"Father" by Armin Tolentino
Fuck it. Lemme show you." I turned my head. He was up, stumbled a second, foot precariously close to the edge, but recovered and pointed with his chin to where we were going.
I tried to get up, stumbled, sat back down with a plop, the wooden dock giving nothing to my sorry ass. "Just wait here, I'll be back." I was fine with that, thought I needed a moment of silence anyway-a bit of communion with nature and liquor-and let the quiet push out my thoughts. But I realized he had the bottle with him and now I was as alone as I could imagine, spitting frothy wads of phlegm as far as I could into the Chesapeake until my mouth became dry. I wanted to piss in that water, shit in it, desecrate it so when these fancy restaurants behind me served the catch of the day, they'd be eating my shit, a fucker in a business suit trying to impress some gold-digging bitch, going on and on about his place in Palm Springs, his hand working it's way up her thigh, while all the while they're eating my shit.
A short stocky Mexican was on the adjacent dock, mechanically casting into the water, reeling in slowly, then casting back again. I watched him for a few minutes amazed by either his stupidity or his dogged determination. He wasn’t catching shit. How could he? There’s these gigantic boats out there with trolling nets sweeping up everything that’s swimming. How can you compete with that? He wore a blue Mets cap, the brim fraying at the edges showing brown cardboard beneath. I wanted at that moment to step up to him and snatch it right off his head. Just to do something, to see what he would do. He may not have looked formidable, but he had the arms of a laborer, the back of a man who had to work every second of daylight just to eat, and without a gun, no one can beat a man like that. Certainly not a punk like me. But I had this overwhelming urge to egg him on, maybe push him into the water. I had an insane rush of energy flowing through me and I wanted to release it with random acts of violence.
My shoulder was suddenly cold and I realized Paul was pushing a forty against me, getting me to drink.
"Wait here," I told him.
"Where you going? Hey, I got something for you!" I was already stumbling away, a good foot of sidewalk between me and the water, trying to keep on a straight row of red bricks, not trusting my motor skills in the least. I pulled my hair out of my face, these yellow, oily strands clumping together and falling to my mouth. I couldn't smell myself anymore, but I knew I stank. I could tell when I'd hit tourists up for money, they'd make this face and I knew they felt sick to smell me. It's incomprehensible to Americans that people can smell that bad, but just imagine there are entire countries that smell like that. They were never scared of me, just my stench. They'd give me a quarter just to get away from the smell of gangrene on my breath.
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