A Work Untitled

The following is an excerpt from my current writing project, which, as the blog title implies, has yet to be named. I am just copy-pasting it right from the rough draft text file, an am not editing it at all. Therefore, errors both typographical and grammatical are abound, and not apologized for. Enjoy.




"Kurtis Thompson!"

That was me. Or is me, depending on how you want to look at it. At this juncture, I know that I'm in trouble, but the fact that she only used two of the three names tells me that while she found some mischief of mine, she isn't entirely certain that I was the culprit. Swallowing down a weird feeling that is equal parts fear, pride, and excitement, I take that first disastrous step towards whatever destiny awaits me.

I walk into the living room of our moderate three-bedroom apartment. It's not exactly the nicest thing in the world, but it's far from squallor, too. The walls are a boring shade of white, and despite the many coats of paint, the "artwork" of my younger brother and I from a boring summer afternoon years ago can still be faintly seen. The furniture is old - heirlooms, mostly - but nice and in good taste. The couch is one of the most comfortable one could ever hope to pass out on, and the loveseat is perfect for those long, intimate nights. Both are a brown and gold plaid pattern, and the frames are made from real wood. The smell of them brings one back to simpler times, before the days of cable television and rock & roll music; times I'd prefer to never have lived in. Then my eyes go to the coffee table, where my mother is pointing and glaring.

On top of this thing is the object of her current ire: what I like to call Franken-mugs. These were coffee mugs that were broken during hijinks that probably were better performed outdoors, and yet my younger brother, Scott, and I would throw all caution and rationality to the wind in the name of Boredom - and sometimes even Science - to entertain ourselves while our mother was out at work, trying desperately to earn the meager money-dollars allotted to her by the United States Government that provided our living.

On retrospect, we probably should have been more grateful to her for her efforts, but fuck it. We were kids, and what's more, we were kids without fathers. In a world like this one, that automatically means that you're on your own to figure everything out in life, and to hell with anybody who says otherwise. Anyways, the Franken-mugs were pretty brilliant, I thought. We managed to give a dog head to Elvis' body, and the body of the dog now had an ass where the dog's head should have been. We found these things incredibly amusing, and thought to share with our Mother Dearest, but apparently, we were wrong.

"What the hell is this about!?"

I answer her with a grin and a look of pride. "We broke them while horsing around, and now they're fixed!"

"You call this fixed?" she asked, holding up two of three mugs in her hands, a look of obvious disapproval on her face.

"Well," I answered. "You should have seen them before we put them back together. A million tiny pieces each. We figured you'd be less upset if we tried to be creative in the process of repair."

I never even thought about the answer; the words just came to me as easily as air to a fish underwater. I was proud of myself, confident that even a woman as entirely unreasonable as this one would have to see the merit in at least giving it a half-assed attempt, and even telling her the truth about it! She'd never see that one coming, to be certain.

As it turns out, the gamble was a good one. Despite herself, a grin formed on her face, though obviously fought. She shook her head, and calmly placed the "fixed" mugs down on the coffee table that had seen better years. She shook her head, and a sound came out of her mouth that I hadn't heard for a few months, now: laughter. And, despite my self, I started laughing along with her. For a moment, I let my guard down as my tense muscles started to relax. This was a mistake.

Out of nowhere, one of the mugs comes careening through the air, missing my head by mere millimeters, only to crash against the drywall behind me, shattering once more and leaving quite a nice dent in the plaster. My eyes go wide, and I do the only sensible thing that I can think of: run to my room at the back of the apartment and lock the door. Little good that did me. She was right behind me. For a half-crippled woman with a horrendous back, she sure could move quickly.

Beating against the door, her fury was plainly evident. I lay down on my bed, shutting my eyes really tight, wishing and praying for her to go away. Neither wish nor prayer came true, as I heard her jimmying the lock and allowing herself entrance into my palace - my sanctuary. She completely ignores everything else in the room but me. I can imagine that her wrath has now caused her to have tunnel vision, where I am the only object present in her line of sight.

She grabs me out of bed and throws me to the floor, and while I fight my bladder for control I'm so scared, she is yelling at me about how one of those was a collector's item that isn't even made anymore, and is shaking me. I start laughing uncontrollably at this point, my head bouncing up and down and striking the ground beneath me. It was carpeted, so it didn't really hurt, but all I could do was laugh and laugh. Eventually, she saw the absurdity in the entire situation herself, and started laughing, too. Only this time, it was no ruse. The laughter was genuine.

We shared this moment of the absolutely insane and unstable. We reveled in it. She took me into her arms, then, and hugged me tight, placing a kiss on the top of my head. I hugged her back, still laughing, tears of it now streaming down my face. It was in that moment that I let words pass my lips that have hardly come out since. "I'm sorry, mom."

"It's alright," she cooed. "It's alright.... I shouldn't have gotten that angry about it. We'll fix the wall this weekend."

Smiling to myself, I already started planning out a weekend that didn't involve the fixing of the wall, instead delegating the work to Scott, leaving me to run amok with what few friends I had in those days. I hugged her back, and she excused herself from my room, closing the door, leaving me there in the Sancutary alone once more.

Laying back down on the bed, I pull a magazine from a huge pile that's sitting next to it. There are magazines of all different sorts, here. Magazines about video games, computers, science, science fiction rags, pulp rags. I had magazines about guns and ammunition, engineering, medicine, religion, and even pornography. The rate at which I would read just about anything was monstrous, to say the absolute least.

Back then, everything in the world was absolutely fascinating. Every time I would read something that was non-fiction, there was usually some really interesting event tied to the subject matter. I would sit there and fantasize about being one of these people who did something great for the world, and the thing was well-liked and well-received. The ones that interested me the most, however, were the ones about the people who started from the very bottom of the ladder, and worked themselves up to the top. That's where I wanted to be most of all: at the top. I wanted my piece of the American Dream.

After a while - I'm not entirely sure how long, as I tend to lose all sense of time and responsibility while I'm reading - the phone rings. I let it ring three times before picking it up, rolling my eyes about the inherent laziness of everybody else in the domicile. As it turns out, the phone was for me, anyway. The voice on the other end was my friend and typical partner-in-crime at the time, Walter.

Now, Walter is a bit of a strange guy, yet one of the best people that I've ever met in my life. I met him way back in elementary school. I was well into my second month there, and being a strange child myself - I preferred to do things like watch kickball games to figure out how it all actually worked than I did to actually participating in them. That, or watch anthills, or stare off into space, living out some space fantasy that any could be expected of any six-year-old who, at this time, had been so indoctrinated into Star Wars that his ambition then was to be a Jedi.

Anyway, my friend was a bit of a giant. He stood easily a whole four to five inches above our peers growing up, despite the fact that he was only a year ahead of myself. His bright red hair and intense blue eyes contrasted in a way that made him a bit frightening to others for some reason. His stocky build, due to the fact that he actually did suffer from being "big boned." His bones were twice the density and about 50% larger than others', which made him appear huge and also has thus far prevented his bones from ever breaking. When I learned this, I immediately began teasing him about being a super hero in the making.

"Hey, dude," he says in that tone of voice of his that is somehow both gentle yet deep at the same time. "Ben's been over for a bit, and we're bored. Want to come and hang out?"

A grin started to form across my face. Little did I realize during my altercation with my mother, an easy out for this kind of situation had presented itself. Not only could I now rely on plausible deniability - probably the most wonderful little toy ever created by our law system in this country - to get out of any trouble with her I might get into for the sure-to-be-had antics of the evening, but I could also give her the space she'd need to fully cool down from what I supposed was a bad day at work, on top of her precious mugs being broken.

"Sure. I can make it over. Give me about thirty minutes."

I hang up the phone, and toss the magazine on my mattress. I know it goes on the pile of them next to it, but fuck it. I'll get it later tonight. Right now, there are more important things to do, such as practice my right to the pursuit of happiness. And right now, my happiness requires nothing more than the companionship of two of my fellow travelers on the path to the American Dream. Two brothers in arms, if you will, and we are fighting our way against all odds to go out, be successful against all odds, and be the ones that people talked about later in life. The year is 1998, and we are thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys, full of hope, promise, hormones, and most importantly of all, a desire to have as much fun as we possibly could before it all came crashing down around us, as it invariably would.

The words of the Bouncing Souls come to mind when I think of our friendship: "He's my friend, he's my alibi. My accessory to the crime." It goes on about a bond that will never die, but that part's bullshit. Always has been, and always will be, thanks to human nature. Anyway, that's what we were to each other. We were hardly ever apart from each other when we could help it, and there most certainly was a bond there, and still is, so we'll see.

I walk out of my Sanctuary, and out to the living room. "Mom," I say, quickly racing for the front door, having learned earlier in life that if I don't give her a chance to actually tell me "no," I can point out that she never really did, and therefore can't be mad at me for doing something that I didn't know I was supposed to do. "I'm going to Walter's house. I'll see you later."

And with that, and a quick twist of the key to lock the door, I'm off on my little adventure.