The next song was a fast song called Bricklayer. Everyone got into it, even the jocks, and a small mosh pit formed. I got into it too. In the pit, bodies hit each other and there was sweat. It was tight and hot. I was behind Brent but he didnt know. I jumped and our bodies collided. And again, in the hot, sweaty circle.
From the side, Mr. Case watched with his crossed eyes.
Jack-O
I sit in the drivers seat of my grandfathers old DeVille. It is night out and cool. Me and
Joe, we just sit.
Were out in front of the Unified Palo Alto School District office, a dead one-story building where old people work. I think of all the boring English teachers I have ever had, and I think they were all born in this building.
We sit here because its dark, and there are no lights outside this building. Were stopped for no reason except that the night is still going and were drunk, and who wants to go home, ever, and this spot is as good as any to just sit in the shadows and let life slow.
My window is cracked, just a bit, and the air plays on my forehead. I often think about driving off the side of freeway overpasses, just plunging Grandpas old blue boat through the cement guardrail. The sculpted posts crumbling about me and Grandpas blue machine: a great moment of metallic explosion and heavy ripping and jerking and then release: a soft, slow dive of arcing color through the windshield, into a hard second of impact, just before the black. What an adventure lies behind one quick turn of the steering wheel. A great screaming, and then, slip away.
Joe and I sit and stare at the wall of the building. The building is beige, but the shadows make it shadow-color. Joe smokes. His window is all the way down, and he breathes his smoke out the black gap.
There is not much to talk about with Joe because hes such a moron. I dont know what he thinks he is, or why he thinks he exists. I guess in some peoples lives, no one tells you what to be, and so you be nothing. In the olden days you were born into it, all decisions made, and you farmed until you died, or cleaned the royal toilets.
I guess they didnt have toilets. Just stuck their asses out and shat in the moat. But someone had to wash out the hole.
If you lived in the olden times, what would you do? I ask Joe.
Joe has to think about it. He is large, and his weight spreads from his belly across the seat, like it was a plastic sack full of liquid, rolling in layers upon itself.
Which olden times? he asks, and its like a boars grunt, a deep thing, from the thick part of his throat.
Like, King Arthur, with knights and horses.
Fat-ass thinks. I can hear it, like rust-flaked gears groaning slowly into motion, even smell it, yellow smoke emanating from his skull.
Id be the king, he says.
You cant be the king, I say. No one is king. Thats like winning the lottery.
If I went back, Id be king. And Id fuck every virgin in the kingdom.
You cant be king, asshole. You cant even be duke . The fact that you even said that shows youre not royalty. Youre a peasant.
Whenever people time travel, they go back and they are friends with the king, or they are the king.
Because those are stories. When people tell stories, theyre always about the king; its Aristotle crap. But its not real .
Neither is time travel.
There are very few kings, and you certainly wouldnt be one of them.
Fuck you.
Fuck you, Joe, youre an idiot.
Youre an idiot.
I know, I say. And I am. I am friends with a slug, and my other friends are pigs and wolves. I never make friends with nice things, just the shit.
If you were king, Id kill myself, I say.
Joe sucks off his cigarette. It looks like the point of a golf tee in his fat, clenched paw.
He looks at me and the blue shadow-smoke drifts over the gate of his teeth like fog over a graveyard.
Then you better die, mofucker, cuz Im the king round these parts.
He smiles with rotten teeth like busted shingles, all climbing over each other, and I think, Why dont you get some braces, motherfucker, and brush those dang things? But I dont really think about that too much because Im thinking about something else, or at least getting ready to do something else, or already doing
And before I even know it, or can enjoy the new look on Joes face, like a blubbery peekaboo face, so surprised, Im driving us right toward the vague beige shadow-filled wall, and I can only see and hear Joes voice for a second, a high-pitched thing that cracks for just a second, and for that second Im with his voice on a plateau in the black of space, wherever it is that noise cracks like that, and decibels live, and then its gone because theres the metal sound so loud and its how I had always planned it to be, crunching, and a jerk, and the front of my head fills with the cold hollow sinus pain, the surprise punch in the nose that takes you back to childhood, and theres an immediate link to every other time you ever had your nose hit, by a ball, by a head, by your own knee, and after the surprise, it doesnt go away; but Im still there and the tires behind me are screeching