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Hometown:: Seattle

Relationship Status:: Single

About Me:: It was a narrow street only one car could creep down at a time, lined by
monster Eucalyptus trees that blotted out most of the mid-day sun. When the Santa Annas blew there'd be a confetti fireworks display on the root-ripped asphalt. Trees doing shadow puppets made the ground alive.

The houses were small to medium in size. All of them Capital As; pattern-punched variations on an already unimaginative theme: skinny front door, four pane window to the living room on the left, cinder block planter below. A bread box. TV antennae sprung up from roofs--every roof--like futuristic crucifixes. Some houses were painted white, some were blue, most of them beige.

Theirs was a tired and diseased sea foam green. No aid in the summer vs. winter tug-o-war. The shingles were rotting, splintering, falling off. Dirty paint peeled like infected scabs. And Jason didn't help any, constantly picking at the house when there was nothing else to do but fidget outside until the screaming inside stopped.

...

The kids around the block spent Summers playing 'ding-dong ditch'. Around twilight was the best time: they could get lost in the bushes easier then. No matter what they were wearing the old people couldn't see them once the sun dipped behind the houses. And when night came they'd string up fishing line from tree to tree, down the street at head-light level. They'd see how far they could get before a stray car came bolting down the road. And they could hear each line snap like a cheap guitar string as the car proceeded. Sometimes the cars slowed down. Sometimes they'd stop. The driver would get out. The kids would be in the bushes, over walls, in the dark, laughing to themselves. The driver would circle his car, look for the problem, not find it, get back in, put it in gear, drive away. Ping-ping-ping, the lines would snap, and the kids would laugh and by the time the car turned off the block his troubles would cease. And they'd start stringing up more line.

...

Jessica Barnes always whined through her plugged nose, "what if some one
comes down the street in a convertible?"

The rest of them would then make jokes about decapitating some self-absorbed fuck-wad none of them knew but collectively hated. Some gold-chain-wearing asshole speeding down such a slim street to some coked-out discotech in hopes of getting down the pants of a some underage high school student with a fake ID deserves to lose his wind blown head.

"Shut up, Jessica."

...

Short shallow breaths helped. And the fact that he had to urinate gave him
something else to concentrate on. He shook his semi-hard-on to ebb the tide
of piss welling up. Should have thought to go at the last one pump gas station they stopped at instead of filling up on warm rubberized garden
hose water.

"How much longer?"
"Go to sleep or something, will ya?"

Jason grabbed one of his father's works shirts from a pile draped over
grease-stained pots and hung it from a tear in the vinyl interior. He
adjusted it so that the shirt blocked out the majority of the sun, but still
gave him a view. He leaned back against a box of junk that was
originally used to transport tomatoes from Mexico and counted things: cars
going the opposite direction, road kill, dirt devils, breaths of air, beats
of his heart…

...

Michael Narry and his older brother Thomas played with fire ants. They would
dig out handfulls from hills and holes in a nearby dirt field and do
experiments on them. They magnified them fried, spray-painted them silver and gold, poured gasoline they siphoned from their dad's lawn mower down their hills. They made a fuse out of yarn. Soaked it in the gas, dropped it down a hill and rolled it out to some place safe, fifteen feet away. They lit it. Waited. When it hit the hill it'd pop open like a fire blossom, a miniature volcano. Small red bodies would scatter and shrink to black bits of pepper. The boys wiped out civilization after civilization that way. One day they brought out an empty jumbo Vlasic pickle jar and colander along with their usual bucket of ice water and garden trowels. They sifted ants from the dirt through the colander and loaded the jar up with all the little bastards they could grab. Their hands hurt from the stings, and the cold water they plunged them into to numb them made their bones ache. They were hardcore because they could withstand such pain. They were proud.

They managed to completely fill the jar. It took over two hours. From a few
feet away it looked like cranberry jam. Up close it was a squirming mass of
bright red hell. There must have been hundreds of thousands of them. Maybe
millions. They put the lid on and took it across the street to Jessica Barnes'. They knocked on the door. No one answered. The garage was open, but no car. They hopped over the fence into the backyard and looked around. No one there. They crawled through an open window to the kitchen. They went through their cupboards, ate their Triscuts, drank a couple of their Old Milwuakees.

"This is some good shit," said Thomas.
"It's a fuckin' beer, dipshit," said Michael.

They went through all the Barnes' drawers, found some money and a porn mag in one of them, beneath a stack of yellowed extra large Fruit Of The Looms. Found several bottles of pills under brand new bras that smelled like cinammon. They pocketed $250, FuxLuts 5, Valium and one of of Mrs. Barnes' bras. But before they left they pulled down the sheets of Mr. and Mrs. Barnes' California King and dumped the ants. They spread them around evenly and remade the bed hotel perfect, hospital corners tight. They left the place otherwise unscathed.
They had the balls to play catch in the street directly in front of the Barnes' house until the Barnes pulled into their driveway. Jessica asked her dad if she could play. He said No. They went in and shut the blinds.

Michael and Thomas threw the ball back and forth.

...

"Jelly," is all that Jason heard.
His father shook him.
It was night, but he was still hot and sweat-soaked. His hair was matted down to his cheeks and forehead. His shirt was translucent and sticky. He pushed himself up. Couldn't figure out where he was. Or why?

"Apple fritter or jelly?" his father asked.
Jason shook his head.
"You've got to eat something." His B.O. reeked like hot and rotten onion soup.
"Water."
"Here." Jason's dad handed him a jug of water. Jason gulped it down.
"I gotta go pee."
Jason's father kneeled down.
"Son. There are a lot of choices we have to make in this life. And no matter what, sometimes you're forced to make decisions you aren't prepared to make. You understand?"
"I just have to go pee."

...

CD

Favorite Music:: Colin McFee
Arvo Part
Prince
Tom Waits
M. Ward
John Adams
Bob Dylan
Terry Riley
Yousef Lateef
Claude Debussy
Giacinto Scelsi
Keegan Dewitt
Neil Young
Rachels
Steve Reich
Takemura
Tim Fite
Veljo Tormis
Ulf Langheinrich
...