Like so many others indigent writers with dubious talents, I've started a blog. Unlike most of my questionable peers, I have no fans and no following. I also have no family. The few friends I have are more likely to catch a seven foot gator barehanded than they are to ever read anything I write. Most of them only use the internet to watch free porn clips and none of them have read a book since high school, or in Junior's case, since 4th grade.
My friends call me Professor not because they think I'm any smarter than they are, but solely because I don't speak in double negatives or with a Cajun drawl. They find that kind of arrogance as amusing as my refusal to throw cigarette butts out of my truck window, or to eat swamp fish fried in three-year-old oil. Or oi-rrroll, as it's called in these parts.
Still, I might occasionally talk about Harley Junior, Mitch, and Bugs — whose real name has never been spoken aloud by anyone except his mother. We tend to keep our secrets here, only dragging them out when people are dead and gone, or in need of a little community humbling.
In another life, I might have gone to college, or even graduated high school. Instead, I took a GED at 16, went on a few adventures, and then returned home to take my place on the old plaid couch left on someone's ramshackle porch. There, surrounded by friends who will never understand why I bought a MacBook instead of a used ATV, I drink warm beer, swat away flies, and soak in the stories. When the fistfights start (and there's always a fistfight), I steal away to my fifteen-year-old Chevy and pass out in the front seat until I'm sober enough to make it back to the place I rent from my former foster parents, neither of whom care much for me (or anyone else for that matter), but who consider $250 a month rent a small fortune for what used to be an old henhouse. Me, I just like continuity. Unless I'm on a purposeful adventure, I like my feet hitting the same ground every morning. I like the same smell of fried eggs and manure wafting in through my windows when I wake up, and the heady scent of warm wood smoke in the evenings.
Whenever I can afford it, I buy myself a steak, usually a good T-bone or ribeye, which I grill on an ancient, wobbly, three-legged Coleman that somebody once had the good fortune to throw away. Propped up by a brick and an old fence post, it serves its purpose of making me feel like a manly-man, one who can imagine that the meat didn't come from Piggly Wiggly, but from an exhausting buffalo hunt in grueling weather conditions, over rough terrain. The fact that I've never even seen a buffalo doesn't stop me from imagining myself a rugged man, a well-muscled and fiercely independent man who can hunt for his own damn meat.
Truth is overrated, especially when genes have given you thin arms, moobs, and a soft belly that no amount of starving or hard work seems to harden. I'm a short, pudgy, hairy man with a prematurely receding hairline. There's no good story in that, and there's certainly no Cadence Caldwell — the fictitious name I've given to a girl with the horrible real-life name of Brent — who betrayed me by way of never recognizing how true and deep my love for her was. She was the one who got away before she was ever caught. A long, lean beauty — one of the very few girls I knew who maintained visible bones past the age of puberty — and I loved her for her skinny wrists and twig-like ankles. I loved her for her gold hair and blue eyes, and for the way she crept into my brain and stayed there, turning me into a young man that was crazed with passion, and willing to do anything it took to win her favor. At 14, 15 years-old I chopped wood with a vengeance and lifted heavy logs, one right after another, in the hopes of developing the kind of biceps that Cadence would notice and see fit to marry. I let the soft hairs on my upper lip grow, so that she would see I was no boy, but a man in the making.
At 16, I cursed my regressive redneck genes and did what any self-respecting almost-man would do when the love of his life — the one he had sweat over, dreamt about, and sent glittery, anonymous Valentines to — started wearing the jacket of some well-to-do boy with two, real parents and a blinding smile that had never seen an infant-sized bottle of Coke or a cheap, backwoods dentist. I ran away.
Bugs was the one that saw me off. He and the boys had gathered up $16 and an old army jacket that promised to make me look older. My friends may be assholes, but they're good-hearted assholes. And even though it's against the redneck brotherhood code to say such things, I love them and I know they love me; moobs, MacBook, arrogance, and all.
There are a lot of stories in between then and now. Some of them are made-up and some are real, but that's not how I care to judge their merits. The world is full of lies that are vigorously defended and truths that are as unwelcome and ominous as a nest of snakes under the bed. People spend far too much of themselves in arguments, defending this or that point of view, but the thing is — it's hardly ever the clinical definition of real or false that propels us forward or motivates us — but about how we feel.
Tonight, I feel like a buffalo hunter whose got hides instead of faded boxer shorts and flannel shirts drying on the line outside. Inside a warm and woodsy cabin, the love of my life is preparing side dishes to go along with the meat I have prepared for us. We'll eat by the glow of fire, and sometime afterwards her twig ankles will wrap around my muscular back. When she is asleep, I will get up and move to a wooden table, where I will write stories that have nothing to do with henhouses, factories, and fistfights, but about all that lies beneath, from bitter seeds and sweet memories, to unrequited love and the kind of love that makes a man plead to God for some sort of transformation.
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