Terrorist
Author: Bill Roberts
My palms were sweating again
when I met Pete some forty years later.
I used to sweat all over back then
when we were in school and he,
a vicious, unrelenting bully,
was my one and only reason
for being late so often mornings:
I didn’t want to confront him
and go through the humiliating ritual
of being grabbed by my shirt front
and shaken down,
having to expose the contents
of my pockets and lunch bag.
The years hadn’t been overly kind
to Pete, though his flower business,
I’d heard, had made him wealthy:
he was entirely bald -
not a pleasant prospect in combination
with his menacing, pockmarked face -
and the scars from various invasions
of his brain coursed wildly
over his yellowish skull.
He slammed down the receiver,
after eying me through the several minutes
of his vituperative conversation,
stood, lurched toward me,
grabbed my hand and shook it nearly off.
We spoke of old times,
even joked about the money I had contributed
to the purchase of his business.
We spoke as friends -
he not apologizing for teenaged terrorism,
me not mentioning I knew he was dying.
(First published in The Raintown Review, Vol. 1, No. 2, June 1998 under my then pseudonym, Bartlett Boswell)
Note: Funny day back in the summer of 1995. I’d just escorted my best friend, Rodney Miller, to his last chemotherapy treatment at George Washington Hospital very near the White House in D.C. Rodney knew he was on borrowed time, his mind sharp as ever, suggesting that we stop in and visit with our old nemesis from Central Junior High days, Pete Chaconas (the same guy from the previous poem, “Floored”) at his thriving flower shop. It happened just as described in the poem and turned out to be a delightful day, scary though those few moments were before the handshake. Amazing how people can bridge that awesome gap in time, hurdle over painful memories and find pleasant things to talk about. My pal Rodney died soon after this. A note on him: last time I came to visit, I brought him a black and gold T shirt with the charging buffalo logo from the University of Colorado in Boulder. He cried, told me it meant a lot to him and that people too often forget to bring presents to friends who are dying. Never too late to learn how to be human.
