by Luke Boyd

So I grab this cheap bottle of vodka I’ve been keeping around and twist the cap off, take a little slug. You know, to test it out. It’s worth every bit of the nine dollars I paid for it. It tastes like it was made in New Jersey, or maybe Utah. Somewhere they don’t know shit about vodka for sure. I twist the cap back down tight and take it with me back up to Bill’s. I figure if he’s awake we can start hitting the vodka and he’ll wish he had gone to bed, and if he’s asleep I’ll just leave it on his stoop. Or pour it glug, glug, glug down some poor soul’s gas tank. Who does that type of shit?

Back up the hill and there’s not many cars out now. Just the drunks and morons. The two cars that do go past me as I’m flip-tossing the bottle in the air and walking, one of them goes by doing about five up the hill and the next guy’s coming up at about sixty. People always assume that they can get away with things real late at night, because it seems like nobody is around and nobody is watching. What a great time for doing donuts in parking lots, paintballing street signs, cruising around with a few six packs and chucking the cans out the sunroof. If they’d think about it they’d realize, when there are fewer people around there is always more attention given by the world of watchers to the few who make themselves seen. You stand a better chance of busting into the White House during brunch than you do at midnight. Really.

The row of houses leading up the hill is pretty typical of the city and things in general. They are all separate but there’s only about a foot of space between each one. They might as well be row-homes. I mean really, what are you gonna do with that space, build a sunporch? Install a Jacuzzi? Maybe fit your trash cans if they’re plastic and a little flexible. The fronts of the houses are all different. Some have ancient aluminum siding like mine, with powdery residue so thick on it that the color becomes a non-issue. Mine’s got a few dents in it too where people have thrown bottles, cans, and rocks at it from the street as they drove by. Again, most of this stuff happens late at absurd hours of the night. A few of the other houses have this fake stucco-plaster look to them. Kind of a white-trash-art-deco look. Most of the places with this stuff have really suffered—the rattling and shaking of big trucks going up and down the hill all day literally vibrates the plaster right off. Some people sweep it into the street, and bit by bit their house disappears. One guy actually gets out the caulking gun every weekend and tries to slime it back into place. That usually holds for a good few hours, then a line of trucks rumble on past and it’s down again. My favorite houses are the ones with sagging front porches, usually with roofs supported by split and rotted four-by-fours. The porches themselves aren’t so bad, they have a certain American Midwest desolation look to them, but it’s the houses behind them that get me. Fresh coats of paint every few months, ornate decorated shutters, heavy framed front doors. Like every time they go through and fix the house up they don’t quite get to the porch, and then it’s time to start all over again. This time a new coat of paint and some fancy gold house numbers fastened to the front door.

And by the way, we’re not talking normal colors of paint here either. Two houses up, the Castillos, they started with a chocolate brown and have since gone through tangerine, yellow, electric blue, and now salmon. The porch? It’s a sunbleached driftwood-rot gray.

These are the houses I pass on my way up to Bill’s. His place is brick and mortar, modest and out of place on this block. I’m almost there when I see some stuff running down the sidewalk towards me. It’s dark so naturally the stuff looks black, soaking into the cement as it crawls downhill. It looks a little like blood and I’m thinking, “Tell me Bill’s not laying up here in the street with his head bashed open or something.” I mean, it’s not exactly a great neighborhood.

Then I remember the cars that went by—the guy that was really flying, what if he had to pass the other guy? Maybe he came up on the sidewalk and there was Bill in his underwear with his cigar…

The stuff keeps running down the hill. But I’m not going to rub my fingers in it or anything, I mean, this isn’t some lame detective show. People don’t do that shit in real life. And besides, if Bill did get hit by that car or he got jumped, there’s nothing me and my finger dipped in blood can do about it. I mean, at his age, I’m sure any decent shot on him would splatter his guts all over. And maybe send a little puffball of dust up into the night sky, too. Because seriously, he’s really, really old.

But no, I’ve got it all wrong because when I get to his stoop at the top of the hill, there he is. With his underwear bunched up down around his ankles he’s facing the street, so I kind of just get a shadowy profile. His arms are thrown up high and I can’t even make out where they end and the darkness begins. He’s got the little glowing nub of his cigar dangling from his lips and he’s taking a piss on the sidewalk. As I get up closer I see the worst part. He’s turned slightly uphill, so his piss is hissing on the sidewalk right in front of him, running down over his bare feet and soggy underwear, and making its way on down the hill. I kind of just stand there for a second and watch him from a few feet off. It’s like some sort of twisted Great Gatsby flashback, only I don’t see what he’s looking at across the street. Then he’s done and he’s shaking the last few droplets out and humming a little bit of “Strangers in the Night”.

“Hey. Bill. I’m back. Everything alright?”

He doesn’t even turn to look at me and he’s still shaking it. When you’re about a thousand years old I guess you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.

“Ahhh. Yep. Let’s go in for a drink, eh?”

“Yeah. Sure. You know, you could get arrested for pissing in the street like that? Your toilet busted or something?”

“Oh. No, it’s working fine. But, the wife’s in there getting cleaned up. I gave her a pretty good going over, but she always washes up for round two.”

I’m picturing Bill in bed with some desiccated corpse and trying not to lose it as he’s hauling his piss soaked underwear back up. Then again, he doesn’t seem to be bothered by this situation, so whatever, why should I care?