Home. The street where I grew up. Jersey baby, that's right. I took this picture two years ago and have carried it around ever since. It's a little bent and there's a faint yellow stain over the tree on the right where I touched it with a greasy fingertip. Anyway, the bright, undented speed limit sign's a replacement. By now, it's probably a replacement of the replacement. We used it's predecessor for target practice, hitting that cool-ass whap-bing! high note with rocks and snowballs packed so tight and thrown so hard that when they hit, they didn't stick to the sign like scoops of ice cream but instead ricocheted off it whole, leaving behind only the barest snow kiss. Baseballs, green beer bottles--anything we could find, until one day, Mark Dubeke from down the block came over and tossed an M-80 at that bitch, leaving a fuming hole the exact size of my open mouth in the center. I'll never forget the whizz of the plastic casing as it shot past my ear. My mother heard the explosion and came running outside, bare foot and smoking. She grabbed Mark by his skinny ass arm.

"What are you doing? Just what the hell were you thinking?" Her voice sounded strange over the ringing in my ears.

"Sorry," Mark said, looking at the ground through his hanging yellow bangs. His family was trash. His mother threw dinner plates at his drunk father, and his older brother Chuck smoked j's on the rooftop, listening to Ozzy. Chuck worked at A&P, walking the aisles with a pricing gun sticking out of one pocket of his super tight jeans and a comb sticking out of the other. He was a total waster who would end up kicking the bucket at 22 when he stupidly shot an air bubble into one of his veins. Mark was the worst, though. He wasn't just a fuck-up--there was something about him--a light missing from his eyes or some shit like that. There was a steadiness of movement and a singleminded nature to his actions that was somehow unnerving. I doubt he ever hesitated for a second over any of the fucked up shit that he did, even years later when he took to lighting parked cars and condos on fire.

He wore army surplus and his brother's old heavy metal t-shirts. He smoked cigarettes and lit firecrackers. I remember him on Fourth of July's, shirtless, his smooth back awash in the flickering yellow light of sparkler glow. "He's so skinny," my mother liked to say. "Look, you can count every rib."

We often saw him leaning against idling, backfiring cars, flirting and getting his cigarette lit. Meanwhile, he treated us younger kids in the neighborhood like we weren't really there while we followed him around at a safe distance. Or so we thought before the cherry bomb. My mother made the five or six of us who were present line up along the curb. I remember BJ and David were crying. With her hand still firmly encircling his upper arm, my mother made Mark go down the line and tell us he was sorry, one by one. I didn't know which was more shocking: her actions or the fact that he was going along with them. Usually, he could care less what my mother said. It felt like church: I remember being barely able to look him in his eyes. They were yellow, like his hair.

Like a tiger.

When he finished his apologies, my mother made him pick up the plastic shrapnel that was scattered across the street. I can still see her standing there, keeping watch over him while she raised her hands slowly, as if in a dream, and lit a new cigarette off her old one. Her toes curled over the edge of the smooth white curb and her shadow stretched out behind her like a skyscraper.

anti4ever