Dead-End

Bay, always in cut off jeans in the unforgiving summer heat lived in the house on the end of our road, the left side. I never knew why he was called Bay, his given name was Lou. He had an older sister, Sherry or Cherie, something like that who always wore this really long face, plain, thin and pale she seemed to strain when she smiled from their doorway. She never came out to play with the rest of us. I don't blame her honestly, we were a very gnarly bunch. Bay also had a little brother, I thought he was quite cute. He also wore cute off jeans.

Our neighbourhood was mostly working middle class, that is, back when there was one. None of us were starving that I knew of yet looking back some were just getting by. Bay's family was one. They were Polish, not that that has anything to do with it, but in the south, in the suburbs outside Nashville, I had never met many Catholics. There was a Lutheran family though. Anyway, we all had to pay the trash man and I guess that Bay's father didn't have enough money to do so. They burned trashed in a big metal can usually at night when the rest of the parents were watching tv in their lazy-boys and taking in some AC; turns out Bay didn't have air conditioning either.

His dog's name was Buffy, yep, like the vampire and she was always following us kids around with her droopy doggy tits and a big worm hanging out of her ass. She was a mix of some kind, with short, silky black hair; she was a good sized dog. "We", meaning whomever was hanging around the creek that day screamed "Buffy's here!" and ran away howling. Sad really.

My dog had baths in our tub every Sunday night, she was a peek-a-poo named Bridget-Marie, I named her of course. Mom sometimes put a little bow on her head. It's kind of funny now as she wasn't a pretty faced pup. She had Pekinese teeth with a poodle body basically which makes for one sweet yet overall, odd composition. Her bottom teeth jutted outward with one in particular being yellowed. Mom called it her 'candy tooth' even though we didn't feed her candy.

Our street was called Jackstaff Drive. The first house on the right was a rental which wasn't well-kempt: this bothered my mother as it was, in her eyes, the gateway into our small community. I know this because she really cared about how everything looked everywhere all the time, especially me. I was clean and had lots of matching outfits which I see now was really not how the rest of my friends outside were dressed. I never had a pair of cut-offs in my life.

Bay's father made him mow the grass and sometimes I noticed him walking away with a gas can from house to house. I wish I had thought about how he felt more, but I didn't.

We often walked in a wild, loud cluster home from school and I took this pack for granted. I knew everyday that Jackstaff kids weren't hanging around for the school bus and would shoot out fast homeward bound to our dead end street as soon as the bell rang. That pack is probably what kept me and a couple of other girls from getting molested or worse to be truthful.

In junior high school someone had a beat up car and I don't have a clue where we were headed, we were just out. I was squished between Bay and another boy in the back: Bay put his arm around my shoulder. I was frozen and kept staring at the road ahead; nothing happened but it was something special, to him, at least I assume it was.

He was really into four wheelers and somehow managed to get a hold of one to fix up. He would take it out in this dried up, brown dirt field by the lake and do tricks in his cut-offs with no shoes. I thought he was crazy by that age. We had long stopped hanging out as a group. After school most of us all went straight home and shut our doors, all locked up in our overthinking weird little teenaged heads. I know I had plenty to figure out and sure as hell had no idea how to help anyone else.

I went to live with my father in another state and went to a private school. It was a terrible experience and that's for another day to share. I learned that what I had on Jackstaff was a shared understanding of just how life could be, that it is different for every one of us but the same sort of regular living stuff happens to us all. We all got called home to dinner and had chigger bites, we all ran from Buffy the dog, we all had a life on a dead end street.

Years later I would return home to visit my mother and ask about everyone. Mr. Double-U, my English teacher who drank whiskey from a dixie cup in our classroom, who lived in the nice white brick house half-way to Bay's had shot himself. The principle whose bushes I used to hide in across the street had developed narcolepsy and rumours said he fell asleep during announcements during lunch, but I highly doubt that was true. The boy next door had joined the Navy and 'BonBon' Brinkley got wrapped up in drugs. That was kind of wild really as she collected dolls that were kept in glass cases that we could never play with. She was really strange when we played, like I had to tell her how to frickin' play.

Later, I would run into Sherry or Cherie at the drugstore and ask how Bay was. Damn, he was in a coma after breaking his neck or something after flipping over his four-wheeler. I didn't know what to say but I'd offered an awkward hug. She was teary.

Yep, we all grew up. I moved the furthest away, guess I needed more space from my childhood. Scrolling through obituaries online I read Bay, rather, Lou had died. He'd spent nearly twenty-years on machines to keep him alive. I really wish I had not been so cold when he put his arm around me that night going nowhere.