I am thinking of writing a novel from this.

Sketches

for

And Here We Have Them

1.

Fountain Park is on the southwest corner of the intersection of Neponset street and Venice Avenue. The fountain in the middle, the one we named it for, has a pixie dancing or standing on one foot spitting a continuous stream skyward, filling a small, ever-overflowing cup. The pool the cup overflows into has lights that change colors. We spent most nights sitting on the benches that lined the fountain's perimeter, the lights casting tones of pink and blue and green across our faces. Sometimes we smashed the lights with golf clubs or our fists and it was dark. There are trees strategically placed through the park so that cops can see from one side to the other without stepping from their squad cars. In the winter, Christmas lights tangled with the branches and moss. For some of us, they were the only thing that set the holidays apart from the rest of the year. During the years we spent at Fountain Park, we never saw anyone put the lights up or take them down. They appeared with the first winter storms and were gone shortly after the New Year.

Futureman and Handsome Jack were brothers and the park's keepers. Their Aryan faces and statuesque physiques gave the group an authority. Their parents had abandoned them when Futureman was 17 and Handsome Jack was 16. They had been homeless for two years; that was how they started hanging out at the park— bathing in the fountain and sleeping in the shadowed corners. They were there from the beginning.

If you spent any amount of time there, they gave you a nickname. Sprinkles was a fag, self proclaimed and proud of it. We were cool with it. Mad Dog Palmer didn't drink—never had—but when people were drunk around him he broke everything in sight. Sandman could fall asleep anywhere. Many nights we left him curled up and trembling on the park bench asleep. When Sandman's parents had asked him where he slept when he didn't come home he told them, "HJ and Futureman's house."

Juice Box was half black but his biological father had died of a cocaine overdose when he was 4 and he was raised by his mother's new husband, a white catholic man who broke his Megadeath tapes and wouldn't let him watch horror movies. There were always Juicy-Juices in their refrigerator. Mercitron was Juice Box's best friend. He worked at the humane society but didn't talk about that much. He was named after the machine Dr. Kevorkian used. For Christmas one year, Juice Box made Mercitron a shirt that said: My Best Friend is Half-Nigger, and insisted he wear it. So Mercitron made Juice Box a shirt that said: Half as Black and Just as Stupit (sic). Stink Finger had dreadlocked Juice Box's hair one time and his hands had smelled like dirt for a month afterwards. They had given names, but those given were not representative of who they were, or so we all felt.

The closest I got to a nickname was Mundy because I was normal by their standards. My parents were still together and by all accounts they seemed to care about me. I was friends with people outside of our group, too, football players and surfers and girls. I was seen as gregarious and that hurt. There were a bunch of others that came and went but the ones that mattered were always around for the good stuff.

It was summer and I had just turned 15, just lost my virginity to a twenty-year old cashier from the grocery store in a lifeguard stand. I was full of anger that had no roots—just dull, blunt convictions, unstructured ideals. The world was undressing before me, spreading its legs and begging me to take advantage of it.

2.

I was working at the coffee shop across the street from The Park, Grinders—a little kitschy place owned by a coke-head from Colorado named Kristine. I was closing up solo one night and heard what sounded like people wrestling on the roof. I was and am still not one to pursue possibly threatening situations, so I just minded my own business and locked the door, ready to get home. I saw someone standing in the middle of the intersection—a shadow under the sepia street-lamp— holding a tennis racquet like a bat, screaming at the roof to “fucking shoot it already!” I looked to the roof just in time to see who I would come to know as Handsome Jack and Mad Dog holding their arms straight forward, stiff, as Mad Dog cocked the water-balloon launcher back. In an instant the launcher snapped, the ball made a sort of sick thud and the kid in the intersection staggered three steps back and crumpled, like his bones had been pulled out, in the middle of the road.

The ball rolled a few feet away from me. I picked it up and went to see if the kid was alright. It was Sprinkles. Before I could get to him, the kids from the roof had already scrambled from the building, laughing violently, and were trying to pick him up. He woke up, confused and wobbly, stood up and said, “I’m going home.”

3.

I got off work one night and they were all standing around holding golf clubs with a bag full of tennis balls. Mercitron had taken the balls from the humane society. Most animals that entered through the door of the humane society were euthanized. Kittens and puppies, some that had not opened their eyes yet, dissolved from the inside out by a blue liquid. He had worked there for years and watched the balls pile up, apparently donated by local country clubs. The balls, used once, were unworthy of the no-doubt stellar level of play the senile World War vets were capable of. The tennis players surely felt like good Samaritans in their white tennis skirts and polo shirts. Unfortunately, Mercitron said, the dogs would kill each other if you threw a ball into the pack.
The boys were hitting the balls into traffic. None of them had ever golfed, but they were doing a pretty good job. Lined up in the middle of the intersection, they would wait for the light down the block to turn green and all hit in unison. The sound of tires screeching meant a direct hit and sent the group diving behind the benches, falling over each other, laughing.
A little later on, after we had gotten bored and put the tennis balls away, one of the local cops came by on a tip that kids had been hitting golf balls at cars.
"You boys wouldn't know anything about that would you?" he asked.
"They were tennis balls," Juice Box said. "And no, I have no idea what you're talking about."
After the cop drove off we dumped the remaining balls into the middle of the intersection and watched cars run them over, sending them flying all over the streets. The gutters were littered with barely-used tennis balls for weeks.

4.

It must have been the end of winter when I bought the second water-balloon launcher because the Christmas lights had been taken down. The first one broke while we were trying to shoot a bowling ball at an abandoned car. So I bought a new one. We shot oranges and rocks and the stale, left over muffins that Kristine's let me take home with me. Handsome Jack found a dead bird and shot it at an ambulance as it streaked by. Futureman got the idea that he wanted to feel what it was like to get shot with it. So we bought water balloons. Actually, Mad Dog stole them. They seemed safe enough. We filled a balloon up half way (accuracy and the object's size were inversely related) and Futureman walked down the street about fifty yards. I wasn't very good at shooting the damn thing so I sat on the bench and watched. Handsome Jack and Stink Finger held the handles out while Juice Box aimed and shot it. The balloon was red. I couldn't tell you the color of the building across the street, but oh! that ruby balloon, sailing through the air, tumbling over itself, distorted by the momentum, moving just slow enough for Futureman to realize that he did not want anything to do with it. He tried to jump out of the way but it caught him in the thigh with enough force to send his legs out from underneath him, his entire body horizontal. He landed on his side and was laughing and crying when we got to him. His thigh had a bruise that looked like the aurora borealis, all purple and green.

5.

Futureman, Sprinkles and I were sitting on the bench running out of things to talk about. Futureman stood up without saying anything and left. We figured he was going to find Handsome Jack and make him buy some food. However, twenty-minutes later he showed back up and sat down. He didn't say anything, just sat back down, no explanation. I didn't really care until he pulled something out of his pocket and started tapping it on the bottom of the bench, tap tap tap. I asked him about a girl he had talked into sleeping with him earlier that week. Sprinkles laughed and said it never happened. Futureman took the small object that he had been taunting us with, tap tap tap, which turned out to be a hunting knife, and stabbed Sprinkles in the thigh. Sprinkles didn't scream or yell—he hardly moved—and then blood started to soak through his pants. He asked Futureman to borrow his knife. Futureman obliged, knowing Sprinkles wouldn't try to stab him back. Sprinkles cut the bottom of his pants off and tied it around his thigh. Then he got up and said "I'm going home."

6.

The fireworks stand usually only showed up for business the week before the 4th of July but that year it just stayed there. Most of the group was over 18 and could sign the safety waiver themselves. The few of us who were not had to have our parents come down and sign it with us. I don't remember exactly what the waiver said, something about using them exclusively for warning and emergency flares or for herding cows. After he got to know us and realized that we were using them as weapons, he started giving us tips. We came in, one at a time usually, not wanting give away our supply list to the others, and he would tell us what the guy before us bought, making us think we had an edge on the crew, not realizing that he was selling us all the same stuff.
"You’re going to have to do better than that," he would say. "I forget his name, the big blonde kid. He got a fuck-load of Saturn Missiles and Roman Candles. Be careful, you boys are in for it." So the arms race escalated and that made life good for everyone: he stayed in business and we set the block surrounding the park on fire.

Once, we were sitting on the benches, pretending to exist somewhere outside the world that surrounded us, talking about 80's action movies probably, or existentialism, or the nature of specific superheroes sexual encounters—I honestly don’t remember. Handsome jack was smoking a cigarette and pulled a bottle rocket out of his pocket. He broke the stem in half and stuck it in his mouth alongside the cigarette. The fuse sparked and snaked towards his lips, sending us all diving from the bench. He didn't even flinch as the rocket shot from his lips and burst inches from his lap.

Incidents like this were commonplace and hell always broke loose afterwards. Cars got burned. Our fingers turned gunpowder grey. We bought novelty butane lighters that looked like guns and spent the majority of our time making small cannons to shoot bottle rockets out of, decorating them with slogans like "death from above" and "show no mercy." The conflicts were not exclusive to the park. They happened in our homes, at school and, once, in the grocery store. We did this for two years and during that time we rarely slept well or took a shit in peace, knowing damn well that someone was bound to slip a firecracker under our pillow or a handful of bottle rockets or Black Cats under the bathroom door.
We were talking politics. Handsome Jack was lighting a cigarette with an entire book of matches.
"People are too dumb to be free," he said.
"You think?" I asked. "Wait, what do you mean?"
"People are too dumb to be free. What do you mean, 'what do I mean?'" He threw the matches down onto the brick where a group of weeds were crawling through the cracks, setting them on fire. The rest of the group had been playing dice on the next bench over and stopped to watch the sprouts burn.
"I guess you're right." I said.
"I'm always right." He exhaled the drag he had taken, pulled a bottle rocket out of his pocket and threw it into the burning weeds. The whole group scattered, running to their cars for cover and ammunition.
That night the cops showed up again. When they did, we were spilt on both sides of the road, shooting roman candles at each other—a sort of irresponsibly beautiful Civil War reenactment. I don't remember exactly who was there. I know Juice Box and Sandman were there. Handsome Jack and Futureman, for sure. Some other hangers-on’s were around, as well. So the cops make us stand up against the cars and ask us a bunch of questions like: "do you have any 'street names', or, 'are you affiliated with any gangs?'." Juice Box just started listing shit off: " I go by: T-Bone, Juice Box, Bone Henge, Terrence of LeBonia, T-Bot, RoBot, Race Trader, Half Breed. Do you want me to keep going?" Somewhere in the interrogation Sandman convinced the cops that we were rival gangs. I think he called the two gangs "The Locusts" and "Heaven's Devils," or something cliché like that. Eventually they gave up and wrote us warnings. Come to think of it, we never really got tickets for anything. Juice Box got one, kind of.
7.

Juice Box would tell us that he was half-black but that his dad was a nigger. His dad had beaten his mom, abused him and died of a cocaine overdose before Juice Box was old enough to really know him. It didn't seem to affect him. In fact, the only times it was brought up was in joke form. And it was effective.

One night a homeless man walked up to the group. Juice Box was playing guitar and Handsome Jack was singing, making up shit as he went along, and we were all dying. The man was drunk and filthy. He asked for money and, when no one gave him any, he called us niggers. He said, "this whole fucking town" was "nothing but niggers." Still singing, Juice Box laid him out with the guitar, catching him above the eye with it. The man dropped. Just slumped down and stayed there. We ran to our cars and left. It was the first time I had ever been really scared. It was serious and we knew it. None of us went to the park for a couple of weeks at least. We never saw him before that night and we never saw him again.
8.

So, about Juice Box's ticket. There was a parade down Venice Avenue one night that went right by the park. The streets were flooded with white hair and beach chairs. The smell, a mix of aging flesh and artificial florals, was overwhelming. Juice Box was standing on the sidewalk kicking around a hacky-sack and a cop on a bike came by and told him to get out of the way. Juice Box just stood there, staring. Again, the cop told him to move. Nothing.
"If you don't get out of the way I am gong to write you a ticket," the cop said.
"For what?" Juice Box asked, balancing the hacky-sack on his knee.
"Blocking pedestrian traffic."
"Really? You can do that.?"
"I will be back in a minute and if you haven't moved I'll be forced to write you a ticket."
"For blocking pedestrian traffic? Wait…..you're on a bike. You're not a pedestrian." The cop smiled and pulled out his pad. Juice Box walked up to and then behind him, looking over his shoulder as he wrote the ticket.
"What's your name, son?"
"Juice Box Lebonia," he whispered in the cops ear.
"Can I see some ID?"
"You now I am not going to pay this, right?" he said, handing the cop his license.
"What you do with it is your business." he said, handing him the thin pink and yellow copy of the carbon paper.
"I guess that's true." He took the paper from the man's hand and tore it in half, then in half again, dropping the pieces at the officer's feet. He threw the hacky-sack in the air and continued juggling.
9.

But sometimes the cops were not all bad. One time Sandman locked his keys in his car and we convinced him that the cops were required to help you get into your car. He called bullshit, but eventually he flagged down a cop who was patrolling the area. It was a woman cop and she seemed quite taken with Sandman's flowing blonde hair and bronzed skin. She told him that one of the other officers on duty was a wiz at B and E, so she called in a request. Minutes later there were four cop cars surrounding Sandman's car, all with their lights on. The officers stood around giving Sandman tips on how to get in, offering little tools that they had in their patrol cars. Sandman thought it was hilarious. We were all sitting on the benches, across the street in the park.
"Hey Juice Box!" Sandman yelled. The cops all turned their attention in the direction where Sandman was yelling. "You're half black. You should have been in and out of this motherfucker already!"
"You're right, man. But I would have just thrown a brick through it."
10.

Another time, early winter, I remember, we were playing hackysack in the middle of the intersection in front of the park. The season's first cold front was passing through and the town was silent, save the wind. A cop showed up, lights showering the block in blue and red as the autumn ended above us, the temperature dropping as the wind screamed through the empty streets. He got out of the car and walked towards the group who pretended he was not there.
"Pass me the rock," he said.
We let it fall at our feet, as confused, dumb silence buried us. He stepped into the circle, picked up the hacky-sack and began juggling it deftly with his boots. Everyone stared blankly as the small uniformed man kicked the sack to Mercitron who twitched out of his trance and volleyed it back.
"You got skills, copper," Juice Box said.
"Word," he responded. A few minutes later another squad car passed us and he pretended to be reprimanding us, pointing his finger and shouting.


At times, looking back, it seems High School never happened. I wasn't a part of it. I was at the Park and that's all I remember when I think of those years. I graduated High School in 2002, a semester early, hoping to move to California. The night before I left, I stopped by the Park to see everyone and say goodbye. Most were in attendance: Juice Box, Handsome Jack and Futureman, Mercitron, Stinkfinger and Mad Dog. Sprinkles had moved by then, with his mom, I think, to Key West. It made sense, really. We had all recently taken a group field trip to Wal-Mart in hopes of finding a uniform that the group could wear, something identifying, obvious, something flamboyant. We had settled on black-vinyl (women's) vests and spray painted "Park Posse" on the backs in safety orange. We were all wearing the vests and Juice Box was trying to get hit by a car on his bicycle. He ended up running into a station wagon that had come to a stop at the intersection, sending him sailing over the handlebars into a Pete Rose-slide across the hood. The woman driving panicked and sped off, the mulatto daredevil still laid across the front, trying to jump off the hurtling grocery-getter. I walked over to him, lying on the side of the road laughing. I kicked him lightly in the back and extended my hand to help him up. He slapped it and smiled. I looked back at everyone sitting on the bench, smiling our way, burning under the sodium arc lamp.