“Snuggle (verb or noun (fabric softener))”

(commissioned by Johny)

One of my earliest memories is of being robbed at gunpoint in my driveway when I was three. (I think I was three.) I can still see the guy’s face, his black t-shirt, his jeans, and his black handgun. I remember that I heard my car door shut – and I was already mostly-deaf by then – and then my brother’s car door shut.

I was in the back. It was a brown Chevy.

I guess I wasn’t being robbed. My mom was. She didn’t move. Then she gave him her purse. He looked at Patrick and then at me and then ran.

My mother called my father first and then the police – I remember the order – and by the time my dad came home, the police were already there. I remember their black uniforms and shiny badges. My dad said, “So you’re not going to do anything?” and staying with it: “Just say you’re not going to do anything” and it must have been pretty loud for me to hear it.

I remember afterwards that my mother told the police my brother was tall for his age (I think he was 11), heard her hypothesize that maybe that’s why he ran off when he saw us.

I went to bed and pretended to be asleep. The door opened – I knew because I had to relax my face when the light hit my eyes – and shut again. I think that was the first time I put myself to bed.

This was the middle of the end, the end which took a decade and a half. We left San Antonio for a small white house in Tampa – this was before my sister came along. We’d spend the weekends at the beach where the men would drink beer and grill ground beef and chicken and the women would smoke and pick at the potato salad. We evacuated the beach a few times in the middle of the night because of some hurricane or other. I was too big by then to be carried to the car.