Knockout by John Jodzio

joking, but the next morning I woke up and found he’d filled my car up with microwave popcorn and lured some squirrels and pigeons inside the car to eat the popcorn and claw and peck the shit out of my dashboard and bucket seats. Jayhole was watching the proceedings from a lawn chair in our front yard, laughing his ass off.
    â€œDan didn’t get my sense of humor right away either,” he told me, “but after a while he thought everything I did was hilarious. You’ll come around just like Dan did.”
    Inside my car, a pigeon squawked at one of the squirrels. I wondered if the birds and squirrels would leave after the popcorn was gone or if they’d hunker down and try to make my car their home.
    â€œJust get a broom and shoo them away,” Jayhole said. “They won’t put up a fight unless they’re rabid.”
    Before I got the broom, one of the pigeons took a watery shit in my glove compartment. Lately, I’d thought a lot about moving out, but I’d recently taken all the profits from my steak stealing and sunk them into expensive glass beads I was planning to use for my fall jewelry collection. If I was going to move, I needed a few months to scrape together some money for a security deposit.
    A few weeks later, Jayhole started to inject horse steroids into his bad knee. He’d gotten them from a friend who was a trainer at the racetrack. His back acne got immediately worse, but his knee started to feel much better. One day, Jayhole woke up and his knee pain was gone. He tossed his cane into the closet and decided it was time he opened his own bounty hunting agency.
    â€œI’ve gotta be my own boss,” he explained. “At this point in my life, I’m too set in my ways to answer to another douchebag in a suit and tie.”
    To get his body in shape for the grind of bounty hunting, Jayhole lifted weights in our garage. He did yoga, sometimes naked, sometimes not, in our living room.
    â€œI just need a little start-up money to open up shop,” he told me. “I just need a couple of bucks to buy tasers and tear gas. I’m not asking for much, but every single person I hit up for money tells me no.”
    I knew exactly what Jayhole was talking about. I was having the same problem getting my jewelry kiosk off the ground. Over the last month I’d asked my relatives for seed money, but no one would help. Most of them gave me bullshit excuses like, “I just got arrested for vehicular homicide,” or, “I finally decided to start paying my child support.” The rest of them were shocked that I had the balls to hit them up for money after all the meat and lingerie I’d stolen from them over the years.
    â€œI’m trying to remain positive,” Jayhole said, “but it’s damn hard.”
    It was hard. So far I’d invested hundreds of hours designing my fall collection, but I knew no one gave a shit. When I’d started making jewelry I had visions of hot women handing me cold flutes of champagne, dreams of gold-toothed rappers stopping by my kiosk and begging me to design them diamond-crusted crucifixes. None of that had happened yet. I still did my visualizationexercises to help make these things happen, but remaining positive was getting difficult. At the swap meet each weekend, I laid my piece of black velvet across my card table and spread out my wares, but almost everyone walked by my booth without breaking stride. On the rare occasion someone stopped, they laughed at my jewelry like it was some sort of gag gift.
    â€œKeep plugging away,” I told Jayhole, placing my hand gently on his shoulder. “Don’t listen to the naysayers. Our passion to our craft is the only thing that matters.”
    Jayhole must’ve appreciated what I’d told him because after I said this he pulled me into his arms and locked me in a bear hug. He held me there for a long time, squeezing my head into his chest. When