Experiment in Terror 09 Dust to Dust(72)

When I lost him, when I was put away in the mental institute, it was bad. But I recovered. I had my own self to fix and I had faith that he was getting on with his life somewhere. Well, actually, I hated him at that point and wished him a bad case of dick rot. How dare he desert me during my time of need?

Now, I can see that why he did it. We were both to blame. Maximus let his pettiness and jealousy get the better of him and I fucked him over, breaking our hard-earned bro code like it was police tape. Which, was something I also liked to break a lot of at the time.

But now, now things were different. When Maximus came back into my life, sitting at that bar in Red Fox, he threw a wrench into the carefully orchestrated play I was holding. He was like Dorothy, pulling back that damn curtain and showing the world the man behind the show. I wanted Perry to keep thinking I was the all-powerful Oz. I didn’t want someone from my past to come along and show her that I was nothing like who I was pretending to be.

That’s what he did, though. On purpose, I’m sure, and also there are just some parts of you that are really fucking hard to hide. Perry eventually saw the real me. And she fell in love with the real me. And if it wasn’t for Maximus exposing me for what I was, who I was, who knows if that would have happened.

There was a lot of wrong that Maximus did but in the end, I can’t fault him. For all of his shortcomings, he was never malicious. He was just an ex-immortal, struggling with the rest of us with what it meant to be human.

Now, Maximus was dead. Dead forever, dead for good, dead in the ways that the old him could never even imagine. And though we’d never really grown that close again, though I’d come up with a million nicknames for his freckled ass and he’d done some shit that had royally pissed me off, losing him hurt.

More than that, it shocked me. I’d seen enough death in my day but it never got easier. Maximus gave up his life so that Perry could get me back. In the end, he was a guardian. I just wished I had a chance to thank him for it.

But that’s why we were standing along the East River, staring at the murky water as it slowly moved past. This was our chance to say good bye.

I looked down the row of us, at Perry, holding my hand beside me, the wind making her hair move like a black silk flag, at Ada beside her, all bleached blonde innocence gone wrong, at their mother, who was standing so straight and strong, it was hard to believe she had gone through what she had with us, and of course her father, balding and portly, wearing a scowl on his face that said he’d rather be elsewhere and thought we were all still tripping on acid.

He could believe what he wanted. It made no difference to me.

Perry looked up at me. “Do you want to start it off?” she asked. She was holding a handful of yellow roses we purchased from a street side vendor. Roses, for Rose. That was a phone call we didn’t want to make but Perry had the balls to do it that morning. Somehow she tracked her down by calling the bar she owned in New Orleans. The moment I heard Rose bawling over the speaker, I had to leave the room. I couldn’t deal with the pain again.

I nodded and cleared my throat. Unlike everything I was just thinking, I was going to keep this short. Maximus would have probably appreciated it and it would definitely prevent me from crying again.

“Maximus was a man of many faces,” I said, feeling both honest and self-conscious. “Most of them aggravatingly handsome.” I noticed Perry’s dad looking at me oddly and I shrugged. “It was annoying, actually, having his mug around me all the time. He could make me look bad just by showing up. He was always just so…much better than me. Better than everyone. And he didn’t even try. He just was. He was strong, he was funny in his backward southern way, he was smart, again in his backward southern way.”

“Is this a funeral or a roast?” Daniel asked, as if he cared.

I ignored him. “I can laugh about all of that, because it was true and that’s the way he was to me. We made fun of each other constantly, because we could. He was a good man, you know. For all the shit we gave each other, he was loyal. Even when he wasn’t, he still was. And he’d watch out for you. He cared. That was probably the thing that bugged me the most and that’s what stands out when I think about Ginger Balls.”

Perry made a tsking sound beside me, her mouth turned down, but I couldn’t help it. “What, it’s true,” I protested. “He cared more than anyone. So I can give him a nickname in death. It doesn’t mean he wasn’t a heck of a guy, a heck of a friend. He was all of those and a bunch of other things that I can’t even begin to be.”