Crash

“Soon you’ll see advertisements for people on TV.”
“To date?”
“Uh huh.”
Crash plops his head against the wall. Outside the children in the courtyard are screaming. Distinguishing if their shouts are of happiness or terror is nearly impossible. Crash’s just signed up for three college courses in the city, pre-GED, and has already started wondering if the workload is going to be too intense. He’s started making friends again, started going out on Friday nights, trying to catch glimpses of the girl who asked him if he was “doing okay” at the last party he was at. He sat drunkenly in the kitchen, alone, on a stool next to the refrigerator. The host had already passed out earlier. She’d just had the time to warn everyone who wanted to smoke cigarettes about the pedophile who lurked on the roof. Those that had gone had never come back; they’d most likely traversed to the other party three blocks away.
Jenny walks into the living room where Crash is watching TV. She takes a picture of him.
Later, when they make love, a balloon comes out of her vagina.
It doesn’t hurt her (in the process), it’s cute, and touchable. She giggles as it inflates, spreading her legs apart. Crash watches half-way across the room in disgust.
“Are you really getting bored of me?”
Crash meanders back home. He takes a break on a park bench, twirling his eyes around a patch of flowery grass, losing himself in his thoughts. A bunch of kids sail by on skateboards, ripping up concrete. They rattle off into the distance. Crash goes back to staring at the patch of flowery grass, hypnotized. The grass begins to intrude in on his thoughts. He crosses his eyes. The patches of grass collide.
Jenny sits down next to Crash, in the living room, with a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice in each hand. Crash doesn’t like pulp, but thanks anyway. His mother would have known this.
“Goodbye,” he says towards himself. “I never want to see or hear from you again.”
Later on in the evening, he subways it to another open-house. Awfully antique and oversized, the mild brass floors creak, parents have gone away for the weekend. Everyone there’s a young man.
That girl shows up. Her name would be fitting for a genie. The bass thumps the cups in the kitchen set up and being filled for beer pong, two walls apart from Crash, sitting on the couch watching disproportionate females and bulky young men with muscles that look like mutant chicken legs. There is a lot of spilling of beer and soon, shots of liquor, but on the other end of the couch that girl raises her hands over her eyes, closes them in disgust, and tilts herself towards the arm of the couch. It’s a navy-green couch. The girl, from his vantage point, appears to be wearing it. The floors look like the walls, the walls look like the American Revolution section of a museum, everything begins to look like something other than itself, including the people.
The girl comes over and starts crying about how her best friend’s fallen in love with her. Crash asks to hold her. He waits for awhile to make sure she feels safe before playing with her hair. Another five minutes before massaging her scalp.
Then she has to go, and she lends him the key to her apartment if he needs somewhere close by to stay, if he can’t crash at the party. But my name is Crash, what else is there for me to do? She giggles, nearly turning on the lights. She knocks a hamburger off the table with her elbow and gasps, covering her mouth with both hands.
How can I convey to you that I don’t want to just be another hook-up to you at a party, that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you for nearly a week, that I don’t want to seem like I’m taking advantage of you because you’re currently feeling depressed, that I don’t want to seem like I’m violating or trespassing you. How can I do this all without not having to kiss you?
He doesn’t kiss her but she hugs him so incredibly tightly before she leaves, and whispers that she’ll probably see him tomorrow.
Jenny ecstatically takes another picture of him, eating chicken nuggets.

The wind around the park this time of year is always bitter, is always freezing. The flowers are not budding and their petals are all dying magnificently, in fact, they’re not even there. The slabs of rockish concrete used to build the stairway leading to the stretch of sports fields and sullied benches before the river are very cold. He can see each and every detail of them at this time of year. There are newly melted leaves stuck between them. Behind him, children sloshing in the snow and mud. There’s an all-seeing eye stationed in the upper-most portion of the sky. In other myths and legends it often represents conscience, but in his life all it does is blink.
He trudges back up a couple avenues and hails a cab home.

No one calls him up tonight. Jenny’s out, whatevering. In a split-second decision, Crash decides to move back in with his Mom. He packs up all his books, his gaming systems, the gifts of silverware, throws it all into a garbage bag and leaves. The furniture stares at him on the way out. This part of the city is grimy, dejected and repulsive, absolutely brimming with glam. There’s no one to meet that you haven’t already met on TV. That girl, she’s most likely making out with her best friend. Jenny’s smiling somewhere. His Mom’s reading pound-heavy fantasy novels that go one-thousand pages and could be summed up in one paragraph. Or she’s cooking an entire dinner for herself, hunched over the countertop cutting fruits and steaming vegetables.
He picks up his pace, increasing his foot-rate faster and faster. Once he’s home he’ll worry about leaving again, but that’s a problem he’ll deal with when it arises.