Eat Him By His Own Light

Some material you come at a little stuffy, so I'll apologize in advance for the seductive baritone and clumsy pauses to wipe my runny nose...

This foamy fog that won't lift, day after day, turns the whole town into a soggy bowl of cereal. At night it turns streetlights into penny flavored snow cones. Turns everybody halfway down the street into a ghost from some Gogol Russian night in Saint Petersburg. I like it at night. Have Chopin in your ears humming homesick about Poland into shivering cold while he's lost or abandoned on some ferry waiting for home to find him. Makes it easy to think about people who play the same notes on your own life. Pretty soon you're walking somewhere else with different versions of yourself and different versions of the people you knew. Maybe back when you fit as friends, even though now you can see and feel the places where you wouldn't fit not too far off, even if it took you a little longer to accept it at the time.

I was thinking about this kid the other day while I was walking alone by the beach late at night. He was someone I used to miss being apart from but don't now. The catch is, when I fall asleep he keeps showing up in my dreams as that version of himself I used to miss. He reminds me how to miss him. Which adds its own brand of fog to my situation. Or maybe he's the same and I'm a different version. He never used to show up in dreams while we were friends.

He's always sad when I see him. Dreams are funny because everybody and everything in them gets exactly what its about except you. By the time it makes sense you wake up.

By the beach I was thinking about when he had a cast over his shattered hand that nobody bothered to sign. I turn back a few pages in his story to where he shattered his hand. I never saw it happen, but I'd heard it. Lots of us did. A whole gym full of people.

He'd had the last shot in a basketball game when he was maybe 14. His father was in the stands watching with a clipboard keeping track of statistics because his son was small and bigger kids played more than him even though he probably had more skill. His father kept track of numbers in order to provide seething evidence of injustice in his boy not playing.

That night his boy was given the last shot with a couple seconds on the clock. I was only a few feet away from the team huddle where the decision was arrived at. I wasn't even good enough to ride the bench. I hadn't made the team at all that year (or any other). Probably not even close. But I saw a couple kids in the huddle protest who ended up gaining the final shot. Down by two points, they needed a three. He was the best pure shooter on the team. I watched his face after the coach told everybody who was getting the ball. I could feel it was one of those moments in his life that might change everything. I remember wondering deep down which one he was more drawn to. Could he *deal* with being a winner. That whole angle on his life. I wasn't sure.

They went into their formations on the court and I saw the ball passed to him. Everything slowed down. The crowd hushed. The guy defending him could feel who the ball was going to. But before he caught it he looked up at the hoop and mishandled receiving the ball. There was still time to get the shot off. In a panic he reached down for it but fumbled it again and the defender grabbed for it and they both fell over. Buzzer rang. Big moan from the crowd. Coach threw up his hands. Game over.

I remember him looking over up into the stands just as I did and seeing the frustration on his father's livid face.

I looked back at the kid, the trauma on his face. For some kind of hideously misplaced refuge, he grabbed his ankle, clutched it in agony just as another boy who had desperately wanted the final shot strutted by smirking, "Broke your ankle, huh?" This particular kid never saw a guy on the ground he didn't want to kick.

Then I think he was crying holding his ankle. Everyone left him alone and headed back to the locker room. The stands emptied. As he got to his feet he tested out the ankle and grimaced. The harder he tried not to cry the worse it got. I watched him limp over to the locker room and not two seconds after he was in there a metallic thud rang out. He'd punched the locker so hard he shattered his hand. Now he'd have a momento over his arm commemorating this awful day. Everybody could ask, "How'd you get *that*?"

I think that's when I started talking to him in the hopes of becoming his friend.

I wasn't a loser's advocate or anything; back then you were an underdog or a whore in my emotional scorecard. Lots of the people who don't become artists by profession do way better jobs of it with their own life. They can't help it. You *have* to be an artist to fuck things up colorfully. *Primary* colorfully. I knew an artist when I saw one. Now nobody could ever look at his life without this Mona Lisa-moment hanging on some wall of his eyes.