Felony Jones

Nicholas--Round Two

     Felony parked across the street from the cluster of bars she thought Nicholas would most likely go to. She had already been by his place without luck. It was Friday night, he had recently turned twenty-one, and he didn't have a car so the odds of him being at one of the gay bars closest to his house tonight were good. She also knew that when a scared or lost kid felt lost and scared, they usually went somewhere they felt they belonged, or to a place they felt there was safety in numbers. She sat in her car watching people mill around. She thought about how many times she was one of those people. It seemed like a lifetime had passed since she, and her mishmash of friends roamed around West Hollywood together. They came from all sorts of backgrounds and orientations, always having the unspoken motto, "stick together no matter what." She looked back on those days as some of the best times of her life, and she missed it terribly at times. The majority of those friends had now died of AIDS, or some AIDS related sickness. One by one they disappeared, mostly going unnoticed by anyone outside of a frightened community suffering from a disease most people denied could even happen to them. Sometimes when it hurt too much to think about those days, she would just try to imagine all of those friends standing around a giant dance floor in heaven, anxiously waiting for her to show up. She made a mental note to go to church for some quiet reflection and a tune up, as she liked to call it.

Felony took a sip of coffee. It had cooled too much for her liking but she wasn't about to throw it out. She lit a cigarette, took a few drags and relaxed back into her seat. She started thinking about Mary, wondering how she was, and what she was doing. Felony had been back a few days, but she couldn't stop thinking about her. She wondered if she had anybody stop by and visit her. Felony wondered if she had eased her mind at all during her visit. She hated the thought of her lying in that bed alone, wasting away day after day, worrying about what happened to her only child. Felony had stopped by the hospice on her way to the airport like she promised, but Mary was sleeping so she sat quietly next to her bed, watching over her. She studied her like she studied her own mother on her deathbed, but there was something different about Mary. Maybe it was the dusk glow of the room and the way her thin limbs sprawled out in awkward directions with the white sheet covering half her body. It made the scene seem like a renaissance painting. Felony wasn't sure what constituted a renaissance painting, but that's what her gut told her. Her mother was much more physically twisted and there was no softness or solemnness to her decline. She would never get those last scenes of Ruby out of her head. Felony was in one of her melancholy moods at the moment, reflecting on everything. Sometimes those moods were a precursor to a short period of depression, sometimes they weren't, she would just have to ride it out, hoping a distraction came along in the meantime to break the cycle.

Felony took a few long drags off her cigarette then flicked it out the window. She looked up and down the street contemplating whether to start going bar to bar looking for Nicholas. She didn't really have the energy at the moment and she was very comfortable just thinking. A few more minutes wasn't going to make a difference. She took a long last drink of coffee then poured it out the window. She felt a little guilty that she never stopped by the cemetery before leaving Indiana, but she had felt enough sadness for one trip. She had never gone by aunt Pansy's old house either, so she justified it in her mind that it wasn't a personal dig toward her mother.

"Fuck it." Felony got out of her car and walked across the street. She had made her way through two bars and headed into the next one. She slowly walked along one side of the room when she spotted Nicholas on the far side of the dance floor and made her way through the crowd. He had his back to her, but the two guys he was talking to saw her coming up on them. The look on their faces got his attention. He spun around just in time for her to grab him hard by the arm. "I need to talk to you, now!" Felony led him to the exit, pushing him out the door to a quiet spot on the sidewalk. "You lied to me Nicholas!"