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rainbowfic2015-06-24 02:03 am
starphotographs) wrote in rainbowfic2015-06-24 02:03 am
Dragon Scale Green #2, Milk Bottle #7, Folly #2
Name: starphotographs
Story: Corwin and Friends
Characters: Spenser (POV), Tyler, a few little pop-ins by others.
Supplies and Styles: Graffiti (Milk Bottle, Dragon Scale Green, Summer Carnival)
Colors: Dragons Scale Green 2 ("You haven't been bit till a dragon does it." ― Tamora Pierce), Milk Bottle 7 (Side Show), Folly 2 (Watch this!)
Word Count: 2,873
Rating: PG-13 (maybe on the higher side?)
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: An oral history of the Greatest Two-Man Show on Earth.
Note: As with everything I post, commentary is open season! (Also, I'm still foggy on how certain things work... Do you use the Graffiti style for Summer Carnival stuff?)
Human Blockheads
Don’t even ask me how, but I’ve stayed friends with Tyler so long that neither of our social circles contain more than like, three people who can even remember how we met. It’s just relatively probable that, wherever one is, the other will eventually pop up, and no one really knows why or questions it much. They don’t think about it. They’re too busy watching us bickering and kicking at each other and shit, wondering if we’re actually fighting and if they should go get the hose or whatever. No, seriously. Amber, Tyler’s twin sister, once told me, after a few hours of hanging out and secretly drinking rum out of paper convenience store coffee cups in the park, that friendships that even halfway resembled ours normally only happened between cats. Then she started trying to flirt with me, and that got a little weird, but we’d both moved on to other subjects after a few more swigs.
…Anyway, point is, a lot of people who know one of us aren’t sure where the ever-loving fuck the other came from. Well, the truth is, we came from the garage. Or, in my mind, he came from the garage. I’m not sure where he thinks I came from. But, the garage was where we met. I’d just wandered back from California, sunburned, shaggy-haired, newly seventeen, and qualified to do exactly nothing. And since I was qualified to do exactly nothing, I became “self-employed,” which is a fuckin’ nice-sounding euphemism for “I put up a hand-written flyer in the laundromat and sometimes people would call me if they needed something fixed.” This didn’t pull in enough money for me to actually live anywhere, and it’s not like it was legal for me to live anywhere, anyway, but I was pretty happy with my situation, all things considered. I hung around with old friends, mooching their fries and plunking sweaty dollar bills on the table when someone suggested we all spring for a pizza.
As for sleeping, when I slept at all, I slept in a lot of weird places. But usually ended up crashing with my ex-girlfriend Mischa, who lived in an abandoned mobile home in a vacant lot with a couple of other girls. They had a bigass cooler and were always yelling at each other to go buy more ice, which got pretty old after a while, but since it meant there was always some kind of substantive food around, I didn’t really mind. I sat roasting hotdogs over their shitty little grill and eating them directly off the stick like marshmallows, while Mischa told me stories about juvenile hall. Apparently, she’d made some good friends there (“that’s Casey,” she said, pointing at a girl with a long curly red mane, who was trying to pull out the awning and swearing at a rusty screw), but the whole experience had been pretty annoying, so she‘d decided to give up shoplifting. It was kind of sad, knowing that she’d never steal anything for me again. And it felt a little like hearing Mozart renounce music. Dejectedly, I took a bite of my hotdog, which had gone rock-hard and coal-black while I’d been so busy listening.
Honestly, all of that could have continued to this day, and I don’t think I would have minded. Fuck knows, I’ve lived worse since then. But eventually, someone caught me hanging a flyer on the wall in a coffee shop, and I thought he was going to get me in trouble for “posting bills,” or whatever they actually call that, but no, he just wanted to talk to me. Said that, since he’d been seeing the flyer around for a while, I must be half-decent, or at least could get under the hood and help out without making anyone’s car explode. He asked me if I wanted a job. The garage he worked at was short-staffed, and it was making his boss cranky. I accepted, and even though it all worked out okay, current me thinks past me had to have been a fucking idiot to even consider it. Hiring filthy, erratic, uncertified teenagers with no interview process is kind of a sketchy business practice. Needless to say, I was paid under the table. Because we all were. This probably had something to do with the place closing three years later, but I didn’t know that yet, and it was one of the funnest jobs I ever had, so really, I guess there’s something to be said for being a fucking idiot.
I barely remember the guy who hired me. Only that his name was Miguel or Michael or something, one of those names with an M and an L and a bunch of vowels that don’t look like they’d make the right sound. He quit a few months after I started, and I guess he wasn’t all that memorable. Which is why this story isn’t really about him. It’s about Tyler. Tyler was memorable, and that’s an understatement. My first impression of the workplace culture there was walking in on my first day and being treated to the sight of him kicking a coffee can full of spare bolts across the room and threatening to do in whoever the hell it was that left it “in the middle of the assfuckin’ floor.” Someone told him to “cool the fuck off, Tyler,” but nobody told him to watch his language. And I knew I’d fit in there just fine. Tyler turned around, saw me, shouted “Jesus Christ, this dude’s like, ten!” and, very promptly and enthusiastically, introduced himself.
From that day on, I found him kind of impressive. He reminded me of one of those people who get conked on the head and lose all their impulse control, but Tyler was unique because he was doing it on purpose and had obviously chosen total disinhibition as a lifestyle. He was completely out of control because he’d broken out of it himself. He shouted, threw things, playfully punched everyone he got into a conversation with, hopped fences, and played with fire. Every other anecdote about his home life involved marijuana, tarantulas, or both. He wore canvas sneakers and a ponytail to work in a garage even though the boss was constantly yelling at him about scalpings and mangled feet, and he smoked constantly, even around gasoline. He laughed loudly and at inappropriate times. But, somehow, everyone just accepted him. And, in kind, he just accepted me.
It didn’t take long for us to make friends. He let me chatter on as long and as loud as I wanted, and would even chatter back. Tyler never talked quickly or constantly like I did, but he had no indoor voice, said literally anything that came to the top of his mind, and could say a lot in one breath, so we never had trouble matching each other’s pace. And even if he got talked-out, he’d still laugh. Under the hood, we were a good team, lateral and linear thinker, almost like two hemispheres of one giant brain. Two weeks after I was hired on, Tyler turned twenty-one, bought a huge case of beer, told me that he was going to go drink it at some shitty unmaintained park on the edge of town, and suggested I come along and help him. I went. And that was the first time I met Amber, who was waiting for us, sitting on the rusty swings and drinking a forty. I also got piss-ass drunk and fell about ten feet off a tube slide I was trying to climb from the outside, but that’s a tale for another day.
So there you have it, that’s Tyler: laughing, punching, swearing, chain-smoking, bolt-can-kicking, beer-sharing, pyromaniac iconoclast. But that wasn’t even what impressed me most, in the long run. No, what really wowed me was how he’s held together. Actually, how he isn’t held together. I don’t really understand how it works, but there’s something wrong with him. Well, just a little wrong. Apparently, there are people in his family who have something really wrong with them, and shouldn’t even try doing what he did for us every day. Well, anyway, Tyler’s joints are fuckin’ jacked. Almost all of them bend in two directions. This made some people stare in awe and others look like they were about to vomit on him, so, Tyler being Tyler, he had to demonstrate this ability whenever possible. And since we were such a shitty garage, no one much wanted to use us, so we’d sometimes sit around idle for hours, waiting for someone to drive up in whatever dilapidated mess they expected us to put back in a working pile. This got real fuckin’ boring, real fuckin’ fast, so, to avoid rioting, we usually needed some kind of entertainment, which Tyler was more than happy to provide.
Sitting on the filthy floor, we’d gawk like we were at a freak show. Tyler put both legs behind his head. He crossed his legs with both feet on top, like he was pretending to be a damn guru or something, then walked around on his knees until he lost balance and fell on his ass. He made his hands touch his arms in ways that nothing should be able to touch something it’s attached to. Once, he bent backwards, grabbed his ankles in his hands, and tried to roll around like a wheel, but that didn’t work so well. My favorite was when he’d untie his hair, brush it over his face, put his hands on his hips, and bend his arms forward so it looked like he had his back to you. I thought this hilarious, and, when I hadn’t been sleeping, a little bit genuinely terrifying. Tyler was one part contortionist and about twelve parts evil jester, and even though he loved working at the garage, and was tied with me as the best guy there, he was obviously born for the circus. But, he found a way to make things work, as the Greatest One-Man Show on Earth. I wanted to be a one-man show, too. And, after watching Tyler twist himself up like putty so many times, I wondered if there was anything that would shock him.
Well, one day, it was particularly slow, so I was particularly bored. My hands needed something to do with themselves. I’d also gotten about a night’s worth of sleep in the past week, so everything seemed a little dull and far-away. I felt like I could do something really crazy, and the consequences would just hit the clear grey jelly around me and bounce off. There was a soldering gun plugged into a socket behind where Tyler was warping his bones into strange, terrible shapes. I looked at it, and thought, Tyler has his gimmick. I’ll have mine. It’s not like I hadn’t intentionally burned myself before. No, I used to do it a lot in California, and mostly for the same reasons I was about to do it then: impressing and repelling others, and building my own confidence. In a word, Macho bullshit, but it was more than that. I felt like it really did say something about who I was, and why I’d always win in the end. What you do to stand out and what you do to survive hinge on the same axis. It’s not about talent, it’s about what you can manage to do without screaming. Tyler had his extra-stretchy joints. I had my casual attitude about pain. We both had the stuff to be great. I leapt to my feet, turned on the gun, waited a few moments to make sure that the tip was hot and everyone was looking, then held the metal up to my arm.
Most pain sneaks up on you, but this pain grabbed me by the wrist and yanked me under. It was so hot it felt cold, it burned so much it almost itched. I didn’t exactly want to scream, but I almost managed to startle myself. I kept my cool, but I felt my guts jump like someone just tapped them in the shoulder from behind. I smiled at Tyler, too crazy and toothy, like a wordless challenge, the whole time thinking, oh god, oh Christ, I’ve just fucked myself up, what the hell am I doing? The tip of the gun was hotter than anything I’d ever made myself touch before, and I held it there for longer than I intended. I was scared that I’d just burned clear through my forearm and would have to go through the rest of my life holding one tool at a time. But no, when I pulled it away, all I saw was a shiny red afterimage, rimmed in steaming black. It hurt like hell, and I smelled like a summer cookout in the backyard of some suburban cannibal, but I was mostly alright. I can stand out. I can survive. I can endure. Having managed to impress even myself, and having managed to make the world pop back out in full color, I felt awfully self-satisfied. I took a little bow. Tyler grabbed me by the shoulders, turned me around, and held out his hand for a high-five. Someone in the miniature audience around us muttered “told you he was nuts,” but his tone sounded oddly approving. I had just appalled everyone. And I was a hit.
From that day forward, Tyler and I were a two-man show. His almost-alien anatomical feats, and my astounding displays of pain and courage. Superhuman, both of us. Of course, since we were doing it together now, and we were already, shall we say, the most “colorful” personalities there, the focus became less what we were doing and more watching us egg each other on. Though, since neither of us can take anything seriously, we’d often have to take a break to laugh our asses off, which made everyone’s eyes visibly glaze over. Not that we even gave a rat‘s. Ever since I first heated up the gun and joined the show, it became less about impressing or offending anyone else and more about having another way to fuck around together. Though, this could also be entertaining, because really, there’s nothing funnier than watching two morons have a go at each other. Once, when I was around nineteen, I had the “stage,” such as it was, to myself, because Tyler needed a smoke and was standing off to the side until he was finished. I was playing tic-tac-toe with a flathead screwdriver that I’d heated with a blowtorch. Xs won. Then Tyler, with no warning whatsoever, reached over and ground out his cigarette on the inside of my wrist. That wrecked my composure.
“…Tyler, what the fuckin’ hell!?”
“Gods, chill. You were doin’ it to yourself like just a sec ago.”
“Well, yeah, I was doing it. To myself!”
“I know. So what the heck’s your issue?”
“My issue is it came outta fuckin’ nowhere! I’d have said the same thing if you just like, reached over and flicked my nose or some shit!”
Tyler reached over and flicked my nose. It was on, now.
“…You asshole!”
I made a loose fist and sort of clipped him in the solar plexus. He jerked back slightly, then regained his footing and made a violent motion towards my face, probably trying to either steal my glasses or flick my goddamn nose again. I shoved him a little, just to get that hand the hell away from me. He shoved back. We went on in this lame pushy-pushy fashion for a few minutes, until I swore the other four mechanics were going to start chanting “fight, fight, fight,” like we were in some kind of cheesy grade-school sitcom. Well, they were probably pretty disappointed. Like I said, Tyler and I can’t take anything seriously, and before long neither of us could keep a straight face, and gradually, the blows grew harder and harder, yet somehow less violent. Until I caught him in a clumsy headlock and we slammed, laughing hysterically, down on the concrete floor.
It’s been almost half a decade since that day in the garage, when we fell together and were left black and blue and giddy for the rest of the week. The garage closed down. We found other jobs, and other ones after those. And now, we’re all grown-up. Except for the part where we didn’t, not really. Tyler still tries to act on every idea that flashes into his mind, still lives for weed and beer and bugs and fire. I still can’t shut the fuck up to save my life. I still think I can prove something about myself, to myself, by deliberately courting pain. As for Amber, she still sits and drinks on swing sets. And Tyler and I never stopped trying to maim each other like a pair of cats who sleep together and play too rough. We still love showing off, doing stupid shit. Only now, Tyler hardly has any cartilage left in his hands. There are patches of skin on my arms that no longer flex or feel.
And we still both have the stuff to be great.
starphotographsStory: Corwin and Friends
Characters: Spenser (POV), Tyler, a few little pop-ins by others.
Supplies and Styles: Graffiti (Milk Bottle, Dragon Scale Green, Summer Carnival)
Colors: Dragons Scale Green 2 ("You haven't been bit till a dragon does it." ― Tamora Pierce), Milk Bottle 7 (Side Show), Folly 2 (Watch this!)
Word Count: 2,873
Rating: PG-13 (maybe on the higher side?)
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: An oral history of the Greatest Two-Man Show on Earth.
Note: As with everything I post, commentary is open season! (Also, I'm still foggy on how certain things work... Do you use the Graffiti style for Summer Carnival stuff?)
Don’t even ask me how, but I’ve stayed friends with Tyler so long that neither of our social circles contain more than like, three people who can even remember how we met. It’s just relatively probable that, wherever one is, the other will eventually pop up, and no one really knows why or questions it much. They don’t think about it. They’re too busy watching us bickering and kicking at each other and shit, wondering if we’re actually fighting and if they should go get the hose or whatever. No, seriously. Amber, Tyler’s twin sister, once told me, after a few hours of hanging out and secretly drinking rum out of paper convenience store coffee cups in the park, that friendships that even halfway resembled ours normally only happened between cats. Then she started trying to flirt with me, and that got a little weird, but we’d both moved on to other subjects after a few more swigs.
…Anyway, point is, a lot of people who know one of us aren’t sure where the ever-loving fuck the other came from. Well, the truth is, we came from the garage. Or, in my mind, he came from the garage. I’m not sure where he thinks I came from. But, the garage was where we met. I’d just wandered back from California, sunburned, shaggy-haired, newly seventeen, and qualified to do exactly nothing. And since I was qualified to do exactly nothing, I became “self-employed,” which is a fuckin’ nice-sounding euphemism for “I put up a hand-written flyer in the laundromat and sometimes people would call me if they needed something fixed.” This didn’t pull in enough money for me to actually live anywhere, and it’s not like it was legal for me to live anywhere, anyway, but I was pretty happy with my situation, all things considered. I hung around with old friends, mooching their fries and plunking sweaty dollar bills on the table when someone suggested we all spring for a pizza.
As for sleeping, when I slept at all, I slept in a lot of weird places. But usually ended up crashing with my ex-girlfriend Mischa, who lived in an abandoned mobile home in a vacant lot with a couple of other girls. They had a bigass cooler and were always yelling at each other to go buy more ice, which got pretty old after a while, but since it meant there was always some kind of substantive food around, I didn’t really mind. I sat roasting hotdogs over their shitty little grill and eating them directly off the stick like marshmallows, while Mischa told me stories about juvenile hall. Apparently, she’d made some good friends there (“that’s Casey,” she said, pointing at a girl with a long curly red mane, who was trying to pull out the awning and swearing at a rusty screw), but the whole experience had been pretty annoying, so she‘d decided to give up shoplifting. It was kind of sad, knowing that she’d never steal anything for me again. And it felt a little like hearing Mozart renounce music. Dejectedly, I took a bite of my hotdog, which had gone rock-hard and coal-black while I’d been so busy listening.
Honestly, all of that could have continued to this day, and I don’t think I would have minded. Fuck knows, I’ve lived worse since then. But eventually, someone caught me hanging a flyer on the wall in a coffee shop, and I thought he was going to get me in trouble for “posting bills,” or whatever they actually call that, but no, he just wanted to talk to me. Said that, since he’d been seeing the flyer around for a while, I must be half-decent, or at least could get under the hood and help out without making anyone’s car explode. He asked me if I wanted a job. The garage he worked at was short-staffed, and it was making his boss cranky. I accepted, and even though it all worked out okay, current me thinks past me had to have been a fucking idiot to even consider it. Hiring filthy, erratic, uncertified teenagers with no interview process is kind of a sketchy business practice. Needless to say, I was paid under the table. Because we all were. This probably had something to do with the place closing three years later, but I didn’t know that yet, and it was one of the funnest jobs I ever had, so really, I guess there’s something to be said for being a fucking idiot.
I barely remember the guy who hired me. Only that his name was Miguel or Michael or something, one of those names with an M and an L and a bunch of vowels that don’t look like they’d make the right sound. He quit a few months after I started, and I guess he wasn’t all that memorable. Which is why this story isn’t really about him. It’s about Tyler. Tyler was memorable, and that’s an understatement. My first impression of the workplace culture there was walking in on my first day and being treated to the sight of him kicking a coffee can full of spare bolts across the room and threatening to do in whoever the hell it was that left it “in the middle of the assfuckin’ floor.” Someone told him to “cool the fuck off, Tyler,” but nobody told him to watch his language. And I knew I’d fit in there just fine. Tyler turned around, saw me, shouted “Jesus Christ, this dude’s like, ten!” and, very promptly and enthusiastically, introduced himself.
From that day on, I found him kind of impressive. He reminded me of one of those people who get conked on the head and lose all their impulse control, but Tyler was unique because he was doing it on purpose and had obviously chosen total disinhibition as a lifestyle. He was completely out of control because he’d broken out of it himself. He shouted, threw things, playfully punched everyone he got into a conversation with, hopped fences, and played with fire. Every other anecdote about his home life involved marijuana, tarantulas, or both. He wore canvas sneakers and a ponytail to work in a garage even though the boss was constantly yelling at him about scalpings and mangled feet, and he smoked constantly, even around gasoline. He laughed loudly and at inappropriate times. But, somehow, everyone just accepted him. And, in kind, he just accepted me.
It didn’t take long for us to make friends. He let me chatter on as long and as loud as I wanted, and would even chatter back. Tyler never talked quickly or constantly like I did, but he had no indoor voice, said literally anything that came to the top of his mind, and could say a lot in one breath, so we never had trouble matching each other’s pace. And even if he got talked-out, he’d still laugh. Under the hood, we were a good team, lateral and linear thinker, almost like two hemispheres of one giant brain. Two weeks after I was hired on, Tyler turned twenty-one, bought a huge case of beer, told me that he was going to go drink it at some shitty unmaintained park on the edge of town, and suggested I come along and help him. I went. And that was the first time I met Amber, who was waiting for us, sitting on the rusty swings and drinking a forty. I also got piss-ass drunk and fell about ten feet off a tube slide I was trying to climb from the outside, but that’s a tale for another day.
So there you have it, that’s Tyler: laughing, punching, swearing, chain-smoking, bolt-can-kicking, beer-sharing, pyromaniac iconoclast. But that wasn’t even what impressed me most, in the long run. No, what really wowed me was how he’s held together. Actually, how he isn’t held together. I don’t really understand how it works, but there’s something wrong with him. Well, just a little wrong. Apparently, there are people in his family who have something really wrong with them, and shouldn’t even try doing what he did for us every day. Well, anyway, Tyler’s joints are fuckin’ jacked. Almost all of them bend in two directions. This made some people stare in awe and others look like they were about to vomit on him, so, Tyler being Tyler, he had to demonstrate this ability whenever possible. And since we were such a shitty garage, no one much wanted to use us, so we’d sometimes sit around idle for hours, waiting for someone to drive up in whatever dilapidated mess they expected us to put back in a working pile. This got real fuckin’ boring, real fuckin’ fast, so, to avoid rioting, we usually needed some kind of entertainment, which Tyler was more than happy to provide.
Sitting on the filthy floor, we’d gawk like we were at a freak show. Tyler put both legs behind his head. He crossed his legs with both feet on top, like he was pretending to be a damn guru or something, then walked around on his knees until he lost balance and fell on his ass. He made his hands touch his arms in ways that nothing should be able to touch something it’s attached to. Once, he bent backwards, grabbed his ankles in his hands, and tried to roll around like a wheel, but that didn’t work so well. My favorite was when he’d untie his hair, brush it over his face, put his hands on his hips, and bend his arms forward so it looked like he had his back to you. I thought this hilarious, and, when I hadn’t been sleeping, a little bit genuinely terrifying. Tyler was one part contortionist and about twelve parts evil jester, and even though he loved working at the garage, and was tied with me as the best guy there, he was obviously born for the circus. But, he found a way to make things work, as the Greatest One-Man Show on Earth. I wanted to be a one-man show, too. And, after watching Tyler twist himself up like putty so many times, I wondered if there was anything that would shock him.
Well, one day, it was particularly slow, so I was particularly bored. My hands needed something to do with themselves. I’d also gotten about a night’s worth of sleep in the past week, so everything seemed a little dull and far-away. I felt like I could do something really crazy, and the consequences would just hit the clear grey jelly around me and bounce off. There was a soldering gun plugged into a socket behind where Tyler was warping his bones into strange, terrible shapes. I looked at it, and thought, Tyler has his gimmick. I’ll have mine. It’s not like I hadn’t intentionally burned myself before. No, I used to do it a lot in California, and mostly for the same reasons I was about to do it then: impressing and repelling others, and building my own confidence. In a word, Macho bullshit, but it was more than that. I felt like it really did say something about who I was, and why I’d always win in the end. What you do to stand out and what you do to survive hinge on the same axis. It’s not about talent, it’s about what you can manage to do without screaming. Tyler had his extra-stretchy joints. I had my casual attitude about pain. We both had the stuff to be great. I leapt to my feet, turned on the gun, waited a few moments to make sure that the tip was hot and everyone was looking, then held the metal up to my arm.
Most pain sneaks up on you, but this pain grabbed me by the wrist and yanked me under. It was so hot it felt cold, it burned so much it almost itched. I didn’t exactly want to scream, but I almost managed to startle myself. I kept my cool, but I felt my guts jump like someone just tapped them in the shoulder from behind. I smiled at Tyler, too crazy and toothy, like a wordless challenge, the whole time thinking, oh god, oh Christ, I’ve just fucked myself up, what the hell am I doing? The tip of the gun was hotter than anything I’d ever made myself touch before, and I held it there for longer than I intended. I was scared that I’d just burned clear through my forearm and would have to go through the rest of my life holding one tool at a time. But no, when I pulled it away, all I saw was a shiny red afterimage, rimmed in steaming black. It hurt like hell, and I smelled like a summer cookout in the backyard of some suburban cannibal, but I was mostly alright. I can stand out. I can survive. I can endure. Having managed to impress even myself, and having managed to make the world pop back out in full color, I felt awfully self-satisfied. I took a little bow. Tyler grabbed me by the shoulders, turned me around, and held out his hand for a high-five. Someone in the miniature audience around us muttered “told you he was nuts,” but his tone sounded oddly approving. I had just appalled everyone. And I was a hit.
From that day forward, Tyler and I were a two-man show. His almost-alien anatomical feats, and my astounding displays of pain and courage. Superhuman, both of us. Of course, since we were doing it together now, and we were already, shall we say, the most “colorful” personalities there, the focus became less what we were doing and more watching us egg each other on. Though, since neither of us can take anything seriously, we’d often have to take a break to laugh our asses off, which made everyone’s eyes visibly glaze over. Not that we even gave a rat‘s. Ever since I first heated up the gun and joined the show, it became less about impressing or offending anyone else and more about having another way to fuck around together. Though, this could also be entertaining, because really, there’s nothing funnier than watching two morons have a go at each other. Once, when I was around nineteen, I had the “stage,” such as it was, to myself, because Tyler needed a smoke and was standing off to the side until he was finished. I was playing tic-tac-toe with a flathead screwdriver that I’d heated with a blowtorch. Xs won. Then Tyler, with no warning whatsoever, reached over and ground out his cigarette on the inside of my wrist. That wrecked my composure.
“…Tyler, what the fuckin’ hell!?”
“Gods, chill. You were doin’ it to yourself like just a sec ago.”
“Well, yeah, I was doing it. To myself!”
“I know. So what the heck’s your issue?”
“My issue is it came outta fuckin’ nowhere! I’d have said the same thing if you just like, reached over and flicked my nose or some shit!”
Tyler reached over and flicked my nose. It was on, now.
“…You asshole!”
I made a loose fist and sort of clipped him in the solar plexus. He jerked back slightly, then regained his footing and made a violent motion towards my face, probably trying to either steal my glasses or flick my goddamn nose again. I shoved him a little, just to get that hand the hell away from me. He shoved back. We went on in this lame pushy-pushy fashion for a few minutes, until I swore the other four mechanics were going to start chanting “fight, fight, fight,” like we were in some kind of cheesy grade-school sitcom. Well, they were probably pretty disappointed. Like I said, Tyler and I can’t take anything seriously, and before long neither of us could keep a straight face, and gradually, the blows grew harder and harder, yet somehow less violent. Until I caught him in a clumsy headlock and we slammed, laughing hysterically, down on the concrete floor.
It’s been almost half a decade since that day in the garage, when we fell together and were left black and blue and giddy for the rest of the week. The garage closed down. We found other jobs, and other ones after those. And now, we’re all grown-up. Except for the part where we didn’t, not really. Tyler still tries to act on every idea that flashes into his mind, still lives for weed and beer and bugs and fire. I still can’t shut the fuck up to save my life. I still think I can prove something about myself, to myself, by deliberately courting pain. As for Amber, she still sits and drinks on swing sets. And Tyler and I never stopped trying to maim each other like a pair of cats who sleep together and play too rough. We still love showing off, doing stupid shit. Only now, Tyler hardly has any cartilage left in his hands. There are patches of skin on my arms that no longer flex or feel.
And we still both have the stuff to be great.
no subject
Makes me think about them. So thank you.
no subject
You're welcome, and thank you!
no subject