When it was very dark in Garret’s room, and Love Line was on the radio, we had finally stopped laughing a while. He said: let’s go look for a crime. And I understood what he meant. The two of us had bonded over the pulp culture of X-men films and Spider-Man comics that were left to the sensitive outcasts of our age group: teenaged boys who did not have cars or girlfriends. I followed his footsteps in the deep dark of his family home and listened to the security system beeping while he turned it off so that we would be able to get in again without his mother knowing. Garret wore glasses and a retainer. He had many toys, one of which was a small bat of smooth wood. He held it now like a billy-club. I don’t remember what I had to arm myself with. Probably nothing.
Outside, his gated community was the sickly Tang-orange of city street lights. We strained our hearing as if there would be a sudden sound of screaming to chase or police sirens wailing an alarm, like in those great movies. But I worried we would get in trouble. I never had been in trouble, not really, and I knew Garret had not either. Then Garret stopped right where he was. Do you see that, he asked me. Look quick. Look over there.
We had come to the very bottom of a t-section in the streets of Studio Estates. About a block up was a big white wolf dog sitting tranquil at the intersection’s stop sign staring in our direction. It did not have any master or any other obvious reason for being there. Garret and I laughed a little together. Then we went back to his room and we went to sleep. Neither of us saw the dog again.
There were many things like that that would happen around Garret. Another time while we were in the midst of a spirited game of big-tag (in which you are too old to play tag so the stakes are upped by recruiting a large group of high schoolers), he stepped on a voodoo doll that had been discarded in my apartment’s laundry room. Garret received an allergy to shellfish he had never had before that. And, yet another time when we were both older, we performed chaos magic over a bottle of Jack Daniels under his mother’s dim garage light. Within a few months, he had met the woman he was going to marry, at a collegiate open house. Just like that. Thunderstruck.
There were starts and stops to our friendship. But I remember that shroud of great coincidence that seemed to surround him. He was always running into those people from his past, introducing me to an old dentist at the supermarket checkout, or an old classmate while we two were waiting in line for a film in a new town.
And sometimes I wonder if we will ever run into one another, years from now, at some seance or spiritual retreat in Nepal, at the base of a mountain, where we are both softer, and kinder too. Maybe then we will have more answers for one another.
FDM
El Golpe Avisa 