Whatever Happened to Baby Wayne?

<p><span style=color: rgba(126 126 126 1)>You are ten years old. Your stomach aches. Your grandfather's hand rests on your shoulder like a weathered leather glove-silent steady and more comforting than any advice ever spoken. You're in a JC Penney dodging your grandmother's wart-picking scrutiny and your brother's thumb-sucking despair. You're in a swing singing about your uncle until he storms out with a belt like a black snake. You stop. You always stop.</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(126 126 126 1)>This is not a memoir. It is a </span><strong style=color: rgba(126 126 126 1)>field guide to survival</strong><span style=color: rgba(126 126 126 1)> in the rusted-out towns of New England where the church bells ring and the pot roast simmers but love is frozen solid in second-floor apartments. Where boys become men by slamming into each other on football fields only to be spit out into factories and bars. Where the All-Star never makes it the coach laughs when he hits you in the face and the only glory is someone else's.</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(126 126 126 1)>You meet Jen in Walgreens. She hasn't eaten all day. You buy her candy. She calls you Duane. You don't correct her.</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(126 126 126 1)>You dream of Nietzsche of Kerouac of Bukowski on a bicycle at the Oscars. You write poems like postcards from the edge of memory where the dead don't speak but their silence is deafening.</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(126 126 126 1)>You are Baby Wayne. Or maybe you were. Or maybe you never were.</span></p>