Aaron M. Fortkamp

These guys outside the restaurant perched like Humpties on the retaining wall drinking 40s in the a.m., smoking smokes, smoking grass out of empties crushed & flattened with holes punched in. One guy in white baseball cap with rainbow polka dot designs, white polo shirt with giant playing card print & symbolism, red diamonds, black clubs, etc., some kind of colorful pants, you get it. Outfit I could see myself dressing my kid in. He’s in his sixties or seventies, or maybe hard-lived forties. Ambulatorily in his nineties. Shambles like a reanimated corpse. No visible facial hair, not likely full-on homeless, he’s got somewhere to stash and utilize toiletries.

First of group to finish 40 now up, pivots, facing the group as they sit facing the road. First is gesticulating angrily to emphasize a point. Not likely drunk but beyond whatever worries made him drink in the first place and feeling good enough to share his opinions about things. Dressed in a plain white t-shirt, like my kid wears to bed.

Polka dot hat crossing the street. Just, up and walks into the road. Six lanes of traffic plus a turn lane, him hunched over, couldn’t escape an angry tortoise, but limping his way across anyway, staring down oncoming traffic. A ball, escapee of the fence line of the private Catholic elementary school up the hill, downhill 40 yards against the retaining wall across the road. What a, what a power it was. What a show of force. To be the one to get the ball. Steep-steep grade, I can’t imagine how he might climb to return the ball, with that broken gate of his, but if that lawn mower can drive straight up it perhaps so might he. Being the child on the interior of such a fence line I remember thinking how trapped, how easily I was kept in check, how relatively weak in comparison I must be to those in existence on the other side. They must have felt it in my eyes, nigh worship of such capacity to return with a simple lob an entire world of play. Asking permission and going to fetch the ball yourself? Not worth it. Such a hollow power. Temporary. False.

Others finishing their 40s. Guy in Dak Prescott jersey up next, talking to the group, gesticulating, bookbag on his back, he’s got places to go.

Polka dot does not make it. Guy mowing lawn has dismounts his ride-on and scuttles down hill himself to fetch the ball. Polka dot does his seven-lane shuffle once again.

Passing the aluminum can bowl around. One slaps another’s hands away in protest of something, then immediately holds out a hand beckoning for the lighter. Seal the lips about the can mouth. Long light, long inhale for such a short delivery mechanism. 

What be the goal, in smoking, in drinking even. Altering the system’s balance. Foiled as soon as you start by steady processes of elimination in the liver, in the lungs, in the kidneys. Loading up the scale in fitful fistfuls, forever countered by a steady drip drip drip on the other side, undoing what best tipsy effort you can make. Would that you could hold in the inhale, keep the smoke in place where you desire it to remain. Take a big enough dose that you can stop, that the chemical equation finally meets its peak, and metes its pique. How long can it be sustained and what even does the descent look like on the other side. Perhaps that be the goal. Forcing the body to the point of desiring the return to equilibrium, to go too far, to want oxygen again. To be reminded of its lack, the ankle weight that forever drags you backward, away from the peak, on the rocky side of the mountain. Didn’t we once play in the snow, careen down the fresh powder, take a lift back up, breathing the cold, do it all again, immediately, relentless, effortless, day after day, all we knew. At what age did we first succumb to the wrong gravity, and why. Was it greed, a choice, can we hate ourselves for this. Or entrapment by sly curiosity, how much was too much, a simple Lot’s wife over the shoulder, mere raise of a brow, unbeknownst the cuff clapped, and down we went.

Polka dot hat, playing card shirt, colorful pants. Such bespoke attire, as if by design, worthy of every sequential, disparate day of your life.