Some nights the light got in, a bit of joy crawled underneath the maudlin broadloom and Ricky embellished the stowaway vignettes of bliss with clenched eyes. Pangs of mediocrity, satisfaction and mental additives that constructed harmless domestic scenes of comfort and healing. Herbal teas, the crunch of toast, the slow burn crackle of a fireplace.

The nightmares on Glenvale Boulevard had a four-pronged distribution and some nights, Holly, Gwen, Randy and Ricky Galore felt the hostile kinetic energy blow the monitoring chart erratic: like a polygraph test needle—tarnishing a once blissfully clean parchment into blood-splattered illegibility. Was it the house, the economy, a cellar’s stairwell cupboard pregnant with two cases of beer, four a night, six a night, down to three a night, the chain-like clanking of empties stacked at the top of the basement stairs, trophies of disgrace hugging the top step—why couldn't he put the empties back in the case? Why, Ricky thought, did he leave these ugly brown walrus teeth at the top of the stairs? Ricky polarized this image; it was an inventory awareness campaign designed to cure Randy's fear of pulling out an empty during a moment in need of dire quench—that's why...And why was Ricky visualising his father's depressant-downing routine? You are too simple, staggeringly simple, must be more to you, but I never want to know. Ricky said, placing his school bag on his bed when the phone rang. Scanning the room as he walked to the phone, he noticed his mother had cleaned his room again, despite being all the way in the basement.

“Hey yeah...that sounds cool,” Ricky said. It was Andrew. He was about to ask Andrew about the go-karts when he heard faucet running upstairs.

“Hold on, I gotta go, there’s a burglar in the house.”

“What?” Andrew said.

“I'll call you back, it’s probably Jason or Freddie.”

“You're coming to the cottage this weekend right? We're leaving at eight sharp Friday.”

“Yeah, for sure.”

“Pack a swimsuit.”

“Oh yeah!” Ricky shouted in a tonsil-dragging voice, strained out like Randy Savage, “I'm gonna take it to the max!”

“Get over it. We’re not wrestling. Besides, you know who’d win.” “No way ‘cos the madness surrounds you yeah!”

Suddenly stricken with a burglarized fear, he put the receiver down. His heart felt sickened and dipped in a vat of high-octane anxiety. Who is in the house with me? Ricky stood up quiet and tiptoed out of his bedroom, leaning his head up the stairs angling him mischievously without pressing his foot on the bottom step, a trick he mastered whenever he wanted to escape the house undetected. Truthfully, he wouldn't have noticed the rustle in the kitchen, or been concerned at all, but he was always the first one home for at least an hour. He snaked upstairs, clutching the doorframe as he pulled himself into the kitchen silently, only to trip over a small pumpkin as he fully arrived.

“Are you okay?”

“Well, that all depends,” Ricky said, smiling and choking as he greeted his older sister’s best friend Elizabeth. He took a deep breath as sort of a reality checkpoint. Great, what am I wearing? Can’t look down now. Relax.

On many occasions in recent months, he had watched Elizabeth from his basement window, in the backyard, dancing with his sister Holly. They were in their swimsuits, tanning, reading magazines, listening to music and talking about boys. She was the opposite of her sister, who had dark features: raven black hair, brown eyes and a compact athletic build. Elizabeth was blond, blue-eyed, and built like a brick house. He had heard them referencing the song one afternoon in particular that involved at least two ass slaps. Ricky had been casually keeping score.

“That’s so you,” Holly would tease Elizabeth, singing along, “she’s a brick-house.”

Everything about Elizabeth excited Ricky. He was a fan: from her lifeguard fantasy features to the way her voice sounded, to the way skin glowed at dusk, the way she chewed salad across the table when she stayed for dinner, to the way her laugh dangled on like a record needle ignored after play, infectious.

He was quick to remind himself about his recent arts and crafts outing, and to hide the evidence of this focus as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

All week Ricky had been constructing his very own Macho Man replica ring jacket. He had gone out to a fabric store, weeks ago, on a whim, purchased a few feet of multi-coloured and solid-coloured materials and began visualizing his final peacock swirl. He operated on his barely worn jean jacket and had his mother sew green sleeves on the tough material, complete with several purple and orange streamers: twenty-two in fact, nearly four feet long apiece, were sewn under each arm for added effect.

As he toiled over the project, Ricky spoke in Macho Man tongues, as verbal seizures, throat-sanded, hands spasming, “the man with the dirty money set me up! Yep, you guessed it, it's the Macho Man Randy Savage.”

“This is a Macho Mash up, oh yeah! This chapter is a found chapter combined with, ah, biographical type information, and personal anecdotes, because I’ve soared with the eagles, slithered with the snakes and been everywhere in between, ooohhh yeeeaaahhh!”

It was a poor man’s Savage jacket, with its cafeteria shock salad dressing array of fluorescents, but Ricky didn’t seem to mind. Savage wore this style when he was feuding with Dusty Rhodes and his sidekick Sapphire. Ricky wasn’t really feuding with anyone. He was lonely and bored. However, this kitchen slow motion stomach butterfly farm fuelled the teen.

As he watched Elizabeth down another glass of municipal water, her glossed lips beading drips, his eyes blotted in neon frenzy. He felt his face reddening, accented with hot pink, the late afternoon sun made the kitchen neon yellow. He took a deep breath and there it was: her undying love of scented lip-gloss. The lip-gloss pulled at his heartstrings. He could smell it in his dreams in which he and Elizabeth would go to the movies, put suntan lotion on her back, help her pick out clothing, when they'd eat pancakes together—she'd always smell like coconuts or something, watermelon, and her lips shined infinitely, bright as flashbulbs. Whenever she was around he felt more alive than usual, that is, he didn't feel like the lonely boy in a basement bedroom wallowing. Even on a basic operating level, Elizabeth now rivaled all his hand-me-down pornos, especially in dreams or on land, when she would wear the tightest most bum-worn jeans he had ever seen, cradling her apple-bum, which sent Ricky over the edge in lusty mental marathons.

Seeing Elizabeth, fawn-like, drinking tap water in the kitchen startled him. He counted down from five in his head: "What are you doing here? Is my sister even home?" That was good, he thought. She had turned around and immediately smiled. Elizabeth refilled the cup.

“I guess I'm early. The front door was open. We’re supposed to carve pumpkins together,” You are the pumpkin, he thought, not sure exactly what he meant by the remark, glad he thought it and didn't say it.

“Okay, well, continue pouring water or whatever you are doing." He began to leave, but knew this was a mistake in any rough draft romantic battle plan. To Ricky her scent had become a legendary nutrient that was now dripping inside his brain, and this brain was tonguing away at each spongy crevice for the most atomized of traces. It was not just her proximity but the collision of fantasy Elizabeth and real-life Elizabeth both 18, one breathing inside his mind, the other breathing and standing before him. He felt her gentle laugh inside his bloodstream, and this feeling excited him to a boil. It lacked resolve. As he left the kitchen and returned down the stairs, he flung his closet open, kicked the Macho Man jacket inside and slammed the door shut.

Did I say goodbye to her? No time time to wonder, seconds later Elizabeth had pushed his bedroom door open.

“What are you doing?” Elizabeth said, scanning Ricky's bedroom with her dancing eyes.

“I am hiding in my room until I’m needed.”

“Needed?”

“Why? Did the taps stop working?”

“No,” Elizabeth said, shaking her head with a slight grin. “Just wondering. Can’t you keep me company?"

“Okay.” She glided past him, her hips swinging out in casual slow-motion, her tight jeans with the slightest rip made Ricky’s eyes bore down on the threading vulnerability.

She turned around in his room and looked him up and down.

“Ricky how old are you now?”

“Why? You know that. I'm in grade ten. Are you making a trivia board game or something?”

“What?”

“It's a simple question.”

“Your room is cool.”

“Thanks. I built it from a kit, when I was in my prime.”

“You're crazy.”

“Yeah, clearly. You can sit here.” Ricky said, trying to contain his excitement and possibly blushing face. He pointed to a cozy one-seater chair facing his bed.

At the foot of his bed on a table sat a television that was playing a movie.

“What movie are you watching?”

“I think it’s Patriot Games.”

“Haven't seen it.” Elizabeth said, looking directly toward Ricky, who was pacing in front of the bed.

“Sit down.”

“I can.”

“I know you can.”

A quick scan of the room would reveal to Elizabeth that Ricky preferred to surround himself in a lonely confluence of sports heroes and zeros, TV guide covers featuring the latest teen prime time drama stars, a Jawa jigsaw puzzle mounted on a piece of plywood, and a cold empty bookcase, partially painted navy blue to match his bedroom walls. Randy Savage watched from his pushpin viewpoint, from behind his trademark shades, posing for a blue Macho Madness t-shirt from an outdated WWE catalogue.

“Do you have a girlfriend Ricky?”

“No. Do you?”

“Ha ha.”

“Because I won't judge you if you do.” Ricky said, now a bit more in control, he had stopped pacing, and sat down, half his body turned towards the television, the other to Elizabeth.

“Were you always funny?”

“Not before I was born. Then I didn't tell so many jokes. Also when I'm asleep, not really funny.”

“Seriously, you're a riot.”

“Why, do I seem funny to you?”

“I guess I've never really talked to you alone.”

“No, probably not.”

“You should have a girlfriend.”

“So should you, but not my sister.”

“Why not?”

“Anyway, why are you and my sister carving pumpkins? Isn't that something two year olds do?”

“Well, goof, it's for a party we're going to tomorrow.”

“I see.”

“Come here.”

“Why?”

“Just come here, stand up, sit on my lap.”

“That seems weird.”

“It’s not weird. I practically raised you.”

“I've only met you like four times, that hardly counts as childrearing.”

“Fine, I'll make room, sit here.”

“Okay.” Ricky moved towards Elizabeth and the cozy chair, squeezed his body in between the right arm of the chair and Elizabeth's tight black mini skirt, where she immediately took his left hand and placed it on her knee. Ricky slowly turned his head towards her.

“This is nice,” she said, watching Ricky’s trembling gaze surrender into blush.

* * *

“Fuck you!” Ricky shouted back at his father. “I'm so sick of this, you’re the criminal, not me, fucking prick!” Ricky shoved his father into a woodpile, causing him to topple down onto the concrete. Ricky got on his bike and pedaled off, tears melting down the side of his red face. The cool afternoon air went over Ricky's fresh scratch marks like lip across wind instruments. It was this fight in particular that lead to an anonymous call, and the subsequent visit by a social worker from social services, and the after school special took off the very next day...

Inside the clench, the flinch a fantasy uncoils, a ream a reel of doing of smiling of killing out the same way to your father, the agony of his life scattering soil over your face. You'll never drink the satisfaction of a fist kiss. Those are your dreams. I called them out, shook them out to this arena of shape shifting memories.

Ricky’s mother greeted him at the door.

“Hi Ricky how was school?” Gwen asked.

“Okay. Why are you home so early from work?” Ricky inquired, immediately suspicious of the greeting.

“I wanted to talk to you, this is a councillor, she’s here to talk to you about you and your father.”

“Hello Ricky, I'm Samantha Jennings from youth social services,”

“What do you want? What is this going to accomplish? He's not even here.”

“Well, we want to hear your side of things.”

“Ricky, just take your coat of, put your bag down, do you want something to drink?”

“Don’t you see, it doesn't matter what I say, the police come and side with you guys.”

“Just relax Ricky,” Gwen said.

“Just tell me Ricky, are things okay at school?”

“School is fine. It’s here, at home, my father, he wants to kill me.”

“We just want to talk about things.”

“Things? What's going on? What is this about? You're making it out to be all my fault, aren't you? What am I going to do? Have a lemonade stand outside and get my own apartment so I can finish high school?”

“No Ricky, just listen to her...”

“That's why she's here, listen, this is not a one-sided thing where I just attack him out of like, no reason."

And when retaliation became sin, I walked in up right down on top of and shot you in, between the eyes. Unkempt eyebrows danced. Thin knuckles eighteen. Knuckles seventeen. You flinched, closed your eyes and turned that back and ate the blow. All the blows I donated to your corpse. Undefeated teenager, I laughed during our routine, your useless performance, and tired muscles, dial police, elimination prints 1991 but not 1979. Home-owner, home ice advantage. This isn't a poem, it sucks like a straw punctures juice box. It makes you want to be someone else.

“We want to figure out what is bothering you. She's here to help you.”

“Are you all insane? Figure out what is wrong? He comes home drunk, he bursts into my room in the middle of the night to finish a fight we had like a week before, then the police come, and threaten to bring in the children’s aid to cater our next family picnic, on top of all this I have to work part-time at grocery store, and school. He’s making my life hell.It's not my fault. It can't be all my fault.”

“When did these incidents with your father start?”

“Well, they seem to have started a lot more recently,” Gwen interjected. “Ricky and Randy just get into these arguments, it’s fine when Ricky’s at work, or Randy’s at work, but when they’re both at home.”

And the muscles on television worked out into the basement night where I hid against a tide of fluff and laundry noise. My stuffed lion, my stuffed giraffe, practiced on, picking on their weak spots, noticing their blind spots, their weakest counters.

“Where do you work Ricky?”

“I'm a fucking surgeon, what does it matter? Are you going to write it down? Is that your job?”

“Ricky, please cooperate.”

“I don't understand what this is about.”

“I have to assess the situation to see if Children’s Aid needs to be called.”

“Why can't he move out? Why does he have to be here? It’s like prison with him here.”

Gwen twisted her face into a strange and brief contortion: an odd unphotogenic grimace, as if trying forming a question mark with her lower facial muscles: “But why do you get so violent Ricky?”

And how many times we worked the main event before my testicles dropped and shattered and you threw me to bed and peeing down my legs sleeping with red legs in a crabby balls rashed with urine and eyes glazed in kerosene tears or so it seemed, eye thrown over surgeon's loom and the scent of beer, a rancid cup of your sweat frothing, I refuse to down it like a sick party trick.

The councillor looks at Ricky, then at Ricky's mother who's eyes were teeming in juice. “Remember when I used to take you to the library? Remember…” Then Ricky cut a promo charged with more honesty and sadness than even Ricky thought possible.

“Okay, let’s play remember, remember when I was five and good ol’ Randy would jerk me around and throw me onto the couch for breach of protocol, or toy hazards, when I’d be so scared I’d pee my pants in fear, when he'd come into my room and throw shit around, and I'd hit him and he'd look at me and sickly glare: YOU THINK YOU'RE HURTING ME?”

I can never remember worrying about ratings, or what the ratings did, I was dealing with puberty, and the top of the hour had more to do with if I was hungry, depressed or ready for my test or presentation. I tried to maintain a level of normalcy, which I supposed could double as professionalism. Did we feel the roar of the imaginary crowd, an invisible sympathy, and then the commercial break? Did any of this actually happen? Was I watching it happen, participating? Was it inconsistent storytelling, unreliable parental narratives, poor booking? I imagine a lot of insecurities were going on, the vibe was not always pleasant. Though sometimes there was no vibe at all.