for Charlie

he was a year older than me
I didn’t know it yet though
all I knew was that
on Thursday’s
at swain elementary school
when I was in the library
looking for those Crestwood
books,
the ones I wanted would be gone
the next week when I would get there
I would read the library card
seeing the his name
as the last one who checked it out.
I wanted to kill him.
there was a small part of me
that wanted to hang out with him
talking about monsters,
but I wanted to kill him.
there were many weeks
when I had to check out books
that I had already read several
times,
in hopes of fucking him over
the same way he fucked me.

years later in high school,
I knew him through others
never really getting close enough
to have a conversation
also because I didn’t know he
and the library kid
were the same kid.
we didn’t find that out until years
later.

a couple years after that,
he wound up working
at my local video store
on Ball Road.
California Video.
it was the greatest video store
I had ever been in
it had everything I wanted and more.
we talked a lot about monster movies
classics and such.

then it turned out
that he went to college
with my first wife
and that they were very close.
when he moved back down
to Cypress
from Frisco,
we caught up
not believing how our lives
kept intersecting.
I was already making my
low budget shit flicks
he just got out of film school.
we ended up very close friends.
we helped each other out of shit,
horrible, horrible shit.
he became the only person
I could trust.
he worked on more of my films
than probably anyone else.
I was even lucky enough to
work on some of his.

his birthday is the day before mine.
his birthday is today.

happy birthday, Charlie.
love you, man!