Wordsmoker

In case you were wondering…  If not, no harsh on you, my friend. Sean was my best friend, and he lived next door to me in section eight housing, in Fuckno, Californication, back in the eighties. I bought some duds for the high school dance, where Lorelei would cause calamity…

I pulled up to the section eight housing development on Chestnut Street off of East McKinley near Dakota Avenue. This was my home.

You know, I was fucking poor. I was making my own cash money working at a biker bar, cleaning up broken teef, blood, spilled beer and used condoms each morning before school.

Lovely.

I went in and showed my new threads to my two little sisters. Galen, the older one who was dressed in a potato sack, clapped her hands and squeeled, “You will look like Johnny Fucking Rotten in that shit, yo!”

I kid you. She liked them, and the younger one, Spamela, (which I called her), got caught up in Galen’s excitement. Cute little ladies.

Sean knocked on the rear door that led to the cement walkway which connected all the duplexes to the inner courtyard. I knew it was him. No, not from a secret knock or anything.

Simply that he was an impatient young man, and he knocked like a kid with a spazztastic condition that would one day be solved with Ridlin. Knockety knock knock knockknockNkNkNkNkNk….

I let him in. Galen and Spam started talking like they were on a sugar high about my new clothes, andtheydidnotletupuntilfinallyIclosedmydooronthem.

Whew.

Sean whistled. “That is some really faggy stuff there, bro.”

Fucking Sean.

Never one to lie to me, he’d get pissed at Joey causing trouble by twisting things around to see what fights he could cause. Little instigator. But the Little Lion man would always have my back in a fight, and you will see that, if you care to follow along this path with me.

Sean, he too would always have my back.

I just didn’t know it yet.

We left the complex of duplexes fixing two sixpacks betwixt two young punks who got drunk for their kicks. You can get a quick little drunk-on for an hour or two by shot-gunning a six pack to your head.

Earlier, we’d pimped some beer from a kind bum with a heart of gold.

Yeah, right, fucker stole half the twelve pack and our change.

He knew we wouldn’t fuck him up, because he was the only one there all the time at the 7-11 up at the end of Chestnut. Convenient, indeed, but pricey.

This was before Starbucks stole every corner lot, mind you. Talk about Pricey.

So then we had to go and get more. Being underage sucked, probably still does.

Now we were sitting on the sloping edge of the cement canal down the street, feet dangling over the quick-flowing mountain water below, with the radio playing in my little spaceship.

“Will. What’s this I hear about you banging some Foreign Strange?” Sean eyed me while positioning a pen near the bottom of an upside-down beer can.

“Dude, I ain’t banging her.” I got my own “shotgun” ready.

He pressed the pen into the bottom of his beer can and opened a hole called “the carb,” which here has nothing to do with calories. Carburator. Air Inlet. For an engine. A beer can will become an engine in such a way.

Sean firmly pressed his thumb over the hole while gently turning the beer can right side up. “Then you got some ‘splaining to do, bud.”

In one deft motion, his lips covered the can and he slipped the tip of his tongue against the hole while taking his thumb away from it, and then cracked open the top of the beer can.

He took his tongue away from the hole, and the beer was in his belly in moments.

“Sean, I don’t want to bang her.” I put my own can up to my mouth, tongue over the hole.

As the frosty cold effervescence of beer shot down into my own belly, Sean burped loudly and laughed.

“Man,” he said, “you are pussy-whipped by two bitches now, spanning the Atlantic all the way from the Pacific.”

He was right about that, but wrong about everything else. I didn’t know what everything else was; I just knew he was wrong about it.

We shot-gunned a rack apiece and set off down the edge of the canal into the fading sunlight; two silhouettes against a golden, Californication sky.