VINCE
May 24th, 2015
It had been two weeks since Sienna didn’t come to dinner, and I hadn’t been back to my mother’s house since. Partially embarrassed, somewhat disappointed, and totally heartbroken, I felt there was no way I would ever be able to face my mother again. I realized in time I would probably change my mind and be able to one day return, but I had no idea when that might be.
“I can remember when you said you’d never do anything with a bitch but shove her full of cock, remember that conversation?” I asked.
Axton crossed his arms, glared at me, and sighed. “What’s your fucking point?” he asked.
“I just made it,” I said. “Never thought I’d see the day you had an Ol’ Lady on the back of your bike.”
“She isn’t my Ol’ Lady, she’s a friend,” he said.
I shrugged my shoulders and turned away. “Doesn’t matter to me. You’ll learn your lesson sooner or later.”
“Hold up, I wasn’t done…”
“I’m done,” I said as I walked out of the office.
“God damn it, Vince, you can’t…”
I pushed the door closed, walked out into the shop, and fired up my bike. There was nothing I wanted to listen to about him trying to justify some chick who had been hanging off the back of his bike for the last two weeks. As I sat on the bike and waited for it to warm up, I lit a cigarette and took a long, slow drag.
If there was one thing I couldn’t stand, it was a hypocrite.
My parent’s had proven to be the only people who mattered to me that hadn’t eventually let me down. The two women in my life, one who I mistakenly thought I loved lied to me and broke a vow. The other, the only woman I truly loved, broke a promise and left me looking like a god damned fool.
Axton seemed like a hypocrite, talking out both sides of his mouth about women. One day he was talking shit about how if the MC wanted a man to have an Ol’ Lady they’d have issued one to all new prospects, and the next time I saw him he had an Ol’ Lady hanging off the back of his bike.
Axton may have been the president of the club, and I might have respected him, but he was no friend of mine. I had one friend, and only one, in my entire life.
We made a pact. A promise to each other. Best friends forever.
That’s what we said.
We walked down to the railroad tracks and put pennies on the tracks. Sitting in the row of trees along the tracks we would wait for the train to come smash the pennies, talking about our futures. He was going to be a doctor and I was going to be a fireman; at least when we talked about it the first time. For me, at least, each time we talked my desires changed. But he always wanted to be a doctor.
He said doctors saved lives.
To be able to take a dying person and redirect the hand of fate, allowing someone to live – when in the absence of your actions they would die – would be miraculous. As a young boy of six his desire to save lives didn’t make as much sense as it made when I was an adult, but the older I got the more I respected him for standing firm in his wishes.
A fireman, a police officer, a tree trimmer, and an ice cream man were a few of my childhood dream careers. I found it funny that as I grew older my view on what was important changed. In my opinion, at least as a boy of six or seven, an ice cream man was much better than a doctor. Although a doctor may be able to save lives, an ice cream man could make everyone happy, the sick and healthy.
We lived our lives convinced that a bank robber rode the train through town as a means of escape, and that during his way out of town, he had tossed a bag of money from the railcar. Convinced all we needed to do was find it, we scoured through the weeds and along the edges of the trees to find it. From when we were six until we were ten, we searched along the tracks almost every day, but never found anything.
One day, right before his tenth birthday, we were both convinced that was the day we would find the bag of money. With expectations running high, we searched like never before. As the day unfolded and the money was undoubtedly under the base of the very next tree, I asked what he was going to do with his share of the riches.
Walking along the edge of the wooden railroad ties while dragging his stick behind him, he shifted his eyes upward and in my direction. Three weeks older, and much wiser in my opinion, I walked along the top of the steel rail, towering above him. I continued to walk slowly, being careful not to lose my balance as I waited for him to respond.
After a few steps, he paused and began to tap his stick against the tracks. When he finally stopped tapping the rail, he responded. As he spoke, I continued my balancing act.
“Buy a new doctor,” he said.
I stopped and attempted to turn around without falling off the edge of the rail. Eventually I felt the need to speak more important and jumped down.
“Why would you need a new doctor?” I asked.
He cleared his throat, stared down at the tracks for a long moment, and shifted his eyes out toward the tree line. “A cardiovascular pathologist. He’s in Texas.”
I’d never heard words that sounded so important, even out of an adult’s mouth, let alone a kid my age. Impressed at his intellect, but now concerned with why he would need an out of state doctor with such a name, I pressed him for more information.
“Why?” I asked.
He turned to face me and shrugged his shoulders. “He’s the best.”
It made sense. Who would want anyone that wasn’t the best at what they did? Satisfied with his answer, and knowing nothing of the real reason why he needed a doctor, I stepped onto the railing and waited for the command he always gave before we started our journeys.
“Lead the way?” he asked.
“Follow me,” I said.
We never found the bag of money, and Jackson never got to go to Texas. His heart stopped two weeks later, just before he turned ten years old.
The school shut down for his funeral, and it seemed the entire city attended. We searched for a spot to park the car for what seemed like forever, and after finding a place, walked along the sidewalk for much longer than Jackson and I ever walked along the tracks. In that time I thought of him, our friendship, the permanency of death; and about losing the only friend I ever had.
I wondered if the pain I felt in my heart was similar to the pain Jackson felt from the disease I learned he had. I decided as we walked into the funeral home that if I never befriended another person, I would never be forced to feel the pain again.
As the sound of my motorcycle’s exhaust echoed throughout the shop and I stared blankly out into the street, I realized I was wrong.
And I suspected this new pain, no differently than the pain I felt from the loss of my best friend, would only be able to be temporarily suspended and not totally eliminated. As an adult, I had learned it wasn’t a doctor or the ice cream man that caused the pain within me to subside, it was a machine.
And that machine was between my legs.