Note: This is way too long, but I haven't posted in months, so whatever.
The first real important thing I did when I got home after all those months was give my girl a holler. I remembered her number, even after eighteen months. I couldn’t remember a single one of those numbers that I was supposed to back in my school days, but for some reason I can always remember a pretty girl’s number.
My parents weren’t too keen on letting me stay in their house in general. I saw my mom’s face get a little strained as she watched me dash upstairs and grab the phone, but she didn’t say anything. My dad would’ve, though. He’d have said that I didn’t have any right to use his phone, what with what I’d done. Good thing he was off at the machines warehouse, making a little bank.
My mom said something when I brought the phone back upstairs, though. She wasn’t complaining about me running up the phone bill, which was nice. Of course, she had to have something to complain about, and this time it was school.
“Denny? Can ya sit down fer a minute er two?”
“Yes’m.” I said all polite-like. “Is there something you need?”
She didn’t even answer my question. “So, what’re you gonna do now?”
“What do you mean?”
“What do you mean, what do I mean? I mean, what the hell are you gonna do with your life now? You’ve already taken a crap on it enough times, when’re you gonna scour it down?”
“I already am.”
“What, in the last day? You haven’t had really enough time to make a change.”
“Well, Mama, during all that time in there, I kinda discovered what I want, you know?”
“And? What’s that?” She leaned forward, tapping her fingernails on the table. She had those plastic, fake caps on them. They were painted this pretty garish red color.
“Just gonna settle down, you know? They let me get my GED. So I’m thinking I’m just gonna hang out here for a while, get a job down at one of the warehouses, save up my money till I can get a place of my own.”
“Huh. How you gonna get a cosigner? Can’t think of anyone ‘round here who’d do any financial shit with you, to be honest, hun.” She chuckled.
“I can work something out. Had a lot of time to think things through.”
“I can’t imagine you doin’ much thinker, either. You ain’t never shown us that you can think.”
I rolled my eyes, but kind of tried to conceal it, so I didn’t look like some stupid teenager. “It’s all in here.” I reached up a finger, tapping the side of my temple with it. “Been thinking a lot in there. Screw high school. They didn’t even give me a chance to show what’s in here.”
“You did break the record in that place, boy, you did.” She reached across the table for her half-gone pack of Pall Malls. “You want a smoke?”
“Nah,” I shook my head. “Eighteen months clean.”
She snickered for a second, then slipped a cig in between her lips, lighting it with this flashy old-style lighter I stole from the old Jewish guy’s pawn shop down town. “I’m sorry for bitching at you so much, kid. But you know why that is –“
I interrupted her a bit. “Yeah, I know, I know. It’s cause you want me to turn out a bit better than you and Dad and Brandon and Lisa and all of them. I get that I’m your last resort.” I leaned in, looking her right in the eyes. “I ain’t gonna be like alla them, though. You get that, right? I’ve got a nice head on my shoulders. I’m straightening out. I got all this good stuff planned.”
“I hope you really do, Denny. But get out of my face. I got some business to do.”
I shrugged, sitting up from the table and dashing away downstairs and to the basement. Business my ass. She hadn’t worked in a decade, since she lost her job as a receptionist at the hair salon.
I got up pretty early the next day for real world standards, I guess. Probably around the same time that all the high school suckers were getting up. I shouldn’t call them suckers, though. I’m the sucker for not being able to keep my ass seated in that place for more than three months straight. And then, eventually, the whole district had enough of me. I left some time around then, though, so it didn’t really matter, anyway.
My old seventh generation F150 was still in the garage, right where I’d left it. The good ole blue tarp was still over it and everything. I was pretty happy that my dad hadn’t messed with it, because he has a habit of tampering with my things while I’m away. My TV didn’t work anymore, and nobody had any explanation for it.
The truck ran perfectly though. I ran up and down our road a couple times, just to make sure. Then I turned up the radio, and proceeded to give myself a little retour of the town. Nothing had changed at all, like I’d suspected. Then I went on uptown, towards the high school.
I was kind of disgusted by the music on the radio, though. I couldn’t really remember any radio station’s numbers, and all the stations seemed to play the same auto-tuned, slutty girls yelling shit about parties. I guess that music kind of loses its substance over time. Makes me miss the days of old Tupac.
The high school wasn’t let out yet, so I kind of hung out in the parking lot. I’m not sure if I’m exactly allowed on school grounds, but it was worth the risk. A couple of guys I used to know spotted my beautiful truck right off, and they came up to talk to me, real slick-like.
“What up, Denny? What’re you doin’ ‘round here? I heard you got twenty-two months!”
I shrugged. “Yeah, it was bullshit.”
“Four months early ain’t too bad though, ya know? I wouldn’t be complainin’.”
“I sure ain’t!”
The kid I was talking to was Brad Reaves. We used to kick it a bit, back in my school days. He was a sideline kind of guy. That is, he liked talking about all the cool things that went down, and even witnessing them sometimes, but if he even smelled trouble he ran away in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. The other guy was Petey Rench, and he didn’t talk much at all. Sort of a useless guy, to be honest. He had greasy, dark hair and always seemed to wear the same Metallica T-Shirt.
“Damn dude, you’re the only kid I know who can shoot a bunch of little kids, and not even get time for it.” Brad rustled around in his pocket for his can of chew.
I laughed a bit. “Yeah, but it bit my ass later. They don’t really like deferring other charges for guys that let loose on a crowd of first graders with their pellet guns.”
“That was some funny shit though, you gotta admit. I’m so damn happy I cut school that day so I could see it! Just watching them kids walking to school, and then: ‘BANG!’ Them cops were there in five minutes, I swear to God, and they had you on the ground so quick! Damn!”
“Yeah,” I said, looking at the ground. “Good times. Back in the day.”
Petey finally spoke up. “What’re you doin’ here, anyway?”
I shrugged.
Brad laughed. “I’ll tell you what he’s doin’! He’s here to see that girl of his! That’s the only thing that’ll bring a good guy back to this shit hole.”
“I guess so. Been thinking about a lot of things, ya know? Gonna settle down a bit.”
“Well,” Brad shrugged. “You down to smoke a couple bleezies after school?”
“Eighteen months clean. Not gonna fuck that up now.”
In the distance, the school bell rang, signaling the beginning of the lunch period.
“A’ man,” said Brad, reaching out to shake my hand. “Good luck with whatever shit you’re gonna do.”
Petey shook my hand, too, and then they were gone. I was pretty happy with myself, for keeping up that eighteen months of being clean. I had good reason for all that, besides all that probationary bullshit.
It wasn’t too long before the girl – my girl – walked up to my truck. She was basically everything I remembered her being, except there was this meretricious sort of quality to her. Her hair was just a bit too blonde, her skin too orange, her makeup a bit too caked on.
“What up, Ash?” I asked her, leaning against the side of my truck.
“Nothen. School. Where we goin’?”
I shrugged. “Mickey D’s?”
“Sure.”
It kind of annoyed me, how she was being so short in everything she said. You’d think, after I’d been in the pen for eighteen months, that she’d been a bit more excited to see me. I mean, we dated for a few years, back in the day.
During the car ride down to McDonald’s, it got a little better. We talked a bit more, but the conversation didn’t exactly go where I wanted it to.
“You got out a little earlier than I expected,” she said, gazing out the window, her face pretty sour.
“Ain’t that a good thing?” I asked, looking over at her.
“Well yeah, I guess.”
It was quiet for a couple seconds, so I sort of tried to break the ice. “How’s school goin’ for you?”
“To be real honest, it ain’t the same without good ole Denny there.” She smiled for the first time. “You really lightened the mood around that place, ya know? Gettin’ suspended every other week, getting caught with half an ounce on you ‘cause you showed it to Mr. Botulinski… All that good stuff.”
“Do you wish it could, ya know, go back to that?”
She looked over at me. “I dunno, I guess. It was a lot of fun, back then.”
It was right then that we pulled up to Mickey D’s. I didn’t have even enough money for a Big Mac – that was always what she ordered – and I felt kind of bad about it. I was pretty happy that she had her own money.
When we were all seated down, the conversation got kind of awkward again.
“So what’re you gonna do now?” she asked me, in between bites. It was the kind of question that she was supposed to ask someone who’d been gone for this long. It was the question that everyone asked, but nobody really cared what the answer was.
“Thinkin’ of settlin’ down.”
She suddenly quit eating, and looked up at me, her big ole brown eyes sort of startled. “What d’ya mean?”
“Like, ya know, gettin’ my own place and all that.”
She didn’t say anything. Instead, she kind of absorbed herself in her burger. She ate pretty nasty, I noticed, with her mouth open and all. I could see everything in there. And then I looked at her arms, and they were pretty nasty too. Girls with dark hair are supposed to shave their arms, aren’t they?
“So, you gonna graduate in a couple months?” I asked her.
She shrugged. Her mouth was full. She swallowed the giant bite, and I swear that I could hear it gurgling and squelching down her throat and into her stomach. “I dunno. I don’t think I’ve got enough credits. We skipped too much school back in the day, Babe.”
Her little pet name just didn’t seem right. It just didn’t seem right, even though she’d waited here for me for all those months. It just didn’t seem like we could pick up everything back where it was.
“Any guys you been checking out?”
She giggled. “None worth mentioning. Don’t you remember, what I said to you when you called me from the police station, all those months ago, when you told me that you probably weren’t coming out this time?”
“I do.”
“I said I’d wait for you, and I did. But this whole settlin’ down thing… You been gone a long time, Denny.”
I didn’t really have anything to say. I just couldn’t think of anything. “So you aren’t gonna graduate?”
She threw her hands up in the air, rolling her eyes. “I dunno, Denny! Why’s it that I need to graduate so bad, anyway? Nobody in either of our families graduates. It don’t matter.”
“You almost done with that?” I asked her, looking down at the half-eaten Big Mac.
“I’m all fulled up.”
We didn’t talk much at all on the whole drive back to the school. I was glad for that, I think. It was bad enough to have to look at all her pouting.
When we arrived at the school, she finally spoke.
“It was nice catching up with you, hun.” She leaned in, her eyes closed, ready to plant a big one right on my lips. And as I looked at those overly painted lips, I couldn’t help but think of all the other guys who’d gotten a taste of them during all those months. I kissed her anyway, but I didn’t make it long or anything.
“You too. Goodbye, Ashley.”
She smiled before leaving the car. She walked backwards a couple of steps, waving at me, and then turned around and made her way back into the school.
None of it just seemed right at all. I thought back to all those months in the pen. Being in a state prison sort of tears people apart, you know. It’s like in that old movie, The Shawshank Redemption. It’s just like that in real life. People get kind of screwed up by being in the slammer. Good people do, at least. They need to find something to focus on during their time there. The guy in that good ole movie focused on digging that little tunnel out so he could escape and screw the commandant over. I focused on the rest of my life. At some point, while I was there, I got it in my head that I was going to buy land once I got out, land out in the Eastside or something. I thought maybe Ash’d come with me, since she’d promised me that she’d wait for me on the outside. What a childish kind of promise that was. How stupid. Completely ridiculous.
My mom was sitting at the kitchen table when I got home, smoking another Pall Mall.
“What’s up?” she said as I walked through the door.
“Nothing.” I said, sitting down across the table from her.
“You ain’t lookin’ so good,” she said. Her wrinkled face was looking real worried, and I felt a bit torn up about it. “You went and saw that Ashley girl, didn’t you?”
I shrugged.
“It’s funny, you always had so many friends while you were out here. And yet, you only think about that damned girl when you come back. There’s good people around here, you know.”
“Shut up. You never liked her.”
She threw her hands up to either side of her face. “I ain’t gonna argue with that one at all. But now that my baby boy’s all torn up about somethin’ to do with that stupid girl, I wanna know what’s up.”
“Just kind of disappointing, you know?”
She chuckled. “I knew you was thinkin’ bout her, when you said you were thinkin’ bout settlin’ down and all. I was hopin’ your time out in the Glen would clean you up a bit, but when I could tell you was thinkin’ bout her, that kinda ruined it for me. She’s a high school kinda girl. She gonna be the same girl ten, twenty, maybe fifty years from now.”
“Yeah, but I wanted to have a life – a real life – with the girl I loved.”
“You think you really loved her?”
I shrugged.
“I gotta tell you a story, Baby. Remember how I use to ride horses, back in the day? Well after I had that fat-ass brother Branson of yours, I gotta say that I gained a little weight myself. But after I was all healed up and all, I was so excited to get back on the saddle again. The dumb thing was – I realized after I got on – was that my ass was too big for my saddle!
Of course I was torn up about it -- all new mothers get pissy when they realize that having kids makes them fat. Your daddy sure cheered me up, though. Wanna know what he said?”
“What’d he say?”
“He told me that my ass wasn’t too big. He told me that the saddle was the thing with the problem.”
The story might sound a bit ridiculous, because it pretty much was, but at any rate some things cleared up for me right then.
“And you know what, son? You ain’t my baby anymore, really. I think you’re the most growned up out of all you kids. I really do hope that you do settle down, son, but you’ve changed a lot now that you know it ain’t gonna be with that damned Ashley.”
I nodded to her, my face starting to get a bit sore from smiling. “I’m gonna go for a drive, alright?”
She nodded back out me, and I ran out to my car as fast as I could. I did another little tour of the town, but this time it was a remembering kind of tour. It wasn’t like I was wishing things could go back to the way they were.
I turned up the radio, and was pretty happy to hear some old Aerosmith song playing, Back in the Saddle, from one of their actual good albums. I kind of started singing and talking to myself, however crazy that sounds, just because I was so doggone happy.
“Gettin’ back in my saddle, I guess.”
