PrettyFakes

So it’s about twelve years ago, and my car was broken down.

Mind you, it was always broken down: a 1969 Chevrolet Camaro with a 307 and a pretty blue paint job that looked a lot better than it ran. Over the couple years I’d had it I learned a few tricks and carried as many tools as you’d find in an average Nascar pit stop. Still: I was stumped, and stuck at a gas station on the corner of 82 and Montgomery in Starkville, and kept sliding quarters into the payphone hoping for help.

First call: Wah. He wanted to help, he was so sorry, but he had a date, and man, please understand. And, I did.

We were from the same neighborhood in Birmingham; our dads had been friends, his snug in a ’65 Studebaker, mine sliding in a ’56 Chevy. Despite our fathers’ assertions, we swore we’d never met before starting State in ’93, where we became fast friends.

“I’d help you, man, but I have a date,” he said, crackling over the line. “I’m sorry,” he said, and I could tell he meant it.

Thirty-four minutes later, me under the Camaro with grease and skinned knuckles, he skidded up in his ’79 Firebird, wearing the finest button-down shirt and Z. Cavaricci pants, with a very pretty and very angry blonde-haired girl in the passenger’s seat.

“Goddammit,” he said. “God-damn-it,” he said again, and laughed a little bit, and began to roll his sleeves up. He was already my friend, but that was the cement.

His birthday this year was filled with chess and laughter, not the shots and jeers of our twenties. I might like it a little better, because there’s less bruising. Jayrah tells us that in our early twenties we demolished a bathroom in a bar at Five Points South on one of his birthdays, apparently in a play-fight started when I kicked him in the ass when he was peeing, and then he swung at me, and then apparently she bribed the server and hustled us out to the Camino before the cops came or we had to pay a bill for broken mirrors and shattered stalls, but I don’t remember it. I do know that I love him, and he’s my brother, and chess or broken bathrooms, he’s the best there is.

See Wah’s other special birthday Polaroid today at the Glam Menagerie.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 28th, 2005 at 8:54 am and is filed under Gorjus, In Mississippi, In the South, Poetry, Polaroids. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.