awhile.” I said.
“Oh… That sucks. Come on in bro, I’m just playing this new Nintendo shit.” He said, opening the door wider. I walked into the dim living room. There were dirty dishes on the coffee table and ceramic figurines on the mantle. “What are you playing?” I asked.
“Super Mario 2. ‘Shit’s addictive, but I can’t get past level six. Little Brian finished it already.” He said, walking into the room he shared with his brother. “Dude, what’s all over your face?”
“Spray paint. I was with Martin and some guy named Ricky at the strip-lot last night and we were sucking it out of a paper bag. I passed out from that shit.”
“You shouldn’t do that. My one cousin from Montebello knows a guy who’s retarded now from doing that.” He said, picking up the game controller and unpausing it. There were dirty clothes in piles around the room mixed in with some of Brian’s toys. Both beds were unmade and there was a half eaten bowl of Cheerios on the floor. The TV was sitting on a board supported by two milk crates, and Colin sat cross legged on the carpet facing it. I put my backpack and my skateboard down on the floor and sat on the bed beneath a BMX poster of a shirtless, long-haired guy flying over a dirt track. “Was he with Rick the football player, or barbwire Ricky?” He asked.
“Barbwire Ricky. He was writing up the whole wall with it.”
“You’re lucky he was cool with you, he’s on some brown-power shit. He usually hates white boys.” He said.
“He wasn’t so scary.” I said.
Colin misjudged the timing on a jump and his little princess character went falling off the screen. “Fuck!” he said. “I gotta beat this level, I always die right there.”
“It’s ‘cause you’re the princess, why don’t you be a man character?”
“The princess is the only one who can hover. Her dress puffs out and she rides the air-current like a flying squirrel.” He said.
“They didn’t have a unicorn or a My Little Pony you could be?”
“Shut up man. You don’t even have Nintendo. You probably never even played this.” He said, restarting the game. “Did your Grandma kick you out just for ditching school?”
“Yeah. They called and told her I haven’t been there this month. I guess it wasn’t just that. We’ve had quite a few run-ins over the past couple years.” I said. “It was the last straw. Anyway, fuck her.”
“You shouldn’t talk like that about your Grandma. Seriously, man. She’s a nice lady. Here you come, all fucked up all the time, bringing drugs and Black Tail magazines up in her little apartment. Staying out all night. You must’ve scared the shit out of her. Fuck… If I’d have done that with my Grandmother when she was living, she would’ve beat my ass.” He said.
“Yeah you’re probably right, but the only reason she let me stay there in the first place was to make my mom look stupid. Her and my mom have been at war for like thirty years -they hate each other. So when my mom decided that I was no good and kicked my ass out, Gram figured she would turn me around, make an eagle scout outta me. She just wanted to show my mom that it was her fault I was a fuck-up. She thinks Jesus can transform people, she talks about it all the time. I must be like kryptonite to Jesus ‘cause his powers don’t work on me. Anyway now I have to go back to Altadena to live with my mom again. I have to deal with her shit, plus the whole scene up there that’s full of assholes.” I said.
“Oh that’s right, Jessie and Pat.” He smiled. “I guess you’re going to have to see them again, huh?”
“Not Pat -he’s dead. They found his body in some woman’s backyard.” I said. “He’d been laying there for two days, dead as fuck.”
“What? You never told me that. What happened?”
“I just found out about it myself last week. Maurice told me. The police found his mother’s car smashed into a telephone pole, but Pat wasn’t around. See, after he wrecked the car he saw the police coming so he decided to run for it -he was drunk and there were a couple of warrants out on him. So he goes cutting through peoples backyards and he got about a mile away before he dropped dead. He’d cracked his skull open in the accident. Two days later some lady is out pruning her bushes and sees Pat’s bloated corpse laying there.” I said. “The fucked up part is that if he’d gotten treatment right away, he would’ve lived for sure. He would have been arrested, but he would’ve lived.”
“Holy shit.”
“I think it’s kind of funny. At least his stupid ass won’t be stealing my mom’s shit and getting me in trouble anymore.” I said. “I just have to watch out for Jessie now.”
I’d told Colin all about Jessie and Pat. They were always together and they supplied all the younger kids in the neighborhood with weed and acid and could even get angel dust and crank, or so I’d heard. They did a lot of other stuff too, including once stealing my mother’s TV and stereo from our house. I know it was them because I happened to be home at the time. I tried to stop them, I was yelling and cursing, I even threatened to call the cops but they said they’d brake my arms and burn down the house if I did. The TV was worth way more than the money I owed them. When my mom got home I tried to act like I didn’t know anything about it, but she could tell I was lying. She thought I’d done it. I told her it was Pat and Jessie, but she thought I was in on it, even if I wasn’t the mastermind. It was one of the events that preceded my getting booted out of her house. “Hey I just had an idea,” I said. “Does your mom have make-up remover?”
“Yeah, probably. She has enough shit in the cupboard.” He said. “Why?”
“For this fucking gold paint. I couldn’t get it off with soap.”
“Oh. Don’t make a mess man, seriously.” He said, absorbed in Mario-land.
I found a bottle in the medicine cabinet behind the Pepto and poured a generous amount onto a washcloth. As I put the cloth up to my face the fumes were strong and I was light headed for a second. It took about half the bottle, but it was working, I could see the paint coming off. The scrubbing left my face red, but at least now when someone looked at me they wouldn’t think there goes a suicidal paint huffer.
On my way back to Colin’s room I stopped to look at the family pictures that were hanging in the hallway. They were mostly of Colin and little Brian over the years, in uniforms for little league, soccer, and BMX. If I didn’t know Colin I’d never have guessed what kind of person he was from those pictures. “Hey, let’s get out of here.” I said walking back into his room.
“Yeah alright. I’m sick of this shit anyway. What do you want to do?”
“I thought you could pay a little visit to your cousin.” I said.
“Maurice? No man, I don’t have any money, and you owe him. He’s not going to give us anything till you pay.” He said.
“I have twenty bucks, I’ll wait outside and you can go in and get us a dub sack. We’ll go to the park and roll up a joint.”
“Alright, but you gotta stay out of sight. If he knows I’m buying that shit for you he won’t be happy.” He switched off the Nintendo and stood up. “Wow, check it out.” He said, looking at the screen. The TV had flipped to the six o-clock news when he turned off the game machine and they were showing footage of the space shuttle Challenger exploding. The anchor woman was saying it was the third anniversary of the tragedy. A fiery streak ripped across the screen and split into a bubble of smoke and debris. A piece shot out and pulled a long trail of smoke behind it.
When we got to Maurice’s house I gave Colin the twenty dollars and sat at a bus stop on the corner a block away. Maurice lived with his wife and baby and his mother-in-law in a run-down house with aluminum siding and a low chain link fence around the dirt yard. It was the worst house on the street. There was a Doberman chained to a tree near the driveway, and if you wanted to see Maurice you had to either stand on the sidewalk and yell for him, or run past the dog to get to the back door. I was a yeller -Colin was a runner. I lit a cigarette and rolled my skate back and forth with one foot.
I was getting bored, so I ska
ted across the street to check out a little wall between the sidewalk and a row of bushes that bordered a convenience store. It was about a foot high so I thought I could ollie up to it, the question was: could I stay on top of it without falling? It was pretty wide but I knew I’d still have to get a good landing. I got up to speed and put my feet in ollie position. I kept my eyes on the spot where I wanted to land, and I popped up. On my way, a fear of falling into the bushes came over me. I held my weight too far back which didn’t bode well for my landing. I put my back foot down on the wall instead of the board. My front foot launched my skate into the bushes. I retrieved it and went back to my starting point. I told myself I had to attack that shit if I was going to pull it off. I went at it a bit faster this time. As I put the board down on the wall I knew I was off center. I wound up in what would’ve been a grind, but the skate chirped to a standstill and I had to run headlong for a few steps before I regained my balance.
I got my skate and was rolling back to my starting point when I heard a blast that shook all the windows around me and left my ears ringing. Maurice’s dog started barking and a bunch of pigeons were startled into flight. It sounded like it came from Maurice’s house.
Colin came tearing around the driveway past the dog and jumped on his bike. He raced over with wide