REUNION

By

Scott Garson

I won't be at the high-school reunion. And neither will J.C., who you might have imagined as selling insurance, gaunt and awkward as ever, relieved to be offering plans whose superior value makes sense to him. Or as selling snack foods, on the road, a distributor, which is what he was, which is why he was in the motel in west Kansas, on the bed, watching Cinemax, working the sights of the revolver up into his palate, because it felt good, pulling the sharp rounded trigger back into its spring, because that felt good also.

I won't be attending. Neither, of course, will R.L., who never graduated, or got to come out of the closet. R.L., that fading impression of a kid with good weed, a small kid with giant round eyes who could pass you the pipe at the midnight showing of Fear and Loathing one Friday in March, then two days later, when his mom and dickwad dad were at church, steal the Buick, drive four-hundred miles, get caught, and be brave or desperate enough to hang himself with a knotted strip of cloth in the county jail.

R.L. won't be there. Not him, and not P.R.S., whose mindlife and doggy charisma didn't translate to a career in the arts. Poor P, you might have thought. Poor P: in a cab in New York on a night when his girlfriend was working. His soon-to-be wife, a Brazilian, lovely, in love. And P in the back of the cab with the needle jig-jiggling in the skin of his arm, and the night swinging past, the city's ripped-back sides, la la la la la. You won't see that name tag. Be sure.

And not mine, either, though I, as I write, am alive.