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The streets of this town are anything but straight lines.
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A series of curved cul-de-sacs are corralled among a few main lines, all just feathers on the wings of what keeps the town itself propped up. Each cubbyhole has its own politics, polite niceties, surrogated by the greater whole. The curvatures of each dead end include soft hidden breakaways into other dead ends or into the larger street, itself just a passing thoroughfare.
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The hierarchy of each community toes the line of the times. There is little concern for unwarranted sexual gambits, each sticky offering taken like a pact and then pushed out into toilets, toilet paper used for its use in wiping away the waste.
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You can often find the bits and pieces of what wasn’t wasted out in the street, practicing their own form of cruelty and lyricism. You can find flat basketballs and Barbie dolls with burnt-black hair hidden in bushes, or even right out for all to see without even looking. Piles of pinecones, like Scrooged holdings, rising high against the trunks of trees.
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You can feel the calm, yet just as easily be struck with feeling – shellacked over the faces of mothers, in particular – that something isn’t quite right and because of this feeling, feel right at home.
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Depending on which side of the tracks you live on, there is no need to lock your doors. Depending on which side of the tracks you live on, neighbors would take it as an affront being unable to barge into your kitchen, desperate for a cup of sugar or an egg.
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The kids need their cookies!
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Benjamin, bored with what had become a perpetual loop on the television, stares into his mirror, sitting there, scratching the wood of his desk with his too-long fingernails as if he were plotting an old-fashioned witch burning. There are cans of Coke lining up along the edge of the desk, each with varying degrees of fullness and spark. He pouts his lips, puffing out his cheeks in what he determines to be attractive, at least to those in a certain mood or general proclivity. He opens the desk drawer and pulls out a large, wide-toothed brush and begins running it through his long, albeit slightly shrunken with days worth of un-washing, bangs in a gradually harder fashion. Methodically stroking in the same precise direction, causing slight secrets of red where each bristle strokes across his forehead.
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He had had a falling out today: a teacher, with a middling command of the English language – though that was his course of instruction – had caught him with a magazine which featured a number of skinny, fleshy young men with large smiles and even larger cocks. The teacher had been in the bathroom where Benjamin had secretly hid to explore the contents of the magazine in private, when he heard the telltale shuffle of soft hands on a hard body. There was an initial knock on the stall door. And then another, with a mumbled question of “what’s doing in there?”
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And then what felt to Benjamin to be a half-body weight push against the door; then a three-quarters push. Finally, the door slammed open with the full weight of Mr. Anderson falling into the squat stall, causing Benjamin to empty his hands free to push against the oncoming open hands of his intruder.
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“What’s this?” the ogre demanded. “What the hell do you think you’re doing here on school property?”
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“Private business, sir!”
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“There’s no such thing in a public place!” He forcefully bent down to pick up the fallen magazine, though Benjamin, who half in shock and half in exhibitionist command, believed he was more interested in getting a closer look at what was between his legs, the very smell of his post-gym un-washed body that he had always felt elicited a certain unmatched odor of attraction, having never gotten the chance to smell a classmates potential superiority himself.
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“You’re gonna need a good talkin’ too, young man!” the putrid, pock marked face said to him, waving the evidence of his arousal to the tip of his nose. “You get yourself decent right now and head straight to the principle’s office!” he demanded.
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“I’ll be there myself shortly!”
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He left the stall to stand guard while Benjamin stood up, pulling up his pants and wiping a bit of snot from his nose. He spreads the goo on the side of the stall, where he had hoped his other intended fluids might land.
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On his way out, Mr. A took a good whack on his ass with the curled up magazine that he had holding in his hand.
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“Atta boy!”
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Had he appreciated his rights, still as a minor, he would have taken much more of a defensive response to the whole affair. Having come from a family of lacking in male role-models aside from concrete moments of massive amounts of directed embarrassment as abuse and a sharp twinge of excitement over the whole scene, he was reluctant to do much more than take the talking to he was offered, commenting on hormones and ever changing bodies and the very concept of curiosity, which seemed to Benjamin to be what dumb people called the smarter set.
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“Oh, he was just curious. He didn’t know any better,” he remembered his elderly aunt tell his mother after he was caught, as a child, flipping through a particular book with pictures that his mother kept under her marital bed.
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Instead, Benjamin now lays on his bed, one hand holding a greased up Bic pen moving slowly – yet thoroughly – in and out of his ass, while the other tightly covers his eyes.
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Dennis is dabbling, mindlessly, in the front yard – finishing some random yard work his father had assigned him earlier in the week – when he hears a roar of an engine, seemingly on fire, approaching with a ferocity that seems spat out of a B-Movie from long ago.
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The approaching elderly Mustang speeds past, smoke entrails emitting a stench that covers the neighborhood like a sudden snowstorm. Dennis can hear the hoots and hollers from the open windows long after the car is gone.
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Dennis ties the large black bag full of grass clippings tightly, letting the air trapped inside with them stay trapped, as if to give the dying grass some shades of hope in their last moments. He carries the bag to the side of the garage, where he deposits it in the trash can, already overflowing with bags of shredded paper and old chicken bones that crinkle and moan like old ladies under the weight of their new upstairs neighbor. He spots a cigarette butt that somehow had escaped his hiding place for it. He picks it up and stuffs it deep into the belly of the can. When his hand returns, he smells it. He admires the way his young hand now reeks of decay, bolstered by the very idea of the living things that cause it to smell that way.
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He sticks his index finger deep into his right nostril, breathing deeper still, and then hooking and pulling out a large chunk the old and worthless inside, flicking it atop the grass clippings where it lands, holding watch, king of the worthless.
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On his way to wash up before the inevitable looming supper-bell, Dennis thinks to himself of the Mustang:
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It had enough age on it to be an obvious hand-me-down from a parent, probably a father, from the side of town where homes aren’t called houses. Rowdiness, a term he had always heard and had equaled to “horseplay” for as long as he can remember, doesn’t seem to refer properly to the sense of attractive danger that brushed past him; it seemed too polite and eager to brush the reality under the rug. It would have to be something that he would have to discover on his own, when once again asked to give something “a good proper scrub”. Shit, the guys were all hot. One in the back wasn’t wearing his t-shirt, but rather waving it abusively out the window, in a tight fist. Of course it was white. What other color t-shirt would someone in an old Mustang even dare to wear? As the car passed, he knew the one in the passenger seat had looked at him in that way that he thinks he looks back at but anyone else would just call shyness. But this wasn’t shyness – this was a clearer sting of I-want-to-fuck-that-kid sort of glance, caught just as eagerly and then as quickly tossed to the ground.
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Dennis feels stupid about his impression of the moment, but only for a moment. He takes it for an instance of education, by being full of the possible of what he never knew.
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Dennis splashes some cold water on his face to feel a little less flush.
