The Guy Who Has 15 Things

image curtesy of The Public Domain Review

by MJ McGinn

1)    Don’t look now, but they’re coming. They want your shit. They want it. They want it and nobody cares how you never had a birthday party. They’re hungry and wanting and wanting and hungry and wanting, and most of all, they’re coming.

2)    I live on the backs of trains where it’s warm enough. If you can’t count the spokes, it’s moving too fast to get on or off. Sometimes fast is the only way. I have no heavy jackets and one pair of sweaty underwear that I stole off a mannequin at a Modell’s Sporting Goods that was going out of business. Velcro sandals with broken soles. All my clothes swallow sweat and have been stolen. Picture this: all your shit has been stolen by you or somebody else. A washing machine of ripping shit off. Some men keep a dog as a friend, but that’s too many things. Imagine your dog getting ripped off when you’re not looking.

3)    No more heroin. Heroin? Or heroine? Either way. Apples and apples. I had a job once with a clock you punched alive each morning, so that Misty and I could sleep inside. I had aspirations, spit tobacco into empty coke cans, and I knifed her name into porta-potty walls at work with a multitool I kept chained to my belt like my wallet. Things were hard knots in my muscles. Misty wore my grey greasy sweatshirt in her sleep. We ate boxed mac and cheese or dinosaur nuggets for breakfast, and we paid the gas man in quarters. I wished the moon would stay up just half an hour more. Our Detroiter trailer could cramp us into fits and fights. Flashbacks. My back hurt all over and Misty knew a guy who knew a guy who could help with that. She had green eyes like green apple ring pops, and I could’ve kissed her until I ran out of breath.

4)    Tell them about the bull frog you caught in the Gatorade bottle and tried to keep as a pet until the sun swallowed him. Wait, don’t tell them that.

5)    I don’t think about what happens when you die. No purple clouds and gates gilded in gold leaf blowing open as I walk to the end of some lightless tunnel of life. No Misty waiting with her arms out wide. I got boxed on the rails in New Mexico, miles from water or people, waiting on a sleeper to pass west. The sun cracked my eyelids blurry. I already know what happens when you die.

6)    Sold a piece of fulgurite as long as my foot to a turquoise woman with an Etsy shop. She smelled like leather and made me miss Misty, but when two people need something as bad as we needed that horse, it’s best you ride as far from each other as land allows.

7)    I had a compass once that I stole from a college kid writing a book. He asked me if he looked like Jack Kerouac, and the train kept on spinning as he fell into the wheels. Lost a foot and sold his book, and he’s the richest man I ever saw alive.

8)    You can catch rain in real storms with your tarp if you’re thirsty enough and your tarp doesn’t have any holes. Some mornings, fog stretches low and forever, and I wish the real sky was blue as my tarp. I wonder how long I could stay still under there before anyone finds me.

9)    Even when Misty and I lived in the Detroiter, I never had a need for a picture. Not of her. Not of me. We ate ice cream out of tubs she swiped from the Walgreens in Brighton, and I miss the way her fingernails felt on my thigh. I miss all sorts of things about her. You can never go back there. You can never go back there. Think of how she’d look at you when she smelled you. Couldn’t even give her a hug. Couldn’t even get close enough to really feel it. Wouldn’t be worth a dime. I’d still miss her all the same, except I’d know about it. She’d be right there, right in my eyes. All the time.

10)  Saw a buzzard with a broken wing once and thought I could’ve kept it, maybe try to train it to be my buddy. Hunt jackrabbits or voles. But buzzards only hunt the dead and that would be too many things.

11)  Backpack, two-liter bottle of water, nicotine patches I found in a garbage can outside a 7-Eleven, blue tarp with the frayed edges, pack of cigarettes, blue lighter, another blue lighter, a receipt from a Best Buy for a big screen TV that I might try and flip if I’m feeling lucky, black jacket, sweaty underwear, Velcro sandals with no soles, black pants, black shirt, another black shirt, sweatshirt I imagine Misty wore when we lived in the Detroiter sometimes.

12)  I found a baseball just west of Texas and wrote Babe Ruth on it with a pen from a bank. Sold it to a kid for all the money he had. Maybe nine dollars.

13)  I try my luck with the Best Buy receipt and almost get snatched. The return lady knew right away. Saw me coming. Maybe it’d be easier in there. Food at least for free.

14)  There’s this moment when you’re waiting on a train and everything is possible. It’s not beautiful like you imagine from your sofa with your Frito chips, thinking all your pretty thoughts. I won’t live in a fortress or marry Misty or be the mayor. Some things, though. Enough things. It’s not beautiful, but it feels alive when it could feel worse.

15)  The sweatshirt gets lost when I’m running from the Best Buy heist. The whole backpack really. The kind of thing you can’t go back for. I sometimes told myself it smelled like her, but it didn’t. It smelled like me, like a wet dog who only eats its own shit and lives under a car with two wheels. A goodbye dog. Some family got it for Christmas, dressed it in clothes, then let it free, said run! Goodbye! It smelled like everything I own. Fuck. Fuck. The sky is tarp blue, sandals with no soles slapping the pavement, and I’ll catch my breath when I need to.

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