he walked along the main drag
the high school was to his right
to his left was City Hall and the
junior high
he was told that as late as the
early Eighties kids rode their horses to high school and released them in a
pasture behind it
that pasture was now a parking lot
filled with cars that students drove to school
affluence sickened him
he walked a paper route before high
school every morning then walked two miles to school
he had to walk through the faculty
parking lot to get into the building
on the other side of the school
was the student parking lot
the cars were cars Mommy and
Daddy bought for their kids and paid for the gas and made oil change
appointments for them or traded them in for new cars that the kids wanted
instead
he really really really had to stay his hand not to key them .
. but in reality not really really really . . . because he didnt have keys
instead he tried to better them that wasnt right they werent better than him
rather he tried to best them on the athletic field or with his fists in a farmers field east of
the high school a small undeveloped parcel of land
that the farmer who the community took his land to build the high school on had
lived and died and never accepted a dime of it while he was alive but his
kids and grandkids scooped in on it the moment after they buried him to claim
the affluence he denied them
hed always hoped the farmer who
kept a donkey on the property swinging
its dick would have gone to the bank
cashed out and burned it in a bond fire
as he sipped from the jug he saw him with time to time nipping from
the miserable tyranny of
family
the old farmer just couldnt bring
himself to cross his kids after his wife died
My wife loved them children to
the marrow in their bones.
But they couldn’t see their way
to help me in the fields.
Lazy so-an-sos.
My only consolation is that they
were madeup more of her blood than mine.
My wife was a whore I fell in
love with.
She was predatory.
I couldn’t see past the nose on
my face.
I suppose he
wipe his chin with his sleeve of a dribble from the jug when we wed, she just became my whore.
I wasn’t a handsome man.
But I could afford her.
affluence isnt pretty
it is just
affluence
Hell
Mommy and Daddy even afforded payment to a psychiatrist
who vouched to the Court that there was a condition called affluenza and their child who suffered it wasnt responsible for killing four people in a car accident while he
was drunk
1227, Thursday,
9 5. 19
1503, Thursday,
9 5. 19
