2.

Most people called him by his last name but to me he was always Red Mark. It was a natural nickname with his flaming hair and wisp of beard, his parchment-white skin burnt red, the scattering of freckles across his cheeks, the red eyebrows and red eyelashes. He was a boy, like all of his friends, a very smart boy who would do great things, maybe even the ultimate, a star, a star of literature no less. That was the dream of the golden mountains for all of that crew, Colin and Raj and Quentin and Seth, to become the next Somebody. Each had their favorite. I think Seth wanted to be James Joyce, Raj wanted to be V.S. Naipaul (or Arthur Fonzarelli, it switched from time to time), Quentin wanted to be e.e. cummings, Colin wanted to be Hemingway, and Red Mark wanted to be Eugene O’Neil. He certainly had the alcoholic capacity of an O’Neil, and he’d taken a few tentative steps away from his mathematics track at the University to write a couple of plays, one of which was produced on campus. He sat in the darkness watching the actors destroy his writing; meanwhile his major professor sat in front of him in the theatre, clearly unamused. I forget what the play was about but it didn’t matter. The professor’s only comment at the conclusion was to correct Red Mark’s grammar regarding his use of the word ‘hung.’

“It’s ‘hanged,’” said the professor and then he left.

Red Mark told me that as we shot through the darkness that was Texas in the mid-1990’s. The route from Austin to Houston and beyond was mostly a caravan across rolling hills and deep pastures of blackness. From time to time we hit a patch of car dealerships or shuttered saloons, maybe an all-night gas station or a truck stop, but mostly it was mother night and the green glow of the dashboard and two friends sipping coffee on the black vinyl bench seat. In the back, my dog Pineapple and one bag for each of us. The mission was the New Orleans Jazz Festival. For Red Mark, this was a foreign country. I was, of course, going home.

I hadn’t really changed. My folks and I had the typical hot and cold relationship we have with our parents when we’re in our 20’s. We love them but we don’t respect them. They love us but wish we’d stop acting crazy and settle down. We fail to realize that our madness begets their madness in the same way theirs once begat ours. So this trip would be a casual pass by the old house and I might see my father and my stepmother or I might not. They’d come to expect nothing from me except the occasional bad news or phone call from jail. Sure, I was a college graduate now. I’d had my diploma mailed to my folks. There it was, proof that I was a bachelor. A degree in history and yet I knew almost no history. The year of Charlemagne’s coronation? Nah. The decades or even century of the 30 years war? Nope? The pantheon of Egyptian gods? Never. Why Pickett’s charge failed? No clue. I was the classic dilettante, someone who knew just enough of anything to make an ass of himself. And I was still holding out for the girl that would save my soul. In that sense Red Mark and I were the same, helpless romantics always ready to perform the gran geste, the Hart Crane leap from the stern deck, the Hemingway walk to a quiet room, the consumptive, smoking whiskey and drinking cigarettes in a cold garret in a rust belt town. All of that and we still kept turning up with these forlorn tough chicks who’d seen it all and couldn’t care less.

We weren’t in the car ten minutes before I spilled the straight dope on my new girl, Melanie.

“She and I were talking about the craziest things that we ever did,” I said. “I told her about the time I passed out on my front lawn and someone threw me a pillow from my second floor apartment. She told me about the time she got drunk at a party and screwed five guys.”

“Holy shit,” said Red Mark as Texas went by.

There wasn’t much more you could say and so we let it ride. I knew Melanie was just another passing thing, too young for me, too damaged, too blonde. I needed a dark-haired beauty who would listen to my bullshit as it formed into a cohesive nimbus of thought. I needed someone smart and funny who liked books. I needed someone like Red Mark’s girl. Not that I was in love with her. Far from, though she was easy on the eye. No, the affection she had for him and he for her was so lovely that only a maniac would have thought to break them up. That’s me, the maniac.

Actually, it was a straight-forward deal. Red Mark wanted to bring his girl on the trip to New Orleans. I said no.

“Really?” he said, quite surprised. “We already talked about it and she’s really excited.”

It’s a different deal when you bring your girl and I told him so. This trip would be about sleeping on floors and long days of drinking in the sun, long lines to use a stink-ass port-o-potty and God knows what for food. It would b fueled by Wild Turkey, jazz music, blues and gospel and dope smoke. It would be hot and dirty and insufferable. It would resemble the sorority house not one tiny bit.

“You’re right,” he said.

And there are things that only can be said when the men are in the room or the car and maybe there’s a dog and maybe not but what’s important is that they’re able to communicate in a way that can’t occur with the forces of reproduction present. For men are both creators and destroyers and we need to know that there are times in our loves when the twain do meet and this must be embraced and cultivated and if there is a goal to reach, a destination to arrive at, a task to be killed like any predator does then so much the better, pass the coffee and hunker in the darkness and talk poetry and music and art and God and women and death until the night’s long hour and the long shift in front of a hot stove catches up with a man and Red Mark leans his head against the glass and softly falls asleep.