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Slacker Thomas Reynolds |
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At the funeral of a close friend, walking out into sunshine through the alley back to the car, I think of Death as Donne had. Not as a fierce, dreadful, regal figure, nor even an upper-management corporate type who wields his axe with cold precision, but a surburban son in jeans and
muscle shirt, like that
slacker on the steps of his parents' house. The fellow with slept-on hair and stubble swallowing smoke
from the day's first cigarette. Unaware of his power to destroy lives, (even unaware of his parents' devastation-- a son who quit school, was busted for cocaine, and arrived back on their doorstop at twenty-eight with a barely-controlled unaccountable rage, staring into the cloudless afternoon sky as the phone
rings and rings). The chasm inside him is so wide and deep, he's unaware whomever he touches disappears, the clerk at the neighborhood convenience store, my friend who much have passed him on the walk, brushing his torn
jacked with cracked red hands. His choice (or lack of choice) is indiscriminate, the way he chooses food, without though or pleasure, prodded not by appetite but a gnawing emptiness, whatever the
fridge supplies serves just as well. Stale bologna with crackers or wind with caviar. He barely gives us a glance, passing us over with a gaze more fixed on a crack in the walk or a grass
blade turning brown in the heat. |