Good stories, too, often have no beginning and no ending

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            Good stories, too, often have no beginning and no ending.

 

 

Looking back—

As seen through the tambourine leafy carousel taut movie screen of a kaleidoscope.

 

            Back in the days when Allan McReynold's had experienced only eight Christmas’ and looked slightly like a diminutive ventriloquist Pee-Wee Herman doll-cherry lips and fair forehead. This story also begins on Downs Circle, which is Patrick’s old street dig and is not really circle in semblance at all but more like a parabola. A contorted thoroughly graveled vowel proportioned “U” with the sad sunken visages of windexed houses brimming back behind concrete sidewalks.  A grade school summer stretched out into what could in fact be eternity. It is before cigarettes and DC. Before random sex with lasses whose first names is all we remember. Before coffee and Lums and the ogle of tautly assed waitresses chartering us the noxious odor that seemed to sate the longing all of us had felt for so long-since perhaps even birth.  Before Hale and cigars. Before any of us had fallen head over Doc Martens in love with life.

 

            Allan is pedaling his brother’s carriage. A thickly-spoked Schwinn numerically specialized something-or-other, computer screen blue that came replete with a pair of lashed poked webbed-eyelids passing for wheels. Allan is outside popping wheelies and fortuitously bumping into park cars informing the seesaw neighborhood smiles that he meant to do that. Patrick is inside either fucking with his VIX-20, palsied palms pressed against jutting joystick (sporadically swearing beneath the hushed parental din offering the computerized images of invaders from space an overture of late American colloquial finest (motherfucker-shit-damn-motherfucker) all the while paying precocious homage to his phonebook thick Irish ancestry)-either that or playing MacGyver upstairs, mulling over the deeper metaphysical modalities of post-hermeneutic thought, extrapolating discrete mathematical theorems while copiously masturbating over crumpled panties in sister Amy’s room, thoughts baptized by images of one whose initials are H.L.-who will spasmodically appear out of nowhere. Our mashed muse for over a decade…

 

            Outside appears a boy attired like he is a hommie with his pants sagging and swerved Starter’s cap pointed the direction of Ursula Minor. The seat on his bicycle is more fourth of July patriotic cap than banana peel. Wigger-Boy and Allan rove up and down the street. They race. Break pedals skid. Back and forth flanking the contours of the giant shaped ‘U”. in front of a Allan makes excuses and the confetti smiles of grade school sweethearts dressed in pastel, Easter M&M color clothing laugh as the two of them banter and bike it out.

 

Allan informs a this arcane bathroom tile skinned alien gesticulating like his mother was Harriet Tubman and his father was Big Daddy Kane that the propelled pedal-chipped vehicle which his bottom is currently appropriating actually belongs to his older brother who has won so many races with it and who also contrived the rope ladder fastened to a branched bicep of the tree in his lawn. Quickly the boy demounts his bike and clambers up the rungs of the rope ladder. He is looking for ascension. He is climbing higher. He is going up.

 

            When he reaches the pinnacle branch he will find a nose-snubbed window overlooking a gritty sallow-stained parking lot, a Dunkin’ Donut placard that blinks sporadically twenty-four-seven, a trash dumpster the size of a caravan and a tepid cup of jamoke positioned appositely in front of him with little S’s of steam rising from it and with human voices surrounding him from all sides.

           

Mama (Helen) McReynolds smacks rolled fists, cupping both sides of her waist in a slugger’s embraceful squeeze.  Leering through the Windex smear, she observes with keen lighthouse vision a stranger dressed in ghetto garb talking with his hands and lounging on the top tree branch, referring to his bike as a ‘ Hoopty.' She promptly informs Savant Boy to go outside and tell that boy to get off our property before he falls flat on his ass and his parents sue us for all we’re worth. Savant Boy seems to comply daintily with Momma McReynolds maternal mandate. There is the thud of the oak door and the swat of the screen slab. Out walks a boy the size of a tree-stump. His hair is thick, taupe in color, with subtle strands protruding out like a cactus. His off brand shoes and knee high socks hint of squeaked genius. He pops out nonchalantly, elbows pacing, fingers saddled around his waist. He is more Lorax than Luddite.  The sun glistens from the rearview mirror of Warren’s Honda reflecting into he boy in the trees vision like a blinding bullet. The ballet of playground pint sized innocence scatter-a clipped string of vocational bible school puppets. Allan pops a wheelie in front of his Brothers presence, falling flat on his ass, once again, and saying that he meant to do that, once again. The repudiated savant boy begins to quake his jowls and sputter out a caveat, trying hard not to use the word “fuck” for fear of mother and the flaky aftertaste of soap. Before his mouth opens he hears a voice sink down from overhead.

 

“Hey man, did you build this? It’s pretty cool.”

 

 The savant boy’s eyes avert to the north and he responds in the first person-affirmative almost immediately.