Baby Doll (the Book).

Rejoice in the bizarre absurd-realism that is Mike Oppenheim’s second novel!

Why should you read Baby Doll (the Book)?

Because…

“It’s like reading television…fun and relentless and hard to put down.”

Because you seek refuge in concepts and ideas like:

-Time Traveling Hobos that oppose the Illuminati

-Magical Dolls that give humans amazing powers of luck and empathy

-What happens when a man from 1989 is transported into a cave in prehistoric Brazil where he must interact with Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud in order to assist in foiling an evil politician and self-help author from dominating Earth in the year 2011.

-Because you know that Mike Oppenheim’s mind is a) crazy, b) entertaining, and c) unlike any other you’ve ever encountered.

Here’s what some of the fifteen “sneak preview” critics have said about Baby Doll (the Book):

“I kept laughing hysterically…I would read parts out loud to my husband and I would laugh out loud and he smirked and giggled.  So hilarious!”

“The book was upbeat, funny, and kind of wacky. The characters were very unique and a lot of fun to read about.  The story was always entertaining and got especially exciting towards the end.”

“[Mike Oppenheim] has such a knack for catching personality in dialogue and for making it come across smoothly and realistic.”

“Simple but evocative.”

“The juxtaposition of famous characters with ‘real’ characters is fascinating and a unique way to view historical figures.”

“I was laughing and squirming the whole time.”

“The characters are brilliantly engaging and endearingly irritating. As the plot spins a web of intrigue, the introspective thoughts and lively banter between characters sustains a reader’s interest, and makes for many joyful moments of gleeful page turning.”

“Baby Doll has insight that is funny and sad and true and all that great jazz that is literature!”

“It’s like reading television…fun and relentless and hard to put down.”

It wasn’t a pissing contest, but we all saw it as one.  From our perspective, it was a contest to see who had the craziest past.  All of us were supposedly crazy—we’d each heard a background story at some point—Manuel had done something real bad, twice, Bee Bop was a coke-head turned meth-head turned ritalin-head turned adderall-head turned got-caught-offering-to-blow-a-cop-for-anything-head, with three strikes on his record, Carl with a C was a skinny, silent guy—well past his prime—and none of us had ever heard a story about him, but this lack of a story told a story, and Old D, well, Old D owned Barney’s, and it was the only place for people like us.  Guys on the lam.

This shack is called Barney’s.  There are no signs calling it that, it’s just a name that gets passed down in the system.  You first hear about it in the county cell.  Then you start to hear a lot more about it as the trial date gets closer.  And since all criminals are obviously innocent, we all learn and accept that it’s the place for anyone to seek if the law says they’re guilty of a crime, but they know that they’re not guilty of the spirit-of-the-law—and the spirit of the law is, of course, open to much interpretation.

Anyway, most guys shrug off Barney’s as a myth, or as an urban legend, but I’m writing this on paper, here, which is to say, I’m “there.”  So Barney’s, it’s real.

Old D wants to know what’s the most fucked up thing I ever did.  Well, not me, he asked all of us, except Six, of course, because Six was inside, Six is always inside.

A rolodex, literally, a rolodex of cards with memories float and rotate in my mind—stiff white cards with blue colored tabs with letters and a black crank that looks like the wheel from a toy truck—I see these cards, imprinted with violent memories; I see a card that bears the memory of my father hitting my hand and telling me not to touch “the nice things” when I am four.

But after many cards have flipped, the rolodex lands on one card that will not turn over.  This card depicts the time my father hit her the hardest.  This is the card that shows his fist hitting her jaw with all of his might.  He’s been doing the same thing all my life, and this time, it is right after my mom’s birthday—I’m there because I’m home on a visit from college—Mom’s birthday falls on Spring Break, so why not come home?

It’s just after all the guests have left, and “she’s a dumb bitch and he can’t believe she…” and I am calm, picking up my aluminum baseball bat—thirty four inches long and thirty ounces heavy—I am calm and I am swinging it, just how coach taught me in high school, so I could get the scholarship for college.  I remember how when the bat hit his stomach, the first time, the stomach gave way a lot more than I had figured it would.  The muscles in the abdomen create much more of a cushion than a ball does and the bat really swung through it, what with all the follow through I gave it.  I remember thinking: It’s just like coach always taught us: “Always use follow through, kids.”  Coach was my dad, talk about cliché, sound advice that comes back to bite you in the ass.

Standing trial when you’re a nineteen year old white kid from New England is hard.  So I learned to tell cheap jokes to feel better about things, and I found out that this attitude helps to keep a person like me from getting really hurt in prison.  It’s hard to hate the funny guy…plus, he might be crazy.  Of course, I was in a county facility until the final verdict, not a real prison.  See, until you’re guilty-guilty, they still treat you like a criminal and beat you and make your life hell, but not to the point where TV’s in the courtroom can show that abuse to America.  No, life sucks in county, but you’re not subject to corrupt guards looking the other way and to bruises that clothes cannot hide; you’re also not subject to weeks in the hole.

No one actually decides to believe in Barney’s except for a few truly desperate guys every year.  Guys who understand the difference between prison and county, or guys headed back for a second or third tour of prison.  And out of those guys who do manage to find the pick up point, which is more than one hundred and forty miles from here, what about them?  Well, Old D says that even fewer make it from there to here, what with the test and all (He told me this after I passed the test, obviously.).  But I made it.  Yup, this is “made it,” and while this sucks, it is not prison; it is not hell.

There’s six of us here: Old D, Manuel, Bee Bop, Carl with a C, Six, who never leaves “the kitchen” portion of Barney’s, which is really just a small camping stove near a flap that we use as an exhaust pipe when we cook inside what is, like I said, basically a shack.  And then there’s me: I’m by far the youngest and least likely person to be here, based on socio-economic demographics, charts of American hierarchical privilege, or pretty much any other census graph one can compose concerning which types of Americans are more and less prone to end up with a life sentence in prison.  Having no sense of remorse for a murder can do a lot to affect a judge’s sentencing, apparently.

They call me “Bam-Bam” here, and then they laugh, and I don’t get it.  Then they laugh even harder when I don’t get it.  We have no internet, obviously.  The shack is the size of a quarter of a basketball court and it smells real awful; worse than a gym but better than a barn.  All six of us sleep in there every night, basically head to toe.  Old D has a cot.  It’s still better than prison, but it is a far cry from the four year private college I was enrolled in before I hit my career-ending homerun.

I would guess that Six gets his name from the fact that he doesn’t just have a six pack, he is one.  He’s the most tightly packed ball of muscles that I’ve ever encountered.  I’m like six feet tall and on the lanky side of things, and even though Six is about four inches shorter than I am, I’m sure he could snap my neck on accident if he were to stretch wrong while yawning.

Manuel is a handsome Mexican dude who doesn’t speak much English.  I grew up near the Canadian border and I took French in high school, so I have no idea what he’s saying, ever, but I nod and I pretend that I do about half the time.  He only looks pissed about a quarter of the time, so I feel like my plan is working.  No one else here seems to understand Spanish except for Old D, but I would never ask him to tell me what Manuel is saying, as I don’t ask anyone here anything, and I feel slightly safer this way.  The only time Old D ever said anything to us about Manuel was to ensure us, upon his arrival, that he had done something “real bad, and twice,” and we took his word as gold.

Bee Bop speaks some horrible meld of nineties slang he picked up from an “infecting local Detroit underground scene that was and will always be, like, like, like the SHIT man, the only REE-E capital E, bitch, REAL shit the world needs to hear, is all I’m saying, yo, like don’t drop the fucking world, that’s D after L, it’s my Word, and MY World, you get me, Bitch?”  His frail, bony white hands shake when he talks and even though there are no drugs at Barney’s, I am positive that he is always on them as he only sleeps about four hours every night.  I wish I could stay awake as long, just so I could watch him all the time because I am very frightened that he is going to kill me/someone/all of us.

So it kind of goes without saying that no one here uses a real name.  Carl with a C, he’s Quiet with a Q, so maybe his name is real, but I wouldn’t know, hence the Q part.  Like I said, he’s an old scrawny white dude, probably in his fifties, and he wears glasses and a plain white tee and a pair of khaki pants with a brown belt.  His socks are black and he lost his shoes getting to Barney’s.  His glasses aren’t broken which means he’s not to be fucked with—something I learned in prison (I mean county.  Like I said, I never made it to the real prison.  Attica.  Shit, just the name makes me shiver.).  Carl with a C came here just after me, within weeks.

So I don’t talk to any of these guys…Everyone here except for Old D scares the living shit out of me, and Old D would scare me a lot, but he’s in charge, so I have to have faith in him and his integrity.  Plus it’s not safe to leave here—I’m barely twenty years old and if anyone were to recognize me out there, in the regular world (which would be really easy given all the press from my trial and what I imagine ensued after my escape) I’d be totally fucked—they’d add escape from prison to my already lifetime long sentence, which would fuck with my already pathetic case for an appeal, obviously.  Apparently killing your Dad for hitting your mom is not self defense, and especially if you do not feel bad about it.  True story.

Old D.  Old D is Proverbial.  He just IS the stereotype in your mind.  He’s old, but young enough to beat you into begging him for mercy.  He’s strong, but in a quiet and gentle way.  He’s “that” older, weathered, but not-past-his-prime dark-black skinned man from the Coney Island ghetto who has seen shit, done shit that other people have seen, felt bad about some of that shit, been okay with other parts of it, and now he has learned how to articulate the differences and the nuances of his perspective, which simultaneously tutors a person in the incontestable tenets of integrity.  He is fit to fairly rule any kingdom.  That’s proverbial, well, something, right?  He makes it easy to trust him, because he speaks candidly about a reality that prior to meeting him had only been proffered to me by many a Hollywood film.

This is why it was so fucking weird when Old D stepped out onto what we call the porch, but what you would call a pile of filthy rags that have been piled into the shape of a nest, which lies next to a shack that looks about as reliable as the listed campaign promises made by the current politician running for some sort of position in an election that you have recently heard about in your life.  Before I killed my Dad I was majoring in Poli-Sci and I really miss it.

Old D wears a tight fitting blue shirt with a pocket over his left breast.  He is thick, but in all the ways a body can be; he is thick with the mass that appears after years of living life to the fullest when it’s possible, but also thick from muscles grown at the expense of scraping by when it’s necessary to do so.  Unlike the rest of us, Old D has a few pairs of pants that he has collected over the years.  The day he asked us about our fucked up past, he was wearing a green pair of cargo pants that were tied snug just under his manly gut.  I can’t grow facial hair, I still look like a teenager, but I always admired his gut more than his thick wily beard and mustache—that sort of tight, powerful gut takes years to develop; it speaks volumes about experiential life.

Old D pursed his lips and scanned the four of us after no one elected to answer his question.  “What, you fuckers think I’m gonna tell someone?  Me?  Who’s got the most to lose here, huh?  I just think it’s about time we all owned up to our shit.  You know, it’s like, uh, it’s like phase two of recovery.  Right, Six?”

“Yup.”  This comes from the kitchen.  Since Six has never spoken in front of me, I have to assume it’s the sound of his voice, but I cannot see into the kitchen, so I’m really not sure it’s him.  The voice is surprisingly baritone, given Six’s stout stature, and it gives testimony to my yawn theory.

Six’s reply seemed predictable; all it needed was a post bud-in-a-can burp to properly accentuate the nature of his agreement, but Barney’s was lucky to get anything more than a half empty bottle of apple juice from a really good bag of trash.

A man Old D refers to as “Guy X” brings trash bags up here every week.  Once a fucking week.  But I’ve never seen the guy.  At ten minutes to Noon, every Sunday, Old D and Six kick the rest of us out and march us up to the river, a twenty minute walk.  Once we’re at the bank, between two old trees, they tell us to lie down and stay still.  If it gets to nightfall, and neither one returns, Old D tells us that we are to run; it’s every man for themselves (“Every man and fuckin’ Bam-Bam,” Bee Bop laughs).  But Old D always returns without Six, and we march back to Barney’s where the old trash bags have been replaced by new ones.  Six is already scrounging them for edibles, and he will place these treasures in the “pantry,” a box next to the stove; a box he guards every second of every day.  Meanwhile, the rest of us put the bags full of inedibles in the backyard to keep the smell out, which doesn’t work when it’s hotter than seventy out.  It’s been hotter than seventy since I got here.

No one is answering Old D’s second round of questions.  Bee Bop is rocking his body and hugging his knees and scaring me, so I nervously glance at Manuel who is also looking at Bee Bop with the same look I always try to give Bee Bop.  This is a look of intense fear that is being masked by a casual, nonchalant “we’re all in this together” smile that is also smug enough to imply an enthusiastic unless-you-want-to-fight-me-and-then-I-will-OWN-you stare of death.  We all learned this look in county or real prison, and we are all trying to win an Academy Award for best performance in this category.  I’d say Old D isn’t playing, Six doesn’t have to, Manuel is winning, I’m in second, and Bee Bop never learned it because no one fucks with someone who bounces all the time and rarely sleeps; they’re no fun for anyone.  And Carl with a C is Quiet with a Q.

Which reminds me of my biggest dilemma here; why on earth did Old D let Bee Bop in?  Old D gives you a test, first day, and it’s simple; pass or fail.  No one sees anyone else’s test, and when I passed mine, Old D made it clear that I should never tell anyone, ever, what my test was—and I won’t.  Not even here.

But, yeah, the test, uh, well, it “worked” for me—I’ll say that much, and so Bee Bop must be OKAY, or Old D has gone crazy.  I don’t know.  What I do know is that it wouldn’t bode well for me to consider Old D insane, since both Manuel and Bee Bop arrived here before me.  If Old D went insane before Bee Bop came, well, that’s an ugly scenario to think about.

Old D tapped his foot hard against the ground, “Go on, tell me.”

I had a stick in my right hand and I was drawing spirals in the dust that lay about the ground, as this helped me to keep my eyes from Bee Bop and the others.  Without any thought, I began to speak, keeping my eyes glued to the ground and the spirals, “My Dad wasn’t nice.  Ever.  I mean, I have no idea how the fuck he got someone as nice and smart as my mom, and I have no siblings, but man, he’s a, he was a fucking dick.  So I killed him.”

“Su fadrer?” Manuel asked.

Well guess who can speak English now. I looked Manuel in the eye, and forgetting about the Academy award, I gave him a cool lie detector exploding look of candor.  He nodded.  His face conveyed no emotion to me, but the nod improved our chances for friendship by nine thousand percent.

“That’s fucked up.  Fucked up!” Old D was not smiling, but I considered his retort as a corroboration of my main thesis, namely that what I had just revealed was indeed “the most fucked up thing that I have ever done in my lifetime.”  I felt good.  I’d never talked to a stranger, outside of the law, about any of this.

“And I fucking really killed him.  Man, I killed him,” I continued.  “And it wasn’t fun, but I wish I could go back and do it again because then I’d have fun, knowing just how fucked up he was—the shit that came out in my defense, the shit he’d done to my mom that I never even knew about—man I’d go back and I’d fucking kill him slower.”

At that point I realized that I was hysterically crying, which served to scare me out of my mind.  I became mortified, that’s the word for it, I became mortified because I was crying in front of an “essay” (that’s what they called people like Manuel in county), and a meth head, and Old D, and…could Six hear me?  And that’s when I noticed it.  Carl with a C, he’s still Quiet with a Q at this point, but he is staring at me, and it’s a look I’ve never seen before.

All I can really remember about anything that happened after I killed my Dad and before I escaped from the prison transfer for Barney’s is telling my mom “sorry” over and over again. “I’m sorry, Mom” followed by tears and a lot of hugging.  I never said, “I did this for you,” because I did not.  I did it for me and for her and for the world, but I think she blames herself for what I did, and that’s what I was saying sorry for, all those times.  I wasn’t sorry for killing my dad, but for putting her through the sordid trial and for eliminating myself from her life, and most of all, for somehow enabling her to put all of that guilt on her own conscience…but I don’t think she thinks that the fucker deserved to die and that’s why I started crying during my story.  I started crying because I was thinking about my mom, not because I felt bad or weird about killing my dad—the fucker.

So then this happens: Carl with a C gets up and walks over to me and he sits down next to me and puts his arm around me and starts comforting me, just like a dad would, but like mine never did—not once.  At first it’s kind of helping, but then it just gets creepy.

How do I explain creepy?  Carl with a C looks nice, and when he sat down, it seemed nice, but there’s a way you do touch a stranger and a way you do not, and he slipped from the former to the latter without changing anything in a way that could be discernable to anyone else’s eyes.  But I felt it.  You just know that feeling; you just do.

I broke the stick and some dust rose and I jumped up, yelling “Faggot!”  It’s all I could think of.  A man is touching me and I am also a man and he is not touching me the right way, the way I think he should, unless we are both into each other, so I call him a faggot, and I again feel sorry for my Mom who did not raise me to be the kind of person who calls anyone a mean name.

Thinking these thoughts makes me cry some more, so I yell some more to combat the tears.  “Faggot!  Get the FUCK away from me!”  Carl with a C just sits there and his eye contact is strong—too strong.  His glasses magnify a look of sardonic, mocking, condescending, paternal “it’s going to be okay—come let me touch you some more” and this turns my mind away from my mother and towards—

—“Boy you need to shut up, now!”  Old D is now my high school principal and wrong or right it is time to shut the fuck up and so I do.  Old D’s thick hand is pressing firmly on my left shoulder in the way that a man can touch another man if that man is not his equal and must be quiet.  His hand is on my shoulder, but he is looking at Carl with a C and his eyes are squinting.

Old D’s scrutiny is interrupted by Six, who has descended the only step from the shack to the ground outside of its only means of egress.  Six is facing Old D, but he steals a glance at my face before he says, “Guy X. Gotta go now.”  These are the third through seventh words I’ve ever heard him speak.  This day is not normal.

Old D breaks his gaze with Carl with a C, who has not changed his facial expression and still looks impossibly relaxed.  He is curled against the wall, still sitting next to where I had been seated, and he looks pleased with life.  He is content and this angers me, but Old D’s hand reminds me to shut up and control my anger.  I wish I had a baseball bat.

“Alright, y’all know the drill.”  Old D releases my shoulder and heads into the shack and grabs a blue bandana.  He ties the bandana to his head as he emerges from the shack and does this with ease and in very little time.  It’s still very hot outside these days and the bandana will help to soak up some of the sweat during the walk to the river.

We march out toward the river with Six in front, carrying a machete, and Old D behind us, who we each know carries a revolver with nine bullets in it at all times.  These are the only weapons any of us know about.

Carl with a C is walking in front of Old D, Bee Bop is behind Six, and Manuel acts as a buffer between Carl with a C and myself.  I wonder if Carl with a C is watching my ass while I walk and I am not okay with some old pedophile being in our group.  This is not okay.

Time flies when there are no clocks and you do not believe in a future, so the walk to the river is a blip on a radar of time and progress that makes drying paint look like a fast-paced car chase scene from a movie.

The river is slow and appears to be nearly dead. It’s the drought season, but even so, this river looks like it is on the verge of becoming a valley.  The trickle of water is muddy and dark and moves in bursts like a partially clogged pipe.  The grass that surrounds the river has been bleached by the summer sun and the only thing that seems to be thriving here is the insect population.  There are many old trees that look like they saw death and laughed at its naivety.

“Okay, you know the drill.”  Old D speaks for the first time since we left the shack.

The drill is for each of us to lie down, face to the ground, and to lie prone until one of them returns, or nightfall (we already went over this).

Carl with a C lies down in his usual spot between two giant trees, next to the left most tree.  Manuel lies down next to him, to his right.  I lie to the right of Manuel, with Bee Bop to my right, who is under the other tree.  Things are set.  This is the drill.

We can’t tell time, but on previous trips, when we get back to the shack, Old D, who carries an old Casio digital wristwatch from the nineties in his pocket, usually informs us that the total trip took about four hours.  One time he was angry after he came back to get us, and the wait had seemed a lot longer than usual, and it was—I overheard him bitching to Six later in the evening, saying, “Seven fucking hours, man, I could fucking kill X!”

Old D, at this point, he does something real out of the ordinary.  He spits onto the ground (normal) and then adjusts the waistline of his pants (also normal).  He and Six are facing us, their backs to the river (still normal), and then he gives Six a look and then looks back at us saying, “You boys are going to be just fine.  But just to be sure, Six is gonna keep y’all company.  Cool, Six?” (Totally not fucking normal, not at all. We. Are. Fucked.).

“Yup,” Imaginary beer burp, Six agrees.

Old D then walks away, and since we aren’t supposed to move at all, we don’t see him again.  Ever.

We cannot tell time, so this is the hardest part of the story to tell.  I try to think of ways to convey the time:

After sixty-eight mosquito bites…

After four hundred and seventy-three bird chirps…

After Bee Bop’s breath slows down to a normal rate… (Okay, this never happens, I’m trying to be funny again, sorry, it’s a coping mechanism). The point is that your mind seems to find ways to pretend that you’re counting time, even when it can’t.  The point is that there’s nothing like the feeling of time passing when you cannot calculate its passage.  Nothing.

At any rate, after a truly long, excruciating period of silence in which Six never once seems to move and I am left to fester in my thoughts of Carl with a C and what this all means, something happens.

A branch falls.  I shit you not, a fucking branch from the tree to my right, the one above Bee Bop, it cracks off from it’s mother, and falls, landing on Bee Bop’s right leg.  The cracking of the branch as it broke from the tree sounded like a chorus of baseball bats crushing a ball, but it did not compare to the cracking sound that emerged from the branch striking Bee Bop’s leg. This crushing sound reminded me more of a high impact car crash—volatile, calculated, and organized; the result disturbing.

The branch was about the size and length of a traffic signal, but it seemed to weigh a lot more.  The thickest and heaviest part of the branch landed on Bee Bop’s leg and the rest of the branch missed my head by a few inches, so it was natural for me to react by leaping up from the ground.

I leapt up, but Six knocked me down to the ground before I could plant my feet, using the same forearm that held the machete.  I landed hard on Manuel who stifled a Spanish curse word and did a pushup that caused me to roll off of him and onto Carl with a C.

My leap and fall was accompanied by a soundtrack of Bee Bop hysterically screaming out in pain.

“Y’all Shut the fuck up and stay still!”  Six yelled.

“Fuck! FUCK SHIT FUCK MY LEG OH FUCK!” Bee Bop ignored him.

A third crack pierced the air and Bee Bop fell silent.  I was lying still, in the prone position, on Carl with a C’s back, but there was no way I was going to look up, let alone flinch, because the third crack had obviously come from a gun.

“Shut the fuck up.” Six repeated, waving a black pistol in front of us, allowing and taunting us to recognize its authority, his authority.

Now there’s a really “funny thing” about me, and again, I’m sorry Mom, as I’m sure this is also difficult for you to read, but you have to understand that I suffer from something, well, kind of weird.  When I’m extremely nervous, and my adrenaline is pumping…it turns me on.  Real on.  Hard on.  If I’m running the mile, I get a little stiff, but if I’m running from someone who wants to hurt me, I’m ready to impregnate a harem, and I’m entirely serious, I saw a campus doctor about this during my freshman year, and it’s a real condition.

When I landed on Carl with a C and then heard the gun shot and saw Six with the gun, my penis grew to a full erection.  There I was, with a hard on, lying on his back with my crotch in his butt.  The problem is that I obviously had to listen to Six, who had ordered me to remain still.  I felt Carl with a C get Relaxed with an R as the two of us nestled into a silence that should have been awkward, but I did not have the mental space to consider as such, what with Six and the gun.

“Faggot.”  It was a whisper.  The Q was removed from Quiet as Carl with a C expelled this simple word, directed at me, under his breath.  And it stung.

“Faggot.”  Carl with a C said this a little bit louder, just loud enough to make sure that I had heard it.

Manuel whispered something short and harsh in Spanish and since my head was buried into Carl with a C’s right shoulder, and Manuel’s head was looking to his left, we were able to make eye contact.

Just as Manuel was about to win the Academy Award for the best death stare of all time, another shot rang into the nearly silent riverbed scenery.  Birds did not scatter, as this was the fourth loud noise in less than a minute.

Manuel’s face exploded, sending small chunks into my face.  I shut my eyes as the first chunk began to navigate its way to my face, so nothing looked the way it does in the movies, for I only caught a glimpse.

“You need to be very still.  Something is wrong.  Every fucker that moves dies,” Six said.

The nervous excitement I experienced from Manuel’s death thrilled my anxiety-hard on to a degree that I did not even feel as I murdered my own father, and this excitement was too much to bear.  With no autonomy I thrust my crotch as hard as I could into Carl with a C’s rear.  His body wriggled beneath my force and he yelled out a curious cry that bordered on pain and bewilderment.  He pushed himself back into me and this caused my body to tumble over the side of him and onto Manuel’s corpse.

I squeezed my eyes shut and braced for death.  I heard the gun fire and I was amazed by how slowly the bullet traveled as it went from Six’s gun and into my head.  I watched a fantasy of what I thought Manuel’s exploding head must have looked like, using the image of his corpse to fill in the necessary details, only I used my memory of my own face and body in place of Manuel’s.

Seriously, this was taking forever.  I was still thinking and waiting for death, when I realized that I had heard a bullet fire far too long ago for it to have struck me.  Even without a way to count time, I knew it had been too long.  The problem with being alive is that it directly contradicted an obvious fate: I had been told not to move, and that if I did, I would die.  I had then been pushed off of Carl with a C and landed on Manuel.  Clearly, I had moved.  I then heard a gun shot, which is the punishment for moving in this scenario, so the only thing that made sense in my head was for me to be dead.

The next problem that arose in my mind was that I was obviously alive, and yet, if I were to open my eyes and see what was going on, I could be shot for disobeying a direct and obvious order, an order that I had already disobeyed and gotten away with once.  “Fool me once…”  So I remained still, eyes shut tight, imagining every situation I could.  I tried to listen but I heard nothing.  I heard nothing to my left or to my right.  No sounds emerged above me or in front of me.  My auditory field of perception was barren.  I heard nothing except the dull sound of dry air on a summer day; enough sound to know that I was not deaf, but that nothing, I mean no life was stirring anywhere around me.

After sixty-eight mosquito bites…

After four hundred and seventy-three bird chirps…

I waited for an eternity; there is no way to express how awful those moments were.  I waited and waited, hearing nothing and refusing to open my eyes or move.  It is amazing what the human mind and body are capable of when they are under a very apparent and direct threat of death.  I am positive that I did not flinch nor move once for however long the period was between that final gunshot and when I finally opened my eyes.

When I did, I could only tell that it was dark, obscenely dark.  We are so far away from civilization at Barney’s that it gets dark in a way that few Americans ever experience.  With what little vision I could muster, I could sense/see that to my left was a corpse; obviously Carl with a C’s.  I waited for what felt like another, half as long eternity before I finally felt secure enough to risk moving anything beyond my eyes.  This waiting period was actually harder than the first because when your eyes are open, time crawls at its slowest possible pace.

I finally turned my head to the right and could see the faint outline of Bee Bop, still lying underneath the tree branch, pinned to the ground.  I slowly arose, peeling my blood soaked shirt from Manuel’s body.  My body was slimy and covered in a combination of foreign blood and sweat.  My hair had chunks of Manuel in it, but I did not care about removing them.  My heart raced as I realized that it was too dark to see anything more than two feet away from me; there were stars out, but they only brightened the sky, all around me, thanks to the ominous trees, it was dark in a way that cinema has never once managed to properly capture.

Here’s the great thing about coming to a random spot at a river that is ‘about’ twenty minutes from a shack that is one hundred and forty miles away from a place where you are told, back in county, to wait at until “Mr. M” comes to find you and take you to said shack: The great thing about this is that it actually works.  I sat next to three corpses for a long while, fully inhaling the reality of my situation, which was that I was lost from a place that was lost from a place that is lost from most everyone in society.  I had no idea of where “I” was and where “anything else” was.  The only thing I knew was what area of the world I was in; I was one hundred forty miles away from a place that is on the way from Albany to Attica.

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 guy.  The guy 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.

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 below 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.  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, or 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 ass, one for the right.)

All I had left to do before I could leave was to take out three enormous bags of trash.  I had to pass my boss’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 in her chest.  I shook my head as I noticed that part of the mayo and tomatoes from her burger had slid into her lap.  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 my boss 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 every day…

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 kid on a rollercoaster.

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.

Hofstrom was my family name.  My older brother had been called Hof all his life, and I was therefore given no choice by my schoolmates and the community in general.  Save for 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 word 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 he had to to make 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 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 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 couldn’t even answer Benny’s question.

Benny pulled himself out of the dumpster.  “Hof, did you hear me?  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 old-as-shit Buick screeched into the back alley of the BK, broiling me in 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.  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.  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 he’d taken two hits, 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 by just 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 a second joint.

Instead of making sure that Benny had a plan, or inquiring as to my overall safety, I instead gave in to 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 that was so cool.

Benny kept laughing while I stared silently out the window, stoned out of my mind.

As we drove on, the houses got shittier and shittier and shittier and the people got Blacker and Mexicaner and Asianer.  I began to grow afraid.  I wasn’t racist, so much as realist, meaning that I was well aware of the fact that skinny little white teenagers from the suburbs were not supposed to be in this part of the city—especially 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 asked.

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 in through the slightly ajar front door.

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

“Shit, Whitey, you don’t wanna stand out HERE alone.”

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.  Just before the door clicked shut, I heard one of them say, “I’d leave that shit open…”

***

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; used latex.

Inside about ten more black guys, and two Asian dudes; most of them had neck tattoos.  They were sitting around drinking and smoking, some of them had girls in their laps, but the girls didn’t even look up at me.  I was trying not to stare and one of them interrupted my lengthy gawk by offering me a blunt.

The last thing in the world that I wanted at that moment was any more pot, especially mixed with a cigar, 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 and 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 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.  She was wearing a tight mini skirt that was all of nine inches long, and a tight white top that barely covered her smooth, dark, black chest.  She had two small studs in her ears and her hair was flat ironed.  When she smiled, her mouth revealed jagged pillars of salt trapped behind braces.

“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, she should have been 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 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 this 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 near 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.  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 waaaaaaay 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 haveta if you don wanna, but y’all still need to pay.”  She said this with the same tone and care that a tired supermarket clerk uses when asking you, “Paper or plastic?”

I stood there, frozen in fear.  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: the option of actually having sex with her.

Why the hell was I there?  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.  I felt so lame, realizing that 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 laughed at the kid in our school with the lisp for talking like a “fag.”  That was not going to be me.

“Kinka, look—” I began.

“—Yes or no?  I don 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, 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 stale, stagnant smells was making me seriously ill, and I finally realized, for sure, that I couldn’t finish this job.

So I asked her, “How much?” and she laughed.

“You gots to ask my man that.  I don’t touch nothing except you.  Get in, o get out.” With this, she peeled off her top 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 paying 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 describe the sense of paralyzing fear and panic that devoured me as I went outside to find no Benny and no car.

“What the fuck?” I thought.

One of the men on the stoop, the one who had barely moved to allow me entry to the house, he 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 deep humiliation.

I was trying my best not to show any of my fear, 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 the sense of confusion that comes with 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.

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 up 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 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 those were not options at my disposal.

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 this squad 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 also didn’t seem notice that I was stoned out of my mind.  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): After that night, no one in my town ever heard from Benny or saw him again.  Suddenly, Benny 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 the next day, when my parents were at work and my brother was at football practice, I took a pair of scissors and cut Benny’s leather jacket into small strips that I hid in a black garbage bag all week.  I waited to throw out this bag until the family trash can was on the curb later that week, the night before the garbage men would come.  I took all these paranoid precautions just to be sure that no evidence of my experience that night would exist.

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 and 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 and a few mysteries—to have a real ghost story of my own.

I asked my parents about Benny one year at Thanksgiving, and my mom laughed—Benny style, kind of maniacal and discomfiting, 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 imagination?”

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.

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.

In my rarely humble opinion, I’d like to declare that if you write; you are a writer.  I mean, I know we all like to make distinctions, like a subway employee is, apparently, a sandwich artist (which is supposed to sound better than being called a sandwich maker), but are there really distinctions for writing and being a writer?  I mean, I write grocery lists that are more fun and interesting to read than half of the famous novels I’ve choked down in a desperate attempt to study the craft of writing.  (Black beans and cilantro—no way!)…

At any rate, something struck me as I prepared to lecture 165 students, 33 or so at a time, for five straight classroom periods, about being an adult and a writer:  What do I tell a room full of 14-17 year olds about what it’s like to be a writer, much less “an adult,” when I don’t believe that anyone out there is really “an adult”?

What is an adult?  As far as I’m concerned, you become an adult the day your state decides that it can try you in a court of law as an adult, and beyond that, there isn’t a single correlative factor that every “adult” shares.

Some adults hold down steady jobs, but many do not.  Some adults can control their substance abuse, but many cannot.  And I have enough adult friends at this point that I feel very confident about making the following assertion:  Most adults don’t feel like adults. After all, a lot of American adults pay other adults (who are licensed by older adults) to listen to them talk or complain about their adult problems, most of which are problems that have occurred since childhood, but failed to “magically go away” at adulthood.  Ergo, most Americans do not feel like they are adults, yet we all believe in this American myth of “adulthood.”

Apparently, I was a big “hit” with the kiddos in Southern Oregon because I didn’t lie to their faces and pretend that things get easier when you become an adult—because they don’t.  I think I also convinced many of them to embrace their youth and at all costs to avoid hypocrisy, because adult or not—no one likes or admires a hypocrite.  I think former governors Rod Blagojevich and Elliot Spitzer can attest to this.  I also lectured them on hegemony, and how it affects personal interactions as much as it affects unilateral politics—yeah, I’m that guy.

For me, becoming an adult means worrying about maintaining responsibilities with people you don’t really know and don’t really care about.  An adult pays taxes without questioning the representation, worries about their income, bills, and unexpected costs like car repairs, and an adult, most of all, tries their best to stay off YouTube.

There are things that I wish more adults would consider: like how to sustain mental happiness and how to forgive themselves and others more often.

And I’d like to add to the “list of adulthood things that suck:” nose hair (and I’m told by older friends that up next is ear hair (I can hardly wait)), having to shave before important events, getting nervous when my heart skips a beat, because technically, men my age can suffer heart attacks, and “dressing my age.”

Things that make me still feel like a kid include: The fact that I still giggle when a fart sounds funny, the fact that I still think “that’s what she said” is an appropriate and funny response to any vague sexual euphemism that was made by a person who doesn’t usually make profane jokes, and the fact that I still get silly crushes on cute women that work in retail, and then fantasize about how I could and would ask them out, and then further fantasize about how I would blow it, since I still think farts sound funny, and I still…you get the point.

My ten year reunion for High School was this past weekend, and it was a very odd experience.  Many of my former classmates seemed like adults; they were dressed to the nines, they had “careers” with companies that I’ve not only heard of, but ones that I actually support, and a lot of my peers had a spouse and a child, or children(!).

Now, don’t get me wrong, “creating” children does not require an adult act, it actually requires little more than barely pubescent hormones and a lack of concern for proper birth control (see: The South, The Midwest, and The Wire).  But having a baby and attempting to raise it will usually turn someone into a “trying-to-be-responsible-person” (a.k.a. an adult) just about as quickly as anything else I can think of (other notable catalysts to adulthood: overcoming drug addiction, witnessing a serious crime, experiencing domestic violence first or second hand, having to take care of an invalid.).

But is there more to life than being a responsible (read: boring) adult?  I know plenty of careerists who spend all their free time and money abusing drugs and getting wasted in order to feel like less of an adult, and I know plenty of parents who use “grandma” to raise their kid about three to four nights a week so they can “get their drink on.”  I’m not judging, I’m just noticing.  And Mom, you’re lucky you live so far away, because I’d probably raise the bar to six nights a week….JUST KIDDING!

The worst part of being an adult is that what appear to be perks to a teenager are actually mere rites of passage that quickly lose their appeal.  Because I am an adult, I can drink recklessly in public so long as I don’t fall down or make a scene, and I can legally fly to Vegas in order to gamble away all of my money and then declare bankruptcy to avoid paying my real bills, but this doesn’t change the fact that I care more about respecting myself than I do about bending rules and pretending that my body likes being poisoned in order to provide me with a brief inhibition of judgment that never lasts long enough for me to do anything more than commit to an unnecessary late night drive-thru at Jack-In-The-Box.

The bottom line is that at 28, I’m not very different from 8.  My body and its routine functions still provides me with simultaneous disgust and intrigue, my imagination is still 1000 times more interesting to me than any aspect of our so-called reality, I still refuse to settle for anything less than what my dreams provide and demand for me, and when I’m really sad, I still want to see my mommy for a hug.

So if you want my advice on adulthood, which I’m sure you don’t, I’ll tell you the same exact thing I told 165 high school kids: “Don’t take anything in life too seriously, except the importance of being as kind as you can be, at all times, to everyone you encounter.  You never know what you’ll need and who you’ll need it from in the future, but you certainly only make things harder for yourself when you close off opportunities just because they don’t seem appealing or cool to you, at the time.  Be nice; your life will be a lot easier that way.”

Now I have to get back to lamenting my one point loss in my championship game of fantasy football, because that’s what adults do best; they figure out how to cope with loss.

In June of 1991, the love of my life was born.  This love was my dog, Hudson.  I don’t know how many of you are animal lovers, but Hudson forever instilled in me a deep and infallible appreciation for the loving relationship that can develop between a human and a different animal (Humans are, after all, animals).

I am an insomniac, and have been one since I was about twelve years old.  My parents used to go to sleep very early, usually by nine o’clock.  So growing up, the only company I had during the cold, awfully lonely evenings was my older brother.  Unfortunately, growing up, my brother and I had very little in common, and we did not get along very well.  As a matter of fact, my brother used to take Hudson into his room at night, and close and lock the door, confining me to the depressing prison that is an insomniac’s high school bedroom.

When my older brother left the west coast for the east coast, for college, in the fall of 1997, I was left “all alone” in my house.  On the outside, I pretended to be “happy” to see my nemesis leave my turf “for at least four years.”  But on the inside, I became secretly depressed and lonely, and the insomnia only got worse.

But dogs are not as dumb as some humans would have you believe.  Hudson sensed my pain, and he knew what to do.

Up until this moment, even though I’d come up with Hudson’s name and tried my best to train him and to love him, he’d been more like a toy to me. He was an object that was sometimes fun to play with, but at other times, an object that seemed to be more of a nuisance; something that had to be fed or looked after in some way.

Hudson proved me wrong.  Hudson was not a toy.  He was a sentient being who was full of nothing but love, empathy, and tenderness; and he proved this to me over the course of the next two years.

After my brother left for school, Hudson began to hang out with me all night, every night, keeping me company while my body refused to subdue my mind into what you humans call “sleep.”  He would scuff around the room, even though my door was wide open, and prefer to stay with me and wag his tail, laughing at Letterman’s bad jokes with me.  And I rubbed off on him as well, as I turned him into the most die hard Oakland A’s fan that any dog has ever been and ever will be.  It was a well balanced relationship.

And even though he would often kick me during his dog naps, just as I was finally beating that evening’s insomnia, I realized that even Hudson’s sleeping kicks were “love kicks.”  He was teaching me a lesson that I still treasure; that love matters most.

One year after I graduated from college, in 2004, Hudson came down with some form of cancer.  He had slowly stopped eating and drinking water, and my parents were in hysterics (in their own way) about his declining state.

Never in my life have I experienced such a fierce and loyal determination to play god.  I don’t remember the details, but I flew back to Iowa to see my parents and to save my puppy’s life.  I was convinced that I owed my puppy this, at the very least.  After all, he had done something nearly impossible for me, just five years prior: he had saved a teenager from a serious bout with adolescent lonely depression.  He was my hero.

Even my father, who is about as comfortable with showing love as an insecure obese person is with sharing their body among a room full of super-models; even my father was having trouble coping with what all of my family knew was inevitable; that Hudson was going to die.  Hudson was truly special.  Even my friends who hated dogs seemed to perceive that Hudson, bad smells and full-on-physical-greeting tactics aside, was more human than dog.

I’ve lost a few people that I truly loved in my life, and each and every loss hurt, and each loss hurt differently.  But the loss of my dog hurt so bad that I still wake up crying sometimes when I think about my last week with my dog.  Today was one of those days.

When I went “home” (Iowa is where my parents live, less my “home”) to care for my allegedly dying dog, I was actually able to get my beloved dog to eat and drink, and to regain some of his mobility and “youth.”  I remember that even my parents were impressed by this turn in our beloved dog’s health.

I was the best nurse you’ve never seen.  I stayed by my faithful puppy’s side as often as I could, just as he had stayed by my side for the last two years of high school.

I nuzzled his muzzle with my face and whispered thanks and kind words of love to him.  And I tried my hardest not to cry in front of him, and to keep him thinking positively.  At no point then, nor now, do I think that anything I did was crazy or unrealistic.

As a matter of fact, Hudson’s positive reaction to my tender love and care was life changing.  It proved to me some conclusions I’d already made governing personal health.  Having already had some eerie medical history of my own, I was convinced that your attitude matters most when it comes to staying healthy.

Unfortunately, the same afternoon that I left Iowa to return to my life in New York, feeling confident in my puppy’s return to glory, Hudson quit performing what was evidently a mere charade, and he relapsed into his former status of “on last leg.”

Basically, Hudson had humored me.  This dog had seen how his own demise was affecting me, and so he had taken it upon himself to remain the strong one in our relationship.  I “shit you not,” as I write this, the memory of Hudson’s brave and bold behavior in the waning hours of his own life are so vivid in my mind that I am beginning to cry.

Like it or not, my experience has taught me that a “stupid” dog can be more emotionally mature than a human.  After all, a “mere dog” was able to realize that for the sake of my lasting memory of him, and for the sake of my mental health, he needed to feign an air of health and confidence.  Yes, you read that correctly, my dog was capable of ‘feign.’

Hudson did something that week that most humans cannot do; he sucked up all the cancerous pain that was literally eating him alive in order to stop me from crying and losing my stability.  And that just about defines altruism for me, in so far as I’m concerned with definitions.

Attitude alone will not prevent illness, but a bad attitude tends to hinder recovery and can often speed up a process of declining health, whereas a good attitude can combat a lot of illnesses.

How can I present such a bold and unscientific theory as though it were a fact?

Well, I tend to form my opinions based on an amalgamation of my own experiences and observations as well as those of other humans, and every single nurse that tended to me after my car accident was fervent in vocalizing the power of positive thought.

But this column is not about “MikeyOpp Psuedo Science.”  (I’ve actually written that column, and never released it…it’s too much, even for me).  No, this column is about love.

This column is about the fact that I was watching a movie last night in which one of the characters said: “Love is a wish you hide in your heart that no one else knows” (Terry, a character in Bandits directed by Barry Levinson, 2001), and about how this quote did not deliver a new epiphany; it did something equally powerful, it re-triggered the memories of an old epiphany, one which I still need to work out, in my own life.

The older I get, the more children amaze me, because while children may fear boogey monsters and “the dark,” they do not fear lightness and love; as a matter of fact, they embrace love and reject hate in ways that should make most adults feel shame.

I guess dogs are like big children, or little children are like big dogs-whatever way you want to set up the analogy, up until a certain point of social interference, all young animals seem to have nothing but a desire to give and receive love–and again, I stress the fact that humans are animals!  It seems to me that it is only as animals grow up that they learn about predators and prey, and this intricate threat tends to make love shrink on the hierarchy of survival.

But what is necessary in nature is no longer necessary for the human species, for we have organized societies that are supposed to diminish the threat of predators.  We have set up a tremendous global enterprise of  agriculture in order to circumvent the necessity of dealing with predators and prey alike!

So what is preventing our species from turning away from hate and fear, and towards love and security?

I recently wrote my parents a letter in which I told them that I had suddenly realized that I never appropriately thanked them for the greatest gift they ever gave me; the gift of unconditional love.

My parents have faults, just like every other earthling out there, but one thing they got right, for certain, was the act of giving truly altruistic love to both my brother and to me (and to Hudson).

The results of my parents’ love are complicated and diverse, but the overwhelming byproduct of their love is that I am not afraid to show love, to give love, to receive love, and to openly talk about love.

Because if we continue to harbor our love ‘as a wish in our hearts,’ hiding it from the world, then how are we ever to move forward towards a universal goal of world peace and harmony?  You think any rational human on earth, at the end of the day, doesn’t wish for anything short of unconditional love and security?  Osama Bin Laden, as evil as he may or may not be, I’m sure even he desires nothing more from life than to feel loved.

And I don’t particularly care if that statement offends any of my readers, because when you carefully ponder the concept of humans and our collective and individual desires for love–and the sense of security that only love can bring about, then I think it’s quite easy to see how even Bin Laden deserves a chance for love.  For I posit that if he were given enough love, even he would surely put down his sword, so to speak.

I currently live in East Oakland, California.  This is a section of the Bay Area that is notorious for its appalling violent crime statistics (It tends to land in the top three category, annually, in “worst homicide rate per capita of any city in the United States” (see Wikipedia: Oakland).).  But when you investigate the nature of the homicides here in my city, you’ll find that most are committed by very, very young people.

The vast majority of crime in Oakland is committed by young people who seem to have been instilled with a sense of cultural and/or racial shame.  Young people who see more local money being spent on law enforcement than education.  Young people who have not yet been given the proper amount of time, distance, and perspective to see the counter-productive results of their naïve and morally questionable codes of ethics.  Young people who, simply put, tend to be growing up with a depressing lack of unconditional love in their life.

When I first moved here, I was full on ready to buy into the cycle of self-protectionism based upon my fears and stereotyping; after all, violent crimes are, um, scary.  Fortunately for me, one of my best friends from Portland helped me to move down here, and when we arrived, she told me, a la Harry Truman that “the buck stops here.”  She further added that it’s foolish to be afraid of my own neighbors, no matter what the statistics say!  Her advice was to smile at everyone in my neighborhood and to let my love shine; to become a friendly addition to my neighborhood, and not just another jaded, uptight “alert citizen.”

And she’s right.  What began two months ago as a work in progress has turned into a very real and empowering personal state of using love to conquer the shaky foundations of fear and hate that purportedly surround my new community!  All the time I am shocked by what a difference it makes to give another human being the gift  of your smile.

And I will stop at nothing to continue in my quest of providing anyone I encounter in my life with a sense of unconditional love and support.  Hudson may have passed on, and I may be “all alone” in the sense that I am very much a bachelor in my late twenties studying the solitary art of writing, but I don’t feel alone, because I have the love that so many give me, and the love that I in turn produce, to give to my world; and it’s a beautiful thing.

So my love is no longer a secret wish.  It’s now a patch I wear on the sleeve of every shirt I don, each and every day.  And no matter how bad the new census’ report on crime statistics becomes, and no matter how many people in world continue to play games based on blame and fear mongering, I will not stop in my quest to mass produce the only product that I believe can and will save everyone on earth from world wide calamity.  It’s called love, and it is indeed, a wonderful thing.

My Hudson and me.

Allow me to introduce myself.  Really, I’m nothing special.  I’m just one of a breed of humans that I like to refer to as the “five percenters.” It’s the five percent of humanity who still wishes to, and therefore actually continues to think about the bigger picture.

We look just like everyone else.  We’re not very different. Some of us are doctors, others are lawyers, some are Republicans, and some are Democrats.  We even work at mini marts, clean rich people’s toilets, and serve fast food.  A few of us, and I stress FEW are even working in politics.

The only thing that separates “us” from “them” is the fact that we do our best to act with the repercussions of our actions in mind.

Me First, That’s Mine, More for Me, The Jones’, and most people who run in elections to get a job, instead of interviewing with the person in charge of paying them; these fine folks make up the 95%.

And it’s got nothing to do with dumb or smart.  I run into careless, thoughtless smart people ALL the time.  In fact, these people piss me off more than the dumb ones.  The dumb ones actually get a little pity out of me, and a lot less anger.

This is what makes me angry: The fact that most people don’t seem to want to think anymore.  They want supervisors and superiors and all sorts of government programs to do their thinking for them, and I think it’s a crying shame.

It seems like most everyone wants to be given a job, a schedule, and a paycheck.  They don’t want to pursue a cause they believe in and then see how that creates its own schedule, and its own paycheck.

Sure, wheels need axles, and machines need all sorts of reliable cogs and gears, but you can still be excited to be a cog, and take pride in it.  You can still realize your intricate role in the system, rather than trying to un-realize your role by thinking as little as possible.

But that’s not the nature of Nature, and so I’m naturally neutralized.

I think I’m living in an age where I get to witness the beginning of a new humanity, and the end of an old and exhausted one; one that I wanted to see die.

But be careful what you wish for, man, because the dinosaur that was mankind rising up from it’s Neanderthal roots is now transforming into a modern Neanderthal…a Neanderthal that knows how to text it’s basic feelings.  Instead of OOGA!  Booga! Ooga Booga!  It’s: LOL UR KEWL or  BTW I C U L8R.

Sometimes when you absentmindedly pull on a thread, you can end up picking an integral thread, and then the whole carefully woven article unravels at a rate you never saw coming.

Hell, when you absentmindedly do most anything, you run a serious risk of not seeing what’s coming.  NINETY FIVE PERCENT OF HUMANITY seems to be oblivious or unconcerned with this simple fact.

I was always bad with statistics.  Especially the ones I make up.  So I’ll tell you what; Take whatever percent of humanity it would take to lead the entire human race into the direction we’re moving in, and these are the people whom I hypothesize do not care about thinking any longer.  They only wish to be entertained, nourished, and looked after.

Who was actually there to witness the opening of Pandora’s Box?  We don’t know how it actually happened.  Most folklore is a metaphor anyway.  Not to be taken too literally.  A picture is worth a thousand words.  But no one had a working camera when and where Pandora lived, so give me a break, you don’t know and I don’t know who the four horsemen are, and by the time we realize who they are, most of us will probably possess a photo featuring one of them, have a subscription to another one’s media outlet, we’ll have elected the third one into an important office, and the fourth one will be on the New York Times Best Seller List, metaphorically speaking, of course.

We as a culture seem to enjoy revering and obsessing over the very people and things that are most bad for us.  It’s in our nature.  It’s no big deal, I was just trying to say one more witty thing before I went off to watch The Sopranos followed by Dexter.

The thread of modern man has been pulled in a funny way, and we no longer care about caring for ourselves.  We’d rather be taken care of.  And I can’t explain why this frightens me any more than I can explain just how much it frightens me.

I’m appalled by consumerism.  I’m appalled because it has become evident that consumerism only works when the rate of consumption remains constant or moving in an upward trajectory.  How can we realize this, and then continue to believe that we must remain a consumer based economy?

This is stupid.  I feel like telling Coach that I wanna hit the showers, someone else can take my spot.

Actually I don’t.  Not at all.  But I don’t know a way to describe the feeling of apathetic disinclination towards participation that I sometimes feel.

It’s like that one time, when that country elected that cowboy and some oil tycoon friend of his into the executive office, and then let them run care free for eight years.

After four years, when the people said, “I’d like more of the same!” I kept thinking, but, uh, guys, we’re going to have to pay for all of this…isn’t this maybe a bad idea?

I felt like Piggy on the island in Lord of the Flies, only I have more charisma than he did, so I got laser eye surgery, ditched my glasses, and pretended to fit in as best I could.

I’d choose almost any state of life to death, because I’ve never met anyone who died, but I know that sometimes, living is FUCKING AWESOME!

And a lot of the opponents of the cowboy and his oil friend, the ones who backed the man who invented the internet and the man who somehow couldn’t tell the difference between oral and oval in his office, these guys told me not to worry, that, “soon we’ll get all the power back, and we’ll fix everything.  Internet Man and Young-Multi-Racial Guy say that we can save the future by saying change, hope, and green a lot.”

And I ‘was all like,’ “um that’s more of the same too, just in the opposite direction.  It’s just a different mantra.  Are you crazy too?”

And so then EVERYONE told me I was a real downer.

And I was.

And I am.

Everyone then thought that I was too dumb to be a Piggy, I was more of a Chicken Little at that point.

And I was.

And I am.

Because every time a piece of sky hits me in the eye, someone passes another bill that stimulates our economy by creating an order for someone to create more fake sky pieces to install in the giant sky illusion before anyone notices that it is a giant illusion.

This is the sort of shit that can give Houdini a real Napolean complex.

I mean, I just thought that we couldn’t keep doing this.

Funny thing is, so far, I am so wrong.

So it goes.

Thanks, Kurt V.

Here, I’ll finish up this modern day history lesson in a way that I think you’d appreciate:

Where was I?  Oh yeah, so the rich kid cowboy and his snakeskin oil selling buddy got kicked to the curb in a demand for “CHANGE!”

And then things changed.  Really quickly.  Stocks plummeted, crazy bitches in Alaska got even crazier, Wall Street hit a real wall, and some people didn’t jump for joy, but they dived to avoid the depression…meanwhile, we taught a whole new generation the word “Ponzi” and told them to scheme their own way out of this mess, cause we’re not really trying to change anything, and we’re ‘gonna take their money before they even make it.

We told them that money doesn’t grow on trees, it’s created the same way we create toilet paper, only it hurts a little more when you wipe with it, it burns differently when you ignite it, and it has more trace semen and cocaine in it.  Oh yeah, and it’s way harder to counterfeit!

Next up, we decided not to penalize HMOs for making it hard to afford good health care, but we saw nothing wrong with telling “Homos” they couldn’t marry.

Penultimately, we decided that in order to save the children, we had to increase military spending by cutting back on education budgets, so we fired a whole bunch of teachers and told them to have an extended summer vacation.

And then, right when everything seemed about to fall apart at the seams, right when the big thread really began to unravel, the big old fat cats on the hill took a recess in order to avoid a meeting with some guy called “The Piper” who was making some ridiculous claim about being owed something in return for all that we took from him.

This piper seemed really steamed, and about to do something about it, but no one even noticed him, because football season was starting, along with a new season of Mad Men, which was a show that made people feel nostalgic about how covertly depraved things used to be, you know, before we got YouTube, Elliot Spitzer, and Energy Drinks.

Besides…what the hell is a Piper anyway?  Can you smoke drugs with it, if you get cancer in a western state?

Maybe I’m a lot dumber than I thought.

I’m sitting in a large, breathtakingly beautiful public park, typing on a “Netbook.”  I look out to my right, and I see a homeless man sleeping like a baby, snuggling with the trunk of a tree, tightly wrapped up in a see-through plastic bag, like the one that I imagine would line a brand new HD flat screen TV when you pull it out of the manufacturer’s box.

I look back at my “Netbook” and type.  But then I notice two figures darting in and out of my peripheral vision, up and to my left.  I look up to see just another elderly Portland couple practicing Tai Chi.  The man has a ZZ Top beard, several tattoos, and an enormous beer gut that seems to defy the tranquil and Zen-like character traits that I stereotypically attribute to a Tai Chi practitioner.  But this man moves fluidly, much like a well practiced ballerina.  And even though I don’t have a beer gut, I can’t even come close to touching my toes, so, really, what’s the point in judging him?

Yes, it’s another slow, cool, and lazy sunny Sunday morning here in Portland, full of squashed stereotypes and drizzly day dreams.

My heart jumps as an inner voice removes me from my state of tranquility by insisting:

Enjoy it now, because YOU ARE LEAVING.  So say goodbye. Things are going to CHANGE.

Change.  I used to hate that word, then I learned to embrace it, and now I feel an abnormally satisfying indifference to the concept of change.  Change is a lot like a lazy fly buzzing around my leg.  I can leave it alone, or swat at it, but it is only doing its thing.

It’s the summer of 2009.  Everything that occurred last summer was last summer. I’m here now.  And it’s now this summer.  The Summer of 2009.   The summer where I am sitting here in a park typing this into my “Netbook.”  This is change.

It’s 2009 and a “Netbook” is not a “Laptop.”  The “Netbook” differs from a laptop, because it’s not a laptop.  That’s why.  And it has no CD Rom Drive.  But I turn it on just like a laptop.  I open applications just like I do on a laptop.  I even surf the internet and use the touchpad just like I would on a laptop.  But it’s a “Netbook,” they tell me.  And the front pages on all the newspapers tell me that it’s 2009.  Things keep changing, damn it.

When I first moved to Portland, Oregon, On June 14^th, 2005, I had one stop to make, before I could do anything else, and that was to stop at “A-One Mini Self Storage,” which was located on “South East Main Street.”

I endured a full hour of perseverance-meets-futility filled frustration, full of wrong turns, wrong exits, and hectic, unfamiliar traffic patterns, and then one last, (and very reluctant) personal-pride-killing stop to ask directions at a gas station before I was finally able to locate the self storage center on South East Main Street.

Upon finally finding this holy grail of damp, mildewed, but reasonably priced box storage units, I unloaded all my earthly possessions as quickly as I could, and headed east on South East Main Street, in order to meet a potential roommate at her house, to interview for a room to sublet.  The year was 2005, and I was marveling at how I’d arranged for this meeting on some weird internet site called “Craigslist.”  Craigslist is now a household name.

We adjust to change.  I am writing this on a “Netbook.”  You are (most likely) reading this “on-line.”  Many of the June protests and riots in Iran were apparently organized by Iranians using an online social network called Twitter.  Twitter is the new Facebook which was the new Craigslist, which was the new Yahoo, which was a brand new part of a thing called “The World Wide Web,” which is the latest paradigm shift to create a slew of nonsensical buzz words.   The Internet; where the spider meets the bee.  Web Buzz.

I was a little late to that apartment meeting, the one that I’d set up on Craigslist, thanks to my machismo-driven hour long refusal to ask for directions to the storage unit, but at least I showed up to the interview in an empty, clean looking car, as opposed to the overloaded “Beverly Hillbillies” mobile that had taken me and all my shit from Ithaca, NY all the way to Portland Oh-Rah-Gone, (as I called it back then).

Michael Jackson hasn’t produced anything of relevance to society in more than ten years, but upon hearing about his “untimely demise” on Twitter,  Our most trusted talking heads and pundits have reviewed his legacy and decided, in an historical sense, that he is to be one of the most revered people in modern pop-culture history.  He had a pet chimpanzee named Bubbles, a massive ranch that he called “Neverland,” in honor of a fictional place in which boys and girls never grow up, and he was accused of child molestation on several occasions.

But we, as social historians, better yet, as humans, we are capable of not only creating, but also of adjusting to change.  It is not uncommon for us, as a species, to collectively reconsider the labels and judgments that we made in the past, and to attempt to amend them, whenever an event creates a new juxtaposition that allows for an opportunity for revision.  Martin Luther, and Martin Luther King!

The Earth is no longer flat, the sun doesn’t revolve around us, we don’t bleed patients to cure diseases, and, as it turns out, Michael Jackson is not a weirdo, nor was he a reviled pedophile.  No, he is and always was a brilliant artist who died too young, and the death was tragic, and so we forgive him for any crimes, both real and imaginary, that we, the people, may have accused him of, once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away.  Amen.  Some things never change!

The interview with my potential new roommate went well.  I apologized for being late, she apologized for making me drive 3,000 miles in order to be screened in person before committing to my offer to sublet.  The place was very nice; it had a tranquil back yard that emulated this picturesque garden I had read about once in a book that someone had left in my hotel drawer (some guy named Gideon wrote it?) The only downside to the place was that I was told that the apartment was non smoking, and I liked to smoke.

Smoking used to be good for you; doctor’s recommended certain brands over others.  Margarine is better for you than butter, if it’s the 1960′s.  They’re both good for you throughout the 70s 80s and 90s, but recently, margarine became bad for you, because it has too many additives.  If you stand by the microwave, you’ll get cancer.  Anti-oxidants prevent cancer.  Blueberries have anti-oxidants as do pomegranates.  Anti-oxidant based food and beverage products saw a 21% upswing in American and European sales from March of 2007 until March of 2009.  4 out of 5 doctors smoke Lucky Strikes.  The Japanese live longer than Europeans do.  They, as a culture, eat a lot of fish.  Fish is good for you.  Some fish have mercury.  Mercury can kill you.  My doctor tells me that I should…

A lot has changed since 2005, now that I think about it.  Maybe these changes I perceive are only a product of the way I tend to view change, or maybe they accompany the fact that I am getting older.  Science calls this “the aging process,” and as I learn to deal with the slow, deliberate destruction of my body’s cells by my own body, I’m also learning, gradually, that one of the hardest parts about being young, is actually the easiest part of growing old:  And this is recognizing and accepting the fact that the only thing in life that seems to be constant, is change.

It seems to me that it is only through a process of retrograde analysis also known as looking through the heavily-subjective-thick-Mr.-Magoo-beer-goggle-esque lenses of nostalgia that we are able to reinvent our narratives, and therein circumscribe meaningfully-meaningless tags of “beginnings, middles, and endings” to our stories.  We sometimes even refer to these events as “life changing.”

But really, during any moment, like right now, you are simply here, and you have to deal with the here, because, well, YOU ARE HERE, and you cannot re-create the past, and you can’t be sure of what future you are creating.  Everything is always life changing; life is a series of changes that can only be reviewed retro-actively, not pro-actively.

And so it’s tricky stuff, this whole “trying to pretend that life has a course, a course that I have any control over, and a course that I can plan my life around.”  It’s hard to pretend that I can predict even a slight minority of the millions of changes that are occurring at all times, all around me!

SAY WHAT?

I said: it’s getting trickier, as I age, to pretend to believe that we as humans can accurately plan for the future, when change is so unpredictable and inevitable.

WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

I posit, that we, as humans, pretend, again and again and again that we can somehow predict and plot out trends from the past to the present and then into the future to wait for, to follow and to rely on, because if we accepted the fact that this is ludicrous, then we’d also have to give up on our absurd and uniquely human notions of personal-autonomy and authorship (the notion that our Ego screams is true every damn moment of our life) and this crushing blow to the ego, well, it could be the end of everything as your ego knows it.  It could be the end of the status quo…the end of things as we know it…why, it could mean tremendous change.  And I’m not talking about some “Twitter-NeoCon-WiFi Internet-Obama” Change.

Last summer, in 2008, when a car collided with me on SOUTH EAST MAIN STREET, right here in good old Portland, Oregon, I experienced many crushing and delightful blows to my body and my ego.  And I remember thinking that this event was the most deliciously ironic event of my life!

“How perfect,” I thought to myself, “How perfect is it that I can now demarcate my Portland experience with South East Main Street as the location for BOTH the front and back pages to the story of my life in Portland!”  What an enjoyable narrative.  Hurrah!

MySpace. You Tube. Google.  Black Swans.  The Earth is really a turtle.  A god named Atlas holds the Earth above his head.  God Created Earth 6,000 years ago.  There was a big bang, just like when your parents created you.  You cannot go faster than sound.  I meant to say light.  I mean, time and space are only connected in our perceptions.  There is an electromagnetic spectrum, and certain animals can see parts of it that we cannot.  But that change, the one you predict, it’s impossible.  Things cannot change that much.  There’s simply no way on Earth that that could happen, it’s just not possible.

South East Main Street, as it turns out, is a repetitive page in my Portland story.  In less than two weeks, I’ll be showing up to the very same A-One Mini Self Storage, on South East Main Street, here in Portland, Oregon, to pick up a U-Haul truck which will take me, and the same worldly possessions that I showed up with here in 2005, (plus a futon bed, a couch, a TV, and a TV stand) down to Oakland, California, where I will be attending a graduate school program.

For those of you keeping score at home:

I left California for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1999 to become a world famous film maker.

I left Pittsburgh for Ithaca, New York in 2003 to become a nationally famous musician.

I left Ithaca for Portland, Oregon in 2005 to escape my own ambitions and to learn how to relax.

I am “now” leaving Portland, “here” in 2009, for Oakland, California to go back to school.

Electricity is witchcraft, a product of Satan.  Radio waves and TV waves could be lethal.  According to Thomas Malthus, the world’s population will forever be curbed and checked by rampant famine (FYI we’re at 6.778 billion and counting, Mr. M).  The war in Europe, the Great one, the one that was fought between the years of 1914 to 1918, it was the “war to end all wars.”  Glad we stopped doing that!  Neil Armstrong actually walked on the moon, but more people associate moon walking with Michael Jackson, and more people know who he is.

Swine Flu is the new Avian Flu which is the new SARS which was the new AIDS which was the new Spanish Flu which was the new Bubonic Plague, which was a curse sent to us humans by god in order to kill off humanity because of its many sins.  But from A-Bomb to H-Bomb, we’re still here.

Bank of America, Chase-Manhattan, Wells Fargo; according to the U.S. Government, these banks are “too big to fail.”  That system could never work. The current system is broken.  I know how to fix it.  No, I do.  No you don’t.  You’re wrong.  That’s impossible.  Things can’t change that much.  Change doesn’t work like that. What if we tried that and it didn’t work?  I don’t like the changes you are discussing.  I can’t accept those changes in MY plan for OUR future.

The Wright Brothers, Chuck Yeager, The International Space Station, Hula Hoops and Yo-Yo’s.  Gandhi.  The French Revolution.  The Indo-China Revolution.  The Cuban Revolution.  Atari, Nintendo, and Microsoft.  Rosie The Riveter and Rosa Parks.  Rock Hudson is the manliest of men.  Did you hear that Rock Hudson was gay?  Changes like that just don’t happen overnight.  9/11 changed everything.

I used to get angry about current events.  I mean truly angry, with a capital RAGE.  And I would suffer in my anger, because I was not capable of accepting the fact that I was unable to change my world, and that my world was always changing around me.  Dick Cheney, George Bush, and an army of angry, ignorant, misinformed people were constantly trying to shape my world into a design that I did not approve of.

The “I” who existed in 1999-2007, if he were still alive, he would be mad with rage, sick with disgust, heavy hearted, and sulking with his guitar, because “too big to fail” would have sent his head spinning into insanity.  It would have been the last straw to break that poor camel’s back.

Instead, “I” am “here” in 2009, and instead of moping or getting angry about things, I’m out on my bicycle, touring around town, reading literature in parks and coffee shops, hanging out with friends, imbibing brew, eating meat from a grill without asking if it’s free-farmed, licking my sauce filled fingers, and basically saying to the universe; I accept you for what you are, for what you are not, for all that you can be, for all that you cannot be; it’s cool with me, thanks for the ability to have feelings.  I am choosing the feeling we call good, thanks for offering!

I’m calm.  I feel relaxed.  I don’t rely on the internet or television in order to be entertained.  I oftentimes forget to smoke cigarettes when I’m supposed to be addicted.  I’m not full of angst.  I’m not mad as hell, and I can totally take it.  I mean, it’s funny, actually.

Believe it or not, but from where I sit perched, I see an ineffable beauty amidst the chaos that is a world full of cognizant, conscious humans who believe that they can predict changes in things like “the economy” “weather” and “crop cycles.”  Somehow, during all the time I’ve spent watching humans argue about how to best control change, I have learned to find this perpetual struggle very amusing, and it’s given me a dearth of material from which to write about, for the rest of my days.

This is the part of the column where I’m supposed to rant and rave about the demise of the United States, the demise of our way of life, and the demise of our economy.  I’m supposed to be witty and poignant as I rewrite jokes about objects that are “too big to fail.”  But I’m okay with the fact that in 2009 change became a buzz word.

Bees buzz as they mindlessly weave around a strict course between the nearest plant in need of pollination, and their hive.  They do this in response to their Queen, because they’re drones, and drones follow orders.  Bees don’t instigate change, but they sure do react to it.  They do this, as most animals do, because it’s a necessary strategy for survival.  Buzz.

Lately, I’ve been watching the animal that we call the human, and I’ve noticed that instead of reacting to changes, like other animals, humans seem to be scrambling around, quite madly, in an effort to try and implement changes that will supposedly restrict things from changing.  They are instigating “necessary” changes in order to prevent things from changing.  I find this odd.  I also find this amusing.  I don’t, however, find it ironic.

I don’t know who my queen is, and I’m not sure if I’m heading away from her or towards her and the hive, but somewhere along this great journey of mine, I’ve happened to notice that sometimes I exist in moments in which I cannot hear the buzzing buzz of humanity (it’s usually when the television is off) and I’m a lot happier during those moments.  Buzz.

Buzz words create buzz concepts which allow for buzz laws of reality, all of which are, naturally, part of

a beginning

a middle

and an End.

And you?  Why, you are right —>  Here.  <—  Always in the middle…

Apparently, my intuition regarding the sanctity of life does not mean that I can now easily operate my life based on this concept alone. Apparently, if I am to make the most of my life, I’m going to actually have to remind myself that I need to work, in order to make something out of my life.

But the more I think about things, the more it makes sense that sometimes I feel more motivated to sleep than to work. After all, sleep is not like life; sleep does not require hard work, determination, goal orienting, working with others, or follow through. And these components of success are the basic building blocks of life that I have been trying to skip over since I…um, all my life.

But regardless of my personal near death experience, I’ve always thought that waking up and wishing to sleep away the day is a bad sign, because I don’t think it’s healthy to want to sleep your life away. But I’m also realistic, and I therefore understand that throughout my life, I’m bound to have some periods wherein I feel like I’m in a rut, and all I want to do is sleep. No matter how hard I push myself and “go for the gold,” I’m positive that life can always wind up seeming to be monotonous, and the only way to escape this is to make some changes, or to adjust your expectations. I’m convinced that here on Earth, your attitude is everything when it comes to enjoying your time.

Thankfully, I’d classify myself as not only an optimist, but also as a “happy camper.” For the most part, I’m an amicable and affable person who enjoys the company of friends. But I have my days, just like I’m sure you all do, and these days sometimes frighten me, because there is always that impending threat of: “What if this is how I’m going to feel for the rest of my life—good god!”

I usually feel like my life is a total waste when I find myself spending too much time alone, without doing anything productive. These mornings usually follow DVD marathons in which I consume a few hours of some HBO drama, along with a couple of vodka martinis, and then I wake up feeling like LIFE IS SHIT.

And these sorts of nights usually occur because I find it difficult to be productive when I’m alone, and no one is watching me. I think this is human nature, and a good friend of mine recently told me that there are plenty of psychology experiments that back up this notion of mine. Namely, people tend to work harder, and better, when they think that someone will notice their work or when they think that someone is watching them.

This is why I am going back to school to become better trained at the art of writing. At the very least, the next two years of my life will be spent in the company of other writers, as well as professors who have to invest an interest in the progress of my writing career. And I need this. I need it bad.

But someday, I will have to learn how to motivate myself, by myself. This is why whenever I meet someone who seems interesting to me, I usually open up to them and try to pick their brain, because interesting people seem to be self motivated, and that’s what makes them interesting; they have “strayed from the herd.”

One of the questions I always want to ask interesting people, but I usually don’t, is: “What do you do when you are alone?” The main reason I don’t ask this is that regardless of a person’s comfort level, this is an unusually jarring and dramatic question, and some people can be put off by it. You kind of sound like a stalker-wierdo-psycho if you ask a stranger “what they do when they are alone.”

In my defense, I don’t think that this question is actually creepy. When I want to ask, or actually ask someone this question, I’m not looking to find out about their masturbation habits. What I want to know is what passionate, successful, intelligent and interesting people do when they have hours of time, with no one to share it with?

Personally, being a self proclaimed member of the “passionate, intelligent, and interesting people club,” (read: elitist, and also take note that I removed the word successful), I constantly vacillate between craving time alone, and fearing time alone, and I wonder how many other people are like me. They say that “no man is an island,” and despite my years of trying to prove this wrong, I’m finally beginning to come around to this philosophy.

But “Lord knows” how hard I’ve tried to prove this aphorism wrong. I’ve lived in studio apartments for years of my life, I have moved to the middle of Iowa in an attempt to surround myself with gravel roads and the isolation that can only come about from living in a toxic cloud of pig shit, I have refused to date perfectly datable women in order to remain independent, and I even, once, turned my cell phone off for three days (side note: This last example of my attempt at isolation is the most pathetically honest and telling anecdote for just how attached I am to my cell phone and communication.).

Throughout my life, no matter how hard I have tried to become an isolated island, apart from humanity, I always come around to a nagging longing for friendship and conversation, and lately, I’ve been exploring the merits of my dependency for personal relationships with other humans.

The most important thing that I have learned about what satiates me has come about from my most recent move back to Portland. What I have learned is that good times are absolutely contingent on good relations with good people. I have met and made amazing friends all over this nation, but only in Portland, Oregon do I have an army of friends who opt to live a life wherein work comes second to hanging out and enjoying the company of others. For this reason alone, Portland is a “magical” place for me.

And don’t get me wrong, people all over the country enjoy hanging out more than working; it’s just that you can’t actually afford to hang out in most of the other cities in this nation, because our inflationary depression is kicking most people’s asses.

The last two days, thankfully, I’ve woken up feeling excited about facing a full day of work and play, and I haven’t had one moment wherein I’ve wished for the bliss that is sleeping my life away. I am, however, quite sure that I will have more of these blasé days at some point in my future, and I have no choice but to accept this. What really irks me is the fact that I want to know everything about this human life I am living, yet I’m fairly sure that I’ll never know if my personal feelings regarding work, success, and the meaning of life would actually exist if I didn’t have role models and a social pecking order to drive me away from my lifelong urge to “slack off.”

If I didn’t come from a community of achievers who attend good colleges and then find good jobs and pretty wives, and then sign mortgages and have babies, would I ever feel like I’m “behind” in life? If I really was ON an island, and I lived alone, with unfettered access to food and water, would I ever feel lonely, despondent, and out of touch with humanity? Or do I only get to feeling this way because I’ve experienced good times, good relationships, and the burning blush that comes about whenever I’m complimented for something I actually take pride in?

No one can answer these questions. And I’m not expecting anyone to. I’m just curious as to how many other people even have these questions. Sometimes I worry that I worry too much about worrying, and this is my manifesto to that cause. If you’re out there, and you’re reading this, and you have ever felt the same loneliness, there’s some quality irony for you; you’re not alone. Yes, together, you and I, we’re alone, but this notion always puts a smile on my face, because it’s only human to enjoy dramatic irony.

My very close friend and “on again off again” boss has always told me to relax a little, and to enjoy the “underachieving phase of my life.” But I’ve never been very good at this, and this column has basically been a catalogue that articulates my struggle to fit into adolescence. But this week, as I prepare to commit to a graduate school program, I suddenly felt very reluctant and afraid of this decision, for it seemed to mark the end of my underachieving phase of my life.

Lately, my brain has been plagued with one consistent thought: “I don’t want to grow up.” After all, what could be better than living the high life that I currently live (pun absolutely intended)? My life is a life of debauchery, wherein day by day, I get off from work, then go out to bars, hang out with friends, consume unhealthy food, and fail miserably with women…it’s great!

Fortunately, there is a rational side of my brain, and it tells me that my urge to accomplish something important with my life has very little to do with the lifestyle I lead. What I mean to say is that I’ve observed plenty of successful adults in my brief stint here on Earth, and I’m convinced that most success stories involve people who ignore standards and do what feels right to them.

And I have certainly never been the type of person who conforms to any of the standards that I come across as I meander through this existence of mine. I mean, I have personal standards, don’t get me wrong, but they are bizarre and, to most everyone I know, these standards of mine seem arbitrary at best. But they’re mine, and I like ‘em!

The other night I was eating dry cheerios from the bag they come in during a game of Scrabble and my friends took notice and ribbed me a bit for this “weird” way of eating cereal. What they didn’t realize is that eating dry cheerios from the bag is one of my earliest memories in life, and therefore quite the “creature comfort” for me. As a matter of fact, whenever I eat the “cheerios dust” (not to be confused with angel dust) at the bottom of the bag, I am automatically transported to a magical land of nostalgia featuring one happy kid (me), who is watching “The Smurfs” on our thirteen inch Trinitron television in the kitchen in the house I grew up in. It’s damn nice, I tell you.

As I get older, I begin to cherish memories like the aforementioned one. Maybe it’s because I know I can never actually return to my true childhood, or maybe it’s just the amazing power of nostalgia; but I really miss being a kid. I miss feeling wide eyed. I miss getting overly excited about future events. Nowadays, no matter how “fun” something sounds, I know not to get too excited, because more often than not, the things I look forward to don’t meet my expectations when they occur.

But the more I think about it, and the more I observe the reality of my condition, the more cocksure I become about the fact that no one is really a “grown up” in this world of ours, we’re all just faking it, and longing for that feeling we used to get when we were real young, and innocent, and “wide eyed.” Everyone’s just chasing the tail of the dragon of their memory equivalent to my “Dry Cheerios Dust and Smurfs” memory.

This past Saturday, I took a trip to the local Science Center here in Portland, called “OMSI” (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry), and I was suddenly transported back in time to a magical land of being a child. This place had it all; paper airplane wind tunnels, giant rooms filled with rubber balls and pressure hoses to shoot said balls all over the place, water bottle rockets, and general mayhem.

The best part was that I was surrounded by loud, obnoxious, pre-pubescent awkward looking children, who were each having the time of their lives, and it was a beautiful site to behold. Despite my lack of compassion and understanding for what it means to be a child, lately, I’ve been finding myself constantly fascinated by children.

I’m fascinated by their lack of socialization, by their lack of adult goals and the adult stresses that come with said goals, and most of all, I’m hopelessly curious about their ability to get excited by things in life that normally seem expectable and mundane to me.

As I made my way through a tiny portion of the Science Center on Saturday, there were fleeting moments (read: the entire time) in which I found myself wide eyed, curious, excited, and unaware of my adult problems as I traversed the unique landscape of science exercises disguised as toys.

And I think I would have stayed in this magical land of childhood if I wasn’t being escorted by one of my “three nanny’s,” the incredible “J-Nine” (She’s also the lead singer of the Bolt-ons, the only all acoustic Michael Bolton Cover Band). I am speaking literally when I refer to J-Nine as one of my three nanny’s, because here in Portland, three of my closest friends are all professional nanny’s with years of nanny-ing experience under their belt, and I think I get along with these three girls so well because they are used to dealing with small, annoying children, so they understand how to keep me from getting bored and desolate. After all, despite my age, I am, for all practical purposes, a whiny, attention starved little kid masquerading in adult clothes and therein making a mockery of the adult system.

As a child, I constantly dreamed of all that I could, and would achieve. But now that I’m encroaching on my thirties, I feel full of doubt and reluctance. I can’t understand my reluctance, because I am on the cusp of achieving most everything I ever thought I wanted, but I can’t shake this nagging fear of achievement, because I’m worried that once I achieve the things I think I want, I’ll be left with ennui, which is the French term used to describe eternal boredom.

But I think this is, actually, total bullshit (excuse my French)! What I’m really doing is failing to understand that in life you simply do things, or don’t do them, and no one else really notices or cares. No one out there is waiting for me to finish my next novel. No one is losing sleep over the progress (or lack thereof), of my career as a writer.

A close friend of mine, who is in his early sixties, and basically an older version of myself (extremely witty, well mannered, down to earth, sophisticated, always interesting to talk to, well, you get the idea…), he gave me some great advice the other day, which led to the preceding epiphany. I was going on and on about my struggle with writer’s block (read: procrastination in the first degree), when he interrupted me (I told you he was like me!) and said, “Mike, Just Do It. It’s the only good thing Nike did for this Earth; they summed up how you accomplish things. You Just Do It.”

Even if I were famous and beloved by millions (which, incidentally, is both my greatest dream and my worst nightmare, and this dichotomy explains a large percentage of my insanity…), it wouldn’t change a thing in so far as my personal motivation goes. Because my friend’s advice is both simple and true: In this world, successful people just do things or they don’t; and it really is that simple.

I hate you, close friend of mine (you know who you are!), for always making the solution to my artistic problems sound so simple. Maybe I don’t want to “just do it.” Maybe I want to write column after column and book after book about my writer’s block. I mean, writers block, it’s a truly amazing thing! After all, without writer’s block, I wouldn’t have all of my eight hundred CD’s alphabetized with every single CD backed up into mp3 form, I would never have finished my taxes on time, my apartment would be a total mess, and I probably would not have been able to watch all five seasons of “The Wire.”

They say that the only way to begin fixing a problem in your life is to first identify and then accept that you have a problem. It is in this spirit that I hope this column will thereby mark the beginning of the end of my personal onus. Because my problem is not writer’s block, and my problem is also not that I am afraid of success and adulthood. The problem is that I’m hallucinating; I’m seeing the trajectory of my life in terms of black and white, when there are a million and one shades of grey!

Before I visited the Science Center, I thought that becoming a successful adult had to mark the end of my childhood innocence, but I was dead wrong. Hanging out with little kids and acting just like them helped me to realize that I will never truly “grow up,” because I am still in touch with my childhood instinct to seek the fascination that comes about from learning (about) new things. I am therefore pleased to announce that I am no longer afraid of success, I will no longer complain about writer’s block, and I am no longer convinced that I will someday become an adult. And I have Toys ‘R Us and Nike to thank for their apt, corporate slogan advice, for I have found a zen like mantra in reconciling their two slogans: “I Don’t Want To Grow Up!” and “Just Do It.”