Epstein

It begins with a very beautiful teenaged girl. I’m at the grocery store one day. She’s walking straight towards me in the parking lot. Maybe it was how she filled out her sundress, maybe her impeccable taste in sundresses, or it could have been her smile too, so genuine and caring, aimed now right at the dispossessed and disowned African man who at this moment is hawking necklaces and other wares in a grocery store parking lot to help feed his family that’s probably sheltering at a nearby refuge church. Welcome to South Seattle.

It wasn’t the first time I’d put eyes on this beauty, either. I’d seen her at a game, giving a wet willy to her boyfriend’s dad while the boyfriend threw for three hundred yards and who knows how many touchdowns. God I hate quarterbacks.

Another time, during senior night, she came right up to us and offered to take a photo of us in front of my kid’s hoop poster. If I didn’t know it before then I knew it then, that there is nothing, and I mean nothing, in the world that quite compares with young and stylish and a goofball and who’s kind in a parking lot when noone’s looking or, say, at a basketball game the kid played zero minutes in on senior night, his senior night. I digress.

This girl, I swear she was an angel and a salve that night. I know how she gets the name kryptonite. And God I hate quarterbacks.

Now kryptonite girl is about to go by me on her way to her car. I hear the kid’s voice in my head. Dude, knock it off. My kid calls me dude now once in a while, especially when he’s nervous

Well, you little chicken shit, you’ve had plenty of chances. If you’re not going to, I am.

I would if I could, just shoo her away and out my head, put something responsible back in, like the pie crust I came for for example, but at this universe–granted moment–

Hey, how are you? she says when we’re within earshot.

I smile back. Good how are you? And I keep on walking. Dude, who’s the chicken now?

If it weren’t for the work that I do and where I go to do it, I wouldn’t be talking about this. It’s often enough, though, that my barge and I are passing an island either on our way to pick up product or return it to Seattle. McNeil Island is located in the lower Puget Sound and is super bright at night thanks to a former penitentiary turned “special commitment center.” During the day, it’s a heavily barbed campus with a fleet of school buses and government vans that make it all still look like a penitentiary. I’ve yet to see any signs of life through my binos, and I don’t quite know how much human activity or movement to expect to see as the number of current “residents” are publicly unavailable. What we do know is that these residents are all sex offenders who served their sentence but are still not allowed to return to society for fear they might repeat their violence.

Between that and this dark dead asshole, Epstein, in the news so much these days, his alleged encyclopedic guest list ; desperate narratives, disturbing excuses and explanations, even Hail Mary litigations by MAGA stalwarts on the Facebook and other social media– let’s just say, in case it’s not already obvious, that from this ignoble island owner and infamous island I cruise by regularly spring things I too carry.

Like kryptonite girl, who has to be approximately forty years my junior and, yes, to borrow one of my homie’s phrases, “uncomfortably attractive.” Outside and in. I mean I really really hate quarterbacks.

I’m not alone. In a typical conversation I’m having with the kid’s old lady, my ex, kryptonite girl comes up. They do yoga together, it’s reported, and each day before getting in their cars, kryptonite girl gives my ex a “very strong, warm hug.”

“Oh, and he told me that she gave him a long hug at the gym the other day while he was so sweaty,” she also reports. Take that, QB.

So the next time I see her, I do what I’m supposed to do. She has a small entourage with her this time that she leads around, besides. They’re all doing the expected thing teenagers do of looking at their phones in line, waiting on the cashier. Kryptonite girl says something and they all cut away from their phones to listen in, raptly.

I’ve punted this one off to the ex by this point. If she fails, well, kid’s on his own now, left to his own devices. I taught him what I know, and it’s all I can do.

And that’s pretty much the island where I belong.

-tmc