Relish. He hot dog-drips relish, all over the last fading itchiness before first sip. Everything in life right behind him, snowballing and tide-rolling and eventually gopher-burrowing between the shoulders: the yawns, the sunny Sundays spent watching losing, the wondering and never getting close to being able to explain how that gas price has been calculated. It all starting with the curse of that doctor’s steady hands, way back, yanking and tugging and caressing down the sliding gooey laundry chute, out of the no-trouble warm cozies, toward dad-held scissors and then rents due and god’s endless ping-pong patter game. One for me, 19 for the world.

But now he stool-sits, hands tapping gently, and he is in the vicinity, the suburbs at least — a manageable commute, a realtor might say — to promise. Brown, dribbling glug deliverance. An aww shucks spirit. That little Suzie said the darndest thing. “Gee baby” and the soul of all the old Gershwin tunes about a season in New York. Neon lights and too-bright sports rolling, blinking, bickering with the commercial breaks of other TVs, everything glowing. He’s out at 2nd and that’s the inning. Marshall Tucker Band wonders “can’t you see?” Or is that John Fogerty? Whoever accentuates the darkness, the caveness.

We flick Bics over votive candles and space them almost evenly in lighting meant for shadowing the muddy tree rings growing under all our eyes.

“Most of being a writer is…”

“I know, I know, giving yourself a lifetime of homework.”

They swig, grimace-kiss the sliding rocks.

“No, it’s staring at the computer and trying not to look at porn…”

“Ahhh…”

Hear the bar assholes. See the idiots toast. The hours spent awake have now been enough for them, finally. Punching the clock on adulthood and her bland disappointment. Venturing themselves as cute now, faux cute, it is a joke, something of one, afterall, so they can still be feminists, or “mostly feminist” as I heard it put by another such off-brand asshole: same beard, all of them having decided to grow it together, to let it curl and take body and streak a bit gray at the chin, as if they don’t care. Keeping it manicured at the sides because they very much care. They all went hat shopping right after this facial hair quorum. Then one bought work boots and, well, fucking forget about it for the rest of their fucking milky baby feet that wouldn’t know a callus if they saw one. Now here are two, exemplary of their kind, and after three drinks it seems everyone is out of ear shot. Then they do a shot before their fourth pale ale and even the other one sitting right fucking there in front of the other one is out of ear shot, so they get louder still. The one does the elbow on the bar leaning all the way toward the bartender thing, conspiratorial, hushed. Except, loud.

“No, seriously… Know what it is?”

“Yeah. It’s making all your paragraphs the same size.”

Rashomon. He keeps saying it. Kurosawa. Perspectives. The sibilance snaking through the crowd noise to the other end of the bar. Perspectives are the thing, and the differing types therein. He’s going on about storytelling, as if this is a new idea, his idea. “It’s very Japanese.” He flicks his hands up, an of course gesture of his understanding and everyone else’s lack.

It is the air of a Rickie at the keg at the parties at the house on 18th street on Saturday nights. He’d stand there, almost as if he were in charge, an emcee, swilling from a red cup and rapping with baseball hat and practiced looseness and finger gun ready to pop for every buddy recognized, every remark appreciated. Early McConaughey, kind of, the type parents warn about, a guttural quip, a jostling brashness, a remark ending in “honey.” Maybe a wink. His own parents thought he was the best, or one of two best, a savior and a scholar. Definitely not just another power conference dickhead hungry for pussy and the approval of his drunk buddies and adequately brain-equipped to plagiarize enough to keep everyone happy, appearances up.

“What about this one?: Don’t fucking put anyone back to field the punt.”

“Nobody back there? Nobody?”

“Fucking. Nobody.”

Another clink and swallow. Soppy spittle glisten on mustaches. Pint glasses clanking, a little violent now, dented bumper-careless, set down right next to the coaster, moving through the beer list as in journeyman voyage, Viking-ish conquest, plotting points on a map with furrowed brow: from buzzed to hammered to needing to think about leaving and then back to High Life’s.

“No, really. Know what being a writer is…?

A pause, a long empty pause that isn’t thinking so much as blanking, losing time, brain cells, trains of thought…

“It’s drinking coffee at strange hours…” Now landing the plane.

There’s still a poster in a shoebox somewhere at Mom’s. Rickie’s face, hat backwards, probably from some such night with a keg at somebody’s friend’s something or other’s house. Some night he drank too much and puked and slapped my ass too hard and lunch in the Union the next day was silent. So long, sweet teenage love.

Eventually they looked for his body for three days while rumors floated about campus like the lost balloons of so many toddlers. Matt or Kevin or Pat or Thom or Bohmer — last name only with many such midwesterners — or some such little fuck with a white guy name and probable polo shirt had set the group out one night, away from campus, near our icy sleepy downtown, toward a strip of bars vaguely Irish — Mulligan’s, O’Shitstains; or semi provocative — Grinders, Spreaders, Cooches. The type of place with a bouncer cadre out front and low cut tanks behind the bar, where we all learned how to drink. The meat-n-cheese days between the thick bun-y bread pieces of parental cover and adulthood.

Now here we are, graduate-level: the classes smaller, quieter, deeper. Lighting low enough to hint at sophistication, square footage slight enough to imply intimacy.

He separated from the group, probably talking to a girl, one who was definitely not me, maybe taking a piss, maybe getting into a fight with a bouncer, “more fat than tough,” he likely said, always diminished, emasculated, by beefy forearms. He maybe tried to cross a half-frozen river, taking a shortcut, toward the dorms, toward hell, toward a drunken wet sleep of shame where nobody can talk about him without hints of embarrassment. Where his parents barely have energy to pull up the shades, where they drown themselves in cheap beer and ass-grooved sagging lazyboys and daytime television turned loud enough to numb, to drown, maybe. Nobody goes to see them, since the funeral with all the running mascara and makeup wasted on a face that was clearly dead, so what’s the point? And so many of us without funeral attire, that still being for the knowing-things-years.

“What about this? Don’t put anyone out there for the tip-off?”

“The tip!?”

“Just. Concede.”

“Now that’s something…”

Wolfish leers poke like moistened toothpicks at cocktail weiners behind me. It is the cartoon where hunted game morphs into porkchop. And they have fangs, exaggerated drool droplets. Except the porkchop is my butt, my asssz as I’m sure they’ll call it and discuss when they’re outside smoking their Spirits, superior-feeling even in their willful childishness. So thoughtful, with the Native American, them tapping their tit pockets for stashes, thinking themselves like grandfathers, wise. They are sloshy with fourth beer dissolution, about to get messy, a Bond movie 30-minutes in, sideways, slurry. Or else to turn back, to go home to their pizza leftovers and glasses of tepid and unsuccessful hangover-helper waters poured in pint glasses stolen from all of last summer’s beer gardening.

“You take the tip-off off!?”

“That’s what she said!”

They are there after nine, maybe 10 beers, it could be seven, or 11, the distance between possible numbers indicating the intensity of work being done, a kind of toddler focus, counting where close is good enough. Stupid, but almost cute.

Whichever it is it starts looking like I’m not leaving by midnight, and very much like I’m not limiting myself to three cigarettes. As it happens these conversations turn impenetrable, each drink a level on the border fence around deeper meaning and a foreign language, them clinging toward one another as survivors must, as the misunderstood do. A kind of cahoots. Conspiracy, ante’s upping, possible felony counts rising with each sip.

Though I hear bits.

“You’re troubled. You need help. But this is a podiatrist’s office, why’d ya come in here…?”

“...The light was on.”

Always a moth joke. And with this they are going, the one with the beard boulder-rolling his head back, fidgeting palms over knees, entering the batter’s box with a little squint toward the mound, shifting his weight on the balls of feet or whatever little league coaches drone on about. Sated getting-late comfort. The tall one is drinking even faster, talking deeper, chortling. A slight kind of karate chopping of the wood in front to aid annunciation, struggling to get back to that point of understanding each time it might wane, to have it roar right back in laughter.

Rounding the bar I straighten a stool near them — little show of authority, not a democracy, fellas, we’re different seeing as how I have this bar rag sticking out my ass pocket and a bottle opener I keep spinning around on an index finger. Sometimes I head for these breaks and daydream on what could be when I come back — the show on HBO where people have vanished, and I’ll just wipe up and be dazily bummed about the beginning of my work week and the end of the world.

But in truth these are not normal Thursday nighters. The thrust is continuing upward, somehow, propulsed like by that little launch rocket that attaches to space ships to help them reach orbit or whatever and then breaks off. It is not breaking off, just spit-farting fire, holding on for life. A dad about to push and release a toddler on the two-wheeler for the first time, but just running and holding, scared, afraid, unready. Maybe tomorrow I’ll let go? Maybe tomorrow we’ll be done?

Sentences are started with “and, and!...” And, and, hats are taken off and adjusted and plopped back down with intent and gazes fall to dark upper shelf corners and what ifs are what if-ed.

I’ve never seen anyone order two shots of Campari after in-the-ballpark of 10 beers while half-watching an early season baseball game on a school night. Someone has cut the brake lines. Arms crossed and a lean back and then a forward thrust and slap of the bar and now a “now I’m getting thirsty.”

Ricocheting, careening, veering toward another shot, back from a smoke break, patting each other’s backs, hush hush whisper, like co-workers from a retreat where they both saw things go too far for the other — a limbo contest and too many mai tais became blowies on the beach with a local sex worker with six teeth. There were silent contracts forged between glances and now they are linked inextricably, bonded, outlaws of a sort.

“Arby’s has got these nuggets now…”

In unison: “Steak!”

But the character actor outlaws from every Western, of the early scenes, the ones with hair too greasy or teeth too wonked to deserve much narrative. The ones that smoke and leer in bars with flies atop the hats. The less confident but more drunk one props his right elbow on the bar, stares blankly at a space just over my head, trying at conjuring, hoping for the thought to strike an accord with the tongue, a treaty to end this conflict, a detente, or some other word long forgotten from a Junior year history class, the uncertainty between the two sides. “Whiskey. Twooo shots. Please.”

A sublime utterance, the relief of one thousand tough presentations of a rookie statesman washing over his being as the blood should drain away from his face. But, rather, the blood stays, as it’s been creeping since tip off or first pitch or whatever is happening on the tv behind me. He’s drying palms on pants with the sweet deliverance. A duty only for the bold. He turns to the other, who stands behind tapping his cigarettes against palm, forgetting they just had one, the past melding with the future feel of tomorrow, nothing paid toward either. I feel myself do the slide, dish rag in ass pocket the only badge of authority disintegrating to the real powers, the bottles and the proofs and the games, so I go, carefully, willfully, from emcee to casual observer to traffic cop to bouncing between feigned interest and cool reproach. Affable, but, at distance.

Tomorrow they will text each other and Saturday they will text each other about my butt and they will maintain their half-assed mostly feminism because they can self efface, and no one is really an asshole if they can self efface. This is what they tell themselves, as they make jokes about ramming each other’s moms.

“You had the new Taco Bell nacho things yet?…”

“With the cheese!?”

Mike and I go out to smoke while they have something called a “cool-down beer.” Like a Sinatra bit where he’s half talking and half crooning about one for my baby. They use coolant as a metaphor at one point, like it’s a ZZ Top, a Zeppelin. They are moving toward something, some conclusion, the one we all are — they went out with vague notions, half suppositions, presumptions, -tion’s and guessed at hypothetical motives for the court to argue and object over later. Only, really, it all being about putting off the hour of return, of reality, of the non-dreams and clockery. They work toward something in the way a baseball game does, suddenly extended, then tied, then really extended, and then toward infinity, a New Yorker thinkpiece, where you need to flip ahead, all the way forward to the next issue.

Delay it, delay it just enough: the wooden door creek of second floor apartment in a WW2-era building, a partially hunched man darkening, silhouetting the dim hall glow, with his charged loneliness and his drunkard alone smile, the victor returning home, his friends lost at sea, the USS Indianapolis, his stories hardwon, forged in scars, hat brim sweat, reeking of pocketed half-puffed American Spirits.

But first they work toward these last moments when they can speak a little truthful, hoping to get all the things in, lest the regret of later, so familiar — I should have said, I’ll never see him again — might return from where it’s been hidden these last three hours.

Did I tell you about my new guitar? Did I tell you I love you? Did I tell you my mom died? And we’re closing and it’s closing, and on the tv it’s the part of the game where there is no more game, the broadcast just showing two talking heads, two suited middle agers with butt chins and plasticky high wattage smile and barely moving eyebrows and hand histrionics, former ball players, full of conviction: can I explain, what they don’t understand, an authoritative zero doubt “you see here’s what these guys shouldda done… Shoulda, shoulda, shoulda…”

They are up and openly unsticking the cotton hug of sweated and sotted boxers, taking last gulps of warming ales, hoping for last one-liners. Mouths mawed, approaching cobwebby, smacking of bad breath, wits half-buried, side-swiped, partially-scathed in a strongarm car-jacking. Dazed. Hoping maybe I’ll let them stay for another, for another, for another. But the red power button of the Magnavox feels like the hangman’s final word, and I savor it, their soppy disappointment. Mike is on the dimmer switch — a nuclear launch: “turn your key dammit!” — the lights rising now like the sun, the dawn of regret, the final clink of the cash register closing like the cacophony of bandmates laughing while they pack up, as these two lean and exhale wobbily and uncertain, toward walks and Uber’s home, a quarter-considerate of goodnight kisses, doing instead the thing the bros do where they kinda chest hug and make a fist that they dab pat in the middle of each other’s backs. How they all learn those things at the same time a world will never know. A wonder.

But they know, and they do, bidding adieu, proper back-of-the-train politician-y proclamations. Insight has been fully gained: “I like this bar.”

You and the song are gone, ba da, but the melody lingers on. Ba da. Like that. Something like that.

His music is maudlin, muddy, the crackly vinyl sound of the albums you inherit from an uncle who stowed his stuff at grandma’s after the divorce that he never talks about. All slow roll piano and barely perceptible upright bass. And those guitar chords that feel fancy enough to be completely made up, formed by a player with cigarettes visible in chest pocket and a tilt to his hat. Brooding, wailful, Sinatra with the orchestra revving, right before he leans into that too much gear of prideful, macho crooning. When technique and Natalie Wood-wooing libido threaten to take the top off, the earnestness cringey, a bit, necessitating eye contact avoidance. Jazzy Ray Charles playing and looking — oops, no, sorry — casting his eyes up anyhow, toward the ceiling and the space and the ghosts dancing between the billowing smoke.

I see him outside on set breaks, solo leaning against the bricks, protruding the jaw, an album cover moment. James Dean about to get in the car or on the bike or whatever it was that last ride was on, in. Or, this asshole, about to get done with his eighth Spirit stick of the night and thinking about flicking it poetic-like before placing it carefully in the little orange plant pot that overflows with the burnt-out carcasses of laughy drunken outside-bar talks. Going back in for another mid-shelf whiskey. Something with ‘barrel’ in the title but not expensive enough to name the type of wood. We nod on these timeouts of ours. Me from the ninth chords and the 1-6-2-5 and the AABA and the standards and the Hoagy, Hoagy, Hoagy. Him, from his rocks glass. Everyone with different ways to waterboard and pull the fingernails out of the life of themselves. Also, there are pale ales, sometimes, that I see him switch to after being put in his place by the digits on the face of an iPhone.

He almost seems like he wants to say something, sometimes, make an apology, an awkward confession. An admission. Some kind of thing you need to pep talk yourself up for and then stand in front of the target person and grab your own t-shirt and kind of fap it back and forth against your chest to air out anxious perspiration pits. I’m not sure it is this, but I can tell: he owns four jazz albums on vinyl and one is Herb Alpert. Another is Getz and Gilberto — he likes the added exoticism when someone comes over and he gets to get on hunches and pull it out from the Ikea shelf and blow the dust off and tell the story about how Astrid was the only one in the studio who knew English. Everyone loves this story, the knowing of this story.

He’ll approach, eventually, with the rigmarole, the litany, the inquests. Ask how much I practice. Like I’m a hamster on a wheel and he’s been out at work all day and he comes home just shaking his head in wondering disbelief. “Still going, eh, little buddy?...”

He might ask about lessons. Oh, you know he’s been teaching himself. Grandma bought him a Mexican Strat and he played the daylights out of “Daytripper” at his other grandparents 50th wedding anniversary. The band let him sit in and then he smoked a cig out back of the Hilton Days Lodge Inn ballroom with the drummer and he puked a bit on his shoes and felt like Eric Clapton for five days until it was too much work or he got distracted by the pull of masterbating. Or some combination therein.

Or maybe it’s: could I play a party for him? If I could blend in with the wallpaper that’d be ideal, and, like, just keep the vibe right on and, oh, wait, I would expect money?

Or he’ll tell me he knows a guitar player too. A white guy, his cousin, in some place like Columbus. No, the other Columbus. Surely I must know him, or want to hear about him and how he knows him. I’m down. That’s implicit and also what they want to hear me say by way of validation, with hand clasp and dap and pat on the back or hug with pound or whatever they are all doing today that has replaced handshakes and eye contact.

Eventually I’m back at it, the work, Sisyphys but with a toe tap. And everyone likes it because they can resume talking a bit louder than normal to be heard over my strings and my bends and my bullshit and that Duke, Duke, Duke.

I can sense, discern, peripheral vision him, such is his frequency, alone almost always, though sometimes with a buddy who might have a variation on his beard, may be riffing a bit on his hat aesthetic. Blue, orange even. It’s then he’ll do the thing with the histrionic wouldjalookatthatnow upward head nod. Sometimes a back of the hand tap to said buddy’s arm or chest, a silent affirmation, public display of getting it. A celebration of quest and discovery: some remnant scraps of beauty in the hard world. At least late on a Friday after three strong brown-ish red ones in the soft candle glow when the coming blows of tomorrow are not even a rumor.

Perhaps he’s growing on me? With the self-serious face skewing toward an appropriate and vague uncertainty, at least as I’ve grown familiar, sympathetic. The ponderous professor, behind the scenes, at the lounge vending machine, rumpled and overweight and taking his frames off to massage the nose bridge and scanning for flaming hots, just like all the rest of us. Maybe sometimes he goes to New York and sits in a low ceiling cellar in the Village after paying one thousand for a cover and listens to modern piano tinking and doesn’t even feel a need to Instagram about it. Maybe he doesn’t go to the record store every weekend, but he goes, forefinger-scrolling through every letter in the jazz section. Even getting to Lester Young. He puts plenty back, but because he’s poor, not because he can’t handle Monk, the weirdness.

And what do I know, anyways, but scales with names as if made up by pharmaceutical companies, and stolen licks, and chords with the little math equations next to the letter. Setting a vibe I guess mostly my point. An idea, a vague notion of live music, a scheme of a place to be, I am the embodiment of proper young people plans on the weekend. They’ll have to talk louder and less and lean closer to the bartender to order and won’t know the songs, and might need to pirouette around the Gibson’s headstock if they make way to the hall leading to the bathroom. Afterward some will have to stand around all cumbrous, grinning gallantly, the soft deference of an extra appendage, while their dates look to talk to me in some kind of identity performance. I know that man. The man with the sacred tool amongst us.

There’s a playfulness at the corner of his mouth you can only see from up close, especially under the street light in faded flannel and midweek beard funneling smoke up toward heaven like a tortured Blue Note shot. Then there’s maybe a soft throaty reverberation, of a hum downshifting, one you can just make out when you catch him alone out there. Softly the Adam’s apple pulling up a tune black-and-white and hard-to-place romantic. Bogart on TCM when you’re flipping through a guideless hotel room TV and catch just a glimpse. Maybe it’s something I’ve just played.

Potential birthed in the air between our ears. Like across-the-street tree branches, close but distant, both. Eye-balling one another, forever sharing in the same sound bath of passing cars. How about that?.. ‘nother Nissan huh?...

Tonight he’s still humming, almost whistling, loose like a patrol on a well known beat, twirling a benign baton, seemingly testing the give of each moment. A getaway driver kneading and mawing the stick shift of his thrust. A warm contemplation has been growing with each sip, with each middle finger drumbeat he plays on the bartop. A failed philosopher is the only kind that knows anything. And by the time we’re outside, together, again, it feels one well struck match away from comradeship, possibly.

But we angle and bob and weave, stare at space, glance at phones, flick off cherries, absentmindedly flick off nothing at all, just jittery finger Turrets, we paw-stroke goatees and ponder, probably, if it’s appropriate for putoff calls back. But no, just a deep quiet space heavy blanketing the streetlight. And two medium men on the sliver of concrete between the door and the traffic, delightful hazy purgatory, not leaving, certainly staying, forever, maybe. Biding time. Cigarettes smell at once like regret and promise, a generational mistake and the most complete affirmation of being alive. A fuck me and a fuck you.

I sort of like the nearly purposeful slouch to the shoulders, a resignation of a kind only found in post game interviews of losers, black-and-white photos of men in flatcaps on steel beam lunch breaks, a city around them still to be built. But what are ya gonna do? Dwarfed, but already timeless, a sort of living ghost.

“Sound good tonight.”

A giving, end-of-week warmth. Strange echoes of a smooth strut and dad coming home, earlier than normal, a slowness and the little extra sauce of a man with a sweating brown bag dangling from his hand, grease pooling and spreading on the bottom in the shape of a hard to identify South American country. A pay day swagger. The too-rare good afternoon of playing the ponies. Where I’d have to go to bed early but there’d be a soft glow about the house for a bit that rang with the crackle of a hi-fi mixed with a tinkle of ice in rocks glasses and mom laughing and suddenly donning lipstick and them not even paying attention to how much drumstick skin I peel off to let sit and marinate and exfoliate salt in my mouth.

“Thanks boss.” I tip my hat or I sort of think to tip my hat. And now a group is spilling out on the sidewalk and we’re not alone and there is revelry and chatter and buzz about a new place doing old cocktails and something about a spot with plates so small they are barely perceptible.

“Stardust? I like that. Those chords…” He’s doing almost a fistpump, like I converted a big third down late, like I’m his pride-worthy spouse that got the promotion. He lets the statement hang.

“Appreciate that, man.” Taken back and disarmed and instinctively flexing and running my left fingers and calling back those Friday nights when the chicken grease would be doused off with water that was meant for teeth, but was just run in the bathroom long enough to placate them getting drunk downstairs. They turned the music up and the talk turned to murmurs and the laughs gained a high pitched type of hoping desperation. Yes I will brush my teeth, yes I will say my prayers, but they are barely listening, dad going for the Coltrane with the singer and baritone ballads, and me to the Epiphone in my bedroom with the janky strings that I will make sing. And I’ll find the sequence, and I will always find the root. Like that I’m back to when it’s fresh, and the beginning of a night and the beginning of a pack and the end of a week and the tuneful start of something.

And his shadow extends out onto the street now, passing Nissan’s trampling the dark silhouette unknowingly. And he’s growing before my eyes and almost smiling, and he’s asking me something: “Can I buy you a drink?”

He’s saying something about a star load, or a loading star, or loaded star, and about Dink or Dick or Dirk or somebody’s big, big, big deal running all the way to the Super Bowl or the Final Four or the Final Fantasy championship. He asked me to stay a minute after practice, and I knew my dad would be in the car with the Beach Boys on and waiting to give a soft fist bump and take me home where there would be Gil swimming by the door and mac n’ cheese after my backpack went in the hallway closet — after he yelled at me to move the backpack, after I let it fall on the floor as soon as I walked through the door. Sweet liberation. “Liberation!” It’s a fun word. And I think I use it right, but mom usually just starts to laugh, over the stove, and dad starts in with a, “Soooophie…” And then he goes into the bit about my floored backpack.

But, we’re here, “just a minute, just a minute, I wanna show you one something.” And he’s kinda sweaty, and kind of red. Beat red, I think mom might call it, and beats are real gross. He takes a sip from the metal thermos thing he always takes a sip out of before the big pre-practice speech about tryings and strivings and ball movement. Now he’s looking for words that aren’t there and is more excited than he’s been all practice and he’s drinking and huffing and saying… “Fadeaway… one foot… left foot… explode back…”

It’s kind of like in slow motion like when the giraffes bend down to eat grass at the zoo. Except he’s not giraffe-like. He’s short, or at least shorter than dad, and bald, way balder, and a bit bell-ish in shape, like that time we walked into Tsunami and he was alone at the bar and he didn’t see me, just kept talking to the bartender, but talking with his pointer finger almost. And his gut was hanging forward and I’d never seen him so out of place, so seated, so offseason. Such a color. Crimson, or, lava-y, kind of. And just like that he is going down to the hardwood and his face is cranberry sauce and the bald head is leaking tears and I’m not sure that’s the right way to do a fadeaway. Or a fader, or whatever it’s called.

I wonder for a second if he is broken. If his back is broken. Or if it’s maybe the tendon thing in the back of the leg that dad is always holding after a run, or before playing basketball, and going, “not today, friend, just hold tight…” Rubbing feet through socks.

But something is wrong and Coach is down.

And he looks at me like he’s been caught. Busted. Like when mom looks at the recycling bin on some mornings and kinda looks at dad while he sips coffee and holds his head over the steam. Like when I asked dad why Santa’s handwriting looked the same as his handwriting.

And Coach is kind of half-smiling, from his back on the floor. Looking a little liberated, maybe? Looking like mom and dad when we go in their bedroom and it’s Saturday morning and they aren’t gonna move no way, no how. “No way, no how,” is what they say — not having to set the alarm as the best thing in the whole wide world, apparently, somehow. And I want to help him up, do our little handshake. I want to see him on his way. He probably needs dinner, maybe a bandaid. Maybe he needs to hear me say “walk it off, walk it off, Champ,” like he’s always saying when somebody bites it going through a screen. But he just stays there, like, he’s done? And he smiles up, looking heated like my face feels when I have to give a class presentation. And he gives a big thumbs up.

He thinks I don’t speak English. Always with his bullshit gracias’ and clasping his hands together like in silent bowing prayer and I swear to god one time he asked me about vosotros. Hands in the air, don’t shoot me, or more like, don’t shoot me.

His lot has been aggrieved by public education foreign language conjugation charts. Brown people as a calculus problem. Ricky Martin or Richie Valens the ambassador. Tacos the talisman. His Instagram evidence of southside hero journeys toward exotica, cultural caloric wisdom sought with bilingual bravery, professorial curiosity, brows furrowed. They learn, or memorize, thinking themselves worldly so they can spout some swear words and get Jorge at the timeshare in Puerto Vallarta to smile in vindication and now he can come here with his big empty gut hope for suadero and chorizo and carbon and uno — “is it un or uno?” — pescadero, and pastor, pastor, pastor.

One time he ordered 10 tacos, like he had lost, or won, a bet. A knowing embarrassment. Occasionally he will dabble in a special, but with a side of two chorizo tacos. Sometimes he gets a torta and three tacos and then asks for the menu back, mid-meal, signaling with finger for me to hold up, with mouth full of bitter salty michelada. Smoky rojo salsa drip in his beard like the wall of a Law & Order crime scene. Guilty, motherfucker.

He is too late for lunch and too early for dinner. The ambiguous epoch of the unemployed, the freelancers, the ones with stained — and not today’s stains — hoodies. Calorie outlaws. They are all sweats and baseball hats and worn Nikes and beards that have long ago been committed to, scorned, committed to because of the scorn.

He’s been here enough, certainly seen Cheers, understands sociological third spaces and idealizes himself a regular. And so he beard strokes and goes with the tacos — the suadero, so often with the suadero. At first he seemed just to like to say it. Swwah… Showing off, trying it out, maybe he’d been to Cancun in college. Maybe he’d studied it solely because of that girl with the legs. And now he’d say it with not completely awful pronunciation and a semblance of gratitude and a quest for absolution. A secret hope of reward for the perfect order. In his mind: an ask, an invitacion, for him to come to my grandmother’s house, on Sunday, Domingo, where she cooks it just right, old country style. He is welcome, seeing as how he’s a great appreciator, a noble man, a worthy gabacho at last.

Coming in off the wind on Lincoln, last week’s newspapers swirling in his wake of the open door with the welcoming ding, he’ll sit with a sense of purpose, duty almost. The scrunched brows next to crow’s feet wrinkles make an age guess one of those unwinnable carnival games. Boyish, but broken. Someone who has been around, then back again. Assuming the quiet gaze that in your 20’s seems poetic, but then, later, is tainted with bad and bitter and wreck. 40 seemed close, 45 wouldn’t have been unreasonable. In the suburbs of middle age. As tired as hungry, and very hungry. “Voracious” is a word that comes echoing back from some ACT or SAT or standardized behind-a-desk rigmarole. “Slathered” was another word, though I couldn’t think of why. His clothes seem slathered around his back, bunched up about the neck, an old flannel, a hoodie, a shirt jacket thing, somehow both sloppily and carefully applied. Like salsa right before a bite. Fleeting hope then real greased shits.

His life seems splayed like an endless analogy of eating.

Everything reeks of laziness, rumpled sheets in broken blinds-darkened rooms. Necessary and continued effort to get away from what was right behind him, what was always sneaking up, trickling through consciousness — mostly the wake of Saturday night and her worst decisions. Everything in his shoddy kingdom just enough to push and prod him up out of bed, across the floor, into the door-darkening and taco-ordering slivers of untucked days.

Though it seems he’s had tucked days too, just maybe not enough, of late. Either way he has likely always been bad at ironing.

And he probably still wore his father’s suit to weddings, if there were any more weddings. He probably still got excited about open bars. Dewar’s. White. He doesn’t know if there are other varietals. He would always have some quip about his “dancing juice.” This is when he’d loosen his tie and pop his top button and exhale long and nasal and free like the moment the plane door opens and you’ve arrived. His favorite movie was something from the 40’s or 50’s he liked a bit and had seen through almost twice.

To say he’d let himself go was generous. As if he’d had control, hold, agency. Agency! As if he were an advertising firm. An office in a business park full of ambition and upright in-at-8-ers hustling to, fro, with manila envelopes, not even letting the elevator door open all the way before they’re out, on. He’d shown agency indeed, a great act of emancipation from inhibitions. Also, from societal restrictions: real pants, sensibility, the notion, ever, of “perhaps I’ve had enough.”

Nobody is coming for him. Though he looks up and over — from the tortilla chips and their salty snapping backtalk, the locust background din of the place; from hunchy over-table focus, the shoulder scrunched workiness of solo dining; from phone; from corner-mounted off brand Japanese TV scrolling with bright but fading colors of yesterday’s games — to see who might be ringing the soft bells. That customer arrival clang. He looks often enough — another family, another pickup order, another late-starter or never-bloomer or sick-day-taker — to start to believe, even himself, that there would be someone.

A friend? A presence at least. An upright entity worth more than a glance. To give a nod and a chin raise and eyebrow arch of familiarity. That subtle spark of recognition, otherness from all the others. A shared history of bullshits and bars and that Allman Brothers show where you both got paranoiac high but were OK side-by-side. Blue skies. An exhale and lean back, to begin with the rat-a-tat and the nothingness. To claim a piece of the swirling aural atmosphere of the joint.

Not today. The midweek currents were likely carrying any of his cohorts toward their screens. Maybe even double-screens. Them, with their professional pants and manilla folders of import and seriousness. And solid wood desks under which to hide legs and appetites and their true nature.

His nature leaks grease. Like an old, or maybe ‘ol, Chevy. You can tell where it was parked. Ghost-shaped AC fluid stain on concrete, though it has no AC. The line between the pool and pool deck, the liquid going down the gullet or out the backend of the plate. Or like a lava flow down his hand toward the ulna bone. An amber cesspool, with rain-droppy sparkles highlighting the gray spots of chin whiskers. But perpetual engrossment, a consummation all day in the making. His napkin seeming to owe him a very large sum of money, such is its physical distance.

It’s like watching one of those sci-fi things where the mother alien finally finds her baby and the viewer feels equal parts revulsion and tenderness. Or like a nature program capturing the mating of something foreign and strange from a faraway land you’ll never see, being narrated by an Australian. The caracal of the (hard to understand) jungle must paw the docile tortilla shell in order to achieve erection.

It’s almost humorous, almost necessitating privacy. He cocks his head to the side as if in slightly demented pre-prayer formation. And then it is flowing, spurting. There’s a samba-ish rhythm to the back-and-forth groove of red salsa, then green, alternating with each bite, right, then left, then right.

I feel like going to get Julio, elbow nudging him, having him look through the swinging door’s little ship window. Your own mother, your own goddamn mother, couldn’t appreciate those knife and flattop skills like this gabacho. On number four now. Not coming up for breath, going toward town, and a very large town at that — with one of those big and old city centers of commerce and buddily grouped little restaurants. Cleaning his plate, not playing with his food. All the tropes, the goddamn mother tropes.

The test results are in and it’s good news. Or, all bad news. I’m afraid you have it. You have everything! And now, dammit, you must live. Red and green — together in one bite!

There I am, leaning against the formica, maybe thankful for surprise entertainments like this, distracting little screenplays of drama and hidden backstory and plainly presented mother issues. And there he is, with shits no longer given, forgotten to even be considered.

He will take a Jarritos “uhhh, para ver por favor.” The big dolt idiot, thinking himself slick.

He looks around, leans toward the wall, scoff laughs to himself as he scoots a tiny flask from hoodie pocket and pours more than a children’s dose of clear liquid into the top of the bottle. He swishes it around with a quiet sense of victory, feeling achieved as a chemist suddenly. The Jonas Salk of his own sadness.

Paying, with more gracias’, with nods, with that cute stoop smile demeanment of those attempting a foreign language. With attempts at normal smiles too and suddenly the flourish of a man with places to be. He swings his Jarritos both boldly and carefully, like a boarding pass. He holds a hand over gut and hoodie pocket, as if protecting a baby, as if nursing appendicitis. And with a look back, near apologetic, for his being, for his way, with head bowed slightly, there is one more gracias before he exits into the wind and gray. Turning and sipping, walking up Halsted, now with head held high. Or, at least, up.

When the new nacho line comes out, you go. Sometimes, maybe, it’s seasonal. Or a new ethnicity — Trinidadian, perhaps? Tobogoan? A commendable crossover fusion cultural appropriation effort. Sometimes there’s guac — now, with GUAC! There might be crispy chicken strips. Or chicken strips that look crispy in high-def, late at night when home lonely, but which really yield with the sogginess of endangered marshland. Or there is red dye five lava dust — a flicker from a capsaicin fairy. Or there is a type of crimson-flecked molten cheese sauce so dangerous, so bad-girl-alluring, that a different language needs to be evoked to capture the fiery essence. Inferno. Diablo. Peligrosooo.

You bee line or zip line or as-the-crow-flies to your favorite location. You go when you’re drunk or when you’re hungover, or in the purgatorial in-between, on nights at, or close enough to the end of the week, for it to feel deserved. To earn the bowel-loosening, to lament the shit-feel of not-20’s-anymore, maybe not-even-30’s-anymore, when the alcohol sits in the brainstem for a while longer the day after, announces itself in little moaning crinkle waves with each roll of the neck. You go on Saturdays, on the weekend waystation of decision-making, letting and willing everything to point your person toward a fully-gassed couch sleep.

This is the alcohol-slicked jist, as I can tell. She’s explaining someone’s viewpoint. Someone. But she’s also sort of pleading, for her own understanding, for cognizance. With the handsy histrionics and balloon-voice of Diane Keaton, a driving fidgetiness of everyone’s mother-in-law after two too many vino’s on Christmas eve. Flighting, fleeting, exasperated, huffing. Scooping at the air with an open hand, hoping to shovel reason, sense, in, on the next inhale. Hers is an of course disappointment not of a single mistake or even a series of mistakes, but of a lifelong one, divided and parceled for repeat daily consumption.

So it goes and so it goes. And they all come to my bar and bitch, bitch, bitch. About the one they chose to spend their life with. And they slurp from a stemmed glass of olive-accented and caustic mistake juice — one I’ll have Mike make, as he loves how ladies clock his triceps during the garish shake shake shakes. A glass frosty with piston-y lubrication potential. They softly oooh and hold heads over fingers thoughtfully as drinks get placed with practiced pizzaz.

Not that there’s anything wrong with assuagement. The slickening of a mired, raging throat. Swallow this to swallow that — that being the world. A little glass of water or a little glass of whiskey to help get it all down the hatch. The hatch so often a gaping, vomitous, bilious receptacle. Burned and burning and ornery. A throat hole that can’t wait for the slug down so it can belch. And then say one more thing. “Oh and another thing…”

Yes, he likes Taco Bell. Yes, yes, he let you down. Yes, he drinks and eats too much, with vigor unseen elsewhere in this life since, well, the time in hell and that great freezing rain sleet snowstorm. With an appetite beyond biological, born of emotion, at once for feeling something and for a complete shock-and-awe burndown, a nuking, a quick funeral hymn and then burial of all feelings. To set those bastards six feet below. Under bitter hops and wing sauce with butter and fried chicken crisp sandwich fast foodery. The stuff with the fallout that burbles and groans and grumbles and pffffts and grrrrrrhs. Indigestion as obfuscation, sweet distraction. The little oomphs squeezing to the surface. Protesting ghosts forcing up and out and out and out from those rolls of hope-abandoned middle-aged midsection.

A coaster flicked atop the oak, a drink set theatrically and look-at-me importantly, backlit. Soliloquy time, a throat clear, ahhem. For this duration of the job, the presentation, the curtain pulleys up and you get your moments, little setting scenes where you dance.

Then they are back within their little night-out whisper.

“Did I tell you about the time he goes down to the basement to watch a game?”

“Always with the basement. With the gam-eehhh.”

“Yeah. But listen. This is last winter. He goes to the basement for the game, a game, some game.”

“Ok. Game. Yeah?”

“He’s down there for two fucking days.”

“What. Yer exaggerating. Like… whaddyou mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Passed out?”

“He’s yelling the whole fucking time.”

“About…?”

“Perfect game, playoff game, prefecture game, prevent defense game…”

“What?”

“Exactly. I don’t know what the fuck…”

You snatch a glimpse. Can feel the screenwriter of the whole thing a few rows back, coming to take the temperature of the crowd, nervously leaning forward, second guessing himself with a grimace. And then you move away. You get a pulse and lower eyes and pat your thigh purposefully and sort of sidestep sashay over to the next patron. Somebody else wants a beer. Somebody else will have quiet desperations of not quite so much desperation. You get a vague sense while pretending to busy hands and then actually busy hands with the cleaning of glasses. The din and drum and waves of conversation like a notion of a weather report for a country you’ve no notion of visiting.

Still, I gather details, holding them like the sticks a toddler hands you importantly on a walk around the block.

Yes, details: This certain someone fucks in a way of strident proving, as if his high school coach were standing in the corner, urging him on with a scowl, whistle dangling from neck, hands on knees, glancing at the stopwatch he cups sweatily in left hand. And one time he fell down at the bar. Another time he fell down, at the same bar. One time he never came home. She called and called, while he laid there on Jack or John or whoever the fuck she didn’t even want to think about’s couch, passed, snoring and drooling and waking with pained confusion — but not even close to an adequate amount of shame. And he’s not allowed on the grade school premises anymore. And he’s not allowed in the high school gym that used to serve as home court to the grade school basketball team, which he used to coach, before the incident where they had to send the old man with the ridiculous over-sized push mop. A janitor mopping and head-shaking: the old two step.

You feel spittly whiffs and wafts and hear snippets and you nod with of course empathy, you feign understanding, you say things: “heard,” “know what that’s like.” But you don’t really hear and you definitely don’t know what this is like.

“He told my favorite aunt to suck his dick.”

“So…”

“My grandmother’s funeral. She’s speaking Spanish.”

“Well, he’s trying.”

“He goes, no mames.”

“Which is…”

“Suck my dick.”

“Well he was trying...”

“Suck my dick…”

They laugh. They toast and waffle. They start on third martinis, a danger zone even for those of us on the other side. Even those of us who possess the churchkeys and the bar rags we wear over shoulders like badges. Like the stripes of important officers.

The snow is on their furs like the third act of an arctic adventure. The jury leans forward in closing argument anticipation. A doctor points to a spot on a hung-up X-ray with his pen of doom. She is un-spearing olives so they float in the glass like little buoys, warning of currents and maybe sharks.

“Did I tell you about the nacho menu thing?”

I move down the bar but can still sense it, ascertain, the carcass smell still wafting on the air. Feel the peripherals and margins and the dark sketches and the outlines, see the body chalk after the coroner leaves but before anybody comes to truly clean up the mess. With the industrial bleach and hoses.

It seems there are times that he might go. Ghost — out for cigarettes in the way of the proverbial dad. Stoked, inspired by a type of sports movie halftime speech inspiration. A sophomore of hormone and hoo rahs and movie score strings suddenly swelling. Shouldery swaggering through the night, toward the night.

But, in his case, it may have been a fast food commercial: A pitch-perfect friend group laughing in sync, with their haircuts and Adam’s Apple’s and bagged food and ambiguous racial makeups and perfect teeth of not-at-all yellow. They are histrionically mawing tacos on the hood of a car. Joshing, gesticulating, jamming on the peculiar singularity of this night, the trajectory of a teenage life, this particular cardboarded taco pack bursting with music and camaraderie. See them: suddenly frolicking in a metaphoric or imagined waterfall of cheese sauce. A waterfall high above gaping mouths, dripping in some sort of Pavlovian or Freudian call for oral defloration. Except, it is queso sauce, perhaps chile con queso sauce, a completely different shade of pale yellowy molten magma. Now dropping from a soup spoon in slow-mo seduction, showing the behind-curtains kitchen work.

And so he went. So he’s always gone, heading for the border in a sodium-leaning fever trance. Harkened by the bellowing bell, forgetting, or what-could-happen philosophizing. Rationalizing, abandoning tact and the basic playbook of parenting.

Their three-year-old had been left, alone, sleeping, not knowing, dreaming of butterflies, zebras, what have you. Nothing ever happens. Nothing will happen, or — more aptly, what could happen? You leave the door unlocked but you’ll be right back. How often are there fires? Serious falls? What could happen?

Then they are back to the moment, to the plugging and playing of the internet juke box, from the phone like the youngs of privilege and wifi and no need for get-up. Rooted to their swively chairs, distractedly fixated. Anchored to a stool by the misery and by the comfort the base of the bar gives. Tentacled down in the magic buttons of their palms from which they can needle and nudge and prod and disseminate and question and misunderstand and manipulate the world around.

He likes to go to Taco Bell. And what’s the big deal? What could happen?

Everything’s alright. Sure, thumbs up, why not? It’s really just lots and lots of grass and a bunch of stones. The highway seems far but you can hear it like it’s close, whirling and whirring and snaking and getting loud all at once, like when he watches a scary movie downstairs after I go to bed and he thinks I’m asleep, or like when he listens to the guy with the long curly hair who always has a shirt that is never buttoned and his chest hair roars out and he sings a little bit like a girl and kinda like he’s yelling and kinda like pain. And there are tears. Dada tears. Dada tears are the kind of real big ones like the kind of sudden rain that hurts your arms in the summer, ones that he called “crocodile tears” one time after he said he never cries, but I remembered wrong and called them “gorilla tears,” because that’s the animal he reminds me of when he’s got that weird A-shaped undershirt on and he’s always scratching his chest and yawning.

Gorilla tears. That’s what we call them now. It’s funny. And there’s that weird kind of boogery snorting galumph thing where I think he’s not crying and then I look when we’re sitting criss-cross applesauce and I can hear the piano come in from the car real loud behind us, and his cheeks are all glistening like he just ran up and down the court. But there’s no ‘hardwood’ here, as he always calls it, and no ball, and not really anything but a lot of quiet and feelings that bubble up like the one time he let me have cherry Coke sitting at the bar on the plasticky stool and burping and it was so, so sweet.

But there’s all this empty space from forever until the highway snakes in and there could at least be some swings. One teensy slide where Dada will chase me up and I’ll find a defensive hitting stick and I’ll whack from a safe high distance until he covers his eyes like a shield and then suddenly he’ll get serious and go: “watch the eyes, watch the eyes.” And I’ll say “How can you watch your eyes!?” And then we’ll laugh again. Instead he just wants to sit like this till he goes “oomph, my knees,” cuz his knees hurt and he’s gotta adjust himself and straighten his legs and grab his back and the side where the rolls push out the fabric of his hoodie and his button shirt like when you squeeze the side of a water balloon. And I look down for a second and he’s suddenly kind of laughing at himself from under the tears then he’s almost smiling and it’s confusing.

Now he’s cracking a fizzy can of beer. But it’s different this time — he doesn’t breathe out windy and long like he does when he cracks a beer when we get in the car on Friday’s after school. He doesn’t have the little smile to himself like when we get to the beer garden and he puts his feet up on the bench and goes ahhhhhh like movie characters do whenever they get to put their hands behind their head and feet up. One foot over the other. He sits thinking, brushing grass off his legs, and takes a big sip, but then he’s pouring some on the ground, and then he’s placing the rest of the can atop a stone.

“Pour some out for our homie, dada?”

“That’s right, baby. Pour some out for our homie.”

It feels almost like a play. There are actors up on the stage, talking loud and sure and remembering, somehow, what to say. When he brings me here I feel like I’m in it, like I got an allowance raise or a gold star for a perfect score or I made a basket in the back alley and he actually wasn’t distracted looking down at his phone — watching some huge sweaty guys play basketball, of all things. Grown up time, where Kaya and Maya and Lyla and Layla and Jebadaya and all of Miss Emily’s class wouldn’t have a clue. I have lines, a part to do, a roll I very much don’t want to mess up.

“Daduuhhh….?”

“Yesssuhh?”

“Are we gonna gooo…. tooo…?”

“Don’t say it…”

“Toooo….”

“Don’t say it!’

“Taco Bell!”

“No. Don’t say it!...”

“The Taco Bell with the ice cream shop!!!”

“Ahhh!”

“Ahh!”

Every time at the place with the grass and the stones I know he’ll get gooey and soft and Teddy-ish by the time we leave. Beer spits on his beard and mustache like when he comes back in from shoveling in a big storm and goes wooooh boy by the door and stomps his boots like he’s back from a great battle. And that’s when I can get him: When he wants to take a nap or thinks he can take a long sit on the toilet or do something as a little reward because he did enough, his chores, his gold star always presented to himself by himself, from the fridge and soundtracked by a fizzy pop and then a gulp. Then there is the single finger dragged across the top lip, the motion that he is warming it up, almost to form a smile, maybe. Like when he took me to the museum and made fun of the eskimos and then we stopped in a bar across the street because he said he needed to use the phone. But he has a cell phone, and he didn’t even look at it anyways, and there wasn’t even a phone there either. He just sat at the bar and joked with the bartender lady who gave me quarters to play the pinball in the corner and then when I looked back up at them he was poking a finger into a donut hole he was forming with his other hand and she looked kinda red and kinda like how mama looks at me after I surprise her by trying to put on her lipstick from the bathroom. Or like when he took me to the playground and made fun of the two-year-old who spun around on the whirly thing and fell down and cried, and then he sat on a bench and let out a big “alllllllright” and got his foot up on over his knee and drank something, something secret I guess because it was in a brown paper bag.

These are the after times when I know he’s gonna give, like jello, like yogurt, like sherbet in the backyard sun in July. It’s like how he gets when we’re watching Charlie Brown right before Christmas and he drinks from his coffee cup in a strange way, in a way like the coffee isn’t hot at all and he’s crying a bit, and can’t wait, and does the slurping like the kinda slurping he always tells me not to slurp like.

And then he starts on one of his third sip speeches.

“Baby, I’m entering the phase of life where when people talk about me, they say: ‘He’s having a hard time.’”

“Yeah. They say that.”

“They say: ‘he’s going through some things.’”

“Yep. I always picture you, like, uh, going through a wall.’”

But he’s not hearing, just looking off like there’s a hardwood game on a TV in the corner of the bar. Except we’re outside and he seems to have forgotten I’m here at all.

“They say, ‘he’s a real piece of shit.’”

“Ooooh, dada…”

There’s a Taco Bell and an ice cream place, a Basket Robbers I think it’s called, and the two of them are neighbors, best friends, meant to be, pals on a daddy daughter day date — like us. He’ll get the tacos, sometimes the special bright red ones that crackle and crumb like the sidewalk in front of his new apartment building. And there will be that familiar crinkling wrinkle of the paper and him ripping at and wrestling with the top of tiny packets of lava-colored sauce and sitting in the front seat turning his head to the side, chomping, crumpling, smacking, crunching, balling up a napkin in his fist, now adding hot stuff like nothing in life is ever juicy enough, fancy enough, rolling and squeezing like it’s the end of the toothpaste tube and he’s gonna get every drop, dabbing the corner of his mouth, but missing the mess because it’s not on the mustache or beard but whatever it’s called that connects the two. Chewing like a cartoon gator wearing a bib. Studying his pants and going argghhh. Remembering me and going mmmmmh. Glancing in the mirror, trying to share the moment with an ehhh? Before squinting and staring out the front window like he’s seeing how far into the future he might glimpse.

And finally we’re at the next drive thru and he doesn’t even mind that I’m kicking his seat.

“Dada, when we get the ice cream, should we pour some out?”

And he smiles at this. He takes his baseball hat off and scratches the side of his head and I can see the corner of his grin in the rearview mirror, the little garage door he always hides his teeth behind is up, the gray and black of his beard is the little scruffy driveway shrubbery. The chompers are out and they are naked and bare and they are almost white, not quite yellow. And he pulls his hat back down. Tight at first, and then he loosens it and tilts it gentle to the side, like Koko, or Bozo, or someone.

“Yeah. Let’s pour some out.”

The first time I was ever called lardass, a bit rudely I’d say — none too jocular, no joshing smirk, not a wink or redolent of a smartaleck or a “get a load of this guy” elbow to the ribs — I was angling my teeth’s way through a late-night cheesesteak with a now-dead uncle. Elbows on the table, arms near 90-degrees, like they taught us at summer basketball camp. Minding structural integrity, like the guy that blueprinted the twin towers. First day security guard cognizance of the backdoors, of the side exits on the steamboat-like loaf and gnashed ribeye and goopy smackets of cheese-ish substance. I shouldn’t have worried much about fallout: the table itself had heard the bomb sirens and taken cover. With that kind of plasticky tablecloth, and those kind of seasonal doily-edge placemats you find at all grandma houses. Especially during the holidays.

Actually this was the holidays. And in fact this was my grandmother’s house. Really, my grandmother was the one. The one who had shuffled, waddled, thin nightie dangling around arm skin flab hang. Through the winter night and the dark, over thick living room carpet, bravely, to shatter the peace, to pull the pin and lob the offensive our way: “Lardasses.”

My then-alive uncle had been talking through his mustache, it seemed, the hair wisps wearing gray streaks like a Home Depot paint sample you might try out on the guest bedroom wall. His mouth did all the meaty business on its own accord. He was making takes. Annunciating with his pinkie extended over the top of the sandwich. Like the way Emily Post or an uptight aunt would teach you to extend a pinkie over a teacup sip. Except the exact opposite. Molson bottles before us sweated as if under interrogation. Which in a way, suddenly, they were. Charged, indicted, the accusation hung over the whole of the chewy half-drunk room.

Just saying it, shooting the shot, gave her a kind of victory. Up from the foxhole, out of the sniper… what? What does a sniper have? A nook? A den? Something cozy within which to retreat in a nightgown and dream of its well-known dead. Whatever the battlefield metaphor for really hurting. Emerging and striking. From the dark, from a place unexpectedly close.

Lardass. What is that and where did an 80-something take it and memorize and digest it into the vernacular and brain swirl of vocabulary and all that forgotten mush?

Now that she’s done and gone, the now-dead uncle long since dead, now with those sandwiches finished and flushed and again longed for, I look back at such a moment with a soft-focus clarity: Do any of us know what we look like? To everyone else? Our appetites and our accumulations and our griefs and a bottle always at arm’s reach, like a baby. And our hoagies and heroes and grinders. And our sartorial givings-up? Occasionally you flutter above like a drone, the blimp shot outside the sports arena. Like the disappointed ghosts of every ancestor who went to every war in the European theater. Who now float and watch us sit on the toilet with our phones in our hand while our children fall down stairs they didn’t see because they were looking at a phone in their hand.

Perpetual Stew is a book about that. Not that, exactly, but the series of thats. That moment where you kind of catch an unexpected, unwanted glimpse of your reflection in a sausage shop window as you pass, see the glut of your gut, misshapen, the weird jut of saggy jaw, the hat at a lazy angle over fallen-out hair. The invisible sum of bads that have piled up on the shoulders and overtaken the goods. The whatever-your-age years that have beaten and shushed all that was promised to come in that long-ago high school graduation speech.

What influencers call mindfulness, maybe.

Perpetual Stew. Forever soup. A never-extinguished fire cooking a brew, of sorts, all the day long. And the day after that too. Heartening, rib-sticking. Murky mucky broth base upon which you just keep adding, and adding, and adding — whatever you find, whatever crosses your mind, the flavor of the moment, what a neighbor dropped off, some leftover 70-30 ground beef from taco night, your one-time dream of filling a page with something maybe not bad, not too bad to someone. Tallow, whatever that is. On a constant simmer and never emptied. The fare of a medieval inn, where the cook eyes you suspiciously and a hush falls upon the joint as you enter out of the winter night of dragons and maidens and such. Bits of tubers, bobbing, and the decades of regret, all rough-chopped, tossed in. Next to the celery, like we’re on Food Network, the host of pure teeth and magnetism talking about how this is how her grandmother used to do it. A medley that never tastes the same from one bite to the next, and never fills you up. And it probably needs more salt. But, oh, how thirsty you get.

In this case, as the last surviving witness to the scene, I can reassign and realign and recontextualize the conversation. I can victim-blame, lionize, scrape together receipts and kindle them into a rugged brush of noble, wise fire. Upon which I stand and scope and poke at the logs, and remember how I did it just right. Or, maybe it was my now-dead uncle. Maybe we said something together, familial, something proud, something collective. Or calm, non-judgmental, un-reactive. Like all the sure, sure, I did that checkboxes of my stoicism worksheets from my court-appointed therapist with the furrowed brows and with the notes. The perpetual notes.

Or, maybe, it was just funny.

I think I took a sip or I definitely took a sip. He took a sip. Maybe I took another. Then one of us said it: “takes one to know one.”

This is a book about the sound of the clink of our bottles cheers-ing in that exact stupid smiling moment.

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