AUGUST OFF
He had to have August off. This was necessary. He had summer savage in his blood—il salavaggio. He couldn’t go to work. He couldn’t be in an office, a cubicle, facing a computer screen. The death sentence of clicks.
***
He had to have August off. He wanted to get drunk on the monkey bars again. He wanted to run out into the lamp-lit street and bite the girl’s bicycle tire. The girl in lavender shorts and white tee. Straddling the bike with both feet on the ground, then up on the balls of her feet. He bites her back bicycle tire. She says, “What the fuck?” They laugh maniacally together. This is a version of first love. Or bullshit.
***
He had to have August off because of all the kitchen death. The way they’d sit in the kitchen with the parents gone and lick the rolling paper and seal it. Smoke it and drink a tall boy and L.A. Woman playing or some shit. What the hell year is this anyway? A year with August off. Undoubtedly.
***
He had to have August off. Or get a brick to the face—several bricks. Bright red bricks and coppery bricks and bricks like Jesus’ blood pants. He had to have August off and he had to have bricks in reserve, just in case he didn’t.
***
He had to have August off or he’d be dead and buried before his time. At best he’d turn into that French kid who traversed the dumpster beaches in the poorest coastal towns. The kid who had a little wooden cross inside his mouth like a 3-D printed tattoo on his inner cheek. The kid who went down to the police station in tatters for a lunch-bag interrogation. A salami sandwich and peeled pear at best. If they let him peel it.
***
He had to have August off because they’d be dreadful in the bars. Drinking far too much after work, wired and blathering. Better up in the loft bed with Angeline in August. Bronze-brown Angeline—her toes touching the ceiling while they fuck. And they fuck all the time. With August off.
***
He had to have August off. Down in the rock pit with her. A couple of slinky snakes slithering among the rubble. And her male friend down there too—two friends. One from high-school days. One from town. They don’t really speak English or if they do they hide it. They talk around him but he’s not worried. He’s with her and she’ll stay with him all day and all night. And for a thousand years to come, he tells himself.
***
He had to have August off. So if it could all just fall apart please… and so then she’d be gone with her desert migraine headaches and he’d go find her and follow the crows. Or he’d have a standoff with a crow in the Painted Desert. He was three thousand miles away from that now but no matter. He had his standoff—with that pecking signpost crow—and she took a picture of it. Three or four pictures of it, laughing. Then they got back into their souped old Duster and drove off.
***
He had to have August off in the dream factory of his youth. Or really, it was more like a warehouse with just a couple of manufacturing stations, some ladies at long tables. And Panos was there with his Greek-lamb sandwich and give-laid attitude. Packing-tape belt…this was thirty or forty years before the drastic shift. Before the kicked-in-the-teeth disillusion.
***
He had to have August off or there’d be self-immolation in the streets. There’d be self-immolation anyway in the slow burn of climate change. That there might be that charred end—and no August off…Sheer lunacy. Hell, shut everything down. End the mass production. The environmental upending. Enough goods in existence to last a hundred years…a thousand years maybe. But August off might be highway robbery. It might break the bank—or banks. It might relax people.
He had to have August off.
But he probably wouldn’t.
