“Which olden times?” he asks, and it’s like a boar’s grunt, a deep thing, from the thick part of his throat.
“Like, King Arthur, with knights and horses.”
Fat-ass thinks. I can hear it, like rust-flaked gears groaning slowly into motion, even smell it, yellow smoke emanating from his skull.
“I’d be the king,” he says.
“You can’t be the king,” I say. “No one is king. That’s like winning the lottery.”
“If I went back, I’d be king. And I’d fuck every virgin in the kingdom.”
“You can’t be king, asshole. You can’t even be duke. The fact that you even said that shows you’re not royalty. You’re a peasant.”
“Whenever people time travel, they go back and they are friends with the king, or they arethe king.”
“Because those are stories. When people tell stories, they’re alwaysabout the king; it’s Aristotle crap. But it’s not real.”
“Neither is time travel.”
“There are very few kings, and you certainly wouldn’t be one of them.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you, Joe, you’re an idiot.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“I know,” I say. And I am. I am friends with a slug, and my other friends are pigs and wolves. I never make friends with nice things, just the shit.
“If you were king, I’d kill myself,” I say.
Joe sucks off his cigarette. It looks like the point of a golf tee in his fat, clenched paw.
He looks at me and the blue shadow-smoke drifts over the gate of his teeth like fog over a graveyard.
“Then you better die, mo’fucker, cuz I’m the king round these parts.”
He smiles with rotten teeth like busted shingles, all climbing over each other, and I think, Why don’t you get some braces, motherfucker, and brush those dang things? But I don’t really think about that too much because I’m thinking about something else, or at least getting ready to do something else, or already doing…
And before I even know it, or can enjoy the new look on Joe’s face, like a blubbery peekaboo face, so surprised, I’m driving us right toward the vague beige shadow-filled wall, and I can only see and hear Joe’s voice for a second, a high-pitched thing that cracks for just a second, and for that second I’m with his voice on a plateau in the black of space, wherever it is that noise cracks like that, and decibels live, and then it’s gone because there’s the metal sound so loud and it’s how I had always planned it to be, crunching, and a jerk, and the front of my head fills with the cold hollow sinus pain, the surprise punch in the nose that takes you back to childhood, and there’s an immediate link to every other time you ever had your nose hit, by a ball, by a head, by your own knee, and after the surprise, it doesn’t go away; but I’m still there and the tires behind me are screeching because my foot is still on the gas, and the car has gone a ways into the wall but it ain’t going any farther, and I look over at fat shit, and there is blood rolling out of a slice in his forehead, and some blood coming out of his mouth, and I think that it’s from the head gash until I see one of those teeth is now a black gap and he looks like a fat something-awfuclass="underline" hockey-player-pumpkin-cartoon-shithead, and he says, “Why the fuck did you do that, Manuel?”
I laugh like crazy, a laughter that explodes like popcorn, because he looks so fucking silly, and because my name isn’t even close to Manuel. That’s his brother’s name.
Joe just looks at me with that stupid look, covered in flowing blood, going onto his shirt like ketchup randomness, so much messier and more random than I could ever plan.
But I did paint those swirls, because I drove Grandpa’s car into the wall.
For six months I drove around town with that busted car. The front was smashed. I replaced the lights, but they were crooked and looked in different directions like Peter Falk’s glass eye and real eye. I didn’t care, and the cops didn’t catch me or pull me over. For a while.
I’m at school and when I pass Joe in the breezeway, I say, “Hey, Jack-O’, we doing this thing tonight?” because we’re friends again.
“Yeah,” he says. “Hector has the good shit.”
Everyone calls Joe “Jack-O’” now because he didn’t get a replacement tooth. He kept the hole because he thinks it makes him unique, and he stopped being mad at me after he figured out he wanted the gap, and then we would laugh about me being so crazy driving into the wall, and I smile when people bring it up, but really it was a failure. If only I had driven right through into some other reality, but the DeVille was sturdy, and yes, it was busted in the front, but not really as much as it could have been, and not so much that my parents got too suspicious when I said that another car backed into me.
Now me and Jack-O’ are driving down the dark 280 freeway. Me and fat boy cruising. And I think about that missing tooth, and that gap, and how there was never a gap in that place before, and about three dimensions, and how the gap was on the inside of his mouth unless he opened his mouth, and how things, shapes, folded in on themselves, and four dimensions, and if time is variable, then how do I vary it, and why do I want to? Because everything just focuses in on me and I hate it.
“If you were an Egyptian, what would you do?” I ask Joe.
“Don’t start this shit again, Michael.”
“Remember when you called me Manuel?”
“I never called you Manuel, idiot. I would be Pharaoh.”
“No, you’re too fat. Pharaohs are skinny,” I say.
“I don’t want to be an Egyptian: pyramids and mummies and shit, and sand, and all that, fuck it, it’s boring, man. I would be an Aztec, or a Mayan, like my peeps, and I’d cut your fucking heart out, homes.”
Joe is Mexican. His skin is an ashy light brown and his lashes are heavier than mine, and he has short, fat eyebrows and shit brown eyes, and thick hair that flops about his fat pumpkin head.
I wish I was Mexican, or Hebrew, I mean Jewish, I mean Israeli, or Mexican Jewish, or Mexican Jewish gay, because it can be so boring being you sometimes, and if you were the most special thing like that, it could be really great, but maybe some people say the same thing about you, and you want to tell those people: “No, you’re stupid, it’s no fun being me.”
“Maybe we should try it,” I say.
“Michael, I’m serious, don’t do something crazy just because we’re talking about your olden-time things again. Just let me the fuck out if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“No, man, I’m just saying that maybe those Mayans were onto something. Maybe if we take someone’s heart out and sacrifice it, then something special will happen.”
Joe looks at me like he wants to figure me out, and I know that he can’t figure me out because he isn’t laughing and he isn’t arguing, he is just staring.
“Maybe we could take Hector’sheart,” I say.
We are going to see Hector over at Foothill, the junior college. He lives near there and sells us shit, and we’re supposed to meet him in the corner of the parking lot. Hector isn’t a scary guy, he has a nice-guy face, but he could probably fuck somebody up if he wanted to.
“Hector would fuck you up,” says Joe.
“Not if I stabbed him in the stomach,” I say, and I’m reaching under my seat with my left hand as I say this, and I pull out a foot-long kitchen knife and then I point it at Joe while I’m still driving.
“Fuck you, Michael. Fuck you, Mike- al!” He screams and I laugh because he has funny inflections when he gets excited. “Why do you have to be like this?” he says. “Why do you have to be Jack the Ripper psycho? Why do you have to be so crazy? I just want to buy some weed, I don’t want to kill anyone, and I don’t want to take their heart!”
“You said you wanted to, puta,so I’m just saying, then let’s doit!” I’m talking with a phony accent.