Slow Drags

I light a cigarette for myself and one for you. I set yours down and puff on it every so often so it won't go out. I'm giving you just one, and for as long as it burns, you are here with me ...

"The Doors are the greatest band, period," you tell me, as you tap your feet so elegantly to "Riders On The Storm" and gaze off with a look of aimless purpose.

You protest to the local 11 o'clock news anchor as she reads off the latest horrible thing that happened to a child today, then you reorganize your pack of cigarettes on the center of the end table, with the lighter lined up symmetrically on top, before turning off the light and going to bed.

You tell me, "Goddamn, look at her figure. A thing of beauty." You humbly worship her womanhood, a pure discipleship that makes talking with women as natural as breathing in and out. You with your childish devotion and your childish love, fleeting like a child but whole like it, too.

You quote the classic television shows and the ex-presidents and the heavyweight boxers. You channel them, aligning your voice to your ear with the precise inflection and pitch and the tone and the understanding of not only how they say what they say but what they are feeling when they say it.

I tell you a truth. I support it with information. You make me feel it.

You tell me you love me.

Puff ...

You're living with us again, sharing my room with me. For six months, maybe, probably less.

Your cycle is as predictable as the alignment of your cigarette pack.

You make a go of a job. You watch the same television shows each night. You build a lillypad in your mind as the cold, dark, putrid, swirling waters splash around it, dampening your clothes, getting them wetter and wetter as you watch the warm sun that keeps you dry recede.

You distract yourself from the real distraction you want, then need, then do anything to have.

You leave, because you cannot stay. You spend the money you've saved (for your own place, your own car, your own dignity). You drink the cheapest booze, whatever stretches the money the farthest. Elegance and charm have no place here. You fall unconscious beneath a bridge. You say the wrong thing to the wrong person.

You're broken: Your ankle, your cheekbone, your spirit.

The bars force you back to your reality.

You're back again. Maybe you'll make it a year. Maybe this is the last new beginning.

Puff ...

I agree. "Bridge Over The River Kwai" is a masterpiece.

I can't help but watch you as you walk, one leg shorter than the other because of that drunken car wreck that left your sister's hotheaded boyfriend a vegetable.

Your gait is a testament to battle, a war within yourself against an unspeakable cruelty that turned faith into desperate hoping.

You wear your sunglasses on cloudy days. Yes, I do understand you. And I believe you. The sunlight still hurts your eyes. It hurts mine, too.

Puff ...

We've talked about the loose-change organizer. What an interesting invention. It never actually measures the change out right, but it's at least a place to make you feel like your loose change is worth something, after all.

The house is yours. For a week. Your sister's in the hospital.. Your nephew (the one who's named after you) is going to the beach to drink Jack Daniels straight from the bottle and get in fights.

I know what's going to happen before I close the door, catching a glimpse of you sitting alone on the couch in a room darkened by the parallax of the setting sun.

I return, on crutches, with new enemies and new women who want to save me.

You're gone, but not entirely gone. I pick up the papers in the trash and see the 40 oz. bottles hidden beneath. I've come back early.

I go upstairs. The loose change is all gone.

So beneath you. The stealing, the lying, the cheap malt liquor.

Puff ...

One thing about you, Uncle Chris: For all of your failings, you always wanted me to think better of you.

You didn't want me to see the same things you saw, unless they were the good things.

When you came back again, I had left. I took my government education money and moved into university housing. The first thing you did with your money from your job bagging groceries is buy me a small refrigerator for my dorm room. You found a deal, and you wanted to find some way to pay me back, with interest for trust lost but never love.

Puff ...

Your cigarette's almost out, Uncle Chris. And no matter how much I'd like it to be another way, I have to tell you goodbye the way I had to tell you goodbye.

You're back. I shake your hand. I ask you to come to my wedding in a couple of months. All is forgiven between us after that night a few months ago.

You remember. I came home to find your sister crying. "Son, you have to make him leave. I can't do it anymore" You left in peace. You wouldn't do it any other way. Not with me there, not with me the one old enough now to demand.

Maybe this is the last new beginning. Your face doesn't say it's so. Good luck to you. See you in a couple of months.

Puff ... puff ... puff ... The cigarette's out ...

"Son, I need to tell you something."

And I know.

"Chris died."

Along the banks of a dirty creek under a bridge of the K-Mart parking lot. Desperately trying to inject the phenobarbital given at the onset of a seizure.

Not found for days mid-July sun. Wallet sealed in a plastic bag from the smell.

Two weeks before my wedding.

All alone.

Find the cheapest place to cremate the body: "You do realize, sir, that this is an African-American funeral home."

Shop the garden stores for an urn. Listen to a brother beg to have his name left out of the obituary. Call the newspaper to tell them not to write about a homeless man in the story about a "body found." Call him "an electrician," his latest go at a job.

"Into this world we're thrown ... like a dog without a bone ... an actor out on loan ..."

I listen to the song.

I channel it.

The soft rolling of the organ keys. The thunder and rain.

I can feel the despair.

The faithless hoping.

Wanting to believe in a phantom, wanting to give something I don't have.