“Determination to be a good man is the worst determination there is.” This phrase came from my mother. She happened to be pissed at the moment because my father had thrown up all over our Thanksgiving dinner. This turned out to be the best thanksgiving of my life. He’d passed out. Which meant I’d have a bit more freedom. To listen to music a little bit louder, to be at ease a little bit longer, masturbate longer, smoke cigarettes harder.

I never wanted to be a good kid much less a good man.

So I wasn’t.

The chemicals that make up charcoal fluid; that’s what’s currently on my mind.
I could look up the recipe for such fluid. But I like to guess. I guess things like fossil fuels, plants and animals being made from some soup stirred millions of years ago.
I think of how pigs are slaughtered, then butchered, then ribbed, then bought and brought here, to the backyard of a neighbor, so he can smoke and heat them, so that I can eat them.
From the behind the BBQ smoke is a neighbor with dark hair plastered against his face. It’s hot, he complains .
I agree. Although I cannot fathom really since I’m not as close to the flames as he is.

I wish I could smoke and pontificate. I’d love to light up a small thin white cigarette and inhale and watch the smoke spill out before me. I’d like that smoke to follow my thoughts.
I’d like to pontificate with someone else. I’d like that someone else to be smoking too: A man with a beard, who’d been smoking a lot, a man who offered me a cigarette–people don’t offer their cigarettes to anyone, anymore. They always assume otherwise.

He’d triggered the adjustment. I’d watched him. Supervised. But he knew what he was doing. He’d managed the spring cock just the way grandfather had told him. But upon reassembly, however, the gun looked different. More angled. Less dangerous. I didn’t like the look of the gun. I told him to take him and the gun out into the woods. He did and got a deer. An live one I was glad to see. The deer scampered alongside him, both him and the deer with large smiles on their faces.

The gun had been left the in the woods, he told me as they approached me.

This man is amazing. I would like to play in a movie, if they ever made one about him. But I can’t play him. Because I am not black. I am brown. And so is he, technically. But not technically enough.

I want to tell my friends that I want to play him. But then I’ll have to explain myself, as I often do, for my deep desires. They will point out the discrepancies of age and sex and, of course, color.

When I jog, I notice this and that and that and this. I see the same couple in matching jogging suits (in inclement weather) who manage to carry on in deep conversations as they lope past me. Everyone lopes past me. But there are the others, coming in the opposite direction too. Half-naked men running in packs, whooshing past me without talking, intense males, mostly in their thirties who make it all look so natural and elegant and fast.  And then there’s me. I’m not putting myself above it all. Oh no. I am just as describable. Except that I tend to lay low, usually run alone. Occasionally, however, I will come across another jogger (as opposed to a runner; there is a difference) who seem to lay even lower.  And this happened on the spring of my fiftieth year.

That’s a long time to wait for someone lower.

If you’d picked up some groceries. We are out of everything–well, except condiments. I know how much you love divvying up capers and pickles and stuffed olives and nesting them in pita bread. While I’m left with a can of tuna that drives our cat insane with desire.

The rug outperformed the floor. The floor got jealous and revolted. Quietly. By just glaring up at the Persian weave, bleeding up, nasty thoughts, wishing fleas on it, dust, cat hair, and and most anything unpleasant to befall its nap.
Floors had recently gotten a bad rap in the process. A wooden panelist concluded that floors were passe and encouraged renters and homeowners, even cockroaches to revolt.
Well, nothing ever came of this panelist’s ill will. But the resentment was there, creaking the floor, tightening its joists, splintering its psyche.
But no matter what, it continued to be stepped on.

Oh my God. I’m not letting him go. There isn’t a single part of my body that is touching his. But, oh my God, I am not letting him go.

He’s in my garage. He’s cleaning a hunting rifle. I don’t like guns nor hunting. But he’s cleaning the barrel with such care, the way his father taught him, he told me in that nonchalant way, that I then bring into my mind, for the warm drops of insight that I manage to wring from his mannerisms and speech. I must slurp from his inner recesses that snake somewhere between the twitch of his shoulders and the stiff wide back that is presented me. I stand hidden by the rose covered trellis where honeybees buzz around me like whirrings of my emboldened, free mind, the droning of insistence that I continue to stay there. And spy. Instead of going inside the garage and engaging in small talk. I could ask him a number of things. Ask him where he buys his cleaning supplies, what is that scar on his left cheek?
“Ouch!” I yell instead.

His head lifts and I can see his face for the first time since we were introduced.

It was in the corner of the living room. Which was called a parlor, here in this part of the country. I stood in front of what I later found out was a corner curio cabinet. I was familiar with these pieces. And, yes, each time I’d seen one, it happened to be in a corner. It was built for that position of a room, I assumed as I studied through the thick, piece of bulging glass, half expecting to find more glass inside–a glass menagerie as I approached. And, in a way, it was. I saw tiny bottles of liquor, like little families perched on the three glass levels. Liqueurs. Vodkas mainly. Of all brands. Brands I’d known and tasted.

The person who had pointed out the corner curio was no longer in the room as they’d gone to the foyer, to take a phone call. It took this opportunity to open the curio. Because I was curious. I unscrewed one bottle; it gave easily, revealedits emptiness. So I tried another one and another. Same thing.

“They’re all empty.” I told my host as he walked back into the room. “Yes,” he said, with a small smile. “But they were all once full.”