ISSN 1758-6488
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Men in Love Fiction |
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I’ll work the Boards. I did this every summer through high school and undergrad. I don’t know why I stopped. Six or seven hundred a week under the table, no deductions, no taxes. A thousand a week in good weather. You’ll try your luck, I’ll make you pay. Shooting baskets, hitting targets, rolling Ski-Ball, betting on the Wheel of Fortune, which I control. I’ll support my curlyhead. You’ll love it. You’ll win a doll in a sailor suit that sailors haven’t worn for twenty years, or a plastic cane, a carton of cigarettes, a watch of gold. It’s stupid is why I stopped. But stupid is money.
I’ll sleep in a single room in a ramshackle old house with twenty bedrooms and thirty summer workers. By June there’ll be seventy of us and stink of beer and pot and sex so bad I’ll sleep on the beach when I sleep alone. I’ll lay all day in sun till it burns through my eyelids and turns the insides of my skull raw meat-pink red. I’ll forget kids who can’t spell in English taking dictation in French from me, who can’t speak anything but English, to get grades that don’t matter. Nobody wants Community College grads. Nothing can change lives nothing will ever matter to, including my own. Eliza says her Mommy says don’t be too proud to forgive. “Still, you need to promise.” I pass a hardscrabble strip-mall, a boarded up used-car dealership, stunted pines covered in creeper vine, a paint-peeled farmhouse with a handpainted sign: “MULCH” RABBITS YOU KILL OR WE DO. “Well, Bob,” says Cokey, “Democrats, some of them tempted to make political hay out of the events of 9/11, have pretty much lined up in support of the President’s measured response.” I promise to try, I promise to see, I promise to think, I promise to remember, I promise to make up for not doing everything I promised before. “This time I mean it, I promise,” I say. A retired brigadier general tells Bob Baghdad is ours, adding gently, “Looting, occasionally, continues.” Boop-de-boop, time for local news and weather. I lean my head out the window. “Fuck!” I shout, hating and helpless.
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