Greenfield Valley High

Security

Photo by Susanna Marsiglia on Unsplash

Frank…I only know him as Frank…locks the second gate on Pastrami Mommy’s one handed, his pistol in his other hand.

It’s a sandwich shop. The way he double chains the first gate makes me think the meat coolers are locked too, the expensive slicer locked up.

It’s 8pm.

In the summer it’s still light out.

The beauty salon has a security guard out front. Don’t know what it’s called, it’s something French, I think, with a sign in chrome in a font I probably couldn’t read in English.

Banger’s Coney is open 24 Hours, but it’s all drive thru. You can’t dine in.

There are way worse neighborhoods than Greenfield Valley, but people… I don’t know man. I don’t know, they’re cautious, scared, sensible I guess…but mostly scared.

My mom was scared of the neighborhood.

Never went out, except to see the psychic next to Kimbeau’s Records (If We Don’t Have It We’ll Find It).

Sometimes I wondered if the psychic helped them find old records people were looking for.

I asked my mom once if she wanted to move to a place she felt safer.

She said no, she was old and dying anyway.

I lied and told her I hit the four digit straight for five bucks, 25k, I could move her into a little place in Belleville on one of them little man made lakes, peaceful and shit.

I should have just did it, man…

Came home one night from wasting time, sittin on the hood of Nacho’s hooptie, not his Saturday car, talking about this one time nothing special happened and this one guy we kinda didn’t like, and mom was gone.

She ate every pill, the ones I knew she had, ones I didn’t know about, and drank this little half pint of brandy.

I don’t tug stems, barely even smoke flower. After the coroner left I started sparking shit like my thumb was the Riverside Fireworks.

Locked myself in the house because I didn’t want nobody important or casual to see me higher than two shooting stars fucking above Mars.

Then I was too high to be in the house anymore.

Didn’t know what time it was, didn’t care, didn’t look, wasn’t thinking and I was breathing through my eyeballs.

Neighborhood was dark like death, sometimes the city just pulls a switch and turns off the streetlights.

I walked, talking to myself, talking to my mom, asking questions of God, Kurt Cobain and some guy I never met.

High the kinda high that makes you never wanna be high again, blessing high, hit your head on the ceiling of hell high.

And I wound up at the psychic.

I didn’t believe in psychics, not even one that could find records, didn’t believe in death, and didn’t know nothing except I turned that psychic’s door knob and the door opened and I walked in.

She did a lot of listening that night, a whole lot, the kind of listening other crackheads don’t even have patience for, talking right over your talking.

Sometime, as the sun came up, I apologized for breaking into her place.

She smiled, the kind of smile that makes a dog stop barking, and told me I didn’t break into her place, I turned the knob and opened the door, that yeah, she was sleeping in the apartment upstairs, but she never locks her door because the stuff she has is stuff no one can steal.

The room had a bunch of tapestries and crystals and weird shit that I knew somebody would steal, and I wanted to tell her that.

But before I could she told me to remember that her door was always open.

She said it like she meant it.

She musta meant it.

I went and paid Yancey Willard for all the product I smoked.

Told me I needed to take a month, maybe more, because he couldn’t have motherfuckers on the stem slinging his shit.

I asked him, courtroom serious, if he talked to the psychic.

He laughed in my face, the kinda angry laugh that makes a dog go runnin, and told me Frank from the sandwich shop saw me on his security camera, standing on the sidewalk, screaming at the sky.

******