 |
 |
Volume XVII – I.G. Boy
The story starts out:
'Our excitable engineer
bangs on his steering wheel…'
from there it gains speed.
The Judge LOVED that story
"Immediate Gratification Boy
by Zack Edwards"
he would say while we
walked the halls at work.
I’d blush and duck.
(This was before people knew
I wrote.)
I told him about
the night it came out.
I was in my office –
a folding chair and a used
laptop in a closet –
I was sweaty, rocking
back and forth and
I had to take a shit,
but I couldn’t stop,
I was a word machine
King of Narration,
channeled through me
the Divine Light of
Not Vague Writing.
It was my first experience
with something like that
the kind of story …
you sit back when it’s over
and look at it
and the words
go in and out of focus
once
as if nothing’s real,
then you smile
a big idiot smile
like the one J.T. sported
when he recited parts
to me.
"Christ, John!" I’d say,
"I know the fucking words."
He lost the first copy I gave him
and HAD to have another,
signed this time.
Fucker used to ask me
"Did ya zeeb today?"
when I picked him up
before work.
He would’ve liked
the whiney boomer generation
line I added. After he died,
I found the copy he’d “lost”
in the stuff from his hotel room.
The autographed copy
was on his desk.
I sat on the floor
of my new expansive office
(a spare bedroom)
and went through everything
he had owned.
His possessions fit into a box
the size of a dozen roses.
It was mostly engineering notes,
reference books and business cards.
There were documents from
a civil suit he'd filed in
Alameda County and
a couple patents.
I was doing okay
until I found that story.
Immediate Gratification Boy.
I could hear him
quote the lines
and I cried
happy tears
the kind …
if he liked it (me)
something must be good.
Click here to read next Volume.