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Know Thyself

“Go, go, they’re coming”, Frankie says, as he shoves me forward with his right hand, a sack full of jewelery in the other. We run down the stairs, and we can hear a woman’s voice as she opens the front door. Me and Frankie make a B-line for the rear exit, which were sliding glass window doors in the den. We open them and, not bothering to close em, keep running, running through backyards, running till we reach a secluded place ’bout half a mile away.

We sit down against the side of an abandoned building, and Frankie starts laughing. I’m not talking your regular laughing here. I mean uncontrollable, outright hysterical, gut wrenching stuff. I can’t help but start chuckling, but the truth is I’m thinking to myself, I’m frigging crazy. What the hell am I doing with this guy? I mean, I don’t need the money. Damn, he doesn’t need it either. We’re seniors in high school, our parents are filthy rich, so what’s going on here? I can screw everything up. College, my whole life, for God’s sake. And I’m sitting there, thinking I gotta figure this out. I mean, I gotta figure myself out.

Why am I doing this? Now, Frankie, he’s another story.

He lives for this type of stuff. I mean, if his adrenaline isn’t pumping to the max, he feels dead inside. He’s always been likethat. Frankie The Prankster, that’s what all the kids parents used to call him while we were growing up. But it was harmless stuff back then. When he started using, alcohol and drugs that is, that’sb when his need for thrills started getting dangerous. It wasn’t enough for him to be high. There seemed to be no limit to his constant craving for excitement. Jimmy, the class bookie, was laying down five to one that he’d be dead or in jail by his eighteenth birthday. Nobody I know was taking the odds.

Now Frankie calms down a little, whips out a pint of J&B, takes a swig, and offers it to me. I do the same, and we just sit there for a while, in total silence.

“You know who’s house that was, right Billy?” Frankie’s smiling again. I could just tell that he was taking some added satisfaction just thinking about the identity of our victim.

Yeah, I knew who it was. Every small town, I guess, has that bitter man who takes out all his life’s frustrations on the kids in the neighborhood. But I just wasn’t in a talking kind of mood. So I just sat there drinking the J&B, knowing I’m gonna have to do some serious thinking over the next couple of days.

“Harry McDougall’s, Billy, Harry goddamn McDougall’s. You remember the time we had fifty pizza’s, with an extra helping of every topping they had, delivered to his house?”

He’s belly laughing again, and this time I can’t help myself but join him. Me and Frankie and a couple of other friends were hiding behind the bushes across the street, watching these four delivery boys carrying these humongous pizza’s, heavy as all hell, and trying to get Mr. McDougall to pay up. I gotta admit, it was one of the funniest things I ever saw.

I mean, even if I live ’till a hundred and twenty, that’s something I’m sure I will NEVER forget.

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