A year on, Jake.

We were doing just under ninety miles an hour down Beecroft Road.
I remember because I was looking at the speedo, at your stupid smile, at the smartarse in the Mercedes dogfighting us through a run of three orange lights, then back at the speedo. Consistently hovering around ninety.
You could never stand losing and I was ever the gutless bastard.
But I wasn't scared of the dying.
I was only scared of dying on somewhere as unworthy as Beecroft Road.
I had grand and morbid designs. Going off a cliff outside Ventimiglia or disappearing on the outskirts of Roquefixade. At a pinch, stone cold sober and without a deity in sight somewhere and nowhere on the Nullarbor. At least that would have been the way I would have liked to have gone, brandishing a tattered copy of Dos Passos' USA in one hand and a Rickenbacker 360 in the other. And just vanishing.
But no. You were determined to make it here and now under a blue dome devoid of any clouds to give perspective.
On Beecroft fucking Road.
We beat the yuppie fuck,of course.
And we didn't get pinched.
But that stupid forced laugh you always gave, playing victor over a battle you were never sure you should have won. Never quite convinced even of how you had won it.
Afterwards we all hooked up at the local and everyone said, "Where the fuck did you two get to?"
They wouldn't have believed me if I said I'd just glimpsed hell. And suburban heaven.

Remember me.