Walking.

FEB. 26 2010

When I was eight and she was six, my sister and I escaped from an after school program one day. We walked home about three miles, in the 110* heat of June, stopping outside of Baskin' Robbins. I drank from the water fountain inside and I will always remember how the water was so cold it would hurt my teeth. I liked that feeling alot, especially after eating a cone of ice cream. A brain freeze was a sweet, beautiful thing.
But we had no money for ice cream, so we were asked to leave.
Outside, a woman in a car asked us if we wanted a ride.
"Look, I know you aren't supposed to ask for a ride from strangers. But you're more likely to get hurt from someone else than me."
The woman had a daughter. And she had a point. We had another two miles to go and it wasn't going to be easy. So we hopped in the back.
I remember being kind of terrified, thinking of elaborate ways to protect myself, but it was mostly just if, if, if.
If I had a knife.
If I had a gun.
If I had a chance.
The woman dropped us off without incident. I stole a dime from her backseat, went inside and we watched Veggie Tales.
Hours of cartoon vegetables later, my dad burst into the room, shouting, "There you are! We've been looking everywhere!"
My sister immediately broke down crying, thinking we were in trouble. We didn't even know we were missed.

The Sewer (non-fiktion)

The Sewer

Our feet sucking through the mud, we stomped through the swampy muck, this raw sewage drained from all the nearby farms, a trench and a tunnel, a big pipe, going through it and the dirt road going over it.
We were hunting frogs, me, my brother Junior and the neighbor kid, Mike. Mike had a small, lime fishnet for extracting goldfish. When we spotted the bulbous yellow eyes floating out of the syrupy grime, we called Mike and he scooped up our writhing, squirming prize.
The further down the sewer we went, the darker the drool became. Oily swirls and floating chunks of I-dare-not-think-what twisted in the ripples we caused. You had to duck your head or risk scraping your scalp against spools of cobwebs. Looking down at your shoes, filled with this goop up to your ankles, terrified of snakes or worse, sometimes we’d jump. What was that, what was that? Then, we realized it was our own splashing. Our own ripples.
We kept the frogs in a Tupperware container we took from grandma. We were careful as surgeons not to let them out when adding to the collection. Junior had the net now, and Mike had trekked to the other side of the tunnel alone. I scanned the brown murky mud and parted the reeds near the entrance, looking for any creatures trying to escape in the opposite direction.
Mike leaned his head into the tunnel and called that he thought he saw something. Something big. Bring the net, quick!
Junior wouldn’t let me take the net and soon it became a fight. I was small and gangly and Junior was 200 pounds, at least, and he was gonna kick my ass. Again.
I was tired of it. Junior was so big and stupid and always trying to push me around.
Rage surged through me and I did the most stupid thing possible. In my tiny mind, I became like Riki Tiki Tavi, the mongoose, a rodent that kills king cobras in India by biting deep into the neck and never letting go.
So I bit Junior on the nipple. Sunk my teeth in through his oversized Phoenix Suns shirt and chomped down. Did. Not. Let. Go. Junior pounded on my back with his fists, the whole time Mike watching from the side, rolling his eyes and telling us to cut it out. I wouldn’t let go and Junior wouldn’t stop hammering me.
But everyone has to breathe sometime and I let out a big exhale, enough room for Junior to shove me back and run off down the dirt road. It was a mile to my grandmother’s house and he ran the entire way, shouting, “I’m telling, I’m telling.”
The Tupperware of frogs knocked over, the net in the bushes. Nothing mattered. I ran off down the street after my brother. As I got to the door, my mother was there, asking what happened and I told her she should punish me so, so, so bad. I was crying. Guilt, or fear, but probably both.
Junior’s nipple was swollen and plum purple. My mother tried to stifle her laughter. Everyone was confused about the nature of the fight, but they figured we had it worked out. It was over and I wasn’t punished.
I went back to Mike, still baffled, but more bored and he said all the frogs got away. I looked down at my ankle, sticking out of my mud caked shoes and browned socks. A leech was suckling on my Achilles’ tendon.

Burden

non-fiction
When I was a little kid, I used to pick up cigarette butts and put them in a bucket and throw them away. I was a little groundskeeper.
My dad smoked on our porch made of astro-turf and he'd throw the butts right on the green and then there was little melted footprints all over, little UFO treadmarks. I'd pick the butts out of the cradles they made. I'd pick up these beer cans of extinguished butts where hives of cockroaches would crawl into and drown in their drunkenness. I'd fish through ashtrays.

I had a mentally retarded neighbor named Keith that did the same thing. Cleaning up everything.
Keith was a twin, but sometimes one of the twins don't come out entirely OK. Keith was one of those twins.
He was confused, and he thought his purpose in life was to clean up the earth.
He'd crawl the streets on the way to the bus stop, crouching down for plastic wrappers and pop tabs and receipts and cigarette butts.
He'd mutter to himself.
Keith kept the trash in a grocery bag at his side. I never knew what he did with the bag when he was done with it.

One day I got real sick from picking up those cigarette butts, those cans, those roach motels.
"They check in, but they don't check out."
I lay in bed, sick to death and vowed never to do that again.
The task to clean the planet was too large a burden for me to carry.
I figured, let the world be filthy.

Now when I get sick, I don't reflect like that any more, I don't think about it.
I keep going. No rest.
I wonder, if I'm still carrying any burdens.

Existing No Longer

This is true.

I was six. My best friend Ryan, who lived at one end of the trailer park, me at the other, were playing one spring afternoon.
I proposed we go on an adventure through our neighborhood.
'You know,' I said. 'A real adventure. Like Indiana Jones or something.'
So we asked permission from our parents and they smiled, condescendingly, but still adoring. Asked where we were going and when we'd be back. And said yes.
Ryan's mom packed us a lunch. With Capri Suns. I remember this because she only gave us one apiece and I loved Capri Suns as a kid, except they were too expensive for my family budget and they were small. Unsatisfying. I craved them, constantly.

We left.

I remember, I brought my Burger King Halloween Bucket and Ryan brought his backpack so we could save any treasures we found. I don't remember what we put inside them, maybe pennies, or bits of broken plastic or strange insects. In my head, things get muddled. Sometimes it's everything. Sometimes it's empty white, bucket. I'll never be sure of the truth.

We went up to the middle of the park and then doubled back, trespassing through our neighbor's backyards.
I was so excited. Ryan seemed nonplussed, but went along with it.
He was kind of a boring kid that liked pro-wrestling and shitty cable television.
I didn't have cable or my antennae didn't get reception. Essentially, no TV at all.

He had a Sega Genesis, I had a Super Nintendo. But he had cooler games, somehow.
I had Kirby's Avalanche and Rampart and Jurassic Park.
He had Sonic the Hedgehog and Jurassic Park too, only in his, you could be a velociraptor and eat people.

We had the same shitty, faux-mullet blond haircuts.
Ryan lost his baby teeth first.
I bit my nails. I think he did too.
We both liked Power Rangers.
My favorite color was green. His was red or blue.

I first met Ryan when my mother met his and we went over to his house and I played in Ryan's room. Within five minutes of knowing Ryan, we were crawling under his bed and suffocating in the huge piles of clutter. We were instant friends.

And it seemed perfect, crawling under bushes and hopping fences in stranger's backyards. TV was boring anyway. These adventures were the memories I'd always treasure. Somehow, I knew that already, as I created them. I knew the moment was special.

We hadn't been hiking for twenty minutes before we propped ourselves up behind someone's air conditioning and quickly ate all our snacks. I was still hungry. I remember that.

The place we rested was shaded and tranquil. A little tangerine tree, painted white. The hum of the air conditioning. The suck, suck, sucking sound of the Capri Suns.
I wanted to stay there forever.

And yet . . . I was disappointed that this was all our adventure had been so far. A twenty minute walk and a mediocre meal.
We hadn't even gone anywhere new or exciting. We were behind a trailer that was next to my babysitter's. I knew where I was.
And still, I went back to the peace I felt, however mild it was. For several years, I'd often revisit that place.

And then we heard footsteps and the home owner yelled at us and we ran off.

So far, we hadn't fought any monsters, like the ones in my favorite video game, A Link to the Past. No Octoroks or Moblins or anything. Just shady, crab-grass infested backyards. We hacked at bushes with sticks.

We went to the far reaches of the trailer park, a place I'd never been before. The very last trailer home was lopsided against a cul-de-sac and the front yard was completely filled with a giant prickly pear cactus. A forest of prickers and green discs.
We threw rocks at it, tearing up the fruitless crowns, bleeding out its juices all over.
I got paranoid that we'd get caught again. But we didn't.
And something about destroying that prickly pear was incredibly surreal.
I vowed to come back one day and finish its destruction. I really did. I don't know why.
And I returned once, many years later, and it was gone.
Maybe it never existed.

It's hard to say what happens to memories so long discarded. Maybe we never went on an adventure, maybe we didn't drink Capri Suns or get yelled at and maybe Ryan didn't exist at all.

It had been an hour or so. We were already exhausted little explorers.
We came upon an empty lot, the large concrete slabs where abandoned trailerhomes used to stand, until they were excavated and dragged away. Existing no longer.

Ryan found a dead bird laying on the slab and dared me to touch it. A dead morning dove, curled up in withered defeat. Existing no longer.
I said, no way.
Ryan reached inside the ribcage and pulled out an organ. Right through the skin. It was easy.
'Look,' he said. 'It's a heart.'
But who knows, it could have been a liver or a lung or something. All I know is it was a quarter-sized ball of red and violet and it leaked.
He dared me to touch it.
'No way,' I said.
Ryan threw it at me and I screamed.
He put the entrails in my bucket and we took it home.
We got back to my room and went through our treasures, which honestly, had to be the most worthless shit ever. I don't remember any of it. None except the organ, kinda drying up, kinda sticking to the side of the bucket.
Ryan left it at my house when he left, and I had to clean it out.

That's the end.

The thing about retelling a story, is, in the gaps of the temporal lobe, we fill in the holes.
With age, more gaps formulate. More are filled.
Some true, some lies, but it doesn't matter. Whatever changes occur, we make them the truth.

Since this is the first time I've told this story in 13 years, there were many gaps to fill.
I actually sit here, wondering, if any of it happened the way I think it did.
I think it did.
I nearly forgot it happened at all.
But retelling the story has changed it, the way you cannot observe anything in nature without yourself influencing the observed. I've changed this story beyond repair. In a way, the original events never existed. In truth, this story exists no longer.