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It started with a gun to my head. Most things do around here. Our endings are our beginnings and The Dude I live with chooses to define his seminal moments by directing firearms at them.

"Is that thing loaded?" I ask.

"Maybe," he grunts, "slacker. What, are you afraid?" He nudges me off the couch and towards the door.

"Hey! Hey now! But I live here!"

"Not if I lock you out."

"I have a key."

"And I have a key. To your despair..."

"Ha! Hey man, that's pretty poeti--" and he locked me out of the house.

So I went for a walk. There's a kind of release instigated by the mechanical movement of legs on pavement: A freedom in the bipedal perambulation, as it were. Yes, yes, I know I have a penchant for the melodramatic, but one has time to craft sentences of gold when they are in the zone of introspection that a constantly shifting landscape over a long period of time creates. The sun bore down. The afternoon waned.

I walked down until I had crossed the railroad tracks, and found the old house. The other dude I lived with introduced me to an old man named Frank about a year ago. His unofficial caregiver, I'd come along on a grocery delivery and enjoyed the company so much that of my own accord I'd been back many times since. Frank lives in a low-built ranchero home bounded on either side by vacant lots where at one point sad houses identical to his pooped out splintered families that have since gone to dust and taken the adjacent lots with them, in one case replaced, on the south side, by squatters with a trailer home.

"Hows things Frank!" I hollered into the sweet smoky confines of his cave, slipping around the screen door. Floorboards creak, something crashes to the floor in a dark room. If voices were made of wood Frank's would be oak, hardened by a decade of methadone and a lifetime before it of Godknowswhat.

"WHOSIT?" Frank gurgles.

"It's me!" I reply, impersonating my own voice and fingering the dust off a portrait of St. Clare, listening to his shuffling footsteps approach from the darkness.
“Well get th’fuck outta here. Who asked you?”

“Nice to see you too,” I said as sunlight, slipping through a crack in the dusty vinyl curtain, illuminates the holy figure framed on the wall. “Who is this is portrait of?”

“That’s Saint Clare,” he booms, suddenly standing right behind me, “Now get lost.” Hanging up his cane and pouring himself a drink, he continues to himself, “My lil’ Clarissa I call her. Patron saint of seein’ things how they are, dirty laundry, and little lost girls an the pedophiles who find ’n love ‘em. What’ll ya have.”

“G & T.”

“That’s a golfers drink,” he rebuffs. Pouring the drink slowly, ever savoring life’s lesser pleasures, one gets the impression that he has seen many go soft and burn out by getting too much too fast.

Franklin Hellfire Hagan was born May 17, 1924 somewhere in western Europe but raised in St. Louis. The H. stands for Hellfire, but don’t ask why, he doesn’t know. His father named him Hellfire and he but appreciates the mystery of “my middle name, dead center of my identity, and like most people I find, its what’s at the center that’s something you’ll never know.”

He dumped 3 long years into the Pacific Theatre and returned with a broken nose (still bowed to this day), a limp in his left leg and a vow to never again set foot in a jeep as long as he lived; a vow which has since come to include all automobiles. “I keep th’ windows drawn at night,” he says, “all those prowlin’ red demon eyes…”

I’ve never been able to get a straight answer out of him as to why. He can be a bit eccentric.

“Starvation can do that to a man. Makes you shrivel up into yer own skin and call things for what they are. Eccentric personalities have always served ta unmask the mechanisms of control,” he once declared to me over a flourish of Queens and Aces, “you should work on that.”

“What? Control?”

“No. Unmasking.”

Frank’s wife died, out of five kids two sons are dead and only one of the remaining ever visits. He estimates eight grandchildren and a few great-grandchildren, but isn’t sure anymore. I imagine myself to be his most frequent companion.

“How long have you lived here, Frank?” I ask, getting out my pen and notebook and taking a seat across from his bucket-seat box of a chair.

“Not long,” he grumbles, settling into the fold in the cushions, “the house was built’n ’60. M’wife died in ’70 an I moved out here from Vegas in ’81 figure.”

“What were you doing in Vegas?”

“Getting’ fucked over.”

He has a grizzled white beard that stumps out of his chin, and softly smokes a fragrant pipe which lends the house its distinctive aroma. “I owned a casino,” he tells me, reigniting the bowl and conversation, “but the bills stacked up over my head so high I’s drownin’ in ‘em so…” blows out a perfect smoke ring, “at any rate I cashed out my chips and settled. Like a scab in this disease ridden patch of country.”

“That’s poetic.”

“Fuck you!” he shot back. “How’s that drink?”

“Best I’ve had all day.”

“As Ray Milland said, ‘One is too many, and a hundred ain’t enough.’”

“Well I’m only here for the one. The Dude’s got me locked out of the house.”

Frank scratches his head and looks at me obliquely. His pale eyes as porous as a clear morning sky. “Who?”

“The Dude. The Dude I live with.”

“Huah!” he laughs, “Listen ta you, Mr. big writerboy. Mr. ‘I am that Masked Man’. Mr. ‘The Dude I live with’. Mr. drinks at ‘The Place I Go.’. Who do y’think you’re protectin’ with all this? Everythin’ in your world revolves around YOU. Nobody cares.”

“But I like the anonymi—--”

“No! Nobody cares about anythin’ in this world ‘cept themselves and whatever they cn’get their grubby hands on. Least of all about you an yer runnin’ around wearin’ a mask. Anonymity is fine. Hell, I fuckin’ encourage it! But get the fuck over yerself first. Jesus.”

I waited a beat and then finished my drink in one swig. Frank set down his pipe and reached for his cane.

“Stay fer dinner?” he asked.

“No thanks. You need anything before I go?”

“I don’ need shit!”

“Would you tell me if you did?”

“Would you?” he asked. I got up and headed for the door. “I’ve put shit in my body an treated m’self like a pin cushion fer years but ain’t never let nobody walk allover me like you’re always doin’.”

“He held a gun to my head.”

“Tell ‘im to fuck himself. He was probly just fuckin’ ‘round anyway.”

“See ya Frank.”

Back in the pearlglintz glare of setting sun I squinted and sweat my way home and when I got to the house the door was unlocked. The Dude, sitting shirtless on the couch was watching reruns of Home Impovement while fiddling with an open bottle of beer.

“Slacker. Where’d you run off to?” he asked.

“Places,” I said.

“What kind of places?”

“Places you’re not invited.”

“I own the world,” he boasted, “I’m invited everywhere.”

“Then somewhere you’re not welcome,” I said. I joined him on the couch to emulate the Tool Time studio audience laughing at Tim Allen’s hijinx.

“Sorry about earlier,” the Dude said, “I didn’t mean to give you a hard time.”

“You gave me a hard time earlier?”

“I was just feeling shitty about… oh, well if you don’t think it was a big deal then nevermind. I retract my apology.”

“Good. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Our endings are our beginnings and the sun set. Heavy winds blew from the west. I went to grab a few more beers from the fridge.

“I ordered pizza,” he said, “hope you’re hungry.”

“Starved,” I said.