lumina raze someday i'll do more sit-ups in a day than you. right now, what you can do with your body seems impossible to me. next to your weight bench there's a newspaper clipping that shows your best friend smiling in black_and_white. he shot himself in the head when you were both barely twenty. you won't say why. maybe you don't know. maybe only he knows why he did what he did. his moustache will never be anything more than a half-formed promise of a fuller flowering to come. you'll never grow one. you let me take a drink of something blue that has alcohol in it. it tastes like mouthwash. you say "au revoir" and somehow find a way to make it sound like you're slurring the words "olive horse". you aren't drunk. you're just being funny. you sell your old camaro and buy a new silver chevy lumina. it's the first car i've even been in that has a cd player. you play "breakfast in america". i can taste the wurlitzer electric piano in "the logical song". it's cool and smooth on my tongue, like a metal spoon. it pins me to my seat. "don't tell your parents about this," you say, smiling before you gun it on a long stretch of road without another car in sight. my head sinks deeper into the headrest. i want you to keep driving until everything disappears. until we don't know who or where we are. but you have to take me home. my stepfather is your brother. i don't know how you can share the same blood. you're nothing like him. the only time you steer me wrong is on the waterslide. i like to do this thing called butt speed. i pull my bathing suit halfway down to make myself move faster. you tell me if i raise my legs i'll work up even more speed. you're right. what you don't tell me is it's going to hurt like nothing i've ever known when my ass slams into the water. i cry and towel off and think about how no spanking ever felt like this. you meet a woman named brenda. she has two daughters who are almost as old as me. you fall in love. the rest of the family tells you your wife is fat. that's all they see. fat. they make her out to be a teeth-gnashing villain. they don't know a thing about her. and it's not like they're much to look at themselves. my mom makes up a new version of "i want a hippopotamus for christmas". it's about brenda. she calls her a brendapotamus and sings, "i wanna grab her face and stab her fucking eyes. stick her head inside a box and call her our surprise." you stop coming around. they don't know why. it must be brenda. it must be your bitch of a wife, who's never been anything but kind to me. she must have turned you against them. the last time i talk to you, it's just your voice on the phone. you ask me what i'd like for christmas. i tell you i could use some new pants. "pants?" you say, laughing. "come on. i gotta get you something better than pants." it doesn't matter. i'll never see you again. but here's the thing: twenty-five years later, i'll still find myself thinking i could use a new pair of jeans. 211231 what's it to you? who go blather from