He has died or should have three or four times by his reckoning but come back to spin like a lucky top in his storytelling, this recital of 23 bones broken in a T-bone in Alabama, an 8 inch screw fixing his hips in line and a scar the curving length of barbed wire he showed me by hoisting his shirt to prove how well it had healed. He smacked his scar and lickety-split the boy he was comes visiting his mother in the ‘nuthouse’, waiting for her to buzz him in to the office in the middle of the ward while he turned in circles keeping track of the crazy people coming for him, the man who stood in a corner staring at the same crack and the twitchy ones, them herking and jerking, limbs flailing out getting closer, and oh the dogs he said, shaking his head, pointing to a red track even now mouth-shaped on his calf, “I’ve been bit by every kind of dog” and seen them rip up cats and rabbits like toys filled with blood, and until football he liked swimming and “beat those rich boys every day of the week” who were all racist anyway cause he was Italian, “oily boy” they said, and they said “he greased his way through the water” so he fought them and won. Then the blinding, of course, jolting awake in darkness so complete and sudden, he thought he had done it this time but it was just the booze and pills and candy and the beatings he had chosen every day since he figured that life wouldn’t last for him, dead at 25, at 30, but “shit, ha ha, here I am” pausing only to breathe and laugh, “a rare bird” he said dazzled that he was around to tell me anything at all.
