Smitty

When we started driving cars my hangout friends was not Smitty among them. My best friend was the son of the church janitor. And of the other two guys we hung-with, were the son of the owner of one of the four bars in town, and a kid from the other side of the channel, to Mud Lake. Sometimes we would go and see the Galaxies play and sometimes would get back stage compliments of Smitty as we did in Chicago one time at a high-school driving in to see them.

I had never-seen anything like-it in my life. We were back-stage actually - with the cops - plain-clothes with peep-holes in the curtains. Uniformed cops at the doors; two gangs, one on each side of the gym. Each gang had to stay on their respective side and not cross over the imaginary center line. Kids with government-paid baby-sitters. Came across it in Europe a few years later, big-gangs and two-side cities like Berlin, Belfast or city Cyprus fenced down the middle.

Smitty was my opposite. I was quiet, shy and reticent; he was loud and brash. There came an aunt to visit his family and she slept in his bed where she shot herself with a shot gun pulling the trigger with her toe. Committed suicide and he showed me brain bits still embedded in the wall.

So perhaps I was not surprised when a few months later he announced that from then-on - it was going to be all about him and damn everyone else. And that's how he became, so we drew apart. But I remember thinking that people make decisions like this at an early age and may forget later that they made them.

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