A Kiss For You

by Rachel Van Dyken

  The place was a complete shit hole. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a kitchen that consisted of a hot plate and a sink that sat on top of two cabinets in the corner of the square living room. One strip of black and white linoleum squares marked off the ‘kitchen’ area.

  It was dirty. There was an ant mound growing under one of the baseboards, flies stuck to traps hanging from the ceiling. A fan with two broken blades that didn’t turn on hung uselessly from the living room ceiling. The only window in the main living area was nailed shut so it couldn’t be opened.

  It was the greatest fucking place ever.

  “Nah man, it’s totally cool. Cops don’t fuck with us cause they’re scared of us. Besides, the MC parties all the fucking time. Pussy and blow everywhere, as far as the eye can fucking see, man.” Bear swayed to one side and kept himself from falling off his milk crate by straightening one of his legs and anchoring the heel of his boot to the floor. “It’s totally tits, man. You gotta join up. Prospect it out like me. Once I’m in, I’ll vouch for you guys. Then after a year, it’s fucking smooth sailing on the SS Tits and Ass. Besides, you’ll love the clubhouse. It has a pool table and a fucking bar.”

  Bear had first told us he was going to turn Prospect for his dad’s MC, The Beach Bastards, when he started buying weed from us in the eighth grade. He’d known what his future held for him since the day he was born. Since he spent most of his time with either the MC or us, he’d been trying to get us to Prospect with him since the day he decided that we were all going to be friends.

  “Not for us, man. We’re like our own MC of two. We’re like the non-MC, MC,” I said. I’d moved on from the tequila and was lighting the two-foot tall purple glass bong that sat in the middle of the living room on yet another overturned milk crate, this one acting as our coffee table.

  “You gotta kill people and shit?” Preppy asked in a lowered voice, like someone was listening in and he didn’t want them to hear. He reached over to take the bottle back from Bear, stretching out his too-long-for-his-body arm.

  Where I was fifteen and taller and more built than most adults, looking several years older than I was, Preppy was smack dab in the middle of an awkward phase that made his arms and legs look like a stretched-out Gumby and his face looked as if he’d had a chronic case of the chicken pox.

  “Only people that need killing,” Bear answered like he was reciting something he’d heard a million times before, and no doubt he had. “No women or kids, nothing like that. Just people who know the score and understand the consequences, or people who fuck with the MC and us earning.” Bear looked up at Preppy through his messy white hair and brushed it out of his eyes. “Why? You got someone who needs killing?”

  He sounded very much like his father, President of The Beach Bastards. Bear’s father was a psychopathic killer, who dealt in drugs and women, but Bear still managed to have the most stable upbringing between the three of us.

  “Nah, man,” Preppy said, waving his hand dismissively like the question was ridiculous, but I knew he was lying. I saw it in his eyes. “Just curious is all.”

  I also had a very good idea of who he thought ‘needed killin’.

  Bear looked around and leaned in close, waving for us to lean in bring it in as well. “We got these guys, specially trained. Pops calls them ‘the janitors. You know what their job is?” he asked pausing dramatically, waiting for Preppy and me to urge him on.

  “What?” Preppy asked, totally enthralled. “What do they do?”

  Bear smiled, elated that Preppy had taken the bait. “When people need killin’, or get killed, they sweep in and make it so it never happened.”

  He made a wiping motion with his hands in the air, extending them out to his sides. He sat back, looking pleased that he could share with us something about the MC. It wasn’t until he turned prospect that he’d finally gotten a glimpse of the inner workings of The Beach Bastards, and he was always excited to tell us more about the club he was raised in but didn’t necessarily know a lot about before he was given a PROSPECT cut.

  The kid was a born biker, but as much as he tried to get us to join, it wasn’t for us.

  Preppy and I never strayed from our plan.

  Ever.

  “You guys ever need a cleaning up, you call me. I can put a word in. Problem is, you’d owe us a favor. That’s how it works. No matter when we call in that favor or no matter what that favor is, you gotta do it.” Bear lit a cigarette and waved the smoke away from his face. “Nuff of that shit, boys. Preppy, you got the goods or what?”

  “Goods?” I asked. I wasn’t aware that we were selling to Bear today, or any other day for that matter. Since he turned Prospect, he bought his weed from the MC.

  Preppy hopped up and walked over to the hall closet. He came back holding something covered with a ripped sheet. “What the fuck is that?” I asked.

  “This—” Preppy waved his hand over the sheet. “—is your birthday gift, you ungrateful fuck.” He set it on the floor and grabbed the sheet in the middle, lifting it off like a magician. “Voila!” He stepped back, and my eyes focused on what was in front of me. It was a cardboard box and inside of it were bits and pieces of something.

  Not just something. It was a tattoo gun.

  “Happy birthday, you fucking fuck! Now, let’s figure out how to put this thing together, because Bear and I already picked out which tattoos we want from your sketchbook.” I stared at the equipment in front of me, not believing my eyes.

  “If you take any longer to get started putting it together, I’m going to request mine be put on my taint,” Bear said, knocking me out of my stunned state.

  “Thanks, boys.” I lifted the box onto my lap and started tinkering with the parts. “And Bear?”

  “Yeah, Man?”

  “There is no fucking way in hell I’m ever going anywhere near your taint.”

  “Noted.”

  That day, I tattooed for the very first time. I didn’t do the ones the boys had picked from my sketchbook. They were too elaborate and although I could draw, I’d never used a tattoo gun before so the full back piece Bear wanted with intertwining snakes, The Beach Bastards logo, would have to wait until I knew what the fuck I was doing.

  Instead, Bear got a small shamrock behind his ear, although I’m not quite sure if he was any sort of Irish. Preppy settled for PREP on his knuckles. The lettering was thin and crooked. They were the worst tattoos in the world. Blown out edges, a bloody fucking mess. But the boys loved them, and I couldn’t wait to practice on them some more.

  “I’m so gangsta.” Preppy said, admiring his newly tatted up knuckles.

  “You’re about as gangsta as my ninety-year-old Grandma,” Bear said.

  “Bear, doesn’t your grandma have a full chest tattoo and purple hair?” I asked.

  “Sure does,” he replied.

  “Then, I actually think she’s way more gangsta then ole Preppy here,” I said.

  “You guys laugh now, but you’ll see. King here is gonna tattoo my neck next. I’m gonna look real mean.”

  “Are you still gonna still wear button down shirts, bow ties and suspenders?” I asked.

  “Fuck yeah. Always. That’s my style.”

  Bear chuckled. “You may not look tough, or mean, but you might confuse the fuck out of people.”

  “Fuck this shit man,” Preppy said, standing up. “I gotta go get the last of my shit from my stepdad’s. I’ll be back. Feel free to laugh at my fucking expense while I’m gone, shitheads.”

  “You want me to go with you?” I asked.

  “Nah, I got this shit. It’s past nine. Fucker’s either at the bar or passed out on the couch. I’ll be back in an hour.”

  Preppy never talked about it, but I was sure that his stepdad was still beating him up until the day he moved out. He was always slightly limping or clutching his ribs. When I asked him if he was okay, he usually told me he was working out. “Nah man, did chest today, hurts like a bitch when you do it right.” He was
a shit liar, but his pride was all he had besides me and Bear. Although we joked around with him, the last thing we wanted was for Preppy to be hurting at the hands of some drunken asshole.

  When I hadn’t heard from Preppy for two hours, I got on my bike and peddled over to the trailer park his stepdad wasted his life away in. As soon as I parked my bike, I heard a commotion inside.

  “Prep?” I called out. No response.

  “FUCK YOU!” I heard Prep roar from inside. His high-pitched voice cracking with his strained scream. With one kick, I knocked in the flimsy door.

  What I saw beyond it would haunt my dreams for years to come.

  His stepdad, Tim, had Prep bent over the end of the old corduroy couch, thrusting furiously into him while holding a pistol to his temple. When I sent the door flying into the room, he turned his attention my way, along with his pistol. Preppy turned and knocked him on his side, the gun slid across the floor. Preppy lunged for it but his jeans, which were still wrapped around his ankles, caused him to trip and fall forward against the wall.

  “Get the fuck out of here, boy. You two think you’re better than this place? Well, you’re fucking wrong. I was teaching Samuel here a lesson. He belongs here. He ain’t no better than me and needs to know it.”

  I kicked over empty beer cans and made my way to the gun. It was the first time in my life I remember seeing red. Seeing red isn’t just a saying, I found out. My vision was tinted the color of the rage boiling inside my veins. I flexed my fingers. My joints itched with the need to release the pressure building within my bones. I wanted to hurt him, but the want was secondary to the need to hurt him.

  “What, are you gonna do? Fucking shoot me?” Tim asked, sitting up against the kitchen cabinets. Pushing off the floor, he went to stand, but before he could, I raised the gun and knocked him in the temple with the butt. Tim went flying across the tiny kitchen, landing head first into the door of the refrigerator.

  “Fucking shoot him!” Preppy called out, righting his jeans. Blood dripped from his nose. His cheek was already yellow and purple. Apparently, he’d taken one hell of a beating before Tim decided that anal rape was a more appropriate way to teach the kid a lesson.

  “So, you’re gonna beat me, kid? Is that it? Gonna teach me a lesson now, boy?” Tim looked up at me from the floor.

  “No,” I said, an eerie calm washing over me. The rage took a kind of precision-like control over my actions. “I’m not going to teach you shit.”

  Fear registered in Tim’s beady little eyes.

  “Then what, boy? You gonna call the cops? Cause I know the cops round here. They ain’t gonna do shit!”

  “No,” I said, taking a step toward him, the gun in my still hand pointed toward the floor.

  “Then, what the fuck, boy? You gonna kill me?” Tim laughed nervously until he saw the affirmative look in my face.

  I raised the gun, aimed it at Tim’s forehead, and fired.

  “Yes.”

  Doe

  The only time King spoke to me in the days following Preppy’s death was to ask me to go into Preppy’s room to find something I thought he would like to be buried in. At least, that is what I took from the grunting and nodding that he’d been using in place of actual words. King was hurting, and I couldn’t do anything to make it go away.

  I’d never been in Preppy’s room before, and when I opened the door, I noticed that his room was huge, much bigger than King’s. Preppy had the master bedroom. The room was neat and tidy but full of random things. Shelves of books, video games, action figures, and knickknacks of all kinds.

  On his dresser was a single picture. A selfie of the three of us. He’d taken it one morning when he rushed into King’s room and bounced on the bed to wake us up, which he did frequently. King and I were on either side of him, tangled hair and half–asleep. King was covering his eyes.

  He’d never wake us up like that again.

  Preppy’s closet was a large walk-in, overflowing with clothes of all kinds. One wall was lined with storage bins that were all neatly labeled. One bin was partially opened. The label read Shit random chicks leave in my room and was filled with women’s clothing. I guess that solves the mystery as to where Preppy was getting all my clothes from.

  I chose a yellow shirt and the loudest bow tie Preppy owned, a multi-colored checkered pattern, from a bin labeled Awesome Fucking Bow Ties.

  Suddenly, holding his clothes in my hands, the final clothes he would be wearing at his funeral, it all became too much. I crumpled to the floor and held his jacket to my chest. My heart felt a million times its size. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t do much of anything except silently cry, holding onto a little piece of the only true friend I’d ever known.

  I don’t know how long I was down there, but I must have cried myself to sleep, because I woke with dried tears on my cheeks and Preppy’s suit wrapped around me in a crumpled mess. I stood up and rehung the jacket onto a hanger and just as I was about to hang it on the back of the closet door in an attempt to de-wrinkle it, I saw something taped to the back of the closet door. A small white envelope. And in Preppy’s messy handwriting the words:

  OPEN ME MOTHERFUCKERS

  King insisted on taking his bike to the funeral in what I think was his way of continuing to avoid any sort of conversation. When we pulled up, there were already several bikes parked along the road that wound through the lush grounds of the cemetery as well as Gladys’s old Buick.

  We were the last ones to arrive. Bear and a handful of bikers, Grace, and six of the ‘Growhouse Granny’s’ were already seated under the portable canopy covering the rectangular hole in the ground that Preppy’s shiny black casket hovered above. All were dressed in black. Some of the grannies wore matching black floppy hats. King wore a black collared shirt and jeans.

  I threw caution to the wind and wore a yellow sun dress. I think Preppy would have liked it.

  As we took our seats on the damp plastic chairs in the front row, King grabbed my hand and set it on his lap, intertwining our fingers, bringing me as close as he could bring me without sitting me in his lap.

  The preacher nodded to King, then started speaking about life and death. He even tried to say a few words about Preppy, although the two had never met. I had to stifle a laugh when he referred to him as a wholesome and well-respected member of the community. For a fraction of a second, King’s stoic face gave way to reveal a hint of a smile, while Bear downright let out a blast of laughter from where he stood against one of the canopy poles. The preacher paused to collect his thoughts, then continued.

  “Who has words for our dearly departed today?” His voice was mechanical, like he was reciting a manual.

  I felt for the envelope in my pocket to make sure it was still there. When Bear started walking to the front of the small crowd, I stood and cut him off. King shot me a look of confusion, and Bear stopped in his tracks.

  “Hi,” I said, realizing my voice wasn’t loud enough for everyone to hear when some of the grannies put hands to their ears to amplify the sound. I tried again, speaking a little louder this time.

  “My name is Doe, and although I didn’t know Preppy, er, Samuel, very long, he was my friend. A great friend. My best friend. As much as I want to say a few words about him and how much he meant to me, in typical Preppy form, he’s already beat us to it.”

  I took the envelope from my pocket and unfolded the notebook pages with small scribbly handwriting. I’d already read it, and I didn’t want to cry, so I tried to zone out while I read the final words my friend wanted his friends to hear before we laid him to rest. “So, just a warning, I know we have some…mature folks in the crowd. Because this is coming right from Preppy, it contains some, um…colorful, language.”

  I glanced apologetically at the preacher whose attention was already down at his cell phone, his thumb raced across the keys.

  Friends and MoFo’s,

  Like you thought I would let you have the last fucking word.

  Fuck
that. I’m way too OCD to have you try to come up with some nice things to say about me, so I came up with them myself. I’ve updated this weekly since I was ten years old, thinking that because of the situation I was living in that I wasn’t going to make it to see twelve and that my family, if you could bother to call them that, wouldn’t expend the effort to say anything at my funeral. And the thought of that, the thought of silence when they put me into the dirt was worse than the thought of dying to me. After that, it became kind of a habit, so I kept doing it.

  So in the event of my untimely death, this is what I need all you fuckers to hear.

  If you’re reading this to a crowd of people dressed in their funeral finest, then I’ve achieved a longevity I never thought I would reach. I’ve made it to the ripe old age of twenty-six and it’s been one hell of a fucking ride.

  By now, I’m dead and will soon be rotting in the fucking ground, being eaten by worms and other random bugs and shit. But don’t worry about me because I died a happy fucking man. Looking back, I never thought I would live a life where the word happy could describe it, but I did and it was all because when I was eleven years old, this big fucking brute of a man-child rescued me from a bully who shall not be named, and then he became my friend. Oh fuck that, the bully’s name was Tyler Nightingale and the pussy still lives with his fucking mom and works the night shift at the Stop-N-Go. Fucking twat. Go egg his fucking car on the way home.

  Anyways, I motherfucking digress.

  The man-child became more than my friend. He became the best fucking friend anyone could ever ask for. He became my only family. Our childhoods were complete shit, but because of him, we were able to live our lives by our own set of rules. He didn’t have to befriend a skinny kid with bruises all over his body and a foul fucking mouth. He could have looked the other way. He could have ignored me when I pestered him to no end. There are a lot of things he could have done. But he chose me to be his family, and I chose him to be mine.