Your thoughts.

“No doubt.” said Chris, his lips still, his pupils wide and directing their dark sinews toward the double-barrel, the M-16, the row of polished handguns; 9mm’s, a Walther P99, a few 10mm’s, others he had no name for, foreign models possibly.

Staring at all this, cogs churning, they both stood as still as they could, but a nervous strain of energy pulsed silently between the two of them like a string of lights, no, like an electric fence. They thought of Mike. They thought of Mike dead.

“So now that you know about all this, I suppose we should think this all through. Less you wanna’ go all guns blazin’ and shit, Serpico and shit.”

“No.” Chris said. “This right here’s gotta be right on the money.”

I closed the cabinet and fed the digits in. We walked back upstairs, into the dimly lit living room and sat down on the sofa. I brushed the hair out of my eyes and exhaled for what seemed like the first time since I’d heard the news. I pulled the laptop from my backpack, flipped the screen open and pulled up a map of the city.

Chris just blew the smoke from his mouth, making it roll and move at his will. We passed it around and sat in the silence, if the crying of cicadas and grasshoppers would ever provide for that; but it was as quiet as it had been all day, so we sat.

In the backyard I had built a little bench and found some chairs around town, wood ones, from rummage stores, or the yard sales they had down the street. The chairs sat back against the fence, looking out on the street, out on the corner and the lamp above it, and the cicadas. The shadow of the trees were over us both, the light out there in front of us, but two far to touch us or to be seen with us. Just the smoke and the street light and minds racing, wanting to make it stop.

We finished and placed the roach in the cigarette paper. I motioned him to the window on the outside of the house, the lamp inside, the blinds down.

“I’m gonna go around front and open the door and check everything out, then I’ll open this window for you.”

I knew no one would be here. I’ve always felt a need to have measures in place, as they say. I let Chris in and we walked downstairs. I pulled the string, the light was on, we stepped back and took a moment to breath. I walked over to the gun-case against the wall, entered the digits, and opened the doors.

“Whooah. I mean, shit, man. That’ll do.”

*The Coup

Fighting a cycle of such scope is futile. But I don’t think that’s what my parents were trying to do. If anything, they were doing what it’s taken to make it past adolescence since the bully and the heartbreak were invented: protect us. It’s especially pleasing sitting down with my dad these days, seeing him smile when he hears of certain details from my past that I would have never told him growing up; not that I didn’t trust him, only that you’re never really sure what you’re doing until you’ve done it.

Not until it’s already happened and you can’t remember when or how, you start to open up to them. Maybe it’s when you realize you both have mustaches. Maybe it’s when you stop borrowing money. Maybe it’s when the world come crashing down, when life kicks you square in the asshole and you cry in front of them, with them. When you’ve garnered the experiences of love and loss and death. Sometimes you never realize the strength your parents had, under the weight of trying to lift us up, make sure the dark things in their in the recces of their own past would somehow pass over us like the angel of death. Under the weight of their own bills, their own frustrations and fears and dreams that were made second to the ones they cared for.

There’s was a time for me when all lines that had once been blurred evened out in front of me, the horizon, burning red and endless. My mother’s death changed all of us; the men she left behind. There isn’t a day that we don’t think of her, her grace, her joys embedded in simplicity, her strength.

And that’s what binds us all even now. That we were loved, and are still loved richly and selflessly even now in the midst of life,  the cynosure of the beast.  That and I can finally say shit in front of dad.

Like a nine year old marshmallow

It must have started with the bratty kids at church or the supermarket. The little nose-picking, tantrum throwing fuckers, squirming in their Sunday best, hanging off the side of grocery carts, chomping on their gum and eventually forcing one of their parents (perfect excuse for a smoke, I’d say) to squeeze and apologize their way out of the pew, a crying and irritated child’s sweaty, miniature paw in grasp. They would walk out of the chapel, heavy doors creaking as they opened them to well-dressed deacons, waiting outside for communion or to pass the hat around. Craig and I were never afforded this type of public disturbance. Bleeding, vomiting, dying: these were excusable reasons for disrupting ones prayers, ones recital, ones communion. As a child I would look over my mother’s shoulder and see a smile creeping from beneath the lips of these kids, wise to their parent’s buttons, to their reactions, their weakness.

Every movie or television show worth watching prior to my 18th birthday was seen somewhere other than my house, usually screened at my neighbor and best-friend Kims’. Nightmare on Elmstreet: check. American Ninja: check. Bevis and Butt-head: heh heh. check. At relatives houses I would stow away in their downstairs, upstairs, wherever the adults weren’t and their cable was. I would watch rock videos, slasher flicks, any movie I heard their was nudity in, partial or the whole kabob, I was there. I knew my party would be crashed at some point, dad waltzing in with a plate of h’ordeurves  to see how we were getting along, and there on the fuzzy screen in front of his two strapping sons were a big pair of tits. Or maybe some film whose character was just in the middle of saying ‘goddamn whore’ or any number and combination of dialect that was unsavory and completely off-limits in our household. I really don’t know what they were thinking all those years, trying to shield us from the inevitable while praying for the best. I suppose it was as simple as the hope we would end up alright and somehow different from the kids whose moms and dads never said no.