This is… a deeply pretentious and weird version of Ponyboy, apologies in advance. That's just your brain on a steady diet of philosophizing.

Steve's joke about jobs at the philosophy factory is cribbed from That 70's Show, Curly's line about falling from a telephone pole 'not feeling like something else' is cribbed from Angie Sijun Lou's poem 'Jessica gives me a chill pill', and Ponyboy's term paper about whether porn counts as art is, sadly, cribbed from my own academic career :(

June 1972

You take the bus from San Francisco to Tulsa the summer you graduate UC Berkeley. The ride's a day and a half, and it becomes clear this was not the brightest decision of your life somewhere around the Arizona border, when the air conditioning breaks down. You sit up front near the driver, who lights a blunt and passes it to you after a couple of tokes— that's just the kind of thing that happened back in the seventies, before seatbelts were even real widespread. "You go to school, kid?" he asks, peeking at the book in your lap. You've been aimlessly flipping through Being and Nothingness for hours. "You sure look like the brainiac type."

"Just finished." Your mouth goes dry like you've been catching cottonseeds on your tongue, as smoke curls around your head. You stare out the window and don't speak again until you're past Oklahoma state lines.

You have a degree in philosophy, which you started to regret having to explain to people somewhere around your junior year, but not enough to go through all the effort of changing your major. Your whole life's operated off the principle of inertia, since Johnny and Dally's deaths, and this is no exception. As a result, you can act like you've got a passable understanding of Hegel (who is incomprehensible), flaunt your knowledge of formal logic in front of the other liberal arts students (you had to take it twice, but who's counting), and wrote an A term paper for Aesthetics 2 on whether or not pornography can qualify as art, with hair-raising descriptions in the reference material (Darry couldn't believe he was helping pay for this). Unfortunately, none of this has been much use in helping you find gainful employment— the job fair for your cohort about amounted to 'go to law school' or 'get a PhD." Being a lawyer strikes you as a Darry kind of job, and while a couple of your seminary professors suggested you had the potential to pursue a doctorate, you're afraid that if you climb the steps of that ivory tower now, you will never, ever find your way back down.

They mailed you Soda's dog tags August 1969. Same month Sharon Tate was killed, pregnant, words smeared on the walls in her blood— the news blared the lurid details around the clock, THE MANSON MURDERS, and what even they left out, the supermarket tabloids were more than happy to speculate about. You don't remember anything else about that summer, and you haven't been home since.

"What'd I tell you after you declared all that mess, there's no jobs at the philosophy factory, kid," Steve says from behind a copy of Popular Mechanics, the morning after you show up on Darry's doorstep; you throw a banana at him, and he just smirks as he dodges, before growing uncharacteristically serious. "Listen, you need a place to work, I need someone to keep the books over at the garage, you know, all the shit I don't want to do. Whattaya say?"

You know full well that if Soda were still alive, he'd never be making any kind of offer like this. You take it regardless. The work's boring as hell, but you like palling around with Steve all day even if he nitpicks your handwriting, playing with his toddler daughter, Lisa, who he swears is going to take over the garage once she's older as he lifts her up and tips her into the disassembled guts of trucks, even Evie coming in with cold lemonades and a hair ruffle, the kind of motherly affection you haven't had since you were shrugging it off at thirteen. It feels good and simple to be around people who love you, after spending years alone in Berkeley. After watching 6'2 Darry pace around your cramped shotgun house like it's suddenly become the palace of Versailles, too big just for him.

That doesn't explain why you're heading on down to Buck's on a Friday night, your paycheck burning a hole in your pocket— though apparently Buck himself doesn't even run it anymore, went to go live with his sister Jackie in LA, of all places. She got loaded covering Charles Manson's trial last year, or as loaded as a journalist can get, which was more than enough to make Buck say sayonara to his meth-ridden roadhouse and sell it to the highest bidder. You step inside and feel a powerful rush of nostalgia for the old joint, the peanut shells and hypodermic needles on the floor, Buck firing a warning shot out of an actual gun when he wanted people to start clearing out, even the godawful country music he used to blare. It's been turned into an actual bar now, and lost all its charm in the bargain.

"Long time no see, baby Curtis."

Your teeth grit together so hard at that, you're shocked they haven't broken into shards, when you unclench your jaw again. Christ, you hate that stupid nickname, the way it draws you back into everything you thought you left behind four years ago. "Can you get me a Jack Daniels on the rocks?" you ask the bored-looking chick behind the bar, her eyes lined with kohl and her hair pulled back in a braid so tight, you're worried it's straining her scalp. Like you're James Bond or something. All that's missing is a shaken, not stirred.

Curly pulls a joint out of his mouth, nice and slow, the tip gleaming with spit— if your film professor from last semester could see this, she'd probably call the symbolism of this whole scene downright phallic. (Hell, like it really takes a professor). Then he leans so far back in his barstool you're shocked he doesn't fall out of it, like he did as an idiot ten-year-old kid, crashing off his chair at school because he was balancing on the back legs. "What, you too good to talk to me all of a sudden?" Now he vaults himself forward like he's about to poke you with a pencil between the ribs, begging to copy the homework. "Figured we could at least catch up, hell."

He looks so much like his big brother it's uncanny, at first glance— but Tim-in-miniature, in his absence, is a simulacrum that can't quite replicate the original. He's got the same sharp features, too harsh to quite be handsome, the same spilled-ink hair and eyes on the border between black and blue, but he's missing the ghastly scar, splitting his face open from temple to jaw, that became Tim's most noticeable attribute. Missing half the swagger, too. Tim-and-Curly used to be a matched set, back in the day, you fucked with one and you got the other right back. Curly wears his old leather jacket despite the summer heat, the one with a knife slash through the left arm, but he doesn't quite fill it out the same way.

You're starting to feel a bit like a smug, self-satisfied ass, big city hotshot come home to flaunt his fancy education. If you cop to that out loud, Curly will say you feel like that because you are like that. "Yeah, I guess," you begrudgingly say as the barmaid shoves the glass at you, then when the astringent whiskey stings your mouth and throat enough, gain a sense of shame. Wrapped up in your self-absorption, your own blanket of grief, you'd forgotten why he might crave even your company. "I'm sorry, man. How have y'all been managing, since…"

Tim got stabbed doing time upstate, last year— it took him three days to die, like he was mulling it over first. Big Mac was real nasty back at the beginning of the seventies. Even tough-and-tuff Tim Shepard didn't turn out to be a match for it, in the end.

"It's been a real gas, all right," Curly says drily, then crosses himself before his next gulp. You already regret asking— if there's anything the whole Shepard clan was never able to digest, it's pity. "We're whole separate people outside our big brother, y'know." He sounds like he's trying to convince himself more than you. "Angie had her second kid a couple months back."

"Girl or boy?" you ask, glad to be off a subject you shouldn't have brought up in the first place. All you really remember of Angela is her wild cackle, that sounded drunk even when she wasn't, and the way she hired someone to glass you for turning her down.

"Girl." He flips his wallet open, and hell, if Curly Shepard himself ain't carrying around a picture of his baby niece in a duckling-patterned onesie. She's got Angela's nose, an exact replica. "Here's lil' Lizzy… her old man's still kind of a prick, I reckon, can't keep down a job, but she says she loves him. She's doin' okay."

When Curly tilts his arm to lift his glass, you see the shiny scar on his elbow where the bone broke through the skin, after he fell off the telephone pole he scaled on a dare. You asked him what it felt like, once the cast finally came off. He said not everything feels like something else. "What are you up to, lately?" you ask, chewing on a shard of ice that slipped inside your mouth. "Keepin' Tim's old outfit in line?"

"Nah," he says, "gangs kind of went out of fashion, few years back, unless you're into shootin' up tar." You weren't aware that gangs could 'go out of fashion' to begin with. "Half of those guys are dead now, anyway, like… I'm workin' on an oil rig now. Week on, week off. 'S tough, but it's real good money, you dig?"

Tough, and dangerous, too— maybe Curly's finally managed to channel his thirst for adrenaline the legal way, captured lightning in a bottle. Years after he didn't come to California with you, you'd lay awake on your shitty dorm room bunk bed, and wonder if you'd doomed him to an early grave— how arrogant. Y'all Curtises really do think the world revolves around you. Hell, Curly seems to have his life more together than you do, at this rate.

"How was San Francisco?" He plucks the lime slice off your glass, because he's an asshole. Sticks it in his mouth and starts sucking, because he's a Shepard, and they love pointless acts of self-harm like that. "Man, forget about me, hustlin' like I'm in some Johnny Cash song. You're the big college man here."

There are a million things you could mention right now, starting with the deeply pedantic Berkeley's about twenty minutes away from the city, but college already feels like a distant, half-forgotten dream, slipping through your fingers before you can grasp anything solid to tell him. It's probably reaching the bottom of your first glass of whiskey, that makes you say, "Why are we pretending to care about any of this?"

You regret saying it the second you do, but not quite enough to take it back. You and Curly have never been much good at small talk— or, hell, any kind of talk, period. Not as kids, daring each other to jump off roofs and burning each other's fingers with cigarettes; not as teenagers, neither, getting all tangled up in the sheets of your twin beds. Curly's smile is like the curved edge of a scythe, when you look at him again. He waves the bartender over for another drink, 'make it a double', then downs half of it in one go. "All right, we can get to what we keep dancin' around. I heard a lot about what goes down in San Francisco. You find another guy to play with your dick over there yet?"

You could tell him about how the sky seems to stretch out so much further way out west, like what needs to be done in the shadows here can be brought into the light. Launch into a real pretentious lecture about being at the very apex of the gay rights movement. You could tell him about Twin Peaks Tavern, the bar that just opened this year that doesn't even have to have tinted windows. Hell, you could start by telling him what 'gay' means. You doubt he's ever heard the term before in his life.

Instead you think of how you did Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead as a freshman, how you got a leading role because your Curtis good looks had a stage presence of their own; it attracted Guildenstern's attention too. You made out under stairwells and in the darkness of the orchestra pit for a few weeks between rehearsals, but when you tried to unbuckle his belt right before opening night, he batted your hands away. "I have a fiancée," he said, not unapologetically. "I'm not a real homosexual."

There was something real absurd there, but you're not convinced it was the play.

"No," you say, swirl some more whiskey around your mouth like antiseptic. "I didn't."

Curly shrugs like he's not surprised, which is a little hurtful. You could've, if you were looking, but you weren't really looking, is all. "Didn't make any new friends in the cooler, neither, so I guess we're even."

You spit out the mouthful of liquor— fortunately, back into the glass. Some of it gets up your nose, which ain't pleasant. "Jesus, Curtis," comes his sardonic drawl right by your ear, "they sure taught you some real fine manners at Berkeley, didn't they? Must've gotten top marks in etiquette class."

"You can't just say shit like that," you choke out, massaging your sternum, though of course he can. He's delighted in scandalizing you ever since grade school, just about.

He wasn't your closest friend, but after Johnny died, he was about the closest you had to one— you'd never been great at making any your own age, as the youngest and smallest in the grade, but for reasons still unknown to you, Curly came in swinging to defend you at recess one day when you got jumped for reading The Yearling. You couldn't even get mad at him when he ripped a few pages out himself afterwards, just for kicks, though you had to pay to replace it at the school library. When he first kissed you at a riverbed party tasting of pink lemonade and cheap grass, the summer after the stabbing, you didn't understand the 'why' there either, and didn't ask for one. You knew full well by then that a boy who likes boys is a dead boy, unless he keeps his mouth shut, and there was nothing to talk about, not really. Only things to do, things to hide.

Then Curly dropped out a couple of days into your senior year, and what was still his sophomore year— Tim was in prison, not around to object, which only left you. It was the beginning of a slow-motion car crash. You'd learned all the wrong lessons from the graveyard you called a life, maybe a little from Darry, which was that relationships were ephemeral and fleeting, but your accomplishments were something that nobody could take away from you. You told him that he was circling the drain, up and quitting school like that. He didn't understand why you were turning down invitations to bonfires all of a sudden, didn't want to cruise around in hotwired trucks with him anymore. At one point, he suspected there was someone else, which was when things really started to get ugly. The truth was, you'd just outgrown him.

Come to California with me, you still asked as you were packing Dad's old suitcase in August, trying to shove more and more books into it until it was bursting at the hinges. You can find a job there, while I'm in school… I dunno, bartending, bein' a bouncer, or something. You don't have to live in this lousy neighborhood your whole life, neither.

No thanks, he said, which you really should've expected. He was playing with his lighter, wasting the fluid, you remember that. Flicking and extinguishing a tiny flame. Even more than smoking, he liked melting things. Think I'd rather get a head start on dyin' violent, young, and desperate. Since it's written in the stars for me an' all.

You recoiled from your own words as though struck, responded by throwing up a shield of haughtiness. Nobody was ever meant to see that, 'cept Mr. Syme. Soda had just deployed— you didn't have the heart to condemn him for the semi-nasty prank he'd pulled on you, sneaking the graded copy out of your room and reading select passages out loud. And if it hurts to hear, hell, maybe you shouldn't be so determined to make it come true.

He shoved you, and you shoved him back, just as hard. On his way out, he slammed the screen door behind him so impressively, he broke part of the frame— Darry went down to the Shepard place to demand restitution from Tim, once he heard the whole story. You wouldn't speak again until Soda's funeral.

"I wrote my last paper on porn, before I graduated— like, actual porn, honest to God," you say to break the long silence, because you think he might find it funny. Hell, it is pretty funny. "Whether it counts as a form of art or not."

"You shittin' me?" You shake your head. "Should've hit me up, if you needed help researching. Tim's old Playboys would've been free to a loving home."

"It's a legitimate academic debate, okay— and my professor, he was kind of a radical, gave everyone A's because he didn't want to be responsible for anyone getting sent to Nam," you say, a laugh bubbling up to the surface of your throat. A couple of your friends, in the same aesthetics class, almost came to blows over it at the student bar after three beers each. "Hell, a legitimate legal one, when it comes to what books can be sold and mailed—"

"So what'd you decide, then?"

"I didn't, really," you can admit to him, alcohol loosening the screws on your tongue. You're the talkative kind of drunk. "I put it off until the night before it was due, and the authors on both sides made sense when I was reading their papers… then I'm just having a crisis at three in the morning, in the shower, with only half of a twelve-page term paper done and it's all garbage anyway— because who the fuck cares about any of this? Why does it matter what counts as art when four kids got shot at Kent State, the whole country's going up in flames, you know? We had this whole debate in the philosophy students' union, if we should be participating in walkouts or not, be co-signing protests or not, or if 'our discipline should stay separate from political trends'. But does anything even really exist outside of 'political trends'?"

When your brother was dead— the one you shared a bed with, close enough to feel his heartbeat through the thin fabric of his t-shirt— what did any of this shit matter? Would anything ever matter again?

"You get all that out of your system?" Curly asks, not unkindly.

"Yeah, reckon so." You ended up claiming it could be, under certain parameters, around the time the sun came up, but your whole position was a long-winded waffle and you knew it. You still got an A. Professor Corcoran didn't want to see any of you boys in Nam.

"You know what I think the answer is?" Curly shakes the ice in his empty glass, but doesn't ask for another drink. "Without havin' read any of the papers, sorry 'bout that. Just givin' my layman's opinion here."

"Do I want to?"

"I think you really need to get laid, Curtis." He bumps his knee against yours, with all the subtlety of a car crashing into a tree, and pulls out a pack of Marlboros from the pocket of Tim's old jacket. "Let's go for a smoke."

The sun's already set deep below the horizon, the sky a mixture of purple and orange like a murky bruise, as you step out onto the rickety metal staircase littered with cigarette butts. The air's muggy, the way it usually doesn't get in Oklahoma, humidity settling down inside your lungs like cement. Cicadas screech overhead. Something's about to happen, something big.

Curly drops to his knees like he's about to take communion, as you lean against the exposed brick wall. You don't want to think about God right now. Before you can ask what he's doing, he's messing with the zipper on your jeans, pulling it down with a small buzzing noise. "Anybody around?" you have about enough sense in your head to ask as he shoves them down your hips, though the alleyway's deserted and darkness has already settled over it like a shroud. You're not going to love explaining this one to Darry, if he's got to bail you out on sodomy charges.

He just gives you the kind of look he's been using to rope you into trouble since preschool. When his fingers curl around the waistband of your underwear, you feel like you've just fallen from a very high building, the pit of your stomach dropping out altogether. "Nobody who's gonna care."

He swallows you down to the hilt, and you bite your fist hard enough to break the delicate skin, to avoid groaning out loud. His mouth's warm and wet and very real, as he hums around your length, makes you jump from the vibration. "Fuck," you say, for lack of anything else to say— you, of all the ten-dollar vocabulary words, finally struck speechless. You grab a handful of his dark curls, pull him in even closer. "God, Curly, fuck."

He smirks, as it falls out of his mouth with a loud pop and he starts stroking you with his hand, your cock gleaming with his spit. You're not thinking about anything else in the world right now, except him. "Well, if that ain't the general idea."

Curly might be sucking you off on his knees, but he's the one with all the power, and he knows it. Sitting in the driver's seat, jerking you around by the joystick. You look down at how his cheeks are all hollowed out, at the same time as he looks up long enough to make eye contact, and you're finished as fast as this began, completely done for. You come so hard you have to scrabble at the wall for purchase, slide down it, end up with your ass on the ground and your drawers bunched around your thighs. The hot gravel scrapes against your skin, your wobbly legs, like you've fallen out of a car going a hundred miles an hour.

He laughs, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. It's art and pornography, entwined together, both and neither at the same time. You get it, now, in a way you didn't inside your walk-up apartment, five books of reference material spread open in front of you. He's beautiful.

You want to say, in Nietzsche's theory of eternal recurrence, he postulated that according to Zarathustra, the übermensch achieved his transcendental state when the thought of reliving his life brought him joy, not despair. Everything we had, I'd do it all over again. I think there's a reason we keep coming back to each other.

You want to say, when you go down to Tim's grave, do you ever just feel like opening your mouth real wide and screaming until your voice gives out?

You want to say, we're never gonna be kids again.

But you don't say any of that. You reach for the pack of Marlboros he left on the metal railing, instead, and light a cigarette. You're a goddamn wreck.