NEWER
NEWER
I’d left my house for cough drops.
I couldn’t be inside anymore.
I had been inside for five days, laying in various positions
trying to manage a sickness that didn’t want to leave me alone.
I never used to get sick this way,
not until my son was born.
Now he brings new germs that can’t be beaten by man.
Germs that collect under his fingernails and in parts of his kisses you can’t see.
Pour your medicine on them like gasoline.
You can do nothing to these germs but wait for them to pass.
A friend called while I was driving.
A new friend that I don’t know so well.
I’d had her purse in my car for a week now
since the first time we’d hung out.
She needed it back.
She’d gone so long without it
I’d nearly forgotten.
The original plan was to give it to a friend
boarding a plane for New York
and have him take pictures of it there
with all the famous landmarks
and then return it to her with the photographs inside.
But we never got that far
and weren’t sure if she would’ve appreciated it.
I stopped at the liquor store
And purchased a package of cherry menthol cough drops
and three lottery tickets.
The jackpot was up over a hundred and nineteen million.
I picked the luckiest looking of the three tickets,
with the mega number 43 (same as Richard Petty, Nascar king)
and gave the other two to her
and her friend.
A half hour later I was at their house
a few blocks from mine
listening to them talk about stealing alcohol
and cereal from their parents pantries
to help supply the slow and steady party
which seemed to occur every night around this time
whether they asked for it or not.
As time passed
sure enough
more roommates came
and strangers and friends
until a nice crop of people who didn’t all know each other sat around half a couch
pulling disgusting gulps of the pilfered alcohol
and watching a movie about a group of teenage boys
from Arkansas who enter a BMX contest.
The movie reminded me a lot of my youth
particularly the haircuts the boys wore and when one of them referred to a radio as “a jambox.”
It had been a while since I’d stolen anything
from my parents pantry.
A while since the pantry and I had even been proximal.
Halfway though the film, a guy arrived, plenty loud
with longish hair and one of the best attitudes I’d come across in recent years.
It was his house too and he was proud of it all over.
As he fixed a drink he showed off some recent wounds
from a motorcycle accident
where he’d knocked himself unconscious.
He shifted a lot in his seat
and talked about the movie
And how many times he had seen it.
Every part was his “favorite part”
and he would get so excited that he would stand up and point at the television.
Halfway through he mentioned that he was going to start sawing off a shotgun later this week
but gave no further details
as to what he was going to shoot with it.
(I imagined stop signs).
Before my throat sickness came calling once more
telling me to walk the blocks back to my cave
for otherwise the evening would not end
until daybreak-
he played us all some music he’d recorded of a friend
who’d been arrested over the weekend.
The song was just a series of noises and the words
“Purple.Golden” repeated over and over again for over a minute.
After it finished he said that was the last thing his friend recorded
before he pushed his girlfriend out of the car
and took the police on a half hour high speed chase
that ended in him running over some spike strips on the highway
before being taken into custody.
“It will be a long fucking time before he makes any music again”
he said.
And everyone felt heavy for just long enough
to wonder what prison was like right now.
As I walked home I thought about all the unintentional energy that some people carry
and how even when they don’t know it
they are steering everyone around them, sometimes good, sometimes bad.
I like being around people like this
and while I am there guessing to myself how far they’ll go on all that energy
and how many people
they’ll take with them to the finish.