Free Life Goes to the Movies by Peter Selgin

of those dramatic pauses he was so good at, or maybe he just
wanted to get past the sounds of cars avalanching on the expressway overhead as we walked under it. It occurred to me then that he drove my curiosity
the way some people drive a car, flooring it or hitting the brakes, nothing in between. He pulled a shiny silver flask from his pea coat pocket, one
that I’d never seen before, drank from it and handed it to me. The chilled liquor burned my lips and carved a warm tunnel deep down into my guts.
    We jumped a spiked iron fence to land with solid thuds on the frozen cemetery earth, and kept walking, passing the shiny flask back and forth. When he
started talking again I listened the way I always listened to Dwaine, as if every word was a door being opened to let in more of the world. Drug
dealers! Compounds in the Arizona desert! To think I knew someone who knew, had known, such criminals; that my best friend’s brother had been a
world-class drug dealer. Dwaine might have said that he knew John Dillinger, or that Al Capone was his brother, or Buffalo Bill! The whole illicit
country seemed to have spilled from Dwaine’s lips and landed in a bright gruesome puddle like vomit at my feet. Only it was good vomit; it was
All-American vomit, it was just the sort of vomit I craved, the corrosive kind that could completely dissolve my immigrant son’s sense of being
an alien nobody from nowhere.
    The sky went from cobalt to Prussian blue. Maybe it was the booze in my belly, but the colors of that night seemed to generate their own light without
any help from the mercury vapor lamps or the moon. Was Dwaine drunk, too? If so he didn’t show it; he never did, while I felt every drop sloshing
around inside my brain like Shelly Winters in a rowboat.
     
    18
     
    We crossed an ocean of fancy graves to drift into a bay of plain tombstones bearing mostly Irish names: O’Rourke, O’Connor, Doherty, Doyle,
Fitzgerald … Dwaine picked up speed. Soon we stood before a grave with a Distinguished Service Cross sprouting like a bronze
sunflower from it:
    John Daniel Fitzgibbon
    b: October 15, 1946
    d: February 14, 1975
    Beloved Son of Sean and Irene
    “That’s him?” I said, and Dwaine nodded. “Your brother was in the war, too?”
    “Infantry,” said Dwaine. “Two tours. Jack got drafted; I didn’t. He always believed it was because of the color of his skin.
See, he had darker skin than me. Black Irish, some people call it. It made no sense to me, but it did to him, and I think he held it against me, too,
in his way. Jack was like that. When he got pissed off he’d call me a little Irish nigger. Projection, the shrinks call it.”
    “How’d he die?”
    Dwaine’s face went through at least three transmission shifts there in the dark before he answered: “Narcotics overdose related cardiac
arrest”—as if it were something he’d been brainwashed into saying by ruthless Chinese operatives.
    Then, unzipping his fly, he undertook what apparently was the crowning ritual of his graveside vigils, and peed a steady stream onto his
brother’s grave mound.
    “ ‘Dwaine,’ my brother said to me last time I saw him, ‘if I ever overdose I want you to promise me you’ll piss on
my grave.’ Well …” Clouds of steam rose from the wet earth as rivulets formed around Dwaine’s boot caps. “A fitting
tribute,” Dwaine added, zipping his fly, “to a guy who pissed his life away.”
     
    19
     
    We left Jack’s grave. As we did Dwaine said: “Have you ever wondered, babe, why so many things starting with the letter D are bad?”
    “Like what?” I asked.
    “Like Death. Disaster. Despair. Depression. Disease. Denial.”
    “What about Dreams?” I said. “And Daylight?”
    “…Disenchantment, Depravity, Drunkenness, Dishonor…”
    “…Destiny, Delight, Determination—”
    “…Destruction, Defoliation…”
    “…Doughnuts? Dominoes?”
    “…Destitution, Dogma, Divorce …”
    “…Dogs, Daisies, Dill