fingers for guns

“Sister got bit by a copperhead snake in the woods behind the house.
Nobody was home so I grabbed her foot and I sucked that poison out..."
- Victoria Williams - “Summer of the Drug”


reaction shots

“The thing you should remember about missing a thumb is that you’re not really missing anything. If it was a finger, yeah, maybe you could say that hand only had three fingers. A thumb, however, is something else. It just don’t count...”

My sister will say this to me when I’m 17 and she’s 7, and it’ll make me feel better. I’ll think about those words so much that I’ll consider putting them on a keychain. But 10 years later, she’ll still be in my ear and I’ll still be waiting to change the subject.

-...but the biggest problem as I see it is you can’t make a gun with a hand like that. If you try, it’ll look like the hammer’s already clicked, which means it’s probably empty...

-Hold up. Someone on the other line.

I won’t get there in time, but Jay will leave me a message. It’ll be too long, as usual, random mumblings like, “I know we haven’t talked for a year, but if you call me back, I’ll pretend your jokes are funny. Even when you say stupid shit like, ‘I need a quarter, got any change?’ and I make the mistake of saying, ‘I hate change’ because I honestly do when it makes my pockets hang to the side when I’m sitting, and then you go ‘You hate change! Get it? Hate change?’ And when you do that, I promise to get it and not say I got it. Oh, yeah, by the way, someone’s dead. Call me back if you wanna know who.” Then he’ll hum along with a song I can’t hear and try to get in a dozen belches and some beatboxing before the beep. A seductive voice will tell me his message will be saved in the archives for “only” three days, and even that computer will sound oddly threatening. I’ll call him back within the hour.

-What’s the what.

-Are you sitting down?

-Of course I am. I’m driving, fucknuts, not running.

-You could be on a unicycle. They don’t have seats, right?

-Who the hell is dead?

-Jamie.

-Seriously? How?

-No one knows. Shot through the head. Either she shot herself or someone else did.

-Oh, really? You deduce that all by yourself?

-What’s the difference?

-What do you mean?

-I mean, what’s the difference? Murder, accident, suicide. She’s still dead.

I will think about this until I understand the difference. I won’t say it out loud, but I’ll realize that if it wasn’t suicide, I wouldn’t be dwelling on it as much. Out of character, Jay will fill this silence with some actual sympathy. It will give me the creeps.

-I’m really sorry, dude.

When I’m watching a movie, I know immediately that it’s bad if the camera keeps lingering on the reaction shots. You know these moments well, the ones designed to tell the dumbest viewers when to gasp, laugh, or cry. Coincidentally, the typical reactions to murder, accident, and suicide. Picture the scene. An actor does something shocking like, say, pulling his eyes out of his head. That should say enough to the viewer, right? Well, a bad movie won’t be content with this. A bad movie will cut to someone screaming, maybe even shouting out, “Oh, my god! I can’t believe something so crazy has just occurred! Imagine the pain!” It’s like someone laughing at their own joke over the punchline. And this is infinitely worse if the bad movie in question is trying to make you cry instead.

“Are you sitting down?” I’ll decide that he only asked me that because he saw it in too many movies. Unless it’s the scene where authority figures come knocking on the door, that’s how the phone call always starts. After I soak in the news, the two of us will discuss Jamie’s death and a bizarre competition will surface that neither of us will be consciously aware of. It will give me an excuse to make this phone call a perfect first and last conversation with Jay for at least another year. And it will sound familiar to anyone leaning in to listen because you’ve said it all before, even outside of the worst movies:

First is your bizarre rush to react the most inappropriately (“I guess she won’t be needing that five bucks back!”) quickly followed by a scramble to be the most respectful (“I’d drive nine hours to her funeral if I had to.”) then comes the ridiculous duel to prove who knew her better (“I remember every word of her alligator poem, I mean ‘crocodile’ poem.”) then you will say something about there being “nothing” you could have done to change things when, of course, anything at all, even an extra word in the last sentence between you, would have changed everything that followed (“I almost forced her to miss a plane by not calling her back.”) then you will subtly attach meaning to the most insignificant interactions (“I’m the one who named her dog, even if she never realized it.”) negated by a hasty downplay of the most significant ones (“She brought me that article on love ‘being a disease,’ but she probably showed it to everyone.”) then you will offer up something embarrassing, knowing that although no one can prove her feelings for you, you can change your own depending on who’s around (“I hesitate to even say this, but I always wanted to sing Karaoke with her in the crowd, and, God help me, sing it well.”) then you will make it clear you’re allowed any joke no matter how many crickets it gets chirping (“I’ve always said, tragedy plus time equals comedy, but this clock ain’t workin!”) but then you’ll make it clear you wouldn’t allow anyone to do the same (“Imagine her mother in the car with us before you say that stupid shit again.”) then you will desperately try to attach yourself a little closer to the tragedy hoping that there’s at least one person left that hasn’t heard so you can ask if they’re sitting down (“If you haven’t called Crazy Mike yet, let me do it.”) then you will remove yourself from the drama...(“That funeral reception is too far away, and her body won’t even be there”)...in direct opposite proportion to your relationship with the deceased (“I’d hitchhike if I had to, even though she probably wouldn’t remember me.”) then you will take advantage of an opportunity to settle old scores (“I’ll tell him I don’t want to talk about it if that asshole has the bad judgment to want to get together and reminisce.”) then you will minimize her best accomplishments...(“I think people should be honest and admit that her poetry needed work.”)...or maximize them depending on the accomplishments in your own life (“I told her that one day we’d all rent hot-air balloons when we’re inevitably millionaires.”) then you’ll start the world’s most more subtle duel about who really knew her better (“Once, I saw her hold up a line of traffic while she walked down the middle of the road with her headphones on, everyone honking and yelling over her shoulders.”) however, you’ll never...(“I know, I know, that’s so Jamie, isn’t it?)...no matter how hard you try...(“Actually, it wasn’t like her at all.”)...really declare a winner.

Unless you get caught with a mouthful of something and spray it everywhere in shock when you hear the news, you can count on reaction shots to always be inappropriate. Now, you can’t just fake it and hold milk in your cheeks and wait for the punchline like they do in the movies. I’m talking about that split-second after your drink washes over your teeth, that instant before your throat flexes to swallow, that moment that’s harder to nail than anyone actually realizes. And if you do spit uncontrollably all over everything when they tell you, then maybe, maybe, I’ll believe that you reacted honestly. Just understand that this has never happened in the entire history of the human race. Notice up there how many more times you will say “I” instead of “her.” This is because the only people who handle tragedy worse than high school kids are college kids. And the only people who handle tragedy worse than those little bastards is everyone else.

how nature says stay away

After I get off the phone, I’ll get pulled over. It’ll be the first male cop I’ve seen in a year, and I’ll give him my license, my registration, my full attention, then finally my carefully autographed citation. But I’ll never say a word. And I’ll be pleased to see that it drives him fucking crazy. He will have seen me on the phone right before I rolled down my window, but it’ll be obvious he doesn’t want to accuse me of pretending to be mute because of the watchful eye of his dashboard camera. He’ll never know that I was simply trying as hard as I could not to use news of a tragedy just to get out of a ticket.

And he won’t know it, but because of his frustration at my silent treatment, this officer will go through all three stages of grief right there at my window. Denial, anger, then acceptance.

Not ready to face family yet, I’ll find a lower road to drive down and look for a good exercise branch to support my weight while I get into the required physical shape for a reunion. Before I leave Toledo for the third time, I will finally bend my chin-up bar beyond repair and will feel the need to hang off various stairwells and construction beams whenever possible. Once, a discarded shelf balanced on the corner of a dumpster, and, disastrously, even the top brace of a bathroom stall that came crashing down with just one more chin-up to go. But my first bar had been securely attached to doorjambs for decades, an important first step in waking myself up with quick, pointless workouts before jobs I hated. But when I step into those woods growing around the lowest road I could find, I’ll discover that there aren’t any good branches anywhere, let alone a mysterious free-standing doorway that would give me the comfort of my morning routine. I’ll remember climbing trees all through childhood, but on this day it will be ridiculously hard to find one with a branch low enough to reach. Even on the last days of my sagging chin-up contraption, I could do three important exercises. First off, simple curls to hit my biceps, all while fantasizing about ripping a bumper off a tailgater. Second, I’d turn my hands around to him my triceps, all while dragging myself out from under an imaginary car wreck. Third, I’d twist my hands to hit my forearms, all while hanging from my steering wheel out the window of that wreck off the crumbling nose of Mount Rushmore. I believed strong forearms would be my good friend in any crisis situation, at least according to one of my drunkest uncles during an ill-fated, impromptu Christmas arm-wrestling tournament, but any of these scenarios would allow me to pull against my own body’s heavy blood, bones and water way past any reasonable point of exhaustion. Inspired by my religious exercise routine, a couple years back my sister tried to mount her own makeshift bar over a particular spot on her carpet where her cat constantly puked. This idea was that the placement would discourage herself from putting her feet down until she absolutely had to. But her doorways weren’t be big enough, and the cat always ate it again anyway.

Of course, I will wait a lifetime in vain for a cliffhanging situation and a chance to amaze any wide-eyed, mouth-breathing bystander with my stamina or impossibly powerful wrists. But I’ll never stop crossing my fingers. Finger-crossing being, of course, something that few people realize is it’s own workout, especially in a car. Someone might someday say to a shocked crowd, “Holy shit, I thought he was pulling himself up onto that helicopter, but he won’t stop exercising! They can’t land until he gets tired, officer, and that could be days! Better make us some sandwiches!” Could still happen.

Oh, yeah, there’s one more exercise I used to do, a behind-the-head technique you can use to work your back. Maybe one more. Leg raises to work your stomach. Problem is, I haven’t really imagined a good scenario where those muscles might save my life, so I never remember to do them. However, I got in such good shape hanging from a doorway (more so than I ever did with decades of free weights or mail-order rubberband machines or coaches or friends screaming in my face to “get it up!”) that finding a perfect branch before a funeral will become my most important task of the day.

After crunching around the brush for a half hour, I’ll settle for one in spite of its strange angle. As I try to pull my body up and up and up, I’ll realize that because of the awkward slant of this limb, it forces me to swing and strain in a completely new way. I realize I’m likely working a new muscle between my bicep and forearm that has never twitched before. I will think, “Fuck it, better than nothing!” and keep on pulling, watching as the tendons and blood bulge in a spot I’ve never known was alive. And as I strain for a few final curls, I’ll start thinking that if working out is indeed only to impress females, imagine how shocked they’d be if I discovered a completely new muscle to display. You hear so much about the symmetry of the human face and body being the main cause of attraction, but has anyone ever tried waving a girl over with one giant finger instead? One tiny barbell or a crooked tree and only about ten minutes a day and you could create a beautiful swollen digit that would make even the most right-brained, math-loving ladies swoon. Just like my dad once said, “Anyone can watch a good movie, but a bad movie takes endurance.” And the same thing applies to exercising. Back in Junior High when I first started to exercise for football, I wandered curiously over to the wrestlers’ workout since their bodies seemed to be in better shape than everyone else (with the possible exception of the swimmers). The senior football players seemed like a bunch of bulbous fat fucks to me, and I had little interest in looking like that long after my football season or high school career was over. My football coach caught me and yelled, “You wanna get strong?! Or you wanna walk on the beach?!” I said, “Uhhh, walk the beach?” Wrong answer. Turned out I ended up running on “the beach” after all, the beach in question being the coaches’ nickname for the gravel piles surrounding the equipment sheds, a punishment that was eerily like that reoccurring dream where someone’s chasing you and your shoes can’t get any traction. It didn’t matter though. I was kicked off the team before my body resembled any of the athletes, in any sport.

Hanging off that branch, trying to stay straight and balanced without the necessary thumb to tie off the grip on my bad hand, I’ll suddenly understand that any answer I would have given the coach that day would have been wrong. Anyone can get traditional muscles into shape, but it takes a special kind of dedication to work on something new, for no good reason, especially if its purpose is to inflate a mysterious muscle with blood, much like a lizard will engorge that red pouch under its head for, at first glance, no reasonable biological function whatsoever. That small, silly coach would never know how effective his offensive line could have been if, instead of pointless snarling and furious marching in place, suddenly a shock of blood-red, frog-like throats expanded under a row of helmets and caused the opposing defensemen to shit themselves in fear.

This is when the branch will snap and drop me hard to the ground. It’ll be only about three feet down, but since my legs will be crossed under me and it’s impossible to unfold them in time, it’ll be more like five and feel more like twelve. Luckily, my ankle won’t be broken, and it won’t effect my driving after I make the long, painful walk back to my car. However, I’ll disguise my limp the entire way because an injury isn’t ever as interesting as the potential story, even if there’s no one around to hear you make one up. Which is how it should be. Never the other way around. How does that saying go? If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one around to hear it, you can invent any story you want.

stop fucking helping

If you drive long enough, the only relationships you can cultivate is hatred for authority figures who claim more than a reasonable share of your road. You will also begin to think of every cop, fireman, even paramedic as the same person, blissfully ignorant of the destructive influence this blind generalization has had with other relationships in your life. This is mostly because, much like the initial giggling skirmish you had over that theater armrest on your first date, you simply cannot tolerate anyone asking you to move over.

When I’m back in Toledo for another (yes another) funeral, this time my grandfather, I will forget about the possible suicide of a friend and decide to narrow down my focus to firefighters instead. Scientists might say I will actually be mad at my newly emotionally distant girlfriend back in Pittsburgh (not because the last movie we watched had a fireman for a hero) but these scientists won’t have proper funding for their research to support this conclusion. For whatever reason, this anger will please me immensely, and I’ll patiently wait for openings in any conversation at my grandpa’s wake in order to insert statistics that make firemen seem foolish, melodramatic, and less than heroic. But after an initial campaign into the first available ears, my exhausted Alpha Aunt will direct me away from her and towards some other relatives with a forceful nudge.

-Your cousin Jim’s a volunteer firefighter now, you know.

-No shit? You know, if we had a policeman in the family I’d have to change my name. Cop movies are the only ones I hate more.

I will go looking for Jim and find him smoking near my uncles’ motorcycles. There’s lots of motorcycles. That’s how I first figured out how many uncles I had (nine). Ten minutes later, Jim will walk away before I even get to the top of my Most and Least Hazardous Occupations list:

-...and with a fireman’s job being, surprisingly, only the fourteenth most dangerous job in the country, number nine is, get this, kids who work at teddy bear factories who...wait. Where are you going?

A sarcastic voice behind me and I’ll forget about Jim.

-Weren’t you just here?

When I turn to face her, my sister will try to trip me up by kicking the back of my knee.

-Hey, watch it! My ankle’s fucked up.

-How’d you do that?

-Football.

-So...how many funerals is this for you?

-About a hundred and nine. You?

-Seven thousand and five, I mean six.

I’ll leave with my sister, who’s still be pretending to be mad at me for me not calling her back an hour earlier, and we’ll drive around looking for local music stores she can support by guilting me into buying record albums she can’t afford. Later, I’m supposed to help her move some stuff into her new apartment, something about a next-door neighbor who’s dead and his kids throwing out all his furniture. Three record stores later, and she’ll insist on driving my new car. I’ll let her. It’ll be a big step for us because we both know she can’t drive for shit. She’s never learned to merge fast enough, and I’ll lose my patience like I always do and have to shove her leg down on the accelerator to help. We will almost crash my first new car ever, a black 2009 Grand Prize, yes, a ridiculously cocky name for a car that sounds like you already won a race even before the odometer even registers a single mile. But at 16 years old, I first learned how to drive on a ‘88 model, and for this reason, it seemed like a good choice. More importantly, I first learned how to merge in that car, a day in school my sister must have skipped. It’ll take two decades for me to start to appreciate my instructor’s training by trying to pass it down to my sister. Even longer to regret everything I did to sabotage that man’s job and reputation for touching my knee.

On the drive, my sister will mention that my Alpha Aunt said my grandpa always called me a “Mama’s Boy.” I’ll admit it’s true, and she’ll want to know why.

-Because I’m exactly like dad.

-What? Nonsense. That phrase means you were girly or something.

-No, it means I was like a second dad. Think about it. All my arguing and conflict was always with mom. Never with dad. When you’re just like somebody, it’s like the other one isn’t there. That’s how dad was. Redundant. Especially when I was yelling.

-You’re not exactly like him. And you only sound like dad when you yell about certain things. That’s about it. And “Mama’s Boy” means “crybaby” for the rest of the planet, so don’t try to glorify your label.

She’ll suddenly slam on the brakes, and I’ll put a quick hand on the dash to keep my face off the windshield. There will be an animal in the road blocking traffic, and I’ll jump out to rescue it like a big brother or father figure is supposed to.

It’ll be a woodchuck. I think. After circling it, afraid touch it, I’ll run and grab a plastic bag off the side of the road, shake out the garbage, and try to trick it to back up inside. That’s when it’ll start tipping over and hissing, losing its balance as it snaps at nothing but air. It must have gotten hit, I’ll decide, but obviously not hit hard enough to be fatal. Cars will be coming from the other direction, and I’ll be running out of ideas fast when a truck pulls up and a bigger man than me gets out.

He’s a shuffling, black-bearded, biker-looking monstrosity, and I’ll be convinced he’s seconds away from bellowing at me for holding up traffic. Instead, he’ll take one hard look at what I’m doing and, without a word, step into the oncoming lane to stop the cars with his hand. His presence is so comforting, I half-expect him to casually stop the cars with his shoulder. And when I finally get the critter off the road and he’s swaggering past us and back to his truck, he’ll clap me on the shoulder and say all wise and grizzled, “It probably ain’t gonna make it anyway, boy. You know, sometimes you just gotta stop fucking helping.”

My sister will pull my car up next to me and my bag of not-quite-roadkill until my tires start to spin loose in the muck. For the moment, I’ll concentrate on shaking the creature loose instead of worrying about my car getting swapped. That is, until a cop cruises up to ruin everything.

-Hey! You want me to put that thing out of its misery?

It’s the second male cop I’ve seen in a year. All the anger I’d been saving up for the next firefighter that cut me off in traffic or glorified his job in front of some females will come bubbling up and over the brim.

-Don’t worry about it. Nothing to see here. Officer.

He’ll hear the disrespect in that last word clear as hell, and I’ll wish he’d have the chance to hear the disdain in my voice whenever I use the word “Sheriff” instead, a technique I picked up from a lifetime of westerns. But it’ll be nasty enough for his forehead to squeeze the top of his sunglasses like a fist, and he’ll actually pull his gun and show it to me.

-I can take care of it. It ain’t gonna make it anyway, son.

-How do you know? You can’t see through this bag. Or do those sunglasses have special powers?

My sister will snicker, and the cop will turn on his hazard flashers and step out next to us. I’ll hear a collective sigh in the revving engines of the traffic stacked behind him. I’ll wonder why he didn’t move his cruiser ten feet forward and onto the shoulder of the road to let the congestion get by instead of choosing to hit the button that makes his shiny, pretty lights announce his entrance from stage left. But I’ll ask him something else instead.

-If you get to shoot this trash bag, will it be the first time you ever fired that gun?

He will scowl and step into my personal space, something I’ve seen civilians arrested for. He’ll act like his feelings are hurt.

-I was gonna do you a favor.

I’ll swing the rustling, hissing bag around to my back so he can’t see it.

-I think this particular bag of garbage wants to fight for every breath it can. It doesn’t believe in a garbage-bag afterlife and has decided it doesn’t want to take that chance by letting you shoot it.

-What is your problem.

-You know why there’s never a question mark? Because the answer doesn’t matter. Do you believe me or not. See how I just said that. That, too.

-Move your car and get outta here. If you drop that bag, I’ll cite you for littering.

-Well played, sir. Of course you will. You realize you’re blocking the road, too, right?

-I said move it.

My sister will be alarmed by this exchange, but more worried about the creature bouncing off my back. It will remind me of the teddy bear I carried around by it’s leg and the comforting pat it gave me when I ran (if that teddy bear scratched, hissed and pissed itself).

I will put the mewling bundle in the trunk, give her a “don’t worry” look, and get in my car. Behind the wheel, I’ll spin my tires, but the cop dodges the fishtail of muck easily. He’ll climb into his cruiser, dialing his cellphone with his thumb as he turns off his hazards. He’ll yell out the window, barely concealing his glee:

-Tow truck’s on the way. I think I’ll wait with you.

Then his hazards will flash back on as he drifts back over the yellow lines. After ten minutes of leaning on our hoods, me staring at his sunglasses, silence periodically broken by a weary honk from more stopped traffic or the angry engine rev of someone pulling a U-turn, I’ll try to break the ice.

-Question for you, Sheriff.

-I’m not a Sheriff.

-Have you ever seen that reality show “C.A.T. the Skip Tracer?”

He won’t answer.

-Sheriff, I have to tell ya, between you and me, the guy on that show has got to be, without a doubt, the biggest candy ass I’ve ever seen in my life.

The sheriff will cross his arm and twitch his ass on his cruiser to get comfortable. The one good thing I’ll say about cops is they’re used to getting lectured by civilians.

-Seriously, I almost punched my television last night with all that posing he was doing while his horrifying white-trash family stood behind him trying to act all tough. We have some time right now, but I don’t know if I can begin to cover everything that makes Cat one of the biggest pussies in history...

He’ll start to look up to the sky for help.

-...but I’ll try. For starters, this silly prick prays on camera. Before he arrests some crackhead or paraplegic bond jumper, always female mind you, way to pick the tough targets, dude, he does this whole self-righteous power prayer psyche-up that’s supposed to impress the viewers. You ever pray before you pull over some blue-haired oldster?

He won’t answer.

-See, the only praying I’ve ever done in my life, and I’m not ashamed to say I’ve had my share of darkness, heartache, and soul-searching moments, but the absolute only time I’ve ever actually gotten down on my knees and asked for anything...was for this bounty hunter to please get a shotgun blast to the fucking face. Either that or have him try to arrest me. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not even trying to be a tough guy here. I’m just saying that it would be so easy to disrupt his weak-ass tactics. First off, he’s only armed with pepper spray, right? Hey, you have that on your belt too, don’t ya, Sheriff? So all I would need to do is answer my door wearing one of them World War II gas masks. "What are you going to do, now?” I would ask him. “Oh, nothing, eh? Out of ideas already?" And that name. “Skip tracer.” Hell, even those words sound lame. When I was a kid, those were two things you should never get caught doing.

My sister will start to smile and take her ear off the trunk to join in. She’ll say:

-You know what I hate? That son of his! He’s got the same carefully-styled ponytail braids and beads and trendy tribal tattoos. You know how much time those guys must spend in front of a mirror? Do you think they do it together? Frightening!

-Good point, sis. Sir, is it like that with other officers? Do you all line up in front of the mirror like in the movies, all combing your mustaches?

The sheriff will adjust his glasses, a very telling move that would have cost him his hand in poker. My sister will giggle and I’ll get back on subject.

-Am I right though? Simply not opening the door? Doesn’t that throws a monkey into the wrench? An exciting pursuit through the trailer park would come to an abrupt end if you simply wouldn’t let them in the door, wouldn’t it? Now, my lawyer friends will correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m thinking that the law treats bounty hunters kind of like vampires. They can’t come in unless you invite them!

He sighs and tries to interrupt..

-I don’t know if that’s really...

-And if his shitbag son did set foot inside my house? Oops! Trespassing! Shotgun blast to the face. That mutt’s beautiful ponytail would flutter lazy to the ground. Of course there’s the rest of that bounty hunter’s sorry-ass crew to worry about, too. Haven’t forgotten about them! Hmm, maybe that ancient, wizened, uncle-molester-looking one? I’ll just trick him with a six-pack of cheap shit beer in a bear trap. Hey, do you have any uncles in the force?

He’ll ignore this and instead ask what I’m pointing at. I’ll look down and be surprised to see I’m aiming just past him, hand cocked like a gun, unknowingly testing my sister’s theory.

-Sorry about that. Annoying, isn’t it? That’s okay. A perfectly normal reaction. To be annoyed by someone pointing at you, I mean. Not the pointing. Speaking of, what’s up with those toy guns bounty hunters carry? I guess they shoot hot sauce or whatever, but they look like super soakers, all pink and green and gigantic. I can tell that they really tried to make them as scary as they could with such an intimidating color scheme. However, when a weapon resembles a sorority girl’s bubble gun, you know, the ones with the bottle of soapy water hanging off the bottom, I’m thinking I might have to try to take it away from him. And what is this weapon's magazine that gets dramatically slapped into place in slow motion when they run out of ammo in a bubble fight? A bottle! Come on, it’s a bubble gun, I’m telling you. My nephew’s super soakers are ten times scarier than his. Do you cops start out with those until you graduate?

No answer.

-But even though Cat the “Skip Tracer” won’t have a Plan B for apprehending me, I’ll have B, C, and D. Let’s say I don’t have my gas mask on me, and they catch me getting some groceries. What do I do? Well, I get in my car and lock the doors. What are they gonna do? Smash the windows? That’s illegal, Jack! You know what happens when you do that? Shotgun blast to the face. Praise Jesus. They’d probably just yell at me in their best, intimidating, made-for-TV voices, and I would begin to read a book. Then they would have to stop filming because it would make for bad television. They would probably turn off the cameras and plead with me to come out, sign a waiver, and please make them look less incompetent. I would then shit on the dashboard and draw pictures on the windshield.

The sheriff will finally take off his sunglasses at this point, but I’ll pick up speed.

-I might attempt to draw pictures of Cat and his entire waterhead family. And that wife of his? That fat fuck with the crispy-fried blonde hair? She would probably get out of their S.U.V. and start squawking at me, too. Now, has anyone ever taken a long, hard at her? Maybe being in law enforcement means you don’t have time to take the same long looks at your wife that you do at minor traffic infractions, but has she even taken a long, hard look at herself? That shiny monster looks like someone tried to cram a Thanksgiving ham into a 3-year-old’s mitten. She just smugly wobbles and totters around on those spiked heels barking orders all day. Does that sorry-ass, bulging piece of moose shit honestly think she’s hot? Does she honestly think she’s intimidating, that’s the question. And when there’s a situation where there’s a chance for her to act like an authority figure, like, say, someone actually not wanting that preening circus sideshow of idiots on their front porch or civilians deciding to express their annoyance, she’ll immediately start shrieking profanity and threats like the tiresome, white-trash failure she is. Wow, what a professional. There’s something very telling about how quickly power is abused, even lame, reality-show perceived power like that. I would love for the nearest front-row sidewalk spectator to crack her in the head with a beer bottle while she’s saying something smug and sassy for those cameras. Then, as she wipes the blood and beer from her ugly mug and her vision clears, she looks up to see half of her beloved Cat’s face and that carefully sprayed, girly-ass hairdo of his come flying across the sky riding a wave of gunfire. Then she’d turn to watch her halfwit son take a crowbar in the teeth because I've somehow managed to sneak up behind him covered in my own shit and laughing uncontrollably while he was babbling into the camera about his killer instincts and heightened senses not allowing anyone to ever get the drop on him. Then the old one with the skinny arms, the pederast, he’d puke all over himself and start running for the hills to sniff out a half-empty beer someone forgot. Hey, that’s a good question. With the glut of reality police shows these days, do you find yourself acting any differently?

Nothing. But the speaker pinned to his shoulder will crackle static like a string of sneezes.

-Oh, please, God, if you’re really up there, let those noble crimefighters try to arrest me. How would I go about doing that? Can you help me with this? I need to commit a crime in Hawaii, right? Isn’t that where these heroes practice their own unique brand of justice? Or is it Candy Land? But how do I get their attention? I’d have to not pay my speeding tickets, right? No, wait, that’s far too serious of a crime. They’d never take the case, never risk the chase. I’d have to not pay a parking ticket, then wait for a judge to issue a bench warrant. And then I’d have to concentrate and make myself forget about it for a year or two. Then maybe, just maybe, while I’m playing video games and watching "Midnight Gun," a fine ‘80s film that must be considered the bounty hunters' Holy Grail, there would be a knock on my door as he and his vanload of cameras and clowns piled into my peephole. Yes, I think I would give up a life of freedom for a chance to beat the life out of Cat and his crew. And guess what...they can’t fight for shit! Online, I located a videoclip with the search words, “Cat,” “Beatdown," and “Glorious,” hoping, sorry, I mean praying he was the one getting the beatdown in question. But it turned out to be his dipshit youngest son supposedly kicking someone’s ass. However, if you analyze the film with the attention it deserves, by which I mean frame by frame with a feverish intensity that should last 72 hours, you’ll realize that the old man Cat Jr. supposedly punches in the face is not getting fazed by any of those limp-wristed blows. The old man only falls from his wheelchair because his wheels slip down steps that should have been handicap-friendly. Or maybe he just had one tire stuck in the mud like me. Either way, the old man leans forward and quickly puts Cat Jr. on his back like the harmless, flailing turtle that he is. And he’s just getting ready to rain down death from above when the entire moron patrol intervenes and pulls him off. Now, if there really was a God, even He would not have intervened in this situation. He would have allowed this old man to beat on Cat’s only begotten Son for forty days and forty nights. It just amazes me how many sons follow their fathers into law enforcement. Is that the case with you?

Crickets.

-Moving on, you know how people travel hundreds of miles to pay tribute to the Virgin Mary image’s on some fuckhead’s waffles? Well, I would swim to Hawaii to kneel in front of this old man’s wheelchair, and hopefully he would still be punching Cat Jr. in the cranium. He would be tired by then, of course, and might be eating a large sandwich with one hand while the other kept up the pummeling, but it would still be worth honoring. And how about Cat’s stern talking-to that he gives those bail jumpers? With the film forever rolling, he tries to come up with something wise to say and instead sounds like every drunk I’ve ever known that felt the end of the evening coming and attention slipping away and decided to pontificate on self-inflating bullshit anecdotes disguised as advice. He talks about how he used to be "a bad guy" himself, and how he now walks the straight-and-narrow. Bad guy, my ass. With those fucking beads he puts on his arms? With that bizarre spray-tan he slathers on himself? With that mind-boggling hair? With his tight-fitting jeans and boots that even homosexuals frown at their television and mutter, "Whoa, that’s really gay." And what about his leather jacket with the American flag on the back?

He won’t look to his other shoulder like I hope. But he’ll want to.

-Hey, just like that patch on your arm! Notice how they didn’t really knit all 50 stars on there because it was too small. I knew a guy who put the American flag on the side of his garage and ran out of room for the stars, too, so I can understand how they had to skimp on the authenticity of yours. But I had to stare at that sloppy garage flag mural daily since there was a traffic light in front of that house that wasn’t timed correctly. There was no way to beat it, no way not to get caught by the red light no matter how fast you were going or what direction you were coming from. But if you looked at the stars on his giant garage flag, you’d see the bottom rows started nice and tight and orderly, then as you got higher on the flag, they’d spread out more and more until there was a random halfhearted splash of them in the corner. Now, if he’d started painting at the bottom, I just don’t understand why he didn’t keep going. Maybe there’d be too many stars, sure, but the United States might catch up with him if they eventually annexed more vacation islands like Hawaii and Puerto Rico. But if he started painting at the top, shit, I don’t know what the hell he was thinking. But as fucked up as his flag was, it’s not much different than a perfect flag. I mean, doesn’t our flag look like it was designed by children or mental defectives? We need something simpler. One less color. Maybe a powerful tool on it? My dad designed a new American flag once. It was a green hand squeezing an 8-ball. Well, maybe that was his own flag. And maybe it was my uncle I’m thinking of. But seriously, our country’s flag is one of the least creative things I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s awful. It looks like a 5-year-old designed it, and used random crayons that weren’t broken. It's a fucking embarrassment. Hey, not for you though, Sheriff. It looks great on your car. Your shoulder not so much though. Makes you look like an astronaut. Hey, do you guys salute the flag like the military does?

My sister will now have officially stopped worrying about the animal in the trunk. She’ll come over to look at the patch on his arm, and he’ll slouch almost imperceptibly, hopefully self-conscious of it for the first time in his life.

-It’s worse than kids wearing their football team's logo. Some teams have cool animals on them, sure, just like the Russian flag. Hell, even Japan's flag is better than ours, and that's just the bouncing red dot from their Karaoke videos. Or from that weird sing-along tampon commercial. But the colors of the American flag are simply horrible. I can’t stand to look at them for another second. Maybe you can stand sideways for me right now. I don’t want to overstate this, but the stripes look like a melting candy cane. Or bird shit from a pigeon with a bladder infection. And the stars look like those grade-school stickers you accumulate when you prove you can efficiently draw a turkey with the outline of your hand and/or wipe your ass correctly. Hey, here’s some trivia for you. Did you know they originally wanted the turkey to be our national symbol? Makes more sense if you think about it. They’re delicious. Bald eagle’s way too stringy. You know, when I see one of those gigantic American flags flapping over a car dealership, I think that the design looks so silly and weak that I always expect the other side to be blank.

I will be surprised, as you are, at how long the sheriff will let me talk. You ever see a cop when it’s got nothing to do? It’s quite funny. They’re like video game characters on your television screen when you walk away from the controller too long, like those animations that the programmers put in there as a gag. A cop will yawn, whistle, bite its lip, pop a piece of gum, scratch its head, blink slow behind those mirrored sunglasses, check the bottom of its feet, then eventually repeat all these movements when it runs out of variations.

-You know what we need instead? We need a thick stack of flags up there on the pole. So that when the wind blew ‘em all, they’d make you think you were seeing one of those stick-figure flip cartoons. The images would, of course, be like all the flip cartoons you ever drew in your library books and hymnals, violent little morality tales with falling rocks or explosions or masturbating dinosaurs that remind us how dangerous the world can be. I forgot, who were we talking about? Firemen? Cops? Oh, yeah, that bounty hunter. Okay, I’m sure he was real bad news back in the day compared to the rest of his neighborhood. But what possible crime did he commit besides crimes against masculinity? Oh, do I dream about that shotgun blast to his face often. While we’re waiting for that tow truck and have this time together, I can tell you that I actually have several reoccurring dreams. First, I get that dream where you’re naked and late for class to take an exam. Everyone’s had that. Then, I get that dream when the basketball game is ending and you’re trying to run but your feet are stuck to the court or sinking into a giant pile of gravel. Finally, I get the dream where you’re straddling the gun turret on a huge tank that’s actually a combination of "tank" and "my cock.” Yes, all very common dreams. Wait, that last one didn’t ring a bell? Anyway, I also get the dream where C.A.T. the Skip Tracer is looking through a peephole, squirt gun cocked and loaded, trying to sound scary for the teenage cameraman over his shoulder, and you know who answers the door? Me in a gas mask. Just kidding. Shotgun blast to the face. Then I wake up, realize it’s just a dream, and don’t believe in God anymore, thank Christ...

My sister will decide she wants to jump in, and the spell will be broken.

-Hey, I hate cops so much I might buy cop-skin shoes if they ever sold ‘em!

I will snicker in spite of my confusion and motion her back over toward my car away from the officer who is now muttering out of the side of his neck.

-Let me guess, your dad was a cop, right? This is all directed towards him.

-Nope. Our cousin Jim’s a firefighter though!

-Well, whatever your problem is, whether this was your pet raccoon or...

My sister will interrupt him.

-If doesn’t matter what the reason is as long as we don’t use it as an excuse!

-Exactly, sis. Hey, that reminds me, you know how dangerous your job isn’t?

-Enough.

The tow truck will finally come roaring in between us. I’ll almost feel bad because he doesn’t react as I hope, but that feeling won’t last long. I will decide that my anger towards cops is simply because I know they will be a problem someday. Firemen and astronauts? That’s less likely. When I hold up my hand to stop the tow truck driver from attaching his hook to my bumper, they will both notice what I’m missing. I’ll laugh and wiggle the rest of my fingers.

-See that? You couldn’t have handcuffed me anyway.

Now the sheriff is getting louder, probably because of the extra pairs of eyes and ears.

-That’s a myth. It’s not the thumb that keeps the cuffs on.

-Really? Hold on, let me check my tires one last time.

I’ll start my car and pull forward, making it obvious that I was never stuck at all. I’ll exaggerate a “how about that?” shrug and lean over to let my sister in.

Miles away, I’ll find a road lower than them all. It was flooded the last time I drove through the area, but today it’ll be waiting, the old detour sign missing the top screw and hanging upside down and powerless. On foot, as we stride deep into the woods with the black bag, I’ll ask my sister if we should name it. “The cop?” she’ll ask, and we’ll laugh. “No, the critter,” I’ll say. “Baxter,” she’ll say. Then “Jasper,” as she reconsiders. She’ll frown and tell me that I should have asked the sheriff if naming an animal makes him less likely to want to shoot it. I’ll sigh and tell her that we didn’t have enough time to ask him every question we’d always wanted to, but we sure snuck a lot of them in.

When I shake the animal free from the trash, it will be dead, and the only one who will be surprised will be both of us. Obviously, it will have suffocated because of all the time I wasted pretending to be stuck in the mud. I will nudge the creature with my foot and try not to look over at my sister, who will still be talking about naming it, maybe keeping it, not noticing just yet. I’ll try not to see her reaction and find ways to occupy my eyes as long as I can to avoid this. It won’t work for long.

reaction shots II: the sequel

As I drive with the phone tight against my head, a car on top of a trailer will catch my eye. Buried in the middle of the pile, one of ten unpainted sedans will suddenly start flashing its hazards, then the brakes, then the brights. But I won’t stop talking long enough to consider there could be someone inside, maybe playing with the knobs, probably trying to desperately signal someone’s attention.

In the movies, the hero never bothers to tell anyone what just happened, no matter how strange or remarkable. This is not the case in real life. I will tell Jay all about the sheriff and the roadkill in the bag and all the crazy shit I got to say to him. But he’ll be convinced that the cop in question wasn’t really a cop because a cop would never stand for all that passive-aggression behavior. And by the time Jay’s done with me, I’ll almost be convinced it wasn’t a cop either. I’ll also be tired of the word “cop.”

-How do you know it was a cop?

-I don’t know. He was dressed like a cop.

-So, on Halloween, you’re starstuck by all the famous monsters running the streets?

-Asshole. He had a cop car.

-Describe it.

-What do you mean?

-You know how in a story, the author takes the time to describe something in case it’s important later? Well, when he first pulled up, how would the author describe the car?

-The author forgot to do all that.

-Well, that’s just bad writing, dude. I’ll bet he was actually a volunteer fireman.

-Or an astronaut.

-Huh?

-Nothing. Hey, Jay, you heard about a law against talking on the phone while driving?

-No. Makes sense though. They say you lose 73% of your reflexes when you’re distracted by a phone conversation.

-What about being distracted by a fucking cop on your ass while you’re trying to talk and drive?

-That’s illegal, too. Being distracted, I mean.

-How many times have you been handcuffed?

-How many times have you been handcuffed?

-Once. Back when I was living with Vee. Remember her? We were sharing a car after mine blew up. And when she was back home in Cleveland, she let her brother borrow it, a white ‘76 Camerico, and some punk tried to hot-wire it but ended up tearing up the steering wheel column instead. Wait, no, that’s not what happened. Someone lost the keys and her brother ripped up the metal and plastic around the wheel to start it. Yeah, that was it. The car was his to begin with, so he was borrowing back a car he sold her...

-Anyway.

-Anyway, we always had to push in this little rod to start it, we never used a key at all and never bothered to get the steering column fixed. So, one day, me and Vee are coming back from swimming at the quarry, and this cop pulls alongside, does a double-take, you know one of those clownish reaction shots to show us he saw something more than actually being surprised? Then he zips back behind her car and flashes for us to pull over. But before he even gets out of his car, there’s three cops behind him. You know how cops act like they’re putting their lives on the line every time their interviewed?

-Sure do!

-Then how come the gutless fucks always need nine more uniforms to get up the courage to give you a ticket? And notice how every time there’s a campus massacre on Wednesday, the news clips show cops huddled and shivering in the bushes, probably holding hands just out of sight? Where’s that courage and risk taking you always hear about? Let me ask you a question. How does every campus massacre end these days?

We’ll both say the word at the same time:

-Suicide.

-Damn straight. Suicide. Crazy bastards actually get tired of killing people before the cops finally drag their asses in the door. They get so tired of shooting people in the head that their arms get tired and they start shooting them in the feet instead. Then they get tired of that, start getting depressed, see that the dramatic shoot-out from the movies will never come and pow! They blow their brains out. Then and only then do the cops tip-toe in...

-What were you saying about getting handcuffed?

-Oh, yeah. So, we get a policeman at each window. And keep in mind we were just swimming, so I’m wearing swim trunks, no shirt, and my paint-splattered cowboy hat. Vee is wearing her swimsuit with a T-shirt over it. So I’m naked from the waist up, and at first glance, it looks like she’s naked from the waist down. Between the two of us, we’re exposing an entire human body worth of skin is my point. So, while the one cop has her step out and is eyeing her up and down, the other cop checks my license and her paperwork. He says to us, "My heart started beating hard when I saw that wheel peeled back like that, son!" Then, disappointed that her registration is valid and the car wasn't stolen, he comes back and happily tells me I have a "reckless op" ticket from 100 years ago back in Brickwood. This is all happening up at school, by the way, 100 miles north of this long-forgotten capital crime. So, I get the cuffs slapped on, and Vee’s freaking out because she still thinks it has something to do with the steering column being torn up. The cops, they don’t bother telling her anything, just rustling me into their car, one of them actually laughing, "Guess we don’t have to search him!" On the way into the car, my cowboy hat gets knocked off. And after I get hog-tied, yes, hog-tied to the seat through my handcuffs with some plastic garbage ties, the cop that was ogling my girlfriend screws my hat back on my head...sideways.

-Ouch. Then what?

-I paid the 50 bucks, 1980 bucks mind you, and we left.

-Doesn’t that make you want to kill somebody?

-Yup.

Then the conversation will circle around to Jamie’s death too fast to be anything except intentional.

-Speaking of, I was thinking about her again and...

-Wait, "speaking of" what? Cop killing? That reminded you of her?

-Maybe.

-Hey, you ever say “cop” too much in one day? It starts to sound like something else, something real stupid.

-Yeah, like “cop.”

Suddenly, the old reflexes will be back before you know it:

First, you’ll ask each other all the sexual details that you’ve always suspected...(“I swear I never fucked her.”)...minimizing or maximizing in relation to what the other one reveals (“Me neither. My shit was up against her shit, and that’s all.”) then you’ll Monday-morning quarterback the crime scene with a decade of police shows under your belt as qualifications ("I think they need to track down where she got the gun.") then you’ll decide that since you’re not directly involved, no one should be involved (“I think that it’s not our tragedy to claim because with every death someone else has earned the right to be more upset than you.”) then you’ll decide no one can grieve unless they’ve got identification to prove they’re her mother, father, brother, or sister by blood (“I honestly don’t think a step-brother should have gotten the phone call first.”) then you’ll complain about how families are the only ones who get to know conclusively if it was really a suicide or not (“I know for a fact her parents knew her least of all.”) then you will try to make someone feel better, but only because jealously motivates you to try to dismiss their influence on her last days (“I’m telling you, it’s not your fault. She was upset about someone she just met, not you.”) then you will try to make sure no one writes about it without changing everything...(“If you’re gonna put it on your website, I think you should say her cat died recently, not her dog, you know, to protect the dog’s family.”)...or else you’ll decide that no one can write about it at all until you have the time to try (“I honestly think posting an online tribute for her relatives to stumble across when they’re searching obituaries is the equivalent of crashing a stranger’s funeral.”) then you will mourn the loss of the most important password you can think of outside of a high-tech heist film (“I tried to befriend her on her MyPlace page, but she told me it was just for show, in order to log in and access other people’s sites. Now hers will be set to “private” forever.”) then you’ll swallow your disgust as you compete with people suddenly claiming things that can never be verified (“Good thing I’m the only one that can access her profile...at least until I forgot her password and ruined it for everyone. Sorry.”) then you’ll either say it’s a god’s fault...(“I saw thirty people today that deserved to die before her.”)...or say it’s a god’s will...(“I know there’s a plan.”) or just find yourself with no position at all unless you pick a god to endorse (“But that plan involves a lot of random bullshit and no meaning at all, and it’s hard to get angry when you don’t believe in anything.”) then you will try to hint, as tastefully as you can, that by talking to her last, or by not talking to her last, you were responsible for her death (“I want you to admit that you’re actually proud you made her cry that time. Because I might be, too.”) and all of this will be what they called during the Cold War as a “race to the bottom,” but you will fail to recognize it. The high road will be unreachable for so long you’ll forget it was even an option.

And you’ll struggle to recognize actual guilt over or under all that bullshit. But the problem is that you never will. You can only feel guilty about having inappropriate reactions to tragedy, never to the tragedy itself. You may finally understand that for humans this is simply impossible. All those “I’s” up there still sprinkled through the conversation? What does that continue to tell you?

But the quickest way to gauge how close you were to the deceased is by how eagerly you use her death to get out of a speeding ticket. And if you’re telling me you don’t do these things, you will be lying, and that’s ever worse, which is exactly why talking on the phone while driving should always be a crime.

the low road

When I turned 16, I had my first shiny car, eclectic, conversation-starter keychain, and a suitably aimless route all ready and waiting for a license to make it all legal. Driver’s education was the only class where I got perfect attendance, and because of this, it seemed like I spent nine years there. On the last day when I was out taking the final test in the instructor’s own ‘69 Grand Prize, he was so annoyed by my tendency to slow down on the highway’s on and off ramps that he finally reached over to push my knee down so I’d accelerate properly. As we rode up that hill like a rollercoaster, he hissed in my ear, “Don’t ever slow down on a ramp.” That was the last time I remember making that mistake, so he must have been doing something right. “And don’t ever slow down when you see a ‘yield’ sign,” he added as he released my leg. Really? I thought. As I sped up and merged successfully that day, he affectionately gave my knee a “job well done” pat and flipped up a page on his clipboard. He never saw my reaction, and I had never really looked at the guy until that moment, even after nine years of classroom face time, not even when he tried to steer me away from accosting my best friend’s girl in the lunch room (a typical moonlighting position for driving instructors was cafeteria monitor) by yelling at her over his shoulder “You don’t even know his favorite song!” when she taking too long to pick the best bag of chips to take to the hospital. But that’s a long story I already told.

Anyhow, I did pass my test, but I also felt the need to tell everyone at school that the driver’s ed. teacher was clearly a homosexual who had almost caused a crash. It was the kind of casual rumor that silently and effectively ruined his reputation for a couple decades, nothing I felt too bad about (or ever remembered) until I started noticing my sister had inherited my limp ankles tailor-made for hesitation when merging onto highways.

As I sit there stewing when she slows down on the ramp, I’ll finally understand that he was, indeed, the finest driving teacher of our age who had only been dealing out some “tough love” to possible save my life on a busy turnpike. At that moment, I’ll even considered giving him a call, go so far as calling information for his number. I’ll want to tell him that I was sorry, that he should understand that anyone who invests any effort in teaching me anything will inevitably regret it.

I’ll want to say that he shouldn’t blame himself because, if you go back to every father, stepfather, father-figure, mother-figure, stepfather-figure, guru, inspiration, boss, teacher, anyone who’s ever invested or projected hopes or dreams in me in some way, you will see that I’ve disappointed every single one of them. And maybe he could form a support group with them? Send out a newsletter amongst these people, share stories of good starts and letdowns that begin and end with deep tired sighs. I’ll want to explain that the first recorded instance of this destructive trend was the day he tried in vain to teach me how to merge into traffic, a lost cause ripe with symbolism if I ever heard one.

When me and my sister finally arrive at her new apartment with the tables and boxes and random leaving-the-nest junk sent on by my parents, we’ll stumble into a house-warming party thrown by her new roommate and a gaggle of little hangers on. It'll be a roomful of twitching children in communist colors watching postmodern horror movies, plinking on keyboards, obsessively flicking lighters, doing whatever 18-and-unders do when there's too many eyeballs in the room. Their heads will come up like meerkats when the door slams, and I’ll have to start herding them against the walls to make enough room to begin assembling her end tables in time to be christened in a glaze of beer. And when a couple of the boys tentatively crawl over to offer help, the girls, suddenly inspired by this display of skill from the androgynous males, will decide they're going to cook everyone some spaghetti. It will be like some social experiment with feral kids only a week removed from the woods suddenly trying to play house in a controlled laboratory setting and failing miserably. Spaghetti will burn black to the bottom of a pan without enough water and stink up the sky, screws and washers will stick to painted toes, skinny fingers will fumble with tools like toddlers with their first footballs. Picturing them later in life failing at various grown-up tasks like getting stuck in revolving doors will make me smile a bit, and I’ll actually stop worrying about my sister for a whole hour, even forget about that year she spent halfway homeless in Chicago after her aborted art-school semester. This will be good because, just like my dad, worrying about her makes me treat her badly.

Leaning back against a wall and breathing deep, I’ll notice the kids all call her “E,” short for “Eee,” shorter for “E.E.E.E.,” which are some of her actual initials, some invented. I just call her “my sister,” always have, probably haven’t said her name out loud in ten years. I’ll also notice that a girl’s apartment always smells good even when it doesn’t, even when they have cats and burnt spaghetti flying around. You’d think cats shit bubblegum when girls own 'em, I'll ponder. But then her cat will quickly prove me wrong by taking too long to bury his own housewarming gift in the litter, a fresh piss biscuit ricocheting around the kitchen floor like a loose hockey puck. I’ll count to a thousand before someone bothers to pick it up, then tell her she needs more books, any books, even if she never intends to read them, just to make this place a little smarter.

Out on a beer run, me and my sister will pass by a car with a crooked "School of Engineering" sticker in the back window, and I’ll instantly regret letting her behind the wheel of my new car. She is, without a doubt, the worst driver I’ve ever known, and I’ll push hard on her knee again so she can cut off the engineering student and almost spin us off the road and into the ditch.

Back in Toledo, I’ll see everything I ever invented when I lived there, every idea I had growing up. No one believes ever believes it, but I thought of just about everything first, whether someone already invented it or not. For example, that compact-disc holder in the visor of your car? The visor on my ‘88 Rancher came with a long gash in it, so I stuck some CDs up there, never expecting so many others to follow suit. Those "got GLF" T-shirts? Even though the moms didn’t look very good back in the ‘80s, the grandmas were fuckin’ hot. And every antenna you see bent into a lightning bolt, smiley face, or other fun shape? Well, you see, some unknown enemy bent the antenna of my ‘85 Stallion all to hell back in college, and I would make creative shapes out of it just to cover up the damage. Hey, ever see those keychains that make cricket noises when you’re boring someone? I was so shocked to see one hanging with the impulse item in a gas station. It should be in a museum somewhere, right next to a caveman and his wheel. I had to cobble my Cricket Maker out of a little speaker and some postage-stamp electronics from a child's book and a signing Graduation card. That particular invention was one of my finest moments, as it’s very important to let someone know when their story has gotten a little too long, however noble their intentions when they started telling it. And beside the cricket noises, I came up with some other ways to deal with this very serious storytelling problem. I thought of a bubble gun that could make a stream of "zzz’s" over your head instead of bubbles, and a machine that would spit out a small tumbleweed to roll across the road behind you, a subtle but clear indication that someone’s boring you.

And, believe it or not, I invented those wheels people use to drive away in the middle of someone’s long drawn-out goodbye. You ever drive away while someone’s still talking? Feels better than hanging up.

Yes, it’s hard to prove I really invented the wheel, I know, but I do have some witnesses. I made one when I was just hours old, before I ever set foot outside the hospital to see one, before I even saw a picture or learned the word for, which is important because otherwise it wouldn’t count. Guess how I made it? I'll give you a hint. It was a piece of me and my mother that hadn't fallen off my body yet. Oh, yeah, I also consider my sister to be the most successful item at the top of this list of inventions, and I resist telling her every chance I get, to no avail.

On the way back with the beer and cookies and an overpriced bag of cashew shrapnel, we’ll pass a sign that says "Slow Down" that’s not even on the down slope of any hill. I’ll get angry when my sister eases off the gas.

-Why the hell would you do that?!

-Calm down.

-How can you listen to a sign that was clearly hammered into ground centuries ago? Would you have stopped if it said "Dinosaur crossing?"

-What’s your problem, Broseph?

-You know, I’m glad you asked. Your friends are kinda worthless. What happens if there’s a fire next time one of them tries to make a waffle? You’ll all be dead before one of those scrawny bastards could struggle to lift the giant phone to his head.

Outside a sign will ask, "Is your turn signal on?" and my sister will click one on and off before she can stop herself.

-Holy shit balls, what in God's name are you doing?

-What?

-That sign doesn’t even make sense! I mean, is there a right answer? What’s the fucking answer?!

I will have raised my voice at her before this, but not quite this loud. This night, I will apparently cross some threshold with her.

-You can’t bellow at me like that. You didn’t raise me.

We’ll be quiet for awhile because I’ll want to say, "Ah ha! Yes, I did raise you. Sort of. Remember all those elaborate games I made up when you were little? Who told you there was no Santa Claus but then took the initiative to quickly replace him with something else? Who went outside at midnight with his graduation gown tucked in his jeans and mirrored sunglasses with one lens popped out so that you could look out your window and watch the Mysterious Christmas Pirate bury your toys in the snow and mark the spot with a neon umbrella? Who apologized when half of your Christmas shit got subsequently ruined? Not me! Because the Christmas Pirate cannot be trusted! That’s part of his unpredictable charm. So admit it, no one made such an effort early on in your life like me, damn it."

Then she’ll yell so loud and abruptly that I'll almost swallow my tongue.

-Stop pointing at me!

-Sorry. Didn’t know I was.

Eventually, she’ll start messing with the clock on my car's stereo. I’ll think about me and my sister playing chess when she was even smaller, our version of chess anyway, which was exactly like checkers. Whenever my mom said we had to go to bed, she'd plead, "Just let us stay up for one more move!" At that moment, I feel more sympathy for my sister than I had for anyone else in my life. My eyes actually got blurry because isn’t that all we wanted back when we were that young? Just one more move? But what would we have done with it if we got it?

She will try to reset my clock to the correct time, but I’ll pull the keys out before she has the chance. In every car since I drove east into that river last year, I will find those flashing zeros very comforting.

Then she’ll see a sign that says "Drive Happy!" and imitate me with a moron’s voice:

-Look at that sign! Blah blah can they see into this car?! Bladdy blah who they talkin' to?! Grrr! Pbht! Snort! Zing!

And then we’ll both laugh even though I don't really sound like that at all.

A block from the party, we’ll pass a cornfield with a ticket booth like you find at an amusement park, and see some kids milling around with flashlights. It’s the site of another new crop circle, a familiar sight in Brickwood, Ohio. A few years back, our town got sort of famous for them, at least for a couple summers. They increased business at the diners enough for people to encourage the mystery rather than prove the hoax (the first and healthiest instinct). My sister will roll down her window, lean out, and muse:

-You know what you never see? A crop circle that’s all fucked up. Like it started as the typical impossibly beautiful geometric pattern, but then ended up more like those smeared goofy paintings they get stupid elephants to do with their trunks. You'd think this would have happened somewhere in the Midwest by now. You’d think someone could have half-assed the rest of the circle or just completely lost interest while arguing with their prankster buddy or something. Imagine the news the new morning. Helicopter view of the latest crop circle being revealed when...whoops. Wow, that looks like complete shit, Bob! Were the aliens drunk or just retarded? Seriously, you'd think we see one like that eventually, right?

-You’d think.

When we return to the party, one of her teachers will have showed up. My sister will whisper, “He likes to be called Professor Lee even though he teaches Junior High" right before I shake his hand, and I’ll be immediately sorry I was so polite. And I'll write him off as one of those silly assholes who likes to hang with the kids and thinks they’re too cool for school. He'll fit the profile. Vintage tour shirt, sandals that have never touched dirt, a volunteer fire brigade (!) ballcap with the fingermarks still on the brim where he tried to bend it to look casual. I’ll crack my knuckles in anticipation. And I’ll finally get my chance to jump into a conversation when this "professor" starts smacking himself in this head with his wallet after one of the skinny kids mispronounces "dichotomy." But my sister will be quicker than me to defend the boy.

-Come on. At least he used the word correctly.

Then she’ll turn to me and mutter something about how Professor Lee is constantly cutting people off in class when they want to talk about their day because he can’t wait to talk about his own. While she’s saying this, Lee will make the mistake of noticing us and directing the rest of his lecture in our direction. He’ll surprise me by clearing his throat right as I imagine my hands clenched around his neck, and I'll have to let him go.

-Yes, that’s fine. But he’s really too young to have an opinion on most subjects.

My sister will drop down to get comfortable on the floor to engage him. I'll lean against the table I just built to test its integrity. Smiling, she’ll ask:

-And why’s that?

-Because, at that age, E, you don’t know the difference between argument and opinion. Kids tend to take the low road in arguments to try to hurt someone instead of convince them.

-Our dad says the "high road" is a lonely place. He recommends not spending much time there.

That comment will make laughter, but when I affectionately clap her on the shoulder, she’ll shrug it off and ask Lee about his hat. She’s still mad about the woodchuck.

-Question. Do you give money to cops when they call for fundraising? They call me all the time. It's the only chance I get to be rude to the fuckers.

-Excuse me? This isn’t for cops. This is a fire...

-Because if you think about it, cops are slaves to sales and commission even more than car salesmen.

-I don’t understand your train of thought here, E. You kids are anti-semantic.

-This is where I’m supposed to misunderstand that as a slur, right?

I’ll want to give her another “That’s my boy!” clap, but won't want to derail her. Instead, I’ll say “Stop calling her ‘E!’” then repeat the list of the nation’s most-dangerous occupations and, assuming he’d rather be thought of as a volunteer fireman before a teacher with a cap like that, exactly where his occupation would be placed on the scale.

-I think you were listed under "Candy Factory Employee." No, wait, my mistake. You were actually just above "Teddy Bear Tester." That’s the kids they bring in to hug the teddy bears to make sure that they’re the softest and most cuddly they can be. That was the only job that was least dangerous than yours. Not by much though because there can conceivably be fires in a teddy bear factory if you’re smoking next to the machine that makes the cute little whiskers.

More laughter will be made, and I can see how easily it would be to hang out with these kids for awhile as long as they keep laughing. I won’t let it sway my opinion of this guy though. But I’ll throw something out to keep the crowd on my side.

-Hey, speaking of teddy bears! I remember giving my class ring to a girl by sticking it on a teddy bear’s thumb. Do you kids still do stuff like that? I think that ring ended up coming back to me, bounced off my chest in the lunch room. You guys still break-up like that? Rings rattled around lunch trays all the time back in our day. But you need ‘80s music for a scene like that. And, oh, the things we used to use girls’ teddy bears to clean up when her parents weren’t home...

-I’m sorry, but I really don’t understand why E and her brother are...

-Hey, man. Story’s only as good as its villain. That will be you. Until I find a better one.

I’ll finally stop focusing on the professor when my good hand sticks to some gum under the newly assembled table. I’ll stretch it up high and yell.

-Hey! Who put this here?!

Highlights from the rest of the night (if this was an '80s teen movie, this would be a montage without the music since that keyboard plinking doesn't count):

My sister’s new roommate will try to convince us that there are only three seasons. My sister will claim she’s doing this because “Spring” is the only salt shaker she’s missing in her “Seasons for Seasoning” series in their new kitchen. Lee will say he got three purple hearts in the war and cause much confusion when girls try to lean in and listen to his chest. Some kid will attempt to be controversial by asking why it’s okay to kill small animals when you’re young, but never people. One girl will brag how she got funded for college next semester, and my sister will mutter, “Jasper got funding...in heaven,” to start an uncontrollable spurt of inappropriate giggling between the two of us. One kid will confide that there’s a certain time of day when all the females are standing in a row by their work-stations, and if you stand just right, you can look down the line of asses and compare them all. I will tell a story about a girl I knew who cried because never “owned anything of her own,” so I said my digital camera was now hers, no matter what happened with our relationship. Then, when we broke up, I told her, “Uh, you don’t really need that camera because you don’t have a computer to download the pictures. Maybe I should just hang onto it.” Then she cried and cried and said she wanted to keep it, even if it meant she only got to keep the same limit of twenty pictures it would store forever. Luckily, the camera broke before we made a decision. None of the kids will understand why that story suddenly makes me so depressed, but at least some of the girls will stop snapping pointless photographs of the party. Then Lee will try to tell a story about how cops stopped wearing their badges because of this one sheriff back in the day who carried his silver star in his hand through barroom brawls and gunfights and never pinned it on because of the hypocrisy. He’ll explain that’s why the highest level of cop, the detective, still carries their badge in their hand. When the room quiets down, Lee will ask everyone, “I’m sorry, does this make you uncomfortable?” I will call “Bullshit!” and tell him to quit trying to save face for authority figures that aren’t even here. Lee will then claim his friend, a cop, died recently, and maybe later he’ll read some of his poetry. I will stare at him for at least five minutes after this. Then my sister will start a debate about reading the works of the deceased and say we should do that while people are still alive but still claim they’re dead to see how much better their work comes across. A skinny kid will say, “No, just read it first, then tell people if they’re dead. It’s the backlash that makes people minimize the dead’s accomplishments these days.” I will agree with him completely and clap his knee in enthusiasm, a move that scares him bad enough to almost do a backwards somersault. “Thou shalt not minimize or maximize victories or I will do the same,” I will announce. Then a kid who’d been quiet in a corner for most of the night will step forward to announce that when people cite the Ten Commandments, “they’re not really citing the Ten Commandments.” He will explain that the tablets that Moses brings down were just “a bunch of goofy crap about feeding goats and wheat harvests.” He’ll tell a quiet room that the “thou shalt not kill or steal” were actually Moses verbally repeating what he was “told” on Mount Sinai, that the stone tablets are ten things about farming and shoemaking (“much more practical rules actually!”) and not the stuff that people argue to put in courtroom lobbies and schools. I will tell him that he mispronounced the name of the mountain, and he’ll go back to his corner again. Another skinny kid, probably the skinniest in the room, will then tell Professor Lee that he’s not too young to have an opinion on any subject because, even though he’s in his early twenties, he’s probably “fucked more chicks and punched more people in the face” than the professor did at his age. I will yell that “Now we’re talking about opinions about opinions for fuck’s sake!” but no one will listen. Then I’ll lock onto the professor’s name being “Lee” and inquire, “Ain’t that a girl’s name? What’s that like?” and keep the conversation on his feminine name for the duration of at least three more beers, ignoring the more incriminating fact that he insists on being called “Professor.” I will notice that, in the eyes of these kids, I’m starting to replace Lee in some ways, especially when he goes back to trying to debate the difference between argument and opinion and forgets to do one crucial thing and never offer an actual argument or opinion about anything besides arguments or opinions. Whew! I will try to explain this to him and sound like a psycho by instead asking if he “likes to read books about books or go fishing for fishing rods or look at photographs of photographs.” I will pout since I believe my examples to be perfect but no one cheers. One girl will say, out of the blue, “I have no respect for cops, I’m sorry. It’s true.” and the shocked reactions around her will surprise me. My sister, too, who will ask everyone, “Wait, who are you people that have an automatic respect for authority? Are you even human?” I will yell “Yep!” and we’ll feel our support slipping away as I scratch doodles into her new table with my thumbnail. I will think about the silence and how I hope it means that everyone in the room is suppressing something inappropriate. “Silence equals nothing nice to say” is what I’ll try to carve into the table until it hurts. Then I’ll think, “Doodles equals everything I want to say is inappropriate” but have to settle for the shorter “Silence equals doodles” instead in order to save that fingernail from total destruction. Then some kid will ask if anyone in the room has seen the awesome show “C.A.T. the Skip Tracer” and how he heard that Cat’s got the largest hands, and therefore the largest thumbs, on the planet, making him the ten-year-running reigning Hawaiian Thumb Wrestling Champion. And he’ll say that this is how he got his nickname, after those weird kittens that are born with that extra thumb, the ones that look like they’re wearing boxing gloves. And he’ll say he once saw Cat punch his thumb through a mailbox right before a commercial. I’ll spit out a petulant “Shut up! Polydactly cats can’t use tools!” before I can stop myself. My sister will then announce that Lee always asks the question, “Does this make you uncomfortable?” only after introducing topics that are anything but controversial. The room will try to figure out why and decide it’s because he needs to understand why people roll their eyes at him when he talks. This is when I’ll start to notice the atmosphere of the room a little more and feel we’ve lost all sympathy from the audience. Lee will give a “she knows not what she does” shrug and not realize he’s pointing at my sister until I grab his finger.

-Don’t do that.

-Do what? No, I was just...

I’ll let his finger go and sit down cross-legged on the floor and clap my hands.

-Hey, kids! Who wants to hear a story! Good. Here we go. A long time ago, I was driving to my friend Ray’s house when I noticed the car in front of me slide on a patch of that scary “black ice” and take out a stop sign. The car kept on going, and I sat in my car awhile building up the courage to go pick it up and keep it for myself. When I was your age, I, of course, had a shed full of stolen street signs like most boys do, but none of us ever had the guts to grab a stop sign, probably because of the possibly fatalities it might cause. But I finally ran out, picked it up, then stumbled up to Ray’s door like I was I was holding balloons and an oversized sweepstakes check. We laughed about it awhile, watched a movie or two, then I left it in her basement until we could think of something funny to do with it. The next day at work, I get a panicky call from her about a street full of cop cars out her window. She whispers, “We gotta get rid of it!” I panic, too, make up and excuse to go home and clock out from the bookstore, knocking over a small child on my way to the car. At her door, Ray is wide-eyed and giggling as inappropriately and uncontrollably as I am. We both run down to the basement to flatten some boxes and slide the stop sign and pole inside. We wrap it all up in tape, cover the mess with a throw rug, then hustle out the back door to my trunk. My heart is popping buttons on my coat as I slam the trunk, say a hasty goodbye, and weave my car slowly through the obstacle course of police. When I’m miles away, I look for a dumpster to drop the sign into, but all the dumpsters I see are suddenly in the middle of apartment courtyards or surrounded by bright windows or in the middle of packed parking lots. One dumpster I swear is actually glowing under a streetlight with its mouth banging in the wind. I’m surprised it doesn’t have a flashing neon arrow or skull and crossbones above. So I start looking for bodies of water for disposal instead and eventually settle on The Mudpit, a shallow, dying lake and grade-school fishing haunt near my dad’s house. Checking the horizon and waiting for all the headlights and taillights to fade, I throw the stop sign out onto the water...and hit the deck in shock when it makes a deafening clang on the ice. I imagine windows popping up and lights clicking on in all the houses behind me as I run back to my car and throw stones outta there. As I’m driving, Ray calls and tells me it was a false alarm. The cops were only there to question her neighbor about being crazy again.

After this story, I will pretend like I’m closing an invisible book and wait for questions from the children. They’ll disappoint, but Lee won’t.

-And?

-And? And I don’t know. And...that stop sign changed my mind about some things? Maybe I stopped being so angry at strangers all the time because I knew that I was too incompetent a criminal to ever get away with disposing of a body. Who knows how many lives that stop sign actually saved after it was knocked over, kids!

Only Lee will see this as a threat, and my sister, suddenly inspired, will tell her own story.

-About a month ago, there was a cat crawling outside my house with its back legs flopping. It must have gotten clipped by a car, and I didn’t know what to do. So I made the mistake of calling the police. It’s the first and last time I’ll ever do that. And when the cop came by, he pulled out his little gun and was like, “Watch out, I’m gonna put it out of its misery.” I pleaded for him not to shoot it, told him how there was no such thing as “putting something out of its misery,” and it’s “only something that fools believe,” that we’re all scratching for every last bit of life since there’s “nothing after you die.” He just shook his head as I picked up the cat, which of course started scratching the shit out of my arms, and placed it gently up the nearest tree. Then I was like, “There you go. Shoot my cat out of the tree, officer. Just like in the movies!” And the cop says, “No, that’s what firemen do.” And I tell him, “Same difference.” End scene. She’ll close her invisible book even harder.

I’ll look around the room for reactions, and even without any milk coming out of their nostrils, I’ll understand her story had more impact, at least on the firemen. Shoulders slumped and defeated, Professor Lee will start looking around for his car keys. I’ll be so proud that, at some point, I’ll actually put my sister on my shoulders and yell, “I told you I raised you! Get it?”

props

I’ll turn around and pick up my sister again, brain boiling over with a way to apologize without having to say a damn thing. She’ll know something is up by the way I’m not talking but can’t control my idiot grin. After a couple blocks at high speed, I’ll gun the engine unnecessarily, turn hard enough for her to put a hand on the roof, then we’ll suddenly be tearing ass through a cornfield just like the old days, except with more purpose than inebriation. I won't have to tell her my idea. She'll be ready with a map.

While she bounces in the passenger’s seat, she’ll hold a large diagram she’s scrawled on the back of a “Hillbilly Holocaust” movie poster up against my windshield and shout out directions. We will attempt to make the worst crop circle in history, hopefully destroying the myth forever, even if it means our town will lose jobs and dry up a little sooner, maybe for exactly that reason.

After, as we idle on the shoulder of the road plucking corn husks out of the grill to cover up our crime, I’ll feel the need to tell my sister other stories of vandalism and near escapes, suddenly afraid that she might think she was there for the best one and have no need for a big mythmaking brother.

-Did I ever tell you about those street signs we stole?

-Probably.

-Shit, I should have saved that story till now! Fuck it. I'll tell ya again anyway in case I forgot anything. Okay, once upon a time, a friend’s sister was getting married to our high school chemistry teacher, and we liked the way the guy let us waste time in his class, so we thought we’d get him an extra special gift for his wedding reception. His name was Tyler Yates and, as you probably remember...

-I know. I know. There’s a Tyler Street and a Yates Street down by the airport.

-You gots it! And every time I’d drive by either of those, one street would make me think of the other. And every time I went to Mr. Yates’ class, I'd think about those signs and how I wished my name could be stolen and immortalized so easily. So when Yates finally married my friend’s sister, we went out to get those two signs, me strapping on dad’s spiked work boots. You know, the ones he had for climbing telephone poles?

My sister will start smiling.

-This ends badly. I remember.

-Yep! You’d think someone ends up with a spike in their dome, but it’s not that bad. Yeah, okay, there’s blood and cops by the time the story's over, but it could have been a lot worse. Anyway, first we go after Yates street. That one is easy to reach and shares a pole with the Clover sign, but it actually turns out to be even easier than we...

-Wait, who’s the "we?"

-Oh, it’s me and Jay, of course, and Pee, with Crazy Mike at the wheel.

-Ah, good idea. Was “Homicide Harry” busy that night?

-Anyhow, we don’t even bother with any climbing or effort or even dad's crazy spurs for Yates street. We just grab a bat leftover from last summer’s mailbox baseball, aim for the right-field fence and clang! knock that sign right off the top of the pole. It’s so easy that Jay suddenly needs to complicate things. This is where it probably all went wrong. He says to us, "Since we’ll be giving Mr. Yates these signs right before his honeymoon, let’s go get Cummings Road, Seaman Road, and Hammer Street, too!" He talks us into this easily, but after we knock Cummings Road loose and get back in the car, we can’t find a single sign left on Seaman road that other vandals haven’t stolen. We clank off a "Hammer Street" before we finally circle back to grab the Tyler street sign and call it a night. And there's a rumor of a pristine, bullet-hole free "Men and Equipment Working" sign we're keeping an eye out for, too. But it turns out Tyler is our Waterloo and our last stop of the evening. It's high, real high Up at the top of a monstrous, splintered telephone pole. Way way higher than we remembered, and even though I brought dad’s spurs just in case...

-I remember this part, I think.

-So I think I’ll get to strap on those boots, climb the pole and be the hero, but Jay’s been wearing them since he first got in the car, and now he's clicking the spikes together with his feet up over his head like a newborn French chef. He takes the bat with him again instead of my dad's toolbelt because our one-good-swing technique has proven itself better than any wrench. Then he climbs the pole and finds he doesn’t have an angle to swing up at it. So he brings the bat down onto the street sign instead. Hard. Right over his head. The sign cracks him above the eyebrow and opens a ruler-straight cut about half a foot long. He’s covered in blood but insisting it doesn’t hurt as we gather the sign and bumrush him back to Crazy Mike’s car. In the back seat, it’s like we’re clichés from a heist gone wrong. Jay’s trying to get the boots off but can’t see with all the blood, so he keeps stabbing Mike’s upholstery, I’m furiously rubbing the stains off the street signs with a corner of my shirt, trying to keep them the perfect wedding gift, Pee is shaking his head so hard I think it’s gonna fly off, and Crazy Mike keeps turning around to yell at Jay every five seconds and is swerving all over the road. We’re probably the most suspicious carload of idiots of all time, and a cop is behind us almost immediately when we’re get to the main drag in Brickwood.

-I don’t remember this part. Hey, before I forget, did mom tell you someone came by because you have an unpaid ticket around here from ten years ago?

She’ll take an armload of corn husks out of the headlights to drop into the ditch, but I’ll see she's got that smile like she's lying.

-Don't tease me like that. Anyway, Mike’s watching the rearview mirror and the cop simultaneously and still trying not to do anything wrong. Which is why he blows right through a red light. So now we’re screaming at him instead, the cop’s flashers come on, and we’re getting pulling us over in the geometric center of town, right in front of the post office flag. Now, you have to picture the scene. Jay’s in the back trying to stop his face from bleeding, and I have to take these four street signs and push them up against the doors to try and anticipate which side of the car the cop will approach us. But while the cop's still messing with his computer or the plate number or whatever he’s doing in his driver’s seat, Mike suddenly leans back and grabs Jay’s face with both hands. He rubs his fingers in the gash to load them with blood and begins to paint tribal patterns, words and pictures on his cheeks and forehead. For some reason, I grab Jay and hold his arms to keep him from struggling until Mike’s done. Jay’s face now resembles an Aztec football fan, if they played football back then and had helmets decorated with butterflies and woolly mammoths and crooked smiley faces by mistake. It might not seem like it, but this is actually the sanest thing I've even seen Crazy Mike do.

-Wait, so you’re saying his face looked exactly like what we just did in the...

-Now drawn to the struggling, the cop’s coming up on the passenger’s side now instead. So I take the street signs and push them against that door, and Jay reads my mind and pins them with his knee. The cop’s light shines on Jay's face, then on mine, then bobs around the car randomly, finally coming back to stop on Jay’s mug for a surprised double take. Satisfied he’s discovered a gay Cherokee and not a mortally wounded teen, he walks around the front of the car, while I grab the street signs from behind Jay’s knee, keeping my upper body upright while pressing them back against the driver’s side door. Then Mike just rolls down the window smiling all innocent. “Hello, office-sir.” The rest is typical cop stuff. He lefts us off with a warning and doesn’t even flinch when Mike hands him a bloody license, still thinking it's pep rally paint or something harmless, and we all drive home in silence. The blood on Jay’s face is black and hard by the time we get him home, and he has trouble smiling when we get to his porch. But he tries, God bless him. "Get that looked at, Chief," someone mutters, and that’s it until the wedding.

-This part I’ve heard from other people.

-Me, too. I wasn’t there. At the reception weeks later, which I missed for whatever reason, Jay walks in proudly with all those street signs tucked under his arm since we decided he’d earned the right to hand them over to Mr. Yates personally. But this guy stops him in the parking lot and says, "Whatcha got there, son?" Jay happily says, "Shit I stole!" And the guy goes, "Yeah, well, I’m an off-duty cop. Why don’t you just let me have those instead." Jay hands the signs over, probably rusting now from his blood, then runs off. We all wait for days for a cop to come knocking on his door, but it never happens. But the worse thing is, those street signs never got put back. That fucking cop's probably got them over his toilet.

-Fucking cops.

-I know. Weird thing is, the signs have never been missed. No one uses those roads anyway, I guess.

-I do! So, what’s the moral of this story?

-Eat your greens.

-Perfect. So, why didn’t you tell that story to the professor? Cops look bad at the end.

-I don’t know. ‘Cause the other one sounded more like a threat.

-Or maybe you hadn’t thought of it yet. Doesn’t matter. All right, let’s go back, Broheim. I need some sleep. Thanks for the fucked-up crop circle. It meant a lot.

She’ll clap me on the knee like a coach.

-First, let me get the last husks out of my hood. Pop it up when I release it, would ya?

I’ll lean in and pull the hood release. And when my sister raises it up, all I can see is that huge black sheet of metal and a tiny hand high in the sky, hovering at the pointed end of it all. I’ll be hypnotized by this image and unable to stand back up. Her hand, five fingers stretched like a hood ornament, wiggling while they get impatient and me mistakenly thinking they're waving at me with affection. Those are the five fingers I was almost born with instead.

Driving out of town, I’ll get a call from my step-brother Moscow. As promised, he’s telling me he arrived safely with the rest of the armed forces in a country on the other side of the planet and making sure I didn’t really put my elbow through the window of the next car I saw with a "God Bless America" sticker on it like I swore I would the day he enlisted. That’s the weird thing about stepbrothers, I used to think I was indifferent to my siblings, especially ones that got added on late in life. But worrying about my sister as she hits her teenage years sort of made me worry about all of them, blood relation or not. I look for the equalizer my real brother installed out of habit.

As he tells me about idiotic routines and tries to disguise his inherent patriotism, I’ll watch a train match speed with me on the horizon. It will have boxcars stacked on boxcars like magnets, like two trains collided and the one going the fastest earned the right to keep going. I’ll be looking hard to see if someone is riding in one and trying to signal for help. I’ll remember how my grandpa, a loyal railroad employee for decades, once told me how much engineers hated it when cars matched speed like that. He said it made them feel like they were standing still and made the work day seem twice as long. And even though he couldn’t prove it, he was sure there were at least five collisions at crossings and dozens of fatalities because of this frustration. “...I’ve never seen anything like this shit,” Moscow will be telling me when I snap back. I’ll tell him that today on the news, I heard about a concentration camp survivor and head of pediatrics at a nearby hospital who reported that a one year-old patient was attacked by fourteen other babies, and, guess what, that doctor said the exact same thing he just did. He’ll call me a liar, and I’ll insist he check online because all the news has been saying for hours is how that baby got bit more than thirty times when the supervisor briefly left the room to answer a phone. Then I’ll tell him they’ve said nothing the foreign land beneath his feet, nothing about this particular war he’s in, and he’ll get real quiet.

-You still there, Fratricide?

I used to call him this, and “Friendly Fire” sometimes, and he thought it was funny for awhile. That was before he actually go on that plane.

After a few more seconds, Moscow tells me he’ll call me back, that his sergeant says he has to go cut his cornflakes in half before he eats them, all while balancing himself on a tank turret. For some reason, this will suddenly give me the urge to buy my sister more furniture so she can eat her breakfast cereal most comfortably. I’ll decide I’m too wired to sleep so I may as well leave a surprise on her porch with a bow to untie when she wakes up.

A sign on the horizon will promise the same “Good Deals On Sofas!” as it has since I was a child. Another sign announces “New After-The-Flood Hours!” and I’ll park and walk into the warehouse for the first time in my life. I’ll decide a bright red couch would be perfect for her, whether it matches her new roommate’s stuff or not, and, luckily, this recent flood will mean everything’s half off or less. But there will be a problem as soon as I enter the showroom.

The props. There will be all these fake cardboard TVs and paper stereo systems and plastic fruit, and those won’t really bother me too much. And I’ll see a puddle or two of river water that still glitters in the corners. But that won’t bother me either. It will be the hundreds of books filling the shelves, coffee tables, and entertainment centers that will cause my plan to jump the tracks. Real books. Old pulp novels that smell like a garage with no floor or that burned-out house of weeds and soggy porno mags and fast-food wrappers and anything else the neighborhood kids and their dogs stashed in there. These books will disturb me deeply. Looking at the other fake stuff, like the cardboard VCRs and foam-rubber telephones, I’ll see that everything came from some place called “Theater Props,” this name written in the place that, for some hilarious reason, you always check an object for authenticity. People, too. The bottom. Not the books though.

They’ll be marked all over their bodies. Most will still have library slots and cards, names of schools staining the crooked teeth of loose pages, numbers taped to broken spines, previous owners’ stamps on dog-eared corners, thick layers of remainder stickers of diminishing pricing covering their barcodes. Some are actually autographed. All of them hardcovers with that deep, wet smell.

I’ll understand that these books are probably long out of print, destined for the burn pile, sold for a quarter at the most. But someone spent months, years, lifetimes writing them. And this is afterlife they get? A fire will seem preferable to all the sad props in this flooded furniture warehouse. I’ll imagine someday an author wandering in and seeing her book of poetry next to a styrofoam television with knobs hastily painted on. She’d probably shoot herself in the head. And the titles of these books? For some reason, good or bad, I will instantly love them all and make up excitable blurbs as I read them out loud:

“The Blue Screwdriver” (The reason you should talk to your tools, even when you're not using them!), “A Radical Alternative” (Crack this book if you dare, or just keep it sealed in case of a radical emergency!), “One Sunburned Week” (Soon to be a major motion picture entitled, "Men Without Hats!"), “Over There!” (The thriller of the year that made you look, sucker!), “Grave Error” (Wait a minute, if the dead dog is right here, then where’s Jamie? Oh, my God!), “Pop Machine” (This book will remind you of the first time you tried to break into a pop machine in second grade and how they lined you up and asked every kid who did it and this scene was right out of a Holocaust movie except with spankings instead of murder, and just notice how huge the cover of this thing is and how this blurb could go on for days...), “A Man and His Money” (not to be confused with the bestsellers “A Man and His Mommy” and “A Man and His Monkey”), “Damn Yankee” (If you read one book this year...then you've got shit for brains!), “Paul's Kite” (It's safe to assume three things will happen in the book you’re holding. The kite is a metaphor, the kite ends up in a tree, Paul cuts down the tree, and...you won’t be disappointed! Okay that was four things), “Sledgehammer” (Notice how this book isn’t called "The Blue Sledgehammer?” That’s because people use them more than screwdrivers!), “Steely Birds” (Turns out they’re kind of “grabby,” too!), “Come On By” (On my way!), “Fly in a Cobweb” (If this title isn’t telling you where to fly, it might be too sad to read as a fly in a cobweb never ever gets eaten), “Balloonatic Love Stalker” (Sorry, got nothin’.).

Every time I set one of the books back down and scribble down another title and promotional quote, I’ll feel like I’m leaving puppies at the pound scratching at their cardboard box. I’ll know that if I leave them, they might start biting each other. So I’ll gather them back up to drop on my sister’s porch instead of the sofa. It will be quite a debate at the cash register, and I’ll even start filling out the old library cards in their slots to distract the manager long enough to head to the door with an armload. But on the way out, a real television will click on, and I’ll choke back a shocked scream. I will have decided nothing was real except the books, but a weather man will be standing in front of a blue screen to prove me wrong. The wall behind him will be all blue. No green, no brown, no landscape at all. I’ll think the studio’s special effects are broken until he explains it’s just another flood, a bigger one this time. “Lighthouses are more important than churches,” he’ll say. “Someone famous said that, not me,” he’ll add, sheepishly. When the styrofoam phone rings near my arm, I’ll have to start running.

As I’m carefully stacking the moldy hardcovers on my sister’s porch, careful not to wake up the stragglers still at her sluggish slumber party inside, my phone will begin vibrating. It’ll be my stepbrother again. Calling from the Middle East. Is he really close enough for all these phone calls? I’ll wonder. Maybe he was flying to a war in the “Midwest” instead, and I wasn’t paying attention. The news wouldn’t be any help.

He will apologize for not giving me “props” for the care package I sent, and it will be comforting to debate the meaning of this word just like he’s still in my car next to me.

-It means respect, right? Or support for something? Or is it something off an airplane?

-Boats, too, bro. But it can also mean fake shit, like in a movie. Speaking of, check this out, we were on a boat in the Red Sea or Black Sea, one of the seas, and someone was playing classic ‘60s rock on their phone. Right then, everyone looked at each other, and I gave the order to “lock and load,” and we all cocked our shit because it was just like one of those Vietnam movies. Then our propeller fell off after snagging a discarded Christmas tree, one of our platoon’s, of course, and we had to wait an hour for someone to fish it out and switch boats. Song was over by then...

-Question. I was reading about how the local girls in that country laugh at any girls who aren’t circumcised.

-Who aren’t what?

-Circumcised. You know, where they cut off the clitoris when they’re young. Or stitch it up. They do something fucked up anyway. You never heard about that? I heard that if a girl doesn’t have this done, the other girls will laugh and point and say she’s got a tail...

I’ll have a second at a red light to flip through my wallet and stop on a picture of my mom pregnant with me. My caption still reads, “Webs spinnin!”

-Well, I’ve never seen anyone with a tail, bro, but we haven’t had much contact with the natives. Saying they got tails seems kind of rude to me...

-No, I wasn’t saying that.

-...in fact, we probably don’t even need these rifles. We could hold up anything and they’d treat us the same, like we weren’t even there. We could be holding a crutch. Or a table leg. Or even just a long pieces of bread. We’re invisible as shit.

Then I’ll hear him clear his throat awkwardly 3,000 miles away and change the subject to tell me about his girls on the side and how this time it won’t blow up in his face because he told the second girl everything, just not the third.

-You can always tell which girl a cheater cares more about. The one he bothers lying to.

I won’t give him too much shit though because this all seems a step up from his “not girlfriend” phase. This was a tragic period of time when Moscow was always attached to some local girl since his serious relationships were out of town and he needed the attention. And when I would try to insinuate something scandalous about his latest Not Girlfriend, he would just say, “That’s not my Not Girlfriend. That’s not my girlfriend.” And I’d say, “Exactly!” Moscow had a lot of Not Girlfriends, and, sadly, they apparently had no problem knowing that’s what they were. They didn’t realize it’s been known to be fatal either.

-Anybody dead?

-Man, that’s not how you ask that shit.

-Sorry.

-Sand in my shoes though. That’s the worst.

I’ll tell him I got to go, that I’m being followed by a cop like always, and he’ll laugh and reminisce about our short-lived band The Bucketmen (previously The Bucketboys, before that The Bucketbabies) and we’ll start making up another song right there on the spot. I’ll helping him before I can stop.

-It should be called “Cop Skin Shoes (A Cure For The Blues)” and detail the misadventures of a man who kills 600 cops.

-Why 600 cops?

-I don’t know yet. Seems like that would make a good pile. You could try to climb it!

-How’s it start again?

-Policeman, I need ya to get a cat outta my tree...

-...but why’d you shoot it down when I coulda done that for free?

I’ll tell Moscow not to worry, that Mobile Infantry is the seventh most dangerous occupation in the world, right behind balloon animal testers. Then we’ll both be singing our new song loud when I think the cop’s finally gonna pull us over. I’m not even humming by the time he drives by and it’s just me again.

reaction shots III: the final bullshit

The worst movie I ever saw would have been fine if it wasn’t for all the reaction shots. The opening, ending, and everything in between was a long chase where the monster was on a rampage and working its way through this campground. But all momentum was destroyed when the camera constantly kept cutting to the faces of the teenagers to show them looking horrified, even though I was the one who was the most traumatized by the way the movie failed.

My phone will ring even though there’s no bell in them anymore.

-I fucked her.

First comes something that no