TAKE A CHANCE WHILE YOU'VE STILL GOT THE CHOICE
Travis’s mom ran a daycare out of their house and let the kids run wild while she sat in a Lay-Z-Boy recliner changing channels on the tv and smoking menthol cigarettes. He lived right near our middle school, but when school let out he tried to avoid going home because the place was still crawling with little kids. Travis’s dad mostly slept somewhere else and looked and drank like Hank Williams. When he was home, he took his son shooting or to the auto races.
To avoid the daycare kids we’d hide out in his room listening to tapes, and Travis would try to give himself tattoos with ink from a broken ball point pen and a needle attached to a stick. He had a huge Iron Maiden poster over his bed but never seemed to listen to them, but constantly played three tapes by AC/DC, The Exploited, and Misfits. We must’ve hit puberty on the same week and started dressing to kill, me with black hair and him with blonde, both with pants tucked into our military boots, black t-shirts (his sleeveless), and cheap silver jewelry. He wore dog tags, and I wore a pull-chain from a lamp with a black cross.
Travis’s house was a gateway to a worse neighborhood, and we tended to walk in the better direction towards school, but if we wanted to go to the convenience store we had to go the sketchy way. We were underage and couldn’t buy real cigarettes, but at the convenience store they would sell us tobacco and rolling papers as if there was a difference. We were headed there, past some apartment houses, when a car rolled up with five guys inside and asked for directions. This kid Eddie from my science class was in the backseat and spotted me but avoided eye contact. The car emptied out and they mounted the sidewalk wearing sleeveless white t-shirts (I refuse to call them “wifebeaters”), bandanas, and wallet chains. Eddie was hanging back, but the driver started spouting some imagined infractions we committed and pointing fingers. We eyed our way out, and right in front of us was an unrelated dude coming out of his apartment, waving us down, saying “This way dudes, it’s safe here!” motioning to go around the front of his house and into the neighborhood. We started heading that way, and right as we pass him he yells to the others “Miami Style, right?” and clocks Travis in the face. I try to run but he grabs me, and suddenly they’ve got us surrounded and it’s a blur of punches and kicks. There’s no way I can fight my way out, so I panic and somehow break free, running at top speed until I think my heart is gonna explode. I didn’t look back. Minutes later I burst through the door at Travis’s house where his mom is sitting in her chair, dipping a stick of butter in a plate of sugar and taking a little bite. There’s little kids everywhere and they all stop what they’re doing and give me a startled look. “WHERE”S TRAVIS?” she says, incensed that I would leave him in whatever scrape we go into. I said “We got jumped. There’s no way we could win, I hope he got out of there.”
Man, she was livid. Her son had to be friends with a no-good wuss like this. She held the phone in her hand as if to call the cops, but didn’t dial. Really, she wanted to go out there and kill anybody who would come at her family, and would have done it too if she hadn’t had a house full of other people’s children.
Finally Travis comes in, breathing heavy with a ripped shirt and blood running down his head, grinning from ear to ear. His mom rushes over to coddle him and he glances at me and says “Where’d you go?”
“I’m sorry man, I’m glad you made it. I was worried we would get knifed.”
“And you would just leave him there to get knifed!” his mom said to me with combination disgust and baby voice.
I called my mom to pick me up, and sat there on the couch counting the minutes. When I heard her car outside, I exaggeratedly leapt up off the couch, crashing my boots to the floor, right onto the leg of their poor dog Beauregard, who let out a pained howl. “Oh god! Oh no!” I said. And Travis’s little sister Tracy rushed over to comfort it. “What have you done now?” his mom said.
“Oh gosh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it” I said, as my mom appeared at the door.
When I went over there the following day, poor Beauregard had a full cast on his little leg, which was stretched out straight in front of him. Travis’s mom looked down her nose at me. “Who is gonna pay for this? The vet bill was sixty dollars!” I looked at the floor and offered to mow their lawn until it was paid off. Travis said “Yeah, make him mow the lawn instead of me!”
Fast forward to that weekend, and I’m in their backyard in the ninety degree weather pushing a mower. Travis came out the sliding glass door just to point at me and laugh. Then he went back inside and got a nice cool drink in a large glass, came back out, taunted me with it, and drank the whole damn thing himself.