Last night a kid threw a rock at me. I was in the street where I live, just looking up at the sky, enjoying the night air. And then zing, a rock the size of an egg goes by. I turned around and about a hundred feet from me sits a kid atop his bicycle. So I did the prudent, safe thing:
I took off after the little punk.
"Hey, did you just lose a rock?" I called after him.
I don't think he expected that. He sped down the hill on his bike. I followed after him a ways, just to let him know, well, what I'm not sure. That he can expect crazy wheelchair man to follow him for a few blocks, I guess.
About Me
- Paul
- Paul Guest is the author of four volumes of poetry and a memoir. His debut, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, was awarded the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize. His second collection, Notes for My Body Double, was awarded the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His third collection, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, was published by Ecco Press/HarperCollins in 2008. His fourth collection, Because Everything Is Terrible, was published by Diode Editions. His poems have appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. His memoir, One More Theory About Happiness, was published by Ecco in May 2010 and selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. The recipient of a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2007 Whiting Writers' Award, Guest lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
11 comments:
...ah, beautiful moment. i like remembering how, as kids, we had the mythology of the neighborhood...tha crazy man there, the old lady w/ cats there...
in my neighborhood, i'm the black mom w/ a white kid who has big witchy hair. they torment me by putting dirt in my mailbox. i scare them by knowing their names...
You "ROCK." Ha.
I laughed outloud at this, and it felt so wrong somehow. Your reaction was stellar. Had I been there, however, he and his bike would have been in the closest garbage can. Oh, with the rock too.
"Did you just lose a rock?" is one of those things I'd think of saying maybe two weeks later. What a great reaction on your part.
About three months ago some f*cking local punks (of which there are many in Baltimore) threw a rock hard at my window which for some reason didn't break. I ran outside, caught the one closest to me, marched him onto the porch, and called the cops. The cop (as they all are here) was big and pretty damn nasty to him, though he winked at me. It took every drip of the tough hoodlum's cracker blood to keep from crying like the little bitch he was. Ha ha! Brat.
kids are awful. except when they're not. at least he was a bad shot.
There's got to be some way of hooking up a pellet gun to your chair and aiming it with one of those joysticks.
;-)
A pellet gun! Or a paintball gun!
Or, maybe, a bazooka...
Dude, that's SO not cool. Glad you scared the pants off the kid.
I can't even believe this. I'm glad you went after him. Who throws a rock at somebody??
Man, that's awesome.
Post a Comment