There was no duffle bag full of money
and toy guns refitted
to perform like the real thing.

No dry blood
under his fingernails either. I never saw him
get on the phone to his shrink in L.A.
and swear that God was forcing the concrete
to eat away at the tires on the fire truck he was driving.

He’s not crazy. I can be sure of this.
When he lifted up his top hat he didn’t fly
to the moon on the hope and prayer
of a cardboard propeller.

I have no proof that he wasn’t crazy.
We had never met before that business
outside the Chinese restaurant on Abercorn. I don’t know
if he did five weeks in the time-out corner back in Kindergarten
and held on to his imaginary friends through high school.

Only a detailed documentary will ever know
if he took Excitable Boy to heart.

It wasn’t that I was out for Chinese food
when he got to me. I was actually on my way to the store
for cigarettes and Canadian chocolate bars. The time was somewhere
around nine a.m.

The moon was still out, foolish as seven kinds of hell
in the blue sky as it tried to slur its way through another
poem about war, passion in spite of bad times
or six-time losers going to work for the local cruel muscle.

I don’t think I’d slept in two days at that point. Local shops
were moving fifty years into the past right there in front of me
and then switching back to the present when I got too close.

Obviously
I needed a vacation. Obviously Lulu was very much on my mind.
I think I was sitting on the heartless bench
outside that Chinese place, resting for a minute, rubbing my lower back.
I was likely wishing I had given her more reasons to keep loving me.

That’s where he pulled up. The fire truck stopped effortlessly
like a bicycle. The guy was wearing an expensive suit,
and there was no one else with him. Not a siren for miles.
The parade had been cancelled years ago due to permanent weather.

He asked me where I was going,
and I told him that it was just down the road. He said
that was fine and advised me to get in. He sounded like a lawyer
from the kind of TV show you just don’t see any more.

To this day and several others
I have no idea why I did.

Was it ever a good time! We somehow cracked a hundred
miles per hour without hurting a single innocent bystander.

I managed to tell him about the last twenty-five years
of my life, and he even let me play with the siren
and wave at strangers.

It was awhile before I realized
we had left and returned to Savannah four times. It might
have even gone from day to night and then back to day at some point.

I didn’t care. That was a first.
I wasn’t worried. That was another first.

I wasn’t even depressed when we finally got to the store.
It was easy to understand and accept
that my time was up. He took my picture with an old camera
and thanked me for the stories.

When he left I still went to the store,
but I slept for about a week when I made it back home.

The bed didn’t move. No one phoned to remind me
that the calls were coming from inside the house.

It was nice and almost completely free of bad dreams.

03/17/2010

Posted on 03/17/2010
Copyright © 2024 Gabriel Ricard