When In Southern California

My ride shows up around 11pm. The buzz from work is just wearing off, and Patty T. Nowak is at the door. I'm scuttling around my parent's place, the summer home I've commandeered while on hiatus from school. I told him I packed this morning, and now I'm looking for a suitable bag to hold a handful of socks, two T-shirts and a pair of shorts, two roman candles and a soviet paratrooper flask. I wonder how Monica is doing, wherever she is. That last e-mail still has me spinning with something that smells like regretful hope stroganoff.

Now Patty is in the kitchen, i high five him, carrying a Sierra club shoulder bag whose contents now consist of only the flask and the fireworks. His burst of laughter echoes through the house, a short syncopated HAHA! and he's back to telling my mom how the new Red Bull Promotion takes him off the streets and into the office, no more peddling for him, its all middle management heaven from here. Her laughter is constant, the kind of half drunken hysteria i have become accustomed to this summer, loose crescendo and reprise, maniacal at times.

I step over the drum set, past the table saw and the canvases, under the hanging steam cleaner to the sleeping bags on the wall shelves next to the cleaning supplies and ammunition.  I dose off into a sleepwalking daydream of my father explaining to the Fire Marshall that there are over 2000 rounds scattered throughout the contents of our newly obtained garage fire.  The firemen are ducking bullets and casings that rip through the plywood and frame boards, tossing ribbons of plastic sheet sealer and roofing insulation like smoldering tracers or the trails of a good fourth of july mortar.  My bag is now packed.  I fill my flask and we kiss my mom on the cheek, we head for the door.  On the road again.

-to be continued-