Month: May 2025

Friends

The Wounds of Friendship (2023). Oil on Wood. From my book Trouble is Trouble, available at Amazon Books. Artwork and text copyright Danny Grosso.

Excerpt: “Like him?” he would start, “Why I like him so much it hurts.” He meant it of course, all of it, the “like” part and the “hurts” part. He grew up in a place where you give up your friends dearly, only as a last resort. Lives depended on friendships, on discretion, on fealty, and for that reason these bonds were cultivated from an early age. The older guys would introduce their sons and nephews to the other guys’ kids, so that by adolescence, everyone was spun together in a web of relationships that perpetuated the status quo. That web would tense with outside pressures from money and wives and and really anything from outside of the group, and sometimes strands would break with violence, leaving suspicion as a remainder. Eventually, the web of friendships would become one of betrayal and deceit that seemed inescapable.

Still, most soldiered on, as most did not know any better, they had few relations outside of the group. With age came wizened faces, and to those who knew how to look, the battle scars of friendship. “In this life, it’s not easy to stay friends. Everybody has to watch out for his own.” He would say that even while he was sitting next to Corky or Slugs, whom he’d know since the second grade. As children, they’d inflicted little tragedies upon each other. As adults, dangerous betrayals. Yet for a lot of them, the ties remained, and were often cultivated anew, after the detritus of the past was swept into a lump under a rug – still obvious, but also, important evidence that effort was made, like a memorial to fallen soldiers.

It was hard for some not to see their wounds as grotesque, their stubborn friendships as masochistic and ridiculous. “I know we are so different, and we don’t see eye to eye anymore but there’s somethin’ I still like about him,” he would say. And even through a blackening, closed eye and bloodied lip he seemed genuine in his feelings.

–Danny Grosso

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The Line of St. Francis O’Brien

The Line (2023). Oil on Board. From my book Trouble is Trouble, available at Amazon Books. Artwork and text copyright Danny Grosso.

Excerpt: When they lit the oil drums on fire it wasn’t so much to provide warmth. Rather, the psychological barrier between those coldly defending their bosses for pay, and those on the line for the cause, was made physical. Indeed, the physicality of the struggle was one of its selling points. It was deep in the race back then to lock arms with your side, and then lock horns with the other. It was how they recruited us back then. There was no internet trolling, there were no overseas bots. There seemed to be a sort of honor in this dangerous endeavor. Getting in close made the conflicts so much more vital, and perhaps, less frequent. They certainly seemed less petty. In the lines they fought for food, for jobs, for a shot at being a boss someday. And while adventurers bounded in on both sides, most on the side of the cause were true believers, although those beliefs fell just short of fanaticism.

However, when those fires were aglow, and the sparks jumped out of the drums like popping corn, the murmuring seemed to take on an ecclesiastical rhythm, and as it grew to surround the asphalt lot, a certain reverence captured the proceedings. Through the chain link fence, across the open lot between the workers’ cottages, and down the street a bit, a priest is moved by the sound, and opens the window of his second floor room. He too can see the pink firelights, and he too, can ascertain what they portend. He grabs his heavy crucifix necklace and a leather coat and runs toward the music.

–Danny Grosso

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