I suppose he didn’t think long about what he did. He wasn’t built that way. The men liked to talk. Trippi, they’d say, Trippi. What’d he do now? They had families, but what’d the kid do? His latest was always worth laughs, and a sense of who they were. The kid had something loose.
I saw him early mornings, the high boots, the walk slow, the feet wide like he meant something. Leaning against that state Forest Service flatbed, he dangled a Lucky and stared into the dirt, five or six around him, half-drunk cups of coffee in their hands. Trippi. Maybe he wasn’t from here.
I was the boss’s son, a kid whose head barely cleared the kitchen tabletop when I sat, too young to understand the staccato talk much. I was figuring out who I would be, a man like them I hoped.
I hoped.
What did Trippi say?
Dad didn’t give up the goods. Only snatches.
Was it that life wasn’t broads like the ones in his truck, him at the bar inside downing Gansetts, those broads with red lipsticked lips and needs? He looked right past them. Who the hell wants fatherhood and baby brats? Losers play that tune, he might shoot. No way he’d go there. The girls could wait and wait and wait for all he cared. He was after something else. Didn’t they get that?
What did he care about? He barely spoke. It wasn’t words, they wasted his time.
The Staties knew him. And fuck ‘em, his squint said. He’d blow right past the bastards on Nooseneck Hill, those mother-humping Rhode Island Staties. Screw ‘em. And screw his sludgeball father. He didn’t know dogshit. Trippi’d bag what that bastard missed.
Kid rolled every goddamned new truck he drove, Dad said, seemed like every damn week. He couldn’t stop talking about Trippi.
Screw the bills, Trippi might spit. You pay ‘em. You pay the goddamn electric, the insurance, the heat, the phone, the bitchin’ wife. Don’t let me die here in the frigging regulation green you Foresties wear for some damn parade…
The men talked the morning after, a pile of empty Narragansetts in the cab of his Chevy pickup, the Staties said. Had to be doing a hundred and jammed a corner he couldn’t see—the devil up his ass—and sailed right out into the Colorado blues.
What did Trippi spill when he got back from the hospital? He wouldn’t say much. Maybe smile, play the fool, let life fly. Hunger needs a quiet place to lie.
The adult me, the wary one, the party pooper, the cloud maker, sees with sadder eyes and Trippi’s a lonesome dude, shredded by his father and much of the world. A heavy-hearted guy, dragging childhood trauma like a three-hundred-pound boulder and needing an out, a place to go, a place to forget, a place to risk his end. Who would care, anyway?
He doesn’t trust “broads” because he doesn’t trust himself, doesn’t believe he’s capable of much, not in this world where the smart guys do the talking and get smiles, the charmers, the teacher’s pets, the damn asskissers he never liked. He comes from nothing they snort, and something in him has come to believe them. Why not booze up and go for the roses, take the pickup and slam it. Who would care if he dropped from sight? No one makes a big deal of him except the men where he works, and they’re just toying. They don’t want to be him, except for a minute. Except in their heads.
But the kid me, the five-year-old me, learned lessons from Trippi that had a glow, and little darkness, and the lessons stuck to me unspoken all these years, lessons I couldn’t pronounce back then. But learned. Courage, honey, that’s what we need. Courage. Foot to the floor. Grab the wheel—your butt in the seat, stick in your hand, the pistons in a roar, the smell of the pines. Smell those pines. Don’t quit, even when you hit the corners. Rebel. Dump convention. Be yourself. It’s dangerous out there. Foot to the floor and your life is yours, only yours. People will love you and then cut and leave you. It may get lonely, but who the hell isn’t. Foot to the floor. Foot to the floor, fruitcake. Be your own.
