Go Down Swinging

Sitting at an outside table, fingers yellowed from decades of smokes.

Eyes small and looking two feet in the distance, no matter what was there.

The skin on his face was pocked and worn like a speed bag…the exercise of decades of non-champions, nobodies…sitting across from me talking.

The words were dialogue of a life moving between flowers…never touching and never noticed.

I could see the ears with long lobes, like the last of leather cut from a belt made shorter…scraps hanging. Almost cauliflower ears, from boxing and damp gyms. Simply the remnants of life, day to day, never knowing $10 dollar scoops of ice cream or a fresh pair of skates.

The conversation started in a bar that was a weigh station for me.

Forty-five minutes closer to the airport to wait for a hug…a hug this man received rarely. This weak polar bear on a small sheet of ice… the smell of cheap beer and four day old shirts and never had a chance.

For him this bar was his name said out loud and knowing what bourbon on ice and a soda back asked from his pocket.

Two days passed that, we met in his backyard.

I chose long ago to sit with the people who have seen the devil and get close enough to smell it all in the back wash of a bottle. A garden hose worn, taped to work, rather than run out to buy one fresh.

Connecting to lives.

Men, women, the people you pass in a hurry, that fix your car or drive the bus you rode that one day no one answered, car in the shop… or solved your neighbor’s murder.

I was pretty sure he had answers to something I was afraid to ask.

What if things went different?

Luck.

It dances like a dragon fly across a pond and gets close and is gone in a flash.

You can put red string on your wrist or sing on Sundays, but the only thing watching over you is circumstance and a clock you invented.

Time and place are two things you have not much control over…given traffic and a crazy person’s intention.

The edge is closer than you think, just over the rise you can’t see passed…one soft nudge.

It’s selfish and humbling and sad to sit with what you call ‘not me for now’.

Maybe it will be, maybe it won’t.

You got a small percentage of the annual billions, cut up by men who couldn’t fuck to save their lives.

You raised kids and were delivered bad pizza and watched cartoons with the only thing that made much sense.

From high school till now it was paint by numbers and good times out of shit and see a kid make something of themselves, but know the worm will turn.

That is better than nothing from nothing.

I knew that from the time the dirt in the front yard was the only thing me and a plastic army man had then, and may ever have.

Our fate.

Sniper, green crawling, bazooka…at the whim of seven years old.

The pocked face man with not quite cauliflower ears….we had another beer and a half each at the metal table in his backyard and while I drove home, he went to bed on a cheap mattress next to a woman who’s best qualification was not stealing from the register she worked at the big box store and what money they had was not enough to change a spare.

I went home lucky.

For now.