Kevin is walking down Willow Street, from the train station to home, his parent’s apartment. As the sun sets, soft streams of orange light challenge the dark silhouettes of the old brick apartments. The kind of orange that makes you think of lasagnas and Garfield. Like the sky is the exact corner of the exact palette minutes before Garfield was first ever created.
Similes are dumb anyways, Kevin thinks, as he looks up at the falling sun. As if pointing out the similarity between one thing to another, has any inherent value, or appreciates either of those things better, he thinks. Instead, we get preoccupied by that similarity and look for a connection that’s not there rather than realizing the uniqueness of everything that’s every fucking been, Kevin thinks. “A rose is a rose is a rose” is fucking right Gertrude Stein! What a gangster she is.
He thinks about homeless people when Kevin walks by them. Thinks about how they’re somebody’s children. Thinks about how they are just like us, in fact, they are us. Yet, we so seldom think of them, care for them. Instead, every time we see them, we think of them as a charity case, a trivial moral question of whether we want to pay to feel like a good person today, or a critical question of principle where if you give money to this one homeless person, are you being unfair to every single homeless person that you didn’t give money to, but “deserved” it just as much? Not a whiff of general concern for their well-being in mind.
Kevin thinks about how homeless people can be dangerous too. With the complete absence of health care, they could be carriers of some deadly, airborne disease, like Tuberculosis. And they could be a threat to somebody’s physical and mental well-being too, Kevin thinks, especially to women. After all, homeless people robbing, or sexually assaulting people aren’t unheard of. Kevin wonders about how the homeless criminals pick their targets. Women, probably. Smaller women, probably preferably. Or maybe if they are crazy or desperate enough, Kevin thinks, would they pick him too, a seemingly athletic twenty-four-year-old young man? Kevin can’t wait if that actually happened! He thinks about how he would love to swiftly and brilliantly kick the homeless person’s ass, a person that is endangering his life, with the new combination he practiced in the MMA gym. Two quick forward Dempsey rolls, followed by a short left-hook to the body, short left hook to the head, leave the dirty boxing range, and fire a right round house kick to the dome or to the rib cage. Kevin doesn’t even realize that he walks slightly faster when he visualizes his combo in his head, pupils dilated.
But as Kevin practices his moves in his head to perfection, Kevin can’t help but wonder if he’s just a fraud, a coward, preying on defenseless homeless people in his imagination with moves he can’t pull-off against actual sparring partners at the gym. He thinks about how in his imagination he’s this great fighter with a perfect combination for every situation, but every time he actually gets in a ring, he has two left feet and gets touched up by people he knows he’s so much more physically gifted than. Kevin thinks about how he always thinks about martial arts as being a true love in life, but when it comes time to roll in the jiu-jitsu sessions, he makes excuses for himself for rolling five rounds instead of seven. He thinks about how five rounds is better than what most people do. But he thinks about how there are people who do nine rounds and he’s the one that’s supposed to do eleven. Because eleven is what no one would do. Eleven is what it takes to be great.
He thinks about where his obsession to be great comes from. He conjectures that half of it could be because he knows, not objectively, but he knows from the bottom of his heart, from the coaches’ murmurings and looks, that he’s one of the top raw talents on that mat, and on most mats. So that if he doesn’t become a top dog in the gym, the only conclusion is that he lacks the determination, didn’t put in the hard work, and fears failure. Kevin is mortified by the idea that that might be who he is, some nobody when he can and should be somebody, which is an idea that he so believed, that he felt natural with, with all his heart when he was a child. Growing up he knew he would become the richest man in the world, and it wasn’t even about the money, but the title. The world was a game for him to solve, and the richest man in the world was the greatest title he recognized with his little mind. In retrospect, growing up seemed to Kevin like a process of growing out of that vain, shallow little shit, and what, to recognize that Kevin just isn’t the name of a world’s richest man? Or that somewhere along the line he ceased being who he was destined to be.
Kevin then remembers this girl he had brief tinder conversations with. She’s graduating from Princeton, has a good paying job lined-up at Morgan Stanley, and she even created a start-up during the “stop Asian hate” movement to sell t-shirts and hoodies with languages of unity printed on the chest, in Chinese. That’s a laughable idea on all the levels because more hoodies sold at fifty bucks with prints in languages that the racists, and any American really, can’t read is exactly what the world needs at a time of social insecurity and racial dissonance. Because that’s not at all a propaganda for herself, not another line in her brilliant resume, not a stamp or memorabilia of “been there, done that” in a very fleeting period of history.
She gave a dollar to the homeless man. Kevin knows that and sees it so clearly. But he also knew, instantly, that this girl is still living who Lil Kev dreamt to be.
And Kevin was so jealous. He was tortured. He can’t stop thinking about her as he stands at the corner of Willow Street and Shannon street, waiting for the little green man to turn up on the opposite side traffic light. He still marvels at the fact that this girl that he doesn’t even like is living who is he is supposed to be. The absolute unquestionable confidence in a glorious manifested destiny never left her. Is it lunacy? Is it because she’s never failed? Or is it because she’s a better keeper of her dreams than Kevin is. Unfortunately, the truth doesn’t really matter to Kevin.
Kevin questions whether he’s a coward. Someone who dreams of beating up homeless people. Who folded when things got tough. Who got good at justifying excuses. Kevin thinks about all the things he gave up on. Kevin wonders about when he said he just didn’t vibe with the kids at the film school and didn’t see passion or talent, so he quit, if it was just him not stepping out of his comfort zone to find his fellow comrades and not determined enough to create a situation for himself. He thinks about how he quit engineering when he branded the subject as “too boring” and “just can’t put his heart in it,” and ponders whether that’s the exact moment he gave up his pride and ego on always being “the smart kid.” He thinks about all the naps he took because he can and no one will know while working remotely. He thinks about how his iPhone tells him everyday exactly what percentage of everyday he wastes on social media. All the books bought but never read. All the films he hasn’t seen.
And then it happens. It actually happens, dramatically, as it sometimes can be in life. Time slows down as Kevin sees the little child with his baseball cap on backwards, stopping in the middle of the Willow Street and Shannon street crossing, taking a precious second to really focus on tasting the chocolate ice-cream cone that is melting onto the back of his dirty little hand, while the big green renewable energy silent electric city bus of death shows no sign of stopping at the light.
How long is a moment really? Is it the time it takes to generate one thought?
Kevin sees it. Redemption. Extra-ordinary courage. An opportunity to be somebody at almost no cost. Proof that at times of crises and examination of character, he stands opposite of cowardice. Kevin realizes that a chance at an act of heroism is almost like buying the winning lottery ticket. It’s better than winning the lottery actually, because you don’t even need to pay the two dollar fifty cents for the ticket. But when it hits, and you grab the opportunity by the fucking throat, you would become somebody, to somebody, and maybe, hopefully, also to yourself.
Similes are dumb anyways, Kevin thinks.
Kevin drops his center of gravity immediately, leans his head down, and springs into the scene, like a sprinter coming off the blocks after the gun, with such a technique that to the bystanders also standing at the Willow and Shannon Street crossing, it definitely looks quite legit. Kevin is focused like he’s trying to cum in round 3. Like he’s never been at work, or film school, or even his jiujitsu gym when he is fighting with all his might to get another breath of air. His pupils constricting to the size of the tip of a needle. He leaps, hangs in the air for a second, almost horizontally to the asphalt and concrete beneath him, and shoves the kid away.
Boo-boom!
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Somewhere about two blocks away from Willow and Shannon Street crossing, around the corner on the second floor, the smell of Kevin’s mother’s famous beef ribs fills up the apartment almost to the ceiling. But the deafening sirens from the ambulance brutally kicks in through the window and strangles Kevin’s mom blind.
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“Channel 9 news special report, this is Alicia Goulding. I am standing here at the Willow Street and Shannon Street crossing in the East end, where late this afternoon, an act of great heroism and heartbreaking tragedy simultaneously took place. A twenty-four-year-old young man dove in front of an electric city bus to save a young boy who stood in the middle of the street. While he was successful at preventing the young boy being hit by the bus, the boy was hit by the on-coming sedan on the right-side lane when pushed away. The boy died on impact. The young man himself was instead run over by the bus, caught under the wheels from waist down. Medics and firemen attempted to remove him from the scene and transfer him to the local hospital, but he unfortunately also passed away an hour after the accident, still caught under the wheels. Local residents can be found putting down flowers and posters near the sidewalk and the traffic light post as I am reporting to you right now, many of them sobbing, many of them hugging each other. From the heart-warming posters, we can identify that the young man is locally known as Kevin.
While the city government and department of transportation officials have yet to make a statement on the incident, Twitter has already started mourning the victims and celebrating an albeit transient moment of great courage and humanity. Account name Cheesetatos97 says it best “It’s at these moments we reflect on our judgement of men. How many of those that are celebrated, that we look up to, would have dove on Willow Street? I wonder. #RememberKevin”