“Mike x Key West”

(Key West x Wikipedia)

To think how I feel doesn’t matter, isn’t an issue I still suffer from. Before mom died, Maxie used to say, “I know you hate mom,” and if I feel that way, I should just leave. And I couldn’t — regardless of how I felt. I’d lost all power and I didn’t know it, yet. Though, that early morning at Union Station, giving hurried kisses to what would become an ex-fiancée and estranged babies, was a death that became myself. I escape the horror of life after exumation. Speaking of which, do you know the work in burying a hatchet that you were left to hold, that wasn’t yours to begin?

It was 1984, and I stood in a trailer — a nice one, I remember — what I remember of it, with wooden-panel walls. It was tidy, maybe a double-wide; no outhouse, like the shack my father grew up in; though, we used chamber-pots because going to the outhouse felt like something from Children of the Corn. No, this was Pensacola, Florida. Home of humidity from Panama City coast; and professional cockfighters and chicken-chasing champions. I played with my Mickey Mouse ears, but don’t have a single picture from that time. I used to. Like I used to have baseball cards that I collected forever. I was Rickey Henderson anytime I stepped onto the diamond. We were driving to Key West and I’d just been in that trailer two years earlier. I thought about it as we drove the old Monte Carlo through Alligator Alley. I…