Kate Wisel - Driving in Cars with Homeless Men

WHEN THE COPS CAME, they came to find us. We huddled by the glittering green sign that said No Loitering. Mozart Park after midnight, on the sidelines in our long-ass sleep tees, watching the boys make free throws in the dark. We were fourteen. We had stubbed butts in our pockets and no curfews.

Theyd find us at the packie because we sat with our arms linked on the semicircle stoop. The alkies strutted past, their beards streaks of dirt. We snickered as we rolled crushed Altoids into computer paper. The taste, burnt and crispy, flying up between our lips. Or in the Best Buy parking lot, where we kicked up cartwheels into parked cars. Screamed O-B-G-Y-N! to the ladies making their way through the automatic doors, their purses clutched to their sides. On the rocks, we licked the chocolate crusts of Reeses. Shards of glass in our foam sandals. The clouds sat close. We were roofless. We got bored with the sky and collected trash like criminals. A collage of wet Colt 45 wrappers, warped pages from nudies. Blond girls with their eyes scratched off, their mouths dropped above tits that suffocated their necks.

October we were older. We knew Fetus from the park, where he practiced his amateur boxing. He took us to his garage, where there was a white fridge and a pool table and a concrete floor that smelled like sharp tools. We poured liters ofSmirnoff into a watermelon, then shook the chunky liquor in cans of orange soda from Nemos. Fetus had sticky, thin lips like the gleam of Smirnoff on the rinds. Hed crouch crow-like on the stool, chalking his cue. He shelled out Oxys like they were mints. The faded shamrock on his neck was a voyeur, a pale green cloud.

One night his mother shuffled in with a greasy ponytail and rhinestone jeans loose like on the rack. She asked us for a lip gloss. In a blurry picture from a disposable camera, she tried to pose with us. Stretched across the green felt, she looked at home among us. We wore hoodies and lip rings, gold hoops that turned our earlobes green. Neon safety vests with no bras. Our pupils pinpointed and bloodshot but shining with purple shadow when the flash caught our blink.

The cops drove slowly down Fetuss snowy side street. They waited for the snap of a match in the front yard. For a cackle to crack out of the dark. They stood sideways with their shoulders against the garage door, shining flashlights, rapping their knuckles with muscle. They had a sweet tooth for knocking. We squatted behind the torn floral couch as they swarmed, our feet ready as springs. We darted, deft as light. We climbed Fetuss stairs to tear open the attic window. We pulled each other out like baby teeth, then skidded our butts down the icy roof. We jumped, all four at once. In the patch of snow, an emergency of laughter, one hairline fracture. We were already gone when the track switched and Biggie chuckled: Fuck all you hos! Get a grip!

We waited for one another. In the Intrepid outside English High, at the 7-Eleven, outside stalls, the faucet dripping away seconds. We took just as much, ran just as fast, just as far. There were no gardens to trample, planted pathways of blue and purple. Just the rattle of the chain-link after we jumped it.

Winter was a wall we couldnt see beyond till the garage door moaned when Fetus pulled it, the sky above the triple-deckers dripping colors like splat fruit. If you touched us, we shivered. Our skin like tangerines, on the cusp of bursting.

By spring, the sun vicious on the seats, we were sitting sweaty in the Impala, its rust spots like psoriasis. We circled the Burger King lot, waiting for Fetus. Wed skipped tests, joined zero teams. We didnt fling ourselves around a track field after the crack of a gunshot. Next spring, in the same BK lot, we heard a cop found some girl in the back seat of a hoopty. He shook her shoulders, shot a vial of Narcan up her nose. She was blacked out, the tips of her fingers ice, so blue they were white.

The dark came every night. Summer came without asking. We were back onthe rocks, stumbling, pocketing curled-up candy wrappers fallen from our fingers one whole summer back. Poised to plummet into the woods dark center. And beyond the tips of trees, the Boston skyline looked tiny as a postcard in the window of a gift shop we were once kicked out of. The cops never caught us, held our wrists, kept us in their firm, disingenuous, fatherly grips. There was nowhere to sit, so we sat on the rocks, the bright blue thirties, each other. We were skin-close to the sky. Our cheeks against that torn black sheet.