Sometimes I Forget

Last night it was about 3 in the morning when LJ came in and came up to bed. I'd been asleep for a couple of hours, but I woke up while he was sitting on the edge of the bed eating his dinner. I've learned, from hard experience, that there is no such thing as choosing a time for a conversation with LJ--it just happens and that's how it is, and we can sleep when we're dead, I guess.

"Everything's all fucked up," he told me. "I found out a bunch of stuff I didn't know before today."

And he told me about one of his friends, part of his circle of supply and demand. This is someone LJ spent a lot of time with over the past few months; someone he's taken road trips with, someone he's known for many years. Now he's got three separate groups of people after him, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. This guy fucked with the wrong people, LJ told me. He got in over his head and then tried to fix it by getting in even deeper, and now he's in so deep that it's very likely the only way it's gonna end is with a murder. It's not like he can undo what he did, or like he can apologize. The streets don't work like that.

LJ tried to play it off like everything else--this is how it is, this is the game as it's played--but I could tell he was a little shaken. This guy, he said...he came up before any of us. He was the one who did it right. He just got....thirsty, I guess. Doin' stupid shit.

I told him to be careful, that I wasn't going through that again, and he told me he's cutting all ties. I believe that; LJ, for all his quirks, has a strong self-preservative instinct. All his friends have been locked up at least once, most of them three or four times; not LJ. Even doing what he does, he's got a good head on his shoulders. But when I come in at the end of the day and hand him the keys to the truck and hug him and tell him "Be careful" as he walks out the front door, sometimes I forget: I'm not sending him off to some cushy office job. Anything can happen.