Post by --Ed. on Jul 26, 2008 20:33:55 GMT -5
“Green paint and rust”
From my youth, I remember a grandfather’s house and a ceramic bowl with ornate designs on the outside. Filled with candy. M&Ms mixed with Skittles. The first mouthful was unpleasant, but tell a kid to not eat candy. I came to enjoy the mix.
Everybody died, the bowl ended up an ashtray, and I was left to find my own candy. I hadn’t made a plan for myself, nobody had. People who hung out in the bowling alley bar were starting to learn my name.
I’d seen homeless guys shivering in the gutters and thought, Why don’t they just start walking south? What else is there to do? This thinking bred my own instinctive response.
I saw some places, always ending up ankle deep in fast food grease-paper, hitching a ride with some hippie heading elsewhere. One of them was going home to Madison. It was winter and the heat ran full blast over my old sneakers, trying to keep up with the vacuum created by a large hole in the bottom of his car. I ground my teeth and watched the highway tumble away underneath his boots. My feet sweat, my toes froze.
Bad news in Milwaukee. I was wrapped up in an old ski jacket, but I needed to cool off. The kid said he wanted to show me this custard joint and went for the highway as soon as I stumbled out of the car. Seeing a little black baby’s face materialize inside my cone was interesting, but seeing the baby start to cry made my shoulders seize. In the back seat of a cab, reeking and wet with sickness sweat, I was crying too.
I learned to palm pills and swap them for cigarettes. An undercover picked me up by the university when I asked him for opium. The plastic yellow bracelet on my wrist told him where to bring me back to.
Another jump, to a fence standing perimeter in front of a forest, growing in my vision as I sprint barefoot through wet grass. A form next to me pinwheels and goes down. See ya. I clear the chain link and there I am in the forest with some Russian. We can’t communicate, so we ditch each other. See ya later.
The point of mentioning the fence is this: it left a gash in my leg. I was busy, for a short period of time, doing things I’ll never be proud of, but it was enough to get me cleaned up to where I could catch a ride with another hippie, who took me east until there were no more roads going east. The hippie dropped me in Boston, and I discovered that something had been working on that gash in my leg. Bone infection.
Streetwalkers found me in an alleyway using my shoes as pillows. They dragged me to a shelter. When the needles finally came out, there wasn’t much left to me. I understood why those guys didn’t walk south when it got cold. Surviving that, I started thinking of myself as a man. I still had pimples, so you couldn’t have said I was an old man, but young, not any more.
(cont'd)
From my youth, I remember a grandfather’s house and a ceramic bowl with ornate designs on the outside. Filled with candy. M&Ms mixed with Skittles. The first mouthful was unpleasant, but tell a kid to not eat candy. I came to enjoy the mix.
Everybody died, the bowl ended up an ashtray, and I was left to find my own candy. I hadn’t made a plan for myself, nobody had. People who hung out in the bowling alley bar were starting to learn my name.
I’d seen homeless guys shivering in the gutters and thought, Why don’t they just start walking south? What else is there to do? This thinking bred my own instinctive response.
I saw some places, always ending up ankle deep in fast food grease-paper, hitching a ride with some hippie heading elsewhere. One of them was going home to Madison. It was winter and the heat ran full blast over my old sneakers, trying to keep up with the vacuum created by a large hole in the bottom of his car. I ground my teeth and watched the highway tumble away underneath his boots. My feet sweat, my toes froze.
Bad news in Milwaukee. I was wrapped up in an old ski jacket, but I needed to cool off. The kid said he wanted to show me this custard joint and went for the highway as soon as I stumbled out of the car. Seeing a little black baby’s face materialize inside my cone was interesting, but seeing the baby start to cry made my shoulders seize. In the back seat of a cab, reeking and wet with sickness sweat, I was crying too.
I learned to palm pills and swap them for cigarettes. An undercover picked me up by the university when I asked him for opium. The plastic yellow bracelet on my wrist told him where to bring me back to.
Another jump, to a fence standing perimeter in front of a forest, growing in my vision as I sprint barefoot through wet grass. A form next to me pinwheels and goes down. See ya. I clear the chain link and there I am in the forest with some Russian. We can’t communicate, so we ditch each other. See ya later.
The point of mentioning the fence is this: it left a gash in my leg. I was busy, for a short period of time, doing things I’ll never be proud of, but it was enough to get me cleaned up to where I could catch a ride with another hippie, who took me east until there were no more roads going east. The hippie dropped me in Boston, and I discovered that something had been working on that gash in my leg. Bone infection.
Streetwalkers found me in an alleyway using my shoes as pillows. They dragged me to a shelter. When the needles finally came out, there wasn’t much left to me. I understood why those guys didn’t walk south when it got cold. Surviving that, I started thinking of myself as a man. I still had pimples, so you couldn’t have said I was an old man, but young, not any more.
(cont'd)
