29

Justin was hanging out on the front porch.


Yo were u bin? Read the incoming text message.

Bin bizzy. He sent back.

Getin likked dogg. U in?

No I’s chillin.


He was hesitant to divulge the information of his wherabouts to all but his closest of friends. He knew they wouldn’t understand. Not yet. They weren’t ready. But they would have to be sooner or later, if his plans for the Adamites were to become a reality.

He still had the same simple philosophy he’d always had: you’re either with him or against him. It was Justin against the world. Same old Justin. Only now, the modes had changed. The basis of comparison for his basic existential axiom, ‘with him or against him,’ had changed. What was considered to be ‘against him’ was now quite a different thing. The attitudes and behaviors behind which it was meant to be ‘with him’ were now quite perceptively different.

His other basic tenet, ‘fuck the world,’ remained a constant in his thoughts only now … now it seemed a strange and foreign idea, but one he was still deeply attracted to. He saw that to ‘fuck the world’ could be a beautiful thing. An act of love as Leah might put it. To open up the world to him and to be one with his environment seemed to him a more rewarding pasttime than trying to tear it down in a bitter dust cloud of rage or apathy.

He wasn’t all ‘fruity and shit’ like Leah, but the world was now his to deflower. He still wanted to tear down, but now he was preoccupied in building back up and creating the world anew. A new way of life based on the model of he and his posse, the Adamites. One where people really thought about what they were doing and how they were interacting with other people.

He saw that people were essentially split up into three basic categories: the alpha doggs, the drones, and the high-minded muthafuckas.

He was ruminating on this idea when one of his friends sent him a video message:

Chek owt dis krakhed MF! LOLZ!


It was a video of a tired looking man with hard-etched features in disheveled used clothing dancing and singing in a worn-out grizzly voice. The toothless man clapped his hands above his head and danced a pathetic jig in some urine stained back alley with Justin’s friends crowded around, doubled-over, laughing, hands to mouths saying “oh shit, son.” When the man was finished, standing there panting, out of breath, one of them threw some small change callously in a dingy, cloudy puddle. The man went on his hands and knees, digging his dark stained fingers into the undetermined liquid to retrieve it. The last image on the video was the face of the friend who sent the video, close-up, laughing hysterically.


He was once like them. They were his crew. How many jigs had he made crack heads dance in back alleys over the years? How many songs had they sung? Now they all crowded around his conscience, knocking and banging around, looking not for loose change, but for empathy and surprisingly, getting it.

He saw in the video not a crackhead, but a man. A man who’d been sold a lie. A man who’d turned off and lost his mind in a vain effort to feed it. A man who he no longer saw as the enemy of society but the victim of it.

Yes, what it was to be against him had become a quite different thing indeed. And the truth was, he didn’t find that video very fucking funny at all.