Lanky Jimmy Tanner swung a bag of good times over his weaker shoulder. The party store neons flickered polychrome in the curved lenses, reflecting below copper irises, while he tried to stay his hand at following through on an idea.

He pushed the tortoise shell frames up on his nose, glided out of a thinking revelry, into a quick shot of gut sadness suddenly not sure where he was, or was going; how could he have forgot? Pausing with a sigh, Jimmy pulled the Black and Mild from the inner pocket of his jacket.

He sparked the cigarillo with a series of long, deep drags, exhaling a thick rope of smoke, the hazy tendrils lit up into swirls and streams under lamp light beams.

The visceral atmosphere, like the fifth planet’s skin, influenced under Jimmy’s breath’s touch. A solitaire street light shining becomes a singular star beaming through viscous marble sheets of exhalation, exposing an infinitesimal  fractal of this world held together in waves. The delicate motions lapping shore lines of rolling dust, mass pressed into form, ‘through torque,’ Jimmy processed previously, ‘cinematically, delivering Divine intent.’

Standing curbside, absorbed by the space around him, he suddenly noted, and heard, like drawing the self from sleep paralysis, a faint murmur, growing nearer in volume, suddenly rising up into a chorus of voices, calling his name, “Jimmy!”

The sun’s light further rolled west, back arched into dusk’s love, and against this blustery grain, the lone figure of Jimmy Tanner, pulled his tall frame out of the cold, into the car’s cramped rear quarter, warmed from bodies and engine.

He boarded the vehicle, dusted with snow and caked on elements, where his friends, Mamie, Abby, and Calvin, waited in the heated ’86 Metallic blue Chevette, the Blue Tortoise. The Chevy was nearly mint for it’s age, except for three spots of rust. Each a corrosion, true, but these were placed, with accidental intricacy, just under the driver’s side view mirror. They pressed out like accessories placed with nuanced grace on a lady’s blouse; medals pricked into the fabric of a uniform.

Small marks, three tiny blooms, drawing the eyes away from your baldness; they did not present as an affliction, rather, the spots became familiar. Like the neighbor’s girl, on whom you secretly crush, though the world sees her plain, and upon her neck, the details you’ve memorized, lay three moles. More than flaws, these mutations becomingly adorn her, against the grain of her predominant plainness, anchoring the thoughts of her to your memory all those years later.

Jimmy looked sternly, his features drawn in, as one who’s news is bittersweet, and he pushed out for space in the tight confines.

The two girls in front enjoyed Jimmy’s dreamy, space cadet qualities for the opportunity to harass and tease, and flirt, prodding him for mischief or small talk, in a cloudy hazing. 

Mamie depressed the clutch with her left foot and led the gear shift into reverse before backing out of the space. Abby prattled on about the seafood dinner she had with her father the previous week. After the meal, as father and daughter were walking toward his car, she threw up the contents of her stomach after snorting two lines of good heroin in the restaurant bathroom for her private dessert. Everything, she told the group, looked like it just came off the plate, except now, it steamed, a circular mound of barely digested fare, resting on the parking lot’s black asphalt surface.

Jimmy listened to Abby, the words becoming a preamble to his thoughts, as he leaned against Cal, snug against his friend, warm and glazed over from the blunt, letting go and quickly swooning in love for her. He was beguiled at her presence; she came on like the breaching Kraken, punching the space with her pale blues and the clinging tentacled wrap of her blooming halter top just under the weight of her winter coat. 

Sitting in the front passenger seat next to Mamie who always drove without talking, wrapped in her grandmother’s red fox, her sandy blond hair teased. She had lacquered onto the lidded upper hollows of her skull, heavy blue eye shadow, painted against the pale sea blue of her irises, and Jimmy, since their meeting, felt an adolescent’s love for her, a fact his actions left little doubt of.

She existed like a postcard, smiling with beverage in hand, telling you outwardly she didn’t care, but her eyes sat pleading from the interior for rescue, to keep her in mind, that she’d be worth it. And he was receptive to this, imagining anything possible; she, and him, driving, no evil remnant to impede them.

Not for Abby was receptivity, she was fire, angry fires, eating all the fuel the land offered.  She was both muse and gorgon.

Jimmy suddenly laughed loudly, all the daydreams resolving sensibly, and abruptly, as though only he knew the joke, ignoring everyone in his revelry, except the one person his focus framed, Abby.

But Abby loved Tommy, in that unique way that leaves everyone running for cover. She brought him to the needle, led him to an enclave seldom exited. Jimmy met her the same night, but drunk towards slurring, did not remember, and considered their initial meeting a week later. Probably, this changed little, since only Tommy afforded Abby that particular luster of being in an absolute limelight, continuing newness that hardly rested.

Tommy never turned off, and Abby, though warm and intelligent, was hungry for that kind of stimulation.  Jimmy quietly sulked. He wanted her furnaces pushing for himself. But he desired sleep too, and he didn’t have money to be messing around with heroin.

None of this was viable really, though he saw, only kind of, and then in a marginal way, where the two lovebirds were heading. He did not think it was sustainable, her push for gratification, Tommy never veering from his path of total commitment to accidental lunacy, their lives only salvageable through remotely available successes. Jimmy wanted to flirt with impulse, he was symptomatic too, of delusional inebriation, and he wanted her to get him high. But he feared other things, besides her rejection. He feared the absence caused from death.

Jimmy was more enamored with Tommy than anyone else besides Abby, since, more than superficially, their relationship, writing songs together, meant they shared with each other feelings on subjects, experiences, in a manner each might otherwise hide from the public. Jimmy, with the reservation of that greatest generation, felt an old fashioned loyalty to Tommy, he once called it ‘Frank Sinatra cool,’ referencing a time when privacy counted for much.

Jimmy had seen people close to him collapse suddenly into nothingness. Witnessing the evisceration of their humanity and he had fears. Fears, that did not lay at rest except in the day’s routine, in the machinations of  a power sander, or the rhythm of a chef’s knife against the board, his guitar, and when the shadows reared up, showing him the end, Jimmy shrugged it off, only wanting to be involved with something visceral. But during the quiet moments, alone with his reality, he knew Tommy was a thread’s break away from oblivion.  This knowing compounded Jimmy’s desire to brave her storm, free Tommy, and arrive, shouldering the confidence of a thousand victors.

“I’ve just figured out one of your secrets, Abby Gold!” Jimmy said, losing his breath from excitement and the hysteria of his trying to get out of a small space.

“What does that mean?!” She was immediately defensive, dropped  her tempo, and everybody picked up on it. Nobody knew what, or whom, he was laughing at and Abby felt like a stranger picked from the crowd, embarrassed at the exposure, and crouched to defend herself against unknown intentions. Palpable demonstrations of attitude, ready to conflict, thickened everyone in the car, except Jimmy, whose lack of tact generally begat these confrontations while any of the other three, could suddenly be a stranger, and violent.