Free White Out by Michael W Clune

lasts forever,” I answered.
    I banged fast and slow on the metal elevator door.
    Twenty minutes later someone heard me banging and called the apartment people. They let me out and I ran down to my car and sped off to Pulaski Street.
    The next day I wrote a threatening letter to the management accusing them of “false imprisonment.” Plus I told them about how the elevator call box was connected to the Chinese restaurant. That was a serious conflict of interest.
    In the letter they wrote back, they were careful not to admit any wrongdoing. The specter of their legal liability did not, however, entirely escape them. They offered me three months of free rent. That came in handy. Three months lasts a long time when you’re a junkie. But the future lasts forever.

CHAPTER 4
Hello, Stripe
    W here did the white tops get in? There are white doors and windows all through my life, but I remember a couple early ones.
    For a long time, I would go to bed early. In summer, my bedtime came when it was still light out. There was a tree outside my window. Once it had two main branches. But by the time my memory starts it was Henry-shaped; its missing branch, lost in a storm, anchored it in the ocean of time before memory.
    “Time for bed, Michael; give your father a hug.”
    “Yes, Dad.”
    With the lights out it was still light in my room. Sometimes my parents would be sitting out in the yard and their laughter would come in through the half-open window. A fan would be on, slowly mixing sleep into the heavy light. I’d fall asleep with one sticky eye on the tree. All those summer evenings, and eventually the one-armed tree got caught in me. Twelve years later, I recognized Henry the first time I saw him. Memory is like that.
    My first word was clock. It’s an unusual first word, spoken with unusual clarity, and my mother reports being startled, thinking someone else was in the room. My best friend was Dan Rest. I met him the week we arrived from Ireland. His last name is one of those deceptively simple German words, like thing , that obviously mean something else. Clock. Dan was completely American. I still had a strong Irish accent, and came equipped with all kinds of outlandish Irish things. Like a red leather satchel my mother gave me to take to first grade. Everyone else had backpacks made of some thin light material. I wanted a backpack like that. I quickly became an expert in these American things. I carefully studied backpacks, lunch boxes with cartoon characters on the outside, shiny Capri Sun juice pouches, Big Wheels, G.I. Joe action figures.
    I knew the soft plastic hand strap of the lunch boxes better than the machine that made them, and could distinguish it from the slightly harder plastic of the cartoon thermos top, and the still harder plastic of the thermos body. I soon grew so proficient I could make these things out of my body. At night, lying in bed, my body was a factory for Big Wheels and blue nylon backpacks.
    I had to make them, since my parents didn’t have very much money at this time, and my mother was determined to exhaust the stock of Irish things before buying anything new. Of course, most of the things I made were invisible and didn’t do me any good at school. But some did. My version of the movie Gremlins for example. Gremlins was the hottest movie at school, in the parks, on the block for a whole season. Some parents, including my own, wouldn’t let their children see it, so those who did had a certain special grandeur.
    I soon realized I had to see Gremlins , but since I couldn’t see the one in the theater, I had to make it myself. I got a workable script from Dan, whose enlightened parents had taken him to it. It went like this: A father gets an unusual pet for his son, a Mogwai, a kind of small cute white furry animal. His delighted son names it “Gizmo.” The guy the father purchases it from tells him not to get it wet and not to feed it after midnight. When the kid gets it wet, Gizmo