5.

The irony of it all is that Wayne always wanted to live and I always wanted to die. That must be the case because I was hell for leather for throwing everything and everybody away. I saw death as a calm and easy escapade, something one could pull off effortlessly as if they’d trained for it their entire lives. Yet somehow the messenger would survive his execution, the suicide mission would return, the martyr would climb down from his crucifixion to applause and good reviews. I didn’t know how to live my life back then, gobbling it up in great irresponsible gulps. Meanwhile Wayne worked on his car.

He had graduated out of the Honeybee into a 280 ZX. It had some mileage on it but had been well-maintained and when you punched it, it took over the road. He wouldn’t let anyone else drive it. He barely allowed himself to take it to work. Every nickel he made at whatever job he was doing went to the car. He would live with his mother until he got married. A situation that precarious was bound to unravel. His only love was the Z. His car defined him as a person, a powerful motor inside a thick torso; a bit plain yet somehow exotic as if Wayne had returned from a foreign war, years after it ended. The car and the man, the man and the car. With a roar he’d leave my apartment, blazing a trail of new self respect down the street.

The night his car was stolen he collapsed in an alcoholic fugue. That’s why the roach had to die.

A cockroach the size of a silver dollar made the mistake of wandering onto the counter top about midnight. At that point Wayne was on his tenth beer since he’d learned from his sister that his car was gone from the driveway. To his credit he hadn’t cried. He’d simply sat there watching us play Mexican, drinking his way through a case of Coors. He watched the passing of the cup with the rattling dice and the lying that was the sport of Mexican and his eyes were dead chunks of coal in a pasty pie face topped with tufts of thin red brown hair and his entire mien was that of a man who knows that his wife is a whore or that the news from the hospital is bad or the job called and said You’re fired! He wanted to die that night even as we were so fucking alive. The music was playing the hits of yesteryear. The girls were pretty and underage. The carpet was dirty and the toilet was jerry rigged but the beer was here and cheap and we all smelled of good cologne to cover the sweat.

And the roach wandered onto the counter top and the girls screamed and Pete jumped up because he hated cockroaches and I just watched as Wayne took an ashtray and slammed it down on the roach. Bam and that primordial monster was immobilized. But not dead. Crippled beyond the ability to escape, it struggled in its own acidic juices while Wayne prepared the flame. Then like a modern Torquemada, he went at la cucaracha with hammer and tongs. I lit a joint and laughed as the music got louder and the roach burned. The aroma was not unpleasant and mingled with the ghetto weed we were smoking back then it had the atmosphere of some 60’s cult. We continued the game. Mexican! Everybody drink. Wayne kept after the roach, burning its separate parts for hours, the roach battling on, struggling against death. If it felt any pain I’m sure we would have heard it, those cockroachy screams. But I don’t think a roach feels shit. At least I hope it doesn’t.

In the morning there was a black blister on the Formica counter top, a future reminder of the roach and better, simpler times.