1998

I. 

Breaking: Lanky Boys Throw Hands in Parking Lot Scuffle.
Clichéd “fight!” chant chorused by hackneyed prepubescent
boys eager for bloodied bread. Adults, bemused by scrawny-
armed haymakers, sip nips in curbside seats. Lightweight belt
withheld at bell; an even-match of puny sob stories determined.
Tune in at ten for on-the-scene playback for twenty-two years.

II.

I’m the vulgar, braille-faced boy who calls the bullies cunts,
a rough block of black granite, bespeckled white, diamondless
coal perpetually squeezed by social cues, class clown taunts,
and tolling bells, shambling the halls a shell of inarticulate
notepad scribbles, sucking in the world through gills, a starfish
pressed against the glass of an environmental drought.

III.

My cousin’s casket, draped in light blue velvet, his scalp stitched
shut, the pale white flesh, made-up to look-living, fails. Piano
plays pianissimo on PA system speakers—some light jazz CD
looped to play once—a short life lived (in retrospect) won’t
warrant repeated jams, as elegy and eulogy turn to ministry,
no orator among us.

IV.

Three weeks prior, at Christmas, my cousin had hoisted me underpits
so high I hit my head on the ceiling fan. I gulp phlegm in stoic stare,
too old to bleed salt or show truth; the nerve endings scream. If only
Santa had given me a dictionary; I may have unspooled my thoughts
on paper rather than pavement. At least I’m warm as I wind up my fists.

V.

February blizzard warning in Boston, Ant and I leave Dot for Copley,
inhale Pixy Stix sugar from caf counters in lame attempt to impress
Gen-X co-ed. Lurk Strawberries’s aisles in search of Busta Rhymes’s
sophomoric album. Wander Back Bay with twenty bucks in our
baggy pockets. Grab a slice of Supreme’s & play Time Crisis 2.
Fire. Action.

 VI.

There used to be a hobby shop along Mass Ave., across from Mary
Baker Eddy—I think it’s a barber shop now. Ant and I haunted it on
fatigueless weekends, buying unpainted halfling casts and dropping
the pseudo-hoodlum patois we’d adopted to chat up emboldened
nerds full of Xena knowledge and Fruitopia. I ache to recall it in full.

VII.

Before the blizzard, we’d pooled our cash to buy displacer beasts, these
puma-like monsters with flailing arms that we’d have to glue on. Snow-
flakes fell in plump salt-shakes and I whizzed my name on Eddy’s alley-
way wall, unaware of I. M. Pei or the mapparium it held within. T tunnels
belched stale piss stank upwind, esophageal puke ravaged our nostrils.

VIII.

Storm clouds muffle the outside world when snow is on the way,
all gray and under glass, a world within the globe. Buses chug by
in motored thrusts, spewing slush upon sidewalks in their angered
wakes. Windswept bums are shuffled off the streets (we think), &
a Berklee singer heats up Maruchan in a dorm nearby.

IX.

Sugar highed or something, we strayed toward Ruggles, off
course, then reversed, and did the same on the Red, waiting in dusk
upon the middle platform in Braintree, cold. Ashmont-bound & late,
Ant’s ma was not amused (and she didn’t like Busta Rhymes at all).
Nevertheless, we rolled dice until dawn with a boombox on low.

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash