Most people, they stumble through life and they don’t even know when the real damage happened. They just wake up one day, fifty years old, with a gut full of regret and a head full of quiet, screaming noise, and they wonder where the hell it all went wrong.
Me? I know the exact goddamn moment. I can pinpoint it on a map, in a calendar, right down to the quiet, stupid little click of a plastic bottle cap. I remember when and where I fried my own goddamn brain.
I was maybe fourteen, fifteen. A beautiful, stupid, and completely hormonal animal, trapped in the quiet, suburban hell of Whittier, California. And like every other bored, desperate kid in America, I was looking for a shortcut. A cheap ticket out of my own skin.
We found the instructions in High Times magazine, the bible for broke, aspiring degenerates. First, it was these trumpet flowers, these big, beautiful, innocent-looking things growing on a bush down the street. The magazine said you boil them up, drink the juice, and bam, instant poor-man’s LSD. A beautiful promise. So we did it. We brewed up a gallon of this foul, green shit, divided it three ways, and choked it down.
And what happened? No mushrooms, no hallucinations, no beautiful, cosmic insights. Just a violent, ugly, and completely thorough cleaning of our bowels. We spent the next hour puking our guts out in perfect, beautiful harmony. A real bonding moment.
But that didn’t stop us. Oh no. When you’re fifteen and stupid, a little bit of projectile vomiting is just foreplay. The magazine had another recipe. A chemical high, it said. Something you could sniff. Something that would make the whole goddamn, boring world slow down and maybe even crack a smile. And the magic ingredient? Film cleaner.
So the four of us, a little gang of beautiful, doomed idiots—Scott, Louis, Mike, and me—we went to the Cerritos Mall. We walked into a photo shop, four teenage boys trying to look casual while casing the joint for industrial solvents. We should have been suspicious as hell, but I guess we just looked pathetic. One of us, probably me, I don’t remember, pocketed a bottle of the stuff, and we retreated to the food court, the great, echoing cathedral of teenage despair.
We followed the instructions like we were building a goddamn bomb. Styrofoam cup, napkins stuffed in the bottom, a little splash of the cleaner. Then, one by one, we took turns burying our faces in the cup and taking a big, deep, beautiful hit of pure, unadulterated poison.
And holy shit. It worked.
It wasn’t a clean high, not like acid. It was a dirty high. A floater. Like smoking bad weed that had been soaked in gasoline. The world went slow-motion. You could hear your own voice, echoing in your skull, a strange, hilarious, and completely alien sound. We giggled like idiots. It wasn’t bad.
But the trick was, the more you sniffed, the higher you got. It was a beautiful, simple, and completely addictive piece of math. Five sniffs got you to level ten. Ten sniffs got you to level twenty. We sat there, in the bright, fluorescent, and completely soulless food court, and we just kept climbing the ladder, one stupid, beautiful, and completely brain-damaging sniff at a time.
Pretty soon, we were outside, in the parking lot, stumbling around like a pack of glue-sniffing Brazilian street kids, laughing at the goddamn sky, completely unaware that we were quietly, efficiently, and permanently murdering our own future selves.
And of course, because I was always the luckiest sonofabitch in the room, I was the one who took the rest of the bottle home.
It was a quiet night. I was in my room, my little blue sanctuary, surfer posters on the wall, the radio whispering some sad, beautiful song into the dark. And I pulled out the bottle.
Just one more hit, I thought. Just to see how high the goddamn ladder goes.
I started sniffing. And sniffing. Past ten. Past twenty. I was trying to get past that point, that quiet, comfortable plateau, and reach something else. I could feel it happening, a strange, beautiful, and completely terrifying crackling in the back of my head, like Pop Rocks candy, like bacon sizzling in a hot pan. That wasn’t a high; that was the sound of my own goddamn brain cells committing suicide.
I put the cap back on the bottle. And I stood up.
And the room wasn’t my room anymore. It was a strange, gray, and completely silent landscape. My light was on, but the world had gone dim. I looked down at my legs, and I could see the bones through my skin. And as I took a step, I saw cracks appear in the bone, little hairline fractures spreading like ice on a pond. I took another step, and pieces started to fall off, turning to gray dust on the floor. I was decaying. Dissolving. A beautiful, ugly, and completely silent implosion.
I tried to get to the light switch, to turn off the horror. It wasn’t a walk; it was a lunge, a slow-motion fall through thick, gray air. I hit the switch, the room went black, and I collapsed onto the floor.
And the frying pan in my head went into overdrive. Sizzling, crackling, popping. This is it, I thought. You finally did it, you beautiful, stupid bastard. You fried your brain.
And then I passed out. Gone.
I woke up the next morning, and the world looked… normal. The sun was shining. The radio was playing. But something was different. Something was missing.
My short-term memory.
It was just… gone. Wiped clean. Like someone had taken a goddamn eraser to the blackboard in my head. We joke about it now, my friends and I. “Old man’s got no memory.” Ha fucking ha. But it’s real. I fried something important that night. The ability to hold onto a license plate number, a name, a goddamn birthday. Gone. My spelling went to shit. My grammar. My ability to follow a goddamn conversation sometimes. I have to look up how to spell my own kids’ names, for Christ’s sake.
And it’s affected my whole goddamn life. It’s why I write this shit down. Because I know that if I don’t, it’ll all just disappear into the beautiful, ugly, and completely empty fog in my head. With age, it’s not getting better; it’s getting worse. By the time I’m seventy, if I make it that far, I’ll probably forget I even wrote this goddamn book. Which might not be such a bad thing.
The physical body, the brain, it’s just a machine. A beautiful, stupid, and completely unreliable piece of equipment. But the spirit, the thing that drives you, the thing that makes you want to climb out of the gutter and scream at the goddamn stars? That’s something else. That’s fireproof.
But anyways, I just wanted to share that. A little bedtime story from your friendly neighborhood degenerate. Take what you will from my beautiful, ugly, and completely fucked-up life. Be a womanizer, be a borderline racist, be a goddamn drunk.
But whatever you do… stay the hell away from the film cleaner.
