by Adam J. Galanski-De León
We were just kids when we first skated the stair sets of Bistel Pharmacy, scabbed knees and scraped skateboard paint jobs in autumn sunlight, sandpaper grip against palms as we ran from old ladies calling the cops and bombed winding hills sloping past the cookie cutter condominiums and sandlot baseball fields bordered with collapsing chain link fences; the cage to the diamond that I tried to climb one time, dropped off early, waited for the rest of the team to show up and my cleat caught in the links and my body flopped, hanging upside down, blood to the head, green mesh cap whisking to the ground, and I was found like that, red with embarrassment, adjusting the cup in my crotch as it squished my jewels between my thighs.
This I remembered passing by the music shop in the Stop and Shop lot, where we drank Moxie Soda and strummed a cheap acoustic guitar, feeling far from our dreams, from most anything, still children.
Invited in by the owner, an old man who talked girls and music with us: rock-n-roll, punk rock, heavy metal. We made joke rhymes for raps, jocking the Beastie Boys, and by the look in his eyes behind his bottle thick glasses resting beneath his Jeffrey Dahmer bowl cut, I could tell he was annoyed by our youthful laughter. But there was something else to that look. The used car salesman smile. He brought us into the back office and clicked on a file marked “Training Videos” on his desktop box Windows 95. Something in our pants felt alive for the first time.
A naked woman walked on the screen, voluptuous in her own right, though that feeling changed when the shot panned to a horse, phallus erect, the length of one of our bony white arms, and she stroked it with a deranged passion and planted the hood on her lips.
I cringed at this, the old man laughed, tapped the counter, said, “There’s more!” He clicked on a file while the clock ticked in the most uncomfortable silence since my teachers pulled the girls and boys aside in class and made us stare into each other’s eyes for ten minutes straight without talking to prepare us for the social interactions of the real world. But I just couldn’t understand what was going on between these men and this woman, their veiny cocks stiff and pink, plucking the bleached rim of her buttocks with a pop and prolapsing her inner organs like a pile of browned vegetables reheated in the microwave.
“That’s it!” said the old man, “The blooming onion!”
At that moment I couldn’t help but pass gas, to which he hysterically laughed.
“Looks like you’re getting excited there!”
Three videos later, of dogs and chickens and lambs fucking men’s tongues, cocks, and hands, we busted out of that store, skating the backstreets, tagging dumpsters with Magnum markers, wobbling and falling, feeling violated, still unsure what we saw or what we thought, though for many years we would go back to that store, take lessons for instruments, or sometimes even work the register, or play used guitars out of half-busted amps while the owner sold drumsticks to soccer moms whose kids were in high school bands, waiting for them to leave so he could show us another video sent by his horn dog cousin in the Carolinas. That same year we forgot skateboarding when the ivy green faded to burnt ochre, then to white drifts of snow, and we fought for the first time, in a group, pummeling each other in the cold.
I thought I hated you as we wrestled there, rolling around, damp and dirty, noses bleeding, eyes crying,
I thought I could kill you. But I loved you more than anything.
Our friends were all we had.
Each day, our parents dropped us off at the music shop or the school bus took us to Main Street where we now walked, no wheels, skate shoes no longer scuffed. Sometimes girls with us, ones I only knew how to make moves on using lines stolen from pornography. They rightfully laughed at me but still kissed my cracked lips and sucked on my neck to leave a mark so my folks would see.
I remember that night, after dark, when the tire shop across from the fire station burned to the ground. Everyone in town stood around the flames, at first looking on in horror before someone cracked and pointed out how crappy our firemen were.
We were stunned and amazed, and in that moment realized it wasn’t the fire department to blame. It was the foundation of our town. An Old New England relic lost in the naked woods, where fischer cats screamed in the night, and from our bedrooms we heard animals moan and die. Our house cats were eaten by coyotes. Turkeys and bears lumbered across our yards. Hawks carried small dogs away in their talons like angry little brats clutching candy bars.
I realized all of this that night, as we hi-fived our greatest enemies around a ridiculous bonfire where once there stood a dilapidated business, and whatever qualms we had were squashed.
After that we didn’t hang out too much. We got old and moved away to bigger cities as our types do, until one day I got a call from my mom checking in.
“That old music shop closed down. The owner moved back to the Carolinas.”
My one chance to tell her, but instead I said, “That place was kind of weird.”
When I showed up the next year to royal Christmas greens and reds glowing across a great white silence, Bistel Pharmacy was a CVS, the tire shop an AutoZone, and the old music store rebuilt as a Guitar Center.
You weren’t there. No one was.
This I remembered passing by the music shop in the Stop and Shop lot, where we drank Moxie Soda and strummed a cheap acoustic guitar, feeling far from our dreams, from most anything, still children.
Invited in by the owner, an old man who talked girls and music with us: rock-n-roll, punk rock, heavy metal. We made joke rhymes for raps, jocking the Beastie Boys, and by the look in his eyes behind his bottle thick glasses resting beneath his Jeffrey Dahmer bowl cut, I could tell he was annoyed by our youthful laughter. But there was something else to that look. The used car salesman smile. He brought us into the back office and clicked on a file marked “Training Videos” on his desktop box Windows 95. Something in our pants felt alive for the first time.
A naked woman walked on the screen, voluptuous in her own right, though that feeling changed when the shot panned to a horse, phallus erect, the length of one of our bony white arms, and she stroked it with a deranged passion and planted the hood on her lips.
I cringed at this, the old man laughed, tapped the counter, said, “There’s more!” He clicked on a file while the clock ticked in the most uncomfortable silence since my teachers pulled the girls and boys aside in class and made us stare into each other’s eyes for ten minutes straight without talking to prepare us for the social interactions of the real world. But I just couldn’t understand what was going on between these men and this woman, their veiny cocks stiff and pink, plucking the bleached rim of her buttocks with a pop and prolapsing her inner organs like a pile of browned vegetables reheated in the microwave.
“That’s it!” said the old man, “The blooming onion!”
At that moment I couldn’t help but pass gas, to which he hysterically laughed.
“Looks like you’re getting excited there!”
Three videos later, of dogs and chickens and lambs fucking men’s tongues, cocks, and hands, we busted out of that store, skating the backstreets, tagging dumpsters with Magnum markers, wobbling and falling, feeling violated, still unsure what we saw or what we thought, though for many years we would go back to that store, take lessons for instruments, or sometimes even work the register, or play used guitars out of half-busted amps while the owner sold drumsticks to soccer moms whose kids were in high school bands, waiting for them to leave so he could show us another video sent by his horn dog cousin in the Carolinas. That same year we forgot skateboarding when the ivy green faded to burnt ochre, then to white drifts of snow, and we fought for the first time, in a group, pummeling each other in the cold.
I thought I hated you as we wrestled there, rolling around, damp and dirty, noses bleeding, eyes crying,
I thought I could kill you. But I loved you more than anything.
Our friends were all we had.
Each day, our parents dropped us off at the music shop or the school bus took us to Main Street where we now walked, no wheels, skate shoes no longer scuffed. Sometimes girls with us, ones I only knew how to make moves on using lines stolen from pornography. They rightfully laughed at me but still kissed my cracked lips and sucked on my neck to leave a mark so my folks would see.
I remember that night, after dark, when the tire shop across from the fire station burned to the ground. Everyone in town stood around the flames, at first looking on in horror before someone cracked and pointed out how crappy our firemen were.
We were stunned and amazed, and in that moment realized it wasn’t the fire department to blame. It was the foundation of our town. An Old New England relic lost in the naked woods, where fischer cats screamed in the night, and from our bedrooms we heard animals moan and die. Our house cats were eaten by coyotes. Turkeys and bears lumbered across our yards. Hawks carried small dogs away in their talons like angry little brats clutching candy bars.
I realized all of this that night, as we hi-fived our greatest enemies around a ridiculous bonfire where once there stood a dilapidated business, and whatever qualms we had were squashed.
After that we didn’t hang out too much. We got old and moved away to bigger cities as our types do, until one day I got a call from my mom checking in.
“That old music shop closed down. The owner moved back to the Carolinas.”
My one chance to tell her, but instead I said, “That place was kind of weird.”
When I showed up the next year to royal Christmas greens and reds glowing across a great white silence, Bistel Pharmacy was a CVS, the tire shop an AutoZone, and the old music store rebuilt as a Guitar Center.
You weren’t there. No one was.
Adam J. Galanski-De León (he/him) has been published in Farside Review, Penumbra, and BULL, among others. His novel Szarotka won the Buffalo Books Prize 2022 and will be published by American Buffalo Books in summer 2024. Adam lives in Chicago with his wife, Ayanni. www.ajgart.net | Instagram @adam_j_galanski
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