America

I’ve drank too much. I already know. The man there. He sells me his last three pills. I take ‘em down with a shot of whiskey. Down the hatch. Gone. I sit in the house. If you can call it a house. So unfamiliar. I look towards the wall and see nothing but roaches crawling. Crawling over the sink. The fridge. The stove with food still on it. The half-packed bowl of weed sitting on the table. I have to use the bathroom. Not a bathroom. A dirty toilet with a shit stained toilet bowl. Moldy children’s clothes on the floor. And roaches. More roaches on the wall. I am a real estate agent. I’ll sell you this house with a dresser with drawers. Drawer number one. 4 kilos of pure coke. Drawer number two. 300 hundred xanex and 300 oxy eighty milligrams ready for distribution. Drawer number three. Well drawer number three is empty. Empty like the people inside this house. Jimmy is garbage. He sits at the table with the weed and some other man. I don’t know his name. I don’t care to. His cough is so bad I expect his lungs to plop right out of his body. Right onto that filthy table. The pills set in. Mixed with the liquor, I’m in for long night. I look to my left. Drunker than hell, a man sits there, too drunk to even keep his eyes open. I bailed him out of jail once. I look to my right. Another man, his brother, just as fucked up as I am. I layed with him once. Or twice. He looks at me with warmth. I don’t understand. A little boy wanders in to the smoke filled kitchen. Dirty hands and dirty feet. Asks for some water. Jimmy screams at him to get his ass back in that bed. He cries. I don’t care. Next door is a woman. Her name is Tammy. She works forty hours in two days to support the 6 children her husband left her with when he was found in that car. On that road. With that needle still stuck in his arm. That man, the one that looks at me with warmth. That was his father. Not his dad. But his father. We go outside and sit. At that broken down wooden pick-nick table. The smell of cat piss all around us. All of us too fucked to even walk straight. He’s carrying the bottle. We pass it around. And shit gets deep. The drunk man and his brother sit and talk of how their father would steal their things. Sell them for crack. Walk right by them, and never acknowledge their presence. Just kept. On. Walking. As desperate shouts came from across the fence from the only parts of that man that. Weren’t. Yet. Dead. One asks “Do you even have one good memory of that man?” His response was this: “No. I have only one. And not a good one.” His father had taken him to crack town. He was all of about eight years old. They drove in a truck that would barely start. He sat in the passenger seat while one man put his fist through the window and two others pulled his father out of that truck. And they beat him. They beat him until his eyes were swollen shut. They beat him until both of his legs were broken. They beat him until he stopped moving. They beat him for the thirty-six dollars worth of crack he had stolen the previous day. The little boy in that truck still has scars on his face from the glass imbedded in his cheek bones and still has the memory of dragging his father back into that truck and driving them home. He then asks the same question to his brother. “Do you?” His answer is the same. No. He also has only one memory. He remembers seeing his lifeless father laying in a casket. He remembers stepping up to the casket, no tears in his eyes. He remembers slipping a cigarette and a lighter in his shirt pocket. Saying goodbye for the first and the last time.