Noah Cicero - Best Behavior

Marissa was drunk. But she was sober enough to play Monopoly. Everyone was excited about Monopoly. They kept talking about past games of Monopoly. Who beat who and how they beat them. Everyone had a philosophy on Monopoly. I had never played Monopoly. I was scared.

The board was put out on the floor. Everyone gathered around the board like Navajos in a sweat lodge. Like students gathered around Socrates and disciples gathered around Jesus. They herded together in a little group, with pagan idols as game pieces to match wits. To own spaces on a board. To play capitalist. To become the owners of large corporations determined to reap profits by searching the earth for the cheapest labor possible. They purchased real estate charging high rents, finding poor folk to share crop their land. Sending slave ships to Africa to pick their cotton. Sending boats to Southern Italy and Greece to work in their steel mills. Building a shoe factory in China, a shirt factory in Brazil. It was The Dream. And they were living it.

I was presented the dog piece. I looked down at the dog piece and felt wary. I was drunk. Too drunk to play Monopoly; too drunk to care about a dog piece.

We started playing.

Marissa and Joseph were Monopoly Nazis.

They had very serious expressions of determination and capitalistic ambition.

Couldn't handle all that ambition and left the room without saying anything.

Walked into Monica's room.

Saw her bed.

It looked soft and polite.

I laid down.

The room was dark and everyone was yelling and screaming in the other room.

Monica came in and said, “You okay?”

“Your bed is nice.”

“Do you want any McDonalds? Tom is going.”

“No thank you. Tell Amanda we need to get up early and get on that bus. I'm going to NYC.”

“Okay, whatever. I'll tell her.”

I woke up.

Looked around.

I was in a room I could not identify immediately.

It was Monica's room.

I looked around the bed and wondered where Monica was. I was hoping I would wake up next to Monica's cute little body. But she chose to sleep somewhere else in the apartment.

I was still drunk.

Then I realized I needed to get on a bus in downtown Youngstown.

I went to the bathroom and pissed.

Then went to the living room and saw bodies sprawled everywhere under cheap blankets.

Surveyed the room to find Amanda and Joseph.

I needed a cigarette. So I picked up Monica's pack of Newports off the coffee table and stole two cigarettes. I lit one. The cigarette made me feel better.

I tapped Joseph on the shoulder till he woke up. He didn't seem happy about having to get up. But he was a responsible person and Protestant so he stood up without complaint.

I kicked Amanda to wake up. She was pissed. She wasn't as Protestant as Joseph. Waking up was hard for her.

Monica yelled from underneath a blanket, “What the fuck are you doing? It's like 7 in the morning?”

“I need to get on a bus.”

Joseph and Amanda got their shoes on and we left.

We had to drive back to the bar and get Amanda's car.

We pulled into the parking lot. The Big Smooth's SUV was still there.

I ran over to the SUV and looked in the window. The Big Smooth was sleeping under a thin blanket in the backseat. It was only 30 degrees outside. I thought about knocking on the window and waking him up so he could get to somewhere warm. But he was The Big Smooth and if anyone could sleep in freezing cold weather under a thin blanket it was him.

I ran to Amanda's car and we went home.

Amanda drove me to the downtown Youngstown bus station. The bus station was located at the end of 193, a long road that started at the edge of Lake Erie and ended in downtown Youngstown. I grew up on 193 in Vienna. I've had five jobs on 193. My black baby that was strangled by his umbilical cord lied buried on 193. And I was even born on 193. And then I was going to take my trip to NYC from the end of 193. Someday they would take me back to that hospital I was born on 193 and I would die. Then they would bury me on 193 and my epigraph would say:

Born on 193

Lived on 193

Died on 193

Here he rests on 193

There will be no procession on 193. There will be no statues celebrating my presence on 193. There won't be any streets named after me. A lot of men and women were born, lived, worked and died on 193.

The bus station was full of poor black people. Old black men sitting alone in silence; old black men in groups talking about the economy. Black women wearing cheap thrift store clothes holding babies talking on their cell phones. An upper class looking white guy was standing beside his bags. He had luggage. No one had luggage. Everyone had a bag, some had garbage bags. The white man with the nice haircut was talking on an iPhone standing next to his expensive luggage.

Got my ticket and Amanda and I went to the coffee shop. There were a lot of older white, Italian, and black men in there. They were sitting around talking chewing on donuts and sipping coffee. The coffee shop had a lottery machine. The older people would get the lottery tickets, scratch them and talk about their past big wins. It was nice to sit there seeing the old white, Italian, and black men sit together and reminisce about the steel mills.

I went to the bathroom at the back of the bus station. The bathroom was full of graffiti. The toilet didn't have a door. There were gang symbols everywhere. There were random quotes about Tupac and Biggie. There were three guys standing around talking about exchanging drugs at eight in the morning.

Walked out of the bathroom. Four young black guys and a young white guy dressed in baggy clothes and tilted baseball caps were rap battling. One would take turns insulting the other one. Everybody would laugh when something funny was said. A huge black security guard came in and starting yelling at them, “What the fuck do you think you're doing? Is this a concert hall? Does this look like a concert hall? I repeat does this look like a concert hall? Are there any tickets being sold? I don't see a stage. Do you see a stage?”

They answered, “What's your problem man?”

“I don't have a problem. I have hoodlums serenading each other in my bus station. What is your problem? This is a family institution. Nobody wants to hear you swear at each other. What is this? Tell me, is this a concert hall?”

“No,” one replied in an angry voice.

“Don't you have a place to go, somewhere else you can serenade each other?”

They stood there looking angry.

“Do you understand what I'm saying; I'm saying this isn't a concert hall.”

He kept repeating it, he kept yelling. He was very fervent.

The guys dispersed.

The security guard walked back up front swearing to himself about hoodlums.

There are a lot of hoodlums in Youngstown. Young black and white men who didn't graduate high school or barely did anything but stumble around Youngstown doing drugs, going to jail, prison, and impregnating women. White collar America did not enjoy those people, the hoodlums. They disgraced The American Dream of hard work and being ambitious. I didn't care. I had met many hoodlums over the years. They had shitty lives. They grew up in projects with crack head mothers most likely with no father figure except for the random men their mothers would fuck. They went to crowded schools and grew up without land to play on, without the comforts of the suburbs. They eventually grew out of it. They eventually stopped singing in bus stations and pulled their pants up and got jobs like everybody else. Hoodlums didn't cause the Afghan and Iraq Wars; they didn't cause the DOW to drop four thousand points.