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The Wheelie Poppin' Lifestyle
"What he do, kill someone?" was not a rhetorical question on my part nor would it be taken as such nor was it answered.
For the first nine or ten years of his life he was cute as a little bug and his occasional forays into creative usage's of cutlery were mostly ignored as the petulant acts of an upset child. Last year at 12 he cut a kid in the Dumaine house, the kid went for stitches and Bug skittered away to avoid the charges which were pressed upon him.
About ten days ago I photographed him on Dumaine popping wheelies on a bicycle. Seeing him I got my first notion that the aging process of the street was finally working on him. His eyes, which had so persistently seen the darkness now, gave some of it back. He wasn't that cute anymore. He could pop a mean motherfuckin' wheelie though, the whole length of two six hundred.
Over the years I would say he mostly hung by himself or on the fringe of a group. I don't think he was a loner by choice but rather because he did not neatly fit into the grouping into which he was born. Nor did he fulfill in any real way the needs of others. Maybe the other kids resented his persistent cuteness. Maybe he was just an annoying brat. I know when I lived on Dumaine I shooed him away many times, as he had a knack for showing up and ringing that bell just when the other kids had gone away and left me to the unique peace that can only be properly given back by a house that has recently endured the pitch of screaming children.
Sometimes his smallness was to his advantage and gained him a place stuffed in that little hatch back area of the smallest car built by Ford and I would drive them (eight was as many as we ever fit in there) around town on Sunday afternoons, or to the dollar theatres before they all went bankrupt. He was a good worker and showed eagerness and diligence while cleaning the street of it's substantial weekly buildup of garbage, which was the chore they did in exchange for my chauffeuring. Other times the adolescent boys did not want him in their company, he too young, he too small, he just a kid.
He's thirteen or fourteen now. I had you scared with all that past tense, yeah? Last week he stole a car and crashed it up pretty bad over on Ursulines, had to be cut out of the wreckage. I know the system does not work this fast so this last part is diluted information from the full strength of hearsay, but the word is that they talking about giving him juvenile life. Locking him up until he 21. That'll show him.