The Longest Week in the World
We put up fliers around the neighborhood the first day like tattooed Yakuza bandits. Someone has written "fart air" on The Rock outside of town. The hottest week of summer coincides with the dreaded Art Fair. Art Fair is a community event where vendors line the streets and plug their wares.
I hate Art Fair because it reminds me that families exist outside of the University town. Not only families, but ornery families. Families with babes in compact strollers, families who need precious parking spaces. Families that won’t buy the art my friends are trying to hustle. Families who shop at Whole Foods. Fragmented families.
I smile malevolently when I look at The Rock. It’s out of town and encrusted in a mire of spray paint. The boulder gets painted over every week by disgruntled college students. It’s only fitting, I think, when I look at The Rock.
“I’m glad someone else is feeling disgruntled, after all, we’re stuck here,” Nelson said.
“I’m going to have a party,” I wag in the rock’s direction, “just you wait. And, there’s nothing you can do to stop me,” I said. “Hehee.”
The internet says this about the party. The invitation is billed as the eternal party at the end of summer. The Telephone Callers suggest that we place them on a float and let them drive up and down the block. I tell them that so-and-so has a flatbed truck. They say they’d rather have a show in a kiddie pool. They will tape up the instruments in plastic to keep them dry. They will party in the middle of the street. They want a wet t-shirt poetry contest; I want to sell my clothing on racks in front of my house. You don’t mess with The Family.
The party songs could be sentimental. Somewhere people are keying grandiloquent phrases on their computers. I mix a little coffee and chocolate together. Sing a little song I’ve heard before to another boy. It goes something like, "in the morning time/ is the choffle kind."
The warble could be innocuous enough, but I'm going to wager on this party. I'm going to make a bet on which one of my friends would get arrested. I ponder whether it would be useful to make a whiteout board. I could subdivide their names and reasons for arrest, also, into an Excel spreadsheet. I work on potential storylines.
Name: Crazy Lou
Reason: Spurned by his recent romantic failure. Since he can’t kick it with a girl in The Netherlands, he opts for destruction. Instead of spending the summer with her, he knocks over the keg on screeching under-agers attempting to rager.
Solution: Pays bail by concocting plans to scam Nigerians while in jail. He says he will pull the ‘ole overdraft check on them.
Name: Crazy Ray
Reason: When the keg falls over, it lands on his purple Adidas shoes. Inveigled in grief for the recent death of his cat, Crazy Ray blinds Crazy Lou with the mace that he finds on the ground leftover from when….
Name: Crazy Rita
Reason: When walking home and accosted by a boy in an anarchy shirt recently, she decided to purchase mace. Channel 7 news stayed outside of Community High all last week. The mace fell from her bag when she got in a tiff with…
Name: Crazy Me
Reason: Because I have been nurturing a Free Kwame campaign in lieu of his absence from Detroit. Because I’m bored. Because that might not ever happen. Because I’m afraid of being nice, intimacy, cultivating more than Standards of Cool, engaging in more than rap battles. Because none of that might happen. Because something else could happen at any minute.
I explain it to myself as a means of justifying the time. I write about worlds that accompany this tunnel.
I list names and give reasons. Because, because, because.
There are always reasons.
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