Spoonman by Delano Franklin

I love the wind at the beach, the way it changes direction so suddenly and swirls around you. I love the way it plays games with the sand and kicks up waves for sport. It was bitter out that day. Maybe not quite bitter, with it being in the upper 40s, maybe 50s, but it was May. There was a storm running its course. It was cold enough to warrant sweatshirts and, for my less-ferociously-haired companions, trapper hats. I was dragged out of my bed that morning (afternoon) by my feet to be greeted by two cheesy grins peeking out from their respective masses of straight black and curly orange hair. It was unseasonably cold and brutally windy, so this lot decided we'd spend the day at the beach. It was Leo and Sean, but no one's called them by those names in years. Leo's been called Bubba for just about forever; even his mom calls him that. A couple of years ago, I started calling Sean by the name Ajax, because he hates his real name and he acts like the mythological Ajax. That name stuck, and it's the only one he goes by anymore. Anyway, it was Bubba and Ajax, who I've known since preschool and are, for all intents and purposes, my best friends; not just two creeps who decided to show up in my bedroom. Every once in a while you meet a person, and it's like looking in a mirror; they're both like this. We're like triplets, and that's why I love these guys. My brother is, truly, the Anti-Delano, so we've never been close. This sounds terribly cruel, but these two are kind of who I wanted my brother to be. Bubba's older brother was waiting out in front and, as usual, played the role of taxi driver. He hates driving us around, but Bubba's mom makes him. He is a true 90s kid, and the music he blasted in the car reflected that. It consisted of Oasis, R.E.M, and other bands whose members are now either dead or homeless. I forgot to ask where they were taking me, because I was delirious from a lack of quality caffeine and sleep. We pulled on to the Parkway (Revere Beach Boulevard, to you foreigners) and this song, "Spoonman" came on. This song isn't truly funny, but it was, for some reason, part of a running joke that we had. We felt the urge to sing along and made a horrible amount of noise doing so. We sounded truly beautiful, but for some reason still unknown to me, we were kicked out of the car. Bubba's brother dumped us at the beginning of the beach in front of some apartment buildings. We started traipsing down the sidewalk and it only then occurred to me to ask where we were going. "Are we going anywhere in particular?" I said while shivering rather melodramatically. "I'm thinking some place warm." "Ice cream it is," said one of them; I don't remember which. The nearest ice cream place was a good half mile away and outdoors. "Fantastic, but if I die of hypothermia, I want my mother to know that it was, in fact, me who broke that hole in our bathroom wall." I'd record our full conversation here, but we tend to get rather philosophical and the philosophy spawned by a group of thirteen-year-old boys walks a fine line between genius and insanity. Something that was said really did change my outlook on life, though: "When you think about it, mustaches are really just mouthbrows." "No, you've got that all wrong, eyebrows are really just eyestaches." We went on like that until we got to the ice cream place. I think its name is Twist & Shake. The building could probably be seen from space; the walls are spray painted hot pink, a noticeable contrast to the concrete-and-sand beige of the beach houses. At a bare minimum, this place stocks six million flavors. I tend to get either orange, lemon, or lime, because even though I know the flavoring is artificial, I find the entire concept of a citrus-flavored dairy product fascinating. They wrap the cones in paper, but, God, they deserve to be wrapped in gold leaf. We must have looked so ridiculous walking down the street. We dress like cartoons and have cartoony hair, too. In the summer before the fifth grade, some kids, maybe ten of us, started a contest to see who could make their hair so insane that their one of their parents would cut it off. One girl dyed her hair like a rainbow clown wig, and her mom chopped it off, so she won. To this day, everyone except that girl has their haircut from that summer. Ajax looks like a ginger cotton ball and Bubba has purple streaks in his jet-black hair. As for me, well, most kids' monsters live under their bed or in their closet; I prefer to keep mine on my head. If you've never been to Revere Beach, you don't know that the seagulls can be rather, well, militant. You have to be wary of them when the beach isn't crowded. Other than that, the beach is really beautiful. It is the kind of beauty that inspires art students to take pretentious black-and-white photography, We sat on the sea wall and watched the hardcore elderly joggers and some shady middle-aged men driving Land Rovers at around five MPH go by. There were some high schoolers driving sports cars they stole from their parents, because the Parkway is a first-rate spot for drifting. Everyone in Chelsea had school off that day. It was late on a Wednesday afternoon so the police weren't even bothering to patrol the beach and ticket the drifters. I don't really remember how that day ended; the memory of it sort of just goes on forever with us rambling a great deal about nothing on that sea wall and me hoping my fingers wouldn't fall off. I think Bubba's brother was MIA, so we trekked back to Ajax's house, because it was the closest. We hung around there for a bit, because, hey, that's what we do.