Our Will Be Done

My fancy, grandiose younger brother visited my house today. His face full of affection or sympathy, he eyed up and down the dirty fluff coming from my couch cushions. As we left to get lunch, his smiling face cut into my heart, that same face that failed to cushion the blows from my stepfather’s pulverizing arms when we were younger. How he can smile and I can only smirk with false earnestness is the mark of how we cope with our past. And our past is bonded and glued together by wicked memories of pain, of crying, of a prison-house we had to return to every night. It was a house where my brother and I hid from the living room where my stepfather–his father–watched television, isolating ourselves in separate rooms to seclude ourselves into the mind-numbing, comfortable alter-reality of video games and books, where pain is merely virtual and not felt like it is with pulled hair, bruised bones, and felled egos. Books and video games were a world that made sense, where if you got hurt it was your own fault and nobody else’s. We starved ourselves in our rooms, save for the snacks we would sneak up with us. We knew the risks of going to the kitchen, which required traveling through the living room, which was a minefield of his biting words, arguments, and physical pain. But sometimes the pain would come upstairs. So when we heard his heavy footsteps coming up the stairs we would pause our game or look up from our book and hope he wouldn’t burst into our room furious about something. We would hope those infinite moments of his coming up the stairs would pass like a bad nightmare. But when he came for you there wasn’t much to do. What was there to do? It was the worst sort of pain–senseless pain, pain without being given a reason why, pain that felt unjust, pain you couldn’t do anything about except go back to day after day.

Our waitress served us tortilla chips and salsa with two plastic glasses of ice-water. She spoke English dappled with Spanish accents. I ordered the dollar-fifty tacos, one carne asada and one vegetarian. He got a shrimp torta. We munched on the complimentary tortilla chips and salsa while we waited for the food. We didn’t talk much aside from my strained, almost unnatural seeming questions about his work, his family, his health. He worked as an accountant, and was a damned good one. We both excelled in school throughout our childhood, but in high school our achievements diverged. While I, being the older brother by two years, meandered through my classes with an eye more on girls and good times than on my grades, he went on to join our school’s state-title-winning math team and scored a perfect 36 on his math ACT scores. I became a temp bouncing from corporate cubicles to unemployment offices. Yet my brother, Timmy, still looks up to me with all the admiration of a child reading about a comic book superhero. I’ve always found him fascinating for that. The waitress came to fill up our glasses. After she finished and we thanked her, Thomas spoke.

“Are you happy?” he asks me.

“What do you think?” I say.

“You’re not somebody that I can imagine being truly unhappy. You’ve got stamina in you, and I know because I’ve seen it.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Come on, Phuong, you’re the only one I know that can make due with what you have under what you’ve gone through. Your car getting towed, your apartment flat getting burned to the ground, and mom dying–all within a matter of weeks–that’s not something anybody can endure, you know?”

“What’s it matter? I’m not going to get those fuckers to give me my car back, I’m not expecting my apartment and possessions to reconstruct itself, I’m not…”

“You’re not expecting mom to come back?”

“She’s not coming back, no.”

He glared at me with an open pondering mouth and those intelligent eyes of his.

“You don’t have any emotion left, do you?” he asked. “Not once did you call me, or any of us for that matter, after she died.”

I don’t say anything. I look at my chips, eat them, the crunches breaking up his truthful words. Frightening truths are lessened by focus on something else, like eating tortilla chips and thinking about their texture or discerning each individual deep-fried crunch on the tongue. It was the same focus on the details that got me through the times when you were getting yelled at and waiting for the pain to come. You would stare at a corner of the ceiling so as not to look at the deliverer of senseless pain in the eyes, waiting patiently for the blows to rain down but thinking only about the dusty texture of the corner of the ceiling of the living room. The truth was I didn’t think anybody should need to depend on anyone else. Tragedies should be endured independently. We only have ourselves to rely on, it’s just that most of us are blessed with good enough friends or family to never know this terrifying truth. To be alone is beautiful in that way.

“You’re breaking apart from the family,” he said. “Every year that goes by that you don’t call or come home, you’re floating away from us.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean you think it’s normal to skip out on Thanksgiving and Christmas, to just completely forget that your family is there celebrating it without you? Your very own family that saw you grow up and leave on your own?”

“You think I fucking don’t know this dude?” I snapped.

Silence. Timmy looks about, glad that there aren’t a lot of people dining around us, listening to us. He faces back toward me, blinkingly aggravated.

“Well just tell me why?”

“I don’t have a family, I don’t have a home or any damn Thanksgiving or Christmas that I was ever a part of.”

“You’re crazy, you know that? You really are.”

I don’t know what’s worse about his berating me: his not knowing my daily torment of berating myself for having such a loveless life or my inability to reach out to him, my half-brother who endured the hard years along with me. And I blame his father, who had married my mother seemingly out of the blue one day and came into my life like a black, cancerous infection.

“Do you think it would have been different had mom divorced?” I asked.

He shook his head no, but more as if he were saying he didn’t want to answer the question, and looked down at his hands. Our mother would talk to me about divorce, about her loneliness and depression. She told me these things when I was older, when our relationship was already estranged by her crazy work schedule and my bouts of passing out drunk and sleeping in parking lots in my car so I didn’t have to come home to my stepfather’s disapproving eyes. Eventually my being out of the house worked, in a way. The house eventually felt alien to me, like a cheap hotel shared by unhappy tenants. And when I would stumble up the stairs into my room in the early morning to catch some sleep and leave again, my mother would be splayed out in her bed sometimes, crying. I would stand there frozen in the middle of the flight of stairs, out of her sight, listening to her quiet sobs that held a low whimper underneath tiny sniffling. It was terrifying facing my mother like this, her usually resolute, strong face that she bared against my stepfather in their arguments seemed so distant when she was alone crying. And I told her to catch a movie, to pick up a hobby or travel more…anything, anywhere. And I used to recommend her books but she brushed books off as uninteresting and unable to hold her interest. She would ask me about divorcing my stepfather a lot. At first, when I was younger, I would plead with her to go through with a divorce, trying to bring up the worst of times to her mind, telling her it’s a terrible situation she’s in and telling her how much I hated him. “No,” she would say to me, “He’s a good man, he’s a good man for what he’s done for us.” Then she would look at me with big wet eyes like a child begging you reassure her that Santa was really real and say, “He got us our citizenship into this country.” Truthfully, that fact has always kept me from completely running away from the family altogether. My green card and citizenship certificate are because of this wretched man and we both saw him as the price we paid. When I grew older, I no longer pleaded for her to take action. I knew that she would continue to rationalize her marriage with him, but not out of love or even gratitude for the legal and financial security he’s provided for us. She is deeply afraid, absolutely sickened by fear of being old and alone with nobody to turn to in this legendary country she had so much hope in, where her only blood-family are two quiet sons.

We decide to walk around the city after our lunch. It’s a yellow-gray day, one of those days where the clouds are so everywhere-gray and mixed with sun that you don’t know whether to bring an umbrella or sunscreen. But the people didn’t care, the people were out and about like they are every afternoon, walking across the street and driving down them and foraging in garbage bins for bottles to recycle and giving you a look and not minding you at all and sad and grinning and friendly.

“For a long time I didn’t really know you,” I told Thomas.

“Well there’s not a lot you did to try,” he said. “You can at least try.”

We were walking past a group of teenagers lounging on a stoop with loose clothing and mean faces. Two were laid back on their elbows on the steps and one was standing, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. He watched me pass him and muttered something in Spanish before flicking his flaming cigarette at me. I glared at him. He walked up to me and said, “What you lookin’ at, bro?”

“Why’d you have to do that?” I asked.

His friends got up and began walking toward us, snickering with each other. The main guy held his arms up like a cross, I guess in an attempt at seeming larger than he was, like a peacock would. “Don’t fuckin’ look at me, bro,” he said.

Thomas grabbed my elbow. “Come on, Phuong, let’s go,” he urged.

“You better listen to your boyfriend there if you know what’s good for you,” said one of the minions standing behind the leader.

Without looking away from them, without blinking even, I said, “He’s my brother.” At this, the group burst out laughing, one of the minions nudging the other with his arm, saying, “Hey what kinda whore bitch they’re mother is, man, squeezing these two ugly ass motherfuckers out of her whore pussy!”

At this, I lunged at the group, my skinny, languid body fueled by a rage against meaningless hostility, fueled by a subliminal racist hatred, fueled by a searing embarrassment for not trying to be a good son, a good brother, or a loving family man. What happened was obvious. I got my ass kicked, the feeling of a bag of fists being dumped onto my face drilled away my blinding rage and left me a limp, ghost-like body on the sidewalk.

I sat in the hospital bed staring out the window. I didn’t think about the black eye or the stitches on my face or the bruises on my ribcage like purple-blue stains. They put me on the top floor, where I asked the nurse to draw back the blinds so I could look at the painfully bright city stretching into the distance as if it were sown into the horizon line. My brother had just left.

“Sorry I ran, Phuong,” he said. “I just couldn’t, you know, I didn’t want to…”

“I know, it’s okay, it was my battle.”

“No, it wasn’t, it was both ours, I just thought it wasn’t worth it, you know?”

“I was just asking for it. But look…about what we talked about earlier. What I meant when I said I didn’t really know you was that I didn’t really know myself,” I said.

“What are you talking about?” he asked. “You’re you. You’re my brother.”

“Listen, you’re half white, man. Your dad’s a fucking white Irish American. Do you know what it’s like growing up Vietnamese, growing up with my mother like this? Do you know what it’s like comparing yourself to others, trying to be someone else all the time to pass off as American? Do you know what it’s like years later when you run out of people you look up to who you can compare yourself to and then one day you wake up and you’re no longer sure who to be anymore? I thank God that his blood, your father’s irrational, abusive blood isn’t in my blood. I just don’t want that. But you have to understand that I can never be a part of the pumpkin-pie Thanksgiving family member or visiting your brother family member or even the unconditional love family member for you. I’m sorry.”

Now, in the hospital bed surrounded by people hurting and dying, all of them thinking about the afterlife and family and their personal philosophies or just hoping to make it another day, I feel so much a part of a family. If only for a few days, this white-walled room is my warm, dreamy, legendary America.

Where the Shadows Fall

“I want to try to be a construction worker,” Priscilla thought. She saw their orange vests and tanned skin all along the highway. She saw them from her comfortable backseat booster chair on the long drives her family would take her on to visit other family. She was a little girl then, her world was one without the sharp biting sense of schedules and routines. She worried about playing only. She had sets of dolls and houses and tiny porcelain tea sets.

Twenty years later, she was folding clothes into neat little squares at a strip-mall clothing store. She did everything carefully, gingerly handling articles of clothing and using white-out on her vacation-request forms. One day, while her hands slipped around the stiff new cotton shirts, her face became contorted and twisted. She started to cry tears that streamed through her eyelashes and around her meaty cheeks. “What’s the matter?” her co-workers asked her. She didn’t answer, but she knew she was unhappy with her clean, consumer retail life. She wanted to work with her hands, to strain muscles and feel exhausted at the end of the day. She didn’t really want to say this though, for fear of her fears becoming and seeming too real. But she wasn’t wanting to become a brawny butch girl either. She had a reverence for delicate things. Her dog was a tiny little wiener, with legs that scurried like an insect and a face that made people remember how delicate life is. She still appreciated cleaning things. After vacuuming the dust that had gathered around the floor-panels of her living room or cleaning the toilet bowl with one of those bristly brushes, she would smile to herself and feel more free to go join social functiona. Most days though, she stayed in and watched movies or read. It wasn’t so much that she was anti-social as much as that she didn’t feel like she deserved to go out after her value-less workday of rearranging cotton shirts on racks by size and color.

When her boyfriend called, she would often be quiet and unresponsive, conversing only out of a feeling of obligation rather than an actual want to talk. Whenever she watched the film Pulp Fiction, her mind would always race around in circles when Mia poses a question to Vincent: “In a conversation, do you listen or wait to talk?”

She always wanted so badly to listen. But sometimes she really just waits to talk. Like when her boyfriend, Mark, was complaining of the messy spider monkeys at work (he works at a public zoo), and she really just wanted to talk about something that’d been bothering her instead of listening. She wished that people would be more something…more empathetic maybe. Something that would make people more susceptible to a good conversation. She had a talk at a street corner one afternoon with a stranger while waiting for the pedestrian light to turn into the green walking signal. It had just finished raining and there was a rainbow, the most vivid one she had ever remembered seeing, painted high and bright in the blue sky. She looked up at it and turned and saw another pedestrian beside her, who looked at her too. “It’s so full and filled in,” she commented. He nodded and smiled. She liked that conversation, even if it was really just an exchange of thoughts.

But what she wanted to tell her boyfriend was that she wasn’t sure about her relationship with him anymore, about their time spent together and their treatment of each other. She felt unappreciated and deserving of better. He would often scold her about being too boring or not interesting enough. She would apologize, but wanted so badly to tell him how she wished he would just hold her and take her out on a night meant just for them or even just say how much he loved her sometimes. But she didn’t say these things, out of a hollowing fear of being left dejected, lonely, heartbroken. Still, they loved each other and completely needed each other.

The first night he had spent at her house, he woke up excited and satiated. She was happy and bubbly. But that night, her father pulled her aside when she walked by the living room and told her how much she needed to get a job, a life, a family. “You’re my only child, you understand that?” he said to her. Then he grabbed her by her shoulder with a tough, almost painful grip and said, “You need to get your act together and make something of yourself. I won’t have you ruining the family name, not under my watch you won’t.” She smelled warm, strong whiskey on his breath. She watched him let her shoulder go. She watched him walk with hard, clumsy steps back to the couch. She watched him watching television, pouring himself another drink. “Asshole,” she whispered to herself, under her breath, feeling a scalding sea of rage under her emotionless face. She used this anger, this resentment, this aggravating feeling of detachment from her father to love her lover more. She knew that when she locked lips with his that there was something she could rely on, a somebody in her life that countered all the murky, foggy, uncertainties in her life.

She had an artistic eye, having been a visual learner since she was little, when she would insist on playing I spy over and over with her older brother. There was a painting she did with trees all swirly, soul-red leaves blending with mushy brushstrokes into green-yellow tree trunks. Trees stacked upon trees in a forest thick like tangled hair. In-between the spaces of the trees, where the shadows fall, you could make out the ghost-outlines of people looking out at you.

One day there was something that drove her to want to quit her job. So she did one morning. Her large eyes glowered in determination as she handed in her two week notice, forcefully shoving the form into the manila envelope taped to the human resources office door. That afternoon, she showed up at her best friend’s door with her dog. When the door opened, she said, “Can you watch Ferdinand for a while? I’ve got something I need to do.” She handed the dog over along with a tote-bag of doggy toys and treats. She got in her car after that and pressed on the accelerator hard, screeching out of the driveway. She laughed to herself as she zipped across the expressway lanes, thinking about how cheesy her peel-out of the driveway was. Then she began thinking about Mark and her laughing mouth closed into a fist-like clamp.

“I’m leaving for a while,” she said to him, sitting at Mark’s kitchen table.

“Where to?” he asked.

“I don’t know yet,” she said.

He chuckled a little. “What are you talking about Priscilla?” he asked. “Is your family going on another trip?”

She didn’t say anything, her blank face punctuated by her tight, almost quivering mouth. Mark got up and poured himself a glass of milk. He took a drink and looked out the window and then at his nails. The television was on in another room, explosions, gunfire, and yelling drifting through the silence between them. “Well, have fun,” he finally said. “Call me when you get back.”

She got up, grabbed her keys from the table and walked upstairs without looking at him. He grabbed his milk and went to sit on the couch, turning the volume up. After a couple minutes, she came down the stairs with a bag of her things hanging from her shoulder and a painting under her other arm. She walked out the door without saying goodbye, the sounds of explosions and violence louder than before. In her parked car under the evening sunlight, her mouth opened as she breathed a huge sigh of relief. Her body shook like a toothache as she started the car with her trembling fingers. She looked over at the painting resting on her passenger seat, a painting of her destination. She looked at the painted weave of trees and the dark, dim figures looking at her from the shadows. Her stomach felt like it was fluttering and sputtering like a deck of cards being shuffled. Her mouth broke into a smile so big her pink gums felt the warm rays of sunshine hitting her face.

A Good Climb

The laptop in my backpack bounces against my back as I walk down the strip-mall sidewalk. It feels good, kind of like there’s a metronome pounding against my shoulders keeping my steps on beat. There are people in the store windows. They are  looking down at their reading materials or plates of food. A multitude of fluffy white poplar seeds drift down as if falling from the sky. Back-lit by the saturated late afternoon sunshine, they look like they’re made of strands of gold.

In-between a value barbershop and a fine linens store is a cafe-bookstore that I enter. Light, almost inaudible African drums float out of invisible speakers over the spread of cafe tables all over. White ceiling fans blow down cool air. I order a small coffee with milk and sit in a corner, so that I’m able to people-watch the rest of the cafe-area. Like puppets, people turn pages with one arm and bring paper-cups of coffee up to their mouths with their other arm. I take this all in before I pop open my laptop and get to work on a couple new graphic designs I am doing pro-bono for a friend. It is for an upstart community-based arts program that caters to urban high school students in my neighborhood. I had met Stan, the organizer of the program, at a bloc party. He seemed like he was living comfortably, which I surmised from his silver watch wrapped around his wrist and his sunglasses with some designer’s signature on them hanging on his shirt-collar. Stan and I talked about great restaurants on our street, which I found a little discomforting.

“You don’t know what good magarita is until you’ve tried Vincent’s at Ashland and Lake,” he raved.

“That place has valet parking, right?” I asked.

“Well yeah,” he said, “You shouldn’t expect to find street parking by there.”

Even though I wanted to talk about cheaper, more hole-in-the-wall restaurants, I kept up the conversation by asking him about vintage wines and which place had the best. Stan had at least twenty-five years over me in age. Even though he was a little more high-culture than me, I appreciated his friendliness and faith in community building. His arts organization is called “Adol-less-sense”. It’s been running for a year but lacked much vitality because of a lack in promotion.

Now that I’m sitting here fitting this design into my busy day, I have my regrets about offering to do a series of poster and handbill designs. I could be working on other things. I have three big clients waiting for first drafts of website logos, the busiest I’ve been since I graduated college. Still, I feel bad about not wanting to do a philanthropic deed, so I churn on.

After a couple hours, I come up with two posters and a handbill, which I create rough draft files of and email to Stan. I decide to take the rest of the day off, so I walk back to my apartment and drop off my laptop, then leave for the beach. In college I had expectations of what my freelance life would be like after graduating. I never knew it would be so taxing on my free time. Throughout compulsory school, you’re trained to go to school eight hours a day with a scheduled lunch five days a week; they’re training you for a cubicle-office life. But although I’ve escaped the corporate-shackles, I find myself constantly looking for work or staying up all night to get projects turned in at the last minute. There’s no routine nor structure in the way I live and I bring my work home with me always. Even as I’m walking along the sandy beach, something I’ve loved since I was a child when my mother used to bring me down to the beach every weekend, I see the beach as something of a design. Is it nothing more than layers of an image to my eye? Water over sand under sky layered by darkened human figures? I imagine all the inspirational-poster companies that would re-purpose this image by slapping on some large, superimposed, kitschy text. The Beach: A Place for Family. Dreams Do Come True. Freedom: Live It. Inspiration: Pass it On. Got Fun?

In college I stuck with my need to excel in all respects of academics. Semester after semester I scored in the top percentile of my major. Getting A’s was mandatory. Twice I even begged my professor to give me an extra assignment or project to raise a borderline grade to an A. But even so, I didn’t participate in the college campus community. I only voted for student government once, out of boredom. I drank too much. Or maybe I just used alcohol too much as a stress reducer, something to make me forget that I was choosing to coop up inside my dorm and poring over the obscure theories of art critics.

I pass by people playing volleyball and little children molding shabby sandcastles. I look ahead and see the abandoned lighthouse that has been fenced off since it was put out of use many decades ago. In high school a group of friends had invited me out one night to break in and climb it. I called them crazy and said no, choosing to study for an art history midterm instead. It’s chipping red-and-white painted structure looms higher than it seems like it should, standing by itself around an empty area of sand all around it. I feel the rusty chain-link fence that surrounds it, rusty chips scattering a big like sparks.

The seagulls begin to come out as the sky fades into an orange twilight. I forgo the bus and rely on my two feet to carry me home. The people and places begin to shift into night-life-mode now, lights being turned on and a general feeling of excitement in the air. I pass by a small fluffy-white dog being walked by an owner with a plastic visor who smiles at me. I pass by a crowd of Japanese business men taking photographs of the city with their little digital cameras. When I get home I feel comfortable and in my element. Even now, a few years after I’ve moved out of my parents’ house, I still relish the feeling of being alone at home.

I fry up some fish fillets and canned asparagus for dinner. After washing down my meal with a couple beers, I head toward my bedroom and lie down, feeling exhausted from the day. There’s an empty cobweb in my corner that I stare at every night. It’s stayed the same size since I’ve lived in this place, making it seem like an abandoned space. Some spiders’ forgotten crevice.

My whole body almost melts into the soft surface of my mattress, but when I close my eyes my thoughts kick into high gear. I think about work and what I’m going to work on tomorrow. I think about my future plans to move to New York. I think about the lovers I’ve become estranged from. I think about the friends that make me smile. And then there’s a figure that is there, lurking. It’s tall, high, rigid, daunting. It flashes upon me, making me feel its searching light.

I sit up in bed and grab my coat and sneakers. I step out into the cool outside air, where the streets are shiny and wet from a sputtering of rain. The night is calmer now, just a few bicyclers riding down the street and lights going out in high windows.

The walk to the beach is slow and soggy. It’s the anticipation that makes me walk faster, though. I blaze through the empty intersections, the traffic lights telling me to stop in vain. I walk and sweat, the sweat cooling off my skin with each breeze that stirs up. When I get to the beach I feel relieved. I calmly walk to the sand and take off my shoes, letting my toes dig deep into the sand with each slow step. A few kids run past me in the dark, playing a game of tag. In the sliver of moon that is out, they look like black paper cutouts. The lake is slumbering, giving off soothing swishy waves of snores. I walk up to the looming figure of the old light house and let my fingers grasp the fencing around it before climbing it. My heart beats and beats, straining my chest bones into a shaky feeling. I walk slowly up to the tower, afraid to look up at it.

The door on the side of the tower creaks painfully when I open it. I follow with my eyes the spiral staircase going up and up and above on the inside. I clasp the railing as I climb. After a couple of nervous steps, I ascend comfortably, looking below me at the height I’m gaining through the holes of the metal steps. As I climb I think about the texture of the steps, its dirty, old metal surface that’s so gritty and masculine you can almost picture it as a background to some chop-shop print-ad. I know that it’s ridiculous, but my viewpoint would make for a great photo for some advertisement for someone somewhere. When I reach the top, the view takes me a second to get used to. I feel the woozy feeling of having a birds-eye, pan-optical view. The old searchlight has dead bugs and a blackened housing. I fumble around the back and find a switch that I flip, but nothing happens. I take a walk along the top-platform, my view panning from the dark ocean abyss to the desolate sand of the beach peppered by a few nocturnal humans to the winking pulse of the city to the sand and back to the everlasting ocean.

When I get back to my house, nestled in the covers, I notice a spider crawling around the cobweb in the corner. So comfortable, when things are in their place.

Passive Nihilism

Jojo crept up and slapped me on the neck last week, so I punched him in the face. I just turned around, balled up my fist, cocked back, and laid one on him square in the nose. I didn’t know what to do. It was the only thing to do. He stumbled back, clutching his nose with both hands, screaming. “You fuck!” he screamed, “You idiot!”

It turns out his move was just a joke, a joke that required him to yell out, “Redneck, you son-a-bitch!” But he must have forgotten the punchline. So I punched him in the face. I got a lot of shit for that one. The boys wouldn’t really talk to me for a couple of days. They’d all kind of just walk away when I would say hi to them. But still, they’d ask me to come along skateboarding with them like usual. Skateboarding is the only thing that keeps any of us from punching the rest of the world in the face. It’s funny how it works sometimes. Like how we can all be angry with the world while pushing around on our little wooden toys. I think about that a lot, but then again I think about many things a lot, like how I would just love it if everyone would stop being such an asshole. I mean I can’t take it, I really can’t. The way you can sit next to someone on the subway and just really sense their sneering thoughts about you, looking at you as if you were scum. And how there’s oil spills and the threat of nuclear war and racism and phony people. It makes me want to just not even try.

Brad and I were standing next to each other on top of the miniramp deck at the skatepark, watching an old forty-something seshing the ramp. He looked seasoned and serious and wore a worn helmet and big, scuffed-up knee pads. “This guy’s awesome,” Brad said, in response to a stylish invert the guy just did. “I hope I can be still shredding when I’m forty.”

“Yeah but this guy’s from a golden age of skateboarding, a time when there were like two big skate teams and skaters were skating without needing to be filmed or photographed,” I said in admonishment. “Now-a-days it’s just drive here, drive there, film some worked-up trick. And when you don’t get it, you get angry and stressed over it. I don’t remember that feeling when I was younger, it wasn’t like that at all. I had not concept of my image on a screen or photograph.”

“You think about it and you talk about it like it’s a horrible thing, dude.”

“That’s because it really is. And you know what? I think it’s too late for me.” I skated away, too angry to talk about it anymore. As I drove away to a clearing on a hill, the spot I’d always go to be by myself in the evenings, I breathed heavy breaths of fury. But by the time I arrived and got out of the car and sat on top of my hood, I had calmed to a starry-eyed human being as calm as the park I was at. I liked being by myself with only my own thoughts to keep me company. It’s like holding hands with the net that keeps me from falling.

That night I got drunk with some of my friends. We sat in a circle in a dark, dingy basement. Someone’s parents were out of town or something, probably getting away from their droning work-lives or going to a funeral or figuring out a way to just get away from it all, to be by themselves with their own thoughts. There were little rusty floor lamps all over, casting just tiny little glow-balls of yellow light through cigarette-burned lampshades. The floor was dirty from all the shoes that never get taken off. Something smelled like vomit, but only near a certain corner of the room. Friends would talk about weed and beer and rum and bitches and pussy and old friends. Some whining voice sang about some fantasy land of deserts and coughdrops over a descending chord progression. You could see faces space out or laugh through the milky holes of the heavy gray smoke coming out of people’s mouths. The shit that comes out of people’s mouths.

And so it goes.