Goodbye, Cowboy Dan
Mark Danowsky It’s 2004 and I’m a sophomore in college when I receive the call from Cowboy Dan saying he’ll fly me to Portland if I’ll help him run his weed operation. A year later I’ll visit where we grew up together, he’ll call to allegedly hang out but on arrival he’ll nonchalantly request a favor. He’ll say he’s clean until we’re in my Mom’s meticulously maintained car, tell me to pull over, shoot up while I idle in silence. I’ll think about two years before college when I sat around his Dad’s dining room table while a meth-head bellowed for Cowboy Dan to Hit him in the jugular and the older brother of a kid in my grade nodded into a stupor mid-sentence while mumbling about missing freshman orientation. That same meth-head who chased me around a car while spouting conspiracy theories about the Knights Templar. That same meth-head Cowboy Dan will tell me, after the jugular incident where he so kindly saved me a “taste” I turned down, he had to literally kick out of his moving car when the meth-head pulled a knife while they scoured North Philly asking every black man they saw where to buy smack. Junior year I’ll see him one more time visiting what I no longer call home. I’ll meet him at his Mom’s, the house still littered with orange prescription pill bottles, he’ll try to loan me things that don’t belong to him. He’ll show me a photograph of a half-naked girl holding an assault rifle and call her My enforcer and then we’ll drive the old haunts where no one will open their doors to us, not anymore. We’ll sit in the parking lot of a once sort-of-friend’s house who isn’t even home and he’ll ask me about starting a philosophy club, but as always we’re going to read something that Probably wouldn’t interest me. A Thousand Plateaus. This is when I know it’s finally over. Somehow it wasn’t the death of the kitten he pinned on me and ruined years of friendships. Somehow it wasn’t the endless deceits. Somehow it wasn’t that smirk everyone else had already proclaimed sinister and abandoned. I was the last. And the last to walk away walks head lowered. |
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About the Author: Mark Danowsky’s poetry has appeared in About Place, Cordite, Grey Sparrow, Shot Glass Journal, Third Wednesday and elsewhere. Originally from the Philadelphia area, Mark currently resides in North-Central West Virginia. He is Managing Editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal and founder of VRS CRFT, a poetry coaching and editing service.