Tom shifted in the seat, the stiff plastic meant to imitate leather creaking beneath him and digging into the bare skin below the hem of his shorts, “You see what I’m saying though, right?” He raised his brows with both expectation and emphasis to the man across from him. “If our fathers had just been more willing to express their faults, rather than exaggerate their victories...”

The man glanced over his shoulder, acknowledging him from behind mirrored glasses, “No I get it,” The man nodded, “It’s like... fuck, just tell me how it really is... instead of spinning me up on this fairytale I’m supposed to... what, be? fulfill? Whatever...Then you’re there, did your best and it’s not the fairytale. I get it. Fed a line of bullshit.”

“Exactly!”, Tom shifted in his seat, rubbing his thumb against his wrist; the tension and the gravity somehow soothing in this interaction. Skin on skin. Friction and warmth. “We do it to ourselves and we pass it along – moral herpes. I can learn from what you fucked up. Give me the fucked up, feed me, educate me so I can mitigate it! But if everything is so artificially polished in the aftermath...?”

The man tossed his sunglasses on the seat next to him, rubbing the bridge of his nose in both habit and thoughtfulness, “Then life is just a trophy, right? Some bar that was set – an ideal to be chased and revered? But never fucking honest.”. The man deftly retrieved his glasses, quickly composing and quietly articulating, “Yeah, feels like everything’s a three-legged race; County Fair shit. You’re always tied to this person who, no matter how well you can do on your own, rules of the race, you carry their burden too.”.

“Corn dogs and Conscience.” Tom smirked, “Backlit by a cosmic glow of neon lights and celestial drifters with rigged games. Still fun though, if you take it for what it is.”

“Stomach Aches and Stuffed Plushies?” The man flashed a genuine smile back, “Non-licensed of course; knock off Garfield.” He tapped a cigarette loose from the soft pack on the dash, lighting it “The American Dream turned Legacy.”

The subtle crackle of the tobacco smoldering in its paper sheath, “Can I get one?” Tom asked, the twinge of addiction plucking at a cord just beneath his jawline.

“You killed your neighbors Pomeranian with a kitchen knife, Tom.” The man shook his head, ashing out the cracked window. “Dad’s suck. Not an excuse to cross the white picket fence and fuck up ‘Franny’.” The cop grimaced and muttered, “Stupid fucking name... ‘Franny’...” then gathered himself. “You’re going to jail. Good talk though, Buddy.”.

“Allegedly.” Tom whispered, deflated in the back seat behind dull wire mesh, “You have to say ‘Allegedly’.”

“Do I?” Officer Richards took a long, slow drag, “I mean... fucking Ring cameras, Tom.”

I bet there were a lot of things that I thought I would remember.

So big, at least to me in the moment, they were assured to scribe a place in my brain that I would tread and retread as life moved ever forward.

Whatever they were, grandiose and revealing, I hope someone else was there to preserve them – because unknowingly and only in hindsight, I’ve found it’s the moments I thought absolutely nothing of that have somehow endured. Stealing that space and tattooing their own small likeness in lazy circles that both bemuse and confound.

Funny how the smaller part of a much larger whole overshadows it when you begin to view your life as a quilt, rather than a tapestry. A recipe, both trial and error, on a stained and handwritten index card; instead of a neatly plated dish, served warmly but sadly whole before you.

Ambridge was where my grandfather drank.

It was a member only sportsman club. Trap and Skeet, weekly raffles. 2 acre pond stocked with garbage fish. The clubhouse was down a winding gravel drive that no one dared to traverse in the winter. Steep drop offs and unmaintained shrubs and trees – you'd miss it if there wasn’t an old hand-painted sign pointing the way. Every year a new pin. Simple tin with the same logo. Different colors and different years, my grandfather had decades of them. Warped and faded on an old canvas jacket he hung in a half-finished basement with a minibar and barely functioning box set. Cheap trophies of a humble and quiet life.

I’d watch ‘Crocodile Dundee’ (only interesting tape he had – others were just nature documentaries) on that tv, toss logs into the furnace until grandma yelled the house was a sweat lodge and pretend I didn’t know he hid the gun closet key on the rafter next to the stairs. He had an empty can of Budweiser mounted like a deer on the wall, the plaque read ‘I’ve Killed Hundreds of These.’. A jackalope too his friend Earl had made. In the corner was a rusted drill press and an elk shed – the only time he’d ventured out of state, romantically seeking to stalk and claim the big beast, but returning with nothing but the cast off remains of a trophy already passed. I don’t know why he kept it.

We apply a lot of pageantry to life. Dress it up. Mostly to protect ourselves – show must go on and all that; but fuck if we don’t all just want to be the guy on TV who makes it look effortless.

I remember catching a dollar-bill at the pond by the pistol range. Pap used marshmallows on the hook – the pastel-colored ones, which were better somehow. It was originally a prank. I didn’t magically catch a dollar; I found it all silty and gross on the shore and put it on the hook. He wasn’t looking and figured he’d get a kick out of it. He’d laugh, I’d laugh. Dumb kid shit. He taught me how to make a fire by that pond, how to clean a fish and he told me what remains the most fucked up joke in my arsenal (did not age well). But weeks later I’m back in TX and get a package. Cheap frame from the dollar store, cardboard backing and that dollar taped to a plain printed text that read, ‘Some people hunt bucks and fish for fish – my grandson fishes and catches bucks!’. He didn’t know it was a prank. Wish I still had it. But one night after the divorce really wanted that 40oz of Steel Reserve, was a little short and wasn’t feeling sentimental. People are people. Most of the apologies you owe in this world are to yourself.

Chasing the rabbit. Wanting to impress him. He was larger than life you know – not just in stature. We talk about heroes, but they never did it for me. Heroes always fell flat. Those things that made them remarkable often made them unobtainable. It was the ones we could achieve, could embody and thus mitigate their flaws that I found value in. Not heroes, no, but icons. And Pap was an icon. It was somehow genuine with him, even if it never kissed the silver screen. The next morning, bacon in the cast iron, he gave me a compass. Said ‘Check which way you’re heading before you run off. So you can find your way back.’. Thought that counts, it was cheap and holds direction for shit. But still have it in a tacklebox in the closet. Fucking rabbit that I am...

I had mailed it off to him. My ‘A’ school graduation picture. All of us, in our dress blues, feeling... probably something different between each of us. I don’t know. It hadn’t made it to the mantle, next to his retirement watch, deflated game ball and Grandma’s urn. And maybe that wasn’t an insult – maybe that was just a dusty place he returned to when the day was done. Perhaps here it still held life, ambition. A backwoods, backwards bar in Pennsylvania. Smiling each of us to those who we wanted to see. Kiner, Boudin, Winters, right there next to me. My crossed cannons. Gunners Mate. Source rating, back when that was thing and you came in under contract. Failed at the latter but ever so proud of the former as it rested comfortably amongst antlers and Canadian whiskey.

I realized time had stopped for them. A moment had extended to a perpetual, yet inevitable end. Those things now, pinned to the corkboard among old photographs, were their last grasping efforts at youth. Trophies of those who still could traverse uncharted waters and thus gave a last dying flicker to the flame they yet clung to as their embers waned. Not the theft of potential, no such thing, but rather the mourning of their own potential squandered and so lost.

But I think about it still. Hypocritically. No breath was stolen, but none was spared. My lungs still carry a hint of that musk – it is on my breath, on my tongue, it lingers as I speak. Thus, in some small way, Ambridge remains. Clawing at an undecided and foreign future that it influenced but itself could never survive.

I think and may hold apprehension, but think that the moments now where I find contentment in the futures of others and those small things I hold dear – could fucking possibly be that place. Yet stirring, yet surviving. Corkboard on a memory wall. Pinned there and whispering ‘it’s good while it lasts and somehow better when it’s passed’.

He had told me once that 99% of what we do will be judged by the 1% we don’t... or fuck up. I get the temptation. To revise or remember those things we ourselves did or are for their best possible light. To erase or avoid those things which ruin that dearly held fantasy. I get it, I really do. But whatever it is that’s a part of me; the consequence thereof is a choice. The more educated the better. After all, it’s a quilt – this stitched together thing we so value as complete. Logan Echolls once said, “They don’t write ballads about the ones that come easy...”. Fuck I hope my life is a song, not a spreadsheet – because I’ve never learned anything from perfection. Can’t buy a legacy. I mean you can, skyscraper with your name on it and lip-service to a shitty painting in the lobby. But that ain’t a song. Not something sung with a smile. You get it or you don’t...

Ambridge was where my grandfather drank.

I don’t know who I am to my daughters, don’t know who I’ll be to my son as he wobbles around my living room now. I don’t have an Ambridge – a supernatural stretch of turf that somehow connects two kingdoms and all their needs and ambitions for each other. But I don’t believe what Pap said about those 1% of our actions defining us. I think maybe the world would convict us on it, sure. But the ones who’d sing our song, those that matter, will fiercely defend the 1% on account of the 99. I know I would for him...

-

“Strength without compassion is, and will only ever be, tyranny. So Justin, have the strength to be kind.” - A. Muchow (Pap Pap), 1927-2019.

(3 different people talking 1,2, 3. Gender M,F.) *A dialog pull from ‘Recidivism’ (work in progress) repurposed for a short story.*

1M: I’m just saying it was a different time! People got it, they were chill. Patriotism AND humor – all intact and rarely the fuck at odds.

2M: “You’re just pissed your tattoo didn’t age well.”

3F: ‘Wait, what tattoo?’

2M: “Purple heart around the pee-hole and a ‘Do it for your country’ banner on his navel”.

3F: ‘Oh fuck… you do not. That is sooooo cliché.’

1M: Fuck off, it was hilarious. And healing.

2M: “And short term. Dude, you’re missing a fucking leg. Fun while young, but future prospects? 3-legged race at your son’s Scout meeting; you’re just gonna… hold hands?”

1M: Low blow. Benefits of being a human tripod, I’ve got a spare.

3F: ‘What? If it’s hard? You getting hard at Scout meetings now? What the fuck did I miss!?’

2M: “Literal purple heart on the tip of his dick... Upside: Now that you got those weird plum veins in your feet because you drink and sit to much, it might actually pass as a third leg. Just keep it way from young boy adventurers.”

3F: ‘How do I not know about this?’

1M: Scouts? Because it used to be cool and you weren’t allowed.

3F: ‘No the… fuck you. World’s smallest fiddle is a gesture, not a gender.’

2M: “David Carridine died covered in jizz from auto-erotic asphyxiation. He was in ‘Kill Bill’.”

1M: Not fucking relevant.

3F: ‘Was pretty relevant to him in those final moments… Wait, did you arrive there because I mentioned gender and you jumped to ‘weird things to do with your penis?’’

2M: “I did. And to the maid who found him. “Fresh towels?... OH FUCKING BANGKOK JESUS!! – Pronounced of course in the Spanish ‘Hey-Sous’… Spain did a lot of good there. Took their annunciation of the glorious Christan language but gifted them firm Mediterranean asses.”.

1M: You think she, he, she-he tossed one over him. I’d like to think I’d have tossed a towel on that wilted celebrity celery before phoning… Press first, then manager right?

3F: ‘Duh. You work in a fuck-hotel in Isis Bermuda. Of course Press first. Then towel. ‘Kung Fu’, cash and dignity matter.’

1M: That’s my other tattoo.

2M: My yearbook quote.

2M: Oh shit. Mom’s turning on the porch light.

3F: I find it disturbing that you call your wife ‘Mom’.

2M: She calls me ‘Daddy’, it’s equal exchange – fundamental rule of ‘Fullmetal Alchemist.’.

1M: Cartoon reference, really backs your point.

2M: Hey, professor McSnob, The Mona Lisa is just a cartoon that took too long. If she’d showed some tit there might have been a sequel.

3F: If you’d showed some… Eeew!.. thought I had something and came up short.

2M: No shame. I always do. That’s why me and mom don’t have kids – thighs if I’m into it or belly if I’m bored…. That and the rampant erectile dysfunction. Star spangled Blue Chew.

1M: Speaking of chemical cocktails, how’s the TRT working?

2M: The ‘Teddy Rosevelt Tangents’?... ‘Let me aggressively tell you about national parks’… Not well… I struggle with impulse control and short term memory, bought a lot of Lego sets and then yelled at Mom because I never finished them.

1M: I don’t know why she has to be like that.

2M: I don’t either.

3F: Kinda a bitch.

2M: But great tits.

1M: Unlike that cunt Mona Lisa. Flat as she believed the world to be…

2M: That’s why she’s smirking, cause she’s secretly got a dick.

3F: …And wouldn’t even throw a towel over David Carradine.

1M: Also, feel like that’s the CPE not the low T. Old people and heavyweight boxers; both captivated and beguiled by cat puzzles.

3F: That’s why they’re next to the coloring books.

2M: Fuck you Target and your assumptions. Candy is next or same aisle too, isn’t it!? Skittles in Titos when you’ve lost your shit, Werther’s when you’ve just shit yourself.

1M: Not mutually exclusive. The satisfying sound of that golden wrapper as you just give in, no control, let it slide into that Depends while nodding about that 7th grandkid’s baseball game; when you only had the energy for the first two and now seek death…

Lot of pussies out there.

Who cares? There’s three of us here – so we just gotta worry about those 19 other shifty bastards.

3F: That’s why a cat will eat your fucking face after a stroke on the bathroom floor, but a labrador will wait till the last possible second.

1M: Dude, what the fuck?...

3F: Evolution. Cat’s binary code is solitary and opportunistic – so they wade right in. Dogs need a pack, without it they hesitate. Numbers enable the worst aspects of their nature, not skittish solitude. Hence, people are mostly dogs; but there’s a few arsonist cats lurking among us.

2M: Yeah, fucking women. What’s going on with y’all!? Severe need to check in more, buy a few scratching posts – I was good with a tennis ball – but you’re over there entertaining fucking Eldritch terrors.

1M: Sam Neil? Into the Mouth of Madness… That was Eldritch, right?

2M: Oh so want a mash up of Jurassic Park and Event Horizon! Rex yodeling into the

void as his maw slowly freezes over…

3F: Holy fuck!? Wasn’t the *brooding* ‘Trauma…’ medic guy also the *stupid* ‘Clever girl…’ dude!?

1M: Sensing some weird glue-stick stains in those panties over Britan’s illustrious Jason Isaacs… and no, ‘Clever girl…’ was General Bob Peck. Your voting is protected, your interjection is not.

3F: Little hurt you referred to my involuntary discharge as a ‘glue stick stain’.

2M: A guy’s discharge is referred to as a ‘money shot’… *imitates Nixon* ’Yet we have

balanced equality.’.

1M: How y’all feeling about the new Vudu?

3F: Literally never heard of it…

2M: Lot of fucking magnification. Trying to make everything a swiss-army knife… Jack of all trades, Master of none. Would rather just dedicate the platform. Fuck the pounds, better to carry two Masters than one ‘Well, it does both…. Kind of…’.

2M: You know what I struggle with?

1M: Being locked in in traffic, front back and sides – panic attack while waiting for the light to change?

2M: No… Yes… But, no… I think I’ve been protecting the best parts of me by building this… layer… of bullshit. I’m worried, well not worried, but you know, is there a day when it’s all just bullshit and the best parts, you were trying to protect are just… buried?

3F: If they’re your best parts, they can take it. You’re protecting your biggest advantage, per training – but just use it. You lose you lose, at least you got bloodied honest.

End:

Hey baby, you’ve been out here a while – food’s ready.

2M: My bad, fire pit isn’t level, I think. Not sure, there’s like a… tilt. Sorry got locked in on it.

All good. *nudges the empties* Awfully expressive…

2M: Oh, headphones *points* I was pretending I was on Rogan and being interviewed.

Gotcha. You know you’re weird right?

2M: Sexy weird though, not Astro Van and gotta register when I move.

Trash, fucking please, then food. Movie night, my pick.

2M: Yep, yep.