BOBBY
There are people that make you and there are people that break you. I write the names down in side by side lists in the same notebook as my drawings of Jess that I take to group. I write them down because the whole point they say is to realize the difference, it's a thin line.
Every Thursday night I work at the county line liquor store with this Mexican who’s got a brain tumor. He smells like a brewery and tells me I need to accept my hardships as a pathway to peace. He talks to me about 401K’s, credit scores, retirement accounts. Shit I know nothing about. He says I have to save my money now that I’m young and not wait until I’m older. Save up for what, I ask him. He says he doesn’t know all the answers.
Soon it’s midnight and the store is closed. I’m waiting for Jess to pick me up because she borrowed my car after she wrecked hers over on Osage Road, speeding up and down the steep hills, high as fuck, trying to get that funny feeling you get in your belly. I’m waiting out in the back parking lot, smoking out of a bubbler, blowing crystal clouds with the Mexican. He’s telling me about how he used to be a banker with all these banks down in Little Rock. He says he’s 71 and that he retired several years ago. He had had all this money but then something happened and he got a brain tumor and he was forced to get another job to make ends meet. That’s when he started working at the liquor store.
He knew I was a tweaker as soon as we met. He asks me for teeners all the time, wraps the dope I give him in a Walmart bag, then tries to pay me with his leftover pozole or half-empty bottle of modelo negra. As we wait, he’s smoking and talking to me about work ethic and moral values. He starts to say that I need to learn what true joy is when he’s interrupted by Jess as she pulls up in my car and dumps out the car’s ashtray, sticking her arm out of the window, smashed butts and grey ash trailing from her hand to the pavement. The Mexican hands me a bottle of beer from his six pack.
“No manches guero, mochate güey”
I look at Jess, then back at him. I hand him a baggie, no more than a gram, and he laughs and looks upward before taking a swig out of his bottle.
“Gracias carnal,” he says.
He wraps his arms around me and puts his head on my shoulder, crying. I sit him down on the curb and kiss his forehead. As we drive home Jess makes fun of me. She laughs and shakes her head and says it’s cute that I have a crush on abuelo. I pay no attention, thinking only of the Mexican’s tears and how they really are my own. What Jess doesn’t know is that I’m writing his name down on my make or break list under break.
Right after hers.