It was all an aberration—the fame, the house, the promo photos and royalties—and now it’s back to what it’s always been: a boy shoved under the house. “Because I was small,” you tell me, your chapped and tattooed hands on the steering wheel.
We drive through the old town, clapboard and train tracks. We grew up in this, years apart but the same story. We rode the same buses, avoided the same schools, slept on the same kind of floors. You lived in this shit town where I went to high school, the same years, and you couldn't keep the lawn clean and I couldn't keep my nose clean and we probably walked past each other a bunch, we say, without even knowing it.
They made you root around down there, you tell me, find the cracks that would wrench those houses apart when the earth shook hard enough, and seal them back together, bolts and metal. They made an industry of it, making those foundations stronger, tougher—but you were the one who did it, weren’t you? The one who learned to play drums in the crawl space, all the places where you couldn’t stand up, I think, a life like that, under there like that, until they fired you: “You’ve gotta pick which life you want, boy,” and you did.
That’s what it always was and what it’s come back to, you sliding beneath those cars, their metallic bellies dripping, your overalls and oil-stained hands, their whole bodies revealed to you. “Make this run for me,” they tell you, and you do.
We don’t say anything as we sat in the cabin, waiting for the girls to come out of the house, the sky of our whole past lives stretched out before us. We were always broken this way, I want to say, always crawling under someone else’s house, drilling the foundations of what wasn’t ours, putting our fingers in their cracks, feeling where they might split open and sealing them shut. And a big enough earthquake hasn’t come yet, I want to say, but the two of us are still waiting, not saying, not touching, in case we might break each other. Which we would.
“Aaron Cometbus used to live inbetween the boards of that sign,” you tell me. “Built a whole loft up there and lived there for a year, until they found him and kicked him out.”
