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a hundred teenage sidekicks

by Gabriel Ricard

Clearly
the old guy was talking
to someone else,
and that’s what made
the whole thing
so disconcerting to the young man
who just happened
to have walked into the room.

The party was a secular sensation
in every other point of the house. A hundred teenage sidekicks
were tearing the pool house to bits,
making big plans for higher education
and physically connecting with each other in a spiritual way
on every available flat surface.

The young man had changed his name three times
and survived four shots of Wild Turkey in a row.

he was going by Lenny
and kind of liked the way it sounded.

None of it helped.
Finding true love was still proving to be
a real pain in the ass.

He staggered around for a while
and imagined stepping outside to find
his older brother’s apartment building way,
way downtown.

The rain was steady,
soothing in a vindictive sort of way,
and all the levees were on loan to Vulcan
until further notice.

He wandered the marvelous scene for a while
and kept looking behind him to see
if there were documentary filmmakers
following his every badly-timed step into immortality.

That one quiet room
out of a thousand was discovered
by complete accident.

The old guy looked up when he walked in,
brushed some fifty-year-old strands of hair
from his eyes and never paid attention to him again.

He went right on playing his guitar
and smoking the same cigarette from 1977.

Along with the room being freakishly dark
Lenny also noticed rain getting into the room
from a huge crack on the nearby sliding door.

He listened to the old guy mumble
something about a wild time
in what had probably become
a much better place to live since then.

There was something else
about how it was a hell of a thing
to lose someone so beautiful so young.

It didn’t make any sense,
and after a few minutes Lenny got tired
of seeing this guy in a boxers and a bathrobe
that didn’t even come close to being tied in the middle.

The guy looked like an actor who was near the end
of paying a heavy price for trying to prove Elvis Presley
could have made it all come together in 1978.

He looked clammy. His fingernails were ridiculously long,
and a set of keys were resting on his desperate gut.

Lenny didn’t think much of his guitar playing,
and that was finally the cue to stumble away quietly.

He let out a loud, jarring laugh as Lenny closed the door
and went back to the party for two more days.

Eventually
somebody had enough
and called the cops,
who responded with wild abandon.

06/28/2011

Posted on 06/28/2011
Copyright © 2024 Gabriel Ricard

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