Luis’s father must have felt sorry for me. Or maybe he just saw what was left after catching me sleeping under the lemon tree in his backyard one morning. He saw a teenage kid who’d gone from surfer boy to punk rock disaster, now just hanging onto the ragged edge of something that didn’t even resemble a life anymore. He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t pry. Maybe he knew that when a kid is drowning, he doesn’t need a speech. He needs a raft. Or just a rock to cling to. Something solid.
By then, the old version of me, the one who still thought he might make something of himself, had long since rotted away. That kid was gone, replaced by an acid dealer, a drifter, a high school dropout running on nothing but fumes and sheets of Red Dragon blotter paper. It was acid so pure you had to keep it wrapped in foil, otherwise it felt like the world could dissolve right through your skin. I had greenies, cross-tops, little baggies of cocaine, all for sale. My name wasn’t attached to me anymore. I was just a source, a hookup. The guy who could get you what you needed to forget you were still alive. And for a while, I liked it that way.
The girls down the street, they came to me regularly. They’d trade stolen cross-tops from their mothers’ medicine cabinets for a taste of the Dragon. They’d hand over the pills with shaking hands and blown-out pupils, laughing. It wasn’t even about the high anymore, not really. It was about the trade. The grim little ritual. That knowing look as we handed each other our own slow-motion poison, watching each other burn from the inside out.
I’d still show up to school sometimes, but only for second period, just to keep my name on a list somewhere. Like clocking in for a single shift at a job you’d already quit. No one called my name. No one noticed me slipping in and out. I’d become a background character in my own life. A ghost expecting to disappear completely at any moment.
There was this place, Forest Grove Cemetery. It became my second home. Maybe my first. To get in, you had to climb a twelve-foot wall. It was worth it. On an eleven-hour acid trip, that place made more sense than the real world. My friends would follow my lead. We’d go there, smell the copal incense someone was always burning, and feel the vibrations in the air. We’d spend the nights reading the tombstones, whispering the names of the long-dead like they were a guest list for some party we were all eventually going to crash. Karen Carpenter was buried there. We used her grave as a landmark, a meeting point. The place where we sat, heads spinning, crying to the dead until the drugs kicked in just right and we’d bounce around that yard, jumping into freshly dug graves, dancing with the dirt.
The night watchman had these big, brutal guard dogs he’d release on us when we got too loud. We’d hear them coming and just run, laughing like maniacs, half-certain one of these nights they’d finally tear us apart. One night, it was just me and Scott, walking outside the cemetery walls. These huge old trees hung over the fence line, and as we went under the canopy, this old screech owl just screamed and dove for our heads. It would dive-bomb us when we weren’t paying attention, talons skimming our hair. Maybe it knew something we didn’t—that we weren’t supposed to be there. That maybe we weren’t supposed to be anywhere at all.
Food? That was an afterthought. Stale white bread. Whatever I could steal from a 7-Eleven. Whatever didn’t require cooking. My real fuel was the high, the trade, the nights that blurred into mornings where I’d wake up in places that weren’t mine. A park bench. A stranger’s floor. The backseat of a car with the windows rolled down just enough to keep me from suffocating.
I wasn’t dead. But I wasn’t exactly alive, either. Just existing. Just riding the wave of bad decisions and hoping it wouldn’t crash too hard. But deep down, I knew how this road ended. You can only outrun the inevitable for so long. One day, you either wake up, or you get carried out.
And on those nights, staring up at the indifferent sky from my makeshift bed on the ground, I started to wonder which one it would be for me. But I’ll tell you this: I was grateful to Luis’s old man. For letting me sleep on the floor of his kid’s room when I really needed it. It was just a floor, but it was inside. And for a little while, that was enough.
Author’s Note:
My thoughts are this: that whole story isn’t about being a badass punk or some big-shot drug dealer. It’s about being nothing. It’s about that hollowed-out space you fall into when you’ve been rejected by everything, right down to your own goddamn life. It’s about being so far outside that the only place that feels like home is a goddamn cemetery.
And the cemetery… Christ. Of course you ended up there. Where else does a ghost go to feel comfortable? You weren’t just visiting the dead; you were one of them, just with a pulse that hadn’t gotten the memo to quit yet. Reading tombstones, jumping in fresh graves—that’s not a party. That’s a goddamn dress rehearsal.
The acid, the speed, all that shit—that wasn’t about getting high. It was about getting out. Out of your own skin, out of your own head. It was a chemical suicide note you wrote every single day, hoping one day you wouldn’t wake up to read it.
Then you have Luis’s old man. In the middle of all this filth and self-destruction, one decent guy sees a stray dog shivering in his yard and doesn’t kick it. He lets you sleep on his floor. He doesn’t preach, he doesn’t judge. He just gives you a piece of solid ground in a world that’s turned to quicksand. That small thing, that quiet act of not being another asshole, that’s probably the only reason you didn’t just dissolve into the night completely.
So yeah, my thoughts are this: that period wasn’t just you being a degenerate punk. It was a kind of purification. A trial by fire and filth. You had to become a ghost to remember what it felt like to be human. You had to live among the dead to realize that somewhere, deep down, you still wanted to be one of the living. It’s the story of a kid hitting a bottom so deep, the only way out was up. A hard, ugly lesson, but sometimes, it’s the only kind that sticks.
