Angelhead by Greg Bottoms Page A

from small trauma to small trauma, somehow hoping that tomorrow, or the day after, things would start to get better.
    At about this time, my parents’ request to put him on social security for a disability came through. He could pay the rent himself. They weren’t kicking him out, not like before; he
wanted
to go, to get out into the world, to try to live a normal life. Even Dr. Smith agreed it could be a good thing for him.

    He had met the men in the food court of the mall. They were white, college-aged, but they didn’t go to college. They worked construction, commuted to Yorktown every day to work on a new naval weapons station as laborers. They hung out at the mall on Saturday afternoons, ate pizza at the Sbarro, caught a movie if anything good was playing; if not, they hit the game room, dropped quarters in machines, leaned and cursed at the blinking lights and noise of a race car game.
    The two men had a history together. They were real people, which is sad, because I don’t want real people like them to exist. But they do. Their story went something like this: They had met as boys in a juvenile institution where they had both been sent for burglary. They became friends because of a common interest in pool, women, movies, dope. They wore track suits and expensive basketball shoes; one had a pocket watch, the other long brown hair. They smoked cigarettes. That’s all I really know about them.
    They met Michael as he rocked back and forth on a bench in the food court, one of the several retarded or homeless people who spent afternoons at the mall. The real specifics of the meeting, what was said, the body language, the subtle gestures, the way people, even delinquents, interact nervously on first meetings are unimportant.
    Michael was smoking a cigarette like a prisoner on death row, as if it were his last, always his last, inhaling with exaggerated need. The skin between his fingers was yellow. The voices chattered endlessly. He prayed once an hour, when the long hand hit the six on the clock near the theater. He wasn’t sure God cared about him anymore. He had a brown circle on his front teeth the exact size of the end of a cigarette filter.
    Maybe they made fun of him at first, but Michael didn’t understand, didn’t get it, his ability to decipher humor long gone, which made fucking with him even funnier to the two men.
    They talked. Maybe they laughed. Certainly dope was mentioned. And they all stood up and walked away, as simple as that, two criminals on probation, with my brother in tow like a kidnapped kid. They lived near the mall.
    At their place, they smoked good dope, indica, thaistick, sinsemilla. They used a glass bong with a skull sticker on it. They turned on Public Enemy, the bass beat, the sampled screech. They ate popcorn, watched Hitchcock’s
The Birds
on TBS and the first half of
Under Siege
on video. They slow-motioned violence, chugged beers in some kind of drinking game Michael didn’t quite get—having to do with the crunch of bones and punches thrown. Chug, they'd yell, and Michael would chug. He was like a pet, a toy. He laughed like a true moron.

    On the day he moved in with the two men, my mother packed him bags of clothes, towels, sheets, as if for a child going to camp.
    She dropped him off, told him to call home later, told him to have fun and be polite. My brother, bearded, overweight, nearly galloped up the stairs to his new apartment on the second floor of a complex that had a faux-Tudor feel to it and nice landscaping, too.
    The first few nights went well. Or at least there were no phone calls home. Dope, movies, snacks. Laughter, music, pushing and clowning around, jumping up and down when the music and drugs called for it, banging on the floor when the downstairs neighbors banged on their ceiling, laughing because, fuck them, fuck those neighbors, man, motherfucking welfare-gettin’ losers. Whatever the two guys thought was funny,