Dragonfly by Jax Hill 

Another Dunker punk stood up.

“Kurt and Joe were in the inner city,” he said. “And maybe poor people seem more needy than others ... but Ernie and I were getting run out of places like Wood Forest and Sawmill Run.” He mentioned a couple of the tonier areas pretty far to the north. “But I figure the more they try to run you out, probably the more they need you, right?”

I couldn’t too well imagine the “town centers” of Wood Forest or Sawmill Run enjoying the site of the psychadelic playbills pasted up on the sides of their stylized centers of commerce. These were suburban enclaves where the Town Associations strictly controlled everything about the retail centers from the brick of the buildings to the color of the blinds ... I could see why Ernie and pal would get chased out. Lucky they weren’t arrested — except the rent-a-cops hired to police these areas weren’t real tough guys. They didn’t have too many real criminals to come after.

“And think about it. What do the people in those places find their security in? Their money, right?” the Dunker punk was saying. “They think they get behind the fence of their gated community, park their Beamer and close the automatic garage door, they got no troubles because the money’s there. But this economy? Even the rich guys are starting to sweat it.”

Ernie and his partner, Vinnie, they’d created their own take on the whole “Where is love?” theme. Their posters and publicity proclaimed, “Can’t buy me love?” This seemed to resonate better with their audience. They played out their dramas at outdoor malls and parks, and they planned their information sessions for places like Starbucks, outside Barnes and Noble and Pottery Barn — places the families of Wood Forest and Sawmill Run would eventually turn up.

“At first, we figured they’d run us off because, well, can you imagine the Dunker bellowing outside a Starbucks in Sawmill Run?” Vinnie laughed. I had to laugh, too. No, I couldn’t imagine it. But the Dunkers, they didn’t bellow. Maybe they did, when Duncan was alive, but their new message, Torstein’s message, didn’t demand it. Instead, they handed out their little cards and talked to people about what was really important in life.

“I want to tell you about J. Clayton Berger,” Vinnie said. “We’d been outside the Barnes and Noble all afternoon, talked to a lot of kids, and a few adults, and now it was getting on toward 10 o’clock. The bookstore there is open until 11. And J. Clayton Berger walks up. We’d seen him hand off his Land Rover to the valet. There’s a buncha restaurants around the bookstore, and a mall with valet parking that’s open until midnight. We figured he was going to dinner, but he came to the bookstore. And he stopped when he saw us.”

Ernie stepped up beside Vinnie now, and continued the story. He was an Hispanic kid, early 20’s, his black hair bleached almost blond from the sun, his dark skin tanned almost black.

“He said, ‘Voy aprender español,’ you know, I’m learning Spanish. So I started talking to him in Spanish. He’s using that Rosetta Stone system, and he’s pretty good. I was impressed. He told me about his wife and kids, their names and ages, and his job, a little bit, abogado, he’s a lawyer. Then, after a while, we couldn’t talk in Spanish anymore, because he ran out of words to tell me about the hours he worked, the things he planned to do for his kids, and the things he wanted to get for his wife and himself. The reasons for his work, he said, razon de ser, his reason to be. He said, Ernesto, mis niños van recibir mas de mis padres mi dan. My kids are going to get more than my parents give me.”

Ernie stopped and smiled. “It was so easy then to ask him, what did your parents give you? Wasn’t it enough? Why do your kids need more? What is this razon de ser that you’re living?”