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By Root 561 0

seven days, and I didn’t have any way to get treatment. I probably should have been laid up in a hospital, or, at the very least, at home resting, but I couldn’t afford to miss work. I didn’t have a family physician, obviously, or health insurance, and one trip to a doc-in-a-box cost $95 plus whatever I would have to pay for antibiotics, none of which was a feasible option. (It wasn’t until a month later that I learned about the free health clinic.) I loaded up on Maalox and other over-the-counter medicines—necessary expenses that chipped away at my savings account—and I ate everything that the Doctor’s Book of Home Remedies3 at Barnes and Noble told me to. By day four, all of my symptoms had pointed directly to having a stomach ulcer—the result of my consumption of some harmful Latin-named bacteria—so at least I knew what I had to treat. Nevertheless, it was a painful experience that had me falling behind on our moves. Way behind. Derrick tolerated it for two days but then had me work with somebody else until I felt better. No sympathy.

BG saw that I was hurting, so he gave me a few days off from our constant bickering. But at the first sign of my feeling better, we picked up right where we had left off.

We always argued. It was like a sport to us, our recreational activity. Literally. That’s how we burned calories at night. If we weren’t bickering, then something wasn’t right, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing since everything was out there, in the open, no holds barred. And 99 percent of the time, our feuds were so trivial, anyway, that we never took each other seriously.

“Man, BG. What is this? I just bought this box of Frosted Flakes yesterday. How’s it empty already?”

“Chill, Shep. I was hungry and I couldn’t get to the store.”

“Right. But the whole box?”

“Dog, why you even worried about it?”

“I’m just sayin’, I just hate that you eat all my food, all the time. Sandwiches, chicken, cereal. But, whatever. Just forget about it. You need to save your money anyway, so you can afford to buy wholesale packages of Chap Stick for your big-ass lips.”

“My lips, huh? Dog, look at your ears. Dumbo. Yo’ goofy ass got the biggest ears I ever seen in my life. Them bitches are like satellite dishes. Shit, go stand by the TV and see if you can fix some of that static.”

Such was our conversation, at least once a day. We would then retreat to our neutral corners for a couple of hours until BG needed a favor.

“Hey, man, can I borrow your truck to run up to the gas station right quick?”

“Sure, here’s a dollar. Grab me a Mountain Dew.”

“Cool.”

I wondered which gas station he was going to, though. Maybe the one down in Savannah. He would be gone for at least three hours—usually more like five—and that would tick me off even more, so our dissension would begin anew upon his return. It was a relentless cycle, but somehow it was never very serious. Quick to quarrel, quick to make amends.

In spite of our clashes, BG and I were still becoming friends. His life had been so much more interesting than mine, and I loved hearing about it. Especially his time in jail. His stories frequently started with, “Shoot, this food is a’ight. But it ain’t as good as the food up at Effin’ham. They feed you right up there.” Or, “Man, I remember this one time up in Kingstree…” Unlike a lot of people he knew—like Derrick, who had served twenty-four months—he had never done any hard time in prison. Even BG’s brother was serving hard time for an arson conviction. He had gotten into an argument with a lady who had made prejudiced remarks, and he told her he was going to burn down her flower shop. So, he did. But BG knew better than to make stupid decisions like that. His violations were always minor—getting locked up for driving with a suspended license or for beating up his stepfather “in self-defense” when BG heard he was assaulting his mom. Or my favorite, the time he went to Bike Week up in Myrtle Beach, which was jam packed with the biggest and baddest motorcyclists on the East Coast riding the biggest and baddest motorcycles in the world. BG