How to Proceed?

We like coincidence, the occurrence of two events at the same time. Friday the 13th. We signify it, bring our attention to it, watch to see what will happen with a greater awareness. Perhaps we need coincidence, especially the predictable kind, to keep our lives from feeling random.

I am struggling with what to tell you, what to reveal in the thread of my narrative. It gets dark, darker, before it gets light. It is an adolescent descent into a nether-world of ugliness. And if I tell it, I wonder how to tell it. So far, I have chosen inference and innuendo over graphical.

But you see, the saving grace was my non-participation. I was an observer, a bystander, by and large. I don't mean that I was blameless, for I chose to stay close to the awfulness, but I was only close.

Tommy was less fortunate; for him there was no escape. He was a sensitive boy, but the life around him was worse than mine. He had chosen to leave his father's house to live in a small trailer with his mother and stepfather because he could no longer stand the tyranny of his father's home. His sister, who was a true beauty, had gotten a boyfriend who worked for UPS and then had gotten pregnant in order to get out of his house. Later, after she had the baby, she told everyone that her father had been molesting her for years.

Tom's mother was a drunk and married a drunk and lived in a trailer park full of drunks and drug addicts. Tommy quit school in the eighth grade and went to work. He could draw and sing and play guitar, but he had to help pay the bills, too. And so he did manual labor at a tire shop, coming home tired with dirty hands day after day. Somehow, he couldn't even afford a car.

But even Tommy had a girlfriend. She lived with her family in a trailer close to his. Her mother was a nurse and very proper, but her father worked in a canning plant just like Tommy's step-father, and he was a drunk, too. After work, he would open a tall can of Falstaff and keep drinking until he fell asleep.

Laura wasn't much to look at. She was skinny and had a large nose and ratty hair, but she was sweet and crazy about Tommy. Tommy wasn't as crazy about her. Donny had a sister, Adair, who was skinny, too, but who had large eyes and an electric personality and she was all Tommy really cared about. However, she had a boyfriend she left behind in Alabama who was twenty-one, and every once in awhile, he would drive to Florida to see her. He would get a hotel room and take her there for a few days. Her parents acted as if this was a wonderful thing and made a big deal out of his coming, but I couldn't understand it. How in the hell could they be pimping off their daughter?

And after he was gone, Adair would bask in the glow of love until he next returned. She was saving herself for only him, and Tommy was sick with it. They were friends, Adair would tell Tommy, and so he would see Laura with one eye wandering, waiting, waiting.