Father Figure

He was mostly pimples and pus, layered over skin the color of freshly rolled pie dough. Leroy’s appearance was not improved by being the victim of a Frankenstein-long face and canines that were the forward-most teeth in this mouth. All the freakishness was kicked aside when he pulled a garter snake out of one pocket and palmed a chipmunk from a second, things of simple, yet necessary, diversion for a sheltered nine year old like me. His choices of conversation and adventure would have scared the shit out of most parents, but mine had pawned me off on relatives while my father went to examine airfield possibilities in some sweltering jungle. They never knew how Leroy’s sixteen-year-old smoothness worked in a whispered, “Do you jack-off very often?” while we were in the middle of reading Archie comics. How he paraded several of us to Lover’s Lane and skimmed rubbers off the cinder road with a stick, examined each and said time after time, “Stranger,” before flipping them onto the thistle and ironweed. How he finally found two stretched side by side, poked the stick in each and held them up for us to see the full, unrolled length, “Yeah, them’s gotta be Delmer and Clarence. They wasn’t lyin’ about Helen and Saturday night.”

Aaahhhh!

I cannot stand a few of the people
whose names inhabit my cell phone.
There for business and/or displeasure,
their treble voices form a corrupt swarm

that nibbles my eardrum like chiggers.
Certain digits fill my bladder with disgust.
I daydream of shoulder-dropping relief
at the filthiest toilet in a hole-in-the-wall bar.

My Samsung sinking into the yellow water,
jaundiced faces packed against the screen,
too squashed to scream. Their silence
bubbling up to meet my stream of piss.