“We should just stay at Brody’s.” I looked at John like he was nuts, “We came down here to find CJM-“John cut in, “He’s home!” I looked towards Market East, then back at John. Before I could say a word, “If he’s home, he’s fine… Jane’s with him.” Jane was a bit protective of CJM and she hated all his boys, especially me. I still have no idea why. “Yeah, I guess.” We started back towards Brody’s house.

It was always kinda cool what happened in the city when it started to get dark, you could still see the people rushing to get out of the city as their work day ended while the night-crawler traffic rushed in. South Street was still pretty good back then, don’t get me wrong, there were still plenty of assholes around but from Front Street up to around 7th it was always alive. This is when we would usually end up there. This time though, I was tired. I could see that John was as well. We covered what felt like all of South Philly trying to find CJM just to find out he already went home. I remember feeling a little weird about Butcher asking us if we needed somewhere to stay, Brody’s door was always open, why would we need an invite?

I tried not to think about it, the short walk to Brody’s felt so long at that point all I could think about was lying down. We were about three doors down from Brody’s and I could see the anxiousness in John’s steps. I knew we wouldn’t get to rest for long before people started showing up but it didn’t matter, I just needed to get me feet off the sidewalk. “It’s locked!” I thought John was gonna cry, “…Why the fuck is it locked?” Came to find out later that everyone went to Live Aid to start a riot and even if I remembered anyone talking about it, it wouldn’t have mattered, all I knew is that I was still gonna be walking. “Fuck man!” I think John must have realized what happened even though I didn’t know. He would take any opportunity to fight, especially an all out riot in the lot of some hippie gig like Live Aid and I could see it in his eyes. We walked back to South Street almost automatically to the pizza shop under Fat Tuesdays.

“Ickie?” Ickie was slouched down in the furthest corner seat in the place. “What are doing here man? Ivan is gonna kill you if he sees you here…” Ickie looked right past me, directly at John. I think John scared him more than Ivan did. “He’s at Live Aid with Justin.” I could hear the nervousness in his voice, “John is way too tired to…” before I could finish saying it, John had already ran past me right at Ickie. Ickie jumped over the table, right past John and out the door, John was right behind him.

Tesco knows that sometimes you can walk all day and still not get where you wanted to go.
Archives

| Permalink | Del.icio.us It | Fark It | Digg It| Stumble It!