Parked out front of Woodrow’s was this beauty of an old car, a classic, with a sweet two-color paint job. I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise, but I thought I recognized an old friend running his hand along the hood and explaining something about the car to one of the khaki-wearing onlookers. He looked like Thomas Gonzalez, my roommate my first semester at UT. He had the same tight curls covering his head, and he postured and gestured in that same semi-effeminate way. I hadn’t thought about him in years.

Thomas was crazy. Not crazy, crazy, but that well-thought out delusioned kind of crazy where he seems really sane and easy-going, but he’s just not looking at the world right. But he loved to work on cars.

He was a good guy. I think his father drank too much and he’d spent his life over-shadowed by a younger brother who was better in school and better with the girls, and worse yet, better with cars than Thomas would ever be. Growing up like that, your grandest dreams handed, one right after the other, to someone else, right in front of you, day after day, year after year, well, that makes a man humble. That makes anyone humble. And it makes you thankful for what you have. That makes you a good guy.

Thomas, more than anything else, wanted to build Corvettes. He loved Corvettes. He had a half-dissembled carbuerator on his desk in the dorm and stack of several month-old car magazines lying around. He probably bought them with a bit of flush cash when he first moved into the dorm. Most of us were broke after we’d frittered the financial aid money away in those first weeks at the beginning of each semester.

Being broke, most of us hung around playing videogames or watching Beevis and Butthead. Mostly, we were just looking for trouble.

So when my car wouldn’t start, Thomas was more than happy to help. A gang of us, bored, agitated with wasting youth were more than happy to trek to the back forty where my car was parked, dead.

Wouldn’t start.

I had this sweet, maroon Pontiac Firebird. Thomas kind of squinted at it funny, and I’m sure he was making it look like a Corvette. He loved Corvettes.

Jorge was there. Me. Thomas. And at least two others. We pushed it to the top of this hill (in Austin, they pave hills for parking lots). We wanted it at the top of this hill because it was a standard, and if you get a standard rolling fast enough — or so the theory goes — and then pop the clutch, the engine has no choice but to start.

We’d tried this a couple of times in the flat parking lot towards the bottom of the hill: a bunch of monkeys pushing a maroon Pontiac Firebird around a parking lot as fast as they could in the middle of the night and wondering why it wouldn’t start.

If I had a Physics degree I could probably explain the process thusly: the inertial rotation caused by the vehicles present velocity, upon imposition of the gear mechanism, forces the pistons to turn, in turn forcing combustion in the engine, and further piston rotation.

So we obviously hadn’t been able to get the car going fast enough. It was obvious, really.

Being educated men — we were college boys, after all — and noticing the incline of the steep fucking hills we had to climb every time we came out this way, we decided we could get the car moving real good if we got the car to the top of the hill and then pushed it down.

Now it was a light car, and there were several of us, but it’s a steep hill and it took some cussing and some sweat in the humid Austin night. At the top, we maneuvered the car so it was pointing down-hill and rested for a moment. That was hard work.

So this was the plan. Several of us line up behind the car and push. Thomas, the resident car expert stood beside the open driver’s side door to push. When he judged the car was going fast enough, he would jump in and pop the clutch. This system had been working fine all night, so we saw no need to change it now.

Below us we had a plenty good stretch of parking lot. The moon was out, and we were men, dragging machines, Man’s dominion over nature, around like the Gods we always knew we were. In essence, we were 18 and not just ready to take over the world. We were taking over the world, that very moment, just as soon as we got the Firebird running.

Thomas gave the steering wheel a final adjustment. His truck was parked down that way a bit, and we didn’t want to hit that by accident. Otherwise, the parking lot was almost completely empty. Everybody was ready, got into a good pushing stance. Glancing around, we all affirmed we were ready, and then we were off.

It’s not hard to push a car down hill. We were running almost right off the bat.

The Firebird took the slope eagerly. In fact, it accelerated so fast, we were having a hard time keeping up. As it streaked down the hill we realized that even if we caught the car, there wasn’t anything we could do.

We just dropped off and watched. What else are stupid apes supposed to do?

Thomas on the other hand was half-running and half being dragged as he held onto the car door. We shouted the helpful and encouraging things panicked youth and real Men of the World yell when something goes all too well. “Jump in!” “Hold on!” “Let go!” I’m sure Thomas thought we were most helpful.

And then there’s the steering. Thomas couldn’t steer. He’s too busy holding on, so the car starts drifting. Adrift as it raced down the hill the front left wheel jumped a median. A pole caught the driver’s side door, slamming it shut. Thomas was nowhere to be seen.

Obviously he’d gotten inside the car, but he must’ve lost a finger or slammed his head or something, so we’re hauling ass down the hill. Thomas steps out of the car just fine, looking pensive.

He hadn’t managed to pop the clutch. I got it towed later that week.

The problem with love is that it makes you think you’re special and that you’ve found this special person, and that they’ve found that one special person in you.

The problem with life is that it reminds you that you’re just someone else in someone else’s list of someone elses.

So, I’m here, all alone, my throat’s sore, and I’m achy. The landlady exterminated the place last Monday, so I’ve been coming across the errant, alleged corpses of various roaches for the past week, about one a day. I hate roaches. They’re gross, but not as gross as their rotting corpses. Those give me some serious ickitude.

My typical policy is to let these uber icktitious monuments lay there a couple of days. My habitual walks around the place (the well-worn trails between the living room, bathroom, bedroom, and kitchen) have been modified slightly, and I have, by instinct, memorized the exact position of each and every bugger so that I may adjust my habitual walk to give them each an extra-wide berth of three or four feet.

I also look at them whenever I go by, to better ascertain, not that they’re dead, but that they haven’t moved. If they’ve moved, it means they writhed brokenly a few inches trying to escape the toxins busily infesting their putrescent little excuses for nervous systems.

And paraplegic, allegedly dead roach wriggling is grosser than rotting roach corpses by many, many magnitudes of ick, where ick is defined as gross to the power of uber-grossed-out shivering heebie-jeebies.

Thusly, my typical policy of letting the fuckers rot for a couple of days. There are few moments in life that can crush one’s heart more than when triumphantly approaching the lifeless shell of your defeated nemesis, to sweep it up, only to have it start flailing about wildly, awakened from its slumber close to death, a few lucky enough to flip themselves back over — immediately into the one positional kryptonite their foul species has against me: the paraplegic, allegedly dead roach wriggling.

So my modified walks have become more complex with each passing day. Even in the dark of night, I can navigate the byways without physically encountering one of these slow-dying intruders. This has recalled a special I saw about elephants several years ago where they disclosed that elephants’ four feet only make two footprints when they walk. The back legs land in the same place as the front legs, or some such physical bizarrity, but this prevents them from stepping on and crushing their children. If their foot was just there, then their other foot can step there, confident that the chattel are safely away. I wondered if this was true for humans, but we only have two legs.

During tonight’s early byway patrol, I assiduously checked each corpse. All was quiet along the hallway: two corpses with no movement. By the backdoor, things were more sinister. Two corpses and one had moved a good foot. This is why I wear shoes. What if I was walking around barefoot after dark and the fucker had wiggled beyond the three to four feet uber-extra-wide berth it had been allotted —-

Footnote 1: Paraplegic, allegedly dead roach wriggling during the daytime is akin to slow chemical death as we’ve seen commonly on the internet and read about in books and can be seen as part of the natural order of the world. If I had a microscope, I would examine the assuredly dead roach corpses for signs of orificial bleeding, pustulent sores, scaled-shedding sheets of skin, and the frothing at the mouth Man has come to expect from chemical agents on every battlefield.

Footnote 2: Paraplegic, allegedly dead roach wriggling at night is unnatural and evil and can only be explained by evil spirits reanimating the roach corpses in brief efforts to lick bits of the ever-present human patina of age that coats everything in the mortal world. It is well known among experts that the human patina of age accounts for all otherworldly visits, not because the spirits are tied here due to unfinished business or malicious intent, but because the human patina of age is a very rare and precious commodity in the spirit world, highly valued against common spirit commodities and widely believed to stop aging and boost virility in men.

What if I was walking around barefoot after dark and the fucker had wiggled beyond the three to four feet uber-extra-wide berth it had been allotted, to rest in petulant ambush of my nubile sole. The crunch of zombie roaches beneath a bare foot belonging to someone else does not even register in kiloickameters on my ickometer. If it were to be my own bare foot, first sensing the light touch of an object, fast enough to tell me it’s there but not fast enough to allow me to abort the step, and then the distinguished multivalent crunch of exoskeltal, necrospiritual roach corpse, I think I would tear a hole in the space-time continuum out of sheer shock. The world cannot fathom such evil.

Noticing one of the corpses had moved, I quickly rejudged the distance between the two, concluded that to give each the proper distance while passing this way would require a hop, if not a leap, just to be safe.

While still at war, life had returned to normal. Regular patrols monitored the waning insurgency, and the producers of the Cosby show had launched a new prime-time sitcom. We became complacent in our prosperity. Our children had not known war, and they scarcely remembered the viciously implied violence in the architecture of a roach’s scurry away from light and all that is good in the world.

The night’s last patrol would shatter the memory of these wholesome, innocent times.

The hallway checked fine as usual: two corpses and no movement. The backdoor checked fine as well: two corpses and no real movement. One of the insidious insects had flipped on his side. Probably an autonomic twitch on the way to total oblivion (there is no afterlife for vermin).

But movement caught my eye. Corpse two had not only flipped on its side, but was wiggling, paraplegically, allegedly dead, roach wriggling. I recoiled. But the horror bade me closer. Its little head was looking up at me with baby eyes while struggling, as if to say “please, please help me.” My veteran years had steeled me against such Machiavellian treacheries, but what I saw next froze my very blood.

The creatures back had split lengthwise and a white, wormlike ickthing had emerged, fully free from the exoskeleton except at the neck where the little head struggled.

The fiend was pupating or larvating or some shit. I’ve seen poisons melt roaches. I’ve seen it make them puke their intestines out. I’ve seen it boil them inside their shells. This was all very Saturday morning type of stuff, requisite acculturation for all true Patriots, but I had never encountered a roach transmogrifying into some sort of grub to escape what should have been certain chemical doom.

Panic set in. I ran back along the patrol route inspecting each carcass for signs of this heinous metamorphosis. All were good. Good and dead. Then panic set in again. What if it had freed itself entirely from the shell and had grubbed off somewhere? I ran to the backdoor. He was still allegedly dead wriggling to free himself. But what if there were more of these grubby things? What if they were everywhere? I checked the walls, the ceiling, the doorframe. They could be anywhere. They could be like some species of roach maggot, the next step in ick evolution. What’s grosser than a roach? A roach maggot!

Quickly, I flew to the kitchen and found a glass container and placed it upside down over the grubling. Either, this evil, alien creature would die after prolonged exposure to the goodness of human atmosphere, or it would try in vain to escape — unless it can somehow dissolve porcelain and glass using intestinal juices, or some hyper-acidic urine produced by a specially evolved insect bladder. If it can do that, then I am fucked. When the police bust down my door at the request of worried family and friends and find my roachmaggot-riddled corpse thrown on the floor in agonized posture, Picasso meets Geiger, know only that I loved you all and that you should flee to the light side of the moon, the only place in our solar system safe from this infernal infestation.

At the moment you may consider me a humanist.

But do not take me for an insectist. Some of my best friends are insects, and I have productive loving relationships with many of the six-legged skuttlers I have been fortunate enough to know. Such is my friendship and respect with these creatures that I have recently been engaged as biographer for Her, a local Queen ant, and have spent much time exploring the insect world in my near vicinity.

In fact, after the initial roachmaggot shock had worn off, I sought for some explanation for the creature in talk, the official language of ant government, but they had no such words. I should not have been surprised. Ants have a very limited, if not entirely utilitarian language, eschewing in their entirety, adjectives, adverbs, and gerunds. Actually, they consider humans to be a rather frivolous, foolish hive, (ant for tribe of beings), not they could actually use such description to say such things, but I can tell by the patronizing way they wiggle their antennae at me and the disinterested way they mark me with their scent as other not eat.

Ant language is almost binary with many things explained almost entirely in imperatives. Their poetry tends to be rather sparse, similar to haiku. An ant from the same hive is said to be me. Anything that is not me must be other. Almost all other is considered eat except where it is considered carry, carry eat, or build. Specific other are treated automatically as kill eat unless Her has specifically intoned only kill. I’m certain this is at her whim, as she is, like all pregnant women, excessively moody, but the hive follows her unquestioningly, confident her governance is guided by divine Her, some sort of hive god in me religion.

Other not eat is such a rare designation, that I have become somewhat of a celebrity among the ants with many me asking, “mark me” so they can show their me. Of course, I have no thorax, but me, my closest friend among the ants has worked up an excess mixture of other not eat in a pastry bag so I might squirt a bit on the legs of star struck doers (ant for worker).

Teeth, the soldier ants, seem entirely nonplussed by my status, and even if they were impressed, teeth would never ask mark me. The scent would betray their position to other me while they were in country, or not hive, as they say. Everyday is like Vietnam for them.

Of course, one of the biggest problems I have is that I lack the keen noses common among insects, so I have hallooed a couple of me so I might mark me, only to find out that they were in fact other as they tried to kill. Fortunately, my native guide, a wolf spider, has leapt to my defense on several occasions keeping the majority of my kills to a minimum. But it’s a good thing I’m not allergic to kill.

My guide’s name is something long and non-sensical and completely beyond the bounds of UTF-8 encodings, requiring, in all honesty, eight eyes and three wavelengths to read. It would be easier for me to tap it out for you in spoken arachnid, which, actually, is what the insect internet has standardized on. The one language commonly understood by all insects is spider. They’ve spent generations learning the complex, rhythmic tapping that for many of them spells certain doom.

But the me had no special mark for this bizarre roachmaggot I encountered. My friend, me guessed that maybe it was other eat, or maybe even an other kill carry not hive, which is pretty damn odd in their world. But in my world, that’s pretty much my mark for all the roaches I find. What me need is a mark for evil. They have none. Probably the closest evidence I’ve found of a me concept of evil is this traditional ant poem depicting the apocalypse:

me mark me other.
me other,
other me other.
other other other no eat!
no hive, no Her.
no.

In any good bar, architecturally speaking, the bathroom exists in the only spot it could possibly exist. The mark of a bad bar is that you must search for the facilities.

Used to, it was enough just laying there, listening to her breathe and basking in the warmth of her youth. But not anymore. She didn’t smell the same. Her hair seemed drier, and her breathing coarser, a slight wheeze at the back of her throat or from somewhere deep in her chest.

David rolled onto his side to watch her. The lava lamp on the beside table painted her face in deep, violet red. You can tell. Just looking at her, the wear and tear just happens. She used to take such good care of herself. That’s how they’d met. They used the same skin creme. He wasn’t too girly to take care of himself. Stave off the rot as much as possible, and he liked to think she appreciated it, but really he didn’t care. He was with her for her youth. And being honest about that fact didn’t make it any better.

And now she was starting to rot. Just like everybody else. Right below the leftmost corner of her lip was a small tear. Maybe they’d been kissing too hard, or maybe she chews it when she’s nervous, but the wear’s starting to show.

Nothing ever creeps up on you. The 3am realization that he was only with her for her for her youth wasn’t some brilliant epiphany struck from nervous static insomnia lightning. He’d always known. You know yourself. You’re born with a complete soul and you know every inch.

David had violent urges. Obsessive ideations of violence were what a therapist would’ve called them. So it’s not like one night, not sleeping, hating his girlfriend’s constant flirtation with Father Time, he decided, all of a sudden, imbued with evil, tempted by demons, that he was going to kill someone young, a child, take their youth from them.

The indians have stories about Wendigos. Lady Bathory, etc.

David’s known himself for years, and he’s just been waiting all this time for the right time. The question is, what are you waiting for?

He threw his arm over her with a half-hearted hug and kissed her on the temple, out of routine and not love, you can be sure, and got out of bed.

The city is best at night. You can’t see the decay, and everyone’s faces are obscured in the yellowed half-light pooled beneath every other street lamp. Night was best for a cab , cause cabbies were the worst.

All of them. Face it. They’re not who they want to be. What are they waiting for? Ridden hard, put up wet, the most of them, and the rest, the young ones, were working on the same agenda. Gaunt. Ugly. Torn. At least you mostly saw only the back’s of their heads, unless they insisted on trying to make eye contact through the rear view while talking. David had actually seen one with no eyes in his sockets, and he could swear his sockets were dusty!

The cabby flipped the dome light when he’d gotten David home, but David looked down at his money while he counted out the fare, and then handed it to the cabby while looking distractedly out the window.

Your life is about patterns. This is the place where David gets out of the cab, goes inside, and stares at his face for two hours before going to work. Put on some lotion and some face creme. Check for thin spots, possible tears. Sometimes if you noticed them early enough, that and some collagen would keep things alright. Then he’d get ready for work, walk downstairs, stop for a second at the school on his way, and then walk to the bus stop. And this is what he did.

David’s life was pretty simple: He hated death. It’s not that he feared dying. No. We are all dying, all the time, and it’s not that he loved life, though he did. David just hated death, and mostly he resented the world for seeping him in it. His life was pretty simple.

Every morning he’d stop at the school to watch the children play. The playground was encircled by a fence of black iron bars he’d grasp with both hands and lean his face against, like a prisoner, and he’d watch the little angels shriek and dash madly around the yard in innocent games, untainted by the world. Not like the yard monitor, who he’d watched decay for two years. If he loitered near the playground for too long she’d drift his way. Usually he’d wave and good morning before she got too close, and shuffle down the street to catch his bus at the corner, but some days, he was so enthralled he’d not notice her approach until she was nearly on him, and he’d be forced to talk to her. Her sunken eyes weren’t so bad, but her left cheek had rotted clean away. It was unbearable watching her masticate good morning or how was he today.

There were no smiling children on the way to the bus stop. He kept his eyes down for the walk to the bus. The neighborhood homeless man, curled up in the doorway of a failed coffee shop, and had entombed himself in old clothes, a curdled stench, and the city’s own foul funk. Bad weather and worse nutrition had eaten away most of his face, manged, with patches of beard clinging to remaining bits of skin.

The bus ride offered no retreat, either. Usually he only had to look at the driver, and only for as long as it took to communicate the payment of the bus fare. He definitely never looked around the bus. And it wasn’t that most bus people are poor. They had no sense of self-worth, and maybe that was why they were poor, but the way they kept themselves up was horrible. Watching age eat away at all those faces, day after day, it was unbearable, so mostly he just kept his eyes down, and he never had to look them in their hollowing, sunken eyes. The only real exception was Robert, a contractor, who was missing a large part of the back of his skull. He had this silly way of combing his remaining hair over the hole to hide his brain. Mucousy brain fluid would get in his hair, leaving a big greasy mark. That greasy clot of hair always caught his attention for some reason. Usually, though, Robert wore a hat, so it wasn’t so bad. If he could read the paper he did, or tried to, so he never had to stare at Robert or any of the other passengers.

At work his chair greeted him every morning with a scratching squeak as he sat down. He didn’t drink coffee. That stuff corrodes your throat from the inside out. The yellowed plastic of his monitor belied the fluorescent lights attempt to paint everything in a sanitary white glow. So, he sat there mostly, waiting for his girlfriend, Michelle to call.

Michelle called most days around three. “He giving you any hell?” Not today, thank God. David hadn’t even seen his manager. Not only had his manger mastered typical managerial duties of obstruction, ignorance, and annoyance, but twenty years of smoking left him without lips, gums, and stained, rotting teeth that brushed every word with a foul, rotten odor, a lifetime’s worth of coffee breath. Meetings were hell on David. He really couldn’t stand the nasty bastard.

“Nah. Haven’t even seen him today. We still on for tonight?” Every Tuesday, they hung out at the club with her friends. “Well, I’ve actually got some errands to run, so I’ll just meet you there.”