Chapter 2
I loved a girl once, ya know. Back in what shoulda been my college years. When I was first with her, that’s when it started happening. That was the first time it all stopped. Didn’t last long, the first time, only a couple of seconds really. I think she taught it to me, how to make everything go away, just from laying there with me. It was a late April afternoon, damp out but not humid.. Thunderstorms had been coming and going since the early morning, so it was nice and cool. The world outside was a real deep green, like spearmint. We weren’t fooling around or nothing, just lying on my bed with the window open. I couldn’t tell you another time I was so happy. We lay there for the longest, sweetest couple hours of my life, just napping with each other. I stared at her the whole time, wondering if she was awake, admiring her little features. She was so beautiful and soft that I couldn’t stop grinning. You know how huge things can look when you get up nice and close to ‘em? She looked like she went on for miles. Damn humbling, it was.
Her tender little face, it made me swell up so much that I thought I’d burst and flood the streets. I couldn’t blink for hours. I gazed, mesmerized by her thick and dusky brown hair. It was like a jungle. I gazed at her paper-thin eyelids that hid away her dense green eyes. I even gazed at that tiny bit of translucent hair that sat above her upper lip. You could only spot it if you was spending some time round there. I loved the way it brushed against my lips when we kissed. It felt like something. It made me feel.
My old ass is rambling. She’s gone.
I goggled and goggled at her ‘till my eyes were like a pair of little thirsty deserts. I had to shut ‘em. That’s when it happened. My house, the record player, Knoxville, everything fell away, disappeared. The only bits of matter in the whole realm of existence were her, my bed, and me. The only thing I could feel was her fleshy waist. I didn’t quite know what to make of it at first, but after moment or two I realized it was the greatest thing in the world. Nowadays I’ve learned to… I don’t wanna say control because I can’t control something I don’t completely understand… instigate fading. That’s what I call it, when I make everything go away, fading. Course I s’pose that’s a hair funny, seeing as how I’m the only thing that ain’t fading. I’m the only thing that’s real. Everything else is swallowed by nothing. When I opened my eyes again she was staring at me with this kinda sullen and understanding glare. She knew what we just did, but she didn’t wanna talk about it so we laid there in silence instead. But she knew. We didn’t say anything else for the rest of the day.
I never got around to eating them pills that night. I reckon I just didn’t have it in me quite yet. I awoke to the blare of a convoy of minivans and the thousands of little brats they bore. They poured out of their sliding doors as they battered their younger brothers and best friends and leapt over one another in grizzly fashion to get to the very front of the line, laughing and crying and belting the whole way. Each of them tugging their mother’s jean shorts with demands of cotton candy, soda pop, teddy bears, and hats. The bigger ones trampled the younglings to ensure their place in the food chain. They had excited themselves into a stupor, completely indifferent to the torment they caused one another. It was the most gruesome thing I had ever seen. I was outside the zoo.
I’ve long thought there’s a difference between happiness and joy. You can be happy one hour and sad the next, those feelings come and go, but joy is an absolute. Those kids, they were joyful. They were so damned full of joy that it was spilling out of them in tears and spit from their screaming little mouths. They were excited for the sheer sake of being excited. Couldn’t wait to pass through those fortress gates and stand, bewildered, before all of the gigantic horned monsters they’d all seen pictures of in kindergarten. I don’t remember the last time I felt that way, probably when I was their age.
In the middle of the war zone there was this one little boy standing all by his lonesome self, clinging to the side seams of his shorts for dear life, biting his lower lip, holding back tears. You could read him like a book, as he was scared straight to fucking hell. Didn’t know where his momma was and he didn’t like it one bit. I started trudging towards him, real slow like so as not to scare him any more. His eye caught me awful quick, he knew from fifty god damned yards away I wanted a word with him. I had to talk and he wouldn’t know how to ignore me. Gazing at each other I just limped, inch by inch to him. Took all of two minutes, each of us getting more riled up with each passing moment. By the time I got over to him he was practically in tears and my eyes were so damned wide that I couldn’t have blinked if I wanted to.
We were statues for minute, beaming at one another. I’m sure in his head he was going through what they’d told him about me in pre-school over and over again. Say no to me, don’t follow me anywhere, scream fire, don’t accept no candy from me. He must have thought me the most awful piece of shit that ever walked the earth. I was nothing to him but a smear on God’s otherwise beautiful green planet. But him, he was beautiful. He was so small and frail. His skin was a long and shallow canvas of a burnt tan yellow, Cambodian, I think. He wore a fanny pack and baseball cap, little symbols of his innocence. His shoes had Velcro straps ‘cause God knows he sure as hell couldn’t tie his shoes. He was a little human soul that hadn’t had enough time to turn sour, not yet at least.
“You lost, boy?” I asked him. He took a small step back and kept his eyes fixed on me. “You got a poppy? Or a mommy around here?” He gurgled a bit when he tried to breathe in through his mouth as he wiped his snot on his forearm, then he nodded at me.
“Yes sir.”
“Well, which is it?”
“My mother, sir. But I can’t find her.”
I took another step towards him. My jaw was hanging, my eyes staring a hole right through him.
“Your daddy, is he at home”
“Yes sir, he is sir.” He stuttered at me.
I reached out and place my hand on the side of his face. That just about sent him over the edge. He was leaking like you wouldn’t believe. His eyes were tearing, his nose was the mouth of a green river, and he drooled all over himself every time he tried to catch his breath.
“And your daddy, does he treat you good? Is he kind to ya?”
He just nodded at me as I caressed his face. Running my thumb along his eyebrow. I crouched down so we was at eye level with each other.
“My pa, he was monster, you know.” I whispered to him. “He used to hit us, me and my mother, on account of the bottle. Your daddy, he don’t drink none does he?” He violently swung his head back and forth, barely holding it back.
My daddy really was a brute to us. I grew up on the Cherokee reservation outside of Gatlinburg with him, my ma, and two a little sister. He was a scarred man, to put it lightly. Ma said he was never the same since he came back from Korea. She always used to pet me and my sister after he’d hit us or drink himself into a blurred rage, telling us that that wasn’t really him and that the war had made him cold. The reservation was a sad enough place even without his barbaric ways because every other house was the exact same way. Everybody’s daddy drank and everybody else suffered because of it. He used to fling his empty bottles at me, yelling that I’d never be a man and that I wasn’t’ good for a god damned thing.
Course in retrospect I’m glad I was born a boy that’d never become a man, it was better to be that than a girl in our household. My father wasn’t your momma’s run of the mill daytime ogre, he was a fiend. Sometimes he’d tell me and my sister to run outside to play, we’d just run around to the side of the house and crouch below a window. The walls were so damned thin that we could hear everything. First he’d cozy on up to ma and start caressing her sleeves, whispering slurred poetry into her ear, telling her how lovely she was. She’d always shake him off, that got him awful flustered. He’d slap her, saying a man’s got needs and a wife’s got duties to her husband, but she’d always resist. Once he realized that she wouldn’t give him what he wanted he’d try to take it from her. Sometimes he got it, other times she’d cut him with a steak knife and force him outta the house. Upon a certain age he stopped telling me and my sister to go outside, and started telling it to just me. It would always be the same way with her as it was with my ma. That is, until when my ma found out about him coming after my sister and she cut him a little deeper than the flesh can take. She was killed in prison.
“Get away from him!”
Time thawed out real quickly when mother bear came home. And she was none to pleased to see me getting friendly with the cub. I’ll spare you the details as I’m sure you can guess what was said by who. Awful lotta words like ‘monster, criminal,’ and ‘predator’ got thrown around. Truth be told I can’t quite blame the lady for getting all riled up at me for getting cozy with him. I wasn’t looking to get married to the little fellar, but I felt I owed him something for slaughtering his extended family, for turning them into pulp. But then, I said to myself, ‘maybe I’m already paying for my actions simply by being so. Simply by having to fret over where I’ll sleep tonight, how I’ll put gas in the tank, or if there’ll be a tomorrow.’ It was foolish thinking. And it was foolish to think that I would have been allowed to stick around the parking lot, moping. Momma bear squealed that a frightening grizzled street creeper was making friends with little kids in the Knoxville zoo parking lot. Didn’t take blue but five minutes to get there, find me, and brandish his bat belt stocked with all kinds of hobo repressors, and tell me to kindly ‘move along.’
I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to watch those toddlers piss themselves by working up such a nervous sweat, giddy with excitement to see the furry dangers that lurked behind the zoo walls. I wanted to see families sharing overpriced buckets of popcorn and arguing over which souvenir that should get, the tiger shirt or the elephant hat. I didn’t have a choice, I picked up my pack and my six stringer, tipped my hat to the kind gentlemen who were sweet enough to move me, and carried on. I couldn’t take much more.
Graham Cohen
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