Lot

by Bryan Washington

But the neighborhood’s changed. With our not-legals shuffling in, people who don’t have time for the violence, people whose only reason for bouncing was to get away from the violence, we’ve mellowed out, found our rhythm.

But you, he said, you’re like your old man. Hierba mala nunca muere.

but tell someone they want an impossible thing and they’ll act like you’ve put out the sun.

His flaunting was a choice. The audacity made it deafening.

she’d read Les Fleurs du Mal unabridged;

You wouldn’t know a rough time if it pissed on you,

Now that I’ve rolled around and had some lovers I can tell you a secret: the difference between people with the wildness in them, and people like us, is you usually can’t tell until it’s past too late. It’s just too much a hidden part of them. Days and months and years’ll pass before a person reveals themselves—and then all of a sudden they’ve fucked the postman, or left the gas on, or stuck their hands in your child’s pants.

and it was a look I’d grown acquainted with: I Will Tolerate You Out of Necessity, and Not a Second Longer Than Required.

But, despite everything, she found time to read—she spent some of the money she was saving for a lifeline on books. She hit the resorts; she discovered Milton; she worked the coast; she discovered Rimbaud; she bought some heels; she discovered Babel; she took care of her skin; she discovered Rumi; she tried not to catch the clap; she discovered Borges; she caught the clap; she discovered Allende; she waited it out; she discovered Plath; she tried not to catch anything else.

We’d already talked about making it past the porch. What we’d do if they let us in, if they asked us to pull it out. This was the summer we were going to get laid, to touch and to suck and to fuck, if they let us.

We tried our hand at a dime of weed (courtesy of Jeff’s older sisters downtown) but I spent that evening lost inside of myself, marveling at all of the space in my head no one had taken the time to tell me about.

She’d start with my father’s Business Affairs, and my mother’s outdated Oprahs; after lunch, she’d slip into Nikki’s shelves, with the Bolaño and the Woolf and the Calvino and the Foucault. She flipped through Chekhov. She nosed through Tanikawa. She threw a long-lost copy of Huck Finn at the wall.

Eventually, I finally asked her what she got out of reading these books by old dead men, what the words on the page had to do with her. The kind of question an idiot asks. But she took it seriously, she pursed her lips. It’s just another way to talk to the dead, she said. It’s another way to make a way, she said.

My mood was indistinguishable to my parents (I was already pretty quiet most days; compounding that silence meant nothing whatsoever)

When Gloria asked me what was wrong, I told her nothing, nothing at all, but in a way that implied that everything was, in fact, very wrong, that the most wrong thing had occurred, that wrong had become my reality.

When we made it to the body, my brother snatched my hand. He made me touch Rick’s face. He told me this was what happened to fags.

or how it wasn’t what I’d thought it should be, or that there was something else out there maybe, but what that was I couldn’t tell him, until I saw him, until he came back home.

Change anything too much, it gets harder to keep it alive.

It didn’t take long to see that there’s the world you live in, and then there are the constellations around it, and you’ll never know you’re missing them if you don’t even know to look up.

She said if we remembered nothing else she taught us, to know that love was a verb.

But you see how other people live, he said. And you really can’t help them if they don’t want it.

And the thing that I remember about my brother, clearer than what he wore on the day he left, or the cracks he made about our uncle when he came to visit Ma, or the way that he laughed or the color of his eyes or his scent or his funeral, is the look on his face while I lay on the carpet.

Desire don’t discriminate, said Avery. Desire’s gonna swallow every motherfucker out here. So we don’t discriminate neither, said Avery. We’re equal opportunity pharmacists!

One of them told me I looked like a pinche negrito, y probablemente ni siquiera hablaba español,

This is how easy it is to walk out of a life. I’d always wondered, and now I knew.

Your eyes will show you what they want to, or whatever they think you should see. They’ll show you a happy family when all you have is bodies in a room.

It took me a while to figure out that we’re only who we allow ourselves to be.

I know that even if we don’t always do the things that need to be done, we do the things that we need to.

You bring yourself wherever you go. You are the one thing you can never run out on.