I remember Rubin Solaro. He was the only guy who ever scared Hector Luis. Nothing scared Luis.

Rubin wanted to kick my ass. Luis had a plan. He’d fought Rubin. Rubin hurt him bad. The plan was simple. Hector Luis would wrap my hands and put gloves on me and have me hit a tree for about half an hour a day. He said Rubin’s body was that hard, like hitting a tree. I would break my hand punching his gut. I had to get used to what it would feel like to hit him. We did this for a week.

The night of what was to be the fight came. Rubin’s girlfriend was with me in my car. We were parked outside the bar. Her saw us, approached my car. I rolled down the window and started to run my mouth. He connected with one shot to my temple. It knocked me clean across the front seats.

I woke up bloody. The girl was gone.

Luis was there. He said, “Lobb, you never told me you was with his girl!”

I said, “You think maybe that’s why he was pissed?”

His eyes were on fire, “You deserve to bleed behind that stupid shit.”

I don’t know until months later Luis answered Rubin’s attack on me with a maple baseball bat.

That war was over.

More were to come.

We thought we’d live forever, Luis and me. Luis didn’t. He’s been gone a long time. I still talk to him. I wish he’d lived to see the violence fade and just be a tired old man trying to piece together the memories to the scars.

One of the boys from back in the day said there is an honor in being an old man covered in scars. I’ve yet to understand the honor.

Tonight I lean on the kitchen sink looking out my window. The sun is setting after a violent mid-summer storm. The temperature has dropped twenty five degrees. The world is rich and green and alive and wet. The sharp last rays of this July day cut through the clouds and make the maples look to be blazing in gold. The hot air seems kinder. Me and Luis we never saw a sunset like that. Maybe it all would have been different if we had.

Luis was the street poet and the scholar. He always knew how to keep the blood inside. Blood was our currency and language. He called me blood and I called him blood, when the mother and father and the church and and the grandma had all abandoned us to the street, all we had left was our blood.

We were both cut up pretty bad from a fight one night. Sitting on some broken blacktop and glass bottles, bleeding, we rubbed our cut forearms together.

“You cut bad, man. I’m cut too. We got to keep that shit on the inside us. We is blood now for real now.”

I can still see that scar through a tattoo on my left arm.

Boys who played with sticks and knives. Blood brothers.

It’s the season again, I suppose; after a year and change away from gatherings of my sweaty fellow Americans, and silent furled flags, I find myself faced with the same old challenge. The questions and facts that have created some uncomfortable noise in my head since pretty Miss Garrison in the first grade sent me to stand in the corner, because I wasn’t quite sure. I got to know that cold, gray, granite block corner all too well. But the questions would not leave me alone. What am I swearing allegiance to?

I was always a less than obedient child, that is not a point of pride or shame, for me. It’s just a fact. I was born that way. My dad never answered questions, he was a pain in the ass, he always said, “Figure it out!” I think he was pretty smart and he sure wasn’t lazy, so I guess he felt it just better to let me ponder all these things that cause such rage and confusion for me, and makes little sense. He left me to draw my own conclusions. I think of him in these moments, “Thanks Dad, this could have been a Hell of a lot easier if you’d just have given me the answers.”

So here I find myself again, unable to raise a hand in salute, or create some implied agency by placing my hand over my heart. I contemplate is my simply standing there, refusing to even mouth the words, because I’m just so tired of being me, not wanting to start another confrontation, is it an act of cowardice, or justified defiance?

My days of needing to cause protest and disruption and chaos have been replaced by a great need to be simply left alone.

Leave me here to silently suffer your patriotism and puffed-out chests and anthems.

I look around the room and wonder if one single person considers the word allegiance at all.

Two hundred and forty years of endless war, and Trail of Tears and the Federal Reserve.

I want to salute the flag of those brave sons-of-bitches who stormed that beach in Normandy and the many who died there. I want to salute the flag of John Glenn and Neil Armstrong and Gene Kranz.

But the thought can’t leave me this is also the flag of the Vietnam war and the military-industrial complex Ike warned us about in 1962. It’s the flag of the 50,000 Americans who died in that war for no goddamned reason at all, except that from 1962 to Saigon’s fall in 1973 It pumped a trillion dollars into the veins of the economy—in today’s dollars.

It was also the flag of the men who murdered Emmett Till. It was the flag of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and the people they owned. It’s the flag of seventeen million American kids who go to bed hungry every night. It’s the flag of too many who died because they couldn’t afford to get the care they needed, in the richest nation on earth.

It is the flag of the obscenely rich, it’s the flag of a poor who are so destitute their life is a living horror.

It’s as much my flag as your flag.

It was the flag of Mohammed Ali and Ty Cobb, the man Babe Ruth called “A racist bastard,” in 1922. It was the Babe’s flag too. It was Chuck Yeagers flag and Jack Ruby’s flag. It was the flag of the land that murdered of Malcolm X, and the flag of the country that hopefully will send Derek Chauvin away for life.

It is the flag of the only nation on earth to ever unleash the nuclear bomb on another nation.

I’ve got a lot to contemplate before I go swearing allegiance to any nation or any thing.

And, look out, here comes the Forth of July. The patriots will be out in force.

It was October ‘65 and it was cold night with no moon. My father had died the previous April and I was still pretty pissed off about that, and all that went along with fathers dying. I didn’t like people feeling sorry for me, and I started to like fighting a lot.

I’d stopped talking to anyone but Kippy, he was twelve and I was eight, and twelve seemed pretty old and worldly. He was bigger than me, by a good foot, and I decided I’d not try to fight him, what with his long arms. Besides his dad had been in the Navy and mine was dead, so that somehow gave him authority.

Then the lights went out. Everything was black, darker than I’d ever seen, before or since. My sister was eighteen and she came home and said the whole town was pitch-black dark. She took me out the front porch and we smoked cigarettes and she told me she was sure it was UFOs. I didn’t say nothin’, just trying to inhale those Camels and not choke.

A fireman came to our house down by the lake and yelled at my sister for giving me the smokes. Then Ma’ came out front with us all and the fireman said the lights was out all the way up into Canada. I didn’t know if I should believe him because them fireman had been coming to our house a lot since my old man died and I wasn’t sure I was ok with it. I wasn’t so sure he was even a real fireman, either, and that it wasn’t just some made up shit. I’d never seen him put out no fire. My money was on he was up to something no good. Besides, how could he know about the lights way the Hell up in Canada.

Kippy and his sister showed up at out back door at the same time and came around front and met all of us: Ma’ the fireman, my sister and me. They said we should go to up to their house. Donna, Kippy’s sister said it was the Soviet’s and we was all gonna die. Ma didn’t want to go but I was really agitated.

That summer past I decided to not speak to no one but Kippy, and seeing how his dad had been in the Navy I figured he’d know what to do when the Soviets attacked.

I was a bit confused and Kippy couldn’t explain, but as the dark night wore on I got more agitated because I’d never done a goddamn thing to no Soviets, and now they were attacking my lake and my dad had just died.

The lights eventually did come back on and there was not a Soviet nor a UFO to be found, but from that day on I decided I’d never trust nobody. Not even Kippy.

That was 1965 to the best of my recollection.

Juneteenth:

My best friend Mark and I had a discussion last night about Juneteenth. Mark and I generally agree on most matters even if we see things from a different perspective. I’m a sixty something white guy, he’s a sixty something black guy. We’ve lived in the same country, through the same times, and seen the world through completely different eyes.

I oppose the federal holiday, for many reasons. Mark pointed out the painful irony of being a black man enslaved as the nation celebrated “Independence Day,” and in many ways this is is more than 150 years past due, and it is. I’m opposed to another holiday that has its meaning and significance lost, in the words of Nat King Cole, in “Those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, days of soda and pretzels and beer…”

Juneteenth should be a day of somber acknowledgment of this nations history of racial hate toward all non-white, non-European people. Trail of Tears to Tulsa, to Emmett Till to the young man shot dead in his car, reaching for his wallet.

Juneteenth for me should be a day of rage in the face of the cowardly Nazis who think denying another citizen human being’s right to a goddamn bottle of water while standing in line to vote is somehow ok.