She has cigarette burns on the walls near her bed
hundreds, maybe thousands, of them.
I asked once why she didn’t use an ashtray
like normal people and she said,
“This is just easier.”

She has a gay neighbor named Craig and a little boy
who comes from somewhere, usually Wednesdays and Fridays, and
sits on the bottom step out front.

I asked him once who he was waiting for
if he needed a ride some place
he explained that sometimes he likes to not spend
his lunch money on lunch
and catch the ice cream man twice after school.

Craig calls him Trump
says he has good business sense.
I think the opposite, because ice cream,
good as it is, is a want.

A kid with good business sense, if he’s going to hold any
of his lunch money back at all, would save it,
even just $0.50 a week.
That’s $26 a year.
That’s half of my cable bill or a decent pair of shoes.

But it’s also a lot of ice cream.
And Trump knows this and, really,
I can’t fault him for living in the moment.

That’s where kids should live.
Kids and my friend,
the one with the cigarette burns in the walls near her bed.

She has a favorite Price is Right game (Plinko)
and two or three of those small mirrors
one might win at a carnival.
One says Budweiser, one says Aerosmith.
I can’t remember what the other one says,
so maybe she only has two.

Some people you lose touch with intentionally
not because they ever did you wrong
but because it hurts your chest
to spend too much time with them.

She used to be spontaneous
had one of the highest GPAs in our class
couldn’t date a smoker.

Craig’s boyfriend, Shaun, doesn’t like cole slaw.
I know this because, once while visiting my sweet little heart attack,
I heard him through the wall:
“Cole slaw?! You know I fuckin’ hate cole slaw.
It’s so ... blech.”

A few weeks later I’d gone back to see her
and Shaun was outside on Craig’s half of the porch.
I almost made one of those obnoxious Dad Jokes
as I approached, like,
“So, Craig still trying to get ya to eat some slaw?”
But thought better of it
and opted for the far less personal, “Hey,”
instead.

She used to know a lot about ‘80s movies.
Probably still does, just doesn’t talk about them as much.
We once argued over which director did a better job
depicting his audience and, in turn, keeping his audience interested
in future projects:

Crowe or Hughes?

She said Hughes, I said Crowe, and, in hindsight,
I think we were both right.
Though her Breakfast Club poster does sort of feel
like a victory flag, waving in my face every time I
enter enemy territory.

I hadn’t seen Trump in a while and started to wonder
but Craig, like a goddamned mind reader
out of the blue explained that it was Summer Vacation.
And all I could think was, “Bummer.
Less money for ice cream.”
I think I’d trade places with him anyway
just to get a Summer Vacation again.

She doesn’t wear a watch on purpose
to make the days go faster.
Although I’m beginning to think you can tell
which hour you’re in by the char marks
on the walls nearest her bed.
I think they’re keeping track of time more slowly
and painfully than any watch.

But I never bring this up and smell like I’ve been in a bar all night
when I leave her room.

Flash forward to Fall. Trump’s back.
Craig broke up with Shaun
(although Shaun swears up and down
it was the other way around).

That may be so, but I’ve neither the time,
the polygraph test, nor the interest to prove it.

She tells me she’s writing a screenplay
about a closet homosexual who inherits
a Southern Baptist Church from his preacher father
and has to stifle his queerness to oversee the congregation,
even though he’s grown exponentially more flamboyant
since his move to New York six months prior to his father’s death.

I wanted to say, “Sounds kinda like The Birdcage,”
but opted for the less critical,
“Holy shit, that’s awesome.”

She asks if I think Hughes would direct
and does so with a coy grin
just to dig up our age-old debate again.
I smile back and laugh once with a quick but audible
bullet of air through my nose.

Dirty dishes crowd the nightstand and dot the floor like disgusting,
obvious landmines.

She asks if I’ve eaten
and offers what’s left of some nuked ravioli
still sitting in the microwave.
She says, “It’s probably cold”
and I wonder how fucking long it’s been in there.

I almost say, “I’d love some, but I don’t think
there’s a clean dish in the house”
but opt for, “No, thank you.”

We joke a lot but there are buttons I won’t push.
Buttons that, once upon a time, triggered a young lady to start
habitually extinguishing cigarettes
on her bedroom walls, nearest the bed.
I could say a lot of things
as you have probably made a lot of assumptions
but if she were to ask either of us why we
weren’t saying precisely what was on our minds,
I assure you, we’d be better off to reply,
“It’s just easier.”

I gave Trump a dollar that day
thinking it might be the last day I’d come around.
I told him not to spend it all in one place.

I don’t think he understood the phrase.
Maybe he’d never heard it before.
Maybe that’s why the ice cream man got all his money.

A stray cat leapt onto an old lady’s lap across the street.

I watched the clouds move out of the way
of the sun on the ground.

We couldn’t all be race car drivers
but the pit crew is just as important.