I

It’s 1995.

“This town fucking sucks,” I say. Like it matters, like we can do anything about it. “Fuck Gladstone. Fuck Missouri.”

I take out a bent up cigarette from the pack in my back pocket when Allen gasps. He walks towards me, beer still in hand.

“You smoke?”

I look up from the dart now hanging out of my mouth, seventeen-going-on-eighteen on the back deck of my dad’s house, and Al’s looking at me like I’m the Devil himself. 

I nod.

“Yeah,” I say. I take a drink.

“Since when?” he asks, popping a seat beside me. The concern is unwelcome, though not unexpected.

“Since Dad took me down to my brother’s last summer,” I say. “You didn’t notice?”

“Well,” Allen says, “Can’t say I did. Least, I never saw you do it.”

“You’re seeing it now,” I say, taking a deep drag. This doesn’t make me feel cool, but it does something.

I ask Allen, more so as a matter of the kind of social expectations I had then: “You want one?”

“No way,” he says. “Smoking’s bad for you, y’know.”

“I’m well aware, Al.”

II

It’s 1996.

We are eighteen, going on nineteen, at the QuikStop closer to Kansas City proper. It’s 11 at night, or thereabouts. I’m on the sauce to some degree, so I’m not driving at Al’s stern advice, and while I offered to go inside to buy my own damn cigarettes, Allen got paranoid about it and said he’d get ‘em for me. So he’s getting ‘em for me. 

He stops at the parking spot past the pumps, and before shutting off his old wood-paneled Station Wagon, he white knuckles the wheel and says: “I’ve never bought cigarettes before.”

“It’s easy,” I tell him. “Just ask ‘em for Luckies filtered, they’ll know what you mean.”

I hand him a fiver.

“What if they don’t got ‘em?” he asks.

“They always got 'em, Al.”

He sighs, and he shuts off the Station Wagon. “Alright, alright. I’m going in.”

So he gets out of the car, leaving me alone and drunk and with a headache coming on ‘cuz my last smoke was yesterday morning. I’m waiting, patient as I can.

Finally, he knocks on the window, pops back in the car, and he looks straight ahead out the windshield.

“Sorry, Roy,” he says.

“They didn’t have ‘em?” 

He nods.

“What’d you get?”

He hands me a pack of L&M Reds and some change, and says, “I didn’t know what to pick, so I kinda panicked.”

I laugh and tell him, “It’s fine, Al, it’s fine. A smoke’s a smoke.”

I bring out my lighter til he says, “Dude, this is my dad’s car.”

“Right, right..”

A small silence, save for the ignition. Then he says, “Those things’ll kill you, y’know.”

I lean my head on the passenger side window.

“I think it helps,” I say. I won't elaborate. Instead, I tell him, “I think something else’ll get me first.”

III

It’s 1997. 

I am nineteen years old at the K-mart parking lot, sometime around midnight. 

My dad’s ‘78 firebird didn’t come with a clock, ‘cuz he opted for the oil pressure meter instead, so that’s my best guess. I drove there in silence, and alone, and stone cold sober. I drove there like I was being pulled in the Pontiac by a string, along a track, like a Scalextric type kid’s toy. It was raining, but not too hard. I’m desperately trying to strike up a Lucky in the car when it happens.

That same sense draws me out the door, and I feel it. A deep fear, like “be not afraid” kind of fear, and then I see it too. An angel, of course it’s an angel, it's formless yet distinct and I know it's a damn angel, come to bear news I never wanted.

Be not afraid, my ass. I’m terrified.

The sparks of my lighter don’t yield a flame, and the rain is getting harder. My cigarette is getting wet. I’m not giving up because I can’t, because I’m scared, because I don’t have anything else at this moment to dull the nerves. I am shaking in my soaked sneakers.

And it “speaks”, but it doesn’t really speak so much as tell direct, like mind-to-mind communication, beaming the idea straight to me.

Then, as quick as it showed up, it goes.

So there it is. The place I’ll go, before I go.

Looking around at the K-mart parking lot, where it’s all empty carts and wasteland in this lonely landing, I see the beauty of this place. Not K-mart, I mean Missouri. I never did before. Always thought KC and Gladstone and this whole town fucking sucked. Maybe I’m right, but there’s something worthwhile here, now that I am so ordered to head East to the coast. Like some kind of seagull with its life trajectory dragging it further out to sea, or an albatross. There’s something worthwhile, someone worthwhile, and I’m gonna take it with me. I have to. I’ll bring him along, because I have to, and because in this moment I realise I have a lot more love than I like to let on.

It’s at this moment that I start to cry. The rain is intense now. I’ll miss the Osage trees in Oak Grove Park. Playing ball with Al and Mickey and the others. Staying at Al’s. Al’s laugh, the one he does when I do something I shouldn’t’ve. Now I am really crying. There’s a lot to miss here.

Grimly, I figure it. The beauty, the love, Al’s goofy laugh. All that stuff. I will take it all with, when I go.

IV

It's late May, 1997.

We’re sat in my dad’s ‘78 Firebird, some time in the evening, having mostly calmed down some but not speaking a word to each other. It’s dark. Al’s been crying, most of this time. Really crying. I’ve been holding him, calm and out of it and fully detached but knowing damn well he needs me to be there in that moment. We’re at the Motel 6 parking lot in Henrico, Virginia.

Finally, he says, “Roy.”

“Yeah?” 

He wipes his eyes on my denim jacket and continues. “I won’t tell your dad, just don’t do that again.”

“I won’t,” I say. I’m not lying.

“Promise,” he says. “Promise you won’t run out into the road again.”

“Al, I-”

“Please,” he says. 

“Al, I promise.”

And I mean it.

He hugs me over the center glovebox, strokes my back like I’m the one who needs it. When he lifts his head off my shoulder, he gives me a kiss, soft and warm.

“I’m not gonna call your dad,” he says, “but we should go home.”

I sigh, and I nod. I know full well what I was going to do. He knows now, too. Time to pack it in.

We both lean back into our respective seats - Al in the driver’s side, and myself in the passenger’s. He lets out a deep sigh, face dried off by now, emotions petering out.

I ask him, “Hey, Al?”

“Yeah?”

I bring out my pack of luckies, from the front pocket, now somewhat smashed.

“Mind if I light up a dart?”