Old Buick

We don’t know our history. We don’t know what a city is capable of. And since the city is made of people, we don’t know what we’re capable of.

It wasn’t a day like another. Or at least I’d rather think it wasn’t just another day. Alright: I mean, you don’t feel the danger before you’re past it. They call it panic, and in our dull existence the present is just a dead momentum in which you consider you’re gonna be alive one day. Cause the past is merely the things you’ve done. They deteriorate and as a corpse they stink and make you wanna do it again: like smelling your own farts. You got another chance to feel alive, and whenever it gets to that there’s no such thing as good and evil, cause you’re not allowed to choose and it’s all bullshit the idea of stepping out of the door and taking a direction. You got the dog in front of you and you’ll have to shoot it. You wanna chase dames? Alright, that’s your problem pal. You’re gonna get cornered and feel the same again, only with someone else’s fart under the linens. The only thing you need is a car and a trunk. You make sure you put there your twelve gauge and some clean shirts. You shave ready as it’s gonna be the last time you do it, have a nice meal, boots on, comb your hair and take a good look at that beautiful body they gave you to play someone else’s rules.

You don’t fit in, you just fit inside a coffin with your senses switched off for good, that’s where you belong now. And forty years in this place tell you this, you don’t need to pay a shrink just to be afraid to do the last move. You don’t need a god to pray and feel a little less lonelier in a too much well-known solitude. You don’t need a father, cause he’s dead already and he would just pretend that you could have had a better life here in Boston.

He wasn’t a poor man, he gave you everything but the will to appreciate life now that your childhood is gone and everything is just re-chewing the memory of a blind passion. You don’t see beauty no more, you just stick to rotten things like yourself now that you got old and they got old with you; things with four decades or more on their backs.

Rusty things that still work one last time though.

America has provided you with clean brand-new things. Knights of Columbus celebrated your achievements; your black Cadillac has been hand-washed by the hands of strangers; a tumor has been removed by a well-paid glove; your ex-wife got one last big check and finally tried cocaine; your son is a grown-up now and forgot the way he used to love you despite everything. What if he still would? I’d say that fathers are supposed to die anyway. So I’ll steal a car, one of those rusty crates that still got a motor. One of those you used to watch under the sun with your first gin-cut Cherry-Cola in your hand. There’s no use leaving them sitting beside the curb of a forsaken neighborhood. Owners look at them as they look in the mirror. Vanity it is, nothing more. Stuck in the past with immobile things all around waiting for a future that never comes. It don’t exist! And if you wanna celebrate America and yourself you do it with a gun in your trunk. No middle way, no compromise. So, defrost the lobster and have it the Boston way. Three cans of icy-cold beer and I’m already in Brookline under those twisted trees. The old Buick with the baseball-smashed windshield is still there. Purple as an old dream, silent as the truth. In that dirty back seat you made love for the first time and broke that irish cherry; you married her, had two kids, back to work, moved to a bigger house in South End, divorced, paid alimony, back to work, millions, women, coke, and finally back to that old Buick again.

Look up in that project, your father’s smoke is not coming out the window no more. Play-time is finished and your black Cadillac is frowning at you from the other side of the road under those twisted trees. Leave it there, that car it’s the damnation itself. You got your twelve gauge with you and that’s all you need. Buick’s door is open, everyone’s got the ticket for the end he wants I think. It’s so easy, so tempting that I smile as a kid for the first time in years. I reckon that if my kids would see me now they would love me again the same way I did with father whenever after he threatened me to put my head in the vice. I used to pee in my pants, and in the night I wondered if he would have done that for real. Than I’d go to his room and see him laughing on Lenny Bruce and loved him again.

My kids didn’t get that same chance with me. Friends are gone, now there’s just a bunch of people like me wandering around my pool with their square cigar and some baseball tickets for their subordinates.

I think that even if we had a crack seven years after those towers came down we still wouldn’t have had the chance to be ourselves again. We were once, no doubt. We had the cards, we had curiosity, and no church or shiny country club can’t give it back to us. No health insurance, no mortgage last payment, no organic food in the table, no secret blowjobs. No family now that I fucked up and real friends would just show up late.

We were something when we felt the dust under our shirts and there were leaves on those trees even in winter. We were Americans. Mobility and risk used to flow in our young blood and we would sleep like babies with the shout of crazy Buicks racing under our windows.

We were and now simply we’re not, and when you aren’t you have to be coherent with the fact and close the curtains. You’ve always been a kid, so close that rusty door and suck the gun now.