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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 3717 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention Two Friends, Two Memories Jim Doss 1. Timmy Like the stockcars you love so much, leukemia races through your veins unleashing its deadly exhaust. I’ll forever picture you riding tall behind the wheel of your four-on-the-column Dodge pick-up, with three of us crammed into the cab, as you popped the clutch at fifty burning rubber down River Road. Your black hair pumped like pistons in the night wind to the beat of Born to be Wild, while we sucked down the sweaty pints of Boone’s Farm wine you’d bought us under-aged punks buzzing our way toward a midnight puke. Pressured into a first drunk, you Jekyll-Hyded and chased us through the woods swinging a rusty hatchet at our heads before I coldcocked you into permanent sobriety and the strong arms of a Baptist prayer-meeting woman. 2. Gordon A lethal worm now bores through your brain, its cancer consuming your thoughts, your body reduced to palsied stutter and shake. I remember your clear voice in the afternoon light of your father’s woodshop as your hands leapt like spawning salmon over the dog-eared pages of Henry Miller and D. H. Lawrence, and our libidos flooded with dreams of female flesh promising to wash the ache away. We double-dated in the white whale of your Pontiac Laurentian, drifted down by Blackwater Creek with a warm six-pack or two of beer we’d pinched from your father’s stash, and spread our make-out blankets just outside of earshot in different spots on the sandy bank. For hours, the water whispered below us. Pinpoints of starlight pricked our eyes, and the moon performed a slow striptease through the oak branches. On the ride home, the books spoke through us as we spun our tales of triumph, still struggling to understand what it meant to love. |
