The blonde man

The fire boiled with reckless savagery as the blonde man threw powders about it.
The blonde man - firm of face, handsome like men only ever seen in photographs - stood up and spoke to the flames. His shirt he removed and cast also into the fire. Upon his feet he wore the caked sand of a day spent among the dunes. His only clothing, torn jeans, cut into loose shorts.
A cheer went up among us, his rabble, as the flames bit the cotton of his discarded clothing. He carried on with the powders. Strange chemicals that drew different colours from the bonfire we had made on the summer beach.
The fading light threw the last of its beams at the shore and they reflected in his eyes a horrible rainbow of deceit as he looked upon us, but not at any of us.
He would keep most of the gang happy until September, with alcohol and whatever pills he could conjure forth, with the excitement of the road and the trembling fear excited whenever we marched through sleepy coastal towns, but maybe I was the only one who sensed this couldn’t last forever.
The fact that I thought about the future at all was probably proof enough that I didn’t belong in this motley band. When it would come time to wash the scum from our bodies and return to our winter lives, our hibernations, they might see that I had barely a stain on my skin. Not mud, nor spittle, nor blood - mine or another’s. I felt little more than an observer, an undercover journalist - always pointing out futilities and irrelevancies - the butt of all jokes, the outsider within the outsiders, the rotten heart within the corpse.
But of all the group, the one who tolerated me most, even liked me, respected my opinion was the most important, the most revered. The blonde man.
The blonde man listened. He kept me by his side. Sometimes my words would countermand his, sometimes he would grimace or fix me with a basilisk’s stare, but he would be looking right at me; right into my living eyes.
How two people could be so similar and so worthy of each other’s respect, and yet so differently regarded by the populous was hard for me to understand at the time.
Now I see it clearer. I see that he pandered to them, like a dull parent who demands nothing more from a child than that they like them, that they are happy to see them because they know they will have fun and get their own way.
The children know they are not being led until the time comes when they are no longer sure what they want. The inexperience of the many allows for the exaltation of the one who is decisive.
He remains the leader providing he knows when to lead, and when to let himself be led. That is why my best friend, the blonde man, had to tell them to take me one night from my sleeping bag, break my legs in the back of a truck and leave me to wash up the next day in the morning surf.
I’m not built to be a leader.