Kurt Olsson

Thanks a Million, Evel Knievel

Searching for the gang. Riding my lime-green, metal-flecked stingray with the boss
butterfly handlebars and banana seat.

Pedaling around the neighborhood—look, Ma, no hands!—twirling a football over my
head and catching it a week before the regular season begins again.

Wanting to brag about my summer in a cabin on a lake in the woods up north, fishing
for pike and small-mouthed bass and swimming

and, when the weather was neighborly, lying on my back on a scalding metal raft with
two high school girls in string bikinis.

(Not wanting to admit nothing ever—and nothing ever would have—happened.)

And when the weather wasn’t, poring over the Bantam edition of Bruce Tegner’s
Complete Book of Karate I’d five-fingered from the RPI bookstore.

Me on my bike checking all the usual haunts—

the vacant lot bisected by the long, winding road to the country club,

the hidden nooks in the tamarack, oak, the prickly underbrush fringing it,

the driveways with basketball hoops, the many without,
the backyards with flowers and lawn sprinklers and base paths beaten into them,

the crick where three of us muscleheads fished once with bare barbs and
saltwater taffy, instead of earthworms.

Finding nobody.

Then going to each of their houses, twirling the football over my head, and asking.

Zeroing in on them finally upstairs, ensconced in an attic bedroom, hunched together,
heh-heh-hehing maybe about their pop’s Fury III, a stolen fifth of Southern Comfort,

the gash of a Penthouse centerfold, a dime bag, maybe something else…

I can’t imagine.
Me still twirling the football.
One of them—one—looking up and shaking his head,
almost like

Knowing then:

them hating me,
me hating them.

Down the hollow stairwell solo, past now Former Best Friend’s Mom asking How’s your
summer going,

out a screen door cracking shut like the echo of a .22 caliber.

Pushing back up the hill in first gear to my house, letting the bike fall however, a spastic
heap.

Punting and punting that football from one end of the backyard to the other, thinking

Johnny Unitas Neil Armstrong Bobby Hull O. J. Simpson RFK MLK
Hank Aaron Evel Knievel

Trying to get straight in my brain why Knievel would be willing to break every single
one of his body’s two hundred some odd bones, waste more than a thousand days of
his life in hospitals, ERs and ICUs, even though what he tried to
do didn’t amount to a thing,
not a single damned
thing.