American Idiot

[Aaron]

I grew up in Sunset Park, located in South Brooklyn, New York, just below Greenwood and north of Bay Ridge.

Our family home was the second from the corner off 6th Ave and 54th Street with a red front door, the numbers 5404 stamped above it in gold. The three-storey townhouse was built in 1910 and had been renovated by my father just after the Y2K scare. I remember counting the twelve steps it took to climb the L shaped staircase to the front door every day after school. There was a deli, small grocery store, and laundromat right across our busy street, but inside the house was quiet, most of the time.

It was less than a ten minute walk to the closest station on 53rd Street and, from there, about forty minutes to Coney Island where they sold the best hot-dogs in Brooklyn. My friends and I spent countless weekends at Astroland eating junk food and riding the Cyclone. I took my first ever girlfriend on a date there. They took down our favourite ride and replaced it with the Thunderbolt, a crazy looking roller-coaster I don’t think I have the stomach for anymore. The place was renamed Luna Park not long after I left home to attend the NYPD Police Academy.

My friend and I rented a tiny one bedroom apartment with two other cadets. I didn’t mind the bunk beds, poky-little-kitchen, and dirty bathroom. It was a small price to pay for freedom. I worked nights at an old Italian restaurant to get by. The tips were terrible, but the leftovers were worth their weight in gold. I put the running track to good use that year.

I don’t know what possessed me to move to Canada. Perhaps I wanted to get as far away from home as possible. Small cities like Harper Rock are always crying out for more law enforcement officers. Six weeks in a local Police College had me up to scratch and, before I knew it, I was here . . . upside down, bleeding, kicking out the windscreen of our cop-car, yelling at Steven to open his eyes.

“Knowles! Knowles, wake up! Knowles!”

Aaron slammed his boot into the windshield again and gave a groan of pain-laced-relief as it came loose. He undid his belt, quickly met by the roof of the car, now floor, with a sharp cry of pain. He hissed and clutched at his ribs and right arm. “Knowles!”

The ringing in his ears was replaced by the blast of the truck horn as his senses were sharpened by an onslaught of fresh agony. Aaron unbuckled Steven and dragged him from the car. He left the man on his back, careful not to jolt his neck or head, remembering his training from a recent, mandatory first-aid course.

On his feet, Aaron could see that the truck driver was slumped over the wheel and, on closer inspection, found that he had not been wearing a seat-belt. He pulled himself up onto the step of the cab after throwing the door open and checked the man’s pulse before radioing the station.

The ambulance only took six minutes, it seemed someone had beaten him to the call, perhaps one of the bystanders that were gathered along the street edge. “Concussion, multiple fractures, internal bleeding,” he heard one of the ambulance officers call in ahead to the hospital as they carted off the tracker driver and Steven, both wearing neck braces.

“I’m fine,” he waved the female paramedic aside who had tried to tend to his arm.
“You’re not fine, you’re bleeding and your arm is clearly broken!”
Broken, he thought, as the adrenaline-dulled-pain flared up again all of the sudden. “I have to give a statement.”
“You can do that after you’ve been given the all clear.”

[Aaron]

I put down the phone and after that I didn’t think about her, not once, not until I saw the cake box in the fridge the following morning. I’ve never been a huge fan of sweet foods, but the small sliver I’d helped myself to the night before, had been delicious. I wonder what she’s doing right now?

Honeymead is a nice neighbourhood, and relatively trouble free compared to areas like Wickbridge. I’ve been trying to get my finances together for some time to purchase an apartment of my own, but for now renting a place in West Towers will have to do. I’m not sure if the owner is okay with cats. Best not to ask.

I’m not allowed to get my cast wet, and I can’t lift my right arm, not if I want my shoulder to heal. This isn’t the first time I’ve broken it. I shattered my right elbow when I was fifteen, fell of my skateboard in front of this girl I really liked who lived just down the block. Needless to say, that was the last time I stood on a board. You should have seen the look on her face. Hell, you should have seen mine.

There’s a certain art to drying one’s self with the use of only one arm, an art I am yet to perfect. This morning was a workout I was not prepared for. Six weeks of this. Lord give me strength. What is it the Bible says? Blessed are the meek. What nonsense. I haven’t been to church since I was about twelve, when dad decided it was no longer worth the arguments.

I have to admit, it's nice to have some time off, even under the circumstances. I’m sure I’ll be tired of sitting around doing nothing soon enough. Perhaps it's time I signed up for the library card I keep meaning to get. It's been so long since I read anything. If I were being honest with myself, I’d admit that I’m not even sure what my reading tastes are anymore. Something with history?

I could really go for a cigarette right now. Better go get that coffee.

[Aaron]

The world was pretty big on cell phones when I left home at sixteen. Data plans didn't really exist back then. We were all carrying around those blue Nokia bricks, trying not to spend our text limit for the month in one night. I left that thing in the top drawer of my bedside table and never looked back. My girlfriend at the time was quite sure my ill-planned escape from New York was a cop-out, a means of breaking up with her without having to say those exact words.

I was in line for a scholarship, one highly sought after at the all boys Catholic school I attended. The dean said I had a promising future, that I was bright, a leader. My father thought the same. In his eyes I would be nothing less than a doctor, a fancy lawyer, like his wife, maybe even an engineer working for NASA. I ran away from a beautiful dream, a lot of beautiful dreams, but they weren't my dreams.

The airport was a couple of train and bus rides away. I knew the city, knew how to get around. There was two thousand, seven hundred and eighty-four dollars in my pocket, the total sum of my savings account withdrawn and closed. It was a lot of money back then, a lot of skipped school lunches, transport costs a good pair of running shoes had saved me, and a dishwashing job at the local diner I was glad to see the back of.

I remember the way my stomach turned in knots as the plane took off, how small everything looked from the air. New York disappeared and, for a while, it seemed all my troubles had too. When I landed in Vegas, I smoked a joint outside of Bellagio Hotel and watched the water show. It was dark, but I remember the lights, remember how different it all was to home. The ground was littered with call-girl cards, people walked around like they had nowhere to be, drinking, shouting, laughing.

Was I homesick? I don’t know. That night I rented a cheap room at New York, New York Hotel, but I didn’t get any sleep.

It was a four hour drive out into the desert and Jackrabbit Drive where my mother lived out of a trailer. What a shithole. What an absolute shithole. I haven’t got anything against people who live out of trailers in the middle of nowhere, but it's not for me. The lack of space, the dust, the nothingness. Some people are content with so little, content just to live and breathe, and rot. Damned if I admit it, I guess I have some of my father’s ambition afterall.

She had married a local tour guide, a Native Indian from the tribe that cared for the facilities at the Canyon. In our letters back and forth, I had promised to stay with her, get to know the mother I never had. She was a retired dancer, I guess one might call her, and I suppose once upon a time she had been beautiful. She gave me a photo, it's the only photo I have of her, not the image of the woman I met out in the desert that sticks in my mind to this day, but a picture all just the same.

Needless to say, I got back on that bus. I wasn’t going to live with dear mother after all, or her partner Achak Smokes-a-lot of the Havasupai people. I gave her some money, she had asked for it, and we never spoke again. Damn it, the Asshole was right, I was better off. She left me with fifty dollars, not enough to get a plane ride home, but enough to hitchhike to California. When I got there, the world stood still. The Twin Towers in New York had fallen, and to think, I had been on a plane just a few days before.

I knew my dad would be worried sick so, against my better judgement, I phoned home using the last bit of change I had in my pocket. “You selfish, little son of a *****,” he said, and I hung up. It was two years before I saw him again.