—LOOKING OVERDRESSED, WEARING BUCKETS OF CHEAP COLOGNE

 

 

Wide Out

 

And then one Sunday morning, a week or so after Gordie’s mom died from that freakish spot blotted out like a stain on her calf, Gordie’s dad fed us beer after beer.

We were boys, almost men, but had another and another until the trailer park resembled a carnival, everything lit up like tragic magic. Even the pigs were singing.

Bent Schlitz cans dropped around the shag like hollow secrets no one was going to bother figuring out. The ghost of Gordie’s mom might have been hunched on the end of the couch, but, coward that I was, I kept looking away, staring at a soiled drape, noticing how it resembled a poor girl’s filthy and torn blouse.

At one point, Gordie’s dad yawned wide as the Milky Way and asked, “You boys are fags, right?” his jaw moving side to side like a Guernsey chewing cud.

I waited for Gordie. I waited some more. I waited for the world to end and reopen, but it didn’t.

“Fuck you, Dad,” Gordie said, and when his dad laughed back, in that slow white trash chuckle that sounds like kindling losing the fire war, we laughed with him, guts out. Wide out.