Wanting More

10 x 10 2022

Wanting More We took the freshman’s lunch bags often so we wouldn’t go hungry. We wanted more money, so we stopped the paperboys on their bikes collection day. We wanted more clothes. We snuck into the Goodwill Bin at night and fought over the good stuff. We wanted to play pinballs. We went to the Chrystal Palace and pushed the players away from their machines and finished their games. We wanted more. We boosted candy and gum from the local stores. We wanted more. We snuck into the church looking for the poor box and emptied it out. We wanted more weed. We took it from the older girls in the park after dinner time. We wanted more noise. We went into the library and beat our hands on the tables and yelled at the top of our lungs. We wanted liquor. We waited outside the liquor store until we spotted a mark and took his purchase. We wanted better grades. We cornered our teachers after class and explained life to them. We wanted more. We took more of everything, anytime we felt like it. We wanted girlfriends, but the girls wanted nothing to do with us. We bullied them, and they turned us in. We wanted motorcycles. We sat on a half dozen of them parked outside the bar and when they guys came out in their leathers, we demanded their keys. Instead, we got a beating. We wanted to heal our wounds, but the motorcycle guys wanted to give us more and bigger wounds. We wanted more attention. We stopped a guy in a station wagon and ordered him to take us to the emergency room. We wanted to stop wanting so much from where we could be seen so we stole from stores in the early morning. We wanted the store owner who caught us to stop pointing his shotgun at us while we washed his floors and followed his instructions on cleaning out the walk-in freezer and the garbage cans. We wanted not to hang out with each other anymore. The police came to the school and took us and we had to spend the night in the same jail cell. We wanted the police to stop taking our pictures and our fingerprints. We wanted them to not wake our parents in the middle of the night and have our fathers come down to the station. We wanted our fathers to believe us that we learned our lesson, but they left us in custody and went back home to bed. We wanted more as we got older and took what we wanted and ended up where we didn’t want to be, jail again. We called our fathers and told them we really learned our lesson and to please come and get us and take us home, but our fathers just hung up on us and we wanted another phone call, but the guards just laughed. It didn’t make any difference, because we had no one else to call.