Pain

     He felt in control that night. He just wished he could control other things in his life as well as he could control his alcohol intake.

     Obviously one area in which he longed for more control was his relationship with Susan. Like the iceberg that awaited the arrival of the Titanic, he could see that something disastrous was going to occur. He desperately wanted to believe otherwise. But staring at the flames shooting out of the garbage can, he admitted to himself for the first time that she would never wear his ring. He could not be his true self if they were to stay together. He would end up hilding so much anger that he would surely give himself an ulcer by age 30. She was too stubborn to loosen her grip on the relationship and he was too stubborn to allow her to rule dictatorially—no matter how benevolent she tried to be. He was ruefully anticipating the day when their ship would sink. The only thing he questioned was whether or not he would go down with the ship.

     He wanted more than anything for her to be there at the party. He wanted to hold hands and stare into her eyes by the light of the fire. There was still that chance. Although she said she had other plans, Susan loved to throw an occasional change-up. She wanted to be thought of as unpredictable and mysterious. After two months, though, Richard saw right through her. To him, Susan had become predictable in her unpredictability. Now her attempts to remain mysterious were a huge annoyance to him. Although he wouldn’t put money on it, he was relatively sure she wouldn’t show up to Dick Stomp. He hoped he was wrong.

     “Hey Dick,” Gopher said, bringing Richard out of his daze. “Mad Dog’s gonna read the poem. Come on in.”

     Mad Dog’s poems were always the highlight of a party Usually at about 2 a.m. Mad Dog would get naked and start howling. Like a mating call, this was the sign that the poem was soon to be read. His poems were read in grandiose fashion as if they were about the adventures of medieval knights. But the words were always linked to the things that dominated Mad Dog’s life: drunkenness, nudity and the everyday pain a distance runner must endure to be successful.

     His poems were always written in basic four-line AABB style. Mad Dog would read the first two lines of a stanza, pause to let it sink in (and let the laughter due down), and then roll out the next two lines, to which the crowd would generally explode in laughter. The words he wrote were clever enough, but it was the delivery that made Mad Dog’s poems so well received.

     The apartment was quite crowded in back. Richard worked his way up to the front and saw Mad Dog howling naked on the puke couch. He saw the hard-core guys—Phil, Atlas, Jeff, Hargrove, Johnny, and Gopher—begin to strip. Not wanting to be left out, Richard took his clothes off and flung them into the corner between the puke couch and the wall. The nudists cleared a space for themselves by pushing some of the clothed on-lookers back a few steps. Most of the party-goers didn’t want to be too close to these crazy naked men and were more than willing to take two steps back. Once given room to operate, the seven nudists got down on their knees below Mad Dog and awaited the poem. The crowd hushed and Mad Dog began:

“We are the clickers, the rollers, the midnight controllers,

The ones with the strength, the exhaustion bestowers.

Taking on the night with no regret,

Sleeping all day after a huge dice bet

We take on the world, beer after beer,

Staring death in the eyes without true fear.

Playing a hand of cards dealt in life,

We accept the madness without strife

With high quality gas, we ride the road,

Invisible to sight and in stealth mode.

We are the few, the rare, the handpicked ones,

Rolling though life with double shotguns.

So beware the weak, you know your own name,

Cause we’re playing the night, down the high road to fame.”