The Cold Inside ©2001 David Boyne

So it’s 1974 and I'm seventeen and I'm a caricature: the angry young white rural male.

Summer is worst. I've no idea why. You would think that the school year would be worst, with its routine stupidity. But it's summer when I could puke up my scorn, it's so twisted in my guts. A-yup.

I always carry a knife, a folding knife with a four-inch blade. It's a Buck knife, a well-made knife. I understand how knives can fascinate people, the way some people are fascinated by snakes. But I'm not fascinated by knives or snakes. I carry a knife because it's useful. I hike in the woods a lot, and even camp and have built some shelters and spent some days and nights in them.

This is the first time I've written a story. If you call this a story. I just want to get something out. I'm thinking it's more a journal. Maybe I'll start a movement. Yeah: therapeutic journals to keep angry young men from axe-murdering their biology teachers, or joining the marines on a whim.

I'm supposed to register for the draft. Selective service. Have you ever in your fucking life heard anything so perfectly named? They select the guys in jeans and flannel shirts with knives in sheaths on their wide leather belts so the guys in khakis and sweaters who seem to sweat cologne and genuinely look up to the school's guidance counselors can go to college and someday select the guys in jeans and flannel shirts and you get the idea.

In the theater we call "society", my friends, costume is character.

Don't worry, from here on I'll be a lot less philosophic, sophomoric, moronic. Right.

Doesn't matter where in this country you grow up, it's all the same movie, different costumes. But the good thing about growing up in Maine? It's within striking distance of Canada. They come selecting me, I'm gone. Yeah. I'll leave a note. Carefully written, or maybe even typed. But what would it say? Fuck you, of course. Stupid. And I promised not to be moronic, didn't I?

Okay. So I'm an angry young man and I've got a motorcycle. What a joke! Want a bigger joke? It's just a little Honda 360 older than I am. Sure, it'll go 80mph but when you whine it out it sounds like a snot-nosed seven-year-old complaining that you changed the television channel during his favorite after-school cartoon. A-yup.

Here's the thing: I'm zinging down I-95, no helmet, with a friend, Chris, on the seat behind me and we're on our way to a house party in Old Saybrooke and it's the middle of a warm summer Saturday afternoon and as we're zooming along I see two guys ahead up on an overpass and I know, know instantly, what they are doing.

They're tossing rocks at cars.

This story will appear in Velocity Nine Stories of People In Motion Autumn 2008 Published by Green Flash Publishing

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