the islands

I do still sometimes think of you. When I'm listening to Diamond Head or Grim Reaper, the kind of shit nobody else except you ever really appreciated-- and it's night-time, and maybe I'm caffeinated, it's not so hard to drift back there: Driving the beat-to-hell (but still V6 balls-out) Camry, both of us drunk as lords, wheeling wildly among the glinting neon night-time surf shops and resort hotels of the islands. Always on the way to somewhere, and I can still see you in the passenger seat, bare feet on the dash, chugging Sparks Light, tossing the cans out the windows, arguing about something, complaining about something, hating something together-- didn't it sustain us? wallowing in the sea air, the repeating sidewalkless cul-de-sacs and Super-Mario-World hyperreal landscaping, everything framed against the massive, serene, dolphin-infested bathtub of the Gulf of Mexico.

Inter-island drawbridges, touristy "pirate" ships, squalid overpriced fish shacks where the staff all fucked each other, ten hundred food-service jobs, delivery, retail, photography, deckhand, covering ribbon cuttings and zoning disputes, 10 articles a week under silly fake names, scamming free meals for advertorial write-ups. Didn't we live large? Trashing one sublet after another, ruining acres of carpet with blenders of slushy day-glo, insane glittering-sun hangovers, blown deadlines and bold long-necked white birds, swerving back home across floodlit causeways after a night raising hell at the only cool bar that wouldn't card you, fighting about who flirted with whom, ferocious drunken sex that settled nothing, or waking up bleary facedown on the beach, or lawn, or condominium parking lot.

God how good it was, hunched over the iMac, so far gone I had to cover one eye to write, pounding out a profile of a senior-center inhabitant for Tuesday's edition while you were out fucking the girl from the tattoo shop, and the stereo so loud it shook the walls, so loud I couldn't hear the cops hammering on the door, and the money from the house sale steadily dwindling, emptying out the IRA, each condo smaller than the previous, then to apartments, then sharing a room in a converted garage that flooded, ruining your record collection. How broke we went! The gun shows, the palmettos all over our walls, the emerald lizards and noon-time downpours, hands shaking for hair of the dog, hustling short money out of leathery "swingers," Western Union from the exes, laughing with each other at our audacity.

Didn't we have fun? Horrible parties at your horrible co-workers' horrible apartments-- meth, bong hits, playstation 2 and Rap-Metal-- absolutely no control, landlord after landlord, employer after employer, and never my fault, never yours, always the hateful world's. What a team we were, darling, what an amazing team.