Jason Thames Fiction

This piece of short fiction was written for a directed studies course at Cal State Long Beach. I wanted to create a more dynamic and immersive piece. I think I’m on the right track:

You pick up your friend Anthony from the LA County lockup downtown on a typical Southern California summer day. It’s only 10:00 AM and the temperature is pushing a hundred degrees. The air conditioning on your mid-nineties Accord gave out long ago, so you sweat while you watch him run over to the car in his socks while holding up his jeans. His blue plaid button-down shirt is around his neck, his chest bare, boxers protruding from the top of his pants. He’s carrying a plastic bag under his other arm with his wallet, tennis shoes, and belt inside. He wears his pants so low you can’t help but wonder why he bothers with a belt.

He opens the door and jumps into the passenger seat like an Olympian. He has a knack for making everything he does appear athletic no matter how mundane.

“What’s up, my nig?” he says as he takes your hand, releases it and snaps his fingers.

“What’s up,” you say in response. You are only mildly irritated about picking him up. On the one hand you hate going into the city, on the other you like having the excuse to spend time with Anthony. You almost always wish it was under better circumstances.

“What happened?” you ask as you try to find your freeway.

“Woo! It was active last night! You should have been there. Me and Mike and Elisha went out to The Plex in Echo Park. Some dick started some shit so I had to put him in his place.”

“How did that go over?”

“Ha! Well, it was going fine. I clocked him and security was on me quick, like they knew I was going to do something. They kicked us out, and we would have been fine if it wasn’t for this cop. He stopped us as we were walking away. Must have been looking to screw someone over. I had some weed on me and he fucking hauls me in.”

You take the 101 and get on the 10 towards West Covina. You roll down the windows, but there’s traffic and instead of a breeze you get exhaust fumes for the next half hour.

“I’m sure you didn’t say anything to tick him off.”

“Nah,” he laughs, “you know me.”

“Why didn’t Mike and Elisha come and get you?”

“They said it was my fault!” He looks hurt.

“You don’t think it was?”

“That cop was going to take someone in last night. I didn’t do shit.”

You want to tell him his life doesn’t have to be this way, that people can take responsibility for their actions, that it’s possible things could be different.

Instead you say, “Are you hungry?”

He shows you his empty wallet.

“Don’t worry, I got you. Where do you want to go?”

“Doesn’t matter to me.”

“Where am I taking you after?”

“I don’t know yet. Can I use your phone?”

You listen to him call friends and family as you inch along through traffic. You hope traffic will be better once you’re past the 5, 10, and 60 interchange. Traffic is always bad there unless it’s the middle of the night.

Three calls in, after arguing with his dad, he gives up.

“You mind if we go to your place while I figure things out?”

You knew that when he took your phone it was going to end up this way. You should have just told him that you wanted him to come over.

“I don’t mind,” you say as you watch him put on his shirt out of the corner of your eye. The heat is stifling and your shirt is drenched with sweat. Thankfully the traffic after the interchange speeds up and the air gets moving through the car. You put on KROQ and Silversun Pickups blares through the tinny speakers. For the next twenty minutes you are both silent.

You take the Vincent Ave exit going south until it turns into Hacienda Blvd. You pass through La Puente, just north of Hacienda Heights where you both grew up. When you were a kid you looked down on La Puente. It was a poorer neighborhood, notorious for drug and gang activity. Hacienda Heights still has its high-end areas, but today the poor parts look all the poorer.

You stop at the McDonalds on Gale Ave, which has been there for as long as you can remember. The fries have always been your favorite, but since Sacramento made all of the fast food restaurants give up trans fats, they’ve never been the same. Considering you and your brother and sister weren’t two hundred pounds when you were kids you think the obesity epidemic has less to do with trans fats and more to do with activity level. Every time you get a combo you first eat a fry but you are ultimately disappointed. Things can never be what they were.

At one point you considered having Anthony as a roommate. However, you came to your senses when you realized you didn’t want 24 hour smokeouts at your place. You watch Anthony go from place to place trying to find somewhere to crash for a few nights at a time, while you live in a small rented room in one of the aforementioned poorer parts of your neighborhood. Once you tried to convince him to do the same, that stability was better than the uncertainty of trying to find a place to sleep, but he perpetually burns his bridges. If he could just stop using, you know he would be alright.

You pull into the driveway of the house you share with two other roommates. It’s a one-story house with three bedrooms, and peeling pale yellow paint. It was built in the sixties, and its age shows next to the newer houses which are popping up in on many of the streets. The house has a pool that comes in handy during except for the odd winter day. You find your roommates out back grilling.

“Hey, Josh,” you say, “Anthony might stay over.”

You like Josh. He’s your age, but unlike you he went to college right out of school and his parents helped him buy this house. You hope he’s not irritated. He’s cooking chicken for his girlfriend.

“Hey, Anthony,” he says as they clasp hands.

“You want to eat inside?” you ask while holding the McDonalds bag high in the air.

He agrees and you go through the sliding glass door. You pull out two dinner plates and a bottle of ketchup from the refrigerator. If they deign to ask you at the drive thru window how much ketchup you want, you never ask for enough.

You’ve had a rough week. Despite your fear that he may never stop drinking after he starts, you ask Anthony if he wants some rum in his coke. You pour some soda from each cup and replace it with Seagram’s dark rum. It was the preferred drink of your parents and you are beginning to think that, though they were terrible at marriage, they really knew their alcohol.

You take a long drag off the straw and eat your meal, fries first.

“How’s your brother?” you ask between bites.

“Good. He’s whipped by his woman, but I guess he’s good.”

You knew his brother Jesse before you knew Anthony. You went to school with Jesse in elementary, middle, and high school. You never really liked him very much. It was his demeanor. He was built and you just knew that if he had his back against the wall, someone was going to get hurt. When you went to his house for a high school assignment, you got to hang out with Anthony. He was smaller, and he only had a hint of the danger that his brother exuded. You were taken in by the playful innocence beneath the surface. There was something that said no matter what he did you would be safe.

“He wants to be around his kids, that’s all,” you say.

“She treats him like shit. She cheated on him!” he says, clearly angry. “I would never let a woman do that to me.”

“Everything’s different when you’ve got kids.”

“That’s why I don’t have any. You won’t see me doing that shit.”

Now that you’re done eating the heat’s starting to get to you. “You want to get in the pool?”

“Sure,” he says as he cleans off the table. He washes the plates in the sink, dries them and puts them back in the cabinet.

You go to your room and hand him the pair of trunks he leaves at your house. At the pool, you use the steps to tentatively test the water. Anthony jumps in without a thought.

 

That night Josh and his girlfriend start a bonfire in the fire pit they installed in the backyard. You help keep the woodpile stocked during the summer just in case some of your friends come over. Josh built the pit by hand.

When Josh and his girlfriend call it a night, it’s just you and Anthony in lawn chairs beside the fire. You’ve progressed from McDonalds cups to Dixie cups. You’re going to need to buy another bottle of rum. Anthony gets up and walks around the fire. He keeps pacing back and forth like a panther stalking its prey.

“Thanks for picking me up today,” he says. “You know, I look up to you like a brother.”

“No problem, man. You’re always there for me too.”

“You think I don’t know I fuck up? I’m fucked up, dude!”

“You’re not fucked up,” you say. You look at the sliding glass door to make sure it’s closed. Josh’s room is upstairs facing the street. “You’re not.”

“You think I don’t know what people say about me? I’ll fuck up any motherfucker who has the balls to say it to my face.”

“I know, Anthony. Calm down.”

“Anyone says anything about you, you let me know! You’re my brother.” The intensity in his voice touches something inside of you.

He walks over to you and hugs you and kisses the top of your head. It’s the compression, the contact, the intensity. It’s then that you know that, for him, you would do anything.

 

The next day he can’t find anyone to take him in. And you don’t want to put him out. He can’t stay with you, but you want to make sure that you spend as much time as possible with him.

Internet cafés were a popular spot for you and your friends growing up. There is one place still operating in Rowland Heights. The rest were out of business. You, Anthony, and Roman, his brother, meet there in the evening.

They insist on drinking in your car. You find a secluded parking spot. You normally would not indulge them, but you decide there’s no harm in giving in.

“Thanks for picking up Anthony,” Roman says.

You tell him it wasn’t a problem.

“I’mma fuck Mike up when I see him,” he says.

“Nah,” Anthony cuts in, “they didn’t do anything.”

“They left your ass downtown!”

“It’s alright,” Anthony says while sipping his drink, “I just gotta learn that he won’t come through.” Anthony pats you on the shoulder. “I know who the homies are.”

You don’t know about or care about Mike. You understand why they would leave Anthony to fend for himself. You figure that he’s going to have to do it some day.

You start to feel a buzz, and after listening to their music you decide to get a little angsty.

“Just listen to this,” you say. The alcohol’s made you sentimental and you start to play Hoobastank. You were in high school when you first heard their music and for some reason it awakened something inside of you. You play Crawling in the Dark. “I don’t know what it is, but it speaks to me.”

They humor you for a bit, then finish off the rest of the rum.

“You ready?” Anthony’s brother asks, his bulk taking up the majority of the back seat.

“Yeah,” Anthony said.

You want to listen to more music, but you relent and pull the key from the ignition.

The internet café is on the second floor of a strip mall, full of garish signs in a language you cannot pin down. The stairs and the surrounding stores are bathed in red light. A group of guys stand outside of the entrance. They are like sentries, alert, watching everyone that passes. You avoid making eye contact. One of the group has his hand in his pocket. You think he looks like a wannabe gangster.

You play Counter Strike for a couple of hours. Anthony bums a smoke off another player and the two of you go outside. Roman stays behind and calls out someone across the room for camping a spawn. You don’t smoke, but you will smoke with him. You can see the headlights of the cars on the freeway, not too far away.

That group of guys is there too, the group you didn’t take any notice of earlier.

You are going to bring up a memory, of a good time with Anthony, before the drugs and the alcohol. You want to say you wish that every moment could be this good. You turn, but he’s off like a stray dog facing dogs twice his size, like a Doberman barking at a Mastiff.

Your imagination of control dissolves into chaos.

Everything is red. Anthony is calling them out. They rush him. Roman is on your left, out of nowhere. One of the other guys pulls a knife. He goes for Anthony, the knife stabs, again, again, again, again.

Anthony grabs his side, his stomach, his hands came back red. Your vision is obscured by the redness.

You rush the guy with the knife. You have never done anything like this in your life. You run into him, the bloody knife is sliding away, painting a grimace in the beige paint on the ground. Then you and he are struggling against the railing. You win, and feel something you’ve never felt before. You begin to lift him off of the ground, expending all your strength until there’s no longer any resistance. He’s going over the railing. You watch his anger switch to fear. That feeling, so powerful a moment ago fades. You are afraid.

You look over the edge, and his body is crumpled, legs and arms twisted like a discarded marionette. You don’t have time to worry about him. You go to Anthony and grab him. You hug him as the blood pools around you. You kiss him on the head. And you weep as his brother chases the rest of them away. All you can do is weep at the life you lost.