(Photo: cal_gecko/Flickr)

A couple years ago, the Giants had owned the neighborhood. Street corners, front stoops, the drive-in, the drug-store, the YMCA; wherever you went in the West Side, if you saw a fella coming in black and orange, you stepped lively out of his way. Buster had moved in then, in those glory days, and by the time he’d been there two months his girl was wearing a black leather jacket and his beat-up old jalopy had Giants spray-painted on the hood. He didn’t so much fit in as take over, and even if he wasn’t exactly the leader by name, everyone knew he was the guy. Someone had to be the guy, and Buster was it.

Even the rumble with the Fish didn’t really stop him. Sure, it was an ugly year on the West Side; Buster was in and out of the doc’s while one by one, the guys who’d welcomed him into the gang dropped off the face of the earth. It got too hot around the neighborhood for Cody’s old man or Andres’s girl, and Pat shocked them all by going off to college (though the word was he had a social disease and just wanted a new pool of girls). Aubrey hung around, but he was kind of a mess, too old to rumble and too young to really figure out his life. So when Buster finally got off his crutches and came back to the block, it was just him and the lifers – Timmy pushing tea on the corners, cool-headed Matt who was in charge if anyone was, Madison still daring people to ask him if he had a girl’s name, and the rest. » Continue reading “Giants Recap: Rumble”