The Reckless Abandon of Youth

Here I am, back to actual short fiction as opposed to things in a screenplay format. As usual, let me know what you think.

Enjoy.

We had climbed up the thick, craggy bricks on the west side of the old church building so we could sit on its roof, dangling our feet over the edge, over the rain gutters. It was probably dangerous but that was immaterial to a pair of poorly behaved thirteen year olds. The chestnut-colored roof shingles were deteriorating, we spent our time picking off bits of the crumbling tiles and tossing them into the void of shrubs and grass below. Neither of us attended church any longer, it had been forsaken in the name of rebellion right around the same time we realized we were officially teenagers. On every day except Sunday the church grounds and façade of the building served as one of our favorite playgrounds.

Reverence for things others found holy was not something either of us would learn and appreciate for a good many years.

Adam and I spoke of many things from our perch, lobbing the bits of tarred shingle every so often between breathes.

“We need girls,” Adam said.

“Mm-hmm,” I agreed.

The thought of it was preposterous. Both Adam and I were still unknown to the touch of pubescence. Our motivation for wanting girls was because it seemed to us something every teenage boy should want. Societal cues informed us much more than primal ones.

“Why don’t we have bikes?” Adam wondered.

I shrugged my shoulders and made an accompanying wordless reply. Thinking back on it, I might have had a bike, but it was dangling in the rafters of the garage in a state beyond repair. It was the bike I got for my eighth birthday. The rims were bent, it’s frame was twisted and that was in addition to the fact that I’d simply outgrown it. I never understood why my father was reluctant to replace it. Maybe he wasn’t, maybe it had just slipped his mind.

He was always busy with something.

For a boy my age then, a bicycle was much more than a mode of transportation; it was some type divine right. With enough kids with bikes, we could form a gang and our range for causing trouble tripled.

As we pondered this, and many other things, about school, homework, home life and how much we thought all of it sucked, a large flatbed truck wheeled into the parking lot with the labored rumble of its overtaxed engine. Startled, we pulled our legs back up onto the roof and jumped up, over the pitch, peeking out at the truck, only our eyes exposed.

Fastened to the bed of the truck was a half-sized freight box with a Goodwill logo in chipped paint on the side. The flatbed cut it’s motor and the driver got out. He took off his hat and wiped his brow with his forearm with one swoop before engaging a winch on his side of the truck. A high-pitched whine signaled the slow backward movement of the Goodwill freight crate. Soon enough, the crate was lowered into a parking space facing the front doors of the building and the truck that brought it was a mere footnote in our memory.

“Hey!” The Pastor shouted from behind us, “You two! Get down from there! How many times have I told you it’s just not safe?”

We scrambled to the other side of the pitch and, in a panic, climbed down the other side of the building, each of us sprinting off in different directions, each of us heading home.

Winded and wheezing, I stepped into my house and shut the door loudly behind me. As I walked in, I could hear the sound of a twenty-four hour news network blaring at top volume in the kitchen. That made it certain that my mother was home, but where was anyone’s guess. She’d installed a small TV in the kitchen so she could watch the news while she cooked, but she used as a radio when she was in any other room in the house.

God, it was obnoxious.

Anyhow, she was the last person I wanted to talk to, so I began tip-toeing down the stairs toward my bedroom.

“John!”

God-damn it.

She heard me.

With all the rebellious indignation I could muster, I replied loudly, “What, Mom?”

“Get up here. Now!”

I hung my head in anger and stormed belligerently back up the stairs and into the kitchen. The very sight of my mother brought my blood to a fevered boil. She annoyed me to no end and I was convinced she would never understand me.

“What?” I said defiantly.

“Pastor Henry called and said you and Adam were up on the church roof again!”

“Yeah. So what?”

The sound of our voices escalated with each word, competing with the volume of the Cable News Network.

“I’ve told you not to climb up on that roof!” She was shrieking now.

“You don’t care! Why would you care?” I was shouting now.

“I care because I don’t want you to get hurt!”

“Why the hell would you care if I got hurt?”

“Don’t you dare talk to me like that…”

“Screw this…” I threw my hands in the air.

I had begun to cry, as young boys are wont to do when arguing with those that love them the most. The coarseness of my demeanor fueled my mother’s rage and that rage, in turn, fueled my coarse demeanor. She stepped toward me, resisting every urge in her body to slap me across the face. Instead, she pointed a finger and with a bellowing shriek she banished me to my bedroom.

“Fine.!” I screamed with such force though salty tears that my voice cracked in a loud, ugly squeak. Embarrassed and humiliated, I fled to my sanctuary, calling behind me, “I should just kill myself!”

I had no real intention of doing so, but it seemed like something sophisticated that someone my age would say to his parents, in some pained effort to illustrate that he was really the one in control of the situation. Thinking back on it, I was a stupid little kid and someone probably should have strangled me to teach me a lesson. Actually, my dad had taken that opportunity on more than a few occasions and it never worked, but that’s neither here nor there as far as this story is concerned.

I wallowed in my room the rest of the day and left only to collect a plate of food at dinner and to use the bathroom.

I passed the time doing this and that. Reading. Drawing. A little homework. Mostly though, I just stared at the ceiling and cried.

I woke up the next morning at noon. It was a Saturday and there was no school.

It took Adam until an hour after that to get to my house (he had to help his dad do some stuff, he said) and then we went carousing about the neighborhood, looking for trouble. Most of the morning was spent sneaking around in our neighbors’ backyards and jumping their fences. We spent two and a half hours finding different routes to the church and back without going through any backyard more than once.

Not long after that, we were at the church, lying down in the grass, staring up at the clouds passing by, catching our breath.

“I got in trouble yesterday.”

“Me too.”

“I hate my mom.”

“I hate her, too.”

The conversation stopped. There was nothing for us to say to each other until one of us figured out what mischief for us to get into next.

“I wonder,” Adam offered, “what’s in that crate that guy dropped off yesterday.”

“Me too.”

The Goodwill crate reeked of moldy clothes and old lawn mowers with grass clippings caked and hardened on their undersides. One side of it was open, silently inviting one and all to donate what they could to the Goodwill. My head swirled when I took a step inside. I know now that the swooning feeling I experienced was my conscious telling me I was probably not somewhere I should have been, but I fought through it hard enough so that it wasn’t an issue.

One side of the crate was piled high with tied garbage bags full of second-hand clothes, bedding. One white plastic bag was stuffed so full of musty stuffed animals that it looked as though they were suffocating against the walls of the plastic. The sight of it sent a shiver up my spine.

At the back of the crate were three lawn mowers that had been wheeled in, side-by-side. The one in the center was leaking oil.

Against the other side of the crate was the Holy Grail.

A half-dozen bikes about our size and in reasonable repair were stacked to the other side. Neither of us said a word. We turned, each of us looking for permission from the other.

We spent the next twenty minutes alternating between watching out for Pastor Henry and choosing a bike.

I chose a chrome bike with black trim. It enamored me completely except for a large sticker across it’s middle proclaiming that it was a Huffy. For some reason, I had it in my head that Huffy bikes weren’t cool. Why? I couldn’t tell you. They weren’t BMX’s, to be sure, but they were bikes and beggars can’t be choosers, right?

“What are you going to tell your mom?” Adam asked me.

That was a good question and it had never crossed my mind. What would I tell my mom? I was sure she’d consider it some type of sin to steal donations from Goodwill, so the truth was out. I had no money, so I couldn’t tell her I bought it. What could I say?

“I’m going to tell my mom that you gave it to me. That you had an extra one in your garage.” Adam said.

“They’ll never buy that.”

“What then?”

“I don’t know. We have to think of something though. We can’t just show up with bikes, they’ll want to know where we got them.”

“What if we said that we’ve been collecting parts for them or something. You know, like we’ve been working on them for a long time.”

“That might work.”

“I don’t know.”

“What if we said we found them in a field somewhere?”

“My mom would tell me put it back.”

“Yeah. Mine too.”

“What then? We can’t keep it a secret?”

“What if we say we traded some kids for them? They got new bikes and we gave them…”

“…we could say we gave them some comic books.”

“Yeah. They might believe that.” I was brimming with excitement. I could barely contain myself.

Now that we had a fairly convincing cover story, we went home with our new bikes. It was dinnertime so we each went our separate ways, pedaling hard on our new bicycles. As soon as I walked in the door I shouted, “I’m home! I got a new bike!”

It was something that came out of my mouth and I instantly regretted saying it, even though no one seemed to have heard me.

Dinner came and I told my family all about the kids we met and how they had these bikes and they didn’t want to just throw them away and how Adam and I happened to have a backpack full of old comic books on us and we offered to trade these two kids (I think I said their names were Sean and Mikey) and they were very pleased with the deal. No one seemed to think I was lying.

Or maybe they did and didn’t want to waste the time embarrassing me. Perhaps they had assumed that we had just found them in a field, or taken them from the Goodwill, but it was of such little consequence to them that they merely remained silent.

My younger siblings were a bit jealous, though, not that it mattered to me.

The whole night I felt like a hero and did my best to stay out of everyone’s way so that I would be able to spend my Sunday biking around the city, happier than I had been for a long time.
The light from the sun hit my bedroom at full force at ten in the morning and because I was so excited about my bike, I didn’t want to sleep in. The house was quiet. My dad was gone, he had to work that day. My mom went to church with my youngest brother. I was alone in the house with my younger sister.

After I showered and dressed I wanted to go to Adam’s house so we could go marauding about the city on our bikes. As I was leaving, all I could focus on was the giant Huffy sticker across the center pole of the bike.

“Hmmm…”

Wheeling the bike inside, I decided to do something about it. Once I had the bike overturned onto its seat and handle bars, it took me twenty minutes to find a razor knife suitable to scrape the sticker off the chrome.

“What are you doing?” My sister asked me, as I started my laborious task. She was a year younger than myself and therefore instantly suspicious of my every move.

“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m scraping this stupid sticker off my bike.”

“Why are you doing that?”

“Because it looks stupid, just like you.” I chuckled at myself. Like I said, I was a pretty stupid kid.

“You’re an idiot.”

“Screw you, Sarah. Go to hell.”

She rolled her eyes and left me to my work.

I scraped and scraped and scraped. And then I slipped. My grip was lost and I managed to make a two inch-gash in the palm of my left hand. The blood spent no time hesitating in boiling over, down my arm, the bike and down to the floor, staining it.

The pain hadn’t caught up to my perception yet, but I grabbed my hand in pain as though I knew that was what I was supposed to do in any case. Soon the pain swam over my consciousness and I wailed in agony.

Over my screaming, I didn’t notice that my sister had raced back into the room to make sure I was all right. I wasn’t. The first time she asked, I didn’t hear her. Same with the second time.

The third time she asked if I was all right she got the picture. By the time I was able to look at my hand I was convinced that I would never stop the bleeding and that I would need stitches. “Get mom,” was all I could think to say, clenching my teeth with pain.

My sister ran to the church to get our mother while I went to the bathroom and tried running the wound under a cold tap.

“Jesus Christ!”

Shouting that always made me feel a little uneasy, kids in my neighborhood, living that close to the church, always got offended, but this time I was not only alone but also in physical anguish. The cold water numbed it enough for me to put direct pressure on it, trying to get it to close but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get the bleeding to stop.

The sound of the door opening forced me to listen hard, hoping it was my mother that had come in. “Where is he?”

Her voice was dripping with tears and sobs. Why was she crying, I thought to myself.

“Where is he?” She said again, her voice the most disconcerted I’d ever heard it before or since.

Sarah led her upstairs to the bathroom where I was nursing my wound. She came in the door and relief washed over both of our faces. “I can’t get the bleeding to stop. Why are you crying?”

She turned her wrist outward and cried when she told me, “She said that you’d cut yourself with a razor…”

“I did. And it hurts, how do I get it to stop bleeding?”

“I thought you tried to kill yourself.”

“What would make you think I would do a stupid thing like that?” I really had no idea.