the kid you’d not been able to forget’d been named lonny and another kid whose name you couldn’t remember called lonny’s hair baby-shit yellow and you’d never forgotten that so when the pale of dutch hyacinth breaks that spring stink in the air you’d smell too lonny’s every wed nes day shirt puce the color of rage every wed nes day how he’d sung it looking forward at you and the way he said wed like it’d meld you together and lonny’d been ripe with skunk cabbage their family stew on every tuesday night was a make-shift possum or coon and you’d remembered his what’s left of a pink floyd iron-on flaking off lonny’s puce t-shirt how it shred the skin of your cheeks lonny’s baby huey body twice your size and that rage colored every wed nes day shirt hadn’t made it past lonny’s belt since before third grade back when he should’ve been in the fifth by then and in fourth grade together you’d been lonny’s every wed nes day target every wed nes day he’d begin singing it on mondays red rover he’d come right over that playground every wed nes day you still never forget not being able to breathe from underneath him he hadn’t tried to break through a red rover line all year instead ran right at you smashed on top of only you who hadn’t known what pink floyd was yet and you were too small for the wrestling coach to let lonny get his arms on you in wrestling club lonny wore his black unitard with a suspender hung off one shoulder showed off his nipple like semi-pros who came through town to thrill the children and take the women and lonny’s baby-shit yellow hairs glowed a gall-green crown around the carrot of his fat lard tit just like the semi-pros lonny would say same uni as mine performing at the vee eff double you hall or the high school gym then after on to the american legion the wanna be pros went where lonny’s mom connie worked and kept lonny in dusty popcorn roy rogers’ lonny’d loved a maraschino his mom gave him a half dozen per glass lonny came dolled up in his unitard piped in yellow like a plant disease around all his limb openings to connect in an x marking a cross in his crotch at his taint just beneath his baby balls compared to yours the only thing you’d got going compared to the other boys in a one room school house aping one another working for supremacy of their broken fathers’ hearts was the size of your testicles and all the way up to junior high your testicles’d been a conversation piece heralded or mocked until bento davi came to town with his curly leg hairs like spiders a density of androgen receptors in dermal papillae climbed into his follicles rather than outward when bento davi stood signing in in front of the gold sash they’d run down the length of printed-on wood grain brown tones they’d called church tables then tops swollen uneven from when the verdigris river crested over banks in seventy six flooded almost all of montgomery and nowata counties on the golden cloth they placed little plastic cups dipped in cheap-gold-chrome trophies they gave for rubbing against and eating sweat off another boy everyone got a ribbon for participation every week but not everyone got a gold cup your face a grimace in its reflection they’d write your name in tape and paste it on the base and the only thing you’d had was upper body strength from throwing bales and mother-less goats they loved to run hard alongside you as you rode that mule they’d chew the hems of your toughskins throwing your legs up over her wither before she’d try to clip you along a barbed wire fence a family named blagg tied that fence with gloved hands around their claim no matter how nice they’d been claim is claim and that mule named cheeto loved to run that fence line showing off for blagg’s pigs get the goats riled up our game and when you climbed the rope thirty feet high in the ceiling of the old grange hall they’d used as a gym and band room not another boy under twelve could scramble as high as you then and your seven-year-old organs felt like they did against that rope no one had told you about that or your mother’s shower massager until you and your friend todd from town discovered it in the bath together nothing coming out yet and the smell of the wrestling mats rubber faint of onion sweat and spit and ammonia oil soaps all of it off-gassing you’d never been an athlete ever your upper body only good for lifting and pulling from behind your useless legs in every gladiator challenge of children you’d fall on your ass with a gust your asthmatic lungs kept you to only bursts of effort followed by inhalers and hours sitting under a tree focused on your breath no one showed you how to survive when you drowned in your own lungs if you went too hard when the grass seeds were in bloom or in harvest or in fallow for weeks at a time you taught yourself to breathe and still couldn’t make a decent move in football or get a hop at third useless legs no rhythm couldn’t jump to shoot now down to sixty-eight pounds to make the weight class because every other boy at seventy-one had taken you over and over every weekend you’d thought if you lost enough weight you’d become favorite in the sixty-eight just six year old nose pickers you could push over but that boy bento who just moved to town had been ripping skin from boys’ ribs all wiry in the sixty-eight you’d hoped to make and even all the way up to eighty three he must have eaten for days without shitting and he moved so fast at every class you’d seen him in the counties a month before his name as ben on the scoreboard but his name was announced in the record by a mister winters as been toe dah vee no name you’d ever heard before and a week before you’d seen a brown kid playing dig dug through the windows of the pump and save the way he jerked hard that control stick while your dad filled up you watched him and that morning you saw bento over in the corner of the high school gymnasium where they sold concessionary foods out of a window after his weigh-in shoving crinkled fried potatoes slathered in mustard and heads of cotton candy in his mouth getting jacked up after dropping fifteen pounds in two weeks his little sister and mother same warm skin as him watched and you hadn’t seen any of them around here before he’d shown up in counties a month before rubbing his legs hard dark hands over and over fast warming himself up no one taught you that and as he pounced up and down on the mat you’d saw his fast hands on dig dug and him the only kid with real boots or legs with hair on them even when the bleacher of boys who were supposed to be six through twelve a kenny the oldest then dead now from flipping his truck when he was seventeen on that same turn on one-sixty-six kills at least one or two boys and their girls each year the next year will be worse when you learn about that turn for the first time from todd’s sister your first babysitter who came to your room after homecoming in her dress didn’t say a word just smiled at you over your bed years before kenny died on that same curve for a while you kept an annual account inside your head who’d died but before kenny’d spar off against baby-shit yellow haired lonny each saturday at eleven-thirty as part of the supposed to be under but none were under twelve years old six one hundred and eighty-seven pounders in the county not one with leg hair like bento just lonny and those sick virescent hairs circled around his udder in the record a mixed up traffic lamp they’d all been the main event every weekend tourney since county division switched to school grade not age and they went and made up their own heavyweight class thirteen fourteen gonna be fifteen and they’d said still they’re in sixth grade and parents loved to watch kids bigger than they should be hurt each other they chanted bring on the big-uns came out in droves their bloodlust rising as the morning progressed from class to class of weight but how that new skinny bento moved a month before at seventy-seven and two weeks ago at eighty-three like a head-shaved devil against all nine of them eighty-three boys in the regional turned some heads lead to early arrivals a grandmother even wished her grandson to lose to that magnificent boy she’d never say it out loud she’d always been loyal to her blood in weekly entertainments until the new boy ben showed up only weeks after you’d come up with the idea of starving yourself to go down a class to not have your face smeared into the mat again by a kid named rodney the record showed you hadn’t slept since you’d seen bento because your plan to get skinny put you in with him at sixty-eight if he wanted to take it easy and on that saturday morning you’d wished you’d had a dollar fifty to buy a hamburger and fries from that concessionary window before weigh-in just enough to make seventy-one go ahead and take poundings you knew like rodney’s the last one of all of you to have died in the record except you the record showed you made it closest to the end you read rodney burned himself up under house arrest the ankle bracelet his son attached pictures of had been fucking fused to his ankle bone his son said check it out man you’d never even met his son but he found you when you were still on the record of faces sent you that picture asked if you had any of his father young and you did his parents had owned the hardware store with a toy and comic book aisle where you stole a jawa and a princess leia action figure first things you ever stole and they were rich compared to almost everyone else on this side of the county no oil here yet and his older sister babysat you once when you’d been sick with flu and you woke
in a break sweat drawers full of a sticky first the dream had been about her even she’d been sitting right there at the end of the couch the whole time your toes touching her leg while she watched a battle of some network stars you woke too ashamed to walk to the bathroom rubbed your fingertips clean on every dry spot left in your underoos and she’d died of cancer decades ago how you’d only hear from people from back there when someone died like rodney you loved him even if at seventy-one pounds every week that year he’d smash your face into the mat and throw his plastic cup with his name scribbled on its face in the back of his father’s fancy truck a dually often enough you’d heard from eleven-hundred and fifty-four and a half miles away about the ones who’d died where you would have gone to high school had your father not scooped you up at least he asked a judge first if he could keep you and the judge asked you what you’d wanted you’d said my father so you both left with the first of the tiny trucks called luvs not much in the back slept on church floors when you didn’t drive into the desert and sleep on the warm hood together he tried to explain to you the stars he’d learned about them in the navy and there were too many for your mind and a few good people from a congregation offered fold-out couches in basements plastic shower stalls hosting shampoo selections the likes of which you’d never seen before it only took a little over three months until your dad got enough work to get into a studio apartment with a rent-a-center television and a couch which opened up each night to be your bed he splurged on a water bed for himself he deserved it even if it wasn’t allowed on upper floors in the apartment building more of his silent crimes the two of you filled the bed with stiff hoses he found in the otherwise empty desert next door that’d become your view one hose smelled of gasoline and you fed it out the window down a whole story striking luck because there’d been a faucet on the back wall hidden behind a pyracantha hedge at the end the record showed you still had scars on your hand from those thorns and the other hose smelled of chlorine and your father duct taped one hose to the bathtub faucet the other he threaded behind the hedge it took two hours and forty-seven minutes and twenty-five seconds on your casio watch you timed it both hoses filling up a bright blue bladder like a cartoon whale an entire story up your father on the other hose down a hall to the bathroom he’d yell go easy as you crouched in the pyracantha and learned cardinals get drunk on berries as you watched them stumble and fight with one another in the desert even though you wouldn’t learn the word pyracantha until three months later when you met your oldest and last friend it was in the record he’d been named patrick and patrick had asked you on your first day of your new school in a new state in first period math where’d you get them shoes and laughed when you said kansas said i haven’t seen a white suede swoosh on white shiny leather before and again you said kansas and patrick said so kansas you wanna come over and melt army men after school and you didn’t know what that meant but you wanted to and then you did and together you melted dozens of plastic army men with furnace matches and his mother’s aquanet made blow torches melted them as they rode upon metal tanks and tonka trucks in patrick’s dramas he’d lead the stories and when you’d ask where he’d learned of the battles he waged he brought out his sgt. rock and ghost tank comic books and when you’d leaned into the hedge to grab a hot burning mess of a platoon now only green puddles stuck to a toy tank patrick said don’t let the fucking pyracantha stick ya in the eye there’d been some in his backyard and you said berries make cardinals drunk and he’d said no way and then you both stopped melting men and made little mounds of berries as bait and watched cardinals eat them as you told patrick about besting bento and patrick’d asked how’d you beat him and you’d admitted a technicality and you’d said but i still have the gold cup and you’d said when you win a weight class they also give you the bracket just a red marker on a yellow eight-and-a-half inch sheet of paper goldenrod in color said sixty-eight at the top with your name appearing three times from left to right the last time at the end over bento and you’d said it’s in a frame on my wall and it was and patrick’d asked but the trophy’s only plastic as together you watched a cardinal eat enough to walk tipsy along the length of the cinder block wall behind patrick’s swimming pool because this patrick had a swimming pool like a sobriety test you’d thought of the cardinal’s walk like your father became good at when the bird fell right off the top of the wall and you both scrambled up to look over to see it foaming cyanide at the mouth in the alley too much you’d said but just enough they won’t die just fight and fall down this was the only thing you’d known that patrick hadn’t known and it turned out he genuinely didn’t need you to have known more than him but your dad crated your entire world book encyclopedias all the way from kansas with your atari twenty six hundred only things of value and that night the hairs on your hands singed by aquanet you looked up pyracantha but the world book didn’t have everything and you’d never forgotten about that even though there is no record in the world book mentioning inebriation of birds called cardinals or by any name from cyanide laced berries for when patrick’d told you to go root around in mom’s bathroom cabinet for more hairspray you’d seen her prell as he was lining up more plastic men to melt you’d told yourself to remember to ask your father if you could have some prell brand shampoo like you remembered from a deacon’s basement shower stall a few months ago made your hair fall straight and now again here was prell in patrick’s mom’s bathroom to the last day your life had been recorded you were convinced your father’d had sex with her at least once but had patrick made it long enough to read this account for the first time it would’ve been news to him the first time he’d even known you’d thought your father and his mom had sex at least once you remember them going to dinner when you and patrick had been old enough to stay at his house without a sitter when he’d showed you microscopic lines his mom scratched in bottle labels and how he’d siphon a little bit of gin off then a little bit of tequila off then a little vodka off a little crown royal off all the bottles just a little bit and add it to capri sun because who gives a shitwhat it tastes like patrick’d said as long as we don’t have to add too much water to make up the difference she’ll never notice he’d said and that night you listened to an iron maiden’s number of the beast and a styx’s rock opera kilroy was here your first rock opera and your first british heavy metal and your first capri sun with alcohol and you bounced his hamsters up and down on his pillows so high they’d touch the ceiling mister zog was the boy hamster’s name and his hamster testicles were so large that they dragged behind him when he walked made a little bald patch patrick grabbed mister zog and shoved his hind end in your face to show you patrick rubbed the spot like a callus they’re so big he said and that made you worry about the future of yours and patrick’s pillow cases had been kick ass star wars empire strikes back cases yours still snoopy a dog drawn by a charles schulz with large headed children at the end you still loved the little kid’s big heads and you’d gotten drunk for the first time to the beats of domo arigato mister roboto set hamsters aflight by putting them in the center of the pillows folding two sides carefully around them to keep them from running away but not smother them and then pulling swift and hard on both sides snap the pillow open they’d fly so high they touched the ceiling and you’d needed to learn a lot more things that were not in world books patrick’d said watch this as he bounced mister zog through the spinning blades of a ceiling fan the first fan you’d ever seen on a ceiling a home seemed a dream it’s his trick patrick’d said moments before the record shows in mister zog’s descent he came in contact with a fan blade on his way back through a revolution was thrown across the room bounced off two walls in a corner as patrick dove for him his empire strikes back pillow out-stretched and it’d been a miraculous catch patrick in full extension on their plush mauve carpeting and after he caught the hamster it drug his balls across the pillow to sniff at patrick’s mouth then climbed casually up and over patrick’s nose and forehead his mom and your dad hadn’t come home by the time you’d passed out from capri sun on mauve carpet i hate mauve patrick’d said you hadn’t even heard of mauve before was it a color or did it refer to how soft carpet smelled sweet like cleaning fluids and when you’d finally convinced patrick to stay over at your apartment the only thing you had that he and his mom hadn’t had yet had been the beginning of what was later called cable television a paid channel called ONtv your father tapped from a line on the roof of your building stole free movies all day until two to four in the morning when it turned into adultsONly time enough for one movie a morning in rotation green debby devil dallas deep doors and miss jones throat one time on a saturday morning your dad snoring hard on the sofa from working too hard you had to sleep on the not mauve carpet floor when you’d seen a chesty morgan in deadly weapons with seventy three thirty two thirsty six required seeing ‘em to believe them just like the trailer told you you’d told patrick to keep sleeping over in case chesty played again and three times a morning once at the beginning of whatever movie they showed and then in the middle and then again at the end there’d been five minute reviews of what’d been called hardcore offered up by a man and woman in a studio sitting casually naked on shiny red vinyl upholstery talking about movies they couldn’t show on adultsONly but they could show you the hostess shift from one leg crossed to the other that’d been your favorite when she moved her legs the host’s penis large even flaccid like your father’s uncut caramel man’s mustache and chest hair brown and dark like your mother’s had been but no hair around his penis or balls shaved smooth made it look bigger they’d recommended you find the movies they reviewed at your local video store or discrete theatre and you’d never heard discrete before while clips from movies ran on a screen over their shoulder only big enough to just make out what you’d learned about was called an orgy and men with even darker dicks several times the size of your dad’s really giving it to that white lady patrick’d pointed out and patrick said i found some magazines out in the desert he said the arroyos are full of them and you didn’t know what an arroyo was yet but you’d seen this trailer before the woman who looked like your favorite teacher from fourth grade you loved her but you’d always felt too weird to touch yourself in your sleeping bag as your teacher could barely open her mouth wide enough to put that in her mouth while naked critics in a studio looked right through you on television the hostess crossing and uncrossing her legs your dad snoring behind you your rental set came with the first remote control you’d used had a dimming feature even on low brilliance you could still see all of the woman who looked liked your teacher you knew she had loved you when no one else had the time you could plug in your transistor radio ear plug that looked like a wax snail right into the front of the television set to hear nude cohosts describe the flawless shot quality believable plot lines a new spin on who comes to visit when you stay home she uncrossed her legs and crossed them again as she said stay-at-home-wives get the best she made jokes about exterminators and pool boys by the time your dad woke the channel changed back to ONtv became cartoons and after you watched transformers and gee eye joes eating toast with you couldn’t believe it was not butter your dad would give you a handful of some ones for an arcade at what they called a strip mall with off-gassing carpet mixed with ozone coming off of 8-bit battles it’d just opened they ran a special from eleven to two you got eight tokens for a buck and half-priced watered down pepsi you liked the small barely frozen cubes
of ice and your dad said watch out for perverts and a few bucks could last you an hour if you stuck to tempest your best game and enough time for your dad to shop alone for salisbury steak tee vee dinners grape nuts cans of oiled tuna on whole grain bread you’d told him your new city teachers said was better for us and the vel vee ta slices you’d used to invent a new sandwich by adding false cheese to government peanut butter that you liked more than the peter pan you used to have when you had a mother a house a family with concord grape jelly and carnation instant breakfast and fruit cocktail cups and the dollars your father gave you for the arcade were now pickpocketed from purses from houses he hung wallpaper in one time he gave you a five that smelled like your grandmother you hadn’t seen in over a year now he’d been the best paperhanger in all of what’d been called a sun city then built for people to live in after they stopped working they called it retirement they loved to talk and spend the last of what they’d made making changes to bathrooms and kitchen wallpaper like a new set of clothing your dad had months booked out specialized in grass cloth foils impossible to make look good without a pro clerks at the paint and decorating stores your father haunted told their customers and passed them your father’s card black bubbly type called thermographic on white paper a little icon of a man on a ladder in the corner after a couple months he’d gotten what they called a beeper on his belt a machine to record requests on tiny tapes he’d return calls at night with his calendar in his lap and it was still not enough to get by on so he’d always shop alone so you wouldn’t have to watch him shove an activision cartridge in his pants as he passed through the photo aisle where they sold a few electronics they’d been called then he’d nick whatever was easiest to reach as he passed down the aisle he’d picked you several of the game tennis like fancy pong and in a kaboom!s you could be a prisoner blowing up walls to escape and often he’d get it wrong steal microvision games even when you didn’t have microvision you didn’t expect him to pay attention to what you had or didn’t have he’d given you so many extra pitfalls and dragsters night drivers you already had you were best at chopper command you taught yourself to play stampede with your toes the joystick wedged between your heels as you ate a sandwich smelled his sweat from his crotch on the game boxes their colors so solid and bright and if you already had the game or couldn’t use the coleco or microvisions he’d stolen for you you’d found a hustle with older kids in alleys behind schools that weren’t yours you made a lot more dollars for real arcades more than the men who shouldn’t trade boys in arroyos for anything but you found you could play the handful of ones from your dad as he shopped and make another five and free pepsi like you liked when you let the arcade attendant put your hairless member in his mouth his eyes largest the first time he saw your man sized nuts he said to you behind the dumpster you said i know and you said i just got my first hairs on them and you said nowhere else yet and he’d said he liked you bald for when you watched all the nothing of the desert behind the strip mall all of those games and pepsi and a blowjob in the hour or so it took your father to shop just down the way that first christmas you’d used his paperhanging blade to carefully unwrap all your presents weeks before the day sold and traded to buy ones you really wanted and wrapped them right back up in the same paper so your father could watch you open them on christmas morning you liked vector-based games the best the lines of tempest and battle zone soothed you unlike 8-bits of joust q bert or galaga at the arcade made your ass crack sweat like record stores did too you’d feel others’ quarters stacking up for next plays everyone else in the place years older than you at least sniggered at your clothes at your face you were certain it was one or another probably your hair got too big in the heat didn’t lie down like it had in kansas or with prell but your lungs could breathe all year round in arizona and you still loved what had happened to you because you knew you’d been drunk once before had smoked cigarettes melted army men had listened to rock operas came in barely men’s mouths once you even bested a bento davi even if it’d been a technicality you played games among men and boys no girls at the strip mall arcade you dreamt of getting so good they’d have to watch you dominate a machine for an hour or more that’d been your dream to not have to go back for anything from anyone you’d asked your dad to bring home bananas and that aerosol cheese that came in a can he’d gotten you that one time when you’d invented coloring fruit with elaborate cheese piping like lonny’s unitard invented shoving the applicator tip of the can of cheese into a banana bending it so slow to fill up the shaft with the plastic tip you’d put a dozen holes in it once and filled them all to within splitting so careful how you filled each one up to keep from bursting it’d been your record to date in the record you remembered the last stab into the very top of the fruit as you released the can’s full force of air all that not real cheese rushing out through a flanged angled tube at your fingertip’s command you could make it look like a flower for when you did it just right the force ruptured all the meat inside to connect all other eleven tiny bud filled holes you’d made dotting down a length of flesh you watched explode from inside out.