His mother went on and on in her praise of her youngest child.
Jon spat. Nothing like that had ever been thrown his way. The squirrel’s soul would have to migrate on without any more salutations. He stomped on the pedals and rode off into the night.
CHAPTER 2
The Tragedy of Man
Buffalo was the faded queen of old New York, the leftovers of an industrial era ground to shit. It had once been a showpiece of culture and success, industry and shipping, where the working slobs could pull down beer money and the educated snobs could twitter their noses at a host of artistic feasts. It wasn’t fully gone, but the city was quickly fading into a new Detroit or Baltimore—hubs of corruption and squalor. As opportunity slowly leaked away, so did Buffalo’s best and brightest. More and more vanished each year, leaving behind only those who were too lazy or stupid to get the hell out. Nowadays, all the city had to boast about was a chronically losing football team and the invention of Buffalo wings.
If the city proper was that bad, Jon’s home of Black Rock, the area he now pedaled through, was its retarded cousin. Once the berg had been a commercial rival for its dominant sister and had nearly been the chosen terminus of the Erie Canal. The War of 1812 changed everything. While it was raging on, Buffalo got the nod for the canal exit, as it was further away from the enemy’s forts. This turned out to be good planning as the township of Black Rock was razed and raped twice by blood hungry Canuck marauders.
The township took its name from an outcropping of black limestone along a nearby river that was blown up by engineers in the building of said Erie Canal, adding insult to injury in the minds of its low-wage residents. Nowadays the typical Black Rockian barely sported a high school diploma and lived paycheck-to-paycheck from an ever-shifting menagerie of minimum-wage jobs. Their dreams of bettering themselves revolved solely around hitting it big on the lottery, rather than actually working toward a goal.
Their dwellings reflected their poor life planning. Cardboard squares duct-taped in place of broken windows. Screen doors with the mesh half hanging out. Red brick stoops that were missing a few bricks. Old paint jobs with flaked-out gray splotches like leper spots. These were common sights. Last decade’s broken down Chevys and germ-ridden public transportation were the rides of choice. Dented corner bars. Cheap wing shacks. Gas stations with rusted nozzles. All of this was Jon’s world.
Which begged the question as to why his parents insisted on staying in the area, despite the fact that they could easily afford something ten times as luxurious. Well, it was the land, the family land that anchored them all to this dead spot. Father had an uncharacteristic soft spot for his heredity, so everyone else had to suffer because of it.
Jon pulled up at Michael Dutch’s house. It was a crumbling brick affair, a thrown together cheap structure, shoved at the very back of a dead end street. The cement stairs to the front door were bare. The iron railings, embedded in the stone, had been twisted off years ago. A barebones carport, just a roof and poles to hold it up, lay to the right, with a beat up truck missing the front tires underneath. The truck’s forward plate dangled by a single stripped-out bolt.
Jon tapped on the front door. Mrs. Dutch answered and, without acknowledging Jon’s presence, yelled for Michael. He came to the door quickly, a backpack slung over his shoulder. Jon was glad of that. He didn’t want to linger inside. It seemed like the Dutch family never cleaned their carpets and the house constantly stunk of cheap cigars and fried bologna. That night was no exception.
He peeked inside as Michael laced up his sneakers. A three legged dog gnawed a rawhide bone. The youngest child rattled the bars of his playpen with savage determination. Mrs. Dutch went back to singing unharmoniously along with the radio. Michael’s dad sat in his boxer shorts and hole-ridden undershirt, swearing at the game on TV. A slab of greasy pizza oozed over his leg.
“God damn losers. Get the ball!”
Michael slapped on a ball cap similar to Jon’s and said, “Let’s go.”
You didn’t have to tell Jon twice. He had plenty of bad memories of the place, and he didn’t even live there. Who knew what barnacles Michael had sticking to the bottom of his soul. They got Michael’s bike out of the back, negotiating through a clump of dropouts sniffing gasoline from an aluminum container. Shaggy hair and shaggy brains, they were friends of Michael’s older brother, an eternal doper who was finally kicked out of the ninth grade at the age of twenty. Michael shouted into the house that he was leaving and didn’t even receive a grunt in reply.
It was a miracle he still even bothered. Michael was shooting for the moon if he thought his parents were going to change. Neither of them had progressed beyond the idiot high schooler’s need to appear tough. They took every new idea as a challenge against them personally, as an attack on their ego, and the easiest way for them to deal with something and still “look cool” was to shit all over it. As if anyone was paying attention.
Jon remembered in the fifth grade they had to do a diorama for their science class. The projects had been all laid out in the school atrium and parents, teachers, and the principal sauntered by and judged them. Michael had worked for days on his, adding all sorts of glitter and streamers, the accoutrements that make an elementary school project pop. He won first place and got a little ribbon to go along with the honor. He was so proud and raced home to show off his achievement. Jon followed him along.
“Look, Daddy,” he had said, heart pounding with pride, “I won this.”
The elder Dutch had half-glanced at the award and snorted, “What the fuck you want me to do?”
The light had switched off in Michael’s eyes. Downtrodden, he slumped out of the house, the project dragging on the ground behind. He had lugged it with a limp hand, glitter sparked up over every bump, like the dying gasps of a fairy. Michael had tossed the whole thing into the trashcan and sat down by it, staring at ants making their rounds.
Jon had tried to cheer him up by buying him an ice cream, the one true cure all for an eight year old’s ills, but nothing could shake him from this slump.
This was just one of many soul-crushing incidents. Michael never spoke about his parents after that, just focused on his studies, hoping that school was his ticket away. To deal with stress, he composed limericks. No, really. Actual limericks. The dirtier the better. It was a side of him that you might not have otherwise known existed.
“There was a young fellow named Simon,
Who tried to discover a hymen,
But he found every girl,
Had given up her pearl,
In exchange for a single fake diamond.”
“Sounds about right for Black Rock,” Jon sneered. “Heard they’re adding a maternity ward to the middle school.”
“Yeah,” Michael laughed. “The girls around here are all dumb sluts. They spread for anyone.”
Except me! They both lamented silently.
Dusk was rapidly running at them. A crisp autumn wind shot down the street. They pedaled through old roads designed for horses and buggies, half the streetlights were out. The pair stopped at an unassuming house surrounded by a tired chain link fence. A figure detached from a porch swing and leapt onto the small patch of lawn.
“Thought y’all might not be comin’,” the figure drawled.