It really was great to see him again.

I took a long look at him as he situated himself in his chair. His long stringy black hair swayed across his neck as he rocked left and right, sliding the chair closer to the table before him. He was thinner and more pale than I remembered… Yet he looked almost exactly as he had when we were kids, with the notable exceptions of the goatee on his chin and upper lip and the tattoo on his chest, the top of which rose barely above the neckline of his t-shirt. It looked like it was probably a skull.

“Jesus, Jay… Wow, man, it’s…” He looked up at me, a slight scowl adorning his face. I glanced at the table in front of me and shook my head slightly as I continued. “Wow. It’s been a long time, man!” I looked back up at the man I hadn’t seen in five years, and every day of our separation was echoed in my voice. He looked so stern and hard, and as a consequence so brittle… Yet he looked so very much like himself. “How are you?”

Jay chose to respond by lighting a cigarette – slowly, deliberately… allowing the act itself to effectively answer the question for him. It did, very loudly and very clearly.

Taking a slow, deep drag, he held the smoke deep in his lungs for several seconds. He stared into my eyes, holding them in place until I broke and looked down at the table in front of me once more. I glanced back up at him in time to watch the side of his mouth crack a sly smile, allowing a thick fog to seep slowly toward escape. He flicked into the small plastic cup sitting to his left the small chunk of ash that had formed at the tip of his cigarette, took a long look at me, and finally replied to me in a southern accent that had grown more pronounced since last I saw him.

“Yah… it has been a long time, you’re right.” His voice crackled and popped as he spoke, sounding almost mechanical and conditioned to respond when questioned. It then broke, revealing a flood of emotion as he blurted out, “Goddamn! Joe, man… It’s damn good to see you, man! How you been?”

I exhaled the shallow pool of air I had been holding in my lungs then allowed myself to take a deep breath, the first real breathing I had done since I had entered this building. ”I can’t really complain, man,” I replied as casually as I could. “Work, school, you know… the typical shit.”

He chuckled a little, drawing tiny circles on the table with his index finger. “Typical for you, maybe…”

I blushed, embarrassed that I could be so absent-minded as to forget his situation. The things that seem typical to me have become distant visions experienced by him through television screens and books and magazines. Things like college and work and girlfriends were seldom brought up in conversation here, and when they were, they were discussed in the past or future tense.

“Oh… Wow, I’m, uh… I’m sorry -”

”Don’t be.” He took another long drag from his cigarette. After a short silence and shooting a stream of smoke up and into the air, he spoke again. “Well, you pretty much know what I’m doin’… how about you tell me about what you doin’ now, man.”

It actually took a moment for me to think about the things I was doing each and every day, trying to find a way to tell him the about my daily rituals without rubbing them in his face. ”Well, during the day, I work in the computer lab at school.”

He looked moderately surprised. ”No shit! College boy, huh! Where you goin’, Clayton?”

“No… Georgia State, actually.”

”Oh, yeah, that one.” He thought for a moment then furrowed his brow, asking “That the one down there, down in Statesboro?”

“No, no… That’s Georgia Southern. State is downtown.”

“Oh.” Another drag, another silence… another minute ticks by. “So computers, huh?”

I shifted in my seat. ”Yah… it’s pretty boring. Mostly I just listen to a bunch of students bitch about the printers not working.”

”Sounds like fun…” He said with a note of sarcasm. I noticed that as his hand lay on the table, it was involuntarily shaking. He saw me looking at it and smiled a little. “But them computers… that’s right up your alley, huh? You always liked ‘em, playin’ those games and stuff.”

“Yah… a bunch of whiny English majors crying because they can’t figure anything out for themselves. It’s real fun.”

He laughed and replied, “You just say that because you’d rather be playing them video games!” And with a raspy mixture of coughing and laughing, added “Am I right?” He smiled through his goatee, revealing a mouth full of nicotine-stained teeth.

I laughed a little. “Yeah, yeah… they don’t really let me do that while I work. Gotta ‘earn’ that minimum wage, you know?”

“Beats pressing license plates.”

Ok, well, yeah… he had a point there.

I cleared my throat, yet again embarrassed. Foregoing yet another apology, I went on with telling him about my life. “Well, at night on the weekends, I make balloon animals for kids in a restaurant.”

He cocked his head a little to the left. ”You’re a clown?”

”No no no... not a clown. I wear normal clothes and all… I just make the balloons for tips. You know… not a clown, just a guy who, you know, makes stuff. Out of balloons.”

”Heh,” he snorted, not buying a word of it. “Hey, you ever make anything, like a big dick or something?”

I laughed. ”Naw, man… of course not! They are for kids!”

”So?”

He had a gigantic grin on his face, the one he always had when he was being a jackass. The statement was fantastically funny, so deadpan and so typical of his character. I wanted to laugh. Instead, I began to cry.

He shook his head violently and knocked on the glass between us. “Hey, man, you gotta stop that shit.”

He was right. Remembering where I was and how long I had until I left, I locked down, wiping away the small streams the tears had formed at the corners of my face. “I’m sorry, man. I’m just… It’s just that, you know…”

”Yeah, I know.” He stared at the table in front of him, elbows resting on top of it, hands clutched together in front of his nose. A thin stream of smoke emanated from the tip of the cigarette he clutched between his yellowed fingers and drifted toward the ceiling in an almost perfectly straight line. He looked back up at me and, in an effort to bring a little levity to the situation, he began to reminisce.

“Hey, yo… You remember that class we had to go to, that one we had to take after we shot up those trucks with that slingshot? You and me and… That kid, the skateboarder... what’s his name…”

“Mike.” I said, wiping my eyes once more.

“Yeah, that guy… Mike. You still talk to him?”

“Yeah. He’s my roommate now.”

“Oh, you out of the folks’ place?” He flicked a bit of ash into the ashtray.

“Yeah… we share a house with my sister and her fiancé, over near Mount Zion.”

His eyes grew wide. “Woah… Jenny? She’s gettin’ married?”

“Yah.”

”Wow, man… Wow, that’s crazy! She sure grew up, huh?” He looked at the wall to his left and then cut quickly back to the right, pounding the cigarette-free hand against the table as he exclaimed, “Damn! You know, man, everybody’s movin’ on. It’s…" The creases around his eyes eased a bit. "It’s good though, you know? It's real good.”

I nodded.

He sat silent for a moment, then continued. “Anyway, one of the kids that was in that class, that juvenile delinquent class… he’s on my block. Omar, the kid who took the jewelry from Parisian. You remember that kid?”

I didn’t know who the hell he was talking about. I remembered the class and how scared Mike and Jay and I were while in it, sitting in and amongst thieves and hooligans who had beat people with sticks, shovels – one girl beat her mom with a lamp. Still, I went with it – it was far better than silence or sniveling like a child from the other side of the window.

“No shit… how’s he doing?”

”Shit, man… same as the rest of us in here... He’s just doin’ his time.”

”Oh,” I said in a tone of voice that made it sound like ‘Duh’. “What did he do to end up here?”

He smashed the butt of his cigarette into the ashtray with his right hand, simultaneously grabbing the pack that sat in front of him with his left and shaking out a new one. He positioned the red and white package in front of his face, yanking out a new smoke with his lips. With the cigarette clinging to his mouth, he answered, “The fucker shot up his old man. Put two in his face.”

I sat there as Jay lazily dragged the head of a match against the back of a book full of them. He quickly brought it to the tip of his new cigarette, causing the small cylinder to glow red and smoke furiously, mimicking what was happening to my brain as I searched for the words to say next. Nothing came readily to mind, and all I could do was try to imagine what it would take to get me mad enough to ‘put two’ into the face – or any other body part – of a person. I didn’t know Omar’s circumstances and I wasn’t sure what a person had to have inside themselves to get to the point of shooting someone, much less their father. I had done - and probably would do in the future - some pretty questionable things in my life, yet One thing I was reasonably certain of was that I lacked whatever it took to murder someone.

Jay coughed, bringing my attention back to him. It was clear that current events weren’t really something that we could find a common ground on, so I sprinted as fast as I could back toward memory lane.

“Hey, you remember that kid Todd?”

“The one I lived next to?” He said, lazily drawing in smoke from his Marlboro. “The one you traded the videos with?”

“Wait, what do you mean, ‘I traded with’?" I asked with a grin on my face. "Man, you made that trade on my behalf!”

“Hey, don’t pin that shit on me, motherfucker,” He said as he pounded his chest with two fingers. “You didn’t have to cough up that tape… You could have said no!”

“Yeah, whatever… You made out on that deal. You didn’t have to give anything up, and at least you got to keep what you traded.” We were both smiling. “You know, I never even got to watch the damn thing – Well, actually I did -"

”Yeah, I know, you told me about that!” He said, laughing loudly. “I would have LOVED to have seen that shit in person… You in the living room with your mom and pops while 2 girls are dykin’ it out on the TV… The look on your mom’s face would be worth at least a million bucks! Oh, man oh man…" he drifted off a bit, then returned with "Say, how is your mom, anyways?”

“She’s not bad. You know, same ol’ mom… She asked me to tell you ‘hi’.”

He didn’t respond, verbally or physically. I didn’t ask him to. “My dad, well… You know my dad. Always on my back about something... In fact, I just bought this car, and -”

“Did he ever forgive you for when we blew up that desk?” He interjected, clearly uninterested in any conversation about a car.

“Um… Actually, I think he thought it was pretty funny,” I said, a bit stunned from the interruption. “I ended up having to buy a new one though.”

We both chuckled a bit as we remembered the homemade fireworks incident. Another short silence situated itself directly between us, personifying the severe discomfort that accompanies a conversation through a speaker in a window at the Lovejoy Correctional Facility - or any correctional facility, for that matter. Eventually, the deafening lack of noise became unbearable, apparently for both of us. Jay’s eyebrows raised as a thought entered his head and he hacked out a smoker’s cough as he raised his hand to point at me. “You know who I always wonder about?”

“Who’s that?” I inquired eager for something else to talk about.

“That punk motherfucker John Dixon. Man, I’d like to beat his ass.”

The name hit me like a cinder block.

“Jesus… wow. John Dixon…” I whispered as a chaotic swarm of thoughts and feelings swept through me. It was impossible to pin down just one emotion to feel as everything ranging from anger, to remorse, to a severe depression made its way through my gut. I lifted my head to look at a broken, incarcerated man sitting in front of me on the other side of a thick pane of Plexiglas, clad in orange, manacles and handcuffs adorning his ankles and wrists. All I could see, however, was the goofy comic collecting kid that lived up the street from me - once my best friend in the world. This was the guy who introduced me to heavy metal (the music) and Heavy Metal (the movie)… a kid who stood by my side through thick and thin – the thickest of which was the night he received a punishment he shouldn’t have because of a cowardly asshole named John Dixon.

It was about six years in the past, over Christmas vacation during my freshman year in high school. A broad cast of moonlight diffused through thick clouds turned the sky a bright purple, illuminating slightly the ‘meeting spot’ of a particularly mischievous trio of young men - a trio my mom had unwittingly dubbed “A scourge upon this subdivision” after viewing an unsigned blue, green and gold suggestion painted on the driveway of one of our neighbors, suggesting he “Suck a cock.” She knew neither that it was a trio nor that I was involved – she just knew that we were “a plague” and she “hoped they were soon caught”. First a scourge, then a plague! I was truly honored.

Jay and I were there, making preparations for the evenings activities, accompanied by our partner in crime John Dixon. I could see plainly in my mind the image of a 6’ 5” thin lanky boy one year our elder, his windswept hair being brushed away from his eyes as the gigantic guilty smirk across his face explained that there was no way on Earth we would ever get caught.

“Dudes, we are too GOOD at this!” He said with the oratory skill of a politician. “We’ve never been caught before, right? Besides, we didn’t get pictures of the car lot. We need them!”

“Dude,” Jay said, exasperated from having argued this point for the past 20 minutes, “we did that place last week! We can’t go back there... not so soon.” He was drinking the final third of a bottle of Michelob he had stolen out of his father’s ‘hidden’ refrigeratorin the shed behind which we were standing. Offering me the rest, I waved it off as I arranged the harness I had just fastened around my waist. He shrugged, swigged the last of the bottle, and offered that “we do the library.”

“The library?!?” John exclaimed a little too loudly, eliciting a loud “SHHHH!!” from both Jay and myself. In a much softer voice, he continued “The library isn’t any kind of challenge. Kids do that place all the time. I’m telling you, we need to get the car lot again!”

I placed the hammer Jay handed me into the small loop on the side of the belt I had finally gotten perfectly situated around my hips and said, “Look, let’s just decide on a place. I don’t care where, I just wanna fuck something up tonight.”

Jay laughed. “Still pissed about that Diana thing?” he asked, referring to a girl who asked me out solely to beat up an ex-boyfriend of hers whom I had to center a football to every single day after school. “Yah… stupid bitch. I’m not going to fight Jeremy! Man… I wish we could go over to her house and do HER place.”

“I think she lives near Kilpatrick,” Jay said. “We could do both the school AND her place.”

John shook his head. He was a year older than us, and as such, felt entitled to fulfill the role of leader of our little band of hooligans. “The car lot. We gotta get the lot… More targets, and it’s the only place we don’t have pictures of yet.”

“Fine,” I said, tired of lollygagging. “The car lot. Let’s just get going… it’s almost three!” I hoisted up the canvas bag filled with the tools of our particular trade by the drawstrings, slinging it over my shoulder. It always fell on me to carry the gear, since I was the largest and most capable of our little pack. A mile and a half with a bag and a tool belt would have made Jay collapse, and John had his hands full with the camera and video recorder.

“Man, I dunno…” Jay said nearly rhetorically as he began following John and me, the three of us marching across his back yard and up to the road.

“Jay, dude, just shut up! Let’s get this thing GOING!” John exclaimed, once again a little too loudly. Jay’s concern was quickly abandoned as we trotted along in our black hooded sweatshirts and black cargo pants, singing in pants and whispers marching cadences that John’s brother sent him from the Marines. The rhythm of the cadence fell in time with the slapping of our Hi-Tec boots against the wet asphalt as we lightly ran toward our destination. I was watching my breath come out in small billows of steam with each step, inhaling deep the moist December air as the canvas bag over my shoulder pounded against my back and the hammer and crowbar hanging on either side of the harness around my waist tapped lightly against each corresponding leg.

Winding through the roads of our neighborhood and cutting across the dark wooded back lot of the apartments at the northern edge of the subdivision, we paused directly across the street from the Hertz Rental Center as we got our stuff ready. The lot we were staring at housed a fleet of ghost white rental vans, trucks and cars – each and every one an unmarked canvas for the ‘art’ we were about to so proudly practice.

“DUDE!” John shouted, causing me to involuntarily hit him in the stomach. He winced a second and began to whisper as he should have, “Look! It’s a whole new batch!” He looked directly at Jay and confidentially stated, “See. I told you this was the place,” asking then, “Was I right?”

Jay was nearly salivating as I plopped the bag onto the moist ground, pulling the strings open. “You were SO right,” he replied, reaching into the bag and grabbing a large pair of bolt cutters. “Man, this rules… and look!” he said, pointing toward the back of the lot at the dense kudzu climbing the fence he intended to cut open with the implement he wielded in both hands. “They barely even patched the fence… Look! It’s barely holding together! I can see the hole from here!” He laughed as he began to stride from behind the apartment building where we were hiding. “This is going to be CAKE.”

I reached into the bag and grabbed several cans of Krylon spray paint, handing John his trademark green and stuffing Jay’s red and my gold into the pockets on the sides of my pants. Leaving the bag where we just were to minimize the load, the three of us quickly and silently moved up along the side of the building, sprinted across the dark street, and slid quickly behind the fence, burying ourselves in the thick kudzu vines as the entire structure rattled and waved. It was completely dark with the exception of the clouds high in the sky that held the light of the full moon behind them. My heart was racing from the thrill, my gut churning and adrenaline pumping. It was times like these that made me – and my companions – feel so completely and utterly alive. I smiled at Jay, who quickly went to work snipping open the small staples which held together the severed links of the fence we had cut open the week previous.

Just as he finished clamping the jaws of the bolt cutters upon the last band of metal at the top of the now flopping fence, John tapped Jay and pulled him back against the loose foliage as a truck inside the lot very slowly proceeded down the farthest horizontal row from us.

My heart completely stopped and my breathing ceased as we watched it moving slowly past each row, the driver stealthily patrolling the lot which had been utterly and completely vandalized the week before. The truck’s lights were off and its engine barely made a sound as it crept slowly to a stop just past the row we were staring down. From behind the fence we could barely see the passenger door slowly creaking open, the head of a crouched form making its way out of the vehicle and closing the door behind it. Just then, a final puff of exhaust exited the tailpipe of the truck as the driver shut off the engine and joined his companion, meeting him around the front of the truck.

“FUCK,” I heard John whisper. Jay kicked him, causing the leaves around his leg to rustle slightly but very audibly. We saw the feet of the first man in a crouching run quickly pacing down the lane just to the right of the one we could see clearly.

The feet quit moving. The two forms were barely visible at the end of the row, crouched behind the vans about 30 yards diagonally in front of our position. I felt John’s left hand extended behind him on my leg and saw his right hand stretched forward resting on Jay’s shoulder. He tapped once lightly, counting in a whisper ”Three…”

My heart immediately began to race, pounding in my ears. I could no longer hear anything; I merely felt the whisper echo through the air as he tapped my leg and Jay’s shoulder once more and muttered the number “Two.”

A final tap landed on the inside of my right thigh and the air broke as his voice shouted “ONE!”

The scene became pure chaos. Acting on pure instinct, the three of us bolted through the kudzu, racing along the edge of the fence and onto the street before us. Our advancement was mirrored on the other side of the fence by the two figures who were stalking us, held up momentarily by the gate of the fence they had to quickly fling open. I saw Jay turning left from the corner of my eye, racing back toward our neighborhood. He would be safe; the subdivision was rife with hiding spots. Immediately thereafter, John turned right and sprinted toward the main highway which was rich with gas stations and small shops he could duck behind, in or under. I continued straight forward toward the apartment complex through which we crept not ten minutes before. My pounding heart paused in response to the report of a gunshot, followed by another and another behind me. They were followed by loud shouting and commands to “Halt!” and “Stop where you are!” Of course, I wasn’t interested in compliance, and my legs churned as the tools on my hips flew about, accompanied by small balls inside the cans of spray paint rattling loudly in rhythm with the pumping of my legs.

I don’t know how I became aware of it. I couldn’t really hear anything… It was more of a feeling, a presence behind me – somehow, I knew that there was someone following me. I ran as fast as I could, kicking one leg in front of me just as quickly as I could push off with the other. The man behind me did the same, his footsteps echoing behind me louder and louder.

He was gaining on me.

I came to the small hill directly in front of the apartment complex, moist with condensation and freshly mowed. The second my boot made contact with the grass, I lost my footing. My right leg kicked directly out in front of me as I landed on the inside of my left thigh, and I somehow slid down the hill this way. I barely managed to land on my feet as I came to the base of the short but steep incline and again began pounding the pavement beneath me with the soles of my boots. The man behind me wasn’t nearly as clumsy, fortunately, and slowed a bit as he kept his footing by pitter-pattering on his sideways-turned feet down the small embankment. I took half a second to look behind me to check his position – it was still way too damn close to me. I turned forward again, pumping my feet just as hard as I could as I reached the asphalt parking lot of the back side of a row of buildings. My mind was in overdrive and nary a cognizant thought could be organized as I brought myself closer and closer to a dumpster facing forward, parked a few yards in front of me – one whose side was so close to the back of the building that I would have to squeeze through slowly to make it to the other side, eating precious time and probably ensuring my capture. Immediately in front of it, however, was a discarded loveseat, its previous owner I immediately thanked God for.

I bounded off of the ground, placing my boot on the cushion of the piece of furniture just in front of me. I was trampolined up and on top of the garbage bin, clambered across it, and sort of plopped to the ground on the other side of it. Immediately I resumed my sprinting, not in the slightest concerned with helping the man who was following me up and over the obstacle that just created the break I needed to lose him.

I turned down one of the rows of buildings and spotted in front of me a small wooden door at the base near the steps of the building to my left. I flung it open, dove inside, and closed it behind me. I gathered myself into as small a position as I could muster and held my breath, swearing an oath to God that I would never, ever again sneak out of my parents’ house at night, vandalize anything, steal anything, think dirty thoughts or sneeze during church if she would just PLEASE get me out of this one.

I sat silently in the red Georgia clay beneath the block of apartments for what felt like at least three days, the musty air filling my lungs as quickly as I could exhale it. I slowly began to catch my breath, slow my heartbeat and think complete thoughts – the first of which was I’ve gotta find John and Jay. I cautiously crawled back over to the small door which led to the outside world (and much, MUCH fresher air). I barely opened it, peeking out to see what I could see – which turned out to be absolutely nothing. I swung it open and pounced out, ready to break into a sprint if someone was waiting on one side of it to apprehend me, which they weren’t. I scanned the immediate area, looking for any sign of anything remotely recognizable or interesting. The only thing that made itself apparent was the canvas bag which sat in a lump about 30 yards to my left behind the last building in the row where we prepared ourselves earlier that morning. I sprinted over to it, the cans of paint in my cargo pockets rattling with each step, effectively negating any attempt at stealth I might have been making at that time. I grabbed up the bag and empted my belt and pockets into it. I grabbed out the watch that was buried in the bottom near the compass and binoculars – 4:10 am.

God… how on Earth am I going to find them? I asked myself. God answered in the form of a panicked and extremely loud whisper from behind a house to the right of the apartment complex. I looked over in that direction – it was Jay, waving his arms and signaling me to make my way over to him. I covered the distance with the wind at my back, thankful that I had found one of my own.

“Have you seen John?” he asked as I arrived and dropped the bag in front of him. We both ducked down behind a shrub at the side of the house behind which we hid.

”No, you?” I replied, catching my breath from the sprint.

“No… Holy Shit, man! Those guys had a GUN! They were shooting at us!” He said, dropping the bolt cutters into the bag.

“Yeah… Oh, MAN, John… ” I said, expelling gigantic clouds of fog from my mouth as I huffed. “I hope he didn’t get shot!”

Jay shook his head and began to panic. “Man, what the HELL are we going to do?!? He probably got picked up… He’s probably dead… oh SHIT man!”

“Just calm down!” I commanded. “He’s probably behind your house waiting for us. We gotta get back there.”

”Yeah… Yeah, you’re right. Let’s get back there,” he agreed.

We began to run back to Jay’s house, this time sans Marine cadence. All thoughts of jovial camaraderie turned to concern for our missing friend as we approached Jay’s shed without a single trace of John anywhere to be found.

The word ‘shit’ was said many, many times during the ensuing search for the third member of our trio. During the following two hours, Jay stuck by my side as we looked all around his house, my house, the filling stations which littered the main highway, the apartment complex, the scene of the crime. There was nowhere we didn’t look, and absolutely every single place we searched turned up no sign of John whatsoever.

I finally offered the only plan that made sense to me at the time. “Man… We gotta call the cops”

”WHAT?!? Are you CRAZY?” Jay asked, knowing fully well that I was. “The second you mention this area, they’re going to know who we are!”

”It doesn’t matter, man,” I said as the sun began to lighten the Eastern sky. “If he’s been caught, we all go down together – we leave no man behind, remember?” The spirit of unity within our small corps filled Jay’s heart as he slowly nodded in agreement. We trotted as quickly as we could to my house, snuck in, and dialed up the local police department.

“Clayton County Police,” the officer said as brightly and friendly as you can imagine a policeman working the graveyard shift would.

“Uh… Hi,” I said. My heart was pounding, causing my voice to quiver with each beat. “I was wondering if you guys have a friend of mine in -”

”Name?” The kind and friendly officer blurted out me.

“Uh… John Dixon.”

A small silence, a deep breath, and the reply – “Nope. No one by that name has been brought in.”

“Are you su-“

”Yes, very sure,” he said gruffly.

”Um… Ok, thank you-“

A resounding click echoed through the earpiece.

“Don’t got him?” Jay asked. He was shaking as badly as I was. I shook my head no.

“SHIT! Man… what do we do?” he said, pleading, completely giving up.

“I think we only have one thing we can do.” I looked at him seriously. “We tell our parents.”

He stopped shaking. He then looked me square in the eye.

“Fuck you.”

“Dude, we don’t have a choice,” I said as he resumed his shivering. “We gotta tell ‘em!”

After about ten minutes of discussion about exactly what his father was going to do to him when he heard about our little escapades, The phone rang. I reached across my bed to grab it just as it ceased its noisy clanging. Not thinking another thing about it, I hammered Jay once more, finally managing to get him to agree to let me at least tell my parents.

“Dude, I swear, I won’t even mention your name.”

“Don’t, seriously man,” Jay replied. “He’ll kick the shit out of me. You know he will.”

Immediately, the door to my bedroom opened to reveal my father in his nightshirt staring holes through the pair of us. My mother, clad in her terrycloth bathrobe, was standing directly behind him. The couple wore an expression on their faces which revealed immediately that they knew far more than we had intended to tell them – and they were going to kill us because of it.

“John’s mother just called here,” My mother said through her scowl. I swear to God, her eyes glowed red for a moment.

Those five words spoke volumes about our current situation. Not only was John alright, he had spilled the beans about the entire evening to his parents who, in turn, called my parents. I looked at Jay who looked back at me. We shrugged, and turning back to my infuriated parents, I asked, “Oh? Um… Really… Did she have anything interesting to say?”

We found out through my mother – at very high volume - that John, “against his will”, managed to “make a break for it” and lose us “before we could force him to vandalize the car lot.”

“Oh, REALLY?” I asked. “Well, I’ll have you know –“ ”I am NOT interested in the slightest in anything you might have to say,” My father exclaimed in a voice that would melt steel. “John told us what you were going to make him do to those cars! That’s great… That’s just WONDERFUL. Real manly behavior, there!”

My mother chimed in merrily, “Jay, honey, you’d better get home. Your father’s waiting for you.”

Panic filled Jay’s face and he stammered, attempting to ask if his father knew anything about what my mother had just told us.

”Oh yes, he knows all about it,” She replied. “He was on three-way with John’s parents and us, and from the sound of it, you are in as much trouble as Joe here is!”

Jay just sat there. Slowly, tears began to wash across his face. He stood up, excused himself past the parents who blocked my doorway, and left my house. I stared at the floor and prepared myself for the devastation.

The tan of the worn carpet in my room gave way to the white cold tile of a penal institution as I was startled back into reality by a sharp rapping against the Plexiglas window which separated me from the inmate on the other side of it.

“YO!” Jay shouted in the modern day. “Wake up.”

My eyes shot toward him as I attempted to collect myself. ”Oh… Um, I’m sorry,” I said apologetically. I had been absorbed in my little trip into the past for more than a full minute. I guess Jay just got sick of hearing himself breathe. “That name just brought back some… you know, some memories.”

”Yeah, I know…” He agreed. “Does the same to me. I hate that motherfucker. Man… turning on us like that. He got my ass KICKED. My old man took a damn fire poker to my ass.”

“Yeah, my parents hit the goddamn roof!” I replied glibly, knowing very well that my punishment of staying up for 3 days straight and doing just about every chore imaginable was absolutely nothing compared to the severe beating Jay suffered at the hands of his father. No amount of scorn, disdain, guilt or disappointment levied upon me by my parents could possibly come close to the treatment Jay received – again and again.

I continued on. “Shit… Yeah, man, I don’t know what happened to John. I didn’t talk to him at all after that night... He never would face us.”

Jay took the last drag off of his cigarette, smashing it into the ashtray as he simultaneously pulled out another. “He’s a punk bitch, man. Forget that motherfucker. Sorry I even brought him up.” He fumbled at the book of matches that had been tucked in the cellophane encasing his pack of cigarettes. “Anyway… HEY! YO!” He banged on the glass again, ceasing my aimless stare into I focused on him once again as he spoke. ”Joe, man… Thanks for coming down here. I know this ain’t easy.”

I looked at him in earnest. “Yah man, you know… What are friends for, right?”

“Heh…” he replied bitterly, “You the only one of my ‘friends’ been down here. Ain’t nobody wanna be your friend when you've been locked up for robbin’ banks and shit, man.” He lit the cigarette clinched between his lips, cupping his hand over his mouth as he spoke. “I didn’t even think you would, you never answered my damn letters. Surprised the shit outta me when they told me you was here.”

I sighed heavily, not knowing exactly what to say. The absolute truth is that I didn’t WANT to be there – no one in their right mind would. I hadn’t seen him in over five years. We were so different now - a difference personified by a stretch of clear plastic seperating the two of us. Two guys of similar backgrounds who chose different paths in life - one who learned from his mistakes, graduated high school and went on to college, and one who obviously did not, attempted to liberate a bank of its holdings, and was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison. To be completely honest, I didn’t even know why he wrote me. I could only surmise that he had reached a point of loneliness that pretty much swallowed him whole and decided to just send out letters, writing to anyone and everyone he possibly could. Even more puzzling was the reason I was there – I didn’t have one that I could easily point to. Perhaps it was curiosity; the desire to see how much of the Jay I once knew still existed. Maybe it was boredom – I had nothing to do that afternoon, and Lovejoy was only 15 miles away. If I didn’t want to be there, why was I?

We sat in silence for another few minutes, each of us completely devoid of conversational material for that moment. Had I known how long we had left, I certainly would have thought of something else to say… Unfortunately, I didn’t, and the buzzer marking the end of our twenty minutes together sounded. The warden immediately appeared beside him, tapping him on the shoulder and instructing Jay to accompany him back to his cell.

I tried to say goodbye, but nothing came out. I just looked at him looking at me, devoid of emotion, blank as slate. He looked me in the eye and simply said, “You stay good out there, man.”

I nodded as he turned to waddle away, warden in tow. As he exited through the door that led to the cells, the reason I had even shown up became apparent - I still cared about him. He was once my best friend on this planet, and the truth is that all the justification and logic in the world couldn’t stop the little burning feeling in my gut that arose as I read his letter.

He was Jay.

That was it. There was no other overwhelming, neatly packaged reason. This was a friend, pure and simple. No matter what had happen, he was Jay.

I rose from my chair, passed the opposite way through the security checkpoints, headed out of the building and quickly got in my car. Trying to get moving as fast as possible, I jammed my keys into the ignition and turned the engine over, but before I could shift into reverse, the wave that had been building inside washed completely over me. There I sat just outside of the jailhouse, just visiting, unable to control myself as I lay my head on the steering wheel of my car and cried.