Brake Fluid

Prison Slang For Psychiatric Meds. A Supervised Visit With His Dad. Out on parole.

Antonio had been nervous for over a month. When I say hide the razor blades, it’s not a joke. A cutter will often find a way to cut himself even if you do hide the razor blades. I have seen cutters cut themselves with plastic combs. Any kid who has been exposed to violence his entire life can exhibit some very strange neurology. His dad had done the time.

He was an old hand at it.

There was going to be a supervised visit with Antonio.

I like to do them outside in the back, sitting on lawn chairs. It’s quiet back there. Secluded. No one to care if it comes down to yelling at the kid. Exactly how low are some parents willing to go.

This would result in the end of the visit. Many parents will sabotage themselves.

The boys are never the first to yell. But they are often the first to blame. Frequently, the supervised visit sails a sea of antipsychotic medication. Both the kid and the father can be taking them.

Antonio was a cutter. His arms were a stairway of scars.

I like to suggest to the kid, long before the visit, which can be a visit the kid is less than thrilled to have, that he make a laundry list. A laundry list of the thing that were done to him can also be an act of revenge. The tricky part is to not make revenge an internal part of blood, guts, and history. Set in concrete. Concrete can be turned to dust as well.

The dad had sold the boy to men who would pay. For adults, all of this is a choice, living the life, and sometimes it’a a lifestyle, and for them, a valid one. But when it comes to kids, it’s beyond the capacity of a brain that is still developing to so much as cope from day to day. Sometimes, it is too late.

Let’s be real for once. Most of the time, it is too late.

Antipsychotic medication and antiretrovirals, especially Sustiva, are chemnistry set experiments in a hopefulness that the whole infammable thing doesn’t blow up in everyone’s face. When a kid throws himself on the ground, and starts beating his head with his fists, it’s time for the supervised visit to conclude.

My dad is a loser stuff. Eyes on the ground, slumped. This is heavy lifting, this, it can be crushing, too.

The way we love now.

We listen.

It’s not about the supervised visit. It’s about what comes next.

I’m biased. I will usually vote for sexually acting out. He wants a lover to be protective, but he’s going to beat himself up for it. This kid doesn’t need chemicals. He is releasing enough in his brain to donate to Exxon Mobil for a solid year. If this kid doesn’t talk to you soon — there’s another can of gasoline to pour onto this fire at the refinery, and that is when the boy he is fixated on rejects him in no uncertain or, better yet to this mode of thinking while on antiretrovirals and antipsychotics — some humiliating terms or paradigms like pushing him forcefully away in front of both their peers.

He wants to close his eyes and die. I would, too.

The term loser is thusly employed to encompass both Antonio and his father. There is no escape. Even the kid who might have lashed out in the face of a neediness he cannot, in truth, fulfill, kids will kill themselves over this incremental shit. Adolescent boys are conflicted on a good day. So and so is a bitch faggot or both, and what does that make Mr. So And So. If we’re talking about kids still being fascinated with Spider Man comic books, and this can happen, the kid will lose himself by himself inside himself, and it can begin to sound like a done deal, but what frequently comes along to save this kid, and this happens all the time, his peers will decide to take matters into their own hands because the loyalty to the brand — Teenage Terrorist — seems absolute. The kids in France biked a lot. Bikes are all over the city. Paris accomodates them. But the boys who live here in the Blue Ridge have to actually wait until the bikes can be transported to the mountain biker paths. And then they are unleashed to vaporized mud and lots of leaves.

Physical activity. It’s heresy to say this, but I kinda do believe that physical activity would win my approval over antipsychotics any good old southern day you cared to wish Sundays were for church.

But no.

Mountin biking can be jarring on your perineum, but it does wonders for your head. Rob Peter to pay Paul. But rob him. Your butt hole will heal soon enough. Sometimes.

Gay boys are not into this stuff is a vicious stereotype whose illusions fly in the face of soccer, swimming, diving from docks, shoveling snow so I can get out the drive, dancing to hip hop, skateboarding, running the dogs, sleeping in tents, climbing onto dangerous rocks to shoot a video clip, or going on hikes at the Blue Ridge Arboretum that are 492,833,649 miles long kills my hippo hips of walking in a steady and enervated rhythm like a pack of hound dogs on the riverbanks of the French Broad in Asheville shooting down the spike and the Jefferson Davis Falls. Drug Depots are the parks that line the way. As if the hours were the plastic bags of meth and death and that’s the gig with what at-risk really means.

It means you listen.

Listening is not always such an easy thing.

“I liked it when he made me fuck him.”

This is why I use the term conflicted. This is why there is no guage to measure the gravity of conflicted with, over, under rocks and these Southern bridges made from beer cans and used pill bottles and glue it all comes unglued at the drop of this fall’s new moonshine clear as gin and far more powerful. Corn liquor has no color and it comes tastefully packaged in Mason jars with lids. Like pickles.

I hitch-hiked through this labyrinthine devil’s charm of sadness, snakes, and snake grass when a Cadillac convertible pulled up being swung ass heavy on the mountain roads and her joints were pink.

When I was their age. It was not that long ago. It was yesterday and the taste of Jesus in my mouth.

I had sucked him off.

I had never seen a pink joint before. As perfectly made as a pink cigarette. I loved hitch-hiking. Everyone wanted to get high, play music, and fuck me silly on these salascious Sabbath-riddled roads. All around Lake Lure and every trout creek drowned in grief. I told you, this is the South. If you think I am going to tell you the secrets of the tribe because the tribe has been pulled apart by the rural migration to urban centers. You would be wrong. Juvenile justice detention centers themselves are usually built near the middle of this hopeless pulling of the fabric some kids cling to.

What these boys learn fast is that crimson stains their blood would look like smeared around the moon with Mama’s lipstick thick with holy scent that speaks on night runs through the muscles of the woods, and the thorns to rush against your throat deep as stones and deeper.

Pink joints can go a long way. More likely, we’d get picked up by pig farmers in a truck.

A few months ago, Antonio asked me if we could drive on the freeway that ran past the prison his father was in at quite a distance actually, but you could clearly see the place and all the vast expanse of fences. All he did was stare and hold himself together. His eyes as dark and gleaming as the barrel of a gun.

He cried in his room. The few the proud and the brave the things we do to boys are as stupid as the things we do to girls.

We are as crooked in our morals as an old barrel of hardware fishhooks.

We want what we want it doesn’t really matter if we do or we don’t because the reality is that this boy is out here by himself, survival sex in cities like Atlanta where they are meat made from gravel and ground for warmth to bone. It’s summer and you pull over to the side of the whiskey road in the dark. The hillbillies grow weed which is why all of them drive Cadillacs and smoke pink joints with the buzzards.

We get through it. We sit among the trees. We watch the elephants. We arrive bewildered in the land of dark milk and dark grass and dark, dark, dark. Street lights and the fields of passages and haze. Always has. Always will. Remains death and your father is the branches of the tree and the rage came and destroyed everything you knew and now that you were a faggot, you would die from AIDS. You knew you would. Urban gay men do not seem to know that not everyone such as the people who live in these dumb as sin and tobacco Appalachian hills has escaped the pandemic and I am here to tell you that if you have not slept under quits in a cabin called Crow Hollow and the fog comes in you have not lived a life worth spit upon the ground.

A 1952 Dodge the squirrels live in. No brake fluid.

Long before the invention of the pink joint. And you take this boy to Maggie’s field you shove him around and he shoves you back.

“It was not your FAULT.”

“You weren’t there so shut up.”

This boy would be found long after he has been dead for eons wrapped in duck tape. He knows. Another I will cling to it and nothing can hurt me. I had to tell them that they could tie up someone else but Antonia was too fragile for it.”

“What if he begs.”

My eyes to the sky.

The grass is high this year.

This latino boy could be hurt by nothing more caustic than a Methodist hymn. Atlanta and her escapees.

But he’s pushing back.

He has the muscles and the bowels to do it.

Hard enough to push me to the ground even as he walks away in anger, I have stirred his pot of shit.

Talk to me.

And so he does.

Why.

Because it’s easier.

Now, to run him with my cow dog as she nips at his soft eyes wide open black as bullsnakes and his cow dog tail.