I was bouncing between two shitholes at the time: Sharon’s house, which was a sad apartment complex of white trash that had been left behind in Lakewood, and Lewis’s house, which was just a different kind of quiet desperation. At Sharon’s, there was this skinny kid, smae age as me, already showing the signs of a serious drug habit, and his beautiful little blonde sister, who definitely caught my eye.
But then there was Marissa.
Marissa was smart, strong, and had a blue mohawk. Ripped jeans, a flannel shirt. She was a beautiful, angry question mark in a world of boring, declarative sentences. She got my attention, and I couldn’t shake her. Maybe it was her, or maybe it was the acid I was carrying.
We’d sneak off in the middle of the night, straight to the cemetery where Carrie Carpenter was buried. I’d slip her a few tabs of acid, little squares of borrowed salvation, and we’d fuck on a blanket spread over the grass where they laid the children down. A pathetic plot, nothing but tiny plaques with names that barely had five years to them. That’s where we chose to sweat it out. That was our holy ground of filth.
One night we were heading down Main, cutting toward the cemetery again. I was already three blotters deep, the acid crawling through my veins, buzzing under my skin. That’s when Lewis shows up—perfect timing, perfect hair, all sun-bleached and grinning like an idiot god. She lit up when she saw him. I handed out hits—stupid move—and they laughed, giggled, sparked like I wasn’t even standing there.
Marissa and I weren’t really a couple, just two kids fucking in the dark, but in my head it meant something. To her, I was just a ride until something shinier came along. When she invited Lewis to tag along to the cemetery, it split something in me. But I said sure, like a coward, like a dog begging scraps.
They vaulted the fence easy, already laughing without me. When I landed, my ankle blew—white-hot, blinding pain—and the acid detonated. Everything went black neon and razor wire. Too much. Way too much.
I watched them walk on, her blonde hair bouncing beside his golden grin, the two of them shrinking toward the horizon, not a glance back. Not one.
I dragged myself over the rail, ankle throbbing like a rotten heart, and limped to Lewis’s porch. Sat there alone, sweating, breathing in shallow gulps, trying to hold the world together. I didn’t want the trip. I didn’t want the voices, the dead babies in the dirt, the ghosts humming in the trees. I just wanted stillness. And all I got was the storm.
I sat there for what felt like a lifetime, watching the ants on the sidewalk. They were incredible, forming these weird, intricate patterns in the shadows of my own fucked-up energy. I looked up at the trees, and they were singing. The wind was blowing, but it sounded like music. I could smell colors, I could taste the air. I was outside of my own body, a passenger in a machine that was rapidly losing control.
I kept my shit together, somehow. I just sat there on that porch, listening to the crows that weren’t there, watching the flutter of the neighbor’s TV through the window. My ankle was pulsating, a goddamn drumbeat of pain.
And then I saw it, across the street. A massive, masculine, dominant-alpha pitbull, staring right at me. It was drooling. I could hear it breathing, smell its hot, sour breath from fifty feet away. It wanted to kill me. I could feel it. I raised my hand, and the dog moved with me, a perfect, terrifying mirror. It started walking towards me, slow and deliberate. And as it crossed the street, I felt a warm puddle of piss spreading in my pants. I was scared shitless.
And then, just as it stepped onto the curb in front of me, it turned into a cat.
It was the longest eleven hours of my life. I’d taken at least five hits of acid, and one was usually enough to kick your ass into next week. I spent most of that time just sitting there, quiet, not moving.
Lewis finally got home about seven hours later. He was glowing. He told me all about how he’d hooked up with Marissa at the cemetery, on our goddamn blanket. I didn’t hate him for it. I was too far gone to hate anyone.
I slept in his room that night. And I think that’s the night I had the dream, the one that laid out the whole rest of my life: the retirement at thirty-five, the twenty-year marriage, all of it. A perfect, beautiful, and completely impossible blueprint.
The next day, we were all piled back at Sharon’s apartment like rats in a warm sewer. Marissa drifted out of the back room, tossed me a half-hearted “hey,” like I was some neighbor kid returning a lost ball, and then her face exploded into sunlight when she saw Lewis. I didn’t need a chalk outline to know I was dead in her eyes. That was it. She was gone, and Lewis had her.
Didn’t bother me. I didn’t bleed out over girls back then. They were revolving doors and I always had another one spinning behind her. So I just re-aimed my sights, shifted my stash, and locked onto her friend—the little blonde, the one that “belonged” to that lunatic brother.
We were alone one night in Sharon’s apartment. Everyone else had vanished—probably running errands for their addictions, or hiding from them. Just me and her, the silence, and that cheap apartment smell of stale smoke and reheated burritos. We slipped into one of the bedrooms, shut the door, and went at each other like animals who hadn’t eaten in weeks. No music, no candles, just the squeak of the mattress and our sweat soaking into Sharon’s dirty sheets. Teenagers pretending they were adults, stretching it out, taking our time, because we knew we weren’t supposed to be doing it in the first place. That made it better. That made it dangerous.
When it was over, she smoothed her hair, pulled her clothes back on in nervous little jerks, and snuck out the back door to the unit below, like a thief escaping the scene of her own crime. I headed in the opposite direction, to Lewis’s place, high on adrenaline, high on being young and reckless.
The next day, I was walking back to Sharon’s complex. I was out of my skull, fried on whatever cocktail of pills and powders I’d managed to shove down my throat that morning. My eyes felt peeled wide open, two white plates rattling around in my head. I was grinning for no reason, floating toward that familiar door, ready to sink into the chaos again.
That’s when I saw him.
The crazy one. Her brother. Standing there, waiting. Like the devil had punched the pause button on my little joyride.
He went into his apartment and came out with a shovel. He put a cigarette in his mouth, and he charged me, holding that shovel like a baseball bat. I just stopped, stood there. I was all skin and bones back then, the drugs and the cheap beer had eaten away all my muscle. He ran right up to me, his face red and covered in zits, his jawline all caved in. He cocked that shovel back over his head, ready to split my skull open.
“Go ahead,” I said. “Go fucking ahead.”
“You fucked my sister!” he screamed, his voice all cracked and pathetic. “You fucked my sister!”
I just stood there. I had on a flannel shirt, nothing underneath, my chest all caved in. A little bit of a mohawk still left, flopped over to one side like some Flock of Seagulls motherfucker. I was at the bottom. And in that moment, I kind of wanted that shovel to connect. I thought about it. It would have been an easy way out of the whole goddamn cycle. A quick, clean exit.
But he didn’t swing. He just stood there, screaming.
And I just stood there, waiting. A mental bus stop, waiting for the next train to arrive and take me somewhere else. Anywhere else.
