juvenescence: tales of boyhood

Butchie

Butchie. I think that was his name, half black, half white. Although, even as a teen, I didn’t understand why someone would define themselves by an accident of birth. We are, at the end of the equation, the sum total of the choices we’ve made; I’m quite sure he’s dead by now.

The rooming house was three or four stories tall; we never noticed how many steps, how many floors. Instinctively, we just knew the way. Butchie had drugs, always, and, even in his bitterness, his disdain for the whole fucking world, and mostly, for himself, he was lonely, so he shared. We, the bright future, the walking dead, were company. Sometimes, it’s just that simple.

The small, filthy room stank of cigarettes, and body odor, of death, and of regret, like a foretelling. His, once white, tshirt, which he always wore, was stained yellow, though his heart was black. I always watched him closely when Fayette was there. Though, she was taken, with my friend, I loved her, in a way, and protected her. She knew, and we never spoke of it.

In the hall, in view of the shared bathroom, though in the shadows, on the third or fourth floor, we didn’t know, but, we drank, Dewars White Label. I spent what seemed like weeks, or months, trying, straining, to twist the cap off the bottle, as we passed it around, dropping the damned thing on every pass. The cap had already been taken off, by Fayette, her head, then, nodding to the left, as she held the white cap in her loose grip, her straight blonde hair falling over her lovely breasts, and supple left shoulder. I hadn’t realized.

Butchie wasn’t there that day, so we drank in the hall, as people came and went, shitting and pissing in the shared bathroom, some looking us over as they passed, but most, indifferent. We never saw him again, and never spent more than a moment or two wondering what had happened to him. There was always someplace else to go. There were always more lonely people.