Standing Dead

            So my brother and I walked into the trailer one night, and the sink was still half full of water because it was clogged. There were three dead mice floating in there and one doing laps.

            The counter was so covered in their shit that it was black. The critters keep finding ways in from the surrounding forest. There is no limit to them, living in the shadows.

“We’re gonna get the plague,” Mack said.

I just said, “Yeah.”

            Watched it swim around, and for a second I could relate. Brother and I were soaked from the drenching autumn rain. On the path a few miles behind us somewhere was our truck, up in flames, toast. Life seems to always spin in circles around the drain, but never quite reaches it.

Got rid of the mice. Washed the rest of the dishes. Unclogged the sink.

Mack nuked a bowl of soup and sat on the couch with it. Left me half the can. He looked tired, but underneath the exhaustion he looked quite a bit angry, from the… From the most recent adventures that had befallen us during the course of the day, and especially from the way it all culminated with our truck. The inner-child in me wondered if the cops were looking for us for the damage to city property, but the jaded old man that had been replacing that inner child over the last few months knew better.  

“Pneumonia, too.” Mack said.

I just said, “Yeah,” again.

I almost said something about the day; I knew it was only a matter of time before he’d say something about it and try to make it out to be my fault, and my window to get the first word in was closing. But I didn’t have the energy. So I said something about the salamander we caught a few weeks ago instead. From there he found a way to say something about the ghost that he thinks haunts my bedroom, and then he started ranting about god and the bible and divine wrath.

I left him in that state. Took my cold soup and started heading towards my room.

Depression is a sign that you’re well adjusted. I shouldn’t have laughed so hard earlier in the day, when everything went bad.  Made me look crazy.

Changed clothes, hid under a mountain of rotting blankets and thought about the fire. Then tried not to think about the fire. Then thought about the fire again.

banter

“It’s right there,” she said, “in your writing.  You write in body parts and juxtapose them with with these images all the time, very meaningfully, and really very well.”  She paused, pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose, then added what he was waiting to hear.  “But…”

“But?”  He tilted his head to the right, and his crooked, left-sided grin rose like an apostrophe, claiming possession over the amusement in his voice.

Sitting at his desk, bathed in lamplight, swiveling left and right on his computer chair, with one leg folded beneath her, like a dog-eared page of his favourite novel, she certainly looked the part of the woman he loved.  He couldn’t be sure.  Seated on the edge of his bed, in the center of the shadows that made an ocean between them, she was blinding to behold, as the full moon to a castaway.

“It’s all very gimmicky.”  Something in her tone, it reminded him of the time when his mother had to ground him for getting suspended from school.  He punched a boy in the face for making fun of his sister, and refused to apologize because he said it would be lying.

“It is.”  Her words were his caviar.

“You know what that means?”  She smiled as though the first time.

“That I’ll have a trademark, and you’ll have your talent.”  He held out his arms like he’d built her an ark.  She stood up and walked towards him, trailed by a messy ponytail, preceded by a few stray hairs.  Her hands fell into his palms, then his thumbs curved inwards to kiss the back of her wrists.

“Just promise me.”  She sat down across his lap, cradled his head against her breast, pressed his ear into the high school hoodie that she was fond of wearing, and rocked him slowly, so he could feel it in his soul.

“I won’t forget you when I’m famous,” he mumbled, into her elbow, against the brachial artery.

It was her.  He was close enough to see.

Peeling Back the Layers

A word to the wise: New Haven is not for the faint of heart. This bastard of a place can lure you in with all its promise of high-bred formality, but that’s only the hook. It’s the surface in a way recently-healed flesh of a burn wound can fold and tear away like tissue paper. What’s underneath, that raw and throbbing sub-surface, that’s the true essence about the place. Only, you never catch a glimpse of that kind of truth until you’re already in the thick of things, and by then it’s already too late to escape.

On a rooftop of a dormitory building I couldn’t name if you asked, Yale University’s Tercentennial celebration was in full swing. It was that way across every rooftop on campus, really, and even if you weren’t a student you at least knew about the wild, overflowing debauchery that could only be sustained by ivy-league students finally able to cut loose after an academic year of brain-torture. And I was no student of any college, let alone Yale. 

I’d only heard of the campus-wide party from Daeg Cathmore, that mind-fuck of a pirate, who did everything but suck my dick to get me to go. One thing about the guy, he never passed up an opportunity to kill a few brain cells a day, especially if he could do it on someone else’s dime. So there I was (how I hate that cliché , but am incapable of finding any other transition for this part) on a rooftop not far from my apartment building and looking out across the way to the rooftop of another building where those students tried to communicate with us. Holy hell, I felt so wrong standing in this type of crowd.

Like a talisman, I held the red plastic cup full of bitter tasting beer. I’d only had two sips before I decided I would not return for a second helping. Not like it mattered. I had a small plastic baggie full of Moroccan hash, two high-dose tabs of oxycontin, another little baggie full of awful weed and a piece of notebook paper upon which was written some very drunk girl’s number. Even as she eagerly gave it to me, we both knew I wouldn’t call her. I told her she was suited for the Norman Rockwell-type of guy, but she simply shrugged and slunk off with a couple of her friends.

That left me standing at the edge of this God-forsaken rooftop, peering over the edge at the ground below and seriously considering tipping myself over. The only thing keeping me from going through with it was the quandary of whether or not I’d give all my stash to Daeg, who was the least-deserving person on the face of this planet. But why should so many decent-to-poor quality drugs go to waste? Besides, there was a bent appeal of handing over chemicals that would—in all inevitability—fail to deliver on Daeg’s part. 

Another girl approached me and said something about the beacon the students across the way were using to send us signals, but I only half heard because I was so startled by her presence that I nearly fell off the rooftop anyway. She wasn’t a student at Yale either, which was fine by me, leaving me to wonder how she was in any way affiliated with this party. The glazed look in her eyes told me she was experiencing some chemical epiphany and I was instantly turned off. It was right at that moment Daeg appeared and whisked the poor girl away to do whatever it was that rat-bastard of a pirate set out to do that night. A million uninvited images crowded my mind as he led her away and winked back at me. 

Having enough, I emptied the contents of my cup and began the lonely descent against the tide of students who just decided to join the party or were flocking from another part of campus to continue their revelry. Though I was probably younger than a good portion of the population, I couldn’t help but see in their faces a freshness to them I hadn’t felt in a terribly long time. And for the record, if you think eight months isn’t a long time, just try persevering when you work grimy, twelve-hour shifts at a factory, getting grit and oil and whatever other foulness you can imagine trapped under your fingernails as you clean machines that bore into metal poles to make gun barrels. 

At ground level, I walked across the courtyard to find a small group of newly graduated students all sitting round a bonfire, sipping from a bottle and talking loudly over each other. A young man with a thin layer of Brillo-hair spotted me and raised the bottle, inviting me over. The last thing I wanted was to continue this charade of a good time, but some fundamental part of me couldn’t turn my back on genuinely good people. Yes, I knew when I laid eyes on them they were good people, even when I’d been so exhaustively wrong about other aspects of my life. 

Brillo-head passed the bottle, labeled The Glenlivet Archive 21, which I guess was top-shelf all the way. It was much better than the J&B my dad fixed himself every night, and whether it was because the spirit was so smooth going down or because all of the previous false starts to this supposedly good time worked me enough so I didn’t feel its burn on the way down, I was immediately accepted into the group.

What we all talked about by firelight for the ensuing three hours, I couldn’t tel you. Not literally—I know what we discussed, but by making a cheap story out of the secret language we spoke to each other would only be an insult to that moment in time. Suffice it to say we tapped into something deeper about ourselves, stripping ourselves of the layers upon layers that made us up across the varying years of our lives. After enough drink and my fill of laughter, I left the group with a feeling that life could go on.

On my walk home, I bumped into Daeg Cathmore, who was draped over the girl who stumbled upon me at the rooftop party. They were going back to her dorm room for the night, so typical of that damned pirate-bastard. I left them to it and continued onward to the apartment. The next street up, I was met by a curious pair who looked like they had no business in this part of town. At first I didn’t know whether to confront them or to keep on going, but their gazes warmed a little and they stopped a few feet ahead of me. The man introduced himself first.

And damn, the sonofabitch could ramble. I don’t remember half of what he said, but that may have been because I was too preoccupied with the woman he was with. Whatever the guy was saying, it sounded a little like he was working himself up to the question of whether or not I had any drugs on me to share. Hell, maybe she put him—who could have been a complete social pariah, for all I know—to task to shake me down.

Without thinking, I handed over the bag of hash. No sense in me keeping it around if the party was winding down. I wondered if the real reason I wasn’t having a good time was because I was looking for the wasters to validate why I had that shit in the first place. The man’s eyes illuminated like I’d seen a million times before in all the other wasters I stumbled across on a daily basis. The woman, on the other hand, smiled at me and wordlessly slipped me a piece of scrap paper.

They took off, the man calling a thousand thank-you’s behind him, leaving me to read the scrap paper given to me by the woman. What I was thinking of at that moment was how pretty she looked under the street light with her raven-black hair and sparkling green eyes, which seems almost too fantastic in memory because—how could anyone notice something like eye color under the mellow glow, especially under the influence? 

When I finished the note, I smiled. Again, you’ll excuse me for not telling what it contained. Like the gathering at the fire pit on campus, this, too, was incredibly personal. Any attempt to describe those few, simple words would sound vulgar and garish coming from me, but they left a remarkably indelible hope that maybe I wasn’t fast sinking into the ominous charm that was New Haven, that me and her and her friend, and the whole city, really, weren’t wasters at all but fractions of the same element. 

All I needed to do was peel back the layers and show the world how alike we truly are, that all the statuses and wealths and pedigrees are the divisive things, that what’s underneath it all are empty vessels to be filled in however way fate or chance sees fit. The feeling was hopeless at first, but after a few days of thinking about it, I packed my bags and left the city.

Forced

I want to remember all the sunsets I painted over black in my memory;

All the laughter I speared with contempt and the taste of vomit;

Forget the dimmed lights and smoky rooms and fake chuckles and half-smiles and eyes-like-daggers;

And the noise of it was the worst, the noise in my head:

On repeat, on a loop, all the questions I had to ask and all the checks and balances to keep in order and all the numbers to count and the marks to tally and the scales to break and the money to spend and the money to earn and the money to burn.

Burn it.

Burn it all.