friend had no morals and could not have cared any less about the preacher or the preacher’s feelings. All he cared about was his love for Eleanor, smoking cigarettes, and having a good time in life.

I dropped my friend off at his apartment, and I could barely make eye contact with him as he thanked me one more time, and said goodnight. As I drove home, alone for the first time that evening, I noticed that my hands were trembling.

I was upset by the fact that I was friends with the kind of person who could screw the cancer-ridden wife of a paraplegic preacher. I was further pissed off that this same friend could then quite duplicitously help said preacher move across the country to be with his sick wife. But most of all, I was irate at the seemingly unfair fact that it was I, and not my friend, who had been punished during this operation with the powerful, lingering stench of cat urine in my car.

Years later, I can now find some humorous elements in this story when I tell it, and this is mostly due to the facts that Eleanor survived her bout with cancer, the Preacher eventually filed for a divorce, and my friend ended up renewing his love affair with the Eleanor, therein proving some sort of genuine affection for the woman, which somehow helps me to validate his end of the adultery.

But the one thing that amazes me the most about this ordeal is that while those three people have moved on completely, and have no scars to bear, I, the innocent bystander who was simply asked to drive some preacher to an airport, I still own that same, shitty Hyundai, and no matter how many times I have tried, I cannot rid the car of the pungent, sickening scent of cat urine. But I still can’t say that I hate cats.

“You see, Sarah, It’s kind of like a colony of ants. You know how a colony of ants works?” Joe hesitated a brief moment, but mostly for a dramatic effect. He knew that Sarah didn’t know anything about ant colonies, and neither did he. But he had just failed a test on ant colonies in biology class, so he felt like he could probably fake some knowledge, and he therefore continued.

“You see, in a colony of ants, especially red ants, there is one ant that tries to give all of the other ants orders to carry out, and well, sometimes these ants get sidetracked, and fail in their mission, which is really, uh, bad, for the colony as a whole.”

Joe felt more rattled than he normally did during a big game. He had no idea as to what in the hell he was talking about, let alone how it was going to somehow safely lead him through a successful break up with Sarah.

“Are you breaking up with me?” Sarah hid her face in her hands.

Joe was shocked. He didn’t think that Sarah was going to cry in front of the entire cafeteria, the last week before graduation.

“Well, I’m just saying, we’re both going away to college, and like a colony of ants, I gotta do what I gotta do for the team. And the team, uh, America, well, it needs me to do my work.” Joe felt pretty good about his analogy now, but Sarah’s face was still buried in her hands. It wasn’t that Sarah was a bad girlfriend, Joe was just tired of having sex with her, and wanted to expand his horizons with other girls. Plus, he’d had sex with Sarah’s best friend at a party last weekend, and he knew that he had to tell her this fact before one of the other cheerleaders broke the news.

Sarah, meanwhile, was trying her hardest not to laugh. Did Joe really think that he needed to break up with her? She hadn’t been faithful to him for the last six months, and she had just figured that they would officially break up over the summer, before leaving for college. She peaked through her fingers at a few of the other tables in the cafeteria.

To her left was a table full of jocks. She had recently had sex with two of them: Tommy and Bill, both of whom were good friends with Joe. And she had also made out with each of them behind Joe’s back (literally) at different times, but at the same party, while drunk. How could Joe not have realized this?

Tommy, Bill, and the other football players at their table were pretending to talk about sexual conquests, but really secretly eyeing Joe and Sarah’s table, to see what was going on between them.

“Yeah, man, the whole nine yards. We went all the way. And her parents were like two rooms away!” Gregory hadn’t actually had sex yet. But a really drunk girl at a party had promised to go down on him once; only she’d passed out before she could fulfill her promise. At any rate, Gregory was pretty sure that he was gay, since he was often aroused by the sight of the other football players when they were changing in the locker room before games. The truth of the matter was that he had no idea as to how sex really worked, and he was afraid of finding out, because he wasn’t sure if he’d know how to properly insert himself into a woman if the opportunity arose. “Yeah, I plowed her, man. Like three times!” Gregory added.

Nicky, one of the biggest dorks in the school passed by the jocks’ table carrying a full tray of food. As he passed them by, he stepped as far away from the table as he could, in order to prevent one of the jocks from trying to trip him. Billy tried to stick his leg out anyway, and Nicky jumped in fright, causing the entire table to laugh at him.

Nicky blushed, and counted his lucky stars that there was only one more week of high school left, and that he had copious quantities of pot awaiting him at home, along with a new first person shoot ‘em up video game that allowed him to vicariously pretend that instead of space aliens, he was actually shooting at all of the high school jocks who had tormented him for the last four years of his life.

Nicky safely passed by the table of jocks and located a table in the back corner of the cafeteria that seemed safe, due to its vicinity to the table of art students, which was adjacent to a table full of kids who only wore black clothing.

Nicky sat down and begin to eat his food amidst the obnoxiously pretentious conversation from the table of art kids. The art snobs were complaining about a lack of NEA funding, and trying to trump one another in a battle of “whose attitude is more morose”. Today’s winner was Johan, who’s real name was John, a self-obsessed, spoiled malcontent who had recently been rejected by the Tish School of the Arts at New York University, because they felt his photography portfolio, entitled “pissing on graves” was not up to their standards of admission.

“I mean, Chloe, you, of all people, you are going to tell me that I crossed a line by getting drunk and photographing myself pissing on old tombstones? Don’t you see the ART in that? ART! With a capital A! Andy Warhol, Willem De Kooning, even Cézanne; you don’t think these men ever actually allowed socially conceived morals to dictate their passion, do you? No, of course not. And that’s why I am an artist. And I don’t need N Y Fucking U to tell me whether or not I am great. The world will someday acknowledge my works as a formidable challenge to all of the greats. You all just wait and see.”

Chloe rolled her eyes at Johan, and in doing so, accidentally made eye contact with Steve Mandini, who was sitting at a table with a bunch of regular looking kids—the boring kids. She felt a pang of guilt at the moment of eye contact, because she hadn’t spoken a word to him since she had faked an illness to stand him up at the prom. But she hated proms, she hated normal kids, and she had finally decided that she wasn’t prepared to go through all of the hoopla, just to appease a nice guy like Steve.

Besides, she would have ended up crushing his spirits, after she had ended the evening by making an awkward excuse to go to her own friends’ party, post-prom, without Steve, in order to avoid attending the big high school party that she knew Steve was going to ask her to accompany him to.

“Steve…Steve…you listening, man?” Steve looked over at Harry, and tried to remember what Harry had been talking about. But he’d been distracted by Chloe and her unparalleled persona. He tried to refocus, but all he could think about was how many times he had masturbated to various fantasies involving Chloe and her pencil thin, long black hair.

“Steve, did you get the fake I.D.?” Harry asked the question with a sense of desperation that should only really be involved with questions like; “Did you remember to pay this month’s rent?” or “Do you have any condoms?”

“Harry, relax, man. My brother promised me that he’d give me his I.D. for the night; I’ll be sure to get us some booze. Relax. You’re so stiff sometimes. It’s not like anyone is actually gonna show up to our lame ass party.”

Harry hunched forward, and broke his voice down into a whisper, one that was just barely audible to the ears of the seven friends sitting at Harry and Steve’s table, “Yeah, but I hear that Joe and Sarah are breaking up, and if they are, I’m going to personally ask Sarah to come. I mean, our parents are like best friends, and we used to hang out all the time—”

“Used to hang out all the time? Yeah, like when you guys were like six years old. Forget it, man, since the last time the two of you played house, Sarah has actually grown up, fucked half the football team, and moreover, she is entirely out of your league!”

Steve felt bad, but only because he was in the same league as Harry, and it was depressing to face the truth; until he was in his thirties, and making six figures, he’d never be able to convince a girl like Sarah to date a guy like him. He based this inconvenient truth on the many recent conversations he had had with his older brother, who was about to graduate from college. According to his older brother, the high school social caste system continued on in college, it was just a little less intense, was all.

Nicky enjoyed sitting alone at his own table in the cafeteria. Despite the fact that he didn’t have any close confidantes, he didn’t feel alone. He felt different—because he was different—but being different meant that he wasn’t the same as the rest of his peers, and Nick’s peers’ depressed him.

He likened his peers to a colony of ants. Yes, America was like a giant ant colony. He recalled a recent biology test on ant colonies and an answer he had given on it: “The ant colony is built and maintained by legions of worker ants that carry tiny bits of dirt in their mandibles and deposit them near the exit of the colony, forming an ant-hill.” He was pleased with his own mental acumen; his analogy was cunning, precise, and apt.

“In the ant colony, there are rooms for nurseries, food storage, and mating.” Yes! So this cafeteria was like the nursery in an ant colony. It was full of a bunch of pre-pubescent ants that were about to be given high school diplomas, which meant that they were about become members of the legions of worker ants, and they were now going to disperse across the country in order to deposit tiny bits of dirt in order to form a greater hill.

Nicky’s thoughts were distracted by some ado at the table near the jocks. Nicky looked up just in time to see Sarah McGellan throw an entire cup of soda at Joe “QB One” Nealey. As she did this, she also yelled, loud enough for everyone in the cafeteria to hear, “You fucking asshole! I can’t believe you would do that! I don’t ever want to see you or your small prick again!”

Harry elbowed Steve from across the table and then produced a lecherous “see I told you so” wink.

This same scene made Chloe smile, but she quickly forced her smile back into her normal expression, which was a carefully practiced attempt to convey the emotion of ‘ennui.’ Johan, catching Chloe’s brief smile, forgot all about pissing on graves, and made a mental note to try and get her to make out with him the next time they were both drunk.

Meanwhile, Tommy, Bill, Gregory, and the rest of the jocks exploded in a chorus of as many jeering and “I’m so shocked” noises as they could invent, in order to convey to the rest of the cafeteria the fact that Sarah had just emasculated Joe, and perhaps now they were next in line to receive the alpha-male trophy that a girl like Sarah represented.

Joe attempted to look as stunned as possible, even though he thought that he’d gotten off quite easily, given the fact that he had just admitted to Sarah that he’d cheated on her with her own best friend, Cathy Jean.

Sarah had only erupted in public in order to arm herself with the power of being a faithful cheerleader who had been cuckolded by the high school quarterback and her own best friend. She reasoned that this would absolve her from receiving any animosity from her female peers, who already resented her for her good looks. She also figured that it would ensure that her cheerleading squad would take her side in making Cathy Jean’s last few months in the town a living hell.

Cathy Jean didn’t really care about her meaningless friendship with Sarah, and was more interested in the social status that would accompany an official relationship with Joe, so she had immediately come over to his table and was now seductively pressing Joe’s soda-stained lap with a handful of napkins and mouthing, but not speaking the shapes of words used to express shock, abhorrence, and betrayal.

Most of the men in the cafeteria secretly acknowledged the fact that Cathy Jean looked like a better lay than Sarah, but due to Cathy Jean’s public status as “easy” she was far less of a trophy than Sarah, and so Joe was to be henceforth considered a lesser man, for having traded in all the social prestige that Sarah offered him for the casual, sex filled pseudo-relationship that came along with a girl like Cathy Jean.

Nicky, meanwhile, couldn’t differentiate between the ant that was Sarah, and the ant that was Cathy Jean. After all, both of them were obviously common ants, since they had chosen to procreate with a common ant like Joe.

Nicky had no interest in procreating with any of the common ants, for he was special. Nicky was going to graduate from this hell, move far away, and then he was going to start an underground magazine that would make Fredrick Nietzsche blush.

Nicky was going to admonish all of the social classes that he so despised. He was going to fight against the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, and everyone else that played any part in this reprehensible society. He was going to change the world, by changing people’s minds with his uncanny social observations. All he had to do was make it through one more godforsaken week of this bullshit, and he was on his way!

Of course, Nicky had never actually written any of his ideas down onto paper. But this was mostly due to the fact that he never felt up to the task by the time he had finished school, gotten high, and played his favorite video game. Nicky wasn’t worried, for time was on his side. He was young. No one did anything productive in high school anyway. He would make his mark on the world later on. In the meantime, Nicky thanked his lucky stars for pot and video games, because for the time being, they were his only saving grace in a world full of mindless ants. He couldn’t wait to get home and kill off a legion of assholes. Someday, maybe, he would get tired of smoking pot, and then he would change the world. Yes, that was the plan. Change—someday. There was a lot of power in that one word: change.

“Well, what are you waiting for?”

“That’s the thing. I just don’t know. I’m waiting for something, but I don’t know what it is. I only know that it awaits me.” His eye contact vacillated between his coffee cup and his fork.

“Well, what kind of thing is it?” She asked.

He didn’t want to keep talking in circles, but he also didn’t want to give her a false answer, just to get off the current subject, so he paused, shut his eyes, and rubbed his temples. When he reopened his eyes, nothing had changed. She was still patiently awaiting his answer, giving him all of her attention.

“I just don’t know.” He said. “I already told you, I’m always impatient, because I’m waiting for something, but try as I might, I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what it is that I’m waiting for.”

She smiled a nervous smile, and blushed. She was so amicable and attractive that it pained him to see her struggling to understand him. “I don’t understand why you can’t be happy where you are?”

This was the much-anticipated question that he had tried so desperately to avoid. It crushed him even worse in reality than it had all the times he’d envisioned it in his mind. What was Peter thinking? Here he was, talking to his girlfriend about how unhappy he was, but he wasn’t able to pinpoint anything helpful. Why had he even bothered to attempt this conversation with her? Oh yeah, it was because he loved her more than anything else in the world, and trusted her more than anyone else as well.

Peter felt his eyes straining, and knew that if he didn’t choose his words very carefully; he was going to begin to cry. “It’s just that, well, no one is like me. I used to think that most people thought the way I did, and felt feelings the way that I do, but as I grow older, and get a better grip on the reality of…get a grip on the way things really are, it gets hard to realize…” He was about to cry, he knew that he was going to cry, but he forced himself to go on, he owed this much to Sarah. “It gets hard to accept the fact that I’m very alone, I’ve always been alone, and I’m always going to be alone.”

There he had done it! He had said the very words that plagued him the most. He had bared the cogs of his soul to Sarah. He was surprised to discover that he wasn’t on the verge of tears any longer.

Lumpy tears spilled down the sides of Sarah’s cheeks. All of her cheerful demeanor was now lost. Peter noticed that Sarah was so beautiful that even the saddest of tears couldn’t cut away from her natural, radiating beauty.

No one spoke. They stared at each other, trying to convey feelings without words.

Sarah wanted to tell Peter how much it hurt her to hear him say that he was alone, when he had her – all of her; everything that she could physically and mentally offer him.

Peter, on the other hand, wanted to tell Sarah that he was so sorry for being a slave to his robotic emotions, but that nothing, not even her spirit and soul could assuage the fact that he was convinced that the world was a cold, nihilistic place devoid of anything more powerful than his own consciousness.

The stalemate continued until the cheerful waitress came by to re-fill their coffee cups.

The waitress smiled at Peter, and then shot Sarah a furtive look that said, “All men are jerks, better to learn that now than later, hon.” It was amazing how successful she was in communicating this with only a slight head nod and a roll of her eyes. The waitress then casually dropped the check on the table and left without a word.

Peter flipped the check over. It listed their choices, followed by the corresponding prices, and at the bottom, underneath the total fare, the waitress had written “Merry Christmas!” and dotted the lower case “i” in Christmas with a smiley face. For some reason, this made Peter begin to cry.

“Why are you crying?” Sarah asked.

Peter nodded his head towards the check, “She wished us a Merry Christmas.”

Sarah smiled the most beautiful smile in the world. Peter had seen that smile nearly every day since he’d met her, but it never lost its novelty, because the smile was pure and genuine; her smile was a masterpiece. Michelangelo had toiled for years to create his “David”, but Sarah could smile whenever she felt happy.

“So why does that make you so unhappy, Peter?”

Peter considered the question, and concluded that he didn’t know the answer. His tears had been involuntary, he supposed. He thought about it some more, and then said, “It made me cry because she was trying to connect with us, and she failed. I cried because I couldn’t care any less about Christmas right now, because I’m so afraid of losing you that other people’s happiness frightens me. I’m crying because I’m a big baby who knows that he has what he’s supposed to want, but I cannot seem to properly appreciate what I have, and this makes me feel guilty and alone.”

Sarah waited a while, to see if Peter was going to continue. When it was clear that he had finished speaking, she reached across the table and wrapped her hand around one of his exposed fists. His hand felt abnormally cold, and he was shaking.

“Peter, you are never going to lose me, unless you make me leave you. I won’t lie, what you have said hurts, it hurts a lot, but it’s the truth, at least in so far as you can translate your true feelings into words, and that’s why I love you, because you are honest – even if it’s to a fault.”

These words made Peter shake and cry even more. Sarah continued, “I don’t know how to help you, but I do know what wouldn’t help you, and that would be for me to throw a tantrum over the fact that my boyfriend feels emotionally isolated from the world. So what? It’s a big deal – to you, but plenty of people share your pain, your frustration. Plenty of people have trouble enjoying what they have. Plenty of people cannot seem to notice just how green their very own grass is. You are not alone.”

These last words stung Peter where it hurt the most. He did feel terribly alone. He felt like an alien, so disconnected from most of humanity that he was afraid that his attitude was the first stop on the train to suicidal depression, and this frightened him more than anything else in the world.

Peter’s mind was blazing with emotions. He was considering the ramifications and permutations that could be hatched by the consequences of his jaded mindset, and these thoughts were beginning to make him feel dizzy. He realized that he wasn’t breathing at a normal rate, and when he realized this, it caused him to panic further. He tried to breathe, but realized that he had somehow forgotten how to breathe normally.

The world became rather dark. Everything in his vision began to appear two dimensionally. All of the objects in his field of vision became hazy, dark, and crisscrossed with fuzzy black lines.

Just as he was sure that he was going to pass out, Peter felt a strong squeeze on his hand, and he began to relax. His eyes regained their ability to focus, and the dizziness began to recede. His pulse lowered, his breathing resumed a regular pattern, and he realized that Sarah was holding his hand and repeating something.

Peter strained his concentration to make out the words: “You are not alone.” That was all she was saying, and for the first time in as long as he could remember, Peter believed those words. He felt their honest implications in a spot that was nowhere near his intellectual mind, and he felt overwhelmed with love, compassion, and a sense of well being.

He looked deeply into Sarah’s eyes and whispered, “Thank you. I love you. And I do not feel alone.”

These words made Sarah resume her crying. She continued to cry, only these were tears of joy, and Peter enjoyed watching her squirm as she attempted to resume control of her emotions. He took a tremendous joy in the knowledge that by looking at her honestly, and by projecting his genuine love, he could still make Sarah squirm as though they had just met. He smiled again, and Sarah blushed and returned the smile. They were still holding hands.

“I don’t deserve you.” The words leapt from his mouth without any sort of filtration process.

Sarah stopped crying, and her face grew stern and assertive. “Yes you do. You deserve everything that you have; you just take most of it for granted. But I also know that you don’t take me for granted, or else you wouldn’t have opened up to me on Christmas, at this shitty diner.”

“So, uh, where do we go from here?” Peter asked.

Sarah took a long time to answer. She released Peter’s hand and wiped her remaining tears from her cheeks and then she took a sip of her coffee.

“Where do we go from here?” She parroted. “We go somewhere, we go anywhere, I mean, we have to find something, right? That’s what you’re waiting for, something…am I right?”

Sarah became apprehensive; she worried that maybe this wasn’t the answer Peter had wanted to hear from her. She looked down at her plate and realized that she hadn’t even attempted to eat one iota of her meal.

Peter began to laugh. At first, it was a bemused chuckle, but as he looked at Sarah, and she became more and more nervous, his chuckle turned into a fit of hysterical laughter.

Peter’s laughter was the last thing in the world that Sarah had expected in response to her heartfelt pledge to assist Peter in his quest for “something,” she wasn’t even sure if his laughter was offensive, as it was so unexpected.

Peter finally quelled his own laughter, and looked gleefully into Sarah’s eyes, “No, silly, I meant literally, where do we go from here?” Peter chuckled again. “I mean, the check’s been dropped, it’s still early, and besides which, it’s Christmas, and I want to make sure that you get all the appreciation from me that you deserve!”

Without another word, Peter stood up, casually dropped a twenty dollar bill on the table, grabbed Sarah’s hand, and led her from her table to the door. She nestled her head in his neck, and realized that even though she hadn’t eaten one bite of it, this had been the best Christmas dinner of her life.

They stood in the canned beans and soup aisle of their local supermarket. They were holding hands, and surveying the neatly piled cans of various consumables. Each can was fairly simple; most of them simply advertised a name and a product, without a lot of hype.

Ben loved shopping with his girlfriend. It reminded him of when he was a kid and he would ride along with his parents in the shopping cart as they shopped together, as a family. He had always associated monogamy with the shared experience of shopping for groceries in a brightly lit supermarket.

Trisha was tired. She was tired of worrying about Ben’s fidelity, tired of waking up with an ominous feeling of ominous doom in her stomach. Most of all, she was tired of quelling her inner voice that insisted, “Ask him. Just ask him, ask him if he’s cheating on you.”

Ben squeezed Trisha’s hand and pointed with his other hand at one of the cans on the shelf. “Honey, let’s buy some lima beans, instead of black beans. Here, look at this one, they’re called butter beans; they look like a cartoon version of a regular bean, all big and lumpy! We always eat black beans. I want to try something new, like lima beans instead.”

Trisha shrugged and her face became downtrodden, “Yeah, I’m sure you do.”

“What?” Ben asked.

“I’m sure you want to try something new. You need a change. Right.”

Ben was confused. He looked at his wristwatch. It was Tuesday, the 22^nd. Trisha had just had her period. Why was she acting so crazy?

“Um, yeah. Change is good, right?” Ben offered.

“Sometimes—when you need it.” Trisha released Ben’s hand.

“I mean, if you eat the same thing, all the time, you’re not really living.”

“Sometimes you need to remain faithful to the things you love, Benjamin.”

Ben knew that they were no longer talking about black beans and lima beans. Trisha only called him Benjamin when something was wrong. He recalled the last three times that Trisha had called him by his full name: once when her favorite Great Aunt had died, once when he had ruined her special family heirloom music box by spilling a beer all over it, and most recently, when he had been an hour late to dinner because he’d lost track of time at the golf course.

“Trisha, what are we talking about?” Ben feigned his best reserved and polite tone.

This was her chance. It was now or never. Trisha could finally solve her issues concerning the weeks of wondering, the confusing signals and mixed messages, and most of all, Ben’s inconsistent body language; one day telling her he loved her, and only her, but the next day, it seemed to be concealing some secret truth that contradicted his brilliant, reassuring smile.

Try as she might, Trisha found herself unable to formulate the sentence that she had practiced so many times before. She had always pictured this conversation taking place in a car, or at home, or in bed, not in the canned soup department of the local grocery mart.

She finally summoned the strength to look Ben in the eyes, and all she saw was a lost puppy dog, wondering if he had broken yet another complicated human rule that was beyond his learning curve.

Trisha blushed, looked away, and began to grab at the cans of butter beans. She was reckless and ruthless as she flung cans onto the floor and threw a few backwards in Ben’s general direction. She was snapping cans at him like a center hikes the ball to a quarterback.

“You want FUCKING LIMA BEANS? YOU WANT A GODDAMN CHANGE? Fine. Here are some more lima beans for you. BUTTER BEANS. Black beans just won’t do it. I get it, Ben. Way to be direct!” Trisha began to sob.

Ben knew that he was in a world of shit. How on Earth could his happy family moment in the grocery store have evolved so quickly into an argument? And it was an argument over butter beans of all things. None of this made any sense to Ben.

“Trisha, honey…you’re freaking me out. What’s wrong?” Ben tried to hold Trisha, but she pushed him away with a force that was to be reckoned with.

Ben and Trisha had met four years ago, at a yoga class. They were both chain smoking, bar hopping twenty-nine year olds who felt that Yoga could stave off or at least lessen the damage they were inflicting upon themselves with their unhealthy habits.

After two years of sleeping at each other’s apartments, they had moved in with one another about two years ago. For the first year and a half, everything had been fine. Then they’d learned to complain about each other’s faults, not just behind each other’s backs, but face to face. But a few months ago, everything had seemed to calm down, and Ben thought that everything was now peachy keen.

Trisha remained hunched over, cradling several cans in her arms, and crying. About four alarmed customers had stopped in the aisle a few feet away, and they were gawking at the two of them. Other, less perceptive shoppers were passing through the aisle, dodging the many littered cans, yet somehow oblivious to the spectacle of melodrama taking place in the canned soup aisle of their local grocery mart.

Ben hated more than anything to be embarrassed in public, and Trisha knew this. But Trisha hated nothing more than deception, and she had read Ben’s latest credit card bill, featuring two strange, late night charges. Her ever so powerful hunch had successfully goaded her into believing that Ben was not the honest man she had fallen for so many years before.

Ben looked at the other shoppers and blushed. Trisha caught him blushing, and this inflated her anger. Ben attempted to assuage the situation.

“Trisha, let’s just get out of here, go back to the car, and if there’s something you want to talk about, I’m all ears.” He offered her his most pleasant smile, but the grin poorly masked the anguish he felt from his sense of public embarrassment.

“No. No, Ben. I don’t need to go outside to talk about this. I can talk about this anywhere. I’m on to you: you and your butter beans and your desire for change. I decided to surprise you this month, and I was going to pay your credit card with my checking account.”

Ben stopped smiling. He stopped breathing. He stopped wondering what the other shopper’s were thinking. He almost stopped thinking, but one thought haunted his mind, repeatedly. “She knows. She fucking knows.”

Ben was a good man, he knew the difference between right and wrong, and until a few weeks ago, he’d never done anything that left him feeling ashamed for longer than a few hours. He’d said some off color remarks when drunk, he’d gossiped about close friends, and he’d lied to his employers in order to get out of work for a baseball game or two, but other than those sorts of things, Ben was an honest man.

But a few weeks ago, after work, he’d lied to Trisha. He’d told her that he had an office dinner meeting with his boss, in order to go out to the bars with a few of his old college buddies that he never got to see anymore.

Being an attractive man, Ben was used to the occasional wandering female eye that would attempt to attract his attention, but he had not flirted with another woman even one time since he’d started dating Trisha. That is, of course, up until that night, about two weeks ago.

The details are not important. They never are. For whatever reason, Ben had decided to accept a young college girl’s advances. It happened in a drunken stupor: he had rented a cheap motel room, charged about twenty dollars at a nearby twenty four hour liquor mart, and he’d showered and returned home at an hour that confirmed his fake office dinner meeting.

Ben was disgusted by his actions and he felt awful about his deceit, and he furthermore did not consider the alcohol as an excuse. But he was also awfully certain that he would never repeat the mistake, and so he’d decided to take it to the grave with him. The only witnesses, after all, were the girl he’d screwed, and a few of his buddies who had taken delight in “Big Ben’s return to his glory days.”

Stuck in his guilty reverie, Ben didn’t see the can of butter beans flying towards his head. He was about to admit the truth to Trisha, but it was too late. The can flew into his forehead; he fell backwards into the opposing aisle, and the last thing he felt was a sharp stabbing pain in the back of his neck.

He woke up in the aisle, with his vision cloudy and his head and neck feeling very sore. Standing over him were two store employees, a store manager, and a security guard. The guard noticed that Ben had opened his eyes, and he clicked on a walkie talkie and said, “twenty-five-thirty-six, this is oh-niner. Subject is fully conscious; you can cancel that five-nine-six-forty-six.”

One of the store employees seemed to be laughing, and Ben tried with all of his might to look him in the eyes, but his ability to properly focus was impaired.

The employee laughed even harder, and said, “Man, she sure nailed you. She got you good. That your girlfriend? She’s got a nice shot. We got four eye witnesses that say she tossed that can at you with the precision and speed of a real baseball pitcher.”

“Trisha…Trisha, my, where is she?” It took an extraordinary amount of effort for Ben to speak these words.

The employee continued to smile, “That your girl’s name? Well, she said that she had to go, and she took the groceries back to your place.”

Without a second thought, Ben hoisted himself up from the floor, and began to reel and wobble towards the store’s exit. He was dizzy, and he was weak, but his adrenaline gave him the necessary strength to launch himself into the parking lot. Once outside, Ben’s fears were confirmed; both Trisha and his car were gone.

It took him about an hour to walk the four miles home. As he walked, he obsessed over which words he would use to convince Trisha to trust him again.

He finally arrived at their small, dark gray duplex, after what seemed to him like an eternity.

All of the lights were off, and Trisha’s car wasn’t parked outside. Only his car, the one they had driven in together to the store, was parked in the two spaced lot.

Ben entered the house, and flipped on the light switch to the kitchen.

Every cabinet was open, and they were overflowing with cans of butter beans. There were butter beans all over the counter, butter beans in the sink, he even noticed that the microwave and oven doors were open, and that these two units were stuffed full of butter beans.

Ben called Trisha’s name aloud, but he knew that she wasn’t there to hear him. He tried to exit the kitchen, and tripped over something as he entered the living room. He fell to the floor and landed on a pile of clunky, uncomfortable metal cylinders. He didn’t need to turn on the lights to see that what he had tripped over and fell upon; butter beans.

During the twenty minutes in which Ben was passed out in the grocery aisle, along with the hour it had taken him to walk home, Trisha had driven to all three major supermarkets in her district, and bought every single can of butter beans they had. She had then returned home, packed up her most necessary possessions, and placed the cans in every odd spot that she could think of in what had formerly been their house.

She didn’t bother to leave a note, because nothing says “its time for a change” better than hundreds of cans of butter beans.

To this day, Ben suffers from a panic attack whenever he sees a can of butter beans, and he always shops alone. He’s a changed man who is afraid of change.

And whenever Trisha meets a man who is worth inviting over for dinner, she always fixes a dish with black beans. It makes for a decent litmus test.

Andy was nervous and excited. He was also bored out of his mind, but the boredom was a surface level reality, whereas in the future, Andy knew that great things awaited him, and this made Andy both nervous and excited.

Andy had always felt secure in the fact that he was extraordinary; that he was destined to do great things. A powerful energy pulsed inside of him as he completed even the most mundane of tasks, but the energy never waned, and so throughout his lifetime, Andy had consistently felt both nervous and excited by his own energy.

The only problem Andy had with his indefatigable energy was that the energy did not come with an instruction manual or any guidelines for how and when best to use his energy. Andy was approaching his forties and he had never used his energy to accomplish anything great by his own standards, and he was beginning to feel bored more and more often these days.

Andy was reflecting on his attitude, when he realized that his boredom was beginning to wage a war against his powerful energy, and this was beginning to make him feel uneasy about a possible lack of purpose to his life.

He chewed the inside of his cheek, gnawing at a loose end of skin, working at carefully removing the annoyance with the expertise and skill of a surgeon removing a cyst. He was unconscious of how this may look to someone watching him, but this was mostly because he was walking alone on a street. These days, most people stayed in doors as often as possible.

Andy stopped to look at the front page of the newspaper displayed in a metal box on the street. The newspaper featured three headlines; two reported news about a different war, each in a different region; and each with different religious and spiritual groups fighting over their varying version of appropriate social conduct. The third headline was about the Earth’s gradual deceleration of spinning on its own axis.

Andy looked up. The sky was a dark gray. It looked like it should be raining, the air was damp and cool, but the ground was very dry; the clouds were thwarting the raindrops’ goals of leaping towards the Earth.

The skies had been gray yet rain free for nearly half a year now, yet this disastrous phenomenon had failed to override the momentum of mankind’s religious warmongering.

The Schwizenstein doctrine had attributed the motionless sky phenomenon to a sudden lack in winds, which in turn had been caused by the Earth’s decreasing velocity in its own daily spin. The Earth was like a washing machine; for eons, it had been involved in a steady spin cycle, traveling in one direction. But now, that spin cycle was ending, and within days, scientists had predicted that the Earth was going to stop spinning altogether.

Days were no longer actually twenty-four hours long, and no one knew for certain why this was happening. Where Andy lived, there was now daylight for twenty two hours of every day. Andy mused that this was all very logical; the Earth’s own energy, just like a human’s, was finite, and now it needed to rest.

What goes up must come down, but evidently, the sun doesn’t always rise and set; “the sun doesn’t always come up tomorrow.” At least Andy could still depend on death, taxes, and war. All had not become chaotic.

Andy lit a cigarette and took a small delight in watching the smoke casually rise into the air as though Andy were sitting in a poorly ventilated room. The smoke twirled and danced about as it slowly rose towards the overcast sky. Heat still rose.

Andy was on his way to the zoo. Why not? He loved animals, he had the day off, and he had no friends.

Why make friends when you can read a book instead? When a book becomes monotonous, you can put it down, and since it’s inanimate, it has no feelings, so you don’t risk offending it when you are bored or done with it. Andy had never made a friend who could reciprocate the style of friendship that was so well provided by a book.

When Andy was feeling overly isolated, and worried that his self-prescribed state of isolation may be causing insanity, he would go to a bar, have a few drinks, and shoot pool with a human, to make sure that they didn’t think he was crazy.

By the end of a few hours of this sort of thing, Andy would wish his pool partner were a book, and he’d usually throw the last game, pay his tab, and return home to sleep off the alcohol.

Andy looked away from the ascending train of cigarette smoke, and towards the cement beneath his feet. Everywhere he looked the natural ground was buried by cement. The air felt heavy, yet it was also dry and hot – it was not arid, like a desert, because when you stood outside, you felt smothered by the air’s odd heaviness.

It was as if someone had stuffed into a blender one-part Sahara Desert with one-part Buffalo, New York, on a muggy, summer day. And since the air was so stagnant, wherever you were outside it smelled like a poorly kept New York City Subway stop. This was why most people were choosing to stay indoors.

A stream of cars jetted down the boulevard and broke the still silence that Andy had been enjoying. Andy subconsciously switched his cigarette into the hand on the opposite side of the cars, a habit he’d developed from when he was a teenager, when he used to smoke on side streets near his home and have to hide his habit from cars, in case one of the cars belonged to his parents or their neighbors.

The cars passed, and Andy grew excited as he realized that the zoo was only about five minutes away. Another car passed Andy, and as it did, someone in the backseat leaned out the window and yelled, “faggot” at Andy. Andy looked at the boy’s face, and was pretty sure that he didn’t know him, but not as sure as he was that he was not a faggot. Andy retorted to the accusation with a lone middle finger thrust towards the rainless sky.

The car didn’t slow down, and Andy was pretty sure that his gesture hadn’t taught the kids in the car anything about why it’s wrong to call a stranger derogatory names. Andy saw another newspaper box, with a different newspaper, and all three of the headlines were different phrases conveying the same three ideas as the other newspaper. This paper, however, had more charts, bigger pictures, and bolder fonts on its front page.

Andy decided to buy it. He reached into his pocket, only to discover that he didn’t have his wallet on him.

Andy quickly felt a flash of anger, for this meant that he couldn’t pay the zoo’s entry fee. He then became entrenched by a feeling of failure, which blossomed into a full fit of self-loathing anger. His cheeks were flushed and he wished he could kick something really, really hard.

Now he had to turn around, walk all the way home in this stinking stuffy weather, and by the time he got home, it would be too late, the zoo would be closing so they could raise the newly constructed nocturnal roof over the compound, inducing an artificial nighttime for the animals.

Without any care or thought, Andy began to kick the newspaper box as hard as he could. He kicked the box with the full weight of his body, and the full force of the anger that was pulsing through his mind. He felt a sense of primal rage as he channeled every iota of personal anger and intensity into the task of maiming the newspaper box.

It was a blind rage, barren of thought. After a lengthy lapse in consciousness, Andy returned to reality upon feeling two stiff hands that were pinning his shoulders into the ground. The back of his head was pulsing like a swollen, saggy drum head, and a police officer with a menacing glare was standing over him and holding a taser.

Andy had never seen a photograph of a taser, let alone a real one, but somehow, he was positive that the weapon in the police officer’s hand was a taser.

He’d read about tasers in the news, and he knew that the protocol that enabled an officer to use one was pretty lenient these days.

Andy’s eyes grew wide as he reflected on the public’s “chill” attitude towards police enforcement vis-à-vis tasers.

“Hold still or I will be forced to make you hold still.” The officer screamed.

Andy wriggled his head left and right; in an attempt to see what the other man looked like, the one who was pinning him down.

“I am ORDERING you to HOLD STILL!” The officer’s eyes connoted a sincere sense of sadism.

Andy tried to speak, but the officer was now holding the taser only an inch away from his chest and this caused Andy to suffer from a panic attack. He wanted to speak, he wanted to apologize and to set things straight, but he couldn’t summon his body to perform the task.

Andy was no longer bored. Now he was only very nervous and very excited, but he was missing his focus and energy, which rendered him as helpless as an infant.

Andy heard the officer click the taser on, and then he heard a small hum. He wanted to speak, but he couldn’t even find the self control to shut his own eyes.

Andy was bracing himself for electrocution when he felt his arms become unpinned, and heard the officer’s taser click off.

What Andy next experienced was an event like no other: Andy distinctly felt the Earth lurch to a complete halt, and then it suddenly began to rotate in a counter motion from its former spin. This action only took about one minute, and right after it occurred, for the first time in many months, Andy felt a cool wind ruffle against his skin, and he could hear the distinct sound of pellets of rain beginning to hit the sidewalk.

The start-stop motion of the Earth was extremely disorienting. It felt like a yo-yo switching from down to up; it was like a clock that had suddenly been wound; only now the clock was running backwards, and Andy could feel his sense of equilibrium adjusting to the flummox of motion. The sky darkened, and the ruffling winds increased in their intensity.

Andy stood up. A second police officer was standing next to the officer with the taser, and both of them were staring, dumbfounded, at the sky.

Andy looked up to see what they were staring at, and as he did so, he felt a massive drop of rain smack his cheek like a water balloon. It stung his face, but before he could reflect on the magnitude of the raindrop, a chunk of rain, roughly the size of a watermelon, slammed into the taser carrying officer’s head, and Andy could hear the man’s neck snap from the force of the collision.

Andy instinctively ran towards the nearest shelter from the rain. He reached a metal-framed awning that was about ten feet away, and turned around to assess his situation.

The frame above his head was clapping like thunder as enormous balls of rain hurtled into it. One globe shaped drop, the size of a wrecking ball, flew right into the second police officer’s head, at a forty-five degree angle, killing him as well. The officer had been caught off guard, as he stood over his dead partner, stunned with disbelief; he had never even seen the damned thing coming.

At first, the raindrops were few and far between, and Andy could actually marvel at the meteorites as they descended upon the Earth, but as they began to gain in frequency and size, Andy realized that his metal shelter was not going to last for much longer.

All around him Andy heard the sound of sirens and horns, as well as the metallic crunch that accompanies high-speed traffic accidents. The paranoia was palpable.

Andy noticed that the enormous raindrops were pulverizing almost every car on the boulevard, and most of these cars’ windows were being smashed clean through.

But not every car was pulverized. The police car, which was parked in front of him, with the driver’s side door wide open, was still intact, and Andy assumed this was because its windshields were composed of thicker, bulletproof glass.

Andy wasn’t sure how strong the car’s glass was, but he figured his odds of survival were higher in that car than under the weak metal awning.

Andy sprinted towards the police car, and hopped into the driver’s seat. The keys were still in the ignition, and the lights on top were still spinning. Andy heard a loud crash, and turned his head in time to witness the metal awning falling to the ground.

Andy turned the ignition on and slammed his foot into the gas pedal – hard. The car took off – fast. Real fast.

The boulevard was one-way, and traveling in the opposite direction of Andy’s apartment. As he raced along it, he had to weave the powerful car between many smashed and ruined cars. He looked inside each of the cars as he passed them, only to see the mutilated bodies of the cars’ drivers and passengers. One of the cars was the car with the teenagers who had called him a faggot.

The raindrops were beginning to decrease in size, but the downpour was increasing, making it very hard to see out of the windshield.

With little warning, Andy had to slam hard on the brakes to prevent himself from flying head on into an overturned red hummer taking up both lanes of the boulevard. Despite the tremendous din of the rain, Andy could hear the voice of a child crying out from the inside of the Hummer.

Without any concern for his own life, Andy leapt out of the police car and ran towards the overturned Hummer. He hoisted himself onto the side of the car and peering through the window, which was miraculously still intact, he could see a small boy fastened to a child safety seat.

Andy shoved his left elbow as hard as he could into the glass, but it wouldn’t break. He yelled to the child that everything was going to be okay, and then ran back to the police car, squeezing his bruised elbow with his right hand.

The raindrops were now coming down at a rate that would be considered normal during a hurricane or a monsoon, but they were no longer large enough to kill someone upon impact. Andy made it back to the police car, and once inside, he grabbed a billy club from the center console, and ran back to the Hummer.

Andy once again hoisted himself onto the side of the car, and then struck the backseat window with the club, using all of his might. The window shattered to pieces, but none of the glass shards seemed to injure the small boy in the car.

Andy dove head first into the car, and unfastened the child from his safety seat. He then pinned the boy into his armpit, like a football, and pulled them up through the smashed window, and onto the side of the car.

Andy leapt from the car, smirking at his own heroism. He strapped the child into the passenger seat of the police car, and then gave the boy a stern look of confidence, in order to convey the fact that everything would be okay now, because Andy was in charge! He then flung the car into reverse, turned the car around, and began to travel in the wrong direction down the one-way boulevard.

Andy briefly studied the car’s console, and discovered the switch that turned the sirens from “lights” to “sirens and lights”. He flicked the switch, and accelerated the car.

In every direction that he looked, Andy saw one catastrophe after another. Cars and buildings looked as though they had been bombed, and the sky was full of rain and dark smoke that was smoldering from various electrical fires.

Andy looked at the child and could see that he was terrified. The child stuck his thumb into his mouth and allowed some drool to spill along his thumb and onto his wrist. Andy reached over and wiped some tears from the poor kid’s eyes.

Andy had always felt that he was destined for greatness – he had only been unsure of what great thing he would someday accomplish. For now, saving a child’s life, and surviving the deadly parade of gargantuan raindrops was a pretty good reward for his lifelong dedication to the apathetic pursuit of greatness.

Andy reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette. Then he remembered the child, and realized that great men lead by example. He took the cigarette, and the pack from which it had come from, and unrolled the window and threw them both out the window and onto the street. Then he realized that littering was probably not a great example either. Well, you had to take things one-step at a time, and this was Andy’s first day as an emergency-rescuer-type-person.

Andy looked back at the child and saw that the child was now crying uncontrollably. But there were certain things you couldn’t rescue someone from, things like seeing your own mother’s decapitated head lying on the floor of the car in front of your face, for example. Andy thought about the expression on the child’s mother face, and he longed for one of the cigarettes that he had just thrown out the window.