by M.C.G.

The idea was you found your porno name by combining the name of your first pet and the street you grew up on. While I was conceived on Spout Run and had a chocolate lab named Buster Brown, even then my 12-year-old mind thought that was too on-the-nose. So, I chose my birthplace, Kennedy Drive. Same night, I went to bed knowing none of these kids would talk to me again, being the only one who refused the Swanson family’s lemon vodka swiped from an upstairs liquor cabinet. 

Now, as I’m lying in bed with a snoring girlfriend who wears a nebulizer and the alarm is creeping toward 7:00 a.m. marketing spreadsheets, I don’t think about the missed opportunity to run around with the peaked-earlies. I think of Buster Kennedy and the life he might’ve led if he rose up from the Swanson family’s shag carpet, covered in amniotic cocoa butter, and ran across their two-acre backyard tearing his umbilical G-string. His fluid glow like that of fleeting comets. Given some convenient birthmarks, I imagine him striking a niche in sci-fi knockoffs with occasional crossovers into guy-on-guy, his face not getting much screen time, especially by his bronzing 40s. By then I imagine producers stopped calling, so he found himself a role as a mechanic who kept his trousers on, wondering, while tinkering with carburetors and spark plugs, if any customers recognized him, departing the body shop with a mutual stare, a secret between them that Buster was more than happy to share.