The real names are so much sexier
and the innocent don't need protecting
now that they're in their sixties, clean and sober,
with their mothers dead or demented.
So Bobby Bro was his real name.
He should have been a famous quarterback
with a name like that. Or maybe a movie star,
or a prizefighter, a golf pro, a lead singer, a lead
scorer. He was sexy and ragged and he scored
with the hottest girls in my high school
mostly because, without fail, he could score
weed. Which is what he was most famous for.
He wore a silver hemostat on a gold chain
around his neck. It caught the light and winked
as he twisted his torso in the passenger seat
of my mother's car, accepting the diminishing roach
from the hand passing it forward from the backseat.
Then, with the manual dexterity of a surgeon,
he disengaged the hemostat's locking mechanism,
eyed the tip narrowly, clamped the roach
perpendicular to its axis, like a blood vessel
or a fallopian tube awaiting ligation,
raised it up to an almost imperceptible
flaxen mustache and sucked vigorously,
surrendering it to me with popping eyes,
farting lips and inflated cheeks. As for my mother,
she never met Bobby Bro, nor heard his real name uttered,
because I always invented an alias,
a poor substitute, a travesty really, as I made up
my alibis for where I was going and what
I was doing with her car--which I always returned
with all the windows down, after smoking the requisite
ratifying bone to seal the sale with Bobby Bro
and his great and good name.
