#4

Both books are sharply dressed in brand new covers, their third such wardrobe transformation. No more! No more. Third time is said to be the charm; I also consider it in certain cases to be a sort of guillotine gate.

At any rate, the covers will no longer change. By way of apology for not designing covers and then for designing them hastily, I shall share another anecdote, this time without relying on the sordid tonal qualities of cigarettes or alcohol.

*

In the second grade a dude handed me my ass in the middle of class because I looked at him wrong. He offered a gentlemanly apology later that week and we became fast friends, as is time-honored and correct. It was his opinion that I showed balls, an ineffable quality that many other men taller and stronger than me have sensed and respected after they have pounded me into sundry available surfaces.

The way it holds up in this example is that I had indeed been looking at him wrong; fuck him! He was looking at me wrong, had done so first--so I did nothing to avoid the conflict, plus I hit him in the mouth as hard as I could the second he dared me to. Not very hard, true, but I did it, and that's the point, upon which key distinctions hinge. Salient also is the point that I did not alter my attitude towards him one iota simply because he then took hold of my head and smashed his knee into my face several times before throwing me into my desk. This proved fuck-all in my opinion, and I'd fight him again at the slightest notice. What the dude recognized innately was this attitudinal, elemental kinship between us, who could not have had more absurdly different abilities, interests, and approaches to the world.

I was a dreamy idiot who breathed with his mouth open and chewed on his bookmarks as he went through reams of paper in his fully doomed attempts to render convincing illustrations of various Dinosauria and aliens from major science-fiction franchises. John was a cold-eyed, piratical hooligan with a lashing-out problem to where the dude had a cobra for a tongue and two rattlesnakes for hands. We bonded over playing Duke Nukem 3D on our computers and game talk in general, and I believe my overwhelming and all-encompassing loves for interpreting data and waxing philosophical sparked in him a life-enriching interest in these things, he who before me had spent his days mostly coming up with ways to vandalize as many things as possible and assert dominance through various mediums.

It was up to the dude to teach me how to be ruthless, how to access the animal beneath the man: the entity that does not merely win fights, but ends them. He also taught me how to lie, steal, brag, confidently approach women, hide weapons on your person, and engineer mayhem, so in retrospect it seems I got much more out of the deal. These are crucial lessons that have served me all my life, either in direct application or to know them when I see them. Dude also came up with the following schoolyard game: take turns climbing the most difficult tree you and your friends can find, and if you fall off, or fall over when you jump off, your friends beat the shit out of you until you claw your way to your feet. Bonus points to everybody if it is possible to fall from the chosen tree onto the barbed wire from the top of a fence and die.

We served each other very well, I think, putting each other so radically far out of our comfort zones. I did fail him, once--overwhelmed by guilt and evidence, I confessed to chucking a raw egg from four stories up smack center onto a dude's car's roof. Imagine a large, angry man genuinely leaping from his car, on which egg has already begun cooking to the metal, and wheeling his gaze up and locking it directly onto yours. Then he comes and yells at your friend's mom, who summons you to have your face pointed at by the man, you, who had before this day never so much as dreamed of engaging in anything even resembling the crime which your friend is denying with perfectly calm, set features. I cracked perhaps harder and with more mess than the egg had. This betrayal unequivocally lacked balls, and the dude let me know it with no mercy whatsoever for my tears, as well as that only dead idiots stay to watch what happens when you lob a grenade--you chuck the bitch and motor. Since that failure I have made ample use of silence under interrogations, and avoided much self-compromise thereby. I try not to do anything wrong, but when I do, I make dead sure it will go right.

This has been my tip of the pen to my old friend, and men like him, who are so despised and misunderstood in this strange age, and my paean to the hypersigil under which our friendship bloomed in those savage, irretrievably serious days of being eight and nine years old, whose resistive power we need now more than ever--balls. Not testicles, which mean and bestow exactly nothing, but balls, which are the difference between a person who crawls away to lick themselves and nurse resentment after a beating, and a person who spits blood and rains cusses on their opponent as they're dragged away, who'll come back tomorrow to lose all over again, who doesn't run out of what they have to prove.


--JL