Novel

I could see the house through the smoke of my Kent cigarette and I hated it all over again. Two stories of brick and misery piled upon each other, carved into the hillside overlooking the skyline. I never wasted much time looking for a place I could call home. I could call anywhere home.

I had stolen the packs of Kent cigarettes from work to smoke whenever I was drinking. This was turning out to be almost everyday, but I rationalized it by rhyming 'drinking' with 'thinking'. I’d walk out into the sun after a nine hour shift in the store, limping because my socks were filled with packs of old cigarettes I found in a small box in the back office. No one noticed because I was the manager responsible for counting them, and even if they did, I was too obvious of a suspect to be considered.

Every time I successfully reached my car and emptied the loot into the passenger seat, I considered it a performance bonus.

I fingered a cheap plastic lighter from my pocket, then put it away and produced some matches which had “The Ginger Man” printed on the cover. I didn’t know where they had come from, and I didn’t light the cigarette in my hand, but instead sipped on orange juice and Hammer and Sickle Vodka as I took a break in the mild sun with the Hatemachine.

“Well, what a fucking guess.” My landlord snorted from his apartment on the first floor. He was watching me drink from his window. “I knew you’d be fucking around out here. God damn.”

It was barely noon, and I had already gone through half the pack of cigarettes and three screw drivers. Sixty days and a binge drinking trip to Prague ago and I was moving out of my second apartment in three months. From where I stood, I could see the markers on a cityscape backdrop. The markers were in different shapes, but mostly crosses and Halloween-ish tombstones in the corner of the yard. I had made it a point to find out if it was legal to bury your pets in a backyard.

I told my ex-roommate, who was now also my ex-girlfriend, that it was within regulation as long as the animals were under 50 pounds. She had replied that all the markers were engraved with the same name, but I hadn’t gotten close enough to confirm this.

Somewhere up north and out of the city a small country suburb with an empty apartment awaited me. Dualities fascinated me and the idea of moving from a city to a sleepy town sounded good. As a child I was dragged along to open houses by parents and realtors. Since then, I usually took the first apartment I saw, no matter the condition or proximity of the landlord. Some things I couldn’t shake.

The staircase was too narrow and the walls too close together. Hatemachine and I took out our frustration on the swirled plaster and polished floor. In my experience, deposits were always as good as gone.

We decided that the easiest manner of moving out the nicer pieces of home furnishings would be to throw them off the balcony and onto the queen sized mattress. The couch was a heavy piece of quality furniture so we struggled with it, myself on the balcony lowering it slowly to the mattress below while the Hatemachine guided it and cheered. At the foot of the driveway, the mailman watched amused, nervously waiting for us to complete the operation before he fed bills into the slits carved into the porch.

One reason why email will make him extinct.

I released the couch and it slammed harmlessly to the mattress below, barley recoiling.

"Perfect!" I shouted from near the roof tops.

"Perfect?!" Vomited my landlord from below. His hair was dirty and slicked back close to his scalp, making him look older than he was. Since I had been a tenant here with my girlfriend it seemed that we all had aged greatly. Two months sometimes is actually two years. Time is relative baby, and my landlord looked up at me from the porch in disbelief.

"That's how you do shit, huh?!" His hair clutched tightly to his skull, goose-stepping around his bald spot. I made my way down and stepped around him, lifting one end of the couch.

“You realize that shampoo with B and D-vitamins would give your hair a more youthful shine and appearance. Especially if you are using minoxidil to help combat thinning. Hey, give us a hand?” I said to him.

He looked like a rapid dog for a moment, but recoiled as we lifted the couch. I could see that he wanted to say something, but he decided against it and went back to his door. He slammed it shut and we heard it lock.

The old man had lived in this house on a nice street in the midst of the city Providence for his whole existence. From birth, here, until his grandma died, then mother, until finally he was the only one left. And he had no choice but to rent it out, and I, with my girlfriend, staggered into his life.

The day I met him he told me he didn’t smoke and was never married. I held a match to a cigarette thinking about sliding into a beautiful, dark haired girl. He continued, telling me the brief history of property which he clearly held in his highest regard-- like an old lover-- and he was always there, in the dead of the night, sleeping on a stiff mattress and monitoring water usage. This man was terrified of the possibility of several youngsters, all under age 27, amassing, drinking, fucking, having a good time in the depths of a weeknight, giggling loudly and recklessly. Possibly changing the course of the universe forever.

My desire to mutilate his face briefly subsided. Maybe I would had I been a few years younger and more dangerous. But in my relatively older age, I found myself more focused on lifting the couch. The hierarchy of the universe was settling in and crushing my outlook on life, and also my ex-girlfriend had taken all the cutlery to her new one bedroom apartment down the road.

A running U-Haul idled half parked on the sidewalk. I had moved so much recently that I was beginning to anticipate the way my car felt new and low to the ground after being behind the wheel of a giant moving van. From the open windows the radio and a/c blasted. Hatemachine suggested earlier that we have it warmed up so we’d be ready to go.

“What now?” He asked me, finishing his beer and tossing the bottle into shards on the sidewalk. Sweat collected on his brow but he didn’t seem to notice or care.

“We go deliver Belle her half of the furniture.” I slammed the back of the truck shut, locking it.

"So would this be the Belle?" asked the Hatemachine, spitting on the ground.

"That's right." I said.

“I thought she died?”

“Died? No--she lives across town now.”

“I could’ve sworn a girl you were dating, named Belle died.” Hatemachine picked his teeth.

“No. I dated another one during college, but we split when I graduated.”

“You left her out there at school? So I‘ve never met this one?”

“That’s right.”

"I thought she was dead. What's with you and women named Belle?" Hatemachine asked, walking towards the van.

"Dunno. I guess it's just a common name."

"So this would be Belle Number Two, then?."

"I was more of a Number One fan, myself." I responded, walking to the driver’s side.

Hatemachine adjusted the radio and I finally lit the stale cigarette. I put the truck into drive and started across the small city, the place, to me, where my old girlfriend lived. Once she had caught wind of my plans to move out, she immediately moved in with some guy she worked with. He lived in a one bedroom on the first floor in a shitty neighborhood. The shingles were peeling off and the exterior was cheap vinyl siding which had cracked in several places. I had been living by myself in the massive top floor apartment, sliding on hardwood floors in front of a giant bay window, waiting for the lease to expire.

“She made heroin look cute.” I said scratching my jaw.

Hatemachine looked at me. “Are you talking about me or you?”

“Who?” I couldn’t hear him over the radio.

“One or two? You talking about Belle One, or Two?” He turned down the music.

“The one I didn’t live with and whose furniture we’re not delivering.”

“That’s number one.”

“Yeah, right.” I took an illegal left turn. “Heroin. She made it look cute.”

“This one is pretty hot.” Hatemachine pointed out. “You should’ve held on to that better.”

“Two isn’t bad. She’s nice.” I agreed.

“She’s annoying. She’s too nice.”

“Too nice?” I was puzzled by this.

“You need a bitch. One that will keep you grounded.“ Hatemachine thought for a moment. “Does this one let you cum in her mouth?”

“Maybe you‘re right.” I said.

Hatemachine shook his head.

I was convinced every human relationship was like those birds which pecked at the skin of Rhinos. Internet and television had given us every form of entertainment and a constant connection, while simultaneously breeding a new kinds of boredom and dissonance with other people. Immediate gratification could not compare with the work that went into a human emotional connection. Instead, we were parasites feeding off each other, seeking to fill mutual gaps in our existence--physical, mental, sexual gaps.

I could have been Belle’s dead father, right down to the alcoholism and income. She could be my heroin addled ex-girlfriend, right down to her name and dick sucking tenancies. Completely user friendly, and it was fine as long as you closed your eyes and enjoyed the ride. Symptoms included not caring as long as you had color in the world.

I turned up the volume on the radio again and lit another stale cigarette. Our pleasant ride was almost over as we reached Belle’s street. I was trying to remember which house was hers.

“She still doesn't know about Number One, huh?" Hatemachine asked me.

"I’m sure she does. Girls figure out all that shit sooner or later-- She's accused me of still being all hung up over my last girlfriend. Not sure if she knows her name." I said pathetically.

"You fool. At least you couldn’t accidentally call her by your ex-girlfriend's name."

"I did everyday." I responded, seeing an old Taurus I didn’t recognize parked in her driveway. Strangely, her new living arrangement didn’t bother me.

“Do me a favor," I asked the Hatemachine, "and please don't call her Number two."




One morning after Valentines day, I was huddled under some blankets on the futon, half conscious, watching the Discovery Channel. I was a severed head on a couch, barely aware of what I was doing and where I was doing it. Sometimes I’d glance at my watch, and feel my stomach crash into my testicles, random panic when I realized Belle would be home soon. I pretended to not notice. If you can lie to yourself then you can lie to anyone. This is why I was so good at job interviews. Unemployment never bothered me.

I wished I was unemployed. Get high and look at porn before Belle got home. I

I had planned on sending a Valentine’s day package, made up mostly of stolen candy from my work. Chocolate rabbits and their delicious eggs. Transfat and saggy, pale asses. Arms thicker than mine. I taped all that pink crap into that box, and wrote a female’s address on the box. A cry out for help, like a desperate car antenna before getting washed away in a flood.

That box filled with sugar and high fructose corn syrup sat on the coffee table for a few hours. I planned to mail it out right after I took a shower. Reach out and touch a long lost someone on Valentine’s day, just like in the movies. One movie could end with being pulled from the rushing water by a smooth, thin arm and brought up onto shore. Throw some pebbles into the rapids.

Another movie would end with me forgetting the box is there. Belle finds it. After a tear jerker of an argument, we decide to go our separate ways. Maybe I get a job as a park ranger, and I find happiness after all. Belle marries a cop and everything works out. Just what I’ve been looking for. In the end though, I just optioned out of either scenario. I emptied all the foiled balls of chocolate into a bowl, threw away the box, and when Belle came home I gave them to her.

Happy Valentine’s Day, baby. Just for you.

But she didn’t eat most of them. She knew I was worried about transfat and saggy, pale asses.





I parked the van and I greeted Belle like one would a relative after a funeral. After the stiff embrace, I thought to myself how heroin could really help the definition of her face.

Hatemachine and I automatically moved in a mattress and some shelves as some sweaty minorities worked on an old Honda and drank Corona as they eyed us suspiciously. I wondered where her new man was and why he wasn’t help to move shit in. I thought about asking, but stopped realizing I didn’t want to meet him.

I didn’t feel guilty for leaving her and running away with my tail between my legs. I could still rationalize to myself that that wasn’t what I was actually doing. But I definitely didn’t want to meet some tall asshole in a collared shit with unshakeable confidence who was now fucking my old girlfriend.

Hatemachine stood out in the yard for a while, all six feet and two inches of him towering over and menacing at the minorities, studying their habits and convinced they were eyeing up the load in the U-Haul, ready to pounce on my speakers. Once they didn’t, he walked over to them and bummed a beer.

Thinking of her new man, I slapped Belle’s ass. She looked sadly back over her shoulder at me as we awkwardly existed together for the last time. I felt some guilt then, and really wanted a beer. This whole situation was costing me light colored eyes, a giant ass in tight shorts, and all the good pieces of furniture. Yet, in the grey between certainty and despair, I held my ground, trusting the choking urge that what I was doing was the best thing for both of us. I knew I could not give her what she needed or deserved. And she couldn’t keep up with me as I searched for what I deserved. Poor, optimistic Belle Two, silently tolerating my habits and lifestyle despite not understanding or participating.

Usually the original is usually better than the sequel, although in this case it was not true and I knew it. I told her I was leaving and she stopped me, wanting to know how I was.

“Fine, I guess.”

“Where have you been, what’ve you been doing?” She asked me.

“Oh, I don’t know.” I rubbed my eyes in the afternoon sun. “Been working, went to that new restaurant off 95. I don’t know, just hanging out. We‘ve only been separated for a couple of weeks.”

She flinched at the mention of the word “separated”.

“Do you need anything?” She asked me suddenly.

“What?” I was not sure if I had understood her. I just wanted to erase myself and hide in a suburb, but the realization that I was throwing away a genuine chance of a normal life hung over my vodka soaked brain.

“Well, I mean I miss you. So if you need anything, just let me know. I know you get all down from work and stuff,” she skipped a beat, and I said nothing, “but you know, you can always call me.”

“Yeah,” I said, already knowing that I would never call her again. “Work is a bummer. Totally a fucking bummer.” I was a manager of a pharmacy. I drank whiskey and coffee on my morning commute. I had a degree, a mid management job, a girlfriend. A good living situation routinely followed by slow, impending death

She cocked her head and looked at me, knowing that I would never call her again either. Instead, she asked me, “Have you been drinking?”

“What? I just spent all morning moving all this shit out.” I said, wondering if I smelled like vodka. I decided that it was very probable.

I was reminded right then why I was leaving her, and I felt completely vindicated. I felt like grabbing one of her tits and twisting it until she screamed. Drops of guilt that I had started to feel on my forehead quickly fell aside.

I recalled night after night climbing narrow wooden stairs to our city apartment, staggering on the first landing and using my arms to brace myself in front of our door. My eyes half closed, my brain numb, sometimes I’d walk right past the correct door and try my key in the lock of another apartment.

Once inside, I'd have to face her hopeful eyes, seeing the eagerness and anxiety for my affection.

“Anything you want.” She would constantly tell me, moving my hands to her breasts which I‘d later want to twist.

Are one of the symptoms a sick kind of sadness when not even kinky sex will keep a young man home?

If not to make me happy, than it was just to get me to stay at least another day, and we both knew it but never spoke of it. I saw it in her eyes every morning when I rolled over to take a shower and drink my coffee and whiskey, I saw it in her eyes when I came home every night and she seemed surprised that I was back again. It was no secret that we had made a mistake, and it was no surprise that it was all slipping away. The dream of millions of Americans was a joke, and I could barely keep a straight face.

“You drink too much.” She said simply.

She had lived with her sick father a few months before we met. I later learned that ’sick’ actually meant ’alcoholic’. He was clean for a few weeks until he started hanging out with some of Belle’s scummy friends who would get him to buy booze for them.

One day Belle came home and discovered her friends had gotten her father completely smashed, left him passed out on the couch, then had stolen all of Belle’s clothes and valuables. She was furious about her dad’s relapse until she realized that he had died on her couch. His intestines essentially had bled to death from years and years of hitting the bottle. His Native American blood which bore Belle’s beautiful cheek bones had seeped through his leaking intestines and killed him.

So now Belle was searching for her father in young men like me who'd always end up hurting her and letting her down. She was trying to fill that gap. In my young age, even as I found myself to be a drunk, I realized the psychology behind it. And the irony amused me in a car crash kind of way.

“Work is a total fucking bummer.” I repeated to her again, breathing slowly so she couldn’t smell my breath. I gave her a hug and a quick kiss on the cheek, then walked out of the door and found Hatemachine leaning against the moving truck finishing a Corona.

I thought of the Flying Wallendas on their trapeze, dancing through the emptiness of the air. I thought about how two of them died in front of a sell out crowd in Detroit when their human pyramid collapsed. I turned around and looked back at the house, and saw some quick movement in a bedroom window. I sighed and realized that her new man had been home after all.




I bid Belle and an always cold apartment in the city with all its scary noises farewell for a final time, and moved towards quiet farms in an old, shitty apartment where I planned on making all the scary noises.

Late one night in my old city loft, when Belle and I had first moved in, my friend Bighead had assembled most of our furniture. His diligent eyes scanned instruction booklets while his hands tightened bolts. I stood watching, drinking whiskey and smoking exotic marijuana, while Belle had nervously bit her lip, concerned about the noise we were making even though it wasn’t even midnight. Concerned about how much I was drinking, concerned about the hallway smelling like pot, concerned about some twisted man that was killing young women in the northeast, concerned about our laughter being lethally loud. Somewhere below, a crazy old man sat on the edge of a chair, his knuckles white, starring maniacally into the ceiling above him. .

I clenched the steering wheel, trying to make my own knuckles turn white. Hatemachine produced a black film canister. He shook out a bright capsule and handed one to me. I swallowed it dry, washing down school boy medication created to make the television generation do their homework.

As I drove and waited for the amphetamine to kick in, I thought about a lizard hiding in a crack.

I tried to ignore this feeling. Spring was at its peak in the northeast. A new season was on the brim and achievement seemed possible. I was determined to finish the month positively, and embrace the carefree festival that the summer was always guaranteed to bring.

The fringes of the spring season is a special time, as it is the only season which feels purely hopeful, like your existence can spin 180 degrees any time, any day the week. Spring is optimistic, wide open; when you're a young child in elementary school, the advent of spring means that the long winter sessions in the classroom are finally over, and the semester is dwindling down towards the true freedom which lay in the short summer months. Summer vacation and summer love, smoking cigarettes in the shade and riding bikes through the rain. Even if you have never experienced those things, Hollywood makes it seem like you have.

Driving out of the city and heading north we sped through traffic on 95 making great time. Hatemachine adjusted his thin glasses as we spoke about drinking. We navigated off the interstate and onto some side streets, which soon turned into back roads.

“I’m the marker.” Hatemachine told me.

“Yeah?”

“When my liver starts to fail, you know that you’ll be next. And it’ll be time to quit. To stop drinking.”

Farm houses and old Victorians sometimes lined the streets with quiet churches and small stores sporadically lining the road. We cut through the non existent traffic and passed a giant lake on our left, heading into thicker trees. Eventually the forest tapered off and was replaced with giant, burned out mills. Abandoned long ago, they stood as relics of a time long past when local man relied upon them to make a living. Once they became obsolete, so did the town. A signed welcomed me to Starkbridge, population ten thousand.

The town began with farms and crumbling buildings on both sides of the bone colored road. Fittingly centered around an ancient cemetery which sprawled into hilly oblivion was the grey wood of my apartment building.

This was my new home. The medication kicked in, and shivered down my spine. No more traffic, no more crime, no more minorities or toll booths before the bridge. The phrase, “Passenger Cars Only,” what does that mean?

Soon we were struggling my couch through a narrow doorway and up the cracked stairs, scraping up the drywall in the front parlor. I grunted as sweat ran down my faces, the amphetamines Hatemachine had given me making me focus extremely well. At the top of the flight of stairs, we were lucky where the walls were already so botched and forgotten that our damage blended right in.

Hatemachine adjusted his glasses and followed my advice to not worry about the walls. If we fucked them up enough, maybe I could blend in too.

“Moon, that’s why you’re a manager.” He commented. I always recruited Hatemachine to help me move. He was not in particularly good shape, nor athletic, but he was reliable and loyal. Also. He sometimes brought Bighead with him, who was an athletic trainer. Between the two of them, they probably knew my possessions better than myself.

As we backed up the stairs, a complete stranger speed walking down the street came up to us and held the door for us, legs pumping and all. She jogged in place as she explained the many times she had moved within the last eight years or so, and the Hatemachine acted impressed. We thanked her and she left, a sign of the small town manners and charm that one reads in tourism books in gas stations advertising nice little places nestled into New England where one could spend an anniversary at a cozy bed and breakfast.

Later, Hatemachine confided in me that he hated people who jogged in place while doing anything, especially when waiting for a light to change colors on a street corner. The way the spittle flew from his lips as he spoke made him seem dangerously hostile towards a woman he had barely met and whom had held a door open for us.

I doubted that there were any bed and breakfasts in this town, or if anyone would want to spend any vacation time here. But then again, I was picking up all my belongings and digging myself a hole here, so anything was possible. Maybe I could take up jogging.

The first thing we unpacked was my marijuana smoking device collection. We smoked grass, trying to combat the amphetamine by numbing our minds with high powered marijuana. We occasionally coughed in the empty silence which always accompanied a new residence. Hatemachine quietly filled my bookcase with obscure works of western literature as I randomly pounded posters into the walls. I realized books on a shelf automatically make a room seem like it has class, even if the walls are thin and with out insulation.

Occasionally, Hatemachine would aimlessly flip through some pages and snort laughter. My friend was a bit scholarly, but in a way that comes from watching BBC and PBS, rather than ever reading a book. This was the standard procedure for most people I knew since graduating from the University. Books were dead, and video stimulation was coming back in a big fucking way.

Unpacking everything you own from Depends and Palmolive boxes during a May afternoon is like going throw baby clothes after a miscarriage. I stood before the large window looking down upon Route 17 which would act mostly as my front yard. I could see leaves and pieces of trash gently blowing in the gutter. This place--Starkbridge--this forgotten New England town, with its burned out mills, would serve as my hiding place.

I did not want to unpack anymore of my things, so I suggested we take a break and get some beer.

Exhaling his drag of smoke, the Hatemachine dropped some science fiction he was holding and looked at me quizzically.

"They sell good beer down the street?" He asked, in between coughs.

"There's a convenience store down the street. Only it's not like a White Hen or Seven-Eleven or Honey farms, it's an old school place like they used to have back in the day. Probably local produce and cheap cigarettes with beef jerky in jars. Plus, they sell beer. We need more beer."

"Oh shit? Let's go---

By this time, despite the marijuana, the homework pills had begun to break the world down for us into easy to understand fragments. I could feel the medication crawl up my spine as it occasionally cracked through all THC into a goosebumped focus. Despite the heat, my nipples were cracking at my shirt and my testicles had retreated into their turtle shell.

"Beer down the street man, that's a pretty nice deal.” Hatemachine spoke rapidly and in monotone. It was like a bad cassette recording, back when those things existed.

“No need to get behind a wheel, don't have to drive anywhere-- that's a nice deal." In the age of drunk driving persecution, it was a big deal.

We strolled down my street, the only main avenue of the town, towards Saint's Market. It was quiet outside despite walking along a main route. A large OPEN sign fluttered from a flag post in the front of the square structure. Murals of horses, grain, and barrels marked the sides of the establishment. "Budweiser" signs glowed neon red from the small window, and we hesitantly entered.

Inside, one aisle of shelves stood claustrophobically before us. Ceiling fans spun high overhead, and an old man sat at a picnic table reading the newspaper, taking his time and glaring at the city slickers nakedly.

We stood in the center of the store, wide eyed, turning in circles trying to take everything in. The shelves held only a few items, mostly bread and cereals. And only a couple of each item were present at that. If I wanted to buy two boxes of Frosted Flakes, I'd clear out the whole store. We headed to the beer cooler in the back. We picked out some imported beers and ten year old duct tape and paid in cash, as is appropriate in a place such as that. The old man behind the counter eyed us suspiciously, and randomly asked if we were musicians. Hatemachine said he was a traveling tattoo artist, which garnered cold dismay from the old man’s eyes. I snorted laughter, realizing that I was infinitely more successful and attractive than he would ever be.

We walked back to my apartment and I realized that I still needed to return the moving van. The giant truck seemed out of place, anachronistic amongst the swaying trees and old wooden buildings. I was attempting to live in a dreamed up place. The awe of city madness was one thing, but the insulated lull of a suburb was like heroin. Sitting on a box in my apartment and sipping my beer, I felt warmly as though my search was over; my evacuation was complete.

Watching Hatemachine quickly drink a beer and open another, I wondered what would be the powder keg. An old woman picking scabs in a grocery store? The lack of any type of youthful culture? The peculiar silence of a weekend? What would be the spark to send me running again; how long before I threw all my shit back into Depends boxes and cursed my mistake to live out here? Gazing out the dusty window half asleep, I realized that it truly did not matter.










I had drove Hatemachine home and retrieved my car when I returned to my dark apartment and realized that Belle had all the lamps. I cursed her and began to dig through a box, pulling out some old Christmas lights and plugging them into the wall. The ball of lights on the floor illuminated all the unpacked cubes, making strange shadows on the walls. I sat down on my crowded couch, expecting it to be dusty.

My cell phone rang from the top of a box and I looked at it strangely. I hated to answer my phone.

I was hoping it wasn’t Belle calling. I hoped that her minority neighbors hadn’t decided to break in and kill her new boyfriend and rape Belle. Actually, I didn’t really care if they did or not, I just didn’t want to listen to her shrill, panicked voice turning to me for guidance--I could hardly take care of myself.

I picked up the phone and was relieved to see it was only Bighead. I answered and he told me to come on down to his work. He worked at some corporate restaurant--Chili’s or Applebees, or Longhorn--I could never remember which-- but he mentioned that Hatemachine was going to swing by for some drinks and free food. Bighead recommended that I do the same. I told him I’d consider it and hung up.

I sighed looking for my marijuana pipe in the darkness. It was only a thirty, maybe fourty minute drive to the concrete shopping center where Bighead’s restaurant was. If I skipped a shower I could get down there pretty quickly and eat some free dinner, maybe get a good buzz on Coors Light. I felt very tired, had a lot of work to do around my new apartment--I didn’t even have a shower curtain or toilet paper I realized--but I knew I’d make the drive. I didn’t have any music set up, and I didn’t want to sit around in the quiet building once it got dark.

I wasn’t really hungry, but it didn’t matter. The premise was always dinner and drinks, but really we got drunk while watching the door, hoping that instead of an overweight, obnoxious family walking in it would be some one who could change our lives.

Passing a giant lake in my car--Lakeview Park! exclaimed the signs--I imagined myself purchasing a fast bike and riding around this area all summer. Freedom from the roads. Freedom from windows and hidden police cars. I’d stop at traffic lights and look into the other cars that would pull up beside me. Sometimes there’d be a pretty girl, and I’d try to make eye contact. They’d almost always look immediately away. I wouldn’t have to deal with that on a bike.

Large hills overlooked the heads of hundreds of trees in a valley which would definitely turn all kinds of colors in the autumn, if I made it that long. Old cemeteries sat quietly before Revolutionary War monuments, a subtle reminder of what I could attain if I stayed here.

This was hardly even a suburb. This was the minor leagues of life, where washed out pro’s with bad knees and prospects which never made it in the show could take refuge from the competition and evaluation of city life. Slower and unfocused, there was nothing to fear out here.

I arrived at the grey network of buildings and became immediately confused. The were several restaurants all located together in a grotesque strip stinking of oil and beef. Applebees. Chilis. Outback. D‘Angelo. I couldn’t remember which one Bighead worked at until I saw a guy out front smoking a cigarette wearing the a familiar dark uniform. I approached and asked if he knew my friend but he shook his head and slowly walked away with his back to me. I shrugged and walked through the glass door anyway.

I greeted Bighead as he shook his head, slightly embarrassed that his friends had nothing better to do than drink away an evening and harass his female coworkers. I didn’t mention that I had gotten confused, but I did realize suddenly that it was Friday.

“How’s the new place?” Bighead asked me, with half a grin. He looked bored, and I realized that I was the only one sitting at the bar. Two female employees were behind it, talking to themselves at the far end. A brunette who looked too young to drink was talking about getting her lip pierced. An even younger looking blonde shook her head and said something I couldn’t hear. They both laughed and looked around. Seeing me, they stopped laughing and turned back to each other in conversation.

I turned back to Bighead realizing that he had asked me something.

“Wait, what?” I asked.

“I said, ‘How’s the new place?’ You moved today, didn’t you?” He said, even though he knew I had.

“Yeah, it’s alright. Not too far. Kind of old but seems peaceful, I guess.”

“Not too far from where?” Bighead asked, picking his teeth.

“I don’t know. Here, I guess.” The girls laughed again, and I heard the word ‘septum’. The brunette was pretty cute, and I wondered if she would come take my drink order.

“Who’s the bartender over there?” I inquired.

“Huh?” Bighead looked across the bar, his elbow resting on my chair. “Kelly? You’ve met her before.”

“I don’t know any Kelly’s.”

“She was at Robert’s party.”

“Is Robert the one with dreadlocks?”

Bighead was silent for a minute. “I don’t know anyone with dreadlocks-- Do you?”

“I think so. I thought Robert did.”

Bighead laughed, looking at me for the first time and raising an eyebrow. “I’ll get you a beer.” He said. “Coors Light?”

I felt small and exposed in the unnecessary air conditioning. “Yeah.”

I looked around the family friendly restaurant and saw some old people eating in the booths. An older couple were drinking something shit colored out of martini glasses. They looked like they were on their regularly scheduled Friday night dinner date. Everything was routine and going according to plan.

Bighead returned with my Coors and the two girls he worked with disappeared into the kitchen. We sat in silence for a bit, watching the baseball game on television. The side door opened and out of habit I turned to look. I recognized Hatemachine, who nodded and walked over.

“I need a beer, where’s the son of a bitch bartender? Those amphetamines Moon, damn, they are going to keep me up all night.” He laughed a little too loudly and the couple drinking the feces colored cocktails looked over at us.

“Hey buddy,” Bighead call across the room half jokingly, “this is a family place. Keep it down.”

“I wouldn’t have to yell if I had a god damn beer! Jesus Christ, should I walk behind the bar and get it myself?” We laughed ignoring the starring couple. They eventually turned back to their foul colored drinks.

Bighead pretended not to hear us and went into the kitchen.

Hatemachine turned to me drumming his fingers on the bar and asked what I was drinking.

“Coors. Do I know anyone with dreadlocks?”

He looked at me as the brunette--Kelly--walked out of the kitchen towards us. “No,” he said. “No you don’t.”


Feeling the alcohol work its way into our bones like it had so many times before, we watched young girls in pants way too tight walk by, flaunting the surgical grade steel shoved through their bodies and their tanned skin as they fished for tips. The tell-tale signs of an innocent culture.

We filled Bighead in on the details of my new place, as he sat with his elbows on the bar, a shit eating grin on his face. I was the only person out of my group of friends that didn’t live with his parents. I found it unsettling that I was the most independent, and to some degree, successful out of everyone I knew. But what it really meant was that there was now a safe house that we could get trashed at and smoke blunts in without worrying about waking up an old man who had work in the morning.

Hatemachine spoke loudly, his fingers twitching on the top of the bar from the speed, stressing while he spoke--the lack of a landlord, the lack of a disapproving girlfriend and what he kept referring to as “the risk of an eccentric lifestyle.”

I didn’t quite understand what he was talking about, but instead tried to make some plans for when the restaurant closed. Even though it was Friday, everything closed early in this town. I drifted through the contacts in my phone, messaging only a couple of people who I thought were around. Then I started to delete contacts that weren’t around anymore.

I looked up and started to stare at a teenage girl who seemed to be eating with her family. There was a guy sitting next to her and I wondered if it was her brother or boyfriend, but it truly didn’t matter. She saw me starring at her and she smiled then quickly looked away. I sighed and drank the rest of my beer and returned to my phone, deleting the names of people I once called but never did anymore.

Bad music played through out the joint as fat families ate and paid, occasionally throwing concerned glances at our loud laughter. I enjoyed being drunk in the urban sprawl because it made the place tolerable. It was a nice buffer against the real world, like the trees which guarded the vacant lots in my new town.

Once the bar closed and Bighead got off work (“cashed out” as he referred to it) we stood outside, smoking, taking in the fresh air of the night with a stomach full of alcohol. Giant neon signs exclaiming Applebees, Longhorn, Chilis, Outback reflected on our faces, until they slowly got shut off one by one and we were left standing in the dark.

We got sidetrack the way drunks do when they get their second wind and marvel at the wonders of all the random opportunity which blurs and sways enticingly before them in small suburbs where no one else is as exciting as the drunks. Finally, our three cars were the only ones left in the vast parking lot, hardly lit by orange street lamos.

“Hey, I got a house warming present for you.” Bighead suddenly said, walking to his car and reaching into the backseat. I looked at Hatemachine and he shrugged.

Bighead came strolling back to the sidewalk with a large box in his hand. He pulled off the cardboard and revealed a large cake. Scrawled across in blue frosting was “Congratulations, Terrence!”

“Nice pastry. Who’s Terrence?”

“Don’t worry about it.” Bighead responded automatically.

“Aw, thanks dude. I don’t really like cake too much, but at least now they’ll be something in the icebox besides beer.”

“You’ve got beer?” Bighead perked.

“And some of that vegetarian shit.” Hatemachine looked in my eyes.

Before I could reply, Bighead turned and threw the cake towards his work. It met the restaurant window with a strange thud, almost silently, before slowly slipping downwards. The frosting clung to the glass like thick semen, and I realized how much I truly hated cake.





We headed back to my new apartment where we set up some chairs in my living room and got high. It was early morning, and we were all pretty buzzed with the slow, heavy pressure of alcohol and expensive dope working into our minds. Cars sometimes buzzed by outside my window, causing my windowpane to rattle. We sat quietly, not really talking, but instead breathing in the old air in the new atmosphere. We are young, and numb ourselves from the impressions of the world, still believing that we will live forever.

Drink heavily to put on an optimistic view of things, if not just to tolerate everything in general, especially the notion that all the drinking was probably killing us. I had a strange feeling that something better was always around the corner, twenty or thirty of fifty miles down the road, where pretty girls smiled and everyone toasted cheers to each other happily while music played in the background all day and night.

Meanwhile, I sit in damp bars or dusty woods, lamenting my desolation into my expensive shirt sleeves. My friends, my lovers, all tried to tell me, it was all the same no matter where you went, that there was still life to avoid no matter what. But it was bullshit, because I wasn’t trying to avoid anything. The problem was, was that I was living in the void. Pitiful comparisons and feelings of longing were useless, and for all the times that they had not come, I had held a drink to my lips so quickly that I had slept through everything before throwing up in the bathroom at work.

“Moon,” Bighead said to me, his eyes half drawn as the succession of the days continued to pile upon him. Poor bastard had wanted to be a cop once.

I looked at him and say nothing. Then I looked to Hatemachine, who is staring absently at the ground, and I am glad that I have no mirrors; I am relieved that I can not see the impression which this life has stamped upon me. Before work I get high, and after work I get drunk. Somewhere in between I stare at everyone who walks by, hoping someone will meet my gaze. Bighead knows all the best roads that lead to the shores in New England. And Hatemachine can tell me anything about the sports teams. I want to do all these things as well, but I prophesize doing nothing.

It is well after midnight when we decided to casually take some LSD. Maybe it was the guilt we all felt for being human, maybe it was the guilt we all felt for not completely taking advantage of our humanness, for perhaps squandering and jilting the pain our mothers went through in order to bring us into the world. This would turn a mundane ending to the night into something divine.

We talked about the trigger for revelation, the first steps toward attaining a purpose, a sense of justification for existence, which ironically could be bought for six dollars and dissolved on the tongue. We prefaced this by stressing how it would be casual. Nothing serious--we all had work the next day.

Bighead rubbed the sides of his face with the backs of his hands. He ran fingers through his thick hair. He picked his nose and spat on my floor, rubbing the stains the cake left on his pants. Finally he sighed and stood up.

“I can’t do this, I have to work too early tomorrow.”

I shrugged. Hatemachine nodded at me, assuring me that he was still down. It would be better this way. I only had a little bit of acid left.

The two of us opened our mouths and listened to music for a while, waiting for the drug to fade in.
A very pleasant fever began to take hold, and I smiled at we watched Bighead play on my computer. My attention span began to slip, and a strange fog began to cloud the placid evening. I felt a great anxiety, like a loud explosion was expected to rock my building any second.

I thought I saw Hatemachine wink at me out of the corner of my eye, but turning I saw that he was looking at a glass pipe. I filled it with marijuana and held it for a long time before smoking it. I finally passed it to Hatemachine, who had woken up now, strangely ecstatic and babbling.

“What?” I asked him.

“Lucidness.” Hatemachine replied. Bighead turned away from the computer screen and raised an eyebrow.

Hatemachine began laughing in his great voice that must’ve been heard for two miles in the quiet air. He walked around throwing match sticks, saying things like “space”. It sounded like he was stomping his feet, but I wasn’t sure.

The wave came and we rode it, laughing at the freshness and clarity of everything. I headed into my kitchen, examining trivial objects like I had never before seen them. I pulled out some paints and I began to paint on my kitchen table. I scratched some greens and browns together with a dry brush, and a giant tree began to form as my mind not unpleasantly floated away from me. A blue man sitting at the base of a great tree was looking out to the rest of the table because I made him do it.

"Damn…” Bighead muttered, suddenly beside me, “I forgot that you were so artistic."

"Yeah.” Was all that I could reply. “Solidness” Echoed in my mind. I felt wonderfully content and open enough to welcome anything which floated into my mind.

A few seconds later Hatemachine and I decided to roam the streets of the town. Like young children with a whole Sunday left to play we eagerly ran down the wooden stairs. Stepping out into the dark of the night, heads buzzing and thriving, we pulsated to the orange halos of the street lights . After a moment, we realized that it was rather cold outside, so I ran back upstairs and grabbed some sweatshirts, barely noticing Bighead sitting drunkenly in front of the television's great eye.

"Oh well", I thought, "at least he's not hurting anything."

I thought I heard him call out after me, but when I turned around before heading out the door, he ignored me. I shrugged, and fell back into the darkness where Hatemachine was waiting.


Tossing on the heavy shirts, Hatemachine and I quietly walked down the steps from my apartment and towards his car. He had purchased some dangerously large fireworks from Virginia, so we pulled some out of his trunk and made our way towards an abandoned parking lot behind a great mill. He filled the six inch mortar with a shell and lit it, and we retreated and hunkered down as the “FOOMP” of the ignition and take off exploded into the air. It was like an electric bass smashing us in the chest causing phlegm to rise and gather in our lungs as the gunpowder exploded, shaking the vegetation and causing cautious birds to flee from their posts in the trees. Tears rolled down our faces in laughter, matching the slow, sloppy trails dripping down from the sky and showering all around us.

The explosives were barely legal in Virginia, and thus completely out of bounds in New England. A distant car alarm went off, and some one on a back porch somewhere hooted in approval. We stood watching the pulsating powders burn slowly back to earth, our laughter fanning the light through out the sky and gilding tiny, lonely late night clouds on the horizon. A meditative silence fell over us for a strange moment, and the only sound was the distant car alarm. We grabbed the mortar and retreated back to sidewalks lining the empty road, once more unable to control our laughter.

We walked towards an old mill building, getting as close as the perimeter fence allowed us. Starring into the dark entrails, visions of the dissected industrial building flickered, a behemoth which once ran all day. The perished employees mere common New Englanders from every direction, running the grind presses and hammering the sickles. I could see their fatigued eyes, ready to eat and sleep more, prepared to tend to a long life despite of everything. Somehow I saw it all leading to misuse and waste--in the end, a life down a solitary path, loving the melancholy and emptiness of their fading hearts, sitting by a ticking clock but feeling noble and justified.

We smoked cigarettes grinning into the broken glass windows, watching the reflection from our smokes buzz around like fire flies.

"Is that someone in the mill smoking a butt?" The Hatemachine asked, slightly terrified.

I squinted my eyes, trying to decipher shapes as the LSD fought to create and extend them into patterns. "No," I said, "I think that's just our reflection in the window."

We laughed heartily in the night, realizing that we were still carrying the mortar from the fireworks. This caused us to laugh even harder, tilting our heads back and letting the laughter stretch our faces. The acid had reduced us to small children, wandering and lost, marveling at everything and anything, completely overwhelmed and overjoyed by the absolute complexity of life and the networks it weaves. Why didn't everyone else appreciate all this immense beauty which surrounded them constantly? Why didn't we have giant parades and fireworks routinely, maybe once a week, to draw together the community, to make life a little bit less lonesome and intolerably sad and boring? End the working and buying and slowly dying for one day out of seven, and let the tired workers smile a little bit more instead of tricking themselves into fulfillment, while aware of their fading time on earth?

We wandered further down the great roadway and into a high class neighborhood consisting of giant sprawling homes and minivans in every driveway. We walked very quickly until the Hatemachine stopped, and then I stopped, and we ask each other "where's the fire?" and we laughed, realizing that there's no hurry whatsoever. We continued the pace again, this time much slower, pointing out funny looking houses. We laughed maniacally at the architecture, criticizing the exertions taken to present their homes to each other, bespeaking the eternal labor necessary to harvest sustenance from the mother earth. I took off my shoes and danced in the golf course lawns, laughing and pin wheeling my arms like a drowning madman. The Hatemachine watched me with a smile on his distracted face as the acid twirled his thoughts. The sky was a giant kaleidoscope, with stars and moons like little well traveled points of information pinballing around the dark background starring right at us. We looked at the sky, necks craned back, for an unknown amount of time. From across the universe, the balls of gas flared and entertained us, burning away their lives like the little monkeys on drugs millions of miles away.

And Belle Number Two, burning away her own life in the city. Under that pulsating country sky, I thought, “Well, what about Belle?” So what if she had to fill some gap in her life with a constant father figure, so what if she felt loneliness even in the company of dozens of men and women? What of me crushing her little spirit while I waited for someone better to come along--someone who could hang with me when it came to bourbon?

I remember the smell of the winter, with its hard wood floors and bad feelings, ignoring the whispers of love and cringing with silence. I saw myself selfishly on drugs under a quiet sky miles away, no better than first Belle.

One of the symptoms is nostalgic longing.

One of the first times that Belle and I had ever spent time together--the apathetic one, and whom is probably on drugs in a field somewhere-- hey why aren’t we spending time doing something we love?-- We had visited old graveyards. We marveled at the decrypted grave stones in the December snow. Belle’s dress flowed in the December wind as we jumped stone fences and tomb stones half concealed by the white powder. Old names and old dates etched in stone in an era long before our time. I had grabbed her among the death and the temporary, and asked her if she was mine.

“Yours.” She had replied.

“Just mine?” I had asked.

“Just yours.” She said, and then kissed me with blasphemy among the dead flowers and bodies of dust. Those which did not last were the witness to our shared joy, which transcended any of their pathetic remains. Everyone buried around us once thought that they too were irreplaceable and eternal. We mocked them with our earthborn happiness.

My pants were wet from standing in the field for an unknown amount of time. I turned towards Hatemachine and he seemed unfazed by any long passage of time. I decided that I deserved wet pants because my manners and etiquette were ugly and brutal. I argued that I was sensitive and caring at times, and how’d I’d love to love everything, but in my mind, I still needed a reason to. Belle had become associated with the negative times I encountered in the city, and it made me feel like a monster.

I could see Belle bitterly popping Valium and Ambien, spiting me, yet I thought of another crying, alone in a giant web of tall buildings with hustling people with places to go.

I could see myself with my hair combed, wearing nice clothes walking around work. Smoking cigarettes in the back rooms like I used to in high school. And I could see myself standing in a stranger’s front yard, starring at the sky all night. I knew this would add no peace to my life, but how sensual, beautiful, and course this is.

The Hatemachine and I were standing in front of someone's house admiring the architecture. A light was on in a upstairs bedroom, and we made up narratives of what was going on inside. We made funny voices and scenarios, pretending that whoever was awake was writing a letter by candle light, saying things like,

"Dearest Benjamen,
This is the hardest letter I've ever had to write. Bleak is our future together, and our fire has become mere ashes in the breath of this coldest wind. My only hope is that it reaches you before the awful Moors close in...."

...Or we would discuss how we could possibly get inside the giant, sprawling houses, not to steal or rape or murder, but just to innocently look around. We wanted to see what the hell it was that people could possibly put in such a large manor, and we figured that if the exterior looked so impressive, the interior must be equally such, so we'd obviously pretend we were journalists looking for a scoop, saying, in deep voices:

"Hello sir, (ringing the door bell) sorry to disturb you at such a strange hour, whatever hour it happens to be, but my name is Hatemachine and this here is my associate editor Moon--Popular Home Magazine. We'd just like to have a look around..."

...and so on, laughing until the cold realization of reality set in as the acid slightly cleared up, and we’d keep moving, afraid we would alarm anyone who saw us looking at the morning rise or the columns in their driveway for what was probably hours.

We headed the opposite direction, back past my apartment, and into the downtown area as light began to dawn into the sky. We laughed as we passed under my window, trying to hear what Bighead was up to. Half a mile down, smoke was pouring into the early sky for some reason.

"What the fuck is that?" Hatemachine cried out.

"We better go check it out."

"We need to make sure everything’s ok, no one else is awake right now. We have a responsibility to the town to investigate."

I agreed. We had a responsibility. We were popping the cherry of this town, and anything worth doing was worth doing right.

We made our way downtown and onto the bridge. The smoke wasn't smoke, it was steam-- coming off of a waterfall. A trickling river sliced through downtown, once aiding the extinct mills, and rolling down man made falls into a pile of water six feet below. We stood by, admiring its unstructured beauty, mesmerized by the chaotic roar. I had once seen a video of some mountain climbers getting killed by an avalanche. They had stood perfectly still, mesmerized in the path of the speeding flow of ice and rock, waiting for all their existences to violently collide. I understood, and thought of Bighead back at the apartment, attached to a television box that was emulating the world while he was missing the world.

The falls were right before the bridge, causing steam and mist to bellow into the sky, obscuring the road and the white bridge. We went over a fence, and down some embankment. There were some wooden benches delicately placed below, in the sand beside the falls along the shore of the river. Trees and undergrowth were trimmed and manicured, and I got the notion of being inside a giant bonsai tree. Peace and tranquility grew silently down here, probably unnoticed by the majority of residents in town. Everyone passed gloriously over on the white bridge, unknowingly grinding above serene sand and dancing little plants on a divine background of roaring water, calling out "roosh!" and "pshhhh"--the ancient cry of H20 to modern man who was too busy to listen.

A spot was cleared in the brush right under the waterfall where one could sit and watch it all tumble down over them, and I walked towards it, letting the cool misty steam caress my face.
"It's like a beer commercial!" I yelled at the Hatemachine, but the water grabbed my voice and brought it along, down the falls and under the bridge.

And so we stood there, taking it all in. We walked under the bridge and to the other side where the river slowed and pooled. Further down, in the shadows of a once great burned out mill, the water slowed and was sectioned off. White muck and foam piled at the edges, and a pool skimmer was dangling nearby. Signs hung warning us of pollution, asbestos, cancer, death. The majestic falls ended in a tepid pool of carcinogens and warning signs. Modern man left nothing untouched, and again my mind flashed to the old city where I had spent the winter, and the way the snow would turn brown and shitty only minutes after falling. When it melted, it didn’t even wash away any of the trash, but just made it soggy and stick to your shoes

We climbed back up a different way which we had come, which is something that tends to always happen when one is on LSD. We crawled up the bank and back onto higher ground, our muddy shoes slapping the pavement. We were now in front of the charred remains of the great Bernat Mill Complex. Only the shell remained, as an enormous fire had apparently broken out there a summer earlier. I wondered if the cause was anything like some doped out twenty something year olds leaving cigarettes burning behind. It wasn't--I would later learn a cold homeless couple had left a candle burning.

Like we had earlier, we stood we our necks craned before a great spectacle. The mammoth entry way of the building still remained-- a skeleton with the window eyes all blackened from its abusive relationship with flame-- but the giant doors of its mouth still intact in a black-toothed grin. The very top of the supporting columns encircling the entrance way were singed from where the flames had reached, nearly forty feet high. The rest of the mill was sectioned off by dark walls and chain linked fence, but peering through the holes we could see that there wasn't much left of the mill. Scraps, twisted steel, and burned machinery littered its interior, with yellow bulldozers and caterpillars resting inside from the clean up. Once again, we were surrounded by fading signs warning us of cancer, asbestos--human created death.

The acid was wearing off in the suddenly too bright morning light. Early morning traffic began to thread through the desolate downtown area, slowly crawling over the white bridge. People were going to work, it was rush hour or something, and reality was slowly creeping back into the edges of our clearing minds. We were dirty, sweaty, wearing old clothes with dilated pupils. We walked slowly back to my place in silence, seeing everything unmarred by happiness or sorrow, but as everything purely and truly was.

Everything had already been said, and we silently reflected, communicating telepathically with every sentient being that existed, exists, and ever will exist. I felt like I had walked out of a movie theater after seeing a rare good film and was still trying to soak in the details and the Hollywood curveball ending. I wanted to discuss this with everyone, but I was overwhelmed with what I had just witnessed, and it influenced everything--illuminating all under its light. I truly wondered if it was possible to see so clearly and serene in everyday life, without subjecting the body and mind to dangerous drugs.

We passed a dead bird on the sidewalk without even slowing. What was death but a temporary transition? Did I not sleep in the same position which my mother died in every night?

We climbed the stairs which once seemed so comically loud and chaotic a lifetime ago. Only a few hours had passed, but the stairs and halls seemed foreign and awkwardly quiet yet large in the silent building. I hoped that we weren't too loud during the night for my neighbors' sake, but we probably were.

Bighead was on the couch awake, watching snuff and shock videos on the internet. It was impossible to drift off because whenever he closed his eyes, Bighead saw a Russian boot holding down a Chechyn rebel by the forehead as a knife worked through his neck. Bighead’s voice cracked and scraped like a man whose read eyes desperately needed sleep. He had stayed up all night with us despite not tripping and being very drunk 8 hours earlier. A pretense had been for him to watch us, but halfway through out the trip it was rather clear that the Hatemachine and I were essentially babysitting Bighead.

"Come on, big guy, I'll give ya a ride home." Hatemachine said to him.

Bighead gratefully got up to leave.

"Thanks for helping me break the new place in." I called as they walked out the door.

It slammed shut, echoing in the empty rooms.

I stripped off my clothes and lay on my mattress, listening to traffic go by. My mind was still wired from the drug, but my body ached for sleep. I closed my eyes and let the strange zooming patterns and lucid dreams clarify my mind for an hour or two. Settling back into reality is like being in love. It's a beautiful perspective to see the world from. I lit a cigarette and realized my friends hadn’t said goodbye. For some reason this bothered me.

I rose refreshed despite no hours of sleep. A quiet building surrounded me, muffling the sound of passing traffic zooming just outside my walls. Pulling up the shades on my new windows in my new living room, I could still feel the buzz in my brain as I peered out into the street, green trees swaying in the wind as nature bloomed once again.

Something in the corner caught my eye, and I noticed that someone had written “Out Before winter” on my wall in black marker. I couldn’t remember which one of us last night had done it, but as I fingered the black ink of the large, looping letters, I realized that I needed a cat, preferably one which was of bright colors.









I woke up late, around nine thirty, so I quickly showered in order to be at work by ten. I jumped in and out of the water, and back into the cold air of the apartment naked to get dressed. My cat watched curiously as I ran furiously around looking for my work shirt which held all the keys and my good pen. I finally found it flung in a far corner underneath a stack of magazines. I poured some food and fresh water in the cat’s bowl and glanced at the clock. I had to be at work in fifteen minutes, and it was about a ten minute drive into the suburban wasteland.

The night before, Hatemachine and I had shambled through a hole in the fence surrounding one of the mills we had seen the night we had tripped. We found a way into the faded building and had began smashing the long fluorescent light bulbs. We eventually found some type of giant take which we beat with steel bars until the tank burst and rancid smelling, thick liquid seeped out and ruined our shoes. We eventually left, but not before breaking every window left in the panes of the east wall.

My pants from the night before were covered in plaster and fiber glass. I tossed them aside andI packed a small amount of marijuana into a little pipe and mixed together a stiff rum and coke. I took a hit of the high powered marijuana and held it into my lungs as I drank half of the cocktail. I exhaled and coughed furiously. I put on some music trying to squeeze in the last bits of freedom I had before I traded in my time for a lump sum of money.

I finished off the marijuana and downed the rest of my drink. I poured a tiny bit more of rum into the empty glass and drank a straight shot of the stuff. It was good drink, expensive and imported from the islands, and it went down smooth and warm into my early morning stomach. My vision sharpened as my head cleared a bit.

I bid farewell to my cat and went out the door locking it behind me. Down the stairs and into my car, I hopped behind the wheel and opened all the windows as I rolled down the driveway as a neighbor eyed me suspiciously.

He was a man with skin like old boots, long dark hair hanging over his eyes, and a middle-aged body that looked as though he had spent the last twenty years or so mixing concrete. I nodded at him and flashed him a quick ‘peace’ sign with one hand and the other on the wheel. He quickly approached me, and made a motion for me to stop. I was late for work, but I held up and allowed him to walk over to me.

“Hey, I live across the hall from you.” He spoke like a male phone sex operator.

“Is that a fact?” I asked, what he wanted. Were the all night acid trips upsetting him? The loud music keeping him awake? Was he aware of all the fireworks my friends and I were responsible for illegally igniting? The constant smell of marijuana smoke? It could be a number of things I was doing in violation of everything he appeared to hold sacred.

“I notice you have a lot of people coming and go, pretty often. Pretty late at night sometimes.” He said.

“Right. I’m a pretty popular guy, I like to entertain. Feel free to stop if you wish, I’m just not sure if it’s your cup of tea. I run with a pretty low brow crowd, a man like you might feel embarrassed to be seen with us. Were you military?” I asked him.

Laughing, he rested a heavily tattooed arm on my car. “Fuck no.” He said simply.

I was never very good at reading other people. Even if I remembered them.

He adjusted a pair of sunglasses resting on his head, gazing across the street calmly before turning back to me. “Sounds like you guys have fun up there. I know you smoke, you blaze, right?”

“Absolutely.” I replied.

“Right, well that’s cool, the people downstairs seem like real strange jobs. Don’t worry about us, but I think you should know that your friends shouldn’t park here. Now, I don’t give a shit,” he said motioning with his hands, “but these people all around us do. Some guy came upstairs the other night and asked me if those were my friends, of course I denied it-why shouldn’t I?”

I couldn’t think of a reason why he shouldn’t, so he continued.

“So yeah, just have them park somewhere else, I like the parking lot down by the mill, lots of privacy and no one gives a fuck what happens down there.”

“Not a problem.”

“Well, feel free to swing by for a drink sometime.” He ran a hand through his long hair, looking me over. “It’s just me and my girl, I work a hell of a lot, she does too, but at least now we know at one of our neighbors is decent.”

“That’s the way some people are, right?”

He seemed confused for a minute. “Military?”

“No, ‘strange jobs‘. Or decent, I guess.‘”

“You got that right.” He said, but I don’t think he understood.

Nodding, I said, “Didn’t catch your name?”

He extended a dark arm. “Mills.” He replied. A fake Breitling rested loosely on one wrist.

“Moon.” I said, gripping his hand. I noticed that somewhere he had learned that a man could be judged by the grip of his handshake.

“Well, enjoy your day.“ I told him, shifting back into drive. “I’ll be sure to spread the word about the parking.” I sped off before I got roped into another conversation. Mills seemed nice enough, not too bright, yet sharp enough to realize that he was a phony. I determined he was most likely a conman, trying to get something from me or exploit my talents in some way.

I played the radio loud and mean, tearing through the narrow back corridors of my town, passing through a couple of other meaningless, disappointing towns until I finally reached the outskirts of the urban sprawl. A hospital rose up on the corner and I hung a quick left, through the oncoming traffic of the green light and roared uphill until I came to the store where I was middle management.

I sprayed some cologne which my boss had given me last Christmas for the present swap we had done.

“I don’t know anything about you or anything you like, so I just got you this.” She had rasped on the December morning before the horrid holiday, her face way too tight, like a veined balloon atop a sagging, pale body about to break down. She tolerated me because I was a hard worker, but I knew she felt contempt towards me that usually would take years to cultivate, and I’d accumulated in only a few months.

I reached into the back seat of my car and grabbed a random tie which was already noosely knotted and threw it over my head and tightened it around my neck. I clipped my manager keys to my belt and smoothed over my hair in my review mirror and strode into work.

She smoked a couple packs of cigarettes a day, and probably had for a long time, so when I reached the back office it was no surprise that Krause, my boss, was smoking. At times, right in the middle of barking out commands, she’d break down and cough for minutes, while the rest of us, her ever loyal troops, stood around awkwardly waiting for the emphysematic blitzkrieg to pass.

Right before Halloween, another manager had whispered to me that Krause’s doctor had given her five years before she was likely to be confined to a wheelchair. I wasn’t sure how to reply, as I felt that despite the universal respect she iron fistedly demanded, we all would‘ve been ambivalent towards her death. After Halloween, the manager who told me this information in a way that made me feel inside of a locker room again, was fired when teenage female employees accused him of rubbing against them.

“Mr. Coyne.” Krause hoarsely dragged out a name like an old door opening slowly.


Poison her coffee. A few years ago someone spiked his coworker’s coffee with sodium azide. It’d be that easy--why wait for her to poison herself with those long Marlboro 100’s?

The informalities being over, she cleared her throat to become businesslike, but she coughed, the burst capillaries underneath her pale cheeks highlighted, her eyes bulging as she temporarily suffocated. Arms crossed, I leaned against the office desk, watching her like a sample in a jar. Finally able to communicate again, she began to bark out orders.

She said something about a napkin display. I thought about the color the sky had been as I had walked across the parking lot.

“I’m not aware of any napkin display.” I replied. This was true. Usually as soon as I stepped foot outside of the store, I immediately forgot anything which occurred within its walls. I no longer knew if my memory was actually deteriorating or if it was just a side effect.

“… And when you’re done with that…” She croaked, and began to hawk phlegm up in her intimidating throat and then swallow it, rising her fat arms to cover her mouth, the flabby undersides of her triceps swaying. I turned away my eyes for the first time that day, the morning rum not sitting as well now that I was at the store as opposed to when I woke up in the morning sun.

She wheezed, then caught her breath, her meaty knuckles turning white as it grasped her soft drink bottle. “What was I saying…?”

“Something about a pot calling a kettle black.”

“Right. Do that again. Then I want you to climb up to the bays and organize all the boxes of paper. They look like shit, I want to be able to see every product from the floor.”

“Will do.” This was a lie. Bay was store code for the rafters. Twenty feet off the ground where we stored the giant boxes of toilet paper and paper towels. It was going to be hot up there, and I’d have to climb a rickety ladder of poor career choice to the top and rearrange the heavy bastards. I’d be sweating through the armpits of my silk work shirt.

But I knew she was not capable of making the climb herself. She never went up there, either due to her poor physical condition or acrophobia. Some days I’d hide up there and imagine what it’d be like to fuck the young cashier who only worked every other Sunday.

“It is an issue.” She continued, as if I was arguing with her. “I want to be able to see it. From the floor.” She croaked.

“Right.” I said.

I needed a tragedy to happen. The booze had made me too indifferent. Apathetic. There was no thrill in this, only a Zen like numb. I wondered if I could poke this monster before me, this asthmatic machine who starred at me like I was a wild animal. Blue veins road mapped her face and I realized that she was almost done talking,

“..And I want it done fast, don’t pull any shit, you’re going to be very busy today.” She rumbled past me, knocking into my shoulder and knocking me back with out seeming to notice. The door slammed as she walked out onto the sales floor.

I spat on the floor and quickly counted the safe, becoming an authority by default. I was on the brink--a young man in his early twenties with a middle management job who still wandered the streets all night with a head full of lysergic acid until the sun came up. I was supposed to crack the whip around here, to put the company first and foremost--and got paid like I did. And hell, I was rich compared to the people who I ran around with that owned nothing--anything was possible. But I was more interested in getting wasted and being wicked, getting girls to smile, getting laughs, and getting crazy enough to sing with anyone who asked.

I wanted to feel like a champion still, unlike the other corporate wet bags who fretted over the sales numbers for a small finger nail of a massive corporate body. They made me feel old, and slightly nervous. The idea that I would be being doing all these retail things, nothing deeper and all this nothing, for such a long time, made me want to try to scream and wake up the customers walking through the front sliding door. The customers who were mostly pharmaceutical addicts so completely gone that they didn’t even realize that they had shit themselves until it the kid walking through the aisle the opposite way made a sour face. And it made me want to cut Krause into little pieces for trading in her life for her paychecks, for so complacently accepting the deal with the devil, and seemingly loving every second of it.

But it wasn’t all bad.

The high school girl who loved me was named Evelyn, but everyone called her Eva. We sometimes worked the same graveyard shift and we got all the freaks in at night. The screw heads, the tweekers and lonely perverts, the old men with no wives and the children with no parents looking to steal condoms so they could use them as balloons.

At the time, Eva was younger than me, somewhere around five or six years my junior. I was her boss, but mostly I was her male figure. Her father had left her mother years ago, so she naturally craved any male attention she could find, especially if they held power-whether it be an Audi A5 coupe, or the laughable responsibilities of a night manager. So she would smile as I craned my neck to get views of her just to brighten my dismal nights.

We had fooled around a few times, exchanging our tongues and lips in the back office during the late night shifts, her young body and eager mouth pressed up against me, my hands up the front of her shirt.

Once I had let her leave work for a few hours to go to a party. When I told her to have a good time, she smiled and stepped our of her tan work khakis and strode to her locker in a pink thong. She put on some small shorts then walked back to me, and kissed my cheek quickly. I licked her face in response.

I walked away towards the back room, off of the awful sales floor where the elderly crawled about, milling around bargain basement prices and cold shelves of deviously advertised products which had no real use or value. I unlocked the door and stepped into the poorly lit backroom, collapsing onto some boxes. Work always exasperated me, making me feel as though I was missing some great event under a wide open sky somewhere, while I squandered my youth for a few bucks an hour inside a dingy and dark back room of a store.

High school health teachers always fed me the propaganda about the pain drugs caused. But they never told me about the pain my soul would experience from working a meaningless job a well trained ape could do with no sweat.

The door unlocked and Eva stepped into the backroom, nervously looking to see if Krause was around, but then smiling at me. I looked up from my position as she pulled up some boxes next to mine. She gingerly sat next to me, smiling, probably because she realized that if I, the boss, was sitting down on the job, hiding in the back room, then it meant that she could do so too. I vaguely thought of telling her to go back onto the floor, but quickly dismissed it. No sense in squandering my youth for a few bucks an hour inside a dingy and dark back room alone.

She sat next to me and smiled again, anticipating. I smiled back, glad that she had decided to join me after all. Her shirt rode up her back, and when she leaned forward I could see down the her back, her pink underwear riding up her ass crack, teasing me.

When she saw me, she talked in sugar covered tones.

"Hey, Mr. M." Her voice dripped with honey, slow and smooth.

"Hey, Eva." I responded, feeling like the teachers that would monitor the bathrooms in high school. We both knew it, knew that we were fools for each other, but we were both very scared of doing much about it. I had my conscious, but I was morally flexible. She usually had some football player or some twenty something meathead chasing her, but most of the time, a short jail term or fist fight with a half back seemed completely worth her bold smile and thin neck that had a silver chain with a horseshoe dangling from it.

She loved horses.

Eva folded her hands down by her waist, arching her back and puffing her young chest out towards me. Unconsciously getting closer, and looking at me, studying me, to see how I reacted. She was used to young boys and old men falling over themselves, trying to communicate with her, or trying to get a better look at her, or trying to get into her.

"Guess what?" She asked me, brushing her blonde hair back behind her as I starred right through her.

"What?"

"I gots a new tattoo!" She exclaimed, pulling the front of her jeans down an inch or two below her hips. She should’ve had hair down there, but it was obvious that she didn't. A spiraled heart wrapped around some type of equestrian creature, redly imprinted into her flesh. I wonder why she loved horses.

But I never asked why, and knew that I never would. Because I didn‘t really care why.
"Beautiful girl." I said, with no commas.

"Let me see your tattoo again, please?" She asked, feigning shyness.

I untucked my soft work short and turned around. I pulled up my clothes for her to see my back.

"That's so badass." She said, being sure to catch my eyes.

"Thank you," I said, half smiling and keeping to the script, "your's isn't half bad, either."

A door opened and crashed shut, and a larger woman walked in. Star, her eyes alert and bright with the burden of a child growing inside of her, the details lost and diluted because at least she had a reason to live for all the world to see in her uterus. Long, dirty blonde hair fell over her brightly hopeful eyes, rimmed with the sadness of the poor, as she could barely afford for herself to eat, let alone another child. I frequently gave her money for vitamins and dinner. She was paid modestly by my boss, and I knew she gave it all to her dipshit ginger boyfriend who was addicted to Oxycotin and Hydrocodone.

She'd be pretty if she wasn't so naive.

"Hey, Mr. Moon Manager, I came up with a great name, tell me what you think?" She told me, referring to her unborn offspring who was either male or female, no one knew.

"You think of new names every day." Eva said, and it was true.

Star was a child having a child, which was becoming more and more common to me everyday. My generation was the new baby boomer generation; everyone I knew from high school was either a drug addict or pregnant. Or something in between. Star was younger than me, slightly older than Eva, and readily admitted that her childhood was shit. Thus, she was determined to create her own family, and by extension a child that she could provide for. Somehow this would avenge the emptiness which she had felt when she was young. I’d tell her that she was throwing her life away, especially with the red-headed faggot that was her boyfriend, but she would just smile and start to hum songs I didn‘t know.

"You see, I don't like going out to clubs and bars like you do." She told me once.

"I don't have many friends, so I'm not going to miss going out with them or anything if I have a kid. I just want to stay at home and be a mother."

“I don’t like going anywhere, either.” I muttered.

“You go out all the time.” Said Eva.

“Yes, but that’s only because I can’t sleep.”

“Well, I sleep just fine, thanks.” Star said.

"Yes," I said, "but what if you want to change your mind? You can't raise a child on 7.50 American dollars an hour. Say you want to go to school and get a degree, say one of you gets sick, say Shithead won't watch your child?"

“Moon, you worry too much!” Star sighs.

“No, Moon is just really smart.” Eva defends.

“No, I don’t have anything to offer anyone except myself.”

"Oh, please." Star said, barely listening, playing with a strand of thread from her second hand clothes. Caught up in her own delusion, people born blind didn't know that they're blind until someone told them. "Cassio isn't that bad, I think he'll make a great father."

She was referring to Shithead. I always forgot his real name, and confused him with other skinny read heads smoking cigarettes on the street.

I sighed in disgust. Children having children. Ruining two lives at once. Population control. Bad public schools. The tax rate.
I was several years older, but with a deep fear of fatherhood, especially when I was with women without condoms--even when they insisted that they were on birth control pills.

I saw procreation as the cause of suffering. To live was to suffer. I was determined to never consciously bring life into the world, despite the joys and splendor I'd seen and accomplished, because I was quit sure that there was not enough to go around. In America, children were a sign of poverty.

"Maynard." Star said, finally pulling the string from her worn dress.

"Huh?" I asked. Eva was checking her cell phone. I wondered if she had a boyfriend.

"How's that for a name? If it's a boy, I mean." Star said.

Eva laughed, not looking up from her purple phone. "Sounds pretentious."

"Nice use of vocab." I told her, smiling.

Eva stuck her pink tongue out at me playfully, then returned to her phone. I was almost positive she had a boyfriend. I could feel jealousy rising into my throat.

"Ceminsk?" Star asked to no one.

"How about Lucifer Satan Damien. You could call him LSD for short." I said.

Star made a face. "You don't know how important a name is to a child."

"Nope." I said.

"Moon never wants to have kids." Eva said.

"Really?" Star was asking Eva instead of me, even though I was standing right there.

Eva nodded.

"Truth," I said anyways.

"Well that's just sad. Kids are people too. Just little people."

"No," I said getting up, not even sure if I existed. "Kids are small animals. Like dogs. Except if I back over my dog in my driveway, I won't go to jail."

Eva laughed, finally putting away her phone. She was watching me closely, like a specimen.

I stomped on a cardboard box, crushing it beneath my feet. Restless, I wondered around and smoked a cigarette. Eva returned to her phone again, and star hummed softly in the silence.

"Can I have one?" Star asked after a while, motioning to my cigarette.

"You're pregnant." Eva looked up and answered for me.

"Listen to Eva." I said.

"So what, just one, please?" Star was talking to Eva again, even though I was standing right there.

"No."

"I'll empty all the trash for you." Star begged.

"Does dipshit know?" I asked.

"Who?"

"Your boyfriend." Eva answered for me.

"No, he doesn't want me to smoke. But please, I'll empty all the trashes the next two times we work together!"

I looked at Eva, beautiful Eva with her young blonde hair falling over her shoulder, her devious smile toying and crippling my reason as her pink thong rode up her ass. I inhaled deeply on my cigarette and blow it towards the two young women. I'm getting paid to be some type of role model to them, and all I can think about is a vagina and a fucking doomed fetus inside another vagina.

Shit.

"Eva, have a cigarette." I said, throwing my pack to her.

"Eva, can I have a cigarette?" Star asked her immediately.

"No." Eva said.

"Moon?" Star begged.

"Ask Eva."

"Evelyn, please?"

"No."

"Moon, I'll empty the trash and count all the draws for you the next week!"

"You can have the rest of mine." I said, handing it to her.

"Thanks!" She exclaimed.

"Just empty the trash tonight." I ordered Star.

"Deal."

Something close to tired, I sat down next to Eva, and she handed me my cigarettes back. Star wandered around, humming and smoking near the fire exit. Eva and I looked at each other like two parents out of ideas of discipline for a rebellious youth. I didn't feel like telling her any jokes or discussing the modern drug culture or high school sex scene, so I pulled out my note pad and drew a pound sign so we could play Tic-Tac-Toe against each other.
______


A few days later and I was watching Beaglesworth sleep on my couch with his girl Jayha. His chest rose slowly, his long, California hair draped over the face of the girl and just obscuring her naked tits. I had seen them before, so I continued to paint the wall of my apartment as oranges and reds dripped sloppily onto the faux hardwood floor.

The night before Hatemachine and I had hung out in my apartment smoking weed and drinking whiskey and water. Eventually we grew sick of whatever it was we were doing--playing video games, I think--and we traveled to a nearby lumber yard and purchased an 18-volt cordless reciprocating saw and a 9 inch 14-tooth metal cutting saw blade. We crawled beneath the same fence and began smashing the west wall of the usual mill. We had left the battery for the saw charging at my house, so after about two hours of hurling bricks around the rusty, forgotten machinery, we returned to my place. We pounded two beers each and retrieved the saw and flashlights and got back to the mill just as the sun was going down. We went to one of the walls and begun to cut giant holes in it, the sound of the machine roaring loudly around us but eventually getting lost in the darkness.

Now it was a rare weekend afternoon I had off from work, and as my friends slept off their drunks I had spent the morning with my cat pacing the no longer empty shell of my apartment. It now appeared as though a group of apes had been living there for quite some time. Empty beer bottles lined the tables and floors, my couch was pulled out into a bed, strewn with clothes and trash and people. Cigarette butts were scattered everywhere from the wind drifting thru my open windows, and I wasn't wearing a shirt. Unpacked boxes still lined the far wall, and I had already unconsciously decided that I’d just leave them so it would easier to pack whenever I decided to move out.

I placed my paintbrush down and crept up to Beaglesworth as he slept. I had a camera and a sock in my hand. I planned to take pictures of each of my friends passed out with socks in their mouths, which had essentially led to Bighead watching snuff videos online that night Hatemachine and I tripped. None of us would become politicians once the pictures got out.

I crammed the sock into Beaglesworth's mouth and he awoke instantly. Jayha squealed laughing.

"Yo man." I greeted him.

"Sup?" He said groggily, smiling.

"Pretty good." I said, which was pretty much the truth.

Beaglesworth rolled over, half awake, looking up at me. "Fucking socks." He grinned as he pushed Jayha off the bed.

“Hey, that hurt!” She said, making no effort to cover herself.

"It's a risk one must take in this post nine eleven world." He muttered.

I sat down next to him, drinking a warm beer, as Jayha went to the bathroom.

He sat up and stuck his foot in the air, waiting for me to notice. I looked at his ugly bare foot.

“So?”

“Fucking poison ivy, man. Such a bitch.” He bent down and scratched hard.

“No reason not to climb trees.”

“True. Or if you’re being chased.”

“By the police?”

He stopped scratching and examined the bloody skin under his finger nails. “Or wild animals. A boar.” He squinted.

“I think only females charge. But I don’t think they have any teeth.”

“They both have tusks.” Beaglesworth corrected. “And both sexes will charge a human.”

My cat rubbed against my legs as I finished my morning beer. “Man, how cool would it be if feral animals still roamed the streets?” I asked.

“Well, I was watching this special on the race riots in L.A. and it was very similar to what I imagine it would look like if we let the wild animals lose.” Beaglesworth laughed.

I nodded.

“What’re we going to do with our lives?” I asked him.

“Today?”

“Ever.”

“Vaguely exist. Get hammer faced. Fuck some sluts.”

“I’m too old for dreams.”

"Hey," he said, suddenly excited, "you got any money? My boy at school’s got a bunch of acid if ya wanna go up to Lowell."

"Sure." I said, realizing he had tricked me into driving him to Lowell.

Jayha entered the room with her hair wet and clothes on. “What’re you boys talking about?”

“We have a plan for the day.” Beaglesworth said putting on a stretched out shirt which I recognized as coming from my closet.

“Jayha, you wanna drive to Lowell?” I asked her.

Beaglesworth leaned back on the couch and starred at the ceiling, smiling. I sipped another warm beer I had found on the table.

“Lowell?”

Lowell had historic significance a hundred years ago, but now was significant for its needle drugs, gangs, and dirty river. Beaglesworth went there to learn to record his guitar playing and let his blond hair grow long and thick. A treacherous bridge crossing the river and its jagged rocks below was a popular suicide hot spot for the local population, and a good destination for those seeking various drugs.

“We really should take a nice German car and not some gook shitbox, if possible.” Beaglesworth muttered.

“Fuck you, my car is no shitbox.” Jayha pouted.

“I’ll pay you in drugs.” I said. No one was listening to me. Beaglesworth pulled out his last two Camels.

"Can I have one?" Jayha asked.

He squinted at her playfully. “Ride to Lowell?”

His hand was outstretched with half his daily supply of tobacco.

“You fuckers are paying for gas.” Knowing that we wouldn’t, she relented and grabbed the cigarette.

We drank while we waited for Beaglesworth to work out the details. He called up his friend and spoke enthusiastically to him, calling him Gibbs, then talked to someone named Yanks. Finally he jumped up, searching for his shoes. I finished my third beer and went to find my wallet, passing by my window. Out back I saw a young Mexican woman pulling a black trash bag towards the dumpster. I stop, forgetting about the wallet.

Normally I’m wasn’t attracted to Latinas--their short, stocky bodies were made too perfect for child bearing--but there were always exceptions. I watched her struggle with a heavy black bag, until she managed to toss it up and into the dumpster. I thought of her disposing of a corpse, and smiled as the back of her shirt pulled up and I got a view of her smooth, tanned back and the seamless curves of her ass.

Who is that? She lives here?? Or just using the dumpster to dump torsos and limbs??

She turned to walk back inside and immediately hung her head, her dark hair draping over her face like a dog that would not look you in the eyes. But before she hung her head, I caught a glimpse of the yellow and purple bruises on her face. Whoever she belonged to had worked her over pretty damn good.

I turned away from the window and found my wallet as Beaglesworth placed a giant purple top hat onto my head. He laughed, and pulled his own long hair into a ponytail before tying a bandana around his forehead.

“Ready, Freddy?” He asked me.

“Let‘s make it happen, captain.” I replied.

Half way to our destination, we stopped for some tacos and beers at a shitty Mexican restaurant.

We strolled in with every eye in the place looking towards us. I was wearing my giant, purple hat while Beaglesworth always seemed to draw attention. Together, all of us were freaks without remorse, setting our upper middle class environment on edge even when alcohol was not involved.

I wanted to sit at the bar, but it was full, so we got a table instead. It was covered with cheap brown paper, and I asked for some crayons. Beaglesworth drew obscenities on it, while I created a mural of a giant penis impaling a young looking Mexican woman with a bloody nose. I had fucked our waitress right after the last World Series, so she had me sign it, then she tore it off the table and folded it into her back pocket, making sure to flex her ass towards me as she did so. I felt sadness at knowing her already-- otherwise I could have made a new friend, a new contact to reach out to.

We finished up and we walked outside into the sun, garnishing looks and stares from the families eating on a Saturday afternoon at a family Mexican restaurant where all the employees spoke English. I tried to make eye contact with their daughters, and some of the thin mothers, but they all starred down wordlessly at their food. None of them looked up, none of them even blinked, none of them acknowledged my existence. Frustrated, I kicked over some potted plants in the lobby on the way out.

We were all half drunk from lunch and breakfast with a long drive ahead of us, but none of us cared, and it wasn't even worth mentioning, despite that this was the pinnacle of the DUI era. So we piled back into the car and sped up the highway as fast as the shitty car would take us, listening to music with windows down and closing our eyes to watch the patterns form through the eye lids.

We walked into some apartment in Lowell. A fat dude and a gay black guy were sitting on a couch smoking weed.

"Sick hat man!" The queer said.

"Thanks."

"No, no, no. After I sell you this acid, the hat's not going to be cool, it's going to be suspicious." The fat kid said, laughing.

"No worries, I tend to blend in." I said, smiling.

Jayha laughed and began telling the queer guy about an episode I got into one night in Norwood in which I didn't particularly blend in.

Norwood was a suburb growing too fast for its own good and filled with South American immigrants who worked day labor and a clashing self righteous white population with nothing better to do than to complain about the South Americans living next door to them. Unless someone needed a new roof.

Beaglesworth and I followed the fat guy into his bedroom and I was surprised when it didn’t smell like cum. He closed the door and made us all sit down.

“How goes it, man?” He shook Beaglesworth hand in some elaborate ritual.

“Burton?” He asked, turning to me.

“Sure.” I replied, and he didn’t offer to shake my hand or introduce himself. I sat down with my back to the wall.

He had produced a giant serrated knife which he bragged was too long to be legal.

“How long is legal?” I inquired.

“Five inches.” He said.

“So you measured the queers dick and had a few inches left over?” I replied.

The fat man’s demeanor changed. His knees popped as he squatted down and leaned over me. He held the point of the knife against the top of my thigh, right above the knee.

“If I just rotate this blade in a circle, how long do you think it would take for it to cut all the way through your leg?” His breath smelled like fried eggs.

“Longer than it took for you to suck off your nigger boyfriend.” I replied.

Beaglesworth laughed and came up behind the fat man. Soon the guitar playing arms of my friend were around the fat man’s head and under his chin in a chokehold.

“You need to learn to laugh at yourself.” Beaglesworth said, pulling him away from me.

The knife fell from five chubby fingers to the ground, causing a cat I hadn’t seen earlier to run out an open window. Beaglesworth released the fat man from his wrestling hold, and the fat face quivered and sucked in breath. His lips were a shade of purple, a sign of oxygen deficiency.

“My hero.” I praised in my best saved princess voice.

“We’re cool.” The fat man said to no one in particular and leaving his knife open on the floor.

Rubbing his neck, he pulled out a giant black army surplus box and some foil. Squares of blotter acid spilled out. I bought 15 purple tabs with white skulls on them. The fat kid nodded, smiling, ranting about how great it was. I jammed it into my pocket as Beaglesworth bought some pot from the kid, then we split, driving furiously back to the suburbs, sweaty and slightly burned out.

Jayha wanted to take a shower before we did any serious drugs, so they dropped me off and roared away. We agreed to eat and clean, doll ourselves all up, then take some LSD later that evening in the hopes of facilitating some type of conscious expanding event between the three of us. This was always the pretense. But essentially there was nowhere else to go, nothing else to do, and television was terribly isolating and depressing, so we got high and smoked cigarettes while listening to musicians who were now dead.

LATER



South of me and in the distance wildfires burned just outside of the city limits where everything was I had left. On evenings that felt like they should have been foggy, I‘d stand alone on my front porch and watch the distant smoke taint the sunset. I‘d hope that the flames would pass through the hills and ford the river into the forsaken city and swallow parking garages and sidewalks.

Audis, Jaguars, BMWs, and Cadillacs that their owners had all flaunted on their half mile trips to supermarkets would roast in their sleep like prisoners in their cells. Like shiny newborns in a maternity ward. I tossed a cigarette I hadn’t realized I was smoking into the brush and returned inside to shower quickly. Jayha was calling my phone.

"Hello."

"Hey, my girlfriends Ash and Lilly want to do something fun tonight...I invited them over to your place, is that okay?"

I smiled. All of Jayha's girl friends were beautiful. "Of course. Do they want to trip?"

"No....I don't think they do that. But they'll drink a bunch...they're a really good time."

"Sounds good." I said, and before hanging up, “Did you know that the legal length of a dick is five inches?“

“What?” A pause. “What did you say?”

“Retractable knives can be no longer than five inches in this state or they’re considered illegal. Isn’t that strange?”

“I’ll see you later tonight.” Jayha hung up.

I tossed my phone down and was grateful I hadn’t jerked off earlier in the shower. I couldn’t orgasm if I drank too much or tripped.

I fed my cat, who was being called Colonel Albatross, and was amused as he ate his wet food furiously, flinging shit looking chunks everywhere. I figured I might as well clean up a bit if some of Jayha's lady friends were coming over. I started by grabbing handfuls of empty beer bottles and cans and throwing them into the recycling bag. Eyeing all the dirty dishes piled high in my sink, I decided to be truly American and just throw them all away rather than clean them. I could always buy new ones because wasn’t time truly precious?

My table was still littered with paints and brushes from my first night in the apartment when the Hatemachine, Bighead, and I stayed up all night exploring the town with a head full of acid. I placed them in a box, and pulled out a cold beer, eyeballing up my cellular phone.

Picking it up, and swigging back some alcohol for a last minute confidence boost, I dialed up Eva's number. Her phone rang and rang until I hit her messages. I thought of leaving my voice, but decided against it. Again, I wondered if she had a boyfriend and decided that it was quite likely.

I tried Hatemachine next, hoping that he wanted to drink some whiskey with me before the girls got here. I was expecting to at least leave a message with his mom, but his phone rang until no one picked up.

It was only another day in the void.

I sighed, and adjusted my belt, which had a big buckle which read "fuck". I felt a sharp sudden pain in my finger tip, and noticed that I somehow had just received a splinter.

Then my phone rang. I didn‘t have a fancy space phone, so I had no way of knowing who was calling. I answered and was greeted by a woman’s voice, hoping it was Eva. But it wasn’t, the voice was too heavy, and I also knew it wasn’t Jayha, but otherwise I had no idea whom I was speaking to.

“Hi, it’s me.” It said.

“Why, hello?” I did a terrible job of masking my confusion and quickly swallowed some more beer.

“Belle.”

“Huh?” I asked.

“It’s Belle.” Belle said.

“I know.”

A shadow crossed over my testicles as I realized that I hadn’t called her since I left her moving in her new apartment. Had barely even thought of her.

A social euthanasia occurred whenever I moved. Sometimes it was easier to just not tend the garden rather than dig rocks out of the soil. Seeing Belle was seeing everything that was cold and wrong with myself reflected back. And I’d rather cover that mirror with some sheet than see the reflection.

Vampires live forever because they never see their reflections. Retractable knives must be shorter than five inches. A symptom is surrendering to murderous rage.

I knew I owed everybody at least a, "Hello and how are you doing". So,

"Hello and how are you doing." I said.

"Hey! How are you?" Her voice lit up, like it always did in the beginning. Even when we were living together in the same bed, she'd ask me 'how are you' in that same manner, the same way she'd asked her grandpa or a homeless stranger.

"What's up?" I said.

"Nothing, are you busy?" She always asked me.

“Just planning to dig a splinter out of my hand with a long knife. What's on your mind, Belle?"

“I want to know how the new place is, wherever you are these days.” Her voice faded back to the usual dull gray.

“Well, it’s quiet here in Starkbridge.”

“Oh?” Her voice filled with color, “you’re in Starkbridge now? I didn’t know that, wow. I can’t picture you there. Do you like it?”

“I do, and I don’t.” I swallowed more beer.

“You do, and you don’t?”

There was some lake out west I had once visited that was so cold gas couldn’t form to bring corpses to the surface. The pacific northwest is a breeding ground for serial killers. Weren’t young women being murdered in Providence? Had Belle told me that?

“I do and I do. Not many young people unfortunately.”

“Not many bars.” She said sharply.

“I haven’t smoke pot all day. Alcohol goes next week. I‘m giving up. Back to school, maybe. Business school. I‘m giving up.”

“Well,” she paused, “it sound’s like you’re ready to begin actually.”

“Were you the one who told not to throw cigarettes out of car windows?”

I heard a sigh on the other end. “What are you talking about now?”

“I thought it was you. I guess it was Hatemachine, though. Worried about the wildfires. The drought... dry conditions.”

“What is a Hatemachine?” The voice was genuinely alarmed now.

“You’ve met him a bunch of times. He helped you move, remember?”

“Oh….right.”

I swigged some beer, pacing restlessly in my small kitchen. Belle picked up on it immediately.

"Are you sure you're not busy?"

"No way, Jose." I spoke more cheerfully than I intended. The phone clung to my ear in silence for a long time. I could hear my breath reflecting in the mouthpiece. Or maybe it was her breath.

"How about you? You doing alight in the new place?" I didn’t miss her, but I was curious.

"It’s alright. Leona moved in with me, but we don’t get along too well. So I’m staying with Adam for now.”

Silence on my end. I strained for a face, but could only picture a dread locked Arab I knew.

“Who’s Adam again?” I asked delicately, realizing too late that it was a trap.

"Oh, he works at the store with me. Technically a manager, but he’s really cool.”

“Wait,” I rubbed my chin, “is he that Asian guy? Yellow car, with tinted windows?”

“No.” She responded. “That’s someone else.”

"Pretty much." I said grimly.

"What? Adam and I are just roommates.” It was like picking at the thin pieces of skin around a fingernail. I dug too deep.

"Well, cool.” To understand her, you had to understand her need, which I had barely grasped like a napkin falling to the floor.

“You know, kiddo, you know what your issue is?” I began. “You’re a great argument for realism, rather than idealism, which was something we'd argue in the political science classes at my university before the discussion inevitably turned to the legalization of marijuana. Fucking kids.”

She began to protest but I cut her off.

“You see the world the way it should be. Not how it is. You force hope and optimism.” I couldn’t stop now. The flood gates had opened. Months of cold anger and silence in the city loft spilled out now that I had miles of darkness between us. Any pity, any guilt was now cold anger.

“Not that the world is cold and ugly of course, but you see--”

“Hey--” She began, but I continued again, over her voice, our conversation looping on top of conversation, dialogue on top of dialogue:

“--All this junk, my bank account, everything surrounding me means nothing--”

“--I heard a quote that reminded me of you--”

I thought of Bruno Ludke, who at first I placed as a famous hockey player I once admired. But I realized he was in fact a necrophiliac discovered by the Nazi police in 1943.

“--it just keeps me up at night, even if I’m not wired on drugs, I lied about not doing drugs but I need to do something--”

“--it was, ‘life isn’t about finding yourself, it’s about creating your--”

Ludke confessed to no fewer than 85 murders over the span of 20 years after a young woman was found strangled in the woods of Kopenick.

“--but I’m part of the problem, I’m apathetic and I contribute to the suffering--”

“--I think you should think about it.”

Post-mortem sexual abuse was found on most of the corpses and Ludke was declared insane.

“…and it's like, well what did Young say?…Closer to the heart, closer to the start? Or something?”

“I think you mean Lee. Geddy Lee was the one who said that. But…what does that have to do with anything? Why does that even matter?” Her voice was becoming shrill. Nails on a chalkboard.

"Oh, right. Well shit, ain’t that the bastard truth... I guess it really doesn‘t matter. At all.”

Ludke was committed to an SS run hospital where he was subjected to medical experiments and ultimately killed in 1944.

"Oh, well okay."

I lied and said I had to shower. I had finished my beer, and my cat had finished his dinner and was now reaching up to meet my outstretched hand.

“You take care of yourself.” Belle told me.

“You too kiddo. Be careful out there--seriously. Fires in the hills, all it takes is some ash raining down onto a dry roof--”

“Right.” She said, and hung up.

Ludke could not tell investigators how many minutes were in an hour and had once got caught attempting to steal a chicken.

I put down my empty bottle and found my reflection in the window. Who said that they cried after seeing their reflection? It wasn’t Young, was it?

I slumped down on my couch, straining to see out the window. Nothing interesting ever happened outside. I was the only one who stirred things up. I glanced quickly around and called for my cat. He came bounding into the room and sat beside me like I was a super villain. In times of self reflection, television stereotypes could be so cruel.

Is a symptom donating everything to battered women? Cancer survivors? Embattled youth? Confessing to murders you did not commit?

I didn’t think that everything had always been so bleak. But I could not remember if there had been some type of paradise which had long passed me be, and I was just smelling the nostalgic fumes. Getting hungry off the smell.

The wide eyed guy with the messy hair reflected in the window smiled at me. It was lonely here a lot of the time, but it was fine, because that was life. Sometimes you got caught stealing chickens, other times you were the chicken. Outside, it was dark, and it was summer.
















PARTY


Parties were like another kind of job for me. It was an atmosphere where new friends, connections, lovers, and information could be had. Pretty women garnished my living room where the only air conditioning was provided. Young teenagers from some local high school were in the kitchen drinking with my friends. The plant in the empty room was knocked over, and I could hear people smoking something in my bedroom. Bighead poured me a shot of something vile. I saw that they were drinking one of my bottles of rum.

Meanwhile I was looking for my cat.

Lily had really good taste in the choice of music she listened to, but I wasn‘t certain about the jewelry she wore around her neck. Thick strands of cord, hemp, and string hung off her, obscuring her modest cleavage, as she bent to fiddle with the music. A large ceramic Buddha hung off of one, and she was fond of saying things like, “What’s your greatest gift to the world?” and “Have you surrendered?”

“Surrendered to what?” I asked her, half listening, half staring at her dark haired friend who only slightly less interesting.

“To the great potential of change.” She replied simply.

Her dark haired friend was named Ash, a gorgeous but insecure skinny girl who I was quite sure I had met once before, but neither of us mentioned it if we had. She seemed unsure of herself, and would’ve been beautiful if she was more confident and if Jayha hadn’t told me that she dug those kind of niggers you saw on MTV. She wore her dark hair over her almond eyes, displaying a kind of weary uncertainty found mostly in single mothers but I could not quite place a child belonging to her. Instead of initiating conversation, I fumbled around until I got drunk enough to be comfortable and not give a shit about how her presence made everything I had in my possession seem small and worthless.

There was loud music scaring my cat as Beaglesworth and I drank feverously, the acid we had picked up earlier in the day temporarily forgotten. We cracked jokes, feeding off each others energy like really good counterparts tend to do. Lily, Ash, and Jayha stood around like observers watching the theatre as Beaglesworth and I performed and danced upon our stage in a hot apartment in a small New England town. Beaglesworth grinned at me from across the room, our brains linked with the same wise, earth bound shame that despite our great talent and humor, we were seemingly banished to the same fate.

"We need some rum." I declared.

"Oh ya? What kind of rum you got here, Moon?" Beaglesworth asked. Occasionally he’d bring some cheap beer or a bottle of his parents liquor, but for the most part I supplied him with the booze.

"Good shit." I replied. I drank well and everyone drank well with me.

Hanging onto our words, the girls mouths twitched with stifled laughter and giggles as though Beaglesworth and I were the only two who knew each other in the room. Lily had stopped digging through my music collection and was watching us closely, as Ash and Jayha sat next to each other smiling.

We were the wind of the group, billowing our little ship towards any direction with everyone else having no choice but to sail along.

"Lily, makes us some drinks?" Beaglesworth asked, feigning sweetness.

Beaglesworth had once told me in confidence, at a back table in some bar or club somewhere one winter night while we drank with our heads low, that "most humans are just stupid animals. Our brains are not that far removed from climbing trees and slinging shit at each other. A select few have figured out how to exploit this, and if you can as well, it's hilarious getting people to respond however you'd like and do whatever you want."

Myself, always the skeptic, laughed dismissingly. "Example."

"Okay," Beaglesworth had said, sliding out from the table. "Fine."

I sat back, casually sipping on my beer, while Beaglesworth walked over to a slightly attractive, slightly older woman standing near the bar. He made a few seconds of conversation it seemed, then lightly touched her shoulder. They both laughed. Turning, they made eye contact with me and waved. Finally, they came walking back to our table. She was carrying a fresh drink in one hand, and Beaglesworth had two in his hands.

Handing me one of the fresh drinks, he announced with a grin, "Moon, this young lady is Diana. She just bought us some drinks and would like to sit down with us."

And as Lily poured us two fine, stiff drinks over ice and walked back from the kitchen with them in hand, one for me and one for Beaglesworth, his eyes sparkled with humor and "I told you so"-ness.

"A couple of alpha-males like ourselves could use some cigars." I said, lighting up an expensive cigar I had bought some time earlier down the street. I handed a second one to Beaglesworth.

"Moon, with your fashion sense, and sense of all that's fastidious, I'd say you're a pea-cock." Jayha said as I reached for the cocktails.

"An alpha-male peacock, though." I looked at Ash who turned away and pretended to rub at a spot on her black skirt.

"I'm going to make a t-shirt." Beaglesworth interrupted.

"Yeah, of what?" I replied, reading from the script.

"It's going to have a silhouette of a pea-cock on it, and underneath it will say "alpha cock"."

We laughed and high fived. Lily seemed confused, Jayha smiled knowingly and Ash continued to rub at some invisible stain on her dress. She shifted her legs and I wondered if she was uncomfortable in the heat. Perhaps even perspiring.

"Yes, we're definitely alpha cocks in this land of flightless grouse and fat penguins marching to their feeding grounds each day, aren't we?" I muttered, dragging on the cigar.

"Can cocks fly?"

"If you treat them right." I said, as the girls looked on in half amazement, half confused horror.

“Stop flirting with us.” Jayha said, pretending to be offended. From the kitchen a roar of laughter as something glass fell. I wondered who had brought all the high school kids.

“Bighead’s friends are out of control.” Jayha murmured to herself, answering my question.

“If they’re not careful they’ll turn this into a party.” I replied.

Jayha gave me a look which meant, “Whatever-it’s your house.”

Someone said, “I think they’re hot.” One of the girls giggled.

“I’m sure they’d be down for getting sideways.” I sipped my drink and dimly noticed that Lily had made them really weak.

“The boys next door.” Jayha smiled deviously.

“A boy next door.” Beaglesworth said. I was quite certain him and Jayha were fucking but it seemed that Jayha was ignoring him tonight.

“They’re just students. High school kids. Almost as bad as college kids.”

“Almost?” I asked Beaglesworth. Everything was so unclear.

He sipped his drink. “At least they’re still gullible enough to believe they have the world by the balls. Remember? Remember when we were in high school--we did whatever we wanted. We owned every second. It was ours.”

“I guess.” I countered. “We just didn’t know any better. Everything was so real back then. So serious. There were times I seriously considered killing my family over things. Fuck.”

“Everything was so real you could touch it.” Jayha said.

“I don’t know. Once I started getting paychecks, everything became muffled. Unreal. It’s like I don’t exist if I’m not getting paid.” This was mumbled to myself.

“Oh, Moon.” Jayha pouted her big lips at me. “You’re just being American. After you get educated--edge you mah cated--you become American.”

“I just want to relax.” Smoke exhaled from my mouth in a thick cloud.

“It’s called Pussy.” Beaglesworth said quickly, his legs stretched out on the coffee table, dangerously close to our drinks. Somehow, the way he said it, made no one uncomfortable. In fact, it seemed to ease the tension in the room.

“You guys have known each other too long.” Lily muttered. I turned to watch her speak. Even Ash laughed at this. The sound coming from her was hardly music, but rather dry and heartless.

“Truth.” I said, gesturing to Ash to come sit on the empty couch with me. She eyed the cigar in one hand, and the cocktail in the other, then mouthed “maybe”.

“Yeah. That’s what happens.” Beaglesworth continues, chuckling. “Everyone grows up together. Then they become we-bins.”

“Weebles?” Jayha asked. I’d heard this before so I groaned. Beaglesworth ignored me.

“We-bins. As in, ‘we’ve been friends for so long, you’re starting to look attractive.’”

Jayha smiled wickedly while the other two ladies looked slightly disgusted. Ash had turned back to her dress again, smoothing it out like a robot.

“Fascinating.” I said in a soft, kind tone.

“A tangled web where everybody is fucking everyone.” Beaglesworth continued, grinning at Jayha as she shook her head, pretending to be upset. I heard someone mention my name in the kitchen, then laughter, as if I couldn‘t hear them, as though I didn’t live here.

I finished the rest of the rum and stood, flashing Ash what I hoped was a sexy smile, but I wasn’t sure whether or not she noticed. In the kitchen, laughter drowned out whatever hip tune Lily had put on the stereo. I couldn’t remember if there had been music playing during the course of our conversation. I decided it didn’t matter.

"Moon, I'm going to take a shot of absinthe!" Beaglesworth declared, strolling into the kitchen. All the high school kids clearly admired him for some reason I couldn’t quite figure, but I decided it had something to do with the way Beaglesworth had said, “pussy” to a room without offending any broads.

"Right on!" I agreed. We went to my freezer and fished out a cold bottle of Absinthium Verde which I had bought for roughly 500 kroners in the Czech Republic during my adventures in Europe.

Lily and Ash seemed a little taken back, joining us in the thick heat of the kitchen, as a little fear crept into the gorgeous full moons of Ash's eyeballs. I tried to comfort them and reassure them with eye contact which she promptly ignored. Meanwhile Beaglesworth tried to convince them to take shots with us.

"No worries, it's gravy, baby." I said to Ash, brushing up next to her. She turned to me and looked completely uncertain, her response drowned out by the loud music. I sent one of the young kids to turn it down.

“Fuck that. I’ve got work tomorrow.” Bighead sighed.

“Where are your friends?” I asked him.

“Huh?”

“All those kids.”

“Kids?” He laughed. “They’re outside smoking butts.”

“How old are those fools?” I asked, not hiding my disgust.

“About as old as that chick you were living with.”

Beaglesworth and Bighead laughed at the same time. Beaglesworth repeated it, then laughed again. snorting. Jayha frowned, her eyebrows raised while Ash looked at me strangely.

“Where is this girl, Moon? I never meet your girlfriends.” Jayha said.

I ignored her. It was too fucking hot and I was mildly drunk.

"I don't have any sugar or the proper glass for it or anything, so it's going to taste like complete shit." I said. I ran my hand over my forehead and it came back wet with sweat.

“He never stays in touch after a break up. He disappears once the relationship is over.” Bighead smirked.

"I thought you said it was gravy?" Ash asked me.

“Who disappears?” Someone asked.

I laughed at the uncertainty. Everything was coming at me at once, so I simply said "You never have gravy which burns your sinuses and waters your eyes, girl?"

She turned away, dangerously worried.

"Is this sugar?" Beaglesworth called out, his blonde head somewhere in a cabinet.

"No, that's corn meal."

"Why do you have corn meal?"

"For making pizzas."

"You put corn meal on your pizzas?" Lily asked me.

"No, I put them underneath."

"Well never mind the sugar then."

Beaglesworth poured out two shots of the vile green stuff. Bighead refused.

"Me, me! I want one, please." Jayha cried.

"Sure." I said, grabbing another shot glass for her.

"Thank you, Moon." She said sweetly, brushing her modest chest against me the way girls do when they’ve been drinking and want something. Or get something.

Beaglesworth poured out a third shot, and we all toasted.

"To life, love, and laughter!" I said. We all tilted our heads back and swallowed the awful stuff, chasing it down with cheap beer. Love.

"God damn!" I said, shaking my head violently. We walked back into the cool air conditioning of the living room towards the couch. Ash shot me a nervous glance, a disbelieving skeptic eyeing a priest before he fails to produce an apparition. Laughter.

We sat down heavily onto the couch as I browsed the music, looking for a song which would beautifully narrate this particular moment in our lives. We were all drunk, happy, and laughing, peaking and climaxing together on a warm summer night. Life.

I gave up and handed the music to Lily.

"You smoke weed, Ash?" I asked her, who was sitting across from me.

"No." She said softly.

"I do, Moon!" Jayha yelled, pointing out the fact that I was focused only on one person.

I laughed to ease the tension and began to break up some high powered marijuana for us to get high. Meanwhile, everyone chattered drunkenly, the apprehension one feels around new people completely forgotten as the alcohol lubricated us, making us dance, grab each others forearms in heated conversation, and spill bad beer over nice upholstery.

I inhaled deeply and passed the dope towards Jayha's direction. Exhaling, I leaned back, marveling at everything that was in my life at that moment.

My windows were closed but the blinds always seemed open. Cool street scenery flashed by in the night, bouncing the single flames from dozens of candles off the walls. Girls shivered in the hot night, and for a moment it might as well had been a dismal September. Each shadow produced by a candle danced with its master, and as I lifted my cup and murmured my lips the darkness mouthed silent songs from the corners. I pulled up my socks and saw the view up Ash’s skirt.

I knew that September would never be as kind to me as this night was now.

The drunks from the next room swallowed slowly and sucked on their cigarettes near the open windows as I slowly told a story in strained monotone, my eyes never leaving the ground. I had to work on eye contact, I resolved, but it got harder the summer I realized that it was easier to make someone cry than to laugh.

“This was life, love, and laughter.” I began.

“Jokers out in the woods, in the ring, and what a circus it was that abused the elephants around us. Better yet, what a prank.”

“I love elephants.” One of the girls squealed. I couldn’t tell which one.

Someone threw on music I'd never heard of before. I'd been cynically traveling back into time looking for songs that were perfected before I had been born. To his dismay, I constantly Ignored Beaglesworth‘s jazzy recommendations. I blatantly ignored anything modern or new out of lonesome loathing to my generation--the all inclusive everyone is special generation, a group of fuck ups and ambitious philosophy majors with no practical skills.

“If I tore my groin from the bone in a kickball game I'd starve to death at third base like a deer with eroded teeth.” I sighed. “But if I happen to mispronounce a French philosopher from the 18th century I catch hell.

“Everybody won a trophy in this generation. Everyone had a right to take what was theirs, and then slap your hand away if your reached back for it.”

I finished speaking and most are too stoned to be paying attention. A few look puzzled and Lily, with her dyed red hair and a dangerous eyebrow ring, asked what it was that I did for a living. I'm an ambitious fuck up with no practical talent so I lie. I tell her I'm a garbage man. Or a disposable lighter repairman.

And in the silence no one laughs. I was too good at making the mood somber. To easy to make them cry. I tilted a half drank beer I did not remember buying to chapped lips, wondering once again why Lily made such weak refills. My need for alcohol eclipsed my manners and I strode to the kitchen, leaving the eyebrow ring and the view up the skirt looking for a cigarette. I told her to check the bookcase but she ignored me.

"We have to go soon, I have to work tomorrow morning." Lily called after me, so sadly that I loved her for it.

"I have to work tomorrow too." Ash quickly said, slurring her words slightly. I realized she had been looking for that escape all along.

"What do you do, Ash?" I asked her over my shoulder, in between the kitchen and living room. For the first time all night, I had finally caught her brown eyes in mine, disappointed that she was leaving.

"I'm a waitress at Cassidy’s," she replied, "I work the bar usually."

"Waitress?” I stopped mid flight to the kitchen and turned back to the couch. “What’d you got to school for, again?”

Sighing, she said, “Art. Art history. Graphic arts. Graphic design. It doesn’t matter, really. I wait tables.”

“At that joint with the giant animal heads on the walls, the waitresses and waiters, servers and busboys all duck down, lowering their heads careful not to get an antler in the eye while the rich fucks from the city come in late at night to drool and ogle over your asses in tight black pants and get stupid drunk--their brief respite of their lost years before grimly heading back home to wife and kids, right?" I asked her. "Isn‘t that what it seems like, at least?"

"….Yeah." Her voice was shaky. I was ranting drunk.

"HA!" Beaglesworth yelled, looking extremely comfortable and content from his corner.

"Creep." Jayha said.

“Hey, some of the best minds we’ve got work at gas stations.” Beaglesworth pointed out.

“I don’t know if that’s accurate.” I replied. “Why would they be at a gas station?”

“Well, maybe a bookstore or something.”

“No one reads books. Everyone needs gas!” Jayha cheered holding up her car keys.

“Maybe managing some sterile white outpost of capitalism. Some shitty retail store.” I muttered.

“Nah, that would be a waste of time and effort.” Beaglesworth looked into my eyes. “That’d make them too misanthropic. They’d hit the bottle instead.”

‘That’s true. I hate people and have never related to anyone. But we all can‘t be rock n‘ roll gods living in our parents‘ basement.” I winked at him.

"What do you do, Moon?" Ash asked me, ignoring my prior statement. “Tell us for real.”

Despite my earlier statement, the question caught me off guard.

"What do you mean?" I stalled, mind racing for something witty to say.

"What do you do for work? How do you have an apartment like this to yourself?" She said, motioning to all the petty things I had collected and would have to move and take with me if I ever wanted to leave the place, all the expensive crap that I'd bought and probably never use twice.

I laughed. "Well, basically I pretend to be an artist most of the time. For my day job, though, I used to work a meaningless, automatic job at a store where I essentially babysat teenagers whom I related to way too much down in the city. I went to college for the finest literature ever written, but a bloodthirsty corporation guaranteed they'd pay me really well as long as I didn't use my brain too much. So I sold my soul... I'm not bitter, though."

Beaglesworth laughed loudly but Ash just nodded her beautiful face.

“Used to work there?” Jayha asked.

“Well I still do, but I’m thinking about quitting. Technically I‘m still employed though.”

I had scared Ash off, but Jayha and Beaglesworth moved closer to me, beside me on the couch. The marijuana was gone, and I doubt they were high, but that had little to do with their relocation. I needed a new drink, and I knew that no matter how strong I made it, I could pass it to either one of my two friends and they’d drink from it. I realized Ash and Lily just weren’t as thirsty. Or worse, they would spill it.

Someone came in and told me that Bighead had left. It was one of the high school kids who was probably too drunk to drive. I nodded, and even smiled when he told me that he was leaving too. I wondered if he knew Eva.

Life, love, and laughter. What a prank.

Despite all the intoxicants, I felt tense sitting between my two friends. My leg shook nervously, vibrating the table and making the ice in the half filled glasses lightly rattle. Condensation formed in the heat and slowly moved down an unopened beer can. I held the controls for the music in my hand, idly searching through all the titles, not really seeing them.

Lily and Ash finally stood as the last to leave. They got up as Beaglesworth, Jayha and I still sat on the couch, half asleep. Swaying drunkenly on her feet, Lily said goodbye as Ash groped around for her purse or something. I hugged them both, telling them to be safe on the drive home, and promising to look for Ash’s Dolce and Gabbana sun glasses, or maybe it was a purse. I had hoped we would all get drunk enough to swim naked in the water fall, but snstead Jayha gave the girls love and they walked off down the stairs and out of my loud life.

For a moment we sat without any conversation, listening to the music and I felt the hollow left from the departure of the two ladies. I could feel the hole in the back of my jaw from where my wisdom teeth were recently removed, and I enjoyed running my tongue over it.

I had a flash of foresight, into the future, and saw our drunk bodies ending the night shortly. The universal property of impermanence was nowhere to be seen and I was still hungry, but dismally I envisioned the music off, and myself passed out on my bed, waking in the late afternoon to the monotony of work--alas, just another day in the void. I smiled, we were all smiling dumbly at each other in the silence, reflecting over the night, silently asking "what comes next". I didn't want the night to end, and I didn't want the smiles to end.

“In this state, there is no requirement for a coroner to be a medical doctor.” I said calmly to no one.

“Huh?” Beaglesworth said dully, half asleep.

“A business man, sheriff, or a baby kissing politician--whatever. The point is, a coroner investigating the cause of death, providing autopsy reports, death certificates, insurance claims, and even murder indictments, are elected or appointed.”

“Is that true? Really?” Jayha turned to Beaglesworth for confirmation. He shrugged.

Still talking, I stood and began to rummage through a dark lock box I kept on my bookshelf.

“During midterm elections, some of those people knocking on doors, asking for votes, were the same people responsible for signing death certificates. While this seems absurd, this is actually the case in many states around the country.”

I found what I was looking for. A small crumpled ball of foil. I cleared a space on the coffee table.

“As you can imagine, errors are inevitably caused by this system. But most mistakes are buried--excuse the pun. Although in one case, right here in this state, a coroner misidentified the body of a burn victim. The corpse was of course terribly mutilated, so it was cremated. By the time the mistake was realized, it was too late. The real family had to arrange funeral services without a body.”

“God damn.” Someone said.

I unfurled the foil and carefully examined the contents, adrenaline fighting off the alcoholic buzz I felt. I produced a sharp knife and some tweezers.

“This is in addition to the dozens of documents recording the crucial evidence pathologists missed in an autopsy. Things like bullet holes, mucus in the lungs, and signs of strangulation.

"The lesson, as usual, is that the meaning lies in the details. Things we don’t even realize we’re not even seeing. Born blind and not realizing it until someone tells us. Acid?" I finished calmly.

Four eyes slowly turned to me. The faces were business looking, grim and untouched by the music which still played softly.

Beaglesworth nervously laughed. "Oh hell no, I've been drinking all night, no way I'm going to take any acid."

"Just a small dose--maybe a half tab each. That's nothing serious, it'll be a casual trip."

"Moon," Beaglesworth was running a hand through his long hair, "there's no such thing as a casual trip."

"That is not the truth. The Hatemachine and I have casually tripped on numerous occasions. Don't be false."

Beaglesworth sighed as though he was very tired. He slumped back heavily on the couch, and muttered something which sounded a lot like, “What the fuck is a hate machine.“

Jayha on the otherhand was smiling brightly, all for it.

"Ok," I said, getting up, "Beaglesworth go outside and smoke a cigarette, get some fresh air, set yourself down and mull it over, clear your head and think it over."

Laughing, Beaglesworth got up and left to smoke and contemplate over his nicotine.

Jayha moved closer to me on the couch. Turning to me, wide eyed and hopeful, she handed me her half drank cocktail of rum and said, "I've never tripped on acid before. Let's do this, Moon."

She said it so sweetly, and her eyes wild with excitement. I finished off her rum and bit an ice cube. The poor, young lady actually believed that there was something idealistic and worthwhile and infallible to this whole Lysergic acid business, but the days of conscious expansion and pseudo-holiness of drugs were gone. There was no such thing as a productive high. Children and their parents were doped up on speed and downers and anti-depressants and everything in between, merely to get them to work, through work, and back again in time to pop their Ambien in order to sleep through the horrid dreams and associated pain of their souls from incompatible heavy weight living.

Acid was gaining popularity again in a drug culture where 12 year old kids were downing bottles of cough syrup just to get fucked up. Because that was all that mattered--getting fucked up. Pounded by the artillery of false hopes and unfounded expectations of fame and fortune, by the media, by their parents before them, by anyone who guaranteed that there was a blue print for life.

There was no blueprint, no map or instructions. And those of us who bitterly miscalculated could forget their hopes or better yet revive them through the use of conscious altering chemicals that were cheaper than a pack of cigarettes.

Once electronic video games stopped providing the morphine to a doomed generation, they turned to drugs and videogames, until finally just drugs. In my experience, it seemed that good people to do acid with were hard to find. That being said, nothing draws together a group of strangers more than being out of your minds.

And so there I was, the supposed master of acid in this hot, cramped room, anointed by those among our circle, while I spent the majority of my time tripping and poorly painting and reading poetry in some pseudo-hippy apartment in a conservative mill town. Wired and sleepless nights. uneasy around strangers and apathetic at work. I could almost remember vividly moving away from the city to do something more tangible than fill my head with drugs trying to listen to some message when I probably should've hung up the phone a long time ago. But Jayha was graciously innocent, and wouldn't like to be bummed out by knowing the fact that I was detachedly tripping away my youth like my lovely sister did a generation before me, so I merely finished another ice cube and said:

"You know it."

I produced all my LSD and pulled out my trusty pocket knife which had my LSD cutting scissors attached. I cut a half tab of the purple skulls for Jayha, and a full tab of my previous brown gel tabs which the Hatemachine and I had ate almost a million years ago. We laid them out neatly on a paper plate on my coffee table as I contemplated how much of the purple skulls I should cut for Beaglesworth. I decided to give him the same as myself.

"Will that be enough for me?" Jayha asked, noticing the discrepancy.

"Well, these brown gels are pretty potent, but if the purple stuff is as good as that fatass seemed to think, you'll definitely trip."

"Ok."

"God damn it!" Beaglesworth had finished his cigarette.

"You tell me to go outside and mull it over, and I come back up and you guys are already cutting up the acid!" He said, not really disappointed and not really all that surprised.

"Executive order, Beaglesworth, straight from the top my friend. I had no hand in this, strictly corporate policy, you understand of course." I said.

"Well whatever. Fine, let's do this." He said reaching for his.

"Fine as paint, but firstly, I'm going to drink some water to offset all this alcohol and prepare myself for the ritual, the monster that is LSD." I said, grabbing a large pitcher of cold water from the fridge.

"I thought we were only casually tripping." Jayha said. “I have a family outing to go to tomorrow.”

“What the fuck is a family outing?” I heard Beaglesworth mutter as I poured some water for myself and returned with the pitcher.

“I have to, like, hang out with my whole fucking family. Grill hamburgers and see my cousins.”

"Well, that’ll definitely be an interesting experience.” Beaglesworth muttered.

“Well, drink up for sure then.” I said placing down the water. “Any measure of existence is pretty significant, and we're about to experience pure existence, true form as it is, without the blinders and safety mechanisms of our conscious minds interfering and obscuring the sometimes terrifying true reality. That puts a lot of strain on the brain, making it work over time like that, combined with alcohol- It's going to make us very thirsty later on" I rambled, already feeling the warm thrill.

"Oh." Jayha whispered.

"To life, laughter, and love." Beaglesworth said, and we all popped our tabs into our mouths.

"We need more water." I said, stumbling up to fill the pitcher once more.

"Water party!" Jayha cried, and Beaglesworth howled out a cheer as our night regained its breath, the second wind being pumped into the lungs of our present moment. In an hour, our heads would be out there, exposed in the chaos.

I filled up the jug of water in the kitchen and brought it back into the living room again, chanting "Wa-ter Par-ty, Wa-ter Par-ty!" Ensuring that all my neighbors in the thin walled building thought that I was insane, if they did not assume so already.

We drank glass after glass of water, filling the few cups I owned and tossing them back routinely as music piped through the speakers. Smoking high powered marijuana and cigarettes, we anxiously relaxed on my couch in the warm air, shutting down the air conditioner so we could instead feel the breeze kick through the open windows and caress our skin with the touch of summer and the smell of June life.

Finally, the acid began to kick in, as our conversations grew more obscure, comical, and painfully logical. I was drawing absently in my pad, sometimes writing the conversation down as my friends sat talking and petting the cat. My notepad filled itself with lines and scratchy shading as I attempted to draw. I pressed down hard on the pencil, graphite shredding into thick sketch paper, creating what had not been seconds ago. I traded in the number two for some colored pencils but I only used red and blue because they stood out to me at that particular moment with the thick, hot air on heavy on the back of my neck and the opaque insight of LSD weighing every consideration upon my soft mind, like heavy footprints on a newly vacuumed carpet when the fibers stand up straight and steps deflower the conformity.

Jayha read some of my poetry, and we sat around on the soft couch and ground, listening to her soft words drip and float in the oceanic air, she spoke personal thoughts and patterns which I had never heard out loud in another voice besides my own, and it made me glow to my core and to whatever it was that I was doing with my sweaty hands.

dripping maroon
from sloppy ceiling sending sound
cascading down like rain dripping down
the wind inhales and waves goodbye
to buildings painted on buildings in disguise
signals sent miss the mark and the creator
sighs in disgust, reflected in his art
a creation lost which bends with all the rest

Soon, things became very funny, and we were laughing uncontrollably, maniacally, and we had to stop reading poetry and put down our drawing pads. Jayha and Beaglesworth's faces are frozen in my memory as grinning ear to ear, their eyes squinted and blurred with tears from laughter and the shadows of light cutting across at sharp angles.

Drifting outside, we stood a few yards away from my building at the edge of the road smoking cigarettes and watching the empty roadway in both directions stretch on and on, from tip of our shoes to the other edge of the continent, ocean to ocean under a clear dark sky, purple and infinite above our heads, stretching on forever, reminding us three little monkeys that we only thought that we knew what was going on, that we only believed that we were in control. Somewhere in between the vast emptiness near the Atlantic, we wandered and vaguely existed, filling our heads with drugs, our lungs with smoke, and the night air with laughter and shrill conversation and I felt larger and louder than the world which contained me.

Staggering down to the waterfall in the center of town, we passed expired houses, antiques of the mill era-- large and presumptuous, pompous displays of bold wealth which emanated the rewards which sometimes awaited the hard American worker. All of it meaningless to us. Bank accounts didn’t mean shit in the long run, I realized, as a rare car would every now and then speed by, the driver's head twisted to catch a glance at the trio briskly walking in the early morning hours of an extinct town.

Down to the bridge and over the wall into the giant bonsai tree we sat and listened. A peaceful trickle of a stream cut through the manicured plants and hidden path, under some wooden planks used as a walkway, further up the path drowned out completely by the white roar of the mill river-- ornamental evidence of an age long past, slowly destroying the rocks at the bottom buried beneath white foam. Our bodies staggered around the wet darkness together as we shared what we discovered and over flowed with pure existence and excitement. I let loose a handful of sand into the wind, and we squinted trying to witness every grain as it disappeared into the wind, laughing and smiling at each other under a soft spray of the roaring water at our backs.

And like trying to catch one of those fleeting grains, I realized very briefly that this was life, right here in its purest form. I had all the choices in the universe spread out before me, and like the drops of water flowing here I even had the options to pick which choices I could choose. I suddenly became overwhelmed, as I exaggerated and altered a million irrelevant options like the trying to catch every grain of sand or every drop of water at once. But it was still freedom; it was beautiful, and it was the world beckoning me to browse everything that it had to offer, and like Eden, I could have my pick from any tree in the garden. Any tree I wanted.

We climbed back up the hidden path, and further up towards the wall. Over the stone barrier again and we bid the waterfall farewell, but we agreed that even though we left it behind we were still there, we could feel a part of ourselves still getting sprayed with water and the roar in our ears. We could feel ourselves imprinted in that time, somewhere existing eternally in the past only because it had happened, therefore it would always happen, and I even turned my head and thought I caught a glimpse of three youths standing near the bank of the river with their backs to us. There was no need to intellectually grasp it, or argue, or confirm, because we all felt it. It was no more important than discussing the weather, and arriving at the consensus that yes, indeed it was rather cool.

And so once again, we stormed back upstairs to my apartment, the long walk back hardly even acknowledged or remembered. Our feet that were wrapped in rubber and plastic marauded upon the hollow tree corpses lining the floors of my apartment, echoing like a war drum in my mind, drowning out the laughter and distracted conversation of my two beautiful friends. We plowed open the door as a frightened cat, my lovely and majestic Colonel Albatross, bounded away from us to his secret hiding space were the silly cat would lay for safety, but then he emerged again to be with us and exist together-- for life is lonesome enough, life is stacked against love and this is understood even by young felines having already bounced between two owners, and it is obvious to young people like us struggling to find a home for ourselves. I looked into my kitty's green olive eyes in that early summer morning heat, sweat on my forehead dripping off my bearded chin from the seasonal climate and drugs in my system, and the Colonel simply purred innocently and circled my extended arm as if it was only another day.

Beaglesworth sat down on my couch, drinking water straight from the pitcher's mouth with a exhausted, exasperated look on his face, nervous and uncertain, as his mind wrangled with Hoffman's lovechild. Our brains had worked to defeat the alcohol, and we became stone sober whenever the LSD momentarily cleared up, causing me to stand and search for something that I knew would come in handy, but then the LSD would creep back in again, and I am left standing at my bookshelf confused and sweaty, my legs rubbery a little bit so I would sit back down empty handed having forgotten why I had stood in the first place.

In the eternal now, we drifted slowly in our boats, and suddenly we decided to go back outside again, why not, the air isn't quite as thick and heavy outside, it is cool and delicious and feels amazing on my hot face and body, so we pounded back down the stairs after an unknown amount of time inside, it seemed like mere minutes but was probably an hour or two. Out the door we noticed the great bringer of light and warmth: our planet's sun starting to come, poking through the jelly colored clouds, tearing a hole in the summer sky and birds began to wake up and line the tree ways and sing us lullabies, reminding us that we were not alone but in this together. Beaglesworth mentioned that the birds were probably tripping too, probably way more than we were, and probably all the time. The paranoia helps them survive, he explained, and my heart beat faster and faster as I contemplated this and that, and walked in random directions trying to see what was what everywhere at once.

Our trio rejoined and we came back together as a tripod of chaos and laughter, the sky orange and yellowed with light as sunlight poured onto route 17 which became busier with the onset of morning traffic, what I supposed to be rush hour traffic, even though that notion seemed quite ridiculous. We instinctively retreated back behind my apartment building and took shelter down a tiny road towards the forest. Behind an old giant mill, rusted and windowless, next door to my building the lot abruptly ended and trees reached towards the sky like natural cell phone towers, their branches swaying and blurring in the breeze which the sun seemed to have brought along. The solar wind made everything dance, including us. Jayha, Beaglesworth and I danced and laughed our way through the empty parking lot as van heading down the road putted along slowly behind us, watching us for a while, the poor driver probably laughing himself to tears until he beeped the horn twice and we danced onto the sidewalk and he blurred past us, most likely in the process of bringing home the bacon to his 2.5 kids planted in front of a television somewhere.

We reached the borderline of pavement and grass and made our way to a path. We found a bridge to our chagrin, and we stood upon it defiantly above slow moving tepid water, brackish with greens and browns, probably another arm of the waterfall further downtown. I yelled something about a bridge to Terabithia and we laughed and moved along off the bridge and onto the muddy bank. We examined everything along the path which was overgrown with weeds and plants, the river slowly oozing beside us in the opposite direction. We continued this for a half mile or so, the world's slowest rush hour traffic on a hidden interstate of grass and algae and water and rock and tree and leaf. We tilted our heads back and got lost in the light filtering through the foliage, the sun i above the horizon now, it is light and the canopy is alive with birds and song, bouncing off our laughter.

The path opened up to our right and we entered the natural archway of trees, and it was perfect, way too perfect to be an accident and I said so, but the other kids didn't hear me lost in their own thoughts and admiration of natural beauty which our videogame generation sadly didn’t have the patience for anymore, and if they did they'd get bored too quickly, because there was no action in things like natural archways made of ancient botanical life, there was no control, and the graphics fucking suck....Nonetheless, we were spat out from the sheltering throat of the path into the wide open air of a green knoll, ankle high in vitality as healthy grass is thick under our feet and the blue, bright sky was now playing on the giant screen above everything. The night had been preparing this main course all night and we were starving, and so we feasted upon the solemn tranquility of low winds which made dandelions and blades of grass twitch and dance on a backdrop of living oak and maple and evergreen which all felt like our ancient companions. And for the first time in a long time everything was alright in my life.

I sat clumsily on the soft earth and lay back into the grass, flat on my back looking up into the sky. The tips of the trees poked and swayed their way into my vision, and Jayha and Beaglesworth laughed and smiled at me seeing me that way. They soon recognized my bliss and couldn't help but join me, their backs upon the land, looking upwards like our little ancestors did when starring towards the light from the primordial waters a planet's life time ago.

I thought of the artificial neighborhood the Hatemachine and I hung out in weeks ago, the front yard festering with expensive fertilizer and cut but a state of the art machine. Here the grass was so much more satisfying because there was no reason for it to be there other than to just be, as opposed to prelude thousands of square feet of hardwood floor and tiled bathroom. As opposed to planted and planned to make neighbors and fellow humans envy your status and your landscaper. I closed my eyes and let the light play patterns through the veins in my lids, and I sat there not thinking, just watching and absorbing-- becoming an absolute child again, overflowing like the glasses of water in my apartment.

I sat up and my friends were gone, walking downwards towards the far edge of the meadow holding hands and staring straight ahead and leaning into each other. Their symphony and concord seemed so rare and enviable that I could see the auras of their energy around them, blending together into a soft blue hue. I began to have selfish thoughts and desires which seemed to pollute the air around me. I suffered as I felt jealous and ugly because I did not have a beautiful other to share this extravagance with, and it made me feel small and quiet. I thought of abandoned Belle with some resistance, I thought of drug addicted Belle with difficulty, I saw young Eva vividly in her bed, and I saw Ash‘s dark hair out there somewhere on the fringe of my life. I felt lonesome to the core suddenly like a cold wave of water so I stood up and wandered in a circle, kicking at the dirt as the acid cleared and I wondered what the hell it was that I'm doing out here in a field getting my only good pair of pants all brown with dirt and green with grass, and myself yellow with envy...

But my friends came back and they saved me. Beaglesworth yelled my name; he called for my presence so I scampered across the field to their side across the distance. I reached them, joining their auras that I can no longer see but feel, and Jayha was already climbing down some embankment at the edge of the field, down between the trees and we followed and again we're spat out onto another river bank. This time the water is moving fast, like the waterfall downtown, a large stream emptying into a placid pool, and it is exactly like the waterfall downtown, except this one was nature's idea, not included on the blueprints to a textile factory from a hundred years ago. We picked up stones and tossed them absently into the water. For the first time we acknowledged out loud how amazing this all was, how beautiful this all is, how unexpected and rewarding a little piece of earth could be. Even if we were stone sober I knew we'd have to drop to our knees, overwhelmed from encountering such soaring beauty in these early morning hours.

Eyes attached to our little piece of silent water our voices were muted because there was nothing to be said now, like when the Hatemachine and I walked silently and solemnly back to my apartment downtown all dirty and haggard among the jeeps and SUVs and freshly showered working class. We stared straight ahead in the lullaby of water, under the veil of branches and swaying leaves, some fluttering gently down in the breeze like snowflakes on cold eastern eves. I caught Beaglesworth's dilated eyes, no longer alarmed, but now gently sorrowful and detached, like a Zen master who knew this was all irrelevant anyway, because nothing was permanent. So we stood there in the early morning on the river bank and got our fill, drinking from the cup of life careful not to spill and passing it back and forth, taking mouthfuls of unique beauty before passing it to someone else.

We climbed back up to the field and walked quietly back to the path, praising the decision to come back here to the woods and reaping the reward that had been in store for us. We found the path and walked towards my apartment in contemplative silence as early morning joggers started to pass us on the left. Out for quick runs before work, this was just part of their routine out here on the path, and our serenity became lost and tainted like when my happiness became polluted by envy. The dream became slightly broken with the regular people among us, saying things like "excuse me" and "how do you do" with a tinge of fear in their voices. We nodded and tried not to appear so much like sore thumbs, but there was no reason for us to be out here this early in the morning, and no one would understand if we had tried to explain the holy moment we witnessed down by the water. So we headed back to my apartment ignoring everything as it was completely light out, everything was morning and as we passed my neighbors house I could see them suspiciously starring out their living room window at us, sipping coffee and nervously following us with their eyes.

We sat around on my couch smoking cigarettes in the yellow morning light trying to decide our next move. I had to work later that night, and I laughed about it. If I didn’t get some sleep, I'd be awake for another twenty four hours, my head drifting instead of watching floor cleaning minorities while ensuring that they don't steal from a multibillion dollar corporation. I took off my pants when I noticed that they were covered in mud and grass, and we smelled animal shit also, so I tossed them off into a corner and Jayha giggled and Irish-Catholic Beaglesworth turned away as I walked into my bedroom and said "goodnight."

I lay on my soft, sad mattress--it’s the only piece of furniture in my bedroom besides a shitty, white table which was there when I moved in. My head began to clear and I saw everything in this reality for the first time again as it stopped vibrating and became normal again. I closed my eyes and my cat came bounding in, purring and seemingly upset that these crazy humans were awake all night, keeping him up, and it made me wonder briefly about my neighbors too. I started to giggle about it, then laugh out right, real loud and maniacally. Jayha and Beaglesworth heared me, and they couldn’t help but laugh too, and we're all laughing for no reason at all, and I'm sitting there with a wall between them and I, with a giant smile on my face, tears leaking from the corners of my eyes.

The windows were all open, my makeshift curtains fluttering beautifully in the sunlit wind, drifting and barely touching the tips of my toes. Loud motorcycles were really common in the town, and they roared by, echoing throughout my thin walled apartment in between loud trucks shaking the whole building to its foundation. I closed my eyes and marvelled at the patterns and geometry dancing in my eyelids as my tired body pleaded for my brain to rest. Then I heared Jayha and Beaglesworth having sex in the other room, and I pretended it was just an illusion--the acid playing tricks with the sounds of the traffic. But no, it was just the muffled sounds of people trying to have sex quietly because they knew I was still awake ten feet away. It confronts me an empty loneliness again and I felt lousy that they're having sex in my apartment on my couch and I tell myself that if there's any jizz or vaginal juice or any black light stains I'm going to react harshly. But then I realized that I've had sex before on Beaglesworth's couch, on his parents' couch actually, so I felt better and struggled not to laugh again, because it turned out we're even. Catch it when it came around.

I finally fell into a restless sleep somewhere in between the dizzying patterns and orange spirals in my eyes. I woke up a few hours later surprisingly refreshed, with my mouth and teeth feeling strange like they always did. I took a long shower, standing under the water half asleep almost, but more awake than I had been in a week or so. The sun falls through the window and I tear off the shower curtain so I can feel the light on me. I smiled in the water and shaft of light like a man fresh out of prison. I got out of the shower and walked naked back to my room wanting to eat fruit. I tossed on some clothes then go to wake up Jayha and Beaglesworth, but they were already gone. I'm not sure if they left while I slept or while I showered, but I didn’t care because at least they turned the bed back into my couch. didn't have to confront any black light stains afterall, although the chore of cleaning up cum is better than cleaning up blood.


Customer



As the man with the weird accent yelled, “You’re a thief! You take my money!” into my face, I felt small drops of his spit hitting my chin and cheeks. I brushed it off with my sleeve, and rolled my eyes, as if looking around for help. Instead I smoothed out my tie and worried about the sweat in my armpits.

As manager, as the watchman, there was no help or rest for me. So I stood there, as he let out his frustrations over a 12$ razor he had purchased sixteen months ago by his own admission, and which now apparently did not work. I cursed at him half under my breath, half not. I wanted him to hear me, I wanted him to hit me, so I would have an excuse to smash the fucking cheap razor over his god damn stubbled face.

He did not have a box, or a receipt. He wanted his money back. I was in no mood to listen or oblige, so as politely as I could, I told him that he was shit out of luck.

He slammed his fists down onto the return counter displeased. Then he wheeled around violently, looking for an audience to plead his case to, but it was early and no one else was in the store except for me and a fat cashier who cared less than I did about this man’s shaving plight. The fat cashier was probably pregnant with her fat Brazilian boyfriend’s son. She had also recently had surgery to repaired a collapsed septum. When I had made a cocaine joke, she starred blankly at me, then asked, “huh?”

The man with the accent stood there yelling in some European language. I tried to place it but could not, I just knew it wasn‘t Spanish or Danish He got tired and finally allowed me to speak.

“Sir, perhaps you can try calling the manufacturer.” I said, sick of it all. Not just sick of this man, but of the fat sixteen year old pregnant cashier with the intelligence of a ape. Sick of how all my nice dress shirts had sweat stains under the arms. Sick of my wheezing, fat boss who smelled like cigarette smoke and ranch dressing. Sick of Eva’s beauty and how I couldn’t have it.

“I don’t know manufacturer! You know it!” The accent man yelled. For a moment I forgot what we were talking about.

“No….I don’t.” I offered, unsure.

“Well,” he said, looking around and noticing a computer, “Use the computer! You find it now!”

“These computers don’t work like that. No access to the outside.” I said, motioning to the windows. To the outside.

“You’re a thief! I never buy another thing here!” He said, then muttered something in another language before leaving.

“Okay, good bye.” I said. “Fucker. I hope your kids die from cancer.”

Farsi, I thought. Maybe he was speaking Farsi.

I waited for him to leave, then I shrugged helplessly at the fat cashier. Compared to the other fucks, junk heads, wastes of life and carbon atoms which came in occasionally, this man was rather mild. It could always be worse, and in the retail industry--especially those located in low income areas--one must always be thankful that it didn’t get worse. We constantly had freaks coming in but they were usually non violent, if verbally abusive. I had never felt physically threatened, except for when dealing with Eva’s football boyfriends.

I thought about going into the backroom and kicking around some boxes or maybe screaming until my throat became raw. I thought about getting on the store intercom and making weird noises to confused everyone. But instead I followed around a couple of immigrants who came in, and watched them to see if they’d steal anything. Sometimes at night I’d find razor blades on the ground which they used to cut open packaging. When they left without buying--or stealing--anything, I walked into the office and starred at my schedule. I made good money, yet I had un-cashed paychecks sitting in the glove box of my blue car.

I was interrupted by the ringing of the phone. The screen said it was coming from the front cash register.

“Hello?”

“Are you mad at me?” The nasally voice of the fat cashier asked.

I hung up without answering and went back to my schedule, counting down the shifts until my next day off.


Neighbor


I wanted to buy some cold beer, something imported from Middle Europe, maybe some Pilsner Urquell, and drink a few until I got buzzed enough to fall asleep.

I strolled down the barren street as cars sometimes passed me with the passengers and drivers looking curiously out their windshields at a young man in the town. As I crossed the bridge, I looked down towards the waterfall where I had spent many nights and it seemed like a different world. The sun was blasting down upon the stone walls and the park benches which lined the shore seemed tacky with their paint job faded. The Bonsai tree looked strong, but the water looked greener and as though it was moving a lot faster, and maybe it was. I put my head down and walked quickly over the bridge worried that I’d taint the paradise I had experienced down in the sandy shadow of the cascade which looked to be littler with cans and trash bags. The summer lamp melted plastic and emphasized every flaw in this town which looked more like a city from the Soviet Eastern Bloc rather than a township in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

I reached the liquor store and bought a case of Pilsner Urquell under the careful eyes of the suspicious employees. I gave my money to a man with a strange skin disease. Thick bulbs of skin bubbled up his neck and off his chin. I tried not to stare, or wipe my hands once he handed me my change, or vomit at the way the loose skin swayed and bounces with every movement. I starred him right in the eyes, then I rushed back to my apartment eager to put the his Halloween face behind me.

I walked up the stairs to the second floor where I saw my neighbor Mills moving something into his doorway. It seemed to be a briefcase, but I later learned that the man hated to carry anything with handles. I stopped as he blocked off the main entrance and I offered to help him.

“Thanks man, this is thing is a bitch.” He replied. I set my beer down.

“What is it?” I asked him as we moved it through the kitchen.

“Hand made oak credence side table. Gothic style.“ He replied. “Ever see one like it before?”

“Can’t say that I have.” I replied lifting it into his apartment, “Not of this quality at least.”

I entered his apartment for the first time as he directed me to set it down in the main room. It had a round kind of feel to it, and the floor was raised in the middle as I had to step up as I entered. The dark furniture was arranged in a circle on top of a large piece of wood which rested directly on the floor, and a strange curtain of symbols hugged the ceiling. He had painted black over his windows facing east, while shades covered the ones to the street. Orchids tied to candles sat on a table. Complimenting his appearance, Mills’ apartment was odd looking and unsettlingly.

“Nice place.” I commented.

“Thanks. It‘s a different feel as you can tell, a kind of sanctuary.” He handed me one of my beers as he cracked one for himself. A strange triangular symbol hung above the doorway, and in the background the noise of screeching guitars and a drummer wildly pounding his set came from a stereo. The music confirmed what I had suspected.

I felt compelled to ask even though black was my favorite color as well. He grinned.

“Yeah,” he spread his arms out, embracing everything in the room, ignoring the question, “I provide all the furnishings.”

I took a long swig of beer, not saying anything. Mills seemed to grow impatient, so he just continued talking. Every so often he’d make an emphatic gesture with his tattooed hands as he spoke, his thick head bobbing slowly with his words.

“I’ve got alternative methods of income. Throwing it out there--you ever heard of the Lesser Keys of Solomon?”

At the time, I was familiar with the grimoire, but I lied and said no. I wasn’t up for a theological discussion of the occult, and I hoped Mills wasn’t the kind of person who pushed his Satanism on you.

“Is it some kind of brand of credence table?” I asked instead.

His eyes narrowed. “Motherfucker, how‘d you know!” He cried, laughing. “Rare Victorian model.”
“Yeah.“ I nodded, watching him closely. “I think Faulkner wrote about it.”

We took a seat after Mills warned me to never sit in a particular black recliner. He didn’t explain and I didn’t ask, which I noticed was a pattern with the man. He produced a joint and insisted that I light it and take the first inhale, as though it was my duty as a guest to do so. Rather than be impolite, I complied. I coughed as I handed the joint back to him.

“So, what do you think of the people downstairs?” Mills asked me.

“They’re alright. They’ve been pretty hospitable to me, I think they might believe I’m a serial killer.”

Mills raised an eyebrow. “Are you?”

“No. I don’t have the discipline or motivation for that. If anything, I’d probably be a spree killer.”

“Spree huh? Just go for it all?” He asked, toying with his beer bottle in his hand.

“Exactly. I’m a sprinter, not really a marathon runner.” I laughed. “What about you, what’re you doing out here?”

“Living with my girl--you’ve probably seen her around. Stupid Mexican bitch. Never fuck with an angry Mexican woman. Hell, never fuck a Mexican woman.” He laughed. “Hey, you need any furniture?”

I shook my head. “No, no. It’d just get destroyed over there anyway.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen your cat in the window, I know what you mean. Those little bastards claw everything. No discipline, not like dogs.”

“What? Dogs are slobs--no self respect. Cats are stoic and proud creatures.” I said.

“Like yourself, huh?” He asked me, tapping the joint on an ashtray. He laughed again. Thinking that he was waiting for me to react, I readjusted my legs and arms.

“Sometimes the owners rub off on their pets, and sometimes the other way around.”

Mills went quiet, and he seemed to be deep in thought. Or perhaps he was just getting stoned. A heavy silence filled the room, which suddenly seemed very empty because of the odd layout.

“So what are you doing out here then? If you’re not a serial killer, then something must’ve brought you out here to this booming metropolis.” He handed me back the joint as he spoke. “People just don’t choose to live here. The locals here don’t give a fuck. Just mind your business.”

“Locals are gross. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a group of people any more close to home than these people seem to be. But either way, I’m just here trying to live, fighting the good fight whenever it happens to stagger down this lonesome road.” I motioned to the obscured windows. Then added, “Just like yourself.”

Mills grinned. “I hear ya. You wanna try to save the world out here with me?”

“No. Why do people keep asking me that?”

“You’ve got that look about you. Tragic hero, like the ones that die at the end of the films all the time.”

I inhaled from the joint. “Well, I’m not making any promises. But I hope to survive at least through this summer.”

“And then what?”

“Then I move on.” I replied simply.

Mills nodded. “Doesn’t matter, I’d rather have the world than save it.”

Not really sure what he meant, I kept quiet and realized that I was sweating. This man was a strange bird and like most people you try to avoid, I wasn’t sure if I liked him or not.

“Just trying to figure out my neighbor.” He carried on. “We’re pretty quiet, my girlfriend is here a lot by herself. And those people downstairs are weird but useless.” He grinned wildly like a drunk making a joke you‘ve seen coming, “but they’re fucking creeps. Just wanna see where your cards lay.”

“Well--” I began, but Mills cut me off.

“That being said, you seem like an okay guy. When are ya going to leave? No one stays here long--no sense in it if you’re under forty. But while you‘re here, we might as well fuck some shit up.”

“Well,” I replied, “I’ll be around all summer at the very least. Been already kinda fucking shit up, I guess. Lots of drugs. Been going to the old mills around town and tearing them apart. Bashing windows and sawing holes through the studs on the ground floors.”
He laughed, only half listening. “Man, no one chooses to live out here if they’ve got money. Hell, if they’ve got any brain. But you did.”

“Poor decision making maybe. Nah. I don’t know.” I was hoping Mills would laugh, or interrupt me again with something about his furniture.

“After a few more months of this town, anywhere at all with a population of at least a dozen females between the ages of 18 and 45 sounds good to me.” I finally said.

“Shit dude, maybe you are a serial killer. Any warrants?”

“No, not at all.” I replied. I wondered how old he thought I was. “But you’ve got eyes. This isn’t a place for young men like us, you know it’s hot in Madrid right now, it’s nice in Copenhagen, spring time in Portland. You want to be a serial killer, you go to Portland. But this place--this town, it’s a corpse, plain and simple.”

He raised an eyebrow at the mention of corpse as if I had made a good point.

“And once this generation dies off like bees in the winter, this town is gone. And I don’t particularly plan to stick around for winter.”

“Speak for yourself.” Mills said. “My brother grew up here. I wanted to move into his old building when I finally got out here, but the bank got to it and boarded it up. Always jerked around by those faggot bankers. I need a good base--and not necessarily fucking Shangri-la.” Mills took a swig of beer.

“That’s understandable,” I replied. “I‘ll have my fun then move on, hopefully to Shangri-La?”

Mills nodded. “Suite yourself, champ. Football season comes, you’re going to pack your shit up and hit the road, and handle whatever hits your way because you can handle anything. Right? Why bother man.” He stomped his boot on the ground to emphasize. “Sometimes we have little angels and devils on our shoulders…but they‘re not always angels. Or devils. Sometimes they‘re your friends, or yourself, giving out shitty advice.” He stamped out the joint in the ashtray.

“True.” I felt defeated on some level.

We sat in silence again, listening to the sound of the traffic out front. I noticed his blackened windows would’ve had a nicer view than mine. My scenery consisted of a road and a parking lot.

“Or it could be worse.” Mills continued and I struggled to remember what we were talking about. “You‘re not really a space case. Just need to find your will.”

I laughed. “I do what I can to throw wrenches into the gears of hard asses like yourself. You‘ve got it all figured out, Mills.”

“Figured out?” He asked. “Shit man.” He got up and went to the kitchen. When he returned, he handed me another beer and rubbed a tattoo on his arm.

“Yes, I suppose we’re on the same side of the fence here.” I took a large gulp. The alcohol and marijuana was beginning to work on my brain, and I could feel myself relaxing and loosening up a bit.

“So,” Mills began, fingering a ring on his thumb, “you meet the landlord?”

“Randall? Yeah. Seems like a decent guy.” I said.

“Decent? Shit, seems like an abortion of a guy.”

“How so?” I asked.

“Dude doesn’t know shit. I had to fix the toilet from leaking when he was showing us the fucking apartment for the first time. I’m sure you’ve noticed how sporadically he collects the rent, hell, there’s been two or three checks laying under my doormat at times. He doesn’t know his elbow from his ass.” Mills said fiercely.

“He lives pretty far west, I guess.”

“Yeah, that’s what I hear, but so fucking what?. I also hear that he’s barely affording the mortgage on this place. Just our luck, he’ll hit bottom and this dump will get foreclosed. Could all be out on our asses then.”

“Well, the second floor will land on their feet. I’d be more concerned if I was one of those people downstairs.” I replied.

“A real freak show.” He agreed. “The ones on the left, well I guess the ones right under us, that woman? My god-- she’s got that retard nigger son. I went outside and caught him throwing rocks at his own dog, the fucking thing was tied to a tree and the little shit was just standing there tossing stones at it like he had fucking shit for brains.”

“I didn’t know he was retarded.” I said.

“Well, he’s not retarded, I guess. That’s just something I say, you know, ‘he’s fucking retarded‘. Let me put it this way: he’s of dubious virtue.”

I laughed and drank more beer. I wasn’t sure what to make of Mills. I still hadn’t lost the initial impression that he wanted something from me, like he was sizing me up before some giant scuffle to see exactly which chips he’d lose and what he’d stand to gain afterwards. But after sitting in his dramatic haunted house, he struck me to be smart enough to know what was at stake, but too dumb to know the odds--but I was certain he often somehow landed right on the money. Despite his claims of having much in common, I felt his naïve belief in witchcraft, magic, alchemy--whatever--was just another way to measure his dick against other religions he spited.

I sat in his crude apartment for a few more hours as we talked about the sad state of our town and cruel times, and the inability of the world to adjust itself. Vague topics that a man in a bar bathroom would shout while you pissed.

After a while I began to get drunk so I stood and told him I was leaving. It wasn’t late yet, but I lied and said that I had to work early. I lied mMainly because it seemed weird to me that I should go a few feet across the hall and sit behind another wall by myself while he did the same in his room with fake cobwebs in a corner. Then I remembered that his girlfriend would be home soon, and I didn’t feel like meeting her while I was drunk and stoned.

By then Mills’ eyes were red and swollen from the drink and drugs and he just laughed stupidly and patted me on the back as I announced my departure. His zeal for blasphemy had subsided and he kept calling me “Guy”, and I wondered if he had forgotten my name.

As I walked through his kitchen to the front door, he called after, “Come back anytime, buddy. We’ll blaze and get trashed.”

“Right on.” I called, as I walked into the evening heat of the hallway. I looked out the hall window at the top of the stairs into the backyard. The sun had caked purples and reds all over the cloudscape, and the plants in the yard were bending and swaying in a low breeze. Somewhere from bellow my feet, a dog barked a few times until a loud voice told it to shut up.

Strangely, I didn’t feel as though I had made a friend.



Dinner



Some nights later I was painting my wall when Jayha called my telephone and invited me out to dinner with her and her friends. I was working a lot and the days passed quickly in a rut of drinking and managing. The night before Hatemachine and I had traveled a half mile to a mill we hadn’t visited before. We found a rickety ladder to a catwalk and had made our way onto the sloped roof. We didn’t bring any power tools but Hatemachine had his fireworks which we ignited from the roof top and watched explode over the town. The sounds echoed off the empty brick buildings and impromptu apartments which had shuffled carelessly and pointlessly into this century, mostly with limited funds and invalid tenants.

Jayha convinced me it’d be a cheerful evening--the kind of event you dress up for and act civilized. Funerals seem based on the same principal, but I agreed because it was what people did on sweaty, Saturday evenings in the summer when the clock seemed to freeze and I wanted to belong.

I picked up Jayha and we headed to Gom’s house whom neither of us had seen since before I had l been to Europe. Although he was a good drinking buddy, overall him and I were just rough acquaintances who only truly clicked when everything was loud and drunk. I stopped the car a quarter mile from his house and we walked along the shoulder of the evening road. Gom was apparently a queer who was at odds with his family so we were forced to retrieve him covertly. Also, his mother and I had had a drunken encounter one morning after the last World Series which had ended in unpleasant accusations. This situation made Gom devious in all the wrong ways but helped us to tolerate the bars we associated with. He always claimed that he needed to stop drinking because he realized that it got him into trouble, but still he’d take down a few margaritas or a horrid amount of rum and pineapple juice then proceed to piss off everyone before he finally fell down and vomited somewhere. The toughest bars were the ones he enjoyed to frequent the most, places where bottles sometimes flew through the air and his drunken laugh made the employees uncomfortable.

He was walking around naked in his room smoking marijuana until I impatiently began to explore his house which made him hurry to get dressed. We were scheduled to meet some of Jayha’s lady friends whom I presumed to be beautiful as I walked around his house half hoping to run into his mom. I could hear his anxious voice mixing with Jayha’s as the talked about--what? Cosmetics? Boys? His mom?

From his room, he apologized for something and then opened the door dressed. From a pile on the floor I loaned myself a giant steel belt buckle which displayed the word “FUCK “on it. I tore off my belt and applied his explicit one around my waist.

Is one of the symptoms an urge to offend everyone?

If I couldn’t be comfortable, I didn’t want anyone else to be. I felt like shaking the fishbowls of their worlds and making them question everything they valued by constantly prodding and destroying things I deemed valueless.

“Where do you want to eat, dude?” Gom called from his room, apparently talking to me.

“How about somewhere with reservations?” I called back after a moment.

“What?” Gom cried. “You Jew bastard. You think you’re in Boston?” He laughed shrilly.

“Nah man. I know this is nowhere. But, I mean, can’t we go somewhere that matters?” The belt buckle felt cool under my fingers.

Gom sighed.

“How about Confers?” Jayha piped up. “I think Meredith is working the bar. Maybe we can get free drinks.”

“Yeah,” I conceded. “It doesn’t really matter.”

Jayha finally pulled my arm and we piled back into my blue car and hit the road. The steal belt buckle dug into my crotch but I felt good to be back on the road. Jayha was on the phone with her friends as we tried to decide on somewhere to go. We preferred somewhere with food as well as drinks but mostly somewhere which wasn’t corporately owned. This stipulation was essentially code for “somewhere fresh and exciting”, but we knew every local dive too well, and would always end up comforted by the darkness of a familiar womb no matter how we denied it.

We drove around aimlessly before finally settling on a bar and grill a few towns over which would be loud and satisfactorily lit. I had never been there before and I had a swelling of excitement and rare hope in my gut, right above where the steel expletive dug into my body. Tonight I would watch the door and wonder who would walk in--what stranger could possibly change my life?

The back roads lined with maples and oaks turned to pavement, ATMs and bowling alleys. I imagined a bleak future where there would be nothing left but bulldozers and ATMs. This was the emptiness of American pride. This was the mediocrity of suburbia-the apathy of watered lawns and the sour taste of a wasted life. The spoils of a routine American life lead to Applebees. Red Lobster. Cheesecake Factory. Whatever, it didn’t matter.

Once we arrived I confronted the hostess and got a table near the bar where hundreds of flat televisions hung like a wall of mirrors. Thousand dollar audio boxes dropped from the rafters among pictures of dead athletes and the jerseys of local heroes. I ordered a large beer which glittered like a Paul Pierce jump shot while we waited for Jayha’s friends to arrive.

“This is the place where everyone freaked out and came into the parking lot and refused to let me drive home.” Gom said once we got settled and our drinks arrived.

“Do they serve bourbon here?“ I asked sipping my beer. “Or ginger ale? I want them mixed.” In my mind I could hear Gom laughing like a tropical bird.

“No, they like, totally shit their pants and Elise had to call Bighead to come pick us up. She pretended she was by herself because Bighead wouldn’t come and help me out.” He tossed this last statement out there as though it was a fact.

“Yeah, Bighead would tell you to fuck yourself off. He really doesn’t dig your tricks anymore.” Jayha took the bait.

“Yeah, but he’d come for Elise.” Gom said laughing deviously.

“Who is Elise?” I asked.

“She’s a girl we work with at the restaurant. Remember? She came with me to your house one night and we slept on the couch while you played with power tools and fucking mocked us all night.” Gom said.

“Bighead really wanted to cut you up and dump your body in the river. But I thought that was one of Jayha’s friends?” I asked.

“Psh”. Jayha scuffed. “My friends aren’t that shady, Moon. Shit.”

“Right.” I grunted. “So was she a bitch?”

“Stepping on peoples toes and trying to punch the strangers.” Gom replied holding his glass of water close to his face.

“That’s right. Meanwhile I am benevolent enough to offer her my comfortable couch and soft pillow.” I said.

“Yeah but Bighead was yelling about throwing us into the ocean all night.” Gom took a sip of his ice water.

“River.” I corrected him.

“Huh?”

“The river. Behind my house.”

I realized my neighbors probably thought I had a dead body on my hands. I remembered my neighbor Mills and the way he had looked when I had used the word corpse.

I shrugged. “What’s her issue anyway?”

“I don’t kno--oow.” Gom emphasized. “She’s always like that--she has problems with people who live at the place she happens to be passing out at.”

“Strange.” We commented.

“I had to shove her onto a train once in Boston just to get her out of my hair. She was puking all over the place.” Gom leaned back slowly and eyed the rest of the environment.

“No wonder Bighead wants no part of you clowns.” I muttered.

“Bighead’s just twenty five and pissed at the world.” Gom said.

“I think he‘s had enough. Of everyone.” Jayha reminded. “I feel like every time I see him, he secretly is thinking about how much he hates me. I can see the dislike painted all over his face.”

“Sounds bad.” I agreed. “We’re all intertwined. Everyone’s fucking or fighting someone and hating someone else for it.”

Jayha finished her beer and ordered another one. I realized there was a hospital nearby and I imagined what it would be like if a medical helicopter crashed through the roof of the restaurant. Would I survive? Probably not.

“Sick situation.” I said. “I need out of here. Start going only by my initials and do this whole life thing right.”

“That‘s a backup plan. You use Plan B too often, man.” Jayha said softly.

She was playing with her empty glass.

Crimes. I wanted to commit a crime in this petty, cookie cutter restaurant. Nothing stood out, nothing was special or significant about the decor or the cliental. No one here mattered. And my urge wasn’t necessarily for a crime that would make me a bad person, just something small that probably would make me a better person. Around us, people sat and spoke of the changing weather and the slumping economy and seemed to be passing kidney stones.

I began playing with the knives. This may have caused the waitress to bring us the wrong meat as it contained bones and I refused to eat anything with bones. As the waitress left, a couple of pretty girls came and sat down at our table and the short haired one introduced me to her partner in crime-- a tall, thin legged dark hair named Wiley.

I extended my hand to the short haired one who I recognized as Ash. She rolled her eyes. I ignored the taller one and she sat down instead.

“We’ve met before….Brendan, right? I was at your house.”

“Right.” I remembered her fidgeting on the floor bored as hell. “But it’s actually Moon.”

“Oh right, sorry. I knew it was something weird.”

“No worries.” I assured her, looking at her artificially tanned skin. “It doesn’t matter. Close enough.”

She sighed.

“Ash? The artist, right?”

She glared at me. Then softly, “Art major. I’m a waitress. At the place with all the shit on the walls.”

“Charmed.” I replied and she began to ignore me for the rest of the evening.

Finally turning to the tall one--WIley--I introduced myself and we made brief eye contact until her glance darted to Ash who was sitting next to me. Her eyes quickly came back on me and I understood their silent communication. It was a mutual feeling like two people quitting chess after the first move knowing it wasn’t worth the effort. I decided to offend her immediately by notifying her that she’d be more attractive if she was six inches shorter. She retorted by informing me that her father was a cop. Unsure what she was implying, I turned away as the unattractive waitress brought the correct meat. Wiley promptly requested a cleaner fork.

Sitting at the table drinking booze for an hour or so numbed the night and the squawk of strangers oblivious of our existence. Restless from the booze we decided to go sit on the back porch. I gave the waitress money to bring us some more beers out back and we climbed onto the patio where a trio of middle aged men were playing live music with a couple of guitars and a small drum set. We were the only people on the porch watching the music and the band awkwardly acknowledged us mid song as we walked to a table in the front.

We hit our seats as the song finished up and our drinks arrived. Jayha’s friends were acting ugly, their initial friendliness had turned to pride in front of each other. My crusty appearance and Fuck belt contrasted heavily with their lovely green skirts that barely covered tanned bodies. Gom’s crude jokes about dead babies and the holes in Jesus’ hands upset them and I vaguely remembered offending the tall one, who had proceeded to dig out two steel needles and a tangle ball of yarn and begin to knit at the table.

I absently watched her fingers work the tangled ends into something tangible. I watched the steel needles mend. I asked her if she was making a scarf but she couldn’t hear me over the noise of the band. After a moment she shrugged and returned back to her work without answering or asking me to repeat myself.

I could taste the tension like pieces of cotton in my thick wheat beer which only seemed to make the night hotter. Bad thoughts slipped out of mouths like summer drifting through the New England trees and the band had given up on their songs and had started making small talk with us into the microphones trying to get close to the girls. As I was the only straight male the guitarist tried to appease me by playing various obscure songs I requested.

It was better because it had been quite sad watching them take their playing seriously to an empty room and no audience. I could see the dismay in the lead guitar’s eyes whenever someone stood to go to the bathroom or bar and had to walk past them. The waitress was slow bringing us the drinks so I had to walk back and forth in between the stage and tables several times trying to figure out what the hesitation was all about. I was getting thirsty and annoyed with the place, especially since we all had to yell which made all my witty comments strained and jumbled.

“That guitarist is going to be Beaglesworth in ten years.” Jayha whispered into my ear. “Playing to empty rooms while wearing sweatpants and hitting on the girls.”

“The girls in the empty rooms?” I asked. I felt mildly offended for my friend.

“Huh?” She asked, barely listening.

“Nevermind.” I didn’t want to argue. She was probably right. I’d probably be carrying their fucking equipment in ten years.

Wiley and Ash went inside to the bathroom together and I noticed the band’s eyes following their asses as they walked past. The three of us were left sitting at opposite points of the table separated by an ocean of empty glasses.

“Man, this place is a real downer.” Jayha commented over the sloppy guitars and simple drum beats which echoed off the empty chairs and tables.

“A dead scene.” I agreed.

Gom agreed and smiled his card dealer’s grin. He lit a cigarette and looked around with his drunken eyes, starring from one paper lantern to the next which lined the outskirts of the porch. He began to tell me gossip about one of our friends which I didn’t mind forgetting seconds after the words left his mouth.

Gom abruptly stood and said he was leaving. He tossed down a ten dollar bill for his part of the tab and then walked off to the parking lot where someone was meeting him to give him a lift somewhere. He had no license--he had crashed his car into some trees a few weeks prior while completely shitfaced drunk, then proceeded to run home to avoid the DUI. Some members of our gang thought it may have been a suicide attempt.

“What a social guy.” I muttered.

“Dude that waitress sucks, it takes her forever to get us drinks out here and we’re the only ones in this damn place. She keeps giving me dirty looks too, what‘s her problem?”

“I think she’s upset that we sent back those meats with bones.” I said. “Plus she’s fat.”

“Well fuck her. If she listened she’d have done it correctly.”

“Truth. We’ll take it out on her tip.” I reassured her.

“Yeah. Or we could just leave this place and leave this bill.” Jayha’s eyes narrowed as she met mine.

“Yeah? And then what?” I asked her, checking my watch to see what bars were still open.

“My friend Adrianna is having a party tonight, we could go over to her house.”

“Who is that?” I asked.

“My home girl.” Jayha answered. “She’s cool shit, you’ll love her. She’s moving to Wyoming and it’s a kind of a going away party.”

“No shit.” I said. “Haven’t we met before?”

“Uh, maybe. Does it matter? You’ll love her.”

We made a silent agreement.

We quickly stood up and acted as though we were going around the side to smoke a cigarette, momentarily debating whether or not to take Wiley and Ash’s purses but deciding against it. We made a break for the parking lot.

“Visit our website!” The guitarist called to us from somewhere in the darkness.

“Right-o.” We called back

As we climbed into my car Jayha got on her phone and I started up the engine. She was telling Wiley that we were running out on the tab and that they should do likewise.

Suddenly a bunch of bad noise began to occur on the telephone. Jayha began to get defensive and seemed to be trying to convince Wiley to join us. She hung up the phone in disgust and turned to me as I drove down the street.

“We have to go back.” She said.

“Why?” I was confused.

“Wiley doesn’t want to leave. She’s still there with Ash and they’re going back to the table.”

“What? Fuck that noise. Tell them to walk down the street-- I’ll pick them up.”

“No, we can’t.” Jayha said. “Wiley is freaking out…her dad’s a cop, so she’s like…really straight about stuff like this. She doesn’t even smoke dope. She’s pissed at us I think.”

“Man, we’re going to look like assholes coming back-- and just because Wiley is trying to get into heaven?”

“We have to, Moon.” Jayha said softly.

“That bitch was fucking knitting all night. I think this will build character.”

“I don’t want them to be pissed at me.” Jayha wailed.
“Fuck them. Tell them it was my idea. Tell them I wouldn’t let you go back.”

Defeated, Jayha sighed. “I’ll just turn off my phone.” She said finally. “Let’s go to Adrianna’s.”

After a while of driving in the wrong direction in half drunk silence, I said, “Your friends will be mad at you.”

“They’re hardly my friends.” Jayha muttered. “So it really doesn’t matter.”


PARTY


We knocked on a door and some blonde woman let us into the apartment. Jayha introduced me to half a dozen people or so whose names I forgot instantly. People were playing some newly released video game and asked if I wanted to play but I wasn’t interested. One of the broads recognized me and asked about a bracelet I had made her. I looked at my wrist, looked at the tangled mass of bracelets, string, and elastic bands which ran around it and shrugged. I was almost positive she was confusing me some one else, but I played along for a few minutes then got bored. I just wanted to get drunk.

We hadn’t brought any liquor of our own but luckily the blonde woman who had answered the door offered us some. I gratefully accepted and sat down with a group of girls to play some card games while we drank. I found out one of them went to the same university I had so we made small talk about hip places at school as I poured down the alcohol.

Sitting across from me at the card table was a pretty, young Mexican in a bathing suit. Her short brown hair fell down just to her shoulders, obscuring the string to the top of her bathing suit. From behind, it looked as though she wasn’t wearing anything. She caught me noticing her, and smiled before turning away quickly. She was in a conversation with an older man about the effects of the Beatles on Charles Manson. Just by watching her I noticed all the suppressed energy she had inside her, as she bounced around talking about Helter Skelter in her small bathing suit, periodically rubbing her tanned belly which had a piece of metal shoved through her button.

The girl from my university--her name was Alezandra or something-- was still talking about Antonio’s Pizza as I was trying to get close to her little brunette friend. The brunette got up and went somewhere else. I tried to follow her but the girl roped me into a conversation about the price of text books. The price of a new transmission in an old car. The price of a nice two bedroom in Providence as compared to a shitty loft in Boston. The price of living out in the middle of fucking no where.

Finally I just said, “I need to puke. I’ll be back.”

“The bathroom is that way Brendan!” I think I heard Alezandra call after me.

I ignored her advice and started walking around some more. I went to the window and starred out into the night by myself. It was a pretty clear night and I wished that I could be outside. It almost occurred to me that I had trouble being happy wherever I was, but I pushed that iceberg thought away because it was unpleasant.

Some old guy walked up to me and started to talk to me about things. He claimed to be a drummer but seemed ignorant of many aspects of the instrument. I asked him about the band that we had witness perform earlier that night at the sports bar but he hadn’t heard of them.

“That’s a shame, they were pretty good. Packed house practically. If you want to get somewhere as a drummer, I’d advise you to talk to those guys.” I told him.

“Really?” His eyes widened. “They got a website?”

“Sure do.” I replied

“Moon, come here.” Jayha called from across the room.

“This is Adrianna.” Jayha said, motioning to her blonde friend.

“Nice to know you, Adrianna.” I said.

“Likewise.” She replied.

“You’re moving to Wyoming, I hear? What’s out in Wyoming?” I asked.

“My husband lives out there.”

“No shit? Where in Wyoming? I know a really cool dude in Laramie, he works at a telescope observatory at the U of W.”

“Oh, I’m going to live in the northern part of the state.” She said.

“That’s a shame.” I said, not thinking about my words. “There’s a big old statue of a coyote howling at the moon along Interstate 84 on your way into Laramie, just past Cheyenne. Depending on how you’re getting there, you’ll miss it.”

“80.” Adrianna corrected. “Interstate 80 runs through it, not 84.”

“But, damn.” I carried on. “I don’t know much about the northern half. What’s out there?”

“My husband.” She said again.

“Right. Well I think I might move to the coast--the west coast in a few months. I’ll have to stop by and say hello if I pass your way.” I told her.

“Didn’t you say your friend is moving out there? Hatemachine? You’re not moving to the west coast, too?” Jayha interrupted.

Adrianna turned to me confused.

“Well, yeah. I think I will. I’m sick of this place, this town, this coast.” I took a long drag off of my beer to fight embarrassment. “I’m sick of this culture, I hate it here--there I said it.”

“Oh, Moon. I think you should go, I think we all need to get out of here. I’ll miss you if you do go!” Jayha said.

“I’ll miss all of you.” I said, feeling the benevolence of the booze. All three of us hugged for some reason.

I walked around the party feeling the flow of the alcohol, trying to get a change of scenery with the bathing suit brunette I saw earlier, but I couldn’t isolate her enough to even say hello. She was constantly around other people. Instead, I went around introducing myself to random people, sometimes two or three times to the same person.

“I know who you are, you’re Moon. We already met. What’s my name?” Some tall guy asked me.

“Ehhh…” I stammered, racking my drunken brain rotted with booze. I couldn’t recall if we had met or not, maybe he was just fucking with me.

“Mike. I’m Mike.” He said.

“Right! Mike, sorry man, my brain is just--plop. Too much sauce.” I told him.

He laughed. “No worries man, I’m terrible with names too. It’s cool. Hey, you’re girlfriend is pretty cute.”

“Who?” I asked him, thinking he was fucking with me again.

“That girl over there with Adrianna.” He pointed to Jayha.

“Oh, that’s Jayha. She’s not my girlfriend, she’s my friend girl. She’s like my sister.”

“Yeah? You should totally hit that man, that’s fine.” He said, licking his lips.

“Pass.” I told him, and laughed. “Would you hit your sister?” I asked.

“Hmm...” He said, hesitating.

“Catch you around, Mike.” I said, leaving.

Someone gave me a camera and I went around taking people’s pictures. For some reason there was a retard running around. I didn’t know what time it was, but I figured it had to be past his bedtime.

“Someone get this kid a parent!” I called to no one in particular, taking his picture a few times. I was actually pretty shocked at the fact that the retard was drinking beers. It seemed strange that a retard should be doing that, but I realized that I guess there was no threat of him wrecking his brain. I wondered if he drove here.

“Moon, take our picture!” Adrianna and some girls called. I pointed and clicked. I caught the brunette by herself, and approached her.

“I’m a little upset with you.” I said to her.

“Oh?” She was surprised.

“I’ve been trying to say hello to you all night but there’s always people around you. Who are you?”
She smiled. “My name is Kori. Who are you?”

“I’m Moon. Pleased to meet you Kori.”

“Moon is an interesting name, you know, kinda like the Tarot. Is that short for anything?” She asked.

“No. Not really. Kori, is that Koriannha?”

“Yeah.” She answered. “I don’t like it.”

“I dig it, I think it’s cool. Sometimes I get sick of Moon, but I think it’s fitting, I’ve grown adjusted to it. Maybe we can switch names sometime, you know?” I said, not really knowing. I looked down at her feet. Beaglesworth told me once that you could tell if someone was interested in you by checking out their placement of their footing. Kori’s right and left feet were both pointed directly at me.

She laughed. “Yeah, maybe.” She turned to me, seeing me for the first time. Her eyes squinted. “I know you. We’ve met before, haven’t we?”

“Probably. Do you have a husband in Wyoming?” I asked her.

“No. I don’t have a husband. My boyfriend lives out in the country, though.” She replied.

“No shit? I live out in the boondocks myself, pass a giant lake. Lakeview park.”

“Really? Me too…I live off of 17.” She said, pushing her short, dark hair back over her shoulder.

“I do too….building 135? Or 130, I can’t remember. It’s a white building though, with four apartments and a cripple and her negro son inside.”

“Yes! 130.…and yeah, that lady and her son are so fucking weird!” She laughed and something clicked.

“Holy shit. We’re neighbors. We sleep like twenty feet apart from each other.” I said.

“Are you first floor or second floor?” She asked.

“I’m second. You must be first?”

“No, I’m second too. We live across the hall from each other!” She laughed.

“Wow, is life too fucking weird or what….wait,” I said, remembering something, “some tattoed guy lives across the hall from me.”

“Yeah, that’s my boyfriend-Mills. You’ve met him?“

“Yeah, once, briefly. We were kind of in passing, but he seems chill enough.” I lied.

She suddenly reached into her top, and pulled out a little plastic baggy. I could see that she had no tan lines underneath. “Want some valium?” She asked me.

“Why not?” I asked as she placed two blue diamonds onto the table. She began to crush them up as she continued to talk.

“He was a marine, but he’s retired now. Gets a pension and stuff so now he does mostly contract work around town. He’s a pretty good guy.” She said, but I could see in her eyes, as she looked away then quickly back into mine that she didn’t really believe it. I realized that the bruises I had seen all over her face head healed. She put blue powder onto her finger and snorted it. She motioned for me to do the same.

“Interesting.” I said. “I don‘t know too many military men. I guess we‘re just not the same breed.” I snorted a pile of powder from my little finger. The horrible stuff burned my nostrils so I stuck a finger into my beer and snorted the liquid as well. No one seemed to notice. “Too much discipline in those types.”

She nodded slowly and reached for more powder. “I think maybe that’s why I was drawn to him in the first place. Our contrasts connected us. Structure. Discipline. That happy horse shit.” She pulled more of the powder into her nose.

“Contrasts seem to connect. Usually I find the other perspective initially interesting, until essentially the disagreements and the unseeing eye to eye drives me crazy, and drives me away.” I said.

“That is so unfortunate.” She told me, placing the bag of pills back into her left breast. “I need to find Leon, he has my phone.” She stood and smiled, extending her hand.

“Good to meet you, neighbor.” I grabbed her hand and we held on for a few seconds before letting go. “I’ve got to go and document some more of this madness.” I held up the camera and took her picture quickly.

“See you around, Mr. Moon.” She called after me.

“Moon, where’s my camera?” Adrianna approached me.

“Here, take this away from me.” I said, laughing. I was drunk and wanted to listen to some music. I walked towards another group of people that were starring at me. Someone was watching pornography in one of the bedrooms.

“What’s up? I’m Moon, who are you?” I asked them. They introduced themselves and I forgot all their names immediately. At some point they reintroduced themselves, and I remembered a tall guy who I think was named Greg.

I liked talking to Greg because he seemed honest, talked about how much he hated doing coke, and because he had coke. He played the guitar and I mashed at some strings myself trying to stay in rhythm as he compensated for my lack of talent. Then he put the instrument down, gave his hat to some blonde girl who was practically sucking his dick already, then turned to me.

"Last time I did it was like being drunk but drunk on 4loco." He lit a cigarette.

I didn't know we could smoke in this apartment, so I lit one too. The blonde girl was trying to talk to me about some stupid bracelet she was wearing. I was almost positive it was the girl I had earlier in the evening, but I wasn’t sure. She wanted to trade bracelets. I pulled off a handful and threw them to the ground, turning back to Greg. I wanted him to give me a quick snooter just to deal with this party.

“Hey, Greg, is this a birthday party?” Greg looked at me confused.

“I thought you lived here?” He asked me.

“Me? Fuck no. I don’t live here. I don’t even know anyone here.”

“What about that hot dark haired chick?” Greg inhaled his cigarette and licked his lips. I assumed he was talking about Jayha.

“Well yeah, she’s my friend. I know her.”

“I don’t care who lives here. As long as there’s no DJ. I was at a party last night with a DJ and I wanted to crawl in a fucking hole. I hate how everyone thinks they can be a DJ.”

"Doesn't matter." I inhaled my cigarette, watching the blonde girl sorting through the jewelry on the floor. “All I can hear are fucking porn sound effects from that bedroom.” The girl on the floor seemed fatter than she had been earlier.

The door banged open as Creedence Clear Water revival started to play, and a bunch of weird Asians walked in. I was sitting near the door so they all introduced themselves to me. I only remembered this short one named Dwayne--he had long black hair streaked with green the color of used limes. He claimed that it was his birthday too.

“Porn. Sound effects?” Greg looked at me puzzled.

"Twenty-five down, twenty-five left to go." I told Dwayne, not shaking his hand. “Years, I mean.” I inhaled my cigarette then tried my beer again. I wanted every last drop of relevance.

Greg clammed up and stopped talking. Watching the crowd of people schmooze in corners and near windows, he slowly sipped his whiskey and averted eyes. I stood to get another beer.

I walked through the crowd avoiding people trying to dance and give me shots of whiskey. I handed the remainder of my cigarette to a guy with a bandanna around his head. We talked about firecrackers and stink bombs until some terrible rap music became too loud from the speakers. I walked into the kitchen and passed someone asking me how my new apartment was. I made up some nonsense until I felt a hand on my shoulder. Adrianna was crying about something, motioning to the living room. It wasn't clear if she was serious, or if she was just a a side effect.

Greg seemed angry enough to be in a comic strip so I went to go talk to him. He was incoherent and yelling, so I danced to a few songs I knew. Adrianna finally stopped crying and brightened up. Before long she had opened and poured a bottle of expensive bourbon.

"Who's birthday is it, again?" Either Adrianna or I asked this. I remembered whoever answered simply said, "Doesn't matter."

“Moon!” Jayha came out of nowhere and handed me a glass of water. “I want to smoke. Let’s go out on the porch.”

“Your wish is my command.”

We were welcomed with the cool summer air by escaping the noise and chaos of the inside world. We seated ourselves on some rickety chairs and I packed a pipe as we made small talk. Looking back inside, I could see a mustached man talking with Kori--my alleged neighbor with a small bag of drugs in between her nipple and tiny bathing suit.

Some blonde girl was seated outside and I didn’t notice her until Jayha and I had begun to get high.

“You guys live here?” She asked us. She seemed dangerously sober.

Jayha shook her head.

“What about you, dude?” She asked.

“Nah. Out in the country. Small apartment on a small road.”

“It’s a chill place. There’s a big river running through his back yard, we, like, go there all fucked up, it’s so beautiful.” Jayha was cautious.

“Sounds nice.” The girl agreed. “What’re you doing way out there?” She asked me.

“Well,” I began, “I decided to go out there to evolve as a human, to feed off some energy which I think I lost some point last year but that I kind of sniffed again a little in Europe, and a lot in those woods behind my house, and the waterfall down town.”

I passed the pipe to the girl and she took a large hit. “Oh, there’s a waterfall?”

“Yeah, it’s pretty fucking sweet.” Jayha said.

“Gives off a lot of positivity.” I muttered, feeling peaceful from the booze and marijuana. My head was adrift and pleasantly detached from reality.

Jayha and I continued to sit out back brushing mosquitoes off our arms as our bottles eventually became empty and I ran out of cigarettes. I lost track of the other girl somewhere along the way as people from the inside came and went, sometimes poking their heads into our conversation before getting bored or confused.

By the time we realized that almost everyone had left the party, it was late and I was severely intoxicated. We made our way back inside, saying goodbye to the few people who remained. The main with the mustache shook my hand, and politely stated that it was good to meet me.

Adrianna hugged me. She kissed me on the cheek and asked if I listened to music while I drove.

“Of course.” I told her before we walked out the door.

We staggered out into the night. The air was warm and fresh, peacefully simmering around us as we walked comfortably to my car. I started the drive back towards our neck of the woods. Jayha produced a pipe and I handed her my bag and told her to fill it with marijuana so we could smoke on the commute bacl as we listened to loud music pumping through out the car.

When I pulled into Jayha’s driveway she moaned.

“I’ve got to work in three hours.” She told me sadly.

“That’s alright, that’s hudred of minutes from now. Get some good sleep.” I reassured.

“Be safe, Moon.” She told me as she climbed out.

I resumed my loud drive around sharp corners and through the trees, and past a giant lake on my left. Finally I reached the area where the trees abruptly stopped and large, burned out mills began to scar the landscape. I casually turned into my parking lot and got out of my car, stumbling slightly as I did so.

As I reached my door I heard a thunderous boom and looked towards the sky. Bright explosions crackled overhead. I staggered back around the house to the road and sat on the sidewalk with my eyes turned a half mile downtown. From one of the mills someone was launching giant fireworks into the early morning air.

I smiled tiredly wondering where Hatemachine had parked. I hoped he wasn’t foolish enough to leave his car at the foot of the fence in front of the mill. He had probably swung by apartment to do some drinking but realized that I wasn’t home. I cursed him again for not owning a cellphone and decided to watch his handy work for a bit.

I lasted only a few minutes until my eyes began to drift close despite the loud booms above me. I dragged myself back around to the parking lot and entered my apartment. I figured I’d leave the doors unlocked in case Hatemachine decided to crash on my couch after the pyrotechnic display.

I stepped a shaky foot towards the stairs to the second floor and noticed a dark shape at the foot of the staircase. The fireworks abruptly stopped.

At first I thought it was a bag of trash someone had left there, so I pulled my leg back in an effort to kick it. But as I brought the hammer down, I abruptly stopped and almost lost my drunken balance. I realized that it wasn’t a pile of garbage at all, but rather a black cat.

As I stood there in the dim light of the hallway, I realized that it was an ugly creature. The thing only had one eye. The right socket stood naked and empty. A single large blue iris glared at me from the left one. It opened it’s mouth and bellowed at me.

“Reow.” As if to say, “What were you expecting? Peace?”

I cocked my head in disbelief. As far as I knew, there weren’t any other cats in the building besides my own. And the Colonel would definitely not romp with this kind of animal. This creature was sickly and devious looking, demonic with its orbital flaws and haunting with its throaty noises from within. It sat completely unafraid before me, on its rear legs, studying me as I scrutinized it right back. In my drunken mind, I wondered if this was some reflection of myself presented before me.

I approached and it scampered off, somewhere down the dusty recesses of the dark hallway. I didn’t care where it went, just as long as it left me alone and didn’t follow me. I ran up the stairs and drunkenly unlocked my door, hearing the throaty calls of the ugly cat from downstairs waft upwards towards me. It was singing to me.

I finally entered my apartment and locked the door behind me. My beautiful, double eyed feline was waiting for me at the base of the door. He looked upwards in gratitude, and I rubbed his head, grateful to escape the ugliness from outside.

Wondering what it could all mean, I grabbed my phone and quickly dialed Jayha’s number. If anyone knew what kind of sign this could represent, she would know. But the phone rang until no one answered and my palms were sweaty.

I collapsed on my couch and draped my face with the palms of my hands. The early morning winds blew through my curtains softly as my cat curled up beside me. My last place of refuge had become tainted. I tried to ignore whatever predetermined sign the black cat represented and concentrated on my drunk, on the euphoria of alcohol, trying to remember exactly whose birthday it was, wondering--

WORK


I went to work the next day early so I could buy some coffee and fill it with rum. I had awoke hung over on the couch and spent most of the morning hours pacing around in my apartment. The front door was unlocked but if Hatemachine had came by in the night, I hadn’t realized it. However, I did notice a new Bic lighter in my kitchen which I had never seen before. On the plastic coating of the lighter there were cartoon bubbles which I interpreted to be blood platelets.

Once I arrived at work and strode half drunk into the office, I suddenly recalled the ugly, one-eyed cat I ran into the night before. It seemed unreal under the cold lights of the store, so I dismissed it as a possible hallucination. Waving to the fat, pregnant cashier as I walked towards the office, I convinced myself that perhaps it was just a strange dream which blended too close to reality. In the hallway I attempted to turn the walls green just to ensure that I wasn’t dreaming right then but had no luck. I was in the fold.

Krause and Knoxville were waiting for me inside the office in silence. Krause was spread out on her poor chair, her bloated body spread and dripping off the seat like dough. Knoxville stood with her arms crossed and her lips tightly pressed together over her small breast, an unflattering pair of dress pants gathered at her ankles and a black shirt made to look casual clung uncomfortably to her torso.

I felt a brief moment of drunken panic, thinking perhaps they had reviewed some security tapes and witnessed me doing something awful. Or perhaps I had misplaced the nightly deposit from the last close like I had done once before. It turned out that a $600 band was just stuck in the safe deposit box and I had received no apology despite the wild accusations of theft and incompetence.

Calmly though, I realized that I was untouchable. Anything that they could do to me was absolutely arbitrary. The best thing within their power was to fire me. And that would merely set me free. So I smiled.

I stood in the silent center of the office for several moments and no one said anything. With her back to me Krause shuffled papers and muttered what sounded like numbers to her self. Sales. Payroll. Blood pressure

I could smell Knoxville behind me. Baby powder and cheap perfume she had tried to subtly use. She was flipping through a magazine and eating something fried from a bag, apparently on her lunch break. Oblivious, I turned to face myself in the mirrored window of the door.

Straightening my tie in my reflection I took a good look at the seemingly broken looking man, uncomfortable in a scratchy polyester blue work shirt and a clashing tie that was wrinkled down the middle. Hair was disheveled and my mouth twisted into a sad frown I had a bold thought of saying good morning and watching their faces turn to me. I thought of looking them in the eyes and telling them that they could still surely save their own lives. There was still time.

Instead I kept silent and kept my head down as I counted the safe. For the rest of the day I worked hard and silently, avoiding the cold silence of the two female coworkers until the sun grew orange and the air cool and it was time for me to leave once the sun was long gone. When I left the building, I let out a loud scream which frightened an old woman behind me walking into the store.

I drifted around the streets of my town at the end of another day which stretched into the many days before it that were just like it. I could not remember the words people had said to me earlier, could not recall what had taken place during the hours of work. The only thing I was positive of was that I was the only thing on the road. No cars, no people, no animals. Just myself. Every now and then a rickety pickup truck would slowly crawl past me, and once a police officer stopped and shone his spotlight on me briefly until I stopped and shielded my eyes as I returned my own glare before he moved on.

I’d usually head to the waterfall and jump the fence, sitting on the edge of the wall above the water and watch it cascade downwards from above. Something about moving water which seemed to calibrate everything else around me. I would spit angrily in it, and sometimes I felt like picking a house at random and just barge in and changing somebody’s life.

Instead I ended up in my apartment again in the heat of summer night. I smoked a cigarette and sipped a beer thinking about what to do with all of this time before me. I watched the weather and dreaded work the next morning like the onset of terminal cancer. I dreaded something not happening, because the anticipation of nothingess was always worse.

Inspiration and insight were crucified as I walked into the only bar in town late enough to have a few beers. My eyes were wide and wild and my shirt soaked in summer night sweat as I realized that I had ran the several miles from my apartment. I felt the urge to reach some plateau again which was so elusive that the only option was the numbing affects of cheap alcohol.

Mary's. A neon signed buzzed in the window with the Virgin’s name. The only bar for miles. Despite this alarming fact, it was pretty much always empty so the owner had created a driving range and miniature golf course out back. It was a ghost town except for a couple of guys sitting at the far end. I had the itch of impermanence and needed the validation that only several cold European beers could produce on a July night, so I sat away from everyone else with my head down, drawing the attention of the other two patrons who obviously were surprised at a young face in such an old place.

The only people to run into in a local establishment were already way past their prime years and were depressing and broken down. I didn’t particularly care to start any kind of relationship with these types, yet I knew regular people had to be out there somewhere.

After some extensive study, the Hatemachine and I discovered that a combination of a few beers and, depending on the strain, a slight amount of THC can produce an optimal level of performance and perfection. In this country, it is referred to as alcoholism. If in America, it is alcoholism, then I am very patriotic.

I ordered a drink and sat down at the bar, focusing my attention on the long, empty night ahead of me. One of the other patrons in a blue hat called, "Holy shit. You look fucking important."

Not realizing that they were speaking to me, he repeated it three times as I sipped my beer until I realized that everyone in the bar, the two guys and the female bartender, were starring at me, waiting for a retort.

"Yeah?" I croaked.

"You look fucking important. What are you, an accountant or something down in the city?"

I laughed realizing that I was wearing a silk button down shirt and European dress pants. The moisture from the bar top was soaking my black tie and the cuffs of my pants were stained slightly with mud and grass and animal shit. "Hell no. I'm no one important. Nothing that I do is significant, just another guy in the void."

The bartender raised an eyebrow and turned away. The man in the blue hat casually walked down to my side and smiled. "So where do you work then?"

"Down the road, local zoo. I feed the monkeys"

"No shit." He wasn’t buying it. He called out for some guy named Clinton to get a load of me.

Clinton was a much older guy. He turned to me drunken smiling, "Think ya can hook me up with some weed? My 'scriptions are costing me."

I laughed again, indicating that I was harmless and meant well. "Clint, if I could get dope, I'd never leave my fucking house."

The bar erupted in laughter, including the bartender. She was an old woman with bleached blonde hair, a once magnificent pair of giant tits that were barely contained by her leather bar maid outfit and a tired looking face which indicated that she had spent way too much time in bars through out her life, on both sides of the counter. She reminded me a lot of one of my lady friends, and I briefly thought that they'd probably both end up the same.

She motioned getting me another beer.

I nodded in approval.

Bluehat clapped me on the back and said, "So you live around here?”

"Truth."

"You ever drink before work?"

"I drink whenever I want.”

Bluehat laughed again and started walking back towards his buddy Clinton. "Hey Kathy, put his next beer on my tab. Anything to keep this guy talking…this dude. Me, well I haven't drank a drop in seven months. This here’s my first one."

"The first of many." I agreed.

He nodded from across the bar.
I drank the beer he bought me and then a shot of tequila he insisted I take. Clinton played Keno and scratched off lottery tickets before cursing silently under a mustached yellowed like soiled sheets. I contemplated asking him for a cigarette but decided against it.

The man with a blue hat grew tired of me once he realized that I wasn’t getting sufficiently drunk. He closed his tab and watched me from near the jukebox across the bar. I returned his gaze and I could see the comfort slip from his face as I followed him with my eyes, really only looking past him until he was only a blur. I felt like the only person in the room.

The old men left but not before feeding some quarters into the music player.

“Here’s some nigger music for your ass, college boy!” I thought one of them yelled at me on their way out. When I turned to confirm I was left with an empty bar and a buzzing head.

Loud, heavy music pumped through the speakers vibrating the spine of the whole establishment. Thick, pulsating notes penetrated my drunken brain reminding me, “There is no peace here--what were you expecting?” I took a quick piss then sat down at the bar again not caring what time it was.

I sat a while alone, drunkenly starring into the mirror behind the bar which was covered in numerous flies and insects and promised not to ever order anything to eat here. Finally the bartender popped out from behind some door while I was making faces at myself and she apologized, for she did not realize that anyone was still inside.

She quickly turned down the music and turned to pour out my drink--a scotch and ginger ale. Double. As she shuffled a bottle or two and made sure my glass was clean, I took a moment to study her.

The alcohol made her seem younger, which was good because she no longer reminded me of a girl I knew. It was difficult to pretend to smile when it seemed that the ghost of Christmas future was pouring highballs and smiling at me above a pair of orange, saggy tits. Her aura of someone who'd been around the bar scene too long and could probably stomp a drunken man's ass if he got too rowdy or grabby was evident in her every movement.

Probably not married or anything, yet definitely had some pets. I was putting my bet on birds. She wasn’t completely grotesque, but eroded as though the remnants of a great hope still burned somewhere inside of her yet had singed through all the important parts of judgment in regards to life altering decisions.

"Want to play some pool with me?" She asked me.

I laughed. "I don't have any quarters."

"That's alright, it's on me. It's just so slow in here, I'm losing my mind.”

"It's good to be here." I said, raising my glass and gulping scotch.

"Then let's play some pool."

"Sounds like a plan, Stan."

"Oh," she said grabbing some quarters from the tip jar. "My name isn't Stan--it's Avery."

"Okay." I said, picking up a stick and examining it. They were all slightly crooked.

"Introduce yourself.”

"Leon Kentwood." I extended my hand.

"Pleasure.”

"Definitely." We shook hands like we both thought the others was dirty. It became rather obvious she was more of a waitress than a bartender judging by the terrible drinks she made, but at least we were drinking heavy alcohol and the bad music had stopped playing.

Lamenting the horrors of her life every time she bent to take a shot, her yellow cleavage would spill out and I vaguely wondered if she thought I was rich. She had lost her house in a fire while staying with some old man who owned the bar and a few other shitty stores in the general area. The woman worked the day cleaning houses and performing manual labor, while spending her nights before various drunks and motorcycle men, pouring them drinks and thinking about sleep while ignoring the fact that on most days in shit hole bars like this she'd never make anything on tips.

She beat me in pool every game and mentioned that it was those who were capable of remaining truly sympathetic and purely charitable were those which would truly benefit the most from the shit which occasionally stormed down upon anyone's life.

“Such strange optimism.” I muttered.

“Don’t you agree? I mean, I think it’s true.”

“I don’t know. Why bother. Why bother to hope when you can just accept.”

“Because,” she said, handing me another free drink, “acceptance leads to failure. Denial leads to evolution.”

I left her a huge tip fearing that she would be fired some time soon. Staggering out of the dive I walked into the darkness, at first puzzled because I couldn’t locate my car, but then thankful that I had not driven. My feet crunched on gravel and I spread my arms out to the side like I could reach the trees and push them down. I was certain that I’d die like this one day, walking in the darkness, drunk in nice clothes. I smiled knowing it would be a better fate than the bartender sadly returning to her shared apartment and her shared VCR to watch tapes of her favorite sitcoms which had been off the air for nearly a decade.



Half a day later, I was free and had planned to sleep through the remainder of the day. But sleep was becoming a hard thing to accept recently. There was no denying it-the days at work were getting ugly. During my last shift, a hulking teenager with the face of an ape had stormed in demanding to see Eva. I was sitting in the office eating stolen chocolate when she frantically begged me to kick him out of the building. I stood before him in his shadow as he looked down upon me and threatened to tear my head off.

“And that stupid Cunt’s head, too. Don’t tell me, I’ll tell you, man. The bitch loves it from me. Loves it in her ass. Spit for lube, you know what I mean, you fucking punk?”

“I’ll burn you alive, kiddo.” I told him, rubbing my jaw as he walked away with fists clenched. Walking back to the office I hesitated to follow a Peruvian immigrant to see if she’d steal anything, but then continued to tell Eva that he was gone. The office was empty-my stolen chocolate also gone-and Star informed me that Eva’s mom had come during the encounter and she had already left. As an extra, Star informed me the Ape was currently on probation for pummeling some poor sap’s face who had drunkenly mouthed off to Eva at some high school gathering.

The Ape's sour words had gotten to me, and the whole experience left me feeling slightly violated. Perhaps because what he said was true.

I dialed Eva’s phone number but got no response. I left no message.

I had the sneaking suspicion that I looked like a faggot trying to assistant manage. With the afternoon heat pouring into me, I saw the branches outside as though they were bars. Events unfolded and bloomed into intricate spirals of mundane people and ritual, while I slowly died in an extinct town.

The cemetery across the street waited.

A dead television mocked me like a giant glass eye. Hatemachine and I had disabled it one night trying to determine if it was causing a very low frequency humming noise which we could only hear late at night, specifically in between the hours of 2:17 and 4:41 AM. Severing the umbilical addiction to the televised universe which glowed in every parlor and living room in town gave me a sense of defiance and disobedience. An unintentional middle finger to a great distraction which kept my attention from the humanistic tangibles of evolution and reproduction, from developing as an individual, and most likely distracting Eva from my phone calls.

In addition the local cable/media conglomerate had sided with illegal government requests to monitor and report viewing habits and phone conversations to the anti terrorism units of the government. Hatemachine seemed dangerously alarmed about this fact.

All the windows were open and a small fan blew ineffectively at me, the stink of summer tires and cut grass coming through the windows. My cat was on my lap and a blank television screen was watching me, sensing how completely wired with the restless burden of another day just like everyone before it. Another notch carved into the faux hardwood floors as the sun would slowly set and I’d do it all again tomorrow.

Days off from work were especially painful in that they were sporadic and strange, and because everyone I knew were employed in the day. Recently I had been wandering supermarkets across the county, standing in the cool air which perpetually ran in those kind of places and trying to strike up conversation with random strangers because I was really unsure of where to meet people, and there always seemed to be many of them in supermarkets.

Eventually I would abandon all attempts at socializing, at friendship, at belonging and relating to a fellow empathetic human being-- a stranger carrying a basket of produce and frozen pizza-- and I would just follow them. My expensive shoes gliding silently over the waxed tile of the cereal aisle. The dairy section. Baked goods. I was invisible and I would pretend to study the nutritional facts on the back of a yogurt container as I watched them. As I studied their habits and attempted to determine what normal, routine, mundane existence looked like.

Somewhere, a paranoid car alarm sounded and rhymed with my cracking knuckles. Air in the joints escaped as I exhaled and found myself in front of the liquor cabinet. I knew the grocery store was open, but I wondered if the library was. A completely different breed of person is available in a library.

Pouring a dark rum, I watched the liquid caress thickly over heavy ice, under the impression that this was the elixir to stir the mind just enough towards a pinnacle that would achieve achievement. The cool glass emitted a beatific swirl of mist as the ice met the warm liquid in the midday heat.

Drinking, I slowly descended into the boat, crossing a river from the bank of sobriety onto the clandestine shore of chaos, spreading wide open for the uncertainty of the current and where it may take me. The waters are dark, and my brackish reflection is just barely visible to my quickly closing eyelids. My stomach churned and welcomed the warmth of the liquor as I had not eaten in over 18 hours.

My existence was slow. I saw an old man with a shopping cart chasing after a bus at the bus stop. He screamed for it to stop, but it kept traveling. The old man stumbled and fell, tripping over himself and causing his cart to flip over. A lone bag of groceries burst and spilled into the road as others looked on—from behind me someone said “Oh, that is so sad.” With the emphasis on “is”.

“Someone should help him.” A murmur behind me.

The only man reached out to his legs, shaky and embarrassed.

I kept on walking because I’ve never met anyone who I could help.

I pounded rum down my throat and grabbed some Belgium beers and walked downstairs.

The second step was cracked and covered in bird shit, and from where I was watching the occasional traffic slipped by like liquid soap. I sip my expensive beer and draw in a little book trying to isolate myself into inspiration when a couple of young girls, dressed in all black with way too much make-up caked on their acned faces stroll by on the sidewalk. I starred at them, watching them pass like how a man in a sports stadium would watch the athletes run onto the field, thinking about perhaps tossing his beer and hot dog aside and jumping the barrier and creating some type of disturbance.

They flipped me off, their little nails on their middle fingers painted black, and I nodded, throwing my empty bottle into the bushes. Understanding, I smiled as car passed by and shrieked to a stop as a rodent ran before it. I liked the sound of the grinding of the brakes-- the noise was a welcomed stain on the day.

An old man came out of his house as it was getting dark. He was wearing one of those facemasks which covered the mouth and nose. He reminded me of a surgeon, or a hypochondriac, and he briefly terrified me. Then I saw the southern glow, and the smoke in the air from the wildfires of the dry summer burning acres out in the middle of nowhere, and realized he was trying to avoid the ash in the air.

The old man got half way to a mailbox then turned around and retreated. I wondered if he shuddered at the sight of me or if it was just the ripple of the light through the exhaust of the heat.

It was night and I was shuffling pointlessly down a road in this great century of ours. Automatic microwaves and billion dollar deaths dropped on cavemen half a world away. Passing through the downtown area I thought how much better this would all look if the lonesome street corners were reduced to ash and fertile debris for bright flowers to grow.

I passed by homes and looked through the windows itching for a confrontation, hoping to see something I could never take back. I sang and whistled and laughed to myself, sailing a lonely boat with torn sails, circling comically in a riptide while the careless captain sat on the deck with his feet dangling in the water. Another journey in the waters of which I had drown so many times.

A rusted pipe jutted out from the side of a house like a broken arm. Bent at a strange angle, I envisioned the muddy truck pulling up alongside it to deposit its seed of heating oil every winter. The driver handing the gray, pock marked owner a pink bill. The thermostat tuned to a very careful level as to maximize the fuel. The kitchen problem stinking like cabbage.

I swung open the door to a local convenience store. The cool air conditioning slapped me in the face and I realized that my head was sweating. I grabbed a bottled water from the back and approached the counter to pay. The cashier—a youngish bitch with long hair and bad dye job- greeted me coldly.

"What kind of cigars do you have here?" I croaked.

She blinked. “Huh?”

I pointed to behind the counter. “Which one of those is the best?”

“I don’t know. People like these I guess.” She handed me a wine flavored cigar.

"Why's that woman using a payphone?" I asked her, pointing outside to the parking lot. “Doesn’t she own a cellphone? Everyone owns fucking cellphones.”

"To…make a phone call?" The cashier, caught off guard, glanced out the windows towards the phone.

“I don’t even see anyone out there.” She muttered, standing on her toes.

“I didn’t even realize that payphones still existed. I used to have a pocket full of crumpled pieces of paper with phone numbers on them. I used to have to ask strangers for quarters outside of Super Stop n Shop just so I could…so I could reach out and touch someone.”

I leaned forward on the counter, my legs uncertain and weak.

“You know those commercials on television? The ones about cellphones? “ I ran a shaky hand through my wet hair. “That guy died from brain cancer. But they replaced him with someone who looked similar, but now he never talks anymore. Think she's buying drugs?"

"I really couldn't say." The cashier turned away from the fogged windows and back to me. “Anything else for you tonight, or what?”

"Strange." I paid for the cigar and water and walked out, eyeballing the woman on the phone. I lit a match I don’t remember having for the cigar, disappointed because I always seemed to forget that I don’t like to smoke. My match is killed in the wind and the yellow dress that is slung around the woman’s body sinks into her, emphasizing every fold and crack in her thin body, the yellow hair on her head swaying and for a second she looked infinitely innocent-- at the whims of the primordial elements. She felt my eyes on her, and she turned to face me for the first time. Her face covered in scabs, bad makeup, a cigarette jammed behind one ear –maybe it was the wildfires burning in the distance lighting the night sky a pale orange towards the edges, but I could smell her, taste her-- the bitter dry core which recoiled my tongue as the cigar smoke fluttered past--and she grinned a toothless mock, looking more hungry than anything else.

PARTY


There was a party in my apartment so I thought it would be a good time to set off firecrackers in my kitchen, but the fuse was way too short and they exploded way too close to everyone's face so all our ears rang. This upset quite a few people, some Greek who called himself Kotos laughed with me about how short the fuses were.

“Why anyone would market a fire cracker like that?” Kotos asked me. I started to answer but someone interrupted, asking about ice. I decided to ignore them both and instead retreated to my bedroom where Hatemachine was smoking opium alone.

“Opium. Music. Sex.” He remarked exhaling a thick cloud of sweet smelling smoke. “That is the pecking order. Anything else is a mere detail.”

When it was my turn to have the glass pipe passed to me, I could immediately feel the warmth of the numb wash over my back and then the rest of my body.

“You going to hang out in this ope-den for the whole night?” I asked him. “By yourself?”

He shrugged. “The majority of people are not intelligent. The real party is music and opium.”

“What about sex?” I asked.

“Don’t forget about the pecking order. But good luck with that.”

I left and floated into a room like a ghost with out a head.

“… since I’ve had sex with my roommate’s sister, we’ve grown apart.” Beaglesworth was saying.

The response was a groan from some one who seemed to care.

“It’s as if she feels like she doesn’t have to impress me anymore.” He continued.

“How does your roommate feel?” I asked.

“Default.” He replied.

I roamed past a clock and banned the use of more fireworks once I absorbed the details of the time. I wasn’t really drunk yet, just sweaty and high, while people I hardly knew tripped on LSD in my living room and front porch. Someone who vaguely resembled my reflection was digging through a pile of cold beers in the kitchen.

"How ya doin', Moon?" my brother asked me, handing me a beer.

"Pretty decent."

"You like it out here?" He asked, shuffling around a pile of coffee grinds on my table.

We hadn't spoken in a long while, not since I left to the city a few months ago. Marcus had been spending the majority of the summer in the Heartland, right off the lakes, sporting good conversation and losing weight. Last he heard, I was still deep in the city--not hiding in some mill town.

I had been receiving letters from my brother forwarded from my city address for a few weeks, but I hadn’t bothered to open any of them or respond.

"It's alright. It's peaceful." I muttered as if from a severed head.

"Do you get bored out here?" Marcus knew me pretty well, probably better than I knew myself.

"Well, that's part of the reason our ears our ringing."

He laughed. "You've got a real hippy-bachelor pad here."

"Yeah, I guess so. Rent's pretty cheap per month but so far it's basically been a giant party house. No one else has anywhere else to go, besides here, to drink and smoke and such."

"You're a generous man." Marcus sipped a beer.

"Yeah, I suppose."

"So what are you accomplishing?"

“ Nothing, dude. I tried my ass off once for three years…nah four years and everything came back to bite me in the ass. Everything set me back way more. Years. Than if I hadn’t . Tried at all.”

“Six dollar drinks.” Was his reply, as though I had asked a question.

“Well, that leads to forty eight dollar tabs.”

“And that leads to fireworks in a kitchen. Or factories burning down.”

“All the factories have burned down, but at least the cats still have homes.”

“So what now? Coasting? On cruise control? You just closing your eyes and letting the chips fall wherever they may?”

“I don’t want to strive.” I said, through gritted teeth. “I just want to accept.”

“Terrible.”

“Moon?” Someone called. “Can we smoke butts in here?”

“I don’t care what you do!” I replied.


“And now? And now we’re just a couple of alcoholics.” Marcus confirmed, raising his glass in a toast.

“Let us drink.” I agreed.

Sitting on the floor with my back to the wall, I did not say much, but listened to the Hatemachine talk occasionally, his voice thick and unused, cloudy from the opium. He argued with my brother, with Beaglesworth, with the random high school girls whom I didn’t know or recognize but knew where I kept the ice and my good bourbons.

I heard the familiar names of little Socialist countries in Europe, poor Latin America, and upside down New Zealand and Tazmania. I sat aside drinking and listening to their stories of places that I hadn’t been to or hadn’t seen in a long time.

Marcus told his tales and I listened eagerly, envying the attitudes of men who could cut loose and go anywhere they wanted at anytime, rather than stare out a window and accept another season with another impending drunk.

Someone had filled up an enormous glass with beer, calling it seventy ounces or something even though from where I sat it just seemed communal and depressing. Everyone drank from it while constantly filling it with more beer, dizzy with alcohol or stoned.

Bits of conversation floated my way and I snagged little pieces from the air, merely a head with ears occupying space and contributing nothing to anyone in my own home.

“…Wicked religious now, all Catholic’ed out now that he got caught with the fifteen year old…”

“What’s more Catholic than getting caught with a fifteen year old?”

The smell of the cheapest cigarettes people could afford and the sounds of people who couldn’t afford any cigarettes at all bumming them. Ashtrays forgotten and butts extinguished on the stained carpet. People ran into the wall in a drunken haze and snorted laughter as meaningfully worthless artwork fell to the floor. Neighbors below tossed and turned in their hot beds, their pillows soaked in sweat and a fat spouse beside them snoring-blissfully unaware of the near rapture which could occur any moment above their heads.

I found myself alone in my room before the open window, a lighter in my hand as I aimlessly toss firecrackers towards the sidewalk below. The Hatemachine was gone but teenagers I did not recognize were smoking cigarettes below and they yelled obscenities up at me as explosions danced at their feet. With a bit of luck I would maim their fingers, destroy a toe, or ruin their lives completely.

“Another day in the void.” Someone grasped my shoulder blade in a crude attempt to massage it. I was back in my kitchen and Beaglesworth was facing me, looking depressed.

“Vaguely existing.” I agreed.

“You think that blond girl is banging that black dude?” He asked me pointing to a couple.

I started to walk away, not knowing whom he was referring to anyway. I stopped.

“You mean Kaitlyn? I think her name is Kait.” I smiled.

“Yeah.” Beaglesworth quickly agreed. “I think you’re right. So, are they hooking up you think?”

Once again I had an itch to do something significant, something which would transcend all the meaningless dribble and alcohol hazed memories of just another summer night in a dead town with a bunch of youth who were trainwrecking towards their twenty fifth, their thirtieth, birthdays.

“I think….I think that they don’t really matter at all. I think their existence on this speck of dust floating through sun lit space is so insignificant, that I never bothered to learn their names… or even who invited them to my house…. I’m actually not even convinced that they exist at all.” My teeth were grinding and I tried to recall if I had taken any amphetamines that night but I was almost certain I had not.

The blonde girl laughed loudly and seemed to be enjoying herself. The black guy wrapped his long arms around her and she playfully tried to push him away, but gave up and collapsed into his arms. His face was buried in her hair, in her neck, and the girl laughed again. I could see the ripples of happiness, like a stone thrown in water, echoing back towards us in the kitchen, where I stood still clutching a fire cracker in my palm.

“Yeah, plus her body is way out of proportion. Those jeans are doing her hips no justice, and I’m pretty sure I saw her making out with Neil in his car last weekend.”

Beaglesworth’s eyes finally focused on me.

“…You alright?” He asked, walking towards the pile of beer in the corner.

Some bad noise from the living room made everyone stir and uncomfortable. I walked over to the disturbance and found a gay guy called Gom arguing with some fringe lady friend who was fiddling with the music. The girl was wearing a waitress uniform and seemed to be very ugly inside, while she moaned about wanting to leave immediately whereas Gom wanted to stay but needed to assure himself a ride home.

“Who lives here?” Gom asked. “I don’t know. But I’m not sleeping here. I don’t even know any of these people. All these people suck.” The girl put on a very loud metal song, the double bass of the Norwegian drummer rattling the phlegm in my chest.

“Just shower in there when you wake up” the girl cried pointing to the bathroom, “then go to work.”

Gom laughed deeply, “I’m not showering in there.”

“What’s up?” I yelled over the music.

The two ignored me and separated, the girl storming into my bedroom and slamming the door behind her. Apparently Gom had been wandering alone in the woods behind my house and had fallen into the river. I had not even noticed the green algae and mold that covered his body, nor the fact that he had been standing in the center of my living room in only his underwear, dripping brackish water onto the cigarette butts which littered my floor.

Gom walked past me speaking racial slurs to himself. A few moments later I heard the shower turn on from the bathroom. I felt like I was at work. I was cracking the whip, trying to get a bunch of shit grinning sixteen year olds to care about the sale price of cereal or the alignment of stacked toilet paper.

I had forgotten that my brother was back in town until he approached me with Beaglesworth.

“Here.” Marcus handed me a shot. I drank it quickly and gratefully, not even acknowledging the horrid taste.

“And here.” He handed me a balled up fist of foil. I raised an eyebrow at him, then Beaglesworth. They both knowingly smiled at me, then stuck out their pink tongues which had little pieces of blotter paper slowly dissolving on them.

“No sense in only vaguely existing.” Beaglesworth was saying. “Might as well shake things up a bit. Keep the synapses on their toes, you know?” I nodded and tore open the foil, taking a slightly smaller does than every one else to maintain some kind of control.

I sighed and walked to a couch. It was late and people were starting to leave—I could hear the periodic opening and closing of my front door and the shuffling of drunk feet down stairs.

“Moon what if all this turns our brains to mush when we’re older?” Jayha asked me sweetly, and I either noticed or imagined her eyes dilating, the shadows on her face becoming exaggerated and cruel.

I laughed half heartedly, not really thinking about the question or the answer and instead drank from the giant glass waiting for the acid to kick in and wiped the sweat from my brow, surprised at how humid it was. There were no longer many people in my little place, but it still faintly smelled like cigarettes and marijuana, and the Hatemachine was cooking something in my oven which made it seem even hotter, while Kotos described the time in Tennessee when Bighead, him and I almost all died from the heat of the wasteland that is Western Tennessee, which I didn’t really remember ever happening, but I agreed as if I did.

“I’ll take insanity of recreational drug use over the insanity of children and a morning commute any day.” I muttered.

Hatemachine walked into the room carrying whatever it was that he cooked in the oven. He sat across from me and didn’t eat or say anything, just looked unhappily right through me until I wondered if he was even seeing me.

“So I guess what we have to offer is better.” Jayha was saying slowly, carefully.

“No,“ I responded, “This isn’t much different from what they’re doing, but at least it’s not what they’re doing. It’s an alternative. But we‘re not exactly building for the future here.”

"Does that bother you?" Someone asked.

"Let it bother everyone else."

"You know," Beaglesworth said, his long hair held out of his eyes with one of my bandannas, "we're older than we've ever been....right now."

“Drinking through the last days of the American Empire.” Marcus interrupted.

“That’s right. Might as well fiddle while the city burns.” I agreed.

“Or get high and fuck all night....all fucking night while it burns.” Beaglesworth corrected.

“We could dance while we’re at it.” Jayha chimed.

“And pass the giant cup so I can drink from it.” I handed the glass to Marcus and he took a big gulp, wiping foam with the back of his hand, looking mildly disgusted.

A loud knock on the door interrupted our pseudo-philosophy.

“Go away!” I screamed.

Someone opened the door anyway. I couldn’t see who it was but I figured it was just somebody who was outside smoking a cigarette. But then Mills and Kori entered the living space, looking around at everyone. Mills looked drunk already, but Kori seemed coherent and smiled warmly as she cut through the madness and made her way through the apartment. She was wearing another bathing suit, this one pure white, absorbing and reflecting the multicolored lights I had strung up from the ceiling. The way she moved in the colors made her look like a lava lamp, slowing churning with purposeful purples and greens.

“Hello, neighbors.” I said to them.

They seemed to recognize me and made their way over to where I was sitting on the floor. Kori smiled at me and offered a quick wave, while Mills patted me hard on the shoulder.

“Man, how are you doing? We were talking to your friend Gom downstairs, he told us to come up--hope you don’t mind us.” Mills said.

“No worries." My voice cold. "Grab a beer and have a seat.” I told them. “We’re just discussing the merits of fucking all night.”

“It’s killing us.” Jayha added.

“Killing what?” Beaglesworth, the wise musician, asked as he motioned for the giant glass of cold beer.

“Damn, that’s a huge fucking glass of beer!” Mills exclaimed.

"As long as we have beer. And television. We're comfortable." I said to no one. "Doesn't matter what we're existing for. As long as we're comfortable doing it."

“Television? You don't even having fucking cable. We’re lucky to have ice!” Beaglesworth was sweating under his long hair, looking uncomfortable.

“I’d rather have ice than television.” Marcus said.

“When life becomes a grind, it’s just tough to accept.” I said sadly.

“That’s what friends are for. And drugs and alcohol.” Beaglesworth spat on my floor, but missed and hit his pant leg.

“Where did you get that giant glass?” Mills asked.

"Fuck, right on my pants." Beaglesworth tried to wipe it on my carpet.

“You can’t change the grind by hiding from it.” Jayha added.

“I’ll pretend I can’t see it. Germany.” I explained.

“People born blind don’t realize that they’re blind until someone tells them.” Jayha said.

“Is that true?” Marcus asked.

“I don’t know. Sounds like it could be.” Jayha laughed.

“What’s it say on it? What does that mean in German?” Mills was still fascinated with the glass.

“Good life is enjoying a good beer with good friends.” Marcus translated.

My neighbors went into the kitchen to make themselves a drink. From where I sat I could hear Mills laughing loudly and knocking stuff over. I stopped drinking, but noticed Kori sending me glances periodically from across the room.

"Hey, I think that broad is in love with me." I tried to get Beaglesworth's attention to no avail. Someone had turned up the music again and no one could hear me.

I decided that I’d end up having her one day if I wanted. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, despite the way she wrapped her small body into smaller bathing suits.

The LSD had begun its slow onset, the nervous twinge in my back and precise clarity began to creep into my peripheral vision. The Colonel jumped onto the couch beside us, wondering what we strange humans were up to once again on these long summer nights, bottled up inside with heat and auras vibrating all around us, drunkenly swaying to music as the last of the alcohol was consumed and the LSD began to straighten us out. Those who were drunk and tired left the trippers alone for the night and headed off into the summer air to their mattresses and homes.

My neighbors announced that they were leaving as well. I was slightly uncertain but walked them to the door to say good night. Mills patted me on the back hard, his eyes half shut and red, forgetting my name. He looked about ready to fall over.

Kori seemed relatively sober, supporting Mills’ large, tanned body the best she could. Mills walked out into the hallway and I could hear him struggling with his apartment door across the way. I was left looking at Kori’s face with my wide pupils, and I gathered that she was really tired in a way which I could never relate to. It was a fatigue which overcame even the most energetic personality on the long, slow summer afternoons where even the grass and the trees seemed to bend softly and slowly in the wind, dragged down by the weight of the life in the sad heat.

I told her goodbye, and extended my hand. She spread her arms as though to embrace me, but quickly pulled them back to her side when she realized that I only intended to shake. It was an awkward moment, caught in between formalities in an inebriated state. I took her soft, small hand and squeezed it. In between apprehensive and embarrassed smiles, we said goodnight.


All that was left was Jayha, Beaglesworth, Marcus, Gom, and myself. Gom had ate a small amount of psilocybin mushrooms in addition to eating some LSD with us, wishing his friend farewell whom he’d been arguing with. After lamenting about his experiences this summer when we all had purchased LSD from various people, he mentioned something about my neighbors.

"What?" I asked him, barely listening to his stories.

"What a bunch of freaks." He repeated.

"That girl understood. She fell in love with me." I said simply.

"Well,' Gom leaned forward excited, and I leaned away from him, "her boyfriend was standing behind her in the kitchen, when we were all talking and playing games and shit, and her boyfriend--he was, like, eating her hair.”

“What?” I asked, thinking I had misheard.

“I know, right? He was standing over her shoulder, and putting her hair in his mouth and chewing on it. For a while.” Gom sat back in his chair to watch my reaction.

“Anyone else see this?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I think Jayha did. And the girl I was arguing with, Ugh, she was being such a bitch tonight.” Gom lit a cigarette with out asking if he could smoke inside.

I said nothing, thinking about the motivation behind eating someone’s hair.

"Gom, what are you talking about?" Jayha asked.

“She’s got nappy ass hair anyway. She needs to condition.” Gom yelled over me to Jayha. I nodded vaguely, and tried to enjoy myself before I began to have horrible dreamscapes of hair eating Marines.

People wanted to smoke cigarettes so everyone got up to head outside and smoke on the porch, except Marcus and I. I was reclined restlessly in a chair, watching my brother from across the room who sat on my couch and starred absently into space as the drug no doubt was working him over.

In that moment, I saw the energy around him flicker and like a car crash suddenly knew he was a direct piece of myself. Complete physical evidence of our relation appeared before me and I realized that I was merely looking at myself by looking at him, and it brought me back to our childhood and teenage years when we would start fires in the backyard.

Some things hadn't changed, but I realized then how far we had evolved and grown from those years in Eastern Massachusetts to our times now, scattered throughout the world and throughout the country, spreading our cynical philosophy and cryptic jokes to everyone we encountered and leaving weird impressions on every boring asshole out there.

I was proud of the bastard for surpassing me in almost everything I had accomplished academically and intellectually, and to boot, he was more of a social butterfly that I ever could hope to be, as I glimpsed briefly into the eternity of our existence and saw nothing but gratitude and benevolence.

By extension, I knew my friends were doing the same thing. They were growing from the roots which connected myself to them, and much like my brother, I could see myself falling slowly away from each of them, like a dead leaf in the embrace of autumn, while they were outside smoking their way to cancer.

For a brief euphoric second, I though that everything would be alright.

A cellular telephone device began to make noises, and my brother and I looked at each other, surprised and awake over the sound. I realized it was my phone but it took me a moment to find it in the acid confusion and by the time I did, whoever was calling had given up on me.

I found the telephone at last and called back Beaglesworth. He notified me that Gom was totally fucked up and had wondered away towards a playground.

“Beaglesworth, you bastard, which playground?” I cried into the phone.

“Huh?”

“There’s two playgrounds near my apartment. If you’re inside my apartment, looking out towards the street, which way is it, to the right or the left?”

“The…….right.” He answered hesitantly.

We walked down the stairs carefully, trying to be quiet, attempting to be understanding of the people who tolerated my loud, unreasonable style of living. And I somehow believed that if at least one of us tiptoed down the wooden stairs, maybe every bit helped, like the bums in Oregon always said with their tired, hungry eyes about any amount of change or spare smokes or surplus tomatoes you gave them at street corners and stop signs.

My brother and I headed out into the hot air, under the dark summer sky surrounded by energy glistening and pulsating around everything that we saw and touched. Down the street I could hear laughter and perhaps screaming, and I thought how I couldn’t spend a winter here.

I was quite certain that everything I was doing this summer was completely killing me, more so than Belle Two in the city, or the Nazi landlord, or the jailbait Eva and her crazy boyfriends that wanted to break my beautiful face for cracking the whip at a job which was part of the terrible tyranny of corporate America which was probably somehow responsible for every symptom of this disease my generation was afflicted with.

I hand't realized I had been speaking out loud until Marcus asked, "Where will you go next?"

"I....I don't know. But I wouldn't mind burning this town to the fucking ground before I leave." I replied.

The playground was beside a church, and I knew from experience that they locked the massive iron doors at night. The gate to the playground was wide open. Marcus and I entered the fenced-in area, noticing that directly behind the play area was a cemetery stretching on and on into the warm, sticky night.

“Was the gate open when you got here?” I asked.

“No, we did that.” Beaglesworth said guiltily, like a young child.

I snorted laughter. “That's alright. There's no kids awake right now. It's our turn."

“That’s what I’m saying, man.” Jayha said, and bounced around, saying things like “Weeeee” and “Woooo” and “Yippeee”, and she seemed just like a child now, the sweet innocence of Jayha which always lay beneath her intelligent surface was fully released now, soaring about her and making her glow virginally with youthful energy befitting a daycare center, not a real estate manager who worked in an office with her very own desk.

We all caught on, climbing and swinging and bouncing, doing things we hadn’t done in decades, cutting through the sweet, thick air, like children on a Sunday with all day to play.

A lot of strange realizations began to confront me, a mid level schmuck manager in his early twenties messing around a playground at three a.m. with a head full of LSD. It seemed so strange, climbing walls and swinging from monkey bars and pumping on swings just for the sake of doing it. I wondered if anyone ever used this playground anymore in the current electric generation. I assumed that there must be power outlets for laptops and such nearby, but I was incorrect.

“Moon, you can’t go in there, you won’t fit. That’s only for children.” Jayha yelled.

I realized that I was on some type of plastic play station, bumbling across a shaky drawbridge and attempting to squeeze through some tube. It was like a giant plastic rat maze for children, possibly training them for basic training in the armed forces later on in life.

“How’s that make you feel, Moon, you gonna let a bunch of children get the best of you?” Beaglesworth challenged.

I remembered a time I sat inside as a child with a fever, listening to the sound of kids playing outside. Starring at the window from my bed through the haze of feverish dreams. Thick and colorful flashes of light dived around my eyes, dying with sounds of kids who were now grown and working in gas stations, hedge funds, or dead from late night car crashes.

"Fuck children." I muttered. "Give me a dog instead. If I back over one of those in the driveway, I won't go to jail at least."

"Poetic." Someone said.

"You know how sensitive I am." I replied.

I was drenched in sweat. It poured off my face and burned my eyes as I watched Gom nervously smoke a cigarette by himself, his back to the group. Deep in the reflective chaos, he looked scarred shitless. I thought about reaching out to him, in an attempt to comfort him, but I didn't. Instead I started to walk through the gate and back towards the street.

The moon rose above us as we worked our way towards the waterfall. Like always. I wasn't sure if I had done this last night also, or if it was last week. Or if last night had seamlessly burned through the day and into another night again. My memory had become extremely difficult to and unreliable to reach. It seemed that I could be in any point in time during the summer, because each night had essentially been the same, despite my efforts to make them valuable, unique, and immortal.

It was just another late night in a void.

So many times in the last few months had I strode down this same corridor, towards the same Mecca of solitude and solace embedded between sun stained sorry looking buildings and a roadway seldom traveled. It was the one redeeming quality of this town, the waterfall, and sitting beside it dead sober in the mid day summer sun or staggering to it in the early morning hours, sharp with drugs or numbed by alcohol, made every moment I had spent, almost in love, in the city seem so tacky and trivial.

We hopped the fence again, because the gate was always locked at this time of the night, and we flooded down the steps, some of us quiet and contemplating, the rest of us laughing and loud, marveling at every little leaf stuck to our feet or each thread which grasped loosely to our fabrics as we shambled onwards. I felt Jayha grabbing my arm, and I turned to her with laughter in my eyes and heart but saw some alarm in her face.

“There’s people down here!” She hissed to me.

I turned to follow her pointed index finger and indeed, there was a couple sitting on a bench together. Embraced in each other’s arms, they sat facing the waterfall, completely unaware of us as our own voices and antics were lost in the rushing onset of water crashing to the stone below.

“Let’s go around.” I said.

We walked softly through some bushes and behind them, towards the far end wall. We emerged slightly behind and above the waterfall, before a great stone wall, where the ancient lake pooled calmly and sat undisturbed, unknowingly marching towards a descent downwards only a few meters away. Judging by the placid surface of the liquid, it was difficult to tell there was a tumultuous bend in the waterway slightly to the right. Haggard looking aquatic plants poked through the glassy surface like elderly hands reaching towards heaven like antennas, and moss and algae covered the surface of the silent water towards the muddy banks beneath faded, wooden structures.

“This is awesome.” Marcus said to no one in particular.

No response was needed, because it was truth. Frogs moaned and hollered at the sky, singing towards a bright moon wrapped in vermillion clouds which seemed to reflect the heat we silly humans felt on the earth. From where we stood, the frogs were the loudest noise, the greatest presence. Their deep, baritone songs even eclipsed the roar of the water which was only several feet to our rear.

“What are they saying?” Jayha asked.

“They’re singing.” I said.

“They stink at singing.” Jayha made a face. “Don’t sing frogs, I thought frogs are supposed to say Bud-Wise-Er?”

“Only in commercials, man.” Gom said.

“They forgot the words.” Jayha said simply. I laughed, and everyone began to laugh, because it was such a strange notion. If frogs sang, I don’t think they’d ever forget the words to their baritone songs which bounce off the water like a lighthouse.

The couple on the bench noticed us, and riled by our laughter they rose and made their way towards us at the wall.

“They’re coming to us!” Jayha seemed alarmed as she was clearly in the grips of the drug.

“Don’t worry, they look friendly.” Marcus reassured.

A man and a woman approached us, both pretty busted and rugged looking, as though they had spent many nights in the midst of dangerous drug binges while sleeping through the vitamin providing sun.

“Hi!” The woman said cheerfully, as though we were meeting in a more appropriate place, such as an Applebee’s around happy hour in an anonymous American neighborhood, rather than in a clandestine and padlocked river bank at three in the morning during a weeknight.

We all greeted her in response, Jayha seemingly forgetting her initial worries as it become rather clear that these two individuals posed no real immediate threat. I realized that our group was probably the scariest thing around in this early morning town.

“What’re ya’ll doing here in the middle of the night?” The woman asked, rubbing her nose on the back of her hand.

“We’re just chilling….” Beaglesworth answered.

“Admiring the sights and the sounds. Isn’t it so lovely here...during the evening?.” I said softly.

“Oh, I love it. I know all the good spots here.” The woman said.

“Have you been to the playground?” Jayha asked anxiously.

“Oh yeah…I’ve been everywhere. Did you all grow up here?”

We all laughed. Her man was looking around nervously, fidgeting and restless like he had somewhere better to be than a flush of water at three a.m.

“Hell no.” I answered to her puzzled face.

“Oh, that’s cool. I’m a townie. For Life!” She smiled, then quickly became stern. “Hey, do you have any drugs?”

“What?” I asked. Once again our group broke out into laughter, it was like we were watching a cartoon.

“No, we don’t have any drugs.” I answered her.

“Oh, okay.” Silence fell between us, as it often does when a group of people tripping on LSD encounters someone who is not under the influence of strong hallucinogens. It was like we all shared a private joke while still going about our business, somewhat acting straight enough to operate socially. Politicians must feel this way all the time, laughing underneath their masks as they shake hands and kiss babies.

“You have a goodnight.” I told her, ending the conversation.

“You too! See ya guys!” And they exited our world, into their private worlds down the path and back to their bench and into each other’s embrace.

“What a bunch of scum.” I said.

Beaglesworth just laughed and laughed.

“What do you mean?” Asked Gom, eyes wide with confusion.

“Who asks complete strangers they meet at a waterfall in the middle of the night for drugs? Not even a specific drug, but anything, just drugs in general?” I said, laughing. “Those are a couple of real freaks.”

Soon we all began to laugh, our giggles and sounds of happiness mending and melting into the lonely song of the bullfrogs who didn’t know the right words as a couple of addicts sat behind us on a bench together, lost in their own drug induced thoughts and behaviors beside an ancient streaming flow of water whose company we all shared in a dead town in the dead of night.

“Ew!” Jayha squeaked. “Look, they’re having sex now!”

We all turned and it was true, the two strangers were doing the familiar rhythmic thrust into each other on the no longer lonely bench which I sometimes sat on to meditate and contemplate the life altering decisions which I was occasionally forced to make.

“I think it’s time to go.” Beaglesworth said, no longer laughing, in the grips of unseen fear.

Back through the thicket of bushes and the feeling of being inside a giant bonsai tree overwhelmed me again--the paranoid feeling of being under a magnifying glass. The wooden stairs creaked under our feet as the couple on the bench didn’t stir or stare, their actions lost within each other and the rush of the water. Behind us they fell, and further back as we climbed over the wall and back onto the empty street. Sick yellow light fell from lamp posts illuminating us and playing strange kaleidoscopic games with our shadows as we roamed aimlessly along the solid yellow line in the middle of the road.

Half of us walked on one side of the road while the other half of the group strode in the middle, in between the two sides. The division between us was noticeable and I was haunted with the paranoid metaphor that this was it-- this was us: each one of us traveling the twisted road but briefly herded together for school and training but then released to our own whims and will. Some of us walked forward, others laterally, or even standing still. Those who stood still might as well have been walking backwards, for the rest of us kept walking into the night, bouncing from yellow street light to street light while the stragglers were left behind in the darkness, puzzled over broken glass in the gutter or bright fire balls in the sky.

A warm breeze passed us by, cooling the sweat which ran down my forehead and my hair onto my body and down my legs into my sandals which were cracked and broken and held together by duck tape. Beaglesworth and I rounded up the drifters, mostly Gom and Jayha who had fallen silently behind us, and brought them forth to the rest of us, as we approached the behemoth black tooth grinning skeleton of a burned out mill.

Rising up from the fencing surrounding it, protecting us from it and it from us, the building stood tall and proud like a monument to the forgotten lifeblood of the town which ran through its veins for a hundred years before it became obsolete and discarded. Now it was just an old relic-- a reminder of the fire hazards poorly and quickly constructed antique mills pose to those who are unfortunate enough to live within the mammoth, cobwebbed shadows of its shell.

Under its gaze we admired the blackened streaks and terrifyingly dark crusted corners of its tallest windows where the flames had licked and leaped outwards, trying to smote the whole town in some sick euthanasia moment of pity and outraged disgust. Silently, we mused over the structure like patrons to a museum would contemplate a twisted work of post modern art which rejected logic yet was brutally primitive enough to be placed beside a statue from Willendorf.

Someone threw a rock which clanged loudly off a sign forbidding entry. Another posted nearby warned of asbestos. Mesothelioma. Lung cell annihilation. A gaping hole in the mesh fencing around the structure beckoned before us. Bums and drug addicts had strode in before us littering the ground with crushed beer cans and used needles. I remembered that heroin had come back to the Northeast in a big fucking way.

My feet carried me over crushed brick and uneven debris. My left toes kicked a beer can. I was walking into the darkness, through the gaping orifice of the barrier and towards the dark caverns of the old mill.

"Hey man...I wouldn't." Someone--I think Beaglesworth-- called after me. I paused suddenly and stood within the shadow slightly past the fence with the outside world behind me. Thin canals of filthy water ran through the ground reflecting the moonlight in eerier shafts of light.

The ugly scar on an ugly town which should’ve burned to the ground long before I had the opportunity to flip through the classifieds while working an obscure midnight shift in some bloodthirsty and faceless retail outlet-- why did the fire patrol cease the engulfing of the whole town by the angry flames bred of the mill which gave this very town birth?

Why not let things come full circle?

Let the flaming holocaust spread to the mill next door, and the ancient crack tombstones of the cemetery across the street with its crooked tooth headstones which resembled the foundation stones in the basement of the place I now called home. Where all the people drive their broken down cars to their broken down lives while avoiding the face to face confrontation with their broken down dreams and the dismal fact that the human race is slowly losing because the race is considered a marathon. Meanwhile those of us who reject that silly notion stay up all night and wander the abandoned streets in the summer heat and decide to sprint until our sides burst into oceanic dreamscapes of LSD induced pure reality which shred the thin blanket of comfort the retail outlets and landlords cling to in order to establish a ground set of rules while cop cruisers drive by slow and shine lights onto us wondering what we’re doing out so late but we just smiled sly grins and stuck out our tongues with our fingers in our ears, mocking the small town pigs.

I say let the whole place burn because it’s evolve or die in the hostile universe, and a town like this is an ugly reminder of the way things used to be, not what they could or should be and it made unconscious tears leaked down my sweaty face. It was like seeing a beaten down dog still chained to its post in its owner’s yard. Why even have a dog if you’re going to treat it like that?

My friends told me to shush until the cop turned his spot light back off and continued his slow coast down the road and they all burst out laughing but I’m not sure at what or why. We were half a mile from the mill now, and I wondered if I had imagined the whole panicked episode. I felt dried tears on my face, and the last thing I wanted was to spend all day and all night out here-- in the dusty solitude of a town that has no business existing anymore.

Where multiple types of drug abusers roam the streets and occupy the same waterfall simultaneously while not working together to bring about some type of positive change. My friends would return to their parents' giant houses in the suburbs in their new cars, stroll to their little bedrooms while the moms did the laundry and dad mowed the lawn.

But this was what I called home.

We were back in the yellow light of my apartment and my clothes are completely soaked in dust and sweat. I headed into my room oblivious to everyone else who seemed to be talking about food for some stupid reason. I tore off my wet clothes I felt anger build up in me, not believing that they could actually be talking about the merits of eating. It was too fucking humid and hot and nothing was alright in this town yet still the residents quietly sleep in their darkened rooms in the corners of their mattresses which are propped up against walls during the day to make more room for their dogs while a bunch of middle class kids talk about fucking steak tips and waffles.

I sat with my back to the door starring into the cracks of my floor. After a while I began to tear the hairs out of my upper arms one at a time, until I hear a door open and close. The sun was almost up, and someone tells me that they're leaving to get food. I don't respond until I hear a soft knock of my door and it's Gom. He seems very awake and tells me that the DMV is opening in a half an hour.

"So?" I ask him, my voice hoarse and raw from crying.

"I need to get my license renewed." He explained. "This is my only day off all week. I'm going to head down there. Want to come? We can bring some potato salad or something."

The mention of food upsets me greatly again, and before the subliminal tears start to leak from my eyes again, I light a cigarette and tell him to take my brother.

"Oh..? Marcus left a few minutes ago. He washed some empty beer glasses then got a ride with Beaglesworth."

Not knowing what to say, and with a lot of effort, I laughed, just to fill the air with something besides smoke.

Gom turned to leave, forgetting his keys which he came back up to retrieve without knocking.

"I didn't know that was your brother." He called out before closing the door behind him.

I didn't respond and instead drew small circles in the dust on the ground.


WORK


I was at work for about thirty minutes before I decided to take my lunch. I went across the street to Garden Pizza because they served bottled beer aside from decent Italian food which I had never bothered to eat. I sat down at a table near the window, watching storm clouds thicken the sky.

I felt like getting fired. I felt like getting drunk and losing my job.

I ordered two beers and threw down some money. When they arrived, I immediately drank the first one and began to sip on the second.

"Kiss that promotion goodbye." I muttered/

"Huh?" Asked the unattractive bartender.

"I'm kissing my promotion goodbye."

"Oh?" She stopped and turned to me, suddenly interested. "What do you do?"

What she actually meant was: "who are you?"

"I'm a janitor." I replied. "I work at the high school."

"Oh, well that's respectable." She said diplomatically, disappointed and walking away.

At that ugly moment in a mid afternoon bar, the stretch marks on the bartender's gut hanging out of her shirt suddenly became the most obvious thing I could perceive. And though I had no true plans of leaving, I knew that whenever I thought back to my time here, I’d always remember scenes like this most clearly.

I was tearing a little napkin to shreds in the palm of my wet hands. Sweat stains formed in my arm pits and I looked nervously towards the door every few minutes waiting for a stranger to enter and change my life.

I finished my beers and paid, then returned to work feeling not quite drunk enough. I had no urge to obey or impress anyone. I went to the frame of the door where I knew the boss kept her spare cigarettes and felt along the top edge of the frame until my hand knocked one to the ground. I retrieved it and walked back out to the front of the store and told the cashier to hold down the fort while I smoked.

Out front on the curb, I was reminded of the hero I had been years ago back in the university. I had spent countless hours sitting on concrete curbs and stone walkways with or without cigarette smoke in my lungs starring at the unfolding sky above me, usually beside beautiful women or great minds who were convinced they'd go on to change the world.

I spent summers inside a grocery store, smoking my camel filters as the sun went down warmly and orange as my youth slipped away for six dollars at a time. I sat on fence posts as cold wicked winds blew through my hair, whipping against my dry lips as I tried to be clever and friendly to strangers as my cigarette hand got ice cold until I went back through the door again.

Now, I sat with my back to my job, to my career, in the light of the familiar feeling of moving on, as dusk started to rise in the east and I smoked a lonely cigarette despite considering myself a non smoker and all I wanted right then was for everything to end.

There’s nothing suicidal in this feeling.

So I dicked around and accomplished no real work for the last hours of my shift.

I sat on counters out front and talked to the lonely and lowly cashier about her life, trying to get inside what she was all about because it was better than watching television. And maybe I could learn some advice from how simply she took her life. The acting was better anyway, even though the storyline was shit--something involving her grandmother and her fat boyfriend who dressed like he was an African American despite being rich middleclass white. And her sinus cavities were shitting the bed, and she had a deviated septum which would require surgery and I nodded and frowned and gave her empathy which she needed and craved and deserved, playing the good man which I really wasn’t, but I was a good actor too.

When my day was over, I walked into the dark parking lot. Humid, hot air hung to my face and hair causing static to rise and I felt like crying because I knew I could not handle a winter in this town.


PARTY

It was a Friday after work and I was eating chicken out of a paper bag when Beaglesworth showed up at my door with his long wet hair tied back in a ponytail. It was raining and he was holding a piece of crumpled paper in his hand which he kept referring to as a map. It actually seemed to be crudely drawn instructions on how to get to a "tits-out crazyhouse party-factory."

We arrived to the party late, and the young girl Beaglesworth had some how befriended was upset, afraid that we had decided not to come, but relieved to the point of tears that we had.

Jayha was worried that Beaglesworth was cheating on her. Some dipshit waitress from a local bar that was in love with Beaglesworth had told him that Jayha was fucking me. I had promised her I would keep an eye on Beaglesworth, but had immediately agreed to join him when he suggested a high school party in the hopes of fucking some girl he had met at a donut shop. The longer I stayed with these people, the longer I was fucking myself.

"You guys are assholes! Fuck off!" A thin high school girl turned and walked furiously down a hard wood hallway after we had knocked on the door. Beaglesworth shrugged, took it in stride and motioned for me to come in.

I was standing near the keg when I first noticed Eva. She was wearing a cheap pink tank top with thin straps and white shorts which were popular at the time with high school girls. I pumped the keg a few more times and filled my cup with mostly foam.

I briefly contemplated ignoring her, but then struggled to think what it was that Beaglesworth would do. I looked around for him to no avail. He was probably already fucking the donut chick in the master bedroom. I hated Beaglesworth so much.

I drank the rest of the foamy beer for a confidence boost, then turned to pour some more but a bunch of kids were surrounding it, getting ready for some keg stands. "Fuck it." I thought, and walked over to Eva who was talking to a girlfriend.

"I hope there's some bourbon in this dump, because that keg is a finished." I said as I approached. Her friend saw me first and acted as though I had just crawled out of a swamp and was tracking mud through out the house. Eva turned from their conversation and immediately her eyes lit up as though she answered my phone calls.

"Moon!" She cried. "I didn't think you'd be here...well actually, I kinda thought you would be. I was hoping you would be." She lied. I smiled anyway and nodded.

"Yeah, my friend knows one of the girls that lives here or something."

"This is my manager, Moon." Eva said to her friend. "This is Chantelle."

"Charmed." I muttered.

"You're her manager? Like, her boss? That's crazy." Chantelle said.

"Insane." I agreed.

The door banged open as Creedence Clearwater Revival began to play and a bunch of very drunk, very young Asians walked in. I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned back to the girls.

"Moon, I fucking love this song. Let's go dance!"

I agreed and took her small hand, her left index finger sporting a ring with a black stone. I tried to ask her if it was a mood ring but the music was too loud. Facing her as she moved in rhythmic circles and caressed the wood floors with her toes, I felt self conscious and realized that she was a tough partner to follow. Other people on the dance floor seemed to be looking at me, and I felt like something out of an Egyptian tomb.

I always forgot how much I don't really care to dance, and that the whole premise of agreeing to do so is always based upon the lapse in memory of how awful I am at it. Thinking about Beaglesworth getting his dick wet somewhere though, I was determined to attempt to have a good time no matter how little I had in common with any of these people.

Mercifully the song ended, and Eva looked at me with something that might have been sympathy in her eyes. I was familiar with this routine--she would say she was tired and try to lose me, and I would take a long walk back to the kitchen to try to find some hard liquor while justifying to myself that she is a skank anyway. This made me think of her boyfriend-the giant ape I kicked out the store once-and I actually began to hope that she would leave me alone.

Instead she said: "Do you have any weed?"

I blinked sweaty rain water out of my eyes and looked at her, determining that she was serious.

"Of course." I replied, thankful that Beaglesworth had reminded me to bring some, mentioning that it would be a great way to make new friends.

"Yeah! I knew you would! I'm so glad you came. Can we go get high?" She pulled me from the dance floor before the next song started. I nodded and gratefully followed her down the hallway towards the kitchen.

We walked through the crowd, people trying to dance and drink sloppily from red cups. Some rap music blasted which I didn't recognize. I felt a hand on my shoulder and some acne faced kid asked me if I played Lacrosse. I shrugged and told him I did. He smiled and gave me a drunken high five. I took one of the beers off his hands and he nodded approval.

Eva and I entered the kitchen where some fat girl named Camille was crying about something. Two other fat girls were trying to comfort her. She asked me who I was, but I couldn't tell if she was serious, or if it was just a side effect, so I ignored her and moved to the kitchen table.

"Do you have anything to smoke out of?" I asked. Beaglesworth had refused to let me bring a glass pipe because he insisted it would hinder us meeting people.

"No, do you? Do you have papers?"

Finding an empty plastic bottle, I told her I could whip something up. As we started to get high in the kitchen, the crying girl-Camille-left, and the girls began to cough and talk about people I didn't know. As we were finishing up, Beaglesworth appeared from out of nowhere and slapped the back of my shoulder.

"Hey buddy-woah, getting high! Nice!" He grabbed the plastic bottle and took a long hit, the two girls still absorbed in conversation. He exhaled a thick, white plume, raised his eyebrows and tossed the bottle to the floor.

"Nothing left." He explained. He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me up. "Hey, come take a look at this." He dragged me through the kitchen. I turned back to Eva to say something, to see if I was missed, but she had lit a cigarette while concentrating on Chantelle.

I tried to remember if she smoked, but couldn't recall.

Beaglesworth pulled me closer to the source of the pulsating music. Bass flooded my chest and even through the high, I became angry at the simplicity of the organized sound that was playing at top volume.

We walked through some glass doors into a carpeted living room. Bodies littered the floor like the scene of a holocaust. A fire was roaring in the stone hearth even though I was certain it was late August.

"There." Beaglesworth turned away to walk out of the room, but not before motioning with a tilt of his head. I turned to follow his gaze and my eyes fell on tanned flesh. A naked girl, no more than seventeen, maybe eighteen, was walking around the room holding a red cup. Walking past me as though I were a ghost, she spilled some dark liquid from the cup which immediately stained the carpet.

I turned to watch her walk out of the room, carefully avoiding the passed out kids who were somehow sleeping through the sound of the terrible music. I followed the tanned body and blonde hair into the hallway and watched her take a turn into a bathroom. She didn't bother to close the door.

Beaglesworth was beside me again. "Dude, I'm sobering up. These kids are fucking boring. Where's the keg?"

I said nothing as we walked towards the pile of cups and melting ice. I pumped the keg twice but got nothing but foam. "Fuck dude, this is a dying scene." Beaglesworth ran a hand through his long hair, looking around the room, presumably for another naked teenager.

"Why do you think she was naked?" I asked.

"Huh?" He asked me. "We need to get some hard alcohol."

"I think Eva said there was some in the kitchen. Rum I think."

"Who the fuck is Eva?" Beaglesworth asked me. He was smiling for some reason.

"C'mon." I said, leading us back into the kitchen. As we walked through a dark hallway, two tall kids wearing white t-shirts were yelling at each other about respect. One was shoving the other.

"Kick his fucking ass." I yelled at them. They didn't hear me over the music.

The light was on in the kitchen and the music was slightly more tolerable. I searched the crowded counter tops for something alcoholic when Beaglesworth gave me a nudge. "Where's your woman?"

I shrugged but again he motioned with his body. I looked past him and saw a crowd of kids at the kitchen table. Eva was sitting on the lap of some guy with a giant Adam's Apple and a tattoo of a cross on his large bicep.

"Interesting." I mumbled. I said nothing as the guy's hands worked their way over Eva's small body, her chest, her stomach, then finally squirming around in her crotch. Eva shifted uncomfortably.

I started over to the table.

"Nope." Beaglesworth said, trying to grab me. He missed and I continued over until I was under the yellow lights of the table, pushing my way through a crowd of kids young enough to be my students had I ever pursued a teaching career. I could feel Beaglesworth behind me, striding to catch up and bumping into other kids trying to pull me away before I did anything stupid.

The crowd around the table cleared and I saw they were playing some kind of card game. The naked girl was sitting at one of the chairs, her eyes half open and glazed, her large breasts resting on the edge of the table on top of some cards.

"Yo, Eva?" I shouted. "Is there any booze left?" Was all I could say. After the first word escaped my body, loud, deep and defiant, a few heads had turned. By the last word everyone was absorbed into their game once again, Eva turning briefly to smile at me, and then away again. I looked around the table to see if anyone could acknowledge me, and saw Beaglesworth across the way absently rubbing one of the naked girl's erect nipples.

I turned and pushed my back through the crowd, grabbing a plastic cup from someone. They didn't protest and I drank the liquid down, vaguely afraid that it could be an ashtray, but was relieved to find it was straight vodka. I lit a cigarette with the hope that some one would tell me that I could not smoke inside, but no one noticed. People pushed past me dancing better than I could ever hope, faces in the shadows of the hall embraced each other with their hands running down one another's backs as more bodies curled up in front of a fire that was still burning for some reason and I ashed a cigarette into a flower pot on the front step as Beaglesworth opened the door in apparent relief, probably out of condoms.

"Ah, here you are. Those meatheads inside are fighting. It's pretty great, I think they already tore apart one of the bedrooms."

I snuffed out the cigarette and stood on uncertain feet. "Can you drive? I'm done with this shit."

"Yeah, I'm alright. Hold on, let me say bye." He turned back into the door then stopped. "You gonna say bye to anyone?"

"Nah. I'm good." I made my way from the front door onto the soggy front yard, noticing that the rain had stopped but slightly disappointed that we would not be able to drive home through it. I climbed into the car and began to look for a cigarette.

I was asleep with a lighter clutched tightly in my hand by the time Beaglesworth woke me by starting the engine. He nodded at me in the darkness as he shifted into reverse and I leaned my hot head against the rain streaked window.




After I quit my job I went to a supermarket and aimlessly walked around in the cold air conditioning, at the same time both starring and avoiding strangers. Watching the deli line from afar just to see the chunks of meat get buzzed into shreds at the whim of spinning blades. Just for the hope to see a finger get sliced off or an old woman slip on the polished linoleum and hurt her brittle bones.

When I called my boss and told her that I was quitting, she asked me if I was trying to ruin her day. There are some things one shouldn't take personally. I stolen twenty dollars from a register after I hung up before she could ask me how I passed all the drug tests I had taken over the months.

I left without telling any of the employees my decision. Eva was off, and I had not seen her since the party, and I wouldn't want it any other way. There was a final feeling of closure surrounding her, as I had finally realized something which was painfully obvious. But people born blind don't realize it until some one tells them.

Standing in a check out line in the supermarket with nothing to buy, I listened to the idle conversations. Day to day talk about weather, old men mumbling sports score, women telling their children now. Idle talk that a drunk hack could have written. Little shits looking at their phones. No one cared about saving the world. None of it was real enough to vomit to.

As I exited the store empty handed, the security guard at the front door nodded at me. I was always surprised when they let me pass by unscathed. My testicles would crawl and my nipples would harden as they watched me approach--it was always so easy to think of the worst things happening, and usually the most irreverent.

It was dark by the time I made it to the parking lot, and I was not sure how much time I had spent inside. It was just beginning to sink in that I had quit my job, and I was quickly losing any confidence I had felt only moments ago wandering the store. I was no longer associated with a Fortune 500 bloodthirsty company with their well respected 401k. I remembered how proud my dad had been when I had first told him I had gotten the job, and how I could not understand his excitement.

I climbed into my car and drove for several miles with out any headlights on. Closing in on the final distance to my apartment, I suddenly began to dread the yellow lit hallways of the building, the dust of the stairs, the smell of Mills cooking human flesh on his stove and eating his abused girlfriends hair.

I reached the turn off for my apartment, but I decided to keep driving. Still in my work clothes, I through my expensive tie out the window, which made me feel better in the sort of way which caused me to believe that I was beating everything-the loneliness, the drugs, the drug tests, and even the heat.

The winds of the universe were with me, even as they tore through all the random scraps in the back seat of my car, and blew my hair around my head and dust into my eyes.


I reached the end of a road. I turned back and watched the houses lining the streets more than the road. Sparse lights flickered in the windows and orange glows covered empty porches like dirty shower curtains. Fearsome looking buildings still standing despite their age gaped at me with their door ways- ugly grins promised that eventually I'd wind up a part of this town much like themselves. The cemetery across the street from my house awaited.

I passed a trio of young girls walking half in the road, dressed in all black. I slowed and noticed all of them wore too much eye make up and had their hair dyed strange colors. Had I been several years younger, I most likely would have been walking with them, but the powers of the universe had me driving by them dismally in the opposite direction and as I leaned on the horn they stuck their middle fingers up in response.

I was eager to get drunk as I watched them fade behind me into a little tight pack. I thought about mixing some of the vodka with a heavily caffeinated drink and petting my cat as he would stand eagerly by the door. I smiled as the wind whipped around my face, thinking that whatever the cat knew about me was way too much, and thus it’s completely love.

I found my parking space behind my building and crunched gravel beneath my shoes. Abruptly I heard glass rattling in my car. I noticed I had almost forgotten beer that I did not remember buying. Walking to the door through thick yellow lights that no one knew how to control, I shifted the six pack in my hand looking for my keys. Hand in mid pocket, I noticed strange movement on the porch.

A thin figure gilded the steps with almost familiar long hair draping its face. I swallowed hard before approaching, thinking perhaps a dope fiend was attempting to burglarize my building. As I got closer though, the figure became feminine and friendly. I relaxed, and saw a face from a memory that smiled uncertain and shy, like she always did.

“Hello, Belle.” I said to Belle.


Her bored eyes sparkled slightly in the yellow light, a display of her heart remembering softly like the last twitch of all my previous lovers expiring on a cross in mid day sun as the birds began to poke at the softer parts of the face. I was honestly surprised that she had remembered me--remembered my address, although I could not recall telling her where I had lived.

Hatemachine thought she was dead. She thought I was dead. At one point I had lived with, loved with, someone so similar to her that they even shared the same name, in an attempt to fill some gap she had left in my life. But those memories were so twisted from drug abuse that I had forgotten them like Belle had forgotten me--like I had forgotten Belle.

I contemplated asking her to leave.

“Don’t call me that anymore.” She said, her glance turning to an eyeful of disgust. “I prefer Bonx now.”

“Ok, Bonx.” I said, close to ending it all. “How are ya?” I could probably choke her to death on my front porch.

She groaned. “Ugghh, don’t even ask. I don’t even want to talk about it, but let’s just say you’re probably one of the most normal and smooth relationships I’ve got going with other humans right now.”

“Ouch.” I said, drifting through the stages. “Sounds serious.”

She looked at me comically. “Are we that bad still?” She asked me innocently, dreading the answer and batting some eyelashes.

“It’s all in the past.” I told her. I doubted if I convinced either of us.

“Oh, look at you, you’ve got beer.” She said not amused, noticing my handful. What she meant was, Oh, you’re still a drunk.

“Indeed. Carlsberg. Probably the best beer around. By the way, how’d ya manage to find me?” I asked quickly.

“Beaglesworth told me.” She answered.

“Is that correct?” I felt vindicated about not giving her my address.

“Welll….” she stared, “at first he refused, saying that he’d give, well tell you, I was looking for you, because I’m pretty sure we don’t know each other’s phone numbers anymore. But I was luckily able to convince him just to give me your address, and I figured out how to get here….It’s a bit tricky in the dark on those streets, you know.”

I smiled. “Seems like you did okay. But you could’ve just gotten my phone number from him.” I said.

“Would you rather speak on the phone than see me?” She seemed hurt.

“And miss the natural wonder that is your dark beauty? The neutral wonder? Of course not.” I replied. “And apparently you’re really persuasive, at least to Beaglesworth.” Off guard, my hands filled with alcohol, I gazed into the darkness of the road, watching our voices echo off the empty street.

She laughed, motioning to her small breasts. “I didn’t even have to show him any of this dark beauty.”

“That’s a good change of pace.” I muttered, accidentally throwing a stone.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing.” I replied. “You look great.”

“Oh?” She asked.

“You’ve lost more weight.” I told her. She had always been skinny, but now it was almost cancer patient thin.

“Have I?” She wrapped herself around the banister on my porch, posing like a dancer on a pole.

“Have I last weight, baby?” She asked, smiling and blinking. “Am I thinner now, do I look smaller, baby?” She had malice in her voice. I knew right then, that whatever reason she had come, was not for me. She would not end up writhing in my arms tonight no matter what the circumstance. Strangers in each others hearts. No longer lovers but unnatural friends, keeping our guards closed and our defense mechanisms close at hand to defend from each other whatever pride we might still have kept secret.

I reached out with my icy hand and placed it on her side. I slid my open palm up and down her stomach and ribs, feeling her bones through her skin in a tender, disturbing way. Her tone of voice was making me uncomfortable.

“Yeah.” I said. “Definitely lost weight.”

She knocked my hand away and sat back up.

“So why‘d you decide to live out here?” She asked me. "This town is fucking pitiful."

“It’s quiet. Sorta peaceful, in an almost annoying kind of way. Not boring. Just annoying.”

“Oh.” Bonx began to fidget around the porch. “You like it our here?”

“Not really--not anymore. It’s not so much the town or anything, just everything. I don’t like anything anymore. Nothing is really alright I guess.”

“Welcome to my life.” Bonx moaned in disgust, apparently remembering unpleasant aspects about her life.

“Why’d you decide to come out here?” I asked her.

She hesitated, then: “I heard you missed me. I wanted to see if it was true.”

I laughed, losing control for a minute.

I had spent roughly the last two years or so fantasizing and daydreaming myself to sleep about some type of glorious reunion which would occur in the always near future with this woman. Pausing outside of my apartment door before unlocking it, listening for a familiar noise or sound indicating that she had returned and desired a way to cure my loneliness. Now I wondered if I'd be able to get a hard on if we decided to fuck.

“So let’s see your apartment.” She said finally. “You gonna invite me in, or what?”

I hesitated. Reunions could be so cruel. Lust for life grows fat and boring. Instead of the passionate embrace you always envisioned upon your return, it was awkward etiquette sitting across a coffee table in a parlor somewhere, sipping warm beers until you spilled it on purpose just for an excuse to leave.

“Let’s go.” I said.

I led her inside and up the wooden stairs, avoiding a giant beetle corpse which had died on the second to top stair towards my floor. I gave her the grand tour, into the filthy kitchen littered with dried up paint brushes and beer cans. Then my empty room, which she enjoyed due to the lone wilted plant being the sole occupant of it. The living room was the apex of my home, with a chaotic feng shui of paintings, posters, art, and colors littering the walls and floor.

“It’s pretty much how I pictured it. Although I am impressed. Seriously. It’s nice for one person. Better than living with your parents.” She made a sour face and slumped down on my couch.

“Could definitely use a woman’s touch, though.” She muttered.

“I’ll pay you in drugs to clean it.”

She said she’d have to think about the offer when I insisted that it included the bathroom. She threw her purse down onto the messy coffee table and sighed loudly, starring blankly out the window into the dark.

“Don’t look so down. This is the first time I’ve seen you in ages. At least pretend to be glad to see me.” I said.

Bonx looked embarrassed, and stood up quickly. “I’m sorry….here I am!” She exclaimed, and embraced me, her small body pressing into mine, my hands unsure of where to go.

She began to fiddle with her long strands of dark hair, clearly nervous. I introduced her to my cat in order to ease the tension and it was love at first sight. She began cooing and talking in a silly voice that used to be reserved for me.

I lit a stale cigarette I found in a crumpled soft pack on the floor.

“Oh man, look at this girl. This is Adrianna.” She pointed to a picture on her phone. A light haired petite girl with a lot of sterling silver shoved through her face took up the whole screen.

“She’s so hot,” Bonx continued, “I used to work with her. She knew I had a huge crush on her. I wanted her so bad.”

“So you’re a lesbian now too?” I asked casually. A lot of girls I knew were now claiming to be into women. It was safer than cocaine.

“What's that supposed to mean?"

I shrugged, looking for an ashtray.

"I just like some girls. Like Adrianna. She was gorgeous. I was so into her…. I, like, found myself doing things I normally wouldn’t do…”

I ashed into an old wine bottle, not biting at any dangling lines. A car rumbled by in the background somewhere, headlights flashing.

I wished I was in that car. Going somewhere. Anywhere but here.

“This place is actually nicer than I imagined.” She commented after a moment.

“Thanks. You've already said that.”

“Really? No. What do you do again? It must pay well.” She said, looking at me.

“A little out post of retail. A bloodthirsty corporate store where I tend to move around boxes all day. It gets the job done. I can’t really stand it, and I actually quit, earlier today I think it was. Yeah, it was. So I'm planning on leaving soon. Or admitting that I'm a serial killer and let a brutal mob beat me to death in the streets like they almost did to Richard Ramirez. Ever hear of him?” I said, stamping out my cigarette.

"The Night Stalker?" I asked.

“What? Leave to where?” For the first time all night, Bonx looked mildly interested.

“Europe. Or head West. I have buddies on the West Coast, so I could be there. I need to leave. I just need out. Maybe start my life over a bit.”

“Yes.” Bonx agreed, stroking my cat softly with one hand and her long hair with the other, “I wish I could just leave everything behind. Whoever said you can’t run from your problems was wrong. You totally can.”

“Yes indeed. I suppose you know that better than most.” I said.

She made a face at me. “So, if you are leaving or whatever, you should rob that place.”

"What place?" I asked.

"Wherever you work."

“My work? You mean where I used to work? I quit today.” I responded. “And I do rob it.”

“No, I mean, do you have the keys still? Do you think they've changed the alarm codes yet? Probably not. We could buy some painkillers!” Her eyes lit up just thinking about them. Oxycontin had ruined the brown gems of the wells to her soul. Two once precious bright stones of her face dulled until she thought about her pills.

“Fuck that. I have better drugs. Want to take a trip?” I smiled.

“Trip? Like what? Shrooms? Acid? You have acid?”

“You bet. Lots of it.”

“Oh man…” She broke off into memories of love and distant mountains, and for a moment she was the old Bonx again, she was Belle, and she was beautiful. I knew what she was thinking.

“Remember when we tripped at Amherst? That was wicked fun. That was probably the best trip I’d ever had.” She said, smiling sadly at all that was lost. Memories are a broken glass pipe.

“Of course I remember. That was awesome. I promised I’d never trip again until you talked me into eating those sugar cubes. I laughed so hard that day.”

“Yup. It was great.” She agreed. “I haven’t done that hippy shit in a long time…”

“That’s okay. Now is the perfect time. I may be leaving soon. This could be your last chance to trip with me ever again in your life.” I said.

“Eh…” She was fighting it, but I could see that she was almost convinced. “Let’s just rob your pharmacy instead.”

“Nope. I’m not breaking into a pharmacy and stealing pills because you’re too chicken shit to take acid.”

She burst out laughing, heavy and hard. Like old times. She smiled at me. “I'd prefer painkillers. But whatever. Let’s do it.”

Another mundane and textbook night transformed into a unique and significant event.

I produced all my drugs, and she marveled over all the different samples and forms of acid I had collected. Lying in crumpled balls of aluminum foil were my greatest accomplishments of the summer.

Finally, she chose brown gel tabs for both of us. I raised my finger and gently placed it on her tongue. An introspective journey with an ex-girlfriend. An ex-love who may or may not be responsible for everything which kept me up and drinking most nights.

All the acid must have really made me crazy after all. Fuck, Jayha was right. At least it would prevent her from going home an hour from now. No turning back.

She went to the bathroom and I went into the kitchen to get a glass of water. As I was fishing around the sink, I heard the hard sound of patter on the roof and pavement outside. It was coming down hard; the fast, angry pellets from a dark New England summer sky bursting out in great emotion. Sheets clicking and clacking down upon the pavement.

Just perfect, I thought bitterly. But I quickly cleared that thought, trying to stay positive for the drug’s sake.

"Oh no! Do you hear that? It's raining!" Bonx cried as she emerged from the bathroom.

"Yeah, I know." I said. "Oh well. Too late for us to do anything now about it, I guess."

"Oof. I guess it‘s gonna be a wet one." She agreed.

"What‘s done is done. Let’s go outside to watch the rain." I suggested.

I led her downstairs and out onto the porch. We stood at the edge of the steps where we could remain dry, but see the rain pass right down in front of our noses. The sheets of water fell steady, bathed in yellow light like young children watching the fireworks on the Fourth of July. Bonx sat down in a puddle and squealed as she got her ass all wet.

I shook my head sadly, because a year or two ago I would have laughed and brushed it off for her, or maybe sat down next to her in the water to keep her company. But now, out here in the relatively isolated part of the state I called home, in this current moment, I didn't want to comfort her, even if I could have. Starring into the rain, the sloppy wet landscape was alien and unfamiliar. I wasn’t prepared to lead.

But I played hero, and suggested we go for a walk. The rain was letting up and I was getting sick of the perversity of the porch, covered in sticky yellow light and spider webs. The effect had Bonx looking more skinny, more sick. I wanted anything else than to be motionless while I looked at her.

"We're going to get completely wet tonight." She protested slightly, but I could see that she didn't particularly care. I assumed that she was probably sick of being dry.

"That's okay. Water washes off."

We left our little shelter of the front stoop and started walking down the street, towards the water fall downtown. I wanted to share it with her. All the months of my misery were fresh in my mind, as though I had been doing all that living just to prove to myself that I was indeed still alive without her. And in a weird way, I realized I did a lot of things just to make her envious or impressed, even though she lived miles away and was completely unaware of my actions. All the times I had wandered these streets alone late at night, perhaps with a bottle in my hand and a notepad and pencil in the other, I had dreamed how lovely it would be if I could share it with someone. Someone who shared my madness and passions for random nonsense as Bonx had up in those mountains years ago, despite the undeniable fact that she did not cast a thought or feeling towards me nearly as often as I did for her.

And I was admittedly a fool for thinking that I could ever resurrect those times. And so here we were, intoxicated with the wines of which the universe was revealed.

"I haven't seen you in a long time." I said for some reason, realizing that my thoughts were spilling out of my mouth. That was never a good thing.

"Yeah." She said simply. If any of this reunion mattered to her nearly as much as it did to me, she didn't reveal it. The rain had picked up again slightly. My shirt started to cling to my back, and my hair was beginning to get soaked.


We shuffled pointlessly and gloriously through neighborhoods, sidewalks, and puddles. Occasionally we would absently brush hands, and one of us would grab the other's hand before we realized it and shook it off. Like a former smoker reaching for a pack of cigarettes. Or the way an amputated limb would still itch even though it was medical waste.

The first couple of times this happened, it was slightly funny. Old habits died hard.

We passed the church and playground where Marcus and my friends and I had all shared and sweated one summer night. That seemed like years ago, and all those people who had experienced and shared my life with me this summer were somewhere else, tucked into their beds or back in the midwest somewhere, not participating in this final act of the play.

"Let's see if it's open." Bonx said suddenly.

"Huh?" I didn't understand.

"The church. Let's see if we can get inside. I bet it's unlocked."

This was Vintage Bonx. It was old times again.

"I don't know..." I said, feeling paranoid again.

"Oh, come on. Remember when you wouldn't come upstairs with me in the Scaryface Annex? You let me go up there all by myself because you pussyed out. You owe me." She called me out, referring to a time which had occurred years ago between two different people who happened to look a lot like us.

"Very well." I said. "Breaking and entering in the night time for a felony, let's do it."

She sighed in impatient disgust and ran ahead, crossing the street and up the steps of the church to its two massive front doors. I followed behind her slowly, looking up and down the street for signs of cars. She pulled hard on the door handles, but it was firmly locked. I felt relief, and started back towards the road, not having even touched the steps of the church. Bonx followed slowly in disappointment.

We walked slowly up he slight hill and around a bend which led downtown. We momentarily took refuge under someone's brick carport in a driveway. But we made ourselves paranoid as we began to shift consciousness, so we scrambled out of the dry darkness and back into the wet streets, trying to discern whether or not the rain was actually uncomfortable or not. We decided that it was tolerable.

As we turned the corner in the road, the giant mill with its burned out rows of toothy windows rose in front of us, like a Brom Stoker mountain revealed around a windy pass. The structure's ugly face was somehow softened by the rain, like watching an old man walk out to his car in a storm without an umbrella. No one would ever bother to again fix the buildings leaky roof or shattered windows and charred foundation. It was surrendered to the New England elements until it would die, and we seemed to mock it with our youth and linear immortality as we strode defiantly under its shadow together.

"Oh my gosh." Bonx said.

"Yup. Lots of those around here."

"That's creepy."

"That's nothing. There's worse places." I replied.

We made our way towards the waterfall in the center of town, passing wearily under a steel overpass used by the railroad which occasionally drifted through town. We foolishly starred at the cobwebs and dust hanging above our heads, fearing a spider dropping onto our hair. We carried on.

My wet clothes stuck to my skin. There were intervals of laughter then silence between us. Silence that would’ve been filled with embraces, kisses, elegant love three years ago. We'd separate and explore as the LSD worked us over, then silently rejoin and shuffle along again. We made it to the waterfall but the gate was locked.

We jumped the fence and landed onto the fern riddled paradised shores of the water. Past the now familiar benches with precision and purpose, we separated in silence as our thoughts isolated us and worked us over, almost churchlike. We reunited and walked down the stairs together, heading below the bridge to the water level, making sure not to fall down.

The river was loud, rushing downward like the sunlight through my blinds in the morning. Like the blood in our veins. White swirls and clusters of splash impaled themselves on the rocks. My legs were tired, so I sat on the wet bench while she took off her shoes.

Bonx looked downward towards the water, apprehensive like a patient seeing the dentist’s tools in the tray. She asked if I had her back. I said, “Yes“, in a voice that could have been a small child‘s.

Fearlessly, she walked barefoot down the rocks from the edge towards the water. I stood upon the lonesome bank foolishly, which seemed symbolic of something, but I could not determine what. Ankle deep and for one moment, right before Bonx placed her hesitant foot into the rushing water, I imagined her being swept away in the current, under the bridge, into the darkness forever.

Watching from above, up on the rocks, I realized that I didn't really have her back at all. I wish I did. I wish I could have saved her if I had to. But I didn't, and I couldn‘t. It didn't seem right to pretend that I did, but it seemed even worse to actually be able to.

She climbed back up with wet feet, and I tried to grab her extended hand to help her up, but she shrugged me off like the old man that I was, and strongly pulled herself up.

I brought us to a place off the path. Down a small embankment right near the mouth of the rushing water on top of the falls, at the top of the embankment where everything begins to fall downwards. Bonx told me to come back as though I were going to jump. I had considered jumping into the rushing darkness many nights before, but tonight I declined again.

I sat in the wet sand, in the pouring rain, as the river’s mist rushed up to greet my warm face. Water streaked through my hair, soaking my eyes and into my mouth. I spat it out. It was cool, it was wet, it was refreshing like a cold shower on a muggy day after you've been cleaning your apartment. Like being set free from the cold chains of an old college lover on a rainy August night the year I began to bald. Like losing a limb but finally accepting the loss and moving on with one’s life, realizing that maybe the prosthetic is actually a lot easier to maintain. Like having a head full of acid occasionally bring you back to your young days in a humid dormitory when the spring wind blew open doors shut and knocked down the poster over my bed onto us as we slept peacefully together.

Simultaneously, while I remembered myself in a younger paradise, I looked back at her wet face hooded in my white sweatshirt which she had given me once as Bonx stared back with little to no passion and bored affection. Atop a waterfall at 3 a.m. in a tiny New England mill town where i thought I'd be able to hide from the world, and also Bonx, she smiled nervously.

Bonx had found me. I could not escape. And instead of returning to my open arms in eager embrace as I had so often fantasized and day dreamed for those intervening years, she did something else to me. Something more benevolent and generous which I wouldn‘t realize until late the next afternoon. Bonx had finally set me free.

We sat on the wet ground, our faces attacked by wet branches whipping at us from the wind, watching as the liquid rushing forth before us splattered onto the rocks below us. This spot had always hypnotized me, it meant so much to me, the way the rushing water would sing me lullabies. But in that moment, I felt as though it bored lovely Bonx, so I grabbed her briefly by the hand and brought her up to the very top of the rocks, where the water pooled and collected before it came crashing down to gravity.

We climbed onto the edge, and stood above the water together, watching the clouds collect again with rain. I tiptoed around the thin rocks, dangerously close to falling, and may have imagined Bonx reaching out to collect me before I fell. But it could have been nothing. By this point, I was drenched with sweat and rain, so I took a seat on a rock near the edge. Bonx continued to stand above me on the stones, dancing above the water with inhibition. She moved with precision, giving with her body more than I could possibly take, her body flying past the rain under the night. It seemed that there was malice in her movements, mocking my tired body with her promise of youth, overfilling the cup with the desires and beauty of a young woman I could no longer have.

After an eternity of watching, I joined her. At the top of the falls, at the mouth of a giant pool of water, with the wilderness of trees and lily pads rushing at us.

As we danced, it began to rain again. “Did you do this?“ I asked her, my palms outstretched collecting drops of water.

She laughed. “No…but this it the perfect place to.”

Dancing on the edge, so close to the water, I chose to close my eyes rather than see her face constantly look away. My pants were tight from the water. Immobile. I didn't almost fall, but I could have. I went back to the wet stone which served as my seat. Bonx took my spot on the edge of the wall overlooking the falls. I sat and watched. How fitting it was that I was the onlooker, watching her dance, balance and move.

Watching Bonx on that rock wall, balanced on the stones, her arms outstretched as if embracing the whole scenery, the impending water and the trees, some how she lost her divinity to me. Right there and then. Just like that. I saw her as a lost child still, just like me. My old love, my old addiction, and the sudden cut off from the supply. I had placed her so high on the pedestal. But watching Bonx on that stone wall took her right off, and I saw her for what she really was.

Lost. Like me.

It was like some one had turned off a switch. Turned the key. Removed the handcuffs.

I was free.

I don’t know how long we were there for. The drug soured all notions of time. But I remember the rain stopping, and the heat coming back to the muggy night. I was relatively dry for a short period before the rain started again. Then we left in silence, not knowing what to say to each other. Or perhaps not having to say anything to each other.

It wasn’t all that long ago that we were essentially one mind. Separated by a couple of bodies which were usually only inches apart. Such joy in that union and dissolution. In such a state of mind, even the memories were solid and powerful as I thought back of them.

And then we were splashing each other in a giant puddle in the gutter. We had taken off our shoes and were walking barefoot in inches of rain water. In the dark we couldn’t see anything below the surface. But thoughts of broken glass, or needles, or danger just simply were not real. The possibility seemed so foreign, that it was nonexistent. How could anything but our own negative thoughts pollute this?

We were in a parking lot behind a giant mill near my house. The path to the woods, and the bridge that led to the beautifully divine clearing that I had experienced with Jayha and Beaglesworth on a holy morning months ago in summer’s youth lay hidden in the thick brush and trees. The summer season was dying fast. And with it my urges to remain for another cold winter. A winter of drugs, drinking, loneliness and longing. Covered in snow.

Covered in water again, Bonx refused to enter the holy woods with me. She did not like the energy the bridge was giving off. So we wandered slowly back towards the road. We wandered aimlessly to the old cemetery down the road. The mocking stones awaiting to collect my bones and make me eternally a part of this town. Immediately, Bonx was fixated.

Conscious of our fleeting time together, I felt the epilogue of our relationship drifting towards an ending. Coming full circle in an ancient bone yard, cracked and still in thick August air the way death always is imagined. Old names and old dates cracked into stone in an era long before my time. I grabbed at her among the death and temporary, and missed. My cigarettes fell out my pocket. The sound echoed throughout the eons of death. Bonx jumped in fear.

“Yours?” She asked, examining the pack of smokes.

“Mine.” I had replied.

“Just yours?” She asked.

“Mine.” But I handed her one with a Parkinson’s hand and she kissed it to her lips. We shared the tobacco in blasphemy among the wilted flowers and permanence of death. Those whom had long passed witnessed our shared joy in addiction, as our minds transcended everything which remained. We inhaled, believing that we were too special and eternal to join the buried dust beneath our wet toes.

We crossed the threshold onto the gravel path beset on both sides by death marked by crooked stone teeth. The rain had subsided once again, but the humid air was thick as fog drifted across the graveyard. In my mind, I could smell the death. I could feel it brush against my skin, and I could feel myself cut through it with each step forward.

“This is awesome.” Bonx said quietly.

I did not like it. It felt terribly wrong. We were out of our minds on hallucinogens. Surrounded by memories of Revolutionary War veterans and victims of small pox and scarlet fever. The atmosphere seemed suddenly hostile. We were mocking the dead. And they were mocking us, and our old memories of new love in their eternal resting place of old life.

“I hate it.” I said. “Let’s leave.”

“No….it’s beautiful.” Bonx insisted.

“It’s terrible. I can smell the death. It’s everywhere. I can see it in the fog. I can feel it in the air. On my clothes. They’re heavy with it.” I was getting paranoid.

“There’s just so much death.” Bonx said softly.
We stopped walking and she looked at me.
“It’s not death. It’s just rebirth. There’s no bodies under here….they’re just empty vessels. Getting recycled.”

It one of those philosophical moments which hallucinogens sometimes produced in the depths of the experience. The drug will relent, and your mind will briefly clear, bringing insights and analysis to the mind as it settles into a freshly perceived reality.

Rebirth. It made sense. Jayha would have love it. But I didn’t buy it. I couldn’t. My mind hadn’t cleared. I looked around wide eyed and continued to have bad thoughts.

“What if two people were tripping and their minds were just floating around, totally lost in the chaos.” I continued. Bonx had started walking again, a few strides ahead of me. “What if their minds were out of their bodies and some wandering spirits saw this and jumped into our bodies?” I was genuinely afraid now.

Bonx stopped walking. I did the same. She was a few yards ahead of me and turned to face me. “Don’t talk about things like that.” She said to me.

“Besides,” she turned around and started walking again, further into the darkness of the graveyard. She outstretched her arms and spun like a dancer on the path. “It’s not so bad if you do this.” And she spun and walked around with her arms outstretched from her body like a small child would play airplane.

I did the same. And for a bit it did seem to help. Then my foot fell into a hole in the path, and I rolled my ankle. I dropped my arms to my side, and caught myself before I fell, but pain shot up my leg. I hurt. And I knew it had to be a spirit. One had gotten me.

“I’m hit! They’ve got me!” I cried out, but Bonx ignored me. She continued to twirl like a dancing child, light on her feet as she missed every bump and sinkhole in the path. She danced alone while I writhed in pain like the World Cup. I felt sharp knots in my stomach. My guts twisted and groaned. I doubled over from the cramps. I knew a spirit was inside me now. It was trying to take over. I began to sweat even more.

“Come on. We gotta go deeper.” Bonx said. She was drawing me further into the void of death. While a parasitic specter was digging into my guts. I turned around and noticed that I couldn’t see the road anymore. I sped up and caught up with my old girl, and I wanted to wrap my arms around in an embrace like a terrified child.

Once we had walked through the western woods of Massachusetts, years ago, minds wandering as we had hung close to each other, surrendering ourselves to the powers which tugged at our hearts and smiles. We didn’t acknowledge or understand, but didn’t scoff either, because weren’t we eternally happy in memories? Certain ones I could always pull and go back in them, there with her, in the woods smiling until my face hurt and grasping her fingers until our palms began to sweat.

Were we even the same people? I thought. It‘s like watching an old cartoon. Yellow and slow, the voices are unfamiliar and strangely discomforting.

For the last year, I had assumed that I had truly wanted to return to those moments. Had I even acknowledged healing? I wondered. It was beginning to occur to me that we had perhaps been truly different enough the whole time, especially evident when we were sick of pretending.

I was sweating to catch up with her. A strange girl who was somehow skinnier, filled with piercings and hardly interested in the mold of my old self. It was a polite relationship now. Completely formal, one which I did not deserve but was helpless to prevent. And now an ancient spirit had my body in its grasp, prepared to commandeer my vessel, recycle it, and use it at its whim. And this strange woman before me, who ran ahead of me in happiness while I staggered in terror, cared nothing about my plight.

Struggling to catch up with her as she ran further ahead, my tongue recognized the bitter taste of ugly thoughts inside of me. The rage was instantaneous, like a dark ooze of oil contaminating a placid, salty pool.

Who does she think she is? Leaving me behind? I growled to myself.

I began to jog into the warm air like an obese woman through crashing surf. Knees high, I swung for the fence of the graveyard with each step, careful to avoid twisting my throbbing ankle again. I followed her uphill, into a wad of dark trees.

The sun’s light was bleeding everything red and purple as I finally reached her on top of the dense hill. The shadows beneath the summer leaves were morphing darkness. I clutched at my intestines as we stood on top of the little rotating hill, Bonx marveling at the sky. I was losing interest. I had been doing that all summer--spending too much time marveling at the sky while I lost interest in everything beneath it.

Bonx muttered in amazement at everything. I wanted to get back home to die. A spirit had hijacked my vessel. I was going mad, I needed to get home to cleanse myself with water. And probably my Buddha statues. Someone way higher than me once said to picture the Buddha raining light down on to your body to ward off demonic possessions. I assumed those would exorcise the once I had summoned from the Satanic Bible when I was 13. Along with the specter which had forgotten to get off the wheel and hid in divets inside the cemetery. But firstly, I had to convince and ward off Bonx, another ghost from the past, which had forced me to try to stand upon the wheel for far too long.

“This is amazing.” Bonx said, somewhat breathlessly. It pitifully reminded me of having sex with her for the last time. In the city, I awoke one night and we wordlessly humped, under the pretense of being half asleep. By then, we had already known that our union was over. Epilogued.

We were at the crest of a hill in the early summer red. Shadows moved and danced among us like how the stars kaleidoscoped for the Hate Machine and I roughly 300 years ago. I had always pictured the reunion of myself and Bonx/Belle as a divine dissolution. But I am almost certain that it was worse than being lonely. I was tripping next to a skinny, long haired billboard which neonly proclaimed how nothing was the same. For ever from now on.

Bonx starred blankly into the morning sky. The fog was breaking apart. It’d be light soon. My mind began to clear and defend itself. Hours had passed, and it was metabolizing. I felt like I needed a bathroom and a notebook. Impatiently, I grabbed Bonx’s hand. She fought me off, but then I started to pull her away. I was done. In the past 3 months, I had wasted significant amounts of time in this cemetery under the influence mediocrity. I had seen enough.

And worse of all, I wasn’t enlightened. Or scatter brained. But still frustrated. And hand in hand with a neon proclamation of chaos. Change. Unknown.

The two of us reached a wounded wire fence, rusted and limping along a border. On the other side, there was the church playground I had enjoyed with everyone I loved 300 years ago. That was gone forever now too. Just the fence now.

Bonx threw one sneaker into the fence and swung her thin legs over the top. No going back. She landed on the other side with a touch of grace. She turned and smiled at me through the rusted links. Her energy had always provided clutch athleticism. I thought, thinking of her drunkenly hitting me in the eye with a piece of orange fruit once.

The pressure was on. All living eyes in the cemetery were on me and my fence jumping skills. As a young shithead, having spent many days in Dedham Juvenile Court, I liked to believe that I could still jump fences if I was being chased, or infected with a ghost spirit.

I planted my foot and pulled myself to the top bar, emulating Bonx. I quickly realized I was a lot heavier than Bonx. And slower. Who knew spending hours wandering in an induced psychosis would get you out of shape.

Around the time that I should’ve been landing beside Bonx outside the cemetery, my shin tore through the wire links. Rusted shards of broken metal cut my into my pant legs. Shredding skin froze me, stupidly balanced with one leg on top of the collapsing fence, the other in the rusted bear trap of fence guts. I had enough time up there to see Bonx’s wide eyed amusement, my face probably a mask of horror.

I was perched like an animal on top of the border before I finally succumbed. My trapped leg ripped free with a horrible paper-tearing feeling and I fell over the top. I landed on the playground soil, made for little kids falling on their heads.

I stood, trying to retain some facet of pride. No such thing these days. I thought. Kill the ego, right ol’ boy? I brushed myself off, my hands going to my wounded leg. My hands brought back my wet pant legs were torn, but I didn’t seem to be bleeding. I stood up straight to offer an explanation but instead I burped.

The spirit left me.

Shaken with my relief, I smiled in the bloody red of darkness, grateful the girl I once loved couldn’t see my dark eyeballs. If she was bored, then I could care less, because the burden of a metaphysical apparition had left my shoulders. Free, free at last.


I gazed through the links of the fence back into the bone yard. Eternal death over there, looking out at a couple of livers. What mark could we possibly make, if we all ended pushing up blades of grass? Aside from child birth, is there anything more natural in life than death? My thoughts seemed very loud, and I hoped that the empty vessels could feel them. I silently apologized for passing through their forever sleeping home.

I saw Bonx giving me a strange look. “What’re you so happy about? That fence kicked your ass.”

“Yeah,” I started walking back towards the street. “Fences can be real cunts.”


Passing through the hollow sounding stairs. Our feet are drum machines on the wood, pounding like our hearts. My door was unlocked and the two of us cascaded in, as though we had just put in a hard days work. I was soaked with sweaty rain and grasped for a towel first thing. I threw it at Bonx do she could dry herself off as well.

“I need to change.” I said. New clothes made me feel lighter, and I was reminded of the time I was with my brother and my friends, soaked in sweat from the playground like a drowned rat. Tripping with my ex-girlfriend…maybe all this acid did fry my brain. Tonight’s just bringing back all kinds of memories, isn’t it?

I emerged feeling reborn with new threads hanging on my skin. Bonx was petting my cat. She looked up at me and I noticed that she was still soaking wet, the way you would notice someone’s nipple was hanging out. Slightly embarrassed at my oversight, I offered her some new clothes as well.

“Yes please.” She said quietly. Sometimes she could be the elephant. Sometimes she was the mouse.

I returned to my room and dug around some more, finding some tiny shorts that someone had long ago forgotten in my room. Bonx pulled off her clothes and I turned away, my back to her. I could still close my eyes and describe her naked body from memory. But sunlight was starting to turn the black into colors, and it did not feel appropriate to see her tiny frame with the rain drumming on the roof like it was.

If she noticed me not looking, she didn’t say. Just a comment on how small the shorts were. I agreed, as she lay down on the coach. Except it was now pulled into a bed. At some point we had transformed it, but I couldn’t quite remember when.

I looked at her laying down, curled up in a fetal position, cuddling my cat. Teasing him with undivided attention. Freezing me out. I shrugged, unsure if this was a signal of disinterest or not. I reckoned it was time for bed.

I lay down next to her and she flinched a bit. Towards the end of everything, I used to wrap my arms around her, half asleep, and she’d flinch the same way. As though she wasn’t expecting it. I tried running my fingers through her hair a couple of times. Her eyes would flicker open and she’d say, “What?” As if I had asked her a question she couldn’t hear.

I gave up and I went to my room and lay on my floor mattress. I closed my eyes and patterns intertwined and zoomed across my eyelids at rapid speeds. I breathed deeply, listening to the groans of an old house, wondering if I had tracked cemetery soil into my sanctuary. I though of the graveyard again in the burgundy light of an impending morning, like looking someone shamefully in the eye. I had wrestled with it, and beat, but it gnawed at my guts still. I was afraid of it. The dead heart of this dying town, mark with crooked stone teeth of the dead patriarchs who built the mills overshadowing the floor I slept on.

The rain had stopped. Restless, I got back to my feet and peeked into the living room. Bonx was still laid down on the coach beside my cat. I got up and went the long way to the kitchen for some water, avoiding the girl. Fighting conflicting thoughts in my head, bouncing around like zigsaw pieces, and feeling selfish, I decided that we should share any revelations.

I returned with a block of cheese and handed it to her. She sat up, suddenly excited. Sometimes the mouse, Bonx loved cheese. She took a look at the packaging and frowned.

“I don’t think I’ll like this cheese.”

“You’ll love it. It’s from Europe.”

She took a nibble and continued petting my cat. I stood restlessly, the back of my calves aching. I had heard somewhere that was a sign of dehydration, but I couldn’t recall if it was true or not. I drank some water and began fiddling with my paints.

“Oh, you’re right. I love this cheese!” She exclaimed. I smiled at the piece of old Bonx coming to me through the darkness. I hesitated, then joined her on the edge of the bed like a squirrel would join a serpent.

“You know,” Bonx turned her head to me, “I’m your guest.”

“Absolutely. Help yourself to my bed if you’d like.” I grinned in the darkness. She sighed and began cuddling with my cat again. Passive aggressive. Where did she learn that so well? From the fucking master.

Time slipped by like a clock that had a hands which stuttered.

I returned to the pile of paint and brushes I had apparently carried over with me. I picked up random tubes of acrylics, admiring their cool temperature in my hands. The morning light turned the black into indigo and sunset. Cyan, azure, and iris. Coral, crimson, and scarlet. I had an insight into colors being intrinsically linked to emotion, but it slipped out of my grasp. The drug was beginning to fade. Soon the night would be day. And the moments we managed to artificially stretch into eternity would be reduced to fragments which we would not be able to fully grasp a mere twenty four hours from now.

I rose and pulled the shades over the windows. Blocking out the sun and bathing us into darkness again. My wall had closed its eyes, making us all blind.

“Thank god.” Bonx said with relief. “I’m not ready for the sun yet.” She relaxed, laying down on her back, the cat perched on her belly.

I returned to my spot and opened a tube of paint. “I like the darkness.“ I said, dumping a glob of purple onto my table. Then another until I had a nice circle of colors separated into neat piles.

“So you’re a painter now?” Bonx asked me.

I ignored her, returning for a moment to a winter night a few years ago at her parents’ house. Sitting beside her on a couch late in the evening. She had fetched a giant folder from some closet, and we were shifting through her portfolio of work. Large collages of mixed media. Psychedelic flowers. Grateful Dead bears. Self portraits. Mushrooms. Still life. Snowy houses that would make Robert Frost cum. I stopped on a small piece. A close up, the paper thick and stiff with many layers of paint. Blended and balanced into a perfect dilated eyeball. Wide with emotion. Do you like it? Bonx had asked. You can have it.

I looked up at my wall. In the narrow shafts of light that cut my wall, I could see the eyeball hanging between posters and paintings of my own. If you turned the eye upside down, it seemed to change its emotion.

Last summer, I had once watched the summer sun rise by myself. Beaglesworth had just gone to sleep, leaving me alone in the yard of his parent’s house. I found a chair and sat as the sole survivor of a long night of tripping. I remember it being the 4th of July, and we had sat at the edges of a lake I never knew existed, a roaring fire sparking eye ball cinders in the sky. Friends tapered off until finally it was Beaglesworth and I arriving somehow to his parents’ suburban home. Better fed than some people, their grass was an indicator of character, and , and I admired the way it danced as the birds sang to it, admiring everything and perplexed that it awlays happened, even when I wasn’t there to witness it.

“Are we going to paint?” Bonx asked me. “I haven’t painted in forever.”

“Nah.” I replied. “I just like the feel of the colors on my skin.”

“Ooo….paint me! I love the feel of paint on my skin!” She sat up excitedly, scarring my cat off into the dawn.

I didn’t know that about her, but I foolish is the man who believes that he can ever truly know someone, I thought. What a sham marriage is, a mere man made creation. It seemed that everyday television unity boiled down to two separate souls holding hands.

“Where should I paint you?” I asked. I wasn’t feeling particularly sexual. In the insufficient light, her numerous piercings glittered like crust on the snow. She looked boyish, masculine in a scum punk rocker kind of pose. Then the shadows would shift, and she’d be a child again, or old Bonx, or cold Bonx. My mind was trying to separate her personalities into individual people.

“Do my back!” She flipped over onto her stomach and pulled her shirt up, exposing her full back. Bras had thankfully never been a clumsy issue with Bonx. I ran the brushes through the paint, and began scrawling long, looping strokes across her back. No particular rhyme or reason, just creating dim shapes on her back in the lack of light. She moaned softly as the cold colors touched her skin.

I started with a tree. Trees had become a kind of my specialty this summer. A few gnarled roots. A thick phallic trunk. Branches sprayed off into the air. Like the infinity of my thoughts. But not nearly as poetic. Sloppy green ran down her lower back into her small shorts. Which were actually my shorts.

“Don’t paint my clothes.” Bonx said, face down. I was straddling her like I’d down so many times before, somewhere west in the mountains another life time ago. Has she forgotten? I wondered. All my thoughts are always directed that way. Tainted with age old envy that I could almost smell. Every action I took as though she was watching me, as I attempted to show off, to display what she’d left behind.

A circle became a face.

“I lost the ring.” She muttered.

“Huh?” I asked.

“Forget it.” She said softly.

Three faces and bodies now. Hands joined together at the hips. It seemed as though they were dancing across her back. A sun appeared on her right shoulder blade. The wet paint mixing with her damp skin at the jab of a dry brush made a sound. The effect was wet, not unlike Gom getting his shoes lost in thick mud, and the sound of more mud quickly filling the hole. Moist.

“That noise is gross.” I said. “I hate it so bad”

Bonx muttered evenly, yet unquietly. “I love the noise it makes.”

Shit man what’s with all the dualism? I realized that I had started to paint letters onto her back, long strokes of an alien language.

“Draw some Nazi symbols on me.” Bonx mentioned, as if commenting on the weather. For some reason I thought of Kori. If she had a swastika on her chest, I probably would’ve punched her. Sitting on top of Bonx here, I misogynistically regretted not hitting her.

There was no use in arguing with Bonx. She would cut her nose to spite her face. Pierce a lip to make it uncomfortable to kiss. Eat pussy like a dyke to show how much she didn’t need me. Or my y chromosomes. A strange taste filled my mouth for a moment, either paint or bitterness, perhaps both. But I cleared my throat and was filled with a kind of apathetic wonder once again.

I have had sex with almost all of the boogeymen in my life. And I am painting Nazi symbols on the naked back on my monster, with the longings of my heart and mind tainted with high powered drugs. Hoping for clarity. Hoping for some type of Saved By The Bell styled closure.

I felt responsible for creating the person beneath me. Beyond recognition and all hope.

Swastikas on her elbows and arms. A giant one beneath the alien language I had scrolled above her butt. I saw the word ‘love’ misspelled on her back. Beneath a small symbol of the holocaust I saw the word “plz”.

What we had turned into since we last lay together like this was utterly alien. Indeed, Bonx shared none of my desires or hopes. And my achievements-- the apartment, my paintings, my poems--she looked upon as childish toys.

But as she moaned beneath me, the brush protecting her soft skin from my sweaty hands, I realized that this was the birth of something wonderful. And we had created it.

I could see her back on the edge of the waterfall, with her arms outstretched, embracing the empty air. Some how she had lost her divinity to me. Right there and then. Just like that. I saw her as a lost child, just like me. My old love, my old addiction, and the sudden cut off from the supply. I had placed her so high on the pedestal. But watching Bonx wide eyed on that stone wall took her right off, and I saw her for what she really was. Lost. Like me. It was like some one had turned off a switch. Turned the key. Removed the handcuffs.

My hands were purple and blue. Dripping on the carpet and my couch. Covering any stains left from Jayha and Beaglesworth. I realized that years from now, or even just a matter of days, when all the infinite, dripping moments of now were forgotten, we would still exist.

People change. They grow apart. Or together. Or they leave their little physical vessels behind and are reborn. But what they did and what they were is infinite. It will always exist. Heading towards all the futures, the pasts are all set in stone, still there. Existing. They will always exist.
We will always exist.

I would envy the very brief dissolution we shared.

Wiping my hands on my pants, I climbed off her and lay down next to the ghost on my couch. A new day would be coming alive outside again, on automatic. Repeat.

I admired this day’s rebirth from inside four walls, wrapped in wet darkness and cold paint. I knew that I couldn’t watch many more disjointed days from here. Soon enough there’d be the winter grey, and I did not want to lay here in the howling mornings, with the cemetery coldly looking at me.

Just below the surface of sleep, where every noise and any peripheral movement scrapes the edge of your sleep. Dreams blend with the waking world, and loud trucks carried by the breeze and rumble by. I awoke for once not alone, joined by my cat and a skinny girl pierced like a boy, covered in racist paint.

I touched her hand, not wanting to speak, or kiss, or fuck. But just to appreciate the way romance is sometimes born. To share these moments together not as ex lovers, or strangers, or a boy and a girl. But to stand together as one, and exist in this world of beauty together, without the sick memories and guilt ridden debts we owed one another.

I admired a small sleeping face in the early light, through the eyes of one who loved. And I realized that I could no longer condemn Bonx for anything that she had felt compelled to do. And I could no longer hate myself for the things which I had let come to be.


I swung my legs out of bed, releasing Bonx’s limp hand back to her side. My cat followed me closely behind like it always did as I reached the shower. Obediently, he stayed outside until I finished, then fled the cascading drops from my body. After I had dressed I walked back into the room where Bonx sat coloring in some sketchbooks of mine.

If she had seen any of my artwork, she didn’t let me know, but continued to grip a crayon she had found somewhere childishly in her hands. She had opened the shades on the windows and light spilled into the filthy room. Everything was on the floor and the scene was as though a pack of wild apes had strolled into my apartment in the night.

My mind was sharp from the lack of sleep and the drug, colors vividly enhanced and clear, my thoughts finally clean and free from the heavy burden of the LSD. But still, I had almost forgotten about the tattoos I had given her, and said nothing in surprise when she looked up at me, catching me staring at her in quiet awe.

“Are you going to take me home now?” She asked me.

I laughed. “You drove here.” I replied.

She wrinkled her thin eyebrows for a second, the sterling silver glittering in the noon sun. “Oh, I forgot. Well…are you going to tell me how to get home now?” She was using her cute voice now.

“Ya, I’ll draw you a map.” I said, reaching for some paper and pen. I paused, and asked her if she was going to go home like that.

“Like what?” She asked.

“Covered in Swastikas.” I answered.
She looked at me suspiciously. “I’m not going to take a shower here.”

“I don’t have any extra towels. I was just asking. Do want breakfast or anything?” I asked her.

“I already look in your fridge while you showered. You don’t have anything good. Just meat. We ate all the cheese.” She tossed the crayon aside after signing her picture. I helped her gather all stuff together.

I walked her to my door, handing her the detailed map I’d drawn. Bonx was apt to get lost, so I hope that it’d get her home. We paused at the doorway, and she stopped, seeing me clearly for the first time since she’d come over to visit. She ran a hand across my shoulder, clad in a nice satin shirt.

“This is how you dress now?” She asked me, an undertone of awe in her voice.

“I’m somewhat important these days. At least they pay me to pretend I am.”

“I can’t believe your life.” She said.

“Indeed.” I looked at her purplish red arms again, and laughed. Her eyes narrowed.

“What?” She said sharply.

“Nothing. I miss you Bonx. I had fun last night. Thanks for coming to see me.”

She said nothing, looking to see if I was joking, if I was being a dick. I wasn’t. I hadn’t felt so sincere about the things in my life in a long time.

“I had fun too.” Her eyes were on the floor. “Sometimes I just want to go back. To the way things used to be.”

“It’s too late.” I said.

“I know.” She answered.

“I’m going to get fired from my fancy job. I got drug tested and I’m probably going to fail. If that happens--when that happens, I’m going to leave this place. That’s what I’ve decided. My lease is month to month. I can leave whenever I want. I have a lot of money saved up. And there’s nothing here for me. So I’m going to drive out west. See what my friend Jorge is doing in Oregon. He’s got a cheap room up for rent.” I sighed, looking out the window where my orange cat was perched upon, watching us through the breeze. Some trees out beyond fluttered softly like my heart when I first held Bonx in a snowy cemetery another lifetime ago.

“We’re soul mates, but we’ll see each other again.” I turned to look at her face. She didn’t smile, because she knew I was serious.

“When did you decide this?” She asked me.

“Right now. Or I guess it’s been brewing. But now I know.”

Bonx nodded slowly, looking into my eyes. She didn’t say anything for a bit. Then, “I’ve always heard people say that you can’t run from your problems. But that’s total bullshit. You can definitely run from your problems. I want to keep that white line in front of me and drive until I fall into the ocean and drown.” Her voice cracked.

“Nah, don’t do that. I need you here to watch my lizard.” I said. She laughed, her gorgeous half smile back on her soft face. I couldn’t even see the lip rings and the septum piercing through the light of her smile.

“Go home before I’m late for work and I get fired twice as badly.” I told her.

“Yes sir.” She gave me a hug and quick kiss on the cheek. “Last night was fun. A good trip. And I’ll definitely baby sit your lizard if you want me to.”

I opened the door and listened to her small footsteps hustle down the hard wooden steps. I walked to my window and watched her walk to her car, the paper map I drew clutched tightly in her small hands, her arms bright with Swastikas and hearts pleading for love as the neighborhood drank coffee in routine disgust.