The Tao Of Sean

Three times in the last week someone has approached me and tried to sell me something illegal. The first — a young man with dark complexion and a nervous hitch in his game — tried to make small talk with me as I walked by him with my dog. He was standing around outside of a bar and pretending to be in the middle of a phone call. The local police precinct is a decent line-drive away from the very spot where he stood.

“Yo, is that a pitbull?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t like pitbulls – they’s killers and shit. Yo, you wanna buy some weed?”

“What? No.”

“I got dimes. It’s pretty good.”

“No thanks. Not looking to buy. You know this is a bad spot, right? The precinct is right over there.”

“You a cop?”

“No. Are you?”

“Fuck no. Everyone smokes weed, son. I gotta get rid of these dimes. I’ll give you two for $15.”

“No thanks, man. Good luck.”

Weed Guy looks me up and down and then walks in the direction of the precinct. Me and the dog go the opposite way.  I had never seen him before and I have not seen him since.

******

I’ve never been really good with the whole idea of “family” in any way. I am just not someone who is wired for any of the stuff that goes along with the word. At times I find myself thinking that maybe if I just tried a little bit harder or if I spent more time observing the way other families work I would get it in some way, but it just doesn’t click into place properly for me.

That entire paragraph is a lie.

******

The second person who tried to sell me something illegal was a homeless-looking dude in the McDonalds at the corner of Greenpoint and Manhattan Aves. I was walking by and decided in that very moment that eating a Quarter Pounder with cheese would totally make my sauntering down the block way more enjoyable for me. As usual, there were fifteen people in line and only two people working. The entire seating area in the restaurant was full of immigrant Poles sitting around and talking in their native tongue.

As a former drug user, I am well aware that the Golden Arches are also a YOU CAN SCORE DRUGS HERE beacon. As a former drug user who has been on the straight and narrow for a while now, I try to redact that knowledge from my head and just buy whatever awful foodstuffs I am there for and not think about anything other than “get in, get out.”

Junkies are interesting critters. They will study you for a few short moments, make an assumption/judgment based on their innate understanding of you as a whole person from that short period of time, and then pounce on you using that assumption/judgment as an avenue to create a discourse that will either lead to them selling you drugs or them begging you to tell them where they can get drugs. If you doubt me, please do spend some time in your local McDonalds. You’ll see.

I’m not sure if it was because I had pushed the sleeves on my hoodie up to my elbows, but the gentleman who was suddenly standing to my right as I was standing in line waiting to have my order taken took a look at my tattoos and bullied his way into conversing with me. Either I was already daydreaming about walking down the street with that burger being shoved in my maw or I had smoked too many cigarettes already that morning, because I should have been able to sniff him out when he was still a shadow in my peripheral vision.

“That’s some sweet ink, my man. You didn’t get none of that shit around here, did you?”

“Nope.”

“I mean, you can’t get good work like that done around here at all. I don’t have any, but I seen plenty to know you spent a lot of money on them shits.”

“It’s not a cheap hobby.”

“Speaking of hobbies – you lookin’ to buy, man? I got brown. Small pieces.”

“Nope.”

“You think you could help a brother out and maybe buy me a cheeseburger or a cup of coffee or something? I’m real hungry. Hard out here, bro.”

“I’ll see what I can do. Let me just place my order, alright?”

“Alright, cool. Thanks, man.”

I figure this will get him to ease off my shoulder and move back to wherever he was simmering – the promise of things to come. The young woman working the register asks if she can help me and I move to where she is and place my order for the burger I want to eat while walking down the street. I also try to order a cheeseburger for homeboy, but as soon as the words start to come out of my mouth he is standing next to me again, his stink so overwhelming that the counter girl puts her hand over her mouth and steps back away from the counter.

“Man, you think you could just spot me the money for the food? I don’t mean to be a bother, I swear. Times are just tough.”

“No. I’ll buy you a burger. Please just go sit down and I’ll bring it over to you.”

“I just really need that money, bro.  C’mon?”

“Do it my way or get nothing. You decide.”

Mr. Brown shuffles off to a table near the door and starts chewing on his fingers. The girl behind the counter hands me a bag with my delicious burger and the one I ordered for Mr. Brown. I walk over to where he is sitting and I just put it on the table without making any kind of eye contact and walk out the door.

I saw him again this morning, asleep at a bus stop.

******

My parents are “buried” thousands of miles away from where I sit as I write this. My mother is interned in a very beautiful Zen garden type of area in a cemetery in San Diego. I have visited her three times since she passed away in 1996. This is something I sometimes struggle with, even though my adult brain is more than capable of parsing what “it” is. My father’s ashes are buried in a very small cemetery in the very small town of Melissa, Texas. He is interned next to the remains of the stillborn daughter of the woman he married. I have not visited him. I did hold the box that contained his ashes in my hands for the last time in the parking lot of the crematorium. I wanted to speak to his ashes but the woman he married and her son were standing right there in front of me with glassy eyes and trembling hands, so I said things to my father’s ashes in my head.

I sometimes feel as though there is no reason at all for me to think about where the remains of my parents are. I do the very best that I can to try not to think about it, to try not to think about what an awful and terrible son I am for not calling, for not writing or visiting. I try to delude myself with oddball logic like, they are with me in my DNA so traveling across the country to sit and stare at a marker and feel the things I feel all the fucking time is a silly exercise and not very frugal. There are moments when I want to steal a car and just rocket out west and sit in front of the markers and cry and yell and hiss at people for staring at me. I try to let those moments pass. I try to allow myself the room to have those moments and then I try to allow myself to move on.

They are only my parents in my memories and in my dreams.

******

The third person who tried to sell me something illegal was an employee for the gas company. He rang my bell and told me that my bill was past due and he had come to collect or they were going to turn off my gas. The bill was relatively small, so I paid him with cash I had on me. When he saw me pull money out of my pocket he then pulled an iPhone out of his coat pocket and offered to sell it to me for cheap. I did not buy the stolen iPhone.

******

Grief is probably the most unpredictable of human reactions. It’s like dusted weed –- you think you’re doing fine and then all of a sudden you are on the floor in the kitchen because the tile is cold and feels good on your face and offsets the heat in your tears and there is only one window in the kitchen and you know that nobody can see you if you hunker down real low-like.

Because of their proximity to important dates on the calendar, my parents’ deaths are like magnetic poles: my mother on Mother’s Day, and my father on my birthday. They come close to splitting the year evenly, which means I come close to splitting myself evenly. Oddly, as time has gone on it has become easier for me to accept my mother’s death — of course I get sad and feel her loss when I see others buying flowers for their mother in May, but it isn’t nearly as bad as it used to be. I am able to cope and put on a mask and act as if everyone loving on their mother doesn’t make me pine for my own. Plenty of practice at that, yes. What is surprising to me is how much I feel her loss piggybacking on how much I feel the loss of my father as my birthday approaches each year.

The last week or so I keep on finding myself reading and rereading The Four Noble Truths and spending time curled up inside of my own head trying to pound that wisdom into dust that can move around inside of my blood and keep me from wanting to jump off the roof. I keep on seeing their ghosts in my eyes in my reflection. I keep on wishing there was a phone number I could call so that I could hear them tell me things. I wouldn’t even mind if there was a recording somewhere of some of my worst moments, just so I could hear them talk to me again.

I understand this is a cycle. I understand this is all a part of a bigger motion, my own aging and facing the inevitability of my own mortality. I get it, I do.

******

I am not the best friend someone could have. I do the best that I can, but there are things that people go through that I am just not very adept at dealing with. I don’t handle dramatics very well. I’m not very empathetic when it comes to someone being upset about something they could have easily avoided had they really looked into themselves before making a poor choice. I’m a decent listener, but my filter is always off because I try not to have one for myself and reminding myself to put it in place when listening to someone vent is hard to remember. I have deluded myself into thinking I am patient, but I am not. I have also deluded myself into thinking that I can surf, which isn’t true. I cannot surf.

I am sometimes the type of monster who will sit and watch someone tread water for whole lifetimes because that is far easier than saying the one true thing which is “I don’t really care about your problem in the way you want/need me to.” I have deluded myself into thinking that by being this way I am helping people untie their own knots and they can find their own way to the surface and they can heal themselves. This is a brick wall that I have put in place to keep myself from pushing myself out into traffic. This is a self-defense mechanism that has kept me not only alive, but alive and looking forward as much as possible so that I may see what is coming for me and be prepared for that. The problem within that construct is that I always feel alone. I feel alone because I make myself alone. I make myself alone because alone is safe.

******

There are things that I am supposed to be doing and I keep on making excuses and conflicts out of nothing to make sure I am not doing them. This is called self-sabotage and it is my albatross. I try very hard to work hard and be a better person, but you can have all the self-knowledge in the world at your disposal and if you are wired like I am you will still find a way to fuck off and make excuses and not do the things you worked so hard to be lucky enough to do. You can put on masks and dance for people and follow through on things that you think other people want you to do, but the reality is that you will at some point [hopefully] understand what it is that you want to do and you have to stay focused and get that shit done. I try to remind myself every day that I am lucky and blessed and that I have worked very hard and all of these good things are things I deserve and that I need to be thankful and dutiful and do the things I am supposed to be doing, but then there is that tiny voice that starts inside of my belly and works its way into the front of my brain and it is always saying I don’t deserve shit and then I back down and go sit on the couch and stare at my dog and cry.

This is what is going on.

******

Tonight when I was walking my dog we came upon a very drunk homeless man who was crouched between two parked cars and shitting on the street. Sometimes I am amazed that I got off the streets and I am living the life I am living now. Sometimes I am amazed that I survived that part of my life. Sometimes I wonder if I really did.

******

I never felt like I fit with my family. For the most part, they are all gregarious and smart people who are overflowing with love and kindness. I tried, when I moved back to New York, to build those relationships. I tried to connect and become a part of a larger whole. There was always this thing inside of me that felt as though I had been abandoned by them when we moved out west. I knew that wasn’t the truth — my mother is the one who broke off a lot of the interaction and controlled the communication. She had her reasons. She had her demons. Now I have my own reasons. Now I have my own demons.  All of the elders I actually looked to for guidance and understanding are gone.

This is not a blues song, this is just my truth.

******

Earlier tonight while I was standing in the kitchen washing the dishes, I made myself a promise. Well — maybe not so much a promise as much as I made a deal with myself.

I am going to be honorable.

I am going to put my head down and do the work.

I am going to be a better person.

******

A few years after my mother had died and the dust of my Cocaine Era had settled, I got involved with a woman who had a young child. I had somehow conned my way into a gig as a Training Manager for a regional restaurant chain and was living in and out of my own reality. Some nights I would close the bar and other nights I would come straight home from work and sit on my floor in my boxers playing video games and smoking pot until I would fall asleep, only to wake up late and hope against all hope that my boss didn’t call the store yet.

How I met the woman was through one of those telephone chat lines — the ones that have the commercials late at night. I’ve written about these chat lines before, so I will spare all the silly little details about the hows and the whys. We exchanged numbers during a series of messages and then agreed to meet up for a cup of coffee. She was lovely and sweet, and we had an almost instant camaraderie. We saw one another again the next night. And then the next.

We had a lot in common, really. She had been a methamphetamine user, so she was able to understand the quirks and strangeness in my post-cocaine behavior. She didn’t necessarily like that I still smoked pot, but understood that is was the lesser of all of my former evils. I had just begun suffering from panic attacks, and she had suggested that I go and see a psychiatrist to possibly get on some medication that could help with that. Her father was a counselor at the VA, and he recommended a shrink to me that had years and years of experience, so I went and the old doctor put my monkey ass on way too much Paxil.

******

We were probably into our third week of dating when she mentioned that her husband — her son’s father — was in prison. She had brought him up from time to time, but only to see if I was open to talking about her past and her troubles. She would let something slip out like dipping her toe into the bath, then retreat and either snuggle up with me or talk about school. She had gone back to college to get her nursing degree and it was very important to her to finish at the top of her class.

“What’s he locked up for?”

“Attempted murder.”

“Oh. Who did he try to kill?”

“Me.”

“Great.”

She went on to tell me that her husband, Troy, was a methamphetamine addict who, when high or even un-high, would fly into rage at the drop of a hat. She told me that things were so bad that they even tried the whole “let’s move across the country to see if things will be better in a different place” idea to no avail. It was in Columbus where he tried to kill her and their son. It was in Columbus where he pistol-whipped her, bound her, and drove around for hours with her in the trunk of her car. He kept their child in his lap as he drove, pointing his gun at other cars and screaming streams of obscenities at anyone who was on the streets. It was in Columbus where he left their child in a running car with his wife bound in the trunk as he walked into a gas station convenience store and flashed his gun at the cashier and told everyone to get on the ground or get dead. The cashier gave him the money and then he went outside and just sat on the hood of the car, spun out of his mind with the gun in his lap.

When the police arrived with their lights and their guns drawn, he didn’t put up a fight. He threw his gun on the ground and started to cry and scream. She told me she could hear him from inside the trunk, screaming her name and howling out about how she was tormenting him and pushed him to be this monster he didn’t want to be. When the police saw the baby on the floorboards among the empty glassine packets and the methamphetamine dust, they stepped on her husband’s head while it was on the pavement, busting the blood vessels in his eye and tearing his face. She told me she tried to be as still and as quiet as she could until she realized they were going to try and take her son away from her for this, that they were going to brand her in some way akin to how they were going to brand her husband.

She told me that when the police opened the trunk and set her free all she could do was laugh. The tears were coming out, but she had no other reaction but uncontrollable, unsettling laughter. The police asked her a series of questions as they took her husband away in the back of a squad car. The police asked her a series of questions as someone from Child Protective Services arrived on the scene and waited patiently to talk to her. She didn’t know anyone in Columbus other than the people she worked with. She knew she wanted to go home.

******

My job made me miserable. My boss — a District Manager who, when he hired me told me, “you can be a star in this company, Sean” — was one of those guys who was really enthusiastic and supportive around all of my employees but a total by-the-book dick who rode my ass nonstop out of their earshot. Most of my employees were high school kids waiting and bussing tables, while the rest were all illegal aliens who worked in the kitchen. I drank at work. I hid a bottle of whiskey in the overhead in my office and would keep some in a thermos under my desk. I would take an extra long time going to the bank every morning to smoke a joint in my truck in the parking lot. I was very kind to my employees and even kinder to my regular guests, but no matter what I did I just couldn‘t shake the feeling that my job was murdering me.

A lot of the kids who worked there I inherited from the previous manager. He was my boss for a month until he realized I was his hired replacement and then he freaked out and tried to pull a bunch of shit to pin on me and get me fired. As his last act of defiance, he hired a girl I could quite easily describe as the most incapable person I have ever worked with in my entire life. She showed up for work on her first day in a pair of cut-offs with her plump ass cheeks hanging out, a pair of sunglasses on her face that she refused to remove because she had herself a “bye-grain,” and an inability to count money that would make an accountant jump out of a window. Her name was Lacey.

Obviously, he had hired her to be the cashier.

Even during our busiest rushes — the late afternoon and then the dinner rush — I would catch Lacey slumped on a stool behind the register with her head down on the counter or even sitting in a booth sipping on iced tea and not even noticing she had a line of folks who were waiting to pay and leave. I made it my assistant’s mission to either get Lacey to get her shit together, or find some way to convince her she didn’t want to work with us any longer. Lacey confessed to my assistant that she had just been fired from her other job — working at a Pizza Hut — for getting caught having sexual relations with her manager in his office during work hours.

Now — I’m not one to be cruel — but Lacey was far from an attractive young lady. She sort of looked like a dwarf who had been stretched to an almost-normal size. Her attitude was abysmal. She dressed like a slob and was completely unrepentant about it. Hearing that she had been balling her boss at her other job made me queasy and uncomfortable. What kind of asshole must that guy have been to take advantage of an unattractive and borderline special needs employee like that?

More than once I found myself getting so annoyed with Lacey and her work ethic that I would just send her home for the day fifteen minutes into her shift and take over her job myself. I just couldn’t take it.

One day, in the middle of a dinner rush, she just up and walked off to the back of the restaurant toward the bathrooms without asking anyone to cover for her. I noticed her walk to the back and went up front to run the register and take care of the guests. Twenty minutes pass and still no sign of her. I call over one of the waitresses and ask her to go check on her. When the waitress comes back she is covering her mouth and trying not to laugh.

“What’s so funny? Where is Lacey?”

“She’s in the bathroom, puking her guts up.”

“Well, shit. I guess I’ll just have to send her home again.”

“That girl is fucking pregnant.”

“What? How do you know that?”

“How could you not know? Her other boss got her pregnant. That’s why she doesn’t do shit here — she thinks he is going to take care of her and she won’t have to work.”

“Fuck. Go back in there and tell her I said she can go home for the day, okay?”

******

For her next four shifts, Lacey averaged being half an hour late. Each time she would stroll in like she didn’t give a damn and would keep her sunglasses on and wouldn’t engage with the guests in any way. During the course of these insubordinate actions I pulled her aside and followed the proper procedure for writing up an employee — verbal warning, written warning with stipulations, and then a final written warning. In a telephone discussion with my boss, he made it clear that he wanted me to terminate her employment. When I told him she was pregnant by her former boss at the other job, his response was “I don’t give a fuck — fire that girl no matter what it takes.”

Lacey was over twenty minutes late for a mandatory staff meeting. All of my employees knew she was on her final warning and watched as I was calm and polite when she showed up late for the meeting, and watched as I continued to run the meeting to the end as if it was no big deal. I then pulled Lacey aside again.

“Lacey, you know I’m going to have to let you go, right? I gave you plenty of chances, but you were on a final warning and I just cannot rely on you to do your job and be present and on time like everyone else.”

“You can’t fire me because I am pregnant.”

“Firing you has nothing to do with your pregnancy, Lacey. Firing you has to do with your inability to be responsible and accountable.”

“You’re a fucking dick. I’m gonna send my brother and his friends in here to kick your ass.”

“That’s great, Lacey. This is part of what I am talking about.”

“Fuck you, Sean. Fuck you!”

******

A few days later we are in the middle of an insane dinner rush and I am working the register. I am making my way through a stream of guests trying to pay and leave when a woman comes through the door next to me and asks me if my name is Sean Doyle. I tell her it is. She stands patiently as I work my way through the rest of the line. I am polite and kind to each and every guest.

“Thanks for being patient — what can I do for you?”

“Did you recently terminate the employment of a young woman named Lacey?”

“Yes. Why do you ask?”

“Did you know that Lacey was pregnant?”

“Yes. What does that have to do with the termination of her employment?”

“That is what I am here to ask — I’m from the EEOC. Did her pregnancy complicate her employment here?”

“No. If anything, it accentuated and pointed out that she was not a good fit here and was a very irresponsible employee who couldn’t show up on time nor stand here and do this simple job.”

“So, you didn’t fire her for being pregnant?”

“No. I’m not a monster. I fired her for being habitually late and insubordinate. Her being pregnant is her own problem, not ours.”

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Doyle. Have a good night.”

******

When I asked her why she was still married to Troy, she responded that he refused to sign the divorce papers. He had been in prison for over a year and she figured she was just going to go on about her life and not deal with it at all until he was released. She moved herself and her son back to Mesa and she enrolled in school. She put all of it out of her mind until I brought up the fact that she would probably get better financial aid as a single mother, not to mention she would be able to make sure he was incapable of any type of custody. There was already an order of protection. The fact that he was behind bars in Ohio made her feel safer, but for some reason she had, on occasion, allowed his parents to spend supervised time with her son.

I asked my father about his attorney, asked him if he was a good man and if he was willing to sit down with us so I could help her. Made the necessary and introductory calls. The attorney contacted the prison and found out that her husband was about to be released and extradited back to Arizona to be put on house arrest and then spend time in a halfway house work release program. The prison did not let her know this beforehand. She would have never known if I hadn‘t contacted the attorney. I never would have seen Troy’s last name if the attorney had not drafted new divorce paperwork.

I never would have known that Troy was Lacey’s brother.

******

When the EEOC filed a lawsuit on Lacey’s behalf for supposed wrongful termination my boss tried to push me in front of the train with the people at corporate. The company sent their attorney to talk to me and take my statement and my boss refused to leave the room while it was happening because he was afraid that I was going to rat him out for telling me to fire her irrespective of the reason. I explained to the attorney that I followed all proper procedure and showed all of the required paperwork as far as write-ups and whatnot. I was placed on an administrative leave for a week while the case went on, and they made my boss run my store.

He found my stashes of whiskey. He also found an envelope I had hidden in a binder where I was skimming money to pay my best kitchen worker for his vacation time. I had made the mistake of telling him he was eligible for paid time off before checking with corporate, and decided that I was going to do the right thing by him and pay him anyway. I had been jacking twenty-five or so bucks almost every day and stashing it to pay him for ten days’ time.

My boss called me at home late at night to lay into me about his discoveries. She was asleep in my bed and her son was in the playpen I had bought for him at a yard sale. They were hiding out with me after Troy had come to her apartment in the middle of the day and broken in, trashing the place and scrawling all over her walls in lipstick and marker. We took a bunch of photos of the carnage and I gave them to my father’s attorney. There was a new restraining order in place.

“I found your fucking whiskey, Sean.”

“Life is rough, you know? Really sorry about that.”

“I also found the envelope with all the money in it. What the fuck are you doing, stealing from me?”

“Not from you personally, no. It’s for Rodrigo. I fucked up and told him he was eligible for a paid vacation and then found out he wasn’t, so I was trying to do him a solid.”

“I should fucking fire you right now, you know that?”

“Are you? Are you firing me? Is that why you’re calling me in the middle of the night, boss?”

“I don’t know what I am going to do. I do know that as soon as you went on that medication and started dating that woman you stopped being responsible.”

“Listen — I know you’re pissed and I would be, too. But my personal life has nothing to do with my employment. If you have a problem with me being on a medication, well, I don’t know what to say to that. As far as who I am dating goes, I didn’t know I needed to run my lifestyle choices by you.”

“You’re lucky they didn’t fire you over this whole Lacey thing.”

“So are you, dude. You’re also lucky I made sure there was a paper trail on her. Can I go back to sleep now?”

All I heard on the other end of the line was an exasperated exhalation and then the dial tone. I stood in the doorway to my bedroom and watched her sleep. I looked over at the playpen and watched her son toss and turn. I thought about my angry boss looking at his kids sleeping — both of them named after NASCAR drivers — and realized this was not the life I was looking for, not the life I thought about in my quiet and alone time. I packed a bowl and went out onto my patio and smoked it. I saw two dudes sitting in a car across the street, watching me. I knew it was Troy. I could feel him.

Something was about to break.

******

She and I are sitting in a Denny’s with her son, waiting for Troy. He told the attorney he would sign the divorce papers if he was allowed to see his son, and she decided that she would let him see him one last time, but only on her terms. I am extremely nervous and have eaten four Xanax. I do not have a weapon, even though I already know he will probably have one. I refuse to sit with my back to the door and she finds me ridiculous.

“He isn’t going to do anything stupid in public, Sean.”

“Right. You can say that, but this is also the same motherfucker who tied you up and stashed you in a trunk.”

As soon as the words leave my mouth I see Troy come strolling in through the door with two large guys in tow. Troy looks like an albino with terrible tattoos, wearing a white Spurs jersey and a white bandana on his head. He motions for his boys to sit themselves in the booth across from us and stands over us, looming and smirking. I can see the outline of the handle of a gun in his waistband and I start to sweat.

“So you’re the motherfucker that not only fired my pregnant sister but is also fucking my wife and trying to take my kid away from me. You don’t look so tough. Are you a fucking tough guy, Sean?”

“I’m not the one who showed up carrying with two clowns as back-up, am I?”

“Fuck you. You don’t mind if I sit down and hold my son, do you?”

She tells him that he can. He sits and I watch as he picks his son up out of the booster seat and holds him to his chest. I can hear his boys snicker and mutter to each other. I feel like the entire room is a sauna and I am in the middle of a bad movie that is not going to have a happy ending. She pushes the divorce papers in front of him and puts a pen on top of them. He glares at her. He glares at me. He nods at his boys and one of them turns in the booth and shows me that he has a gun in his lap and it is pointed at me. I feel faint and flushed. She kicks me under the table.

“I’m not signing that shit. Fuck your Jew lawyer and your Jew boyfriend. I’m going to get up right now and walk out of here with my son and you’re not going to stop me.”

She starts to laugh. He turns to look at her laughing and I reach under the table as fast as I can and grab him by the balls as hard as I can. He drops his son on the table, spilling the water glasses. I pull him toward me so that he slumps and I pull his gun from his pants with my left hand while squeezing as hard as I can with my right. A waitress sees what is happening and lets out a little yelp. His boys look confused and I let go of Troy.

“Sign the fucking papers and stop being a fucking dick. If you don’t sign them we’ll just up and walk right the fuck out of here and you will never see your son again. Tell your pal to take that gun off of me or he’ll be the first one I shoot, unless you’re such a dumbass you didn’t load this thing.”

“So you are a tough guy. Fuck this, I’m leaving.”

“Then leave. Have those two cocksuckers leave first and you follow them out. I’m not going to tell you twice not to follow us. You follow us and I will fucking break every last bone in your body.”

Troy slams his fists on the table. His boys get up and slowly walk out the door. Troy sits with us for a second. I take the magazine out of the gun and put the gun on the table. He looks at it. He looks at me. I nod at the gun and he picks it up and puts it back in his waistband. She is holding their son. Their son is crying. Her face is red. His face is red. I am sweating and scared and ready to run through a wall to get as far away as possible. Troy gets up slowly and steps out of the booth. He shakes his head and then he spits in my face.

“Fuck you. I will fucking kill you.”

“Good luck with that, Troy. Gonna be kind of hard to kill me from inside a prison.”

Troy walks out the door. The waitress comes over and asks us if she should call the police. She says yes and I say no. I start to gather our things. She is crying. Her son is crying. People are staring over at us. I finally wipe the spit off of my face with a napkin and we start to move toward the door. I can see Troy and his boys sitting in the same car I saw outside of my apartment. I tell her to get into her car as fast as she can and that I am driving. She sees Troy in his car. She flips him the bird as she gets in the car. He revs his engine. I get behind the wheel of her car and start it up and look in the mirror and see him waiting. I back up and pull out of the lot and across four lanes of traffic as erratically as I can.

“He’s following us.”

“I know. I’m going to try and lose him but you have to help me keep an eye out for him, okay?”

I run a red light, carefully. He follows and almost gets hit. I make a rushed left turn into a residential neighborhood and stand on it. Everything feels drenched in my sweat. I can feel my hands becoming part of the wheel. She tells me he is behind us so I make a quick series of turns and get back out on the bigger street and head in the opposite direction to the one we came — back toward the Denny’s. I see two squad cars in the lot and I cut across the lanes of traffic again and pull up right next to them as Troy stops his car in the middle of the street and lays on his horn. As soon as he does this one of the squad cars lights up and starts to hustle out of the lot toward his car. Troy takes off with the squad car following. She gets out of the car and starts screaming. Two officers come over and I turn off the car and get out to talk to them, the magazine still in my pocket.

******

Three months later my boss fires me as I walk in the door after taking a cab to work because my truck had been repossessed. He yells and screams in my face telling me I am irresponsible and he should have fired me months ago but didn’t have anyone he could replace me with and I just stand there with my heart in my throat and trying to fight back tears. I walk three miles home and collapse on my couch. I roll a joint and smoke it in the shower.

She and I had started to drift apart shortly after Troy had been sent back to prison. That night in bed after I had been fired she told me that she wanted to have another child, and when I told her I didn’t want to be a father she started to cry. I waited until she fell asleep and then I crept out of her apartment and stopped answering her calls. After a few days of this she called the police and asked them to do a welfare check on me — which basically meant the police came to my apartment and tried to kick in my door to make sure I was still alive. She had told them on the phone about Troy and told them about the incident and about how I had just been fired and had my truck repossessed so when they arrived they had guns drawn expecting to find the corpse of me.

I think they were stunned when I opened the door.

She was standing behind them, holding her son. I couldn’t form sentences because I was so high. All I could do was shake my head and keep on saying that I couldn’t believe this was happening. The police asked me if I was okay and I told them I was alive and alive is okay. When they left I allowed her to come inside. She stayed with me that night, but it was the last time I ever saw her or her son.

******

When I got out of the military and went back to Phoenix to try and salvage/mend my relationship with my father I had no idea that the drug habits I had partly joined the military to escape would come rushing back to the forefront of my simian brain. I figured that I had replaced all that longing to be fucked up for no reason with a new and improved longing to be fucked up for different reasons. I didn’t want to snort trucker speed. I didn’t want to stand around in the parking lot of a sketchy Circle K waiting for some cat I’d never met to bring me cocaine. I didn’t want to huff ether. I didn’t want to eat mushrooms and go climb to the top of Squaw Peak and watch the valley unfold and show me how every last yard of land had been stolen from the Hopi and the Papago.

I just wanted to be his son, to have a few drinks with him now and again. He told me I could live with him and his new wife for a while — they had a spare bedroom in their apartment. My father told me to take my time getting adjusted to being out of the military. Told me there was no rush. Told me he wanted to get to know me, to know the man I was becoming.

******

Because my father was the manager for the apartment complex where I lived, I would use the set of master keys and go into the apartments of some of the elderly when they were in and out of the hospital and steal their morphine pills, valium, and if I was really lucky and they had a really good pain management doctor — handfuls of dilaudid.

I used to think the crimes I committed to get high — my petty little drug crimes — were not crimes at all. I used to think they were victimless. I didn’t think that sneaking into some old person’s apartment when I knew they were in the hospital to raid their pills was a criminal act — I felt like it was some sort of divine thing, some universal accord that allowed me to maintain my bad habits without having to resort to any real crime, without violence. I never took any money or anything of any real value. That was a line I wasn’t willing to cross.

******

Something about having a secret habit or two is almost as intoxicating as the habits themselves. You just never know if you’re going to get caught, and the dopamine rush attached to the checklist one has to run through to make sure they aren’t caught — well, them’s some motherfucking good times. Until you get caught. Then the game gets switched up and you have to spend a good amount of time and energy convincing people that they are wrong about you, wrong about what they think they caught you doing.

******

You are seventeen years old. You are seventeen years old and you — being the fledgling punk rocker you are at seventeen [all nerve and no brain] — have punched holes in the door to your bedroom. All the way to the elbow. Multiple times. At this point, there are three rather large holes in your bedroom door that anyone can peer through and witness every last activity you attempt to pull off behind that closed door.

You are seventeen years old and you are sitting on the floor in your room with the door closed and in front of you is a mirror covered in crushed up amphetamines that you intend to snort into yourself and that you also plan to share with the girl who snuck in through your bedroom window. You are seventeen years old and you are hoping that maybe after the two of you get high she will take her shirt and bra off and you can run your face all over her young flesh while the amphetamines surge through your seventeen year old veins.

You do not care at all that she is the girlfriend of some other seventeen year old that you casually know. That is not a problem for you. You have already done plenty with this girl that is not your girl, but the girl of another you. Because that is a truth — you’re all the same. All of you seventeen year old boys trying to snort amphetamines with girls you hope to nuzzle and kiss and rub up on. You’re the same.

You offer her the mirror and the straw first. You watch her as she takes the straw between her fingers and uses her other hand to push her hair out of her face as she bends to the mirror on the floor. You look at her hair — chunks of it are bleached so harshly that it looks like hay, combustible — and you think about her head resting on your chest as you visualize the two of you in your bed, smoking. You see a shadow on the floor and quickly look up to see an eyeball in one of the holes in your door, scanning the room through the bruised and battered particle board.

Before she moves toward the mirror you reach out and put your hand on her shoulder.

“Sean? Are you awake? I need your help opening a jar — could you please come help me?”

“Just a minute, grandma. I’ll be right there.”

You move your hand from her shoulder to her mouth and cover it so that her laughter is inaudible. You hold a finger to your seventeen year old lips — the lips you want to give to her — and you make a stern face. You get up and go out the door and to the kitchen to help your grandmother.

******

Every person who lives at the apartment complex is wary of you until they find out you just got home from a war. Once they find out you are a veteran, everything opens up for you. You no longer get weird and cold glares from folks when they find you passed out in a lounge chair by the swimming pool. Nobody shies away from you when they find you asleep on the floor in the laundry room surrounded by empty beer bottles. Nobody gives it a second thought when you’re found having sex in the pool with the one semi-young woman in the complex — a supposed sex addict in her early forties who was in recovery until you entice her with marijuana and a youthful lack of pretense — they just figure you need to let off steam.

When the sweet old Michigan snowbird who owns the complex comes to you to offer you a job — painting the exterior of the complex for him — you know he is just doing you a solid because you are a veteran. At first you lie to him and tell him you have another gig lined up, because the money he offers you is so embarrassingly little that you would rather go rob Girl Scouts. Your father pulls you aside and tells you to take the gig. Your father tells you it isn’t just about you, it’s about him as well. You take the gig.

The first time you use the master keys to go into someone’s apartment and root around for drugs you go into the supposed sex addict’s place. You take off your shoes as you close the door behind you. You stand there in the air conditioning, your sweat turning to ice water. You fumble around in the medicine cabinet, but all you find are expired packets of birth control pills and bottles of vitamins. You make your way into her bedroom and the smell of incense is overpowering. On her nightstand you find four prescription bottles. Valium. Xanax. Zoloft. Soma. Each bottle is close to full. You carefully take the top off of each one and shake out half the bottle into your hand. You put the pills in different pockets. You put the bottles back on the nightstand exactly as you found them. You open up the drawer of the nightstand. A ream of condoms. A huge rubber dildo. Lubricant. A leather cock ring that you can smell as soon as you opened the drawer. A diary.

You pull out three of the valium and pop them in your mouth as you sit down on the bed and crack open the diary.

******

You are back in your room rolling and tumbling in bed with the girl who snuck in through your window. You are both very high on the amphetamines you have snorted. You are both naked to the waist, seventeen year old chest pressed to seventeen year old chest. You used thumbtacks and cardboard to cover the holes in your door from the inside. You have all of the lights out other than a candle in one of the cubbies of the headboard. You are seventeen years old, high enough to feel the gravity of the earth trying to will you back down, naked to the waist with a girl in your bed and you have one hand working into the front of her pants with the very tips of your fingers beginning to get moist.

You hear a faint sound but you keep on rolling and tumbling and searching with your fingers, trying to find the route that goes in. The girl who snuck in through your window has unbuttoned your pants and has you in her hand. Seventeen year old you. In her hand. You hear another faint sound, but the amphetamines are mixing with the hormones and your fingers are inside and her fingers are around and everything tastes sweet and her mouth and your mouth are rolling and tumbling and sweet and wet and you hear someone cough.

You hear someone cough.

You pull your seventeen year old mouth away from the girl who snuck in through your window and listen. You see a shadow on the rug from the other side of the door. You hear the handle to the door jiggle. Your seventeen year old self freezes and the girl who snuck in through your window tightens her grip around you and giggles. There is another cough and then you hear footfalls moving back down the hall. Your seventeen year old self is now in the mouth of the girl who snuck in through your window and you see God when you close your eyes.

******

One of the elderly residents, a septaugenarian chainsmoker named Leona, passes away in her sleep. Nobody knows she has passed away until you decide she must be in the hospital or on vacation, so you use the master keys to go into her apartment to look for pills. It is July and her air conditioning was not on. The moment you enter her apartment the smell of her death murders you where you stand. You begin to panic. Her apartment is dark and rank. The walls are covered in a layer of smoke and ash. You take off your shoes as you enter, only to find that the carpet feels like sandpaper. You cover your mouth and nose to fight back the reflex to hack and wheeze from her death.

You know that Leona is in her bed — the smell wafting at you from the open door to her bedroom like a plague — so you waste no time and go to her bathroom to hunt for drugs. The medicine cabinet is flux with benzos, muscle relaxants, cough syrups with codeine and two pristine glass bottles of liquid morphine. Leona will not need these, so you stuff them into your pockets. You don’t even bother closing the door to the medicine cabinet because you can already feel yourself floating on a raft in the pool high on the morphine.

In the kitchen you find three cartons of cigarettes. You don’t care that they aren’t your brand — you’ll find a way to trade them for the brand you like. You take off your shirt and wrap the cartons in it and slip out the door.

It was another three days until anyone else knew Leona had died.

******

After I left my father’s place I lived with a girlfriend in a really tiny guesthouse on probably one of the worst blocks in Central Phoenix. We were sandwiched between an apartment complex overrun by a violent Mexican street gang and a canal that doubled as a campground for the homeless veterans who were in and out of the VA detox center that was across 7th Ave. There were fights and gunshots and helicopters scanning our block every night.

Because we were the only young white people on the block, the gang members thought it would be funny to shoot up my car one night. Luckily, none of the bullets flew in through our thin walls. My car, on the other hand, was fucked. When the police came they told us to move. I tried my very best not to get into any violent altercations with the gang. My girlfriend was once accosted by two or three of them on a Sunday morning when she went to the corner store to buy eggs and milk. I got dressed and walked right over to the biggest and meanest looking gang member milling around outside of the store and dropped him with one punch he never saw coming. They pretty much left us alone after that.

Every Saturday morning we would get picked up by our friends — a crazy hippie/sort of punk-ish couple — to go to yard sales all over Phoenix. We would just drive around affluent neighborhoods and freak on people while hunting for weird shit. They were a really awesome couple. Supposedly I had gone to the same temple that he had gone to, but I was so high all the time that I had no idea if I had or hadn’t. I liked to play along, though. Nobody knew that I was eating anywhere from ten to twenty pills a day. It didn’t matter what the pills were — I was taking them. It was acceptable to everyone that I smoked a lot of pot, though. In a way it felt expected, so I would often just smoke a joint wherever we happened to be at the time.

As much as I loved my girlfriend, I was a miserable motherfucker on the inside. She was working as a barista and I was working some printing gig. I was always home in the early evenings by myself and bored to tears so I would pretty much get loaded on pills and smoke myself silly. One night I bought a couple of dusted joints off of a guy at the corner store. I smoked one of them and barely felt high, so I fired up the second. That was when it hit me full force. I was fucked up.

I don’t remember much of anything other than laying on the floor, furiously masturbating to the classified ads in the back of Maximum Rock and Roll. I had the stereo blasting and I was sweating and yelling and rubbing and yelling and crying on the floor. I was cruising through the ads and yelling them out loud as I worked myself over. I was yelling about girls who were looking for pen pals. I was yelling about girls placing ads for places to crash as they traveled across country following their favorite bands. I was yelling about guys looking for punk girls into BDSM. I was screaming and bleeding on my floor with my cock a blistering mess in my hand.

******

“You had someone in your room with you last night.”

“No I didn’t, grandma. Why would you think that?”

“You can’t fool me. Just because I’m old doesn’t mean I don’t know what’s going on.”

“Grandma, there was nobody in my room with me last night. It was just me.”

“Well then, I certainly hope you don’t get yourself pregnant.”

******

I was sitting at the bar with my father and his wife having dinner when I decided to go into the bathroom and do some of the cocaine I had in my pocket. This was a small neighborhood bar — an Irish pub with food and a dining area for families and kids. I was standing near the sink with my keys in my hand, one of them headed toward my nose with an oversized lump of cocaine on it when my father walked in and looked right at me and shook his head.

“You’re a fucking piece of work, Sean.”

******

One Saturday morning we’re all sitting in a Denny’s having breakfast when the girls both decide it’s bathroom time. I am slowly eating my pancakes, stoned to the gills and enjoying every last savory morsel. My friend is sitting across from me, thumbing through the newest issue of Flipside.

“When you’re through with that, can I check it out?”

“I guess so. I don’t think the classifieds in the back are as racy as the ones in Maximum Rock and Roll, though.”

I look up at him. He smiles wide. I feel my face getting hot.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He laughs.

“C’mon, really? Jerking off to the classified ads is a tradition, isn’t it? Everybody does it.”

I just glare at him. I feel like incinerating everything in the room.

“You don’t remember anything, do you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The girls come back to the table and I go back to my food. They all have their little conversations. Something about the four of us going bowling. Something about the four of us going up north to Flagstaff to go to yard sales up there the next weekend. All of it is peripheral though, because in my head I keep on flashing to me on the floor bleeding and yelling and rubbing myself raw. I am going insane at the table and he knows it, because he keeps on smirking at me and giggling when I look up at him.

******

You are in a park with your friends and you are high on PCP. Seventeen year old you has just been told by one of your friends that the girl who snuck in through your window is running around and telling everyone that you got her pregnant. Seventeen year old you has no idea what to make of this information, so seventeen year old you looks your friend in the eye and tells him you never slept with her. Your friend calls you an asshole and a liar because you told him the day after it happened that you did indeed sleep with the girl who snuck in through your window. Your friend calls you an asshole and a liar because everyone knows you have been sleeping with the girl who snuck in through your window for weeks, including her boyfriend who is also at the park but not high on PCP.

Seventeen year old you wanders off to another part of the park by himself to try and think. Thinking is impossible when you are high on PCP. Everyone else is just stoned or drunk or not anything other than a teenager in a shitty town with nothing else to do on a Friday night. You look over at the group of friends you have — some of them are rich, some of them are not. Some of them have been friends with one another since they were little. Some of them are just meeting one another for the first time. Seventeen year old you does not remember having an orgasm inside of the girl who snuck in through your window. Seventeen year old you specifically remembers other orgasms. Seventeen year old you high on PCP decides that if the girl who snuck in through your window is pregnant the baby isn’t yours.

The girl who snuck in through your window makes her way over to where you are in the park. She is drunk. She is crying. She sits down in the grass in front of you and starts to ask you why seventeen year old you is ashamed of having sex with her. Seventeen year old you is high on PCP so you just sit there and stare at her face while she talks and cries and cries and talks. You hear every word she says to seventeen year old you, but you are high on PCP and every word she says to you feels like someone pulling one of your toenails out through your face. You close your eyes as tight as they can close and you see Cumulonimbus clouds turning into multi-colored super cells and churning behind your eyelids.

When you open your eyes again seventeen year old you is crying and there are more people sitting in the grass in front of you with the girl who snuck in through your window. Her boyfriend calls you an asshole and challenges you to a fight. Seventeen year old you is high on PCP and crying in a park surrounded by a group of kids who are on drugs and you do not want to fight because you know that if you fight you will kill this kid, so you say that and he gets angrier. Seventeen year old you is high on PCP and you feel surrounded so you get up and start to walk home.

Nobody follows you.

******

Your father dies in your arms on your 35th birthday. You have been helping to take care of him. It has been the hardest thing you have ever had to do in your lifetime. You forgave one another for so many terrible things that happened between you without having to say anything out loud about those terrible things. Now you are looking at him without any life in him. His vessel is empty. You stand in silence as his wife cries and cries. You stand in silence as her son consoles her. You stand in silence because your eyes are drawn to the bottle of liquid morphine on the table. You stand in silence because your mind is thinking about the bottles of pain management pills on the counter.

You do not touch them. You fight back that urge the best that you can.

Your father’s wife leaves with her other son to go back to his house a few blocks away, leaving you there with the son who was there with you for the passing and now a nurse from the Hospice who has arrived. You watch as she pours the liquid morphine down the sink. You watch as she dumps pill after pill down the drain. You feel her looking into your eyes and you know that she knows that you wet your lips thinking about the liquid morphine and the pills.

When the coroner comes you help to put your father into the body bag and you help to put him on the gurney. You help put the gurney in the back of the van. You keep on thinking about that liquid morphine and the tacky feeling of it between your fingers when you would put it under your father’s tongue during the night. You watch the van pull away and you look at the nurse who has been so kind to you and your father and you think about the few little drops of that liquid morphine you allowed yourself as you cared for your father. You think about being in that state with him. You think about the moment the priest came and gave him his Last Rites and how all you wanted to do in that moment was put a pillow over his face and help him slip away.

You do not allow yourself to cry until you are on an almost empty airplane. Somewhere between Houston and New York City as you sit and watch “Roll Bounce” without headphones or sound you feel the first tear leak out of your eye and roll down your cheek. The next tear comes much more quickly. Then the next. You turn your face to look out the window at the lights below you. You reach into your sock and pull out one of the morphine-laced lollipops the hospice nurse forgot to take from you and you unwrap it and rest it against your lips.

It takes another year for you to finally come down.

******

When I was fresh off the streets and working at the coffee joint, I met this guy named Luke. I’m not sure how it really happened — either I was genuinely nice to him when he was on line to buy a cup of coffee, or he must have noticed my tattoos slipping out from under the long sleeves I was forced to wear by the dress code and sparked some quick discourse — but we ended up sitting around outside one day after my shift and bullshitting with one another. Luke was also covered in tattoos, but his were all very blackened and angry-looking, like they were carved into his flesh with stones and had soot rubbed into them to make them appear ancient and mystical. Luke was wearing a black skullcap and spoke like a stuttering machine gun with a Boston accent. Luke had a sketchbook with him, and it was overflowing with heavily-penciled, Giger-esque drawings of despair and anguish — the kind of drawings and scribblings you might find on a scratch pad used by a meth addict.

Luke was in a wheelchair.

Being polite, I didn’t see fit as to ask Luke what had landed him in the wheelchair. I just did what I normally did with people, and let them decide on their own what it was that they wanted to share with me. It took Luke all of fifteen minutes to turn himself loose and uncoil the story.

******

I have never been particularly adept at maintaining friendships with other boys/men. I’m not sure if this is a result of the awkward childhood I had or if it is a result of me paying attention to the stupid shit I have witnessed boys/men do time after time. I am much more apt to confide in a woman as a close ally than I am capable of spending anything longer than a few minutes listening to another boy/man bitch or gripe about his situation. Most of the time the types of boys/men that gravitate toward me are usually broken beyond repair and full of venom and anger toward anyone that they do not see when they look in the mirror.

From my experience, most boys/men are completely incapable of verbalizing their feelings without somehow pointing angry and crooked fingers at someone or some entity that they feel is to blame for their state of being.

“It’s not my fault” is almost always the first explanation.

******

“So, like, umm — how come you haven’t asked me yet why I’m in this chair?”

“Probably because it’s none of my business.”

“That’s a little weird. Most of the time the first thing people ask me about is how I ended up in the chair.”

“I can clearly see that you are in a wheelchair. I mean — it sounds to me like you want to tell me why you’re in the thing, so you might as well go ahead. I wasn’t going to ask because it is what it is — you’re in a wheelchair.”

“Yeah, man. It sucks being in this chair. A lot.”

“I’d imagine that it does.”

“You have no idea.”

“That’s true — I don’t.”

At this point, Luke had already smoked no less than three of my cigarettes and shown me his entire sketchbook full of demons and pain. It wasn’t that I didn’t care that he was in the wheelchair — it obviously sucked for him, as it would for anyone. I just didn’t feel the need to have someone unload whatever misery they had inside of themselves onto me at that point. I was miserable enough, and just coming off the streets and landing a job and all of that was the best thing I had going for me. I wanted to keep the positive energy flowing from the tap, not muddy it all up with someone else‘s trauma.

“I broke my spine and my neck in Hawaii a couple of years ago. I was on vacation with my girlfriend. We were living in San Francisco — Oakland — when it happened.”

I pushed the pack of smokes across the table toward him and took another drink from my coffee. I watched his hands tremble as he reached for the pack, and then watched as the tremors continued while he tried to light the smoke dangling from his lips. I fought off the urge to reach over and light it for him.

“I always promised her we would go to Hawaii, man. Fuck. I loved her so much. I had a ring with me to ask her to marry me and everything — saved up a ton of money to pay for the trip and pulled lots of extra shifts working as a carpenter. Have you ever loved someone so much that they just took over every part of your being?”

“I used to think that I had, but no — no I haven’t.”

Luke looks at me for a long pause and then his eyes start to well up, so he fumbles with his sunglasses and puts them back on. I can see my reflection in them — my bald pate glistening in the sun and the shadowy outline of the rest of me sitting in the chair across from him. As he gathers himself, I keep on thinking about his drawings and how much pain I could feel coming out of them. I don’t think I had ever seen anything so dark before in my entire life.

“We were having a great time. Sightseeing and all the shit that people do in Hawaii. We went hiking in this nature preserve and it was the most beautiful place I had ever seen, like a real rainforest out of a movie or something. I kept on thinking, ‘now is the time to ask her, you should do it now.’”

“Well? Did you ask her?”

Luke kind of let his head drop, with his chin almost resting on his chest. I sat and waited, taking notice of the size of his hands — they were as big as catcher’s mitts. His upper body and arms were obviously in excellent shape from being in the chair, but I was pretty sure this guy had always been someone who was in excellent shape. Probably blessed with one of those metabolisms that burned off whatever he put into himself within the hour. I took out another smoke and lit it up.

“I didn’t get a chance to ask her. That’s when the accident happened.”

I wait.

“I just — we were standing on this cliff thing, overlooking a pool of water, and I felt so nervous and fucked up about asking her, so I decided to dive into the water, to cool myself down so I could do it.”

“Jesus, Luke.”

“Yeah. She told me that when I hit the water it sounded like a tree coming down or a car accident. Because we were in a remote area she had to scream and scream for help after she climbed down and pulled me out of that water. Someone ran and got the Park Ranger and he radioed for a helicopter to come and get me. The paramedics told her that I should’ve been dead.”

“Fuck.”

“I was in surgery for a long time — they had to re-break my spine because I had fused some of the vertebrae together when I hit the rocks. They did the thing where they drilled a halo into my head to keep my neck stable. They said I would probably never walk again even before they did the surgeries.”

There was a silence that hung in the air between us. I felt terrible for the guy, but this was exactly why I never asked anyone about any kind of affliction or malady — it always ended up embedding itself inside of me, and then I would start to feel so much shame for the ways in which I had wrecked and abused my own body, taking it for granted with all the stupid stunts and bullshit I had pulled over the years. We sat there in the stillness, with teens and soccer moms floating about us as peripheral ghosts — neither one of us making a sound, just smoking and waiting for the silence to end itself.

******

For a very brief period of time I dated a stripper. I met her one afternoon when I was supposed to be at work but decided that I needed to go somewhere and clear my head and be away from everyone else in the world. Whenever I needed to do that I almost always picked a strip club that was on the other side of town from where I lived. I could go in and sit at a table far away from the stage and everyone else, maybe have a couple of drinks and watch from afar as the girls worked the room and the stage. My mother had recently passed away, so the last thing in the world I wanted to do was be around people. Well — people who would want to talk to me or ask me how I was doing.

The cocktail waitress came over to me and asked me what I would like to drink and I told her I just wanted a ginger ale. She looked at me funny and then said there was a two drink minimum, so I told her to go on ahead and bring me two of them. She shimmied off toward the bar. There was a girl dancing on stage to a Scorpions song. There were maybe ten other patrons in the club. The doorman kept on looking over toward where I was sitting. I had, as usual, chosen a table far away from everyone else. The rest of the patrons were all lined up at the tables surrounding the stage. I didn’t want to associate with them, nor did I want to hear the lurid bullshit that would roll off of their tongues.

“Hey.”

I turned my head from glaring across the room at the others to face the voice to my left. Standing before me was one of the dancers. She had long brown hair and a very white bikini. She shimmered under the ultra-violet light. Under that type of lighting, the whiteness screamed off of her bikini and made the rest of her appear almost an apparition. She smelled sweet from five feet away.

“Do you want a dance?”

“I’m sorry — not just yet. I kind of came in here to get some thinking time in, you know?”

“Thinking time? In here? You’re an odd one. What’s your name?”

“Sean.”

“Hi Sean. I’m Amber. Can I sit here with you?”

“Of course you can, Amber. Nice to meet you.”

Amber and I started talking. She asked me a bunch of questions — what did I do for a living and all that regular stuff — and I answered her honestly. I didn’t even notice when the cocktail waitress came by and set down my drinks. When I noticed them on the table I offered one to Amber and she took it, smiling. I asked her some questions about herself — did she like this gig and things of that nature — and it seemed as though she answered them honestly. We were getting to know one another, and it felt pretty natural. Right as we both seemed to be feeling our connection, Amber got called to the stage by the DJ.

“I’ll be right back, Sean. Please don’t leave, okay?”

I nodded and watched her as she made her way to the stage.

******

After a little while had passed, Luke told me that his girlfriend — the woman he wanted to marry — had basically ran out on him after the first couple of months of his rehabilitation. She had started stealing his pain medications and had become hooked on the morphine the doctors had given him. When he confronted her about it, she freaked out and split, leaving him all alone and broke, with nobody to care for him. He didn’t want to go back to Boston to the family he had there, because like most men my age, he was the survivor of a really shitty childhood. He ended up reaching out to his doctors, and they told him about a program in Phoenix where a neurosurgeon was looking for patients willing to take a risk to get their ability to walk returned to them.

He was living in a nursing home and going to see the neurosurgeon at his clinic four days a week. He was on a ridiculous amount of medication — anti-seizure stuff and all of that — and wasn’t really supposed to be drinking coffee, but he felt like the littlest things he wanted were things he should have. As he told me all of this stuff, I watched his face change colors as if I were on acid. With each new set of problems he would share with me his brow would furrow and he would break out in little beads of sweat all over his face and arms.

“I came here because I had a shot to get up out of this chair, to maybe go and find her and get her back. That’s really all I have to live for, man. Just her. Other than that, I’m just living on borrowed time. I can roll this chair out into traffic and be done with all of it, just like that.”

******

I didn’t wait for Amber to come back. I took out a business card for some insurance agent I had been using and wrote my number on the back of it, and gave it to the cocktail waitress, telling her that Amber and I were talking about how she needed new car insurance. I figured it was worth a shot to get my number to her without pissing off the doorman or anyone else in the club. I walked out without even watching her on the stage — I didn’t want to see her like that, not after talking to her as openly as I had.

She called me a few hours later and told me her real name was Marísol. She told me that she was going to community college and studying to be a nurse. She asked me if I would meet her at a Denny’s over by her apartment to get some food and talk some more — she had studying to do and couldn‘t get any studying done where she lived because there were too many people living there.

I told her I would meet her there in one hour.

******

When I saw her sitting in the booth all by herself, surrounded by all of those books and papers, I found her to appear so tiny and childlike. In the darkness of the club she looked older and unobtainable. In the light of the dining area, she looked young and sweet. She looked up as I was walking over and her smile broke me into little shards. She started gathering up her mess and trying to organize it, to make some room.

“I’m so glad you came, Sean. I’ve been thinking about you all day.”

“I’ve been thinking about you too, Marísol. You sure have a lot of homework, don’t you?”

She smiled that smile again and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I asked the waiter for some coffee. Marísol just kept on sitting there, looking at me.

“You’re different, Sean. Why are you so different?”

“I’m not so sure that I am as different as you think I am. I’m just me, really.”

We went back and forth like that for a little while, like boxers feeling one another out in the first round, trying to look for holes in the defense. After a while of that, we ended up sharing things about ourselves. I told her that my mother had recently passed, and she told me about a little brother who was in prison for murder. She told me about her family’s struggle to keep all of her cousins out of gangs, and I told her about my troubles with my father. It seemed like both of us had a lot of hard-scrabble learning experiences under our belts. I looked toward the windows and saw that the sun was starting to rise.

“Marísol, the sun is coming up. Do you need me to drive you home?”

“I’d actually like it if you took me to your home, Sean. I know that sounds really forward, but — you know?”

I took her back to my apartment. We didn’t really say much more for a few hours.

******

Luke started showing up almost every day around the time my shift was ending. At first it didn’t really bother me — I kind of enjoyed getting to know him, as we had really similar backgrounds. Two kids who grew up all kinds of fucked up because of drugs, punk rock and the freedom we found in it, not to mention being spawned from awkward homes where we both had to learn how to take a punch or two. It wasn’t that I felt bad for Luke, either. After all the shit I had been through, I had started to come to the conclusion that The Universe didn’t test weak motherfuckers. I used to think The Universe did nothing but mold shit into champions, and a part of me felt like Luke and I were both sort of shit on our way to being champions.

One afternoon when my shift was about to end, one of my co-workers came to me to tell me that Luke was sitting outside at a table and crying. She had seen him pull a flask out of his little backpack and pour a bunch of booze into his coffee. I felt a little uneasy, because Luke had already told me about his drug problem he had to kick, and here he was getting his drink on in the middle of the day at the place I worked.

I was nervous, but as soon as my shift ended I went right over to where Luke was sitting and sat right the fuck down.

“Are you drinking, Luke?”

“Yeah, man. Shit’s getting kind of rough for me right now. They’re not sure if the therapy is working. I feel so fucked, Sean.”

“What are your options?”

“The doc says he is pretty sure that even if they changed all the medications, I would still end up not being able to walk under all of my own power again. I’ve been able to jiggle my leg a few times, and my toes have been able to wiggle. But this has been going on for almost a year now, and nothing is really progressing.”

“Fuck.”

I just sat and hung out with him as he poured his heart out. His sketchbook was on the table in front of him, and as usual it was overflowing with really dark energy. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from it — the line-work was heavy-handed and full of implied violence and anger that just jumped off of the page and coiled around my heart. It was killing me to see Luke this way, even though I knew there was really nothing I could do.

“How could I have not seen the sign? Sean, the sign was fucking huge and when I think about it in my mind, I can see it as clear as day, ‘Caution: No Diving, Shallow Water.’”

I just sat there, paralyzed in my own way.

******

Marísol and I hung out a lot over the next few weeks. She worked the day shift at the club because they told her she wasn’t pretty enough to work at night — which was pretty much coded racism because she was Mexican. She didn’t mind though, because she preferred the much more easygoing daytime crowd. They tipped her well because she was more attractive than most of the other girls, plus she didn’t have to deal with getting groped and treated like shit by all the drunks that rolled in once the sun went down.

It made perfect sense to me.

Things were going pretty good for us until she found a small amount of heroin in my bathroom. It was in a little pillbox that I had forgotten about. I used to like to sprinkle a little bit of it into a bowl of pot before getting high, to combat my insomnia. I’m pretty sure that heroin was over a year old at the time she found it.

Needless to say, she was mortified at her discovery and it turned into a huge argument. She didn’t mind me smoking pot — in fact, a few times she had indulged with me — but the found artifact of my sordid drug past was something she was not going to be able to get beyond. She started marching around my apartment gathering up her things and cursing at me under her breath in Spanish. I asked her to reconsider, but she wasn’t having it.

“Heroin is fucked up, Sean. You know how many men in my family are in prison because of that shit? No. No way, Sean. I cannot be with someone who uses that shit. No.”

I asked her if she wanted me to drive her home, and she got even angrier with me and then stormed out of my apartment.

A few days later she left me a voicemail telling me all the reasons why it was better if we didn’t see one another any longer. This message contained quite a few things she had never mentioned before, but I figured that is what happens to people when they have time outside of the bubble to really think about and justify things.

I missed her.

******

“Luke — let me ask you a really personal question?”

“Anything, Sean. Ask away.”

“Does your dick still work?”

“Yeah, actually. Not all the time, though. It really freaked some of the nurses out at the home. Sometimes when they are helping me bathe I get a hard-on and they have to leave the room until I tell them it is gone.”

“Is that even normal for a spinal injury?”

“Nope. The doc says that is one of the things that keeps on giving him hope.”

“I have an idea, Luke.”

******

Because Luke had his chair, riding the city bus was always difficult for him. I decided that since I had just been paid, I was taking Luke to the strip club. There was one not too far from where we were, so I went inside and called us a cab to take us there. I rolled Luke over to the cab when it arrived, picked him up and scooted him into the back seat, and then folded up his chair and put it in the trunk. When I told the driver where we were going, he looked at me all kinds of funny in the rear-view mirror, but I didn’t care. I was going to get Luke a lap dance.

When we pulled up to the club — not the same club where I had met Marísol — the doorman actually came over and helped me get Luke out of the cab and into his wheelchair. When I tried to tip him he smirked at me and shook his head. As we went inside, the girl working the door refused to take my money for the cover — basically giving me the same look as the doorman and shaking her head as well.

As Luke and I went through the doors into the main area of the club, even though my eyes were adjusting to the UV lights and my senses were adjusting to the booming sound — I could still see everyone in the place turn and look at us. I didn’t fucking care at all. This was about Luke and not me. As stupid as it sounds, I just wanted my new friend to have one good day, to have a few hours where he didn’t have to think about anything at all.

“Sean, this is amazing. I can’t remember the last time I was in a place like this.”

When the cocktail waitress came around to ask us what we wanted, it took me a second for it to hit me.

It was Marísol.

“What are you doing here, Sean?”

“Hi. I brought my friend here to have a good time. I promise you I won’t be any trouble. How are you?”

“I’m good. Who is your friend?”

“This is Luke. Luke, this is —”

“Amber. My name is Amber. It’s very nice to meet you, Luke. Can I get you something to drink?”

“Yeah. A Jack and Coke.”

Marísol, realizing that Luke is in a wheelchair, puts her hand on my shoulder and leans in close to my ear. I can smell her sweetness and my mind jumps back in time, to dark and hushed nights.

“Is he okay to be here, Sean?”

“I think he needs to be here right now. He has had a rough road, you know?”

“I’ll let the girls know to take good care of him.”

“Thanks, Marísol — this means a lot to me.”

“Amber. You don’t get to call me Marísol anymore, remember?”

******

The night goes by in a blur. Luke gets treated like a conquering king by almost every single dancer. The manager of the club comes over to make sure he is having a good time, and then buys us a couple of rounds of drinks. He tells Luke about a cousin of his, paralyzed in a motorcycle accident. One of the dancers comes over with a pizza and sits in Luke’s lap, feeding him, his smile so big and wide I can see his insides shining.

Marísol, with her kindness radiating out of her, sits next to me and asks me what has been going on in my life. I tell her about recently being homeless, about getting my shit together, about trying to keep my head above water. She tells me she is almost done with nursing school, and she finally has her own place. She keeps on looking over at Luke and smiling. I start to tell her about Luke’s situation, about the neurosurgeon and the special program. She smiles.

“The world is very small and strange, Sean.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just got placed there. I start working there on Monday. I’ll be one of the nurses working with Luke.”

******

After that, Luke never really came around my job anymore.

A few weeks after he disappeared, one of my coworkers said he saw him on the bus, with a girl.

“You saw Luke? On the bus? With a girl?”

“Yeah. They said — ‘Tell Sean, Amber and Luke said thank you.’”

******

Weird shit always happens when you’re waiting around in a car. Like — it never matters why you’re sitting in there — some sort of chicanery always occurs when you’re idling in the furthest corner of a darkened and foreign parking lot, or even right out in front of the 7-Eleven under those brighter than the sun lights.

Cars equal action in many different ways.

******

Back when I was working at that ice cream parlor — the one that got robbed and I was a stupid shit and couldn’t keep myself from fucking with the robber — I befriended the other dishwasher kid. He was a couple of years ahead of me in school and had himself a car. Way more connected in the little punk rock scene I was trying to jimmy my way into, especially when it came to girls. This motherfucker knew every girl in the goddamn city. If a girl even had a haircut that remotely looked “new wave,” or even resembled a grown-out Chelsea, he knew them.

I spent a lot of time in his car that year.

Whether we were driving around aimlessly looking for another house party or going to the mall or whatever — his big U-boat of a car felt like the center of The Universe. He didn’t even have a tape deck, so he’d play cassettes on some little tinny-sounding radio he kept on the seat next to him. We’d drive around passing joints of Mexican dirt weed back and forth while he would put in cassettes of shit I didn’t want to hear at all, but somehow I innately knew this was his way of connecting with all of these girls — like I gave a fuck about Bauhaus or Alien Sex Fiend or any of that kind of shit at this point in my life? I wanted to listen to Black Flag or Black Sabbath — nothing in the known world sounded better to me when I was high — but he would always pop in some fruity Goth shit that I would somehow end up understanding was muy importante through some very primal form of Stoner Osmosis.

That fruity Goth shit was the secret handshake into the club. That fruity Goth shit was the gateway to make-out sessions in laundry rooms. That fruity Goth shit would lead to having girls come knocking on my window when the moon hung up in the sky. That fruity Goth shit would get my fingers in a lot of different pies.

******

Sitting in a car while people you barely know go inside of a house in a really shitty part of town to connect to get drugs you know you should not be doing with money you took out of the cash register at the place where your friend works is always an awkward thing. The car is running and you sort of keep on having these feverish ideas of sliding over to the drivers’ seat and taking off with it — it isn’t like these fools know you in any way, so you might be able to get pretty far before they send their dogs after you.

The drugs are worth the wait. The drugs are worth the awkwardness of this. The drugs will make all of this feel better.

You keep on looking over at the doorway to the house, hoping to see shadows moving as people, foaming at the mouth at the thought of the bounty they will have on their shadowy person as they slither and amble back to the car. You also keep scanning the block for any interlopers — you know this neighborhood is notorious for strong-arm robberies and low-level thugs who lurk behind hedges who like to pop out and rob white boys to teach them a lesson. Your fingers feel fat with anticipation and skinny with hunger while you rub them on your pants. You can see your breath in the car and you can smell that stale smell coming from the ashtray.

Full of stubbed-out roaches, you take two of them, and after carefully emptying out the tip you shove them into the end of your cigarette and figure “what the fuck?” and fire it off to ease some of the itch you have going on while you wait for the drugs you came here for.

The smoke fills the inside of the car so you crack the window and that is when you hear the yelling coming from inside the house. It sounds like someone is being beaten, and you hear someone screaming about money. You go to put your head in your hands because you know this means you will probably not be able to get what you came here for and when you move your head everything around you drags and wheezes. Dusted.

You realize you are fucked and start calculating in your head how you can navigate your way back to where you started without having to get dragged from the car by the people in the house who are angry about something that has nothing to do with you.

You realize you are fucked and you are not going to get the drugs that you came here for, so you open the glove compartment and see that within it is a small brick of marijuana wrapped in paper and a small caliber handgun inside of a dirty sock. You shove both of them into your pants, realizing you will never see the money you stole that you gave to the people you barely know that are inside the house — possibly being beaten, possibly running a game that you will end up being punished for — well, you’ll have to weigh this theft as a leavening agent and call it a night. For a moment you think about selling the things you’ve just found in the glove compartment for the same amount of money you stole from the register to balance everything out as best as you can.

You leave the car as quietly as you can and slink down the block in the direction your dusted mind thinks will get you home.

******

These two girls I went to high school with had this weird secret life thing going on. They would get into the smaller girl’s car and drive up north to Black Canyon City one night per week and hang out in this little biker bar that never carded them. Black Canyon City was about forty miles outside of Phoenix in Yavapai County. It was a town totally run by Hells Angels. The bigger girl was way into this whole scene — she was always talking in quirky code-speak about how she had “boyfriends” who were in “a club” and how they lived outside of the city.

One night they took me and my closeted gay friend up there with them. We were in the back seat of the car, and the girls were acting like we weren’t even there. Forty miles of them playing Whitesnake songs really loudly on the stereo and lighting smokes for one another. It felt like some weirdo field trip — my friend and I kept on looking at each other and shrugging.

We pulled into the dirt lot of a bar and the girls just got out of the car and went inside without waiting for us. When we went inside, we realized these people had probably never seen punk rock kids before. The place was pretty quiet — maybe only a dozen folks inside at all. There were four pool tables, so my friend and I immediately went and occupied one of them, trying to pick one furthest away from where everyone else was.

The girls came back with a couple of pitchers of beer and we all started to shoot pool. The funny vibe I felt when we had come in had started to dissipate a bit. The four of us loosened up a lot, and I could kind of feel the room loosen up as well.

At one point, this massive biker — he must have been at least 6’7” and easily over three hundred pounds — shuffled his way over to where we were and started flirting with the bigger girl. It was kind of cool to see her outside of the control group of our school, letting loose and smiling for real. She seemed happy and seemed to enjoy the attention she was getting. The other girl kept on smiling at the two of us, trying to clue us in that this was just how it went with them. I started to play connect the dots in my head and realized this was her way of going along for the ride to make her friend happy, and I felt pretty good about it.

That’s around the time the biker started to talk shit, though.

“I see you girls like to hang out with a couple of fags.”

I didn’t weigh more than a buck and a half. I wasn’t afraid, and the beers I had been drinking probably helped me feel a little tougher than I was — but I was damn sure not going to get into a brawl with a biker in his bar. I knew better than that.

“We’re not fags. Why do you have to be a dick?”

When my closeted friend said it, I could see he was pissed. He had those really long skater bangs at the time — the kind that only fell over one half of his face — and he swung his head to the side so they swept up and over to uncover his face. He just glared at the big biker and then went back to lining up his shot.

“If you’re not fags, well then what the fuck are you? You look like a couple of fags to me.”

The bigger girl he had been flirting with looked hurt but still smiled at him as she put her hand around his waist and sort of led him over toward the jukebox. He kept on looking back over at us, but she was doing her best to distract him. I watched her plant a big sloppy kiss on his mouth and he grabbed at her pretty hungrily. My friend and I kept on shooting pool and the other girl sat on a stool smoking and nursing her beer.

After what felt like a long time, I looked over toward the jukebox and saw that the bigger girl and the massive biker were gone. I asked the other girl where they went, and she just shrugged her shoulders, smirked, and went back to flirting with my closeted friend. I went to go empty my bladder in the bathroom. The inside of that bathroom was a horrorshow — nothing but biker memorabilia and racist graffiti/jokes crudely scrawled all over the place in marker. In the urinal was a Mexican flag, as some sort of target to aim at. Fucking lovely.

Coming out of the bathroom I heard some old timer at the bar mumbling something to another one about “getting his turn to ride,” and the other one sort of slapping him on the back with a guffaw. The first old timer winked at me and then they both started cracking up. I looked over by the pool table and saw that the smaller girl was trying to work her magic on my closeted friend — she kept on trying to kiss his face and he kept on laughing and taking big swigs of beer.

I always knew she loved him.

The front door to the bar was open, so I went out into the parking lot to have a smoke and to let the cool air hit me and clear up my head a bit. As I stood out there I could hear the squeaking of the car and then I looked over and saw the back door open with four really big legs sticking out of it — the bare ass of the giant biker pumping up and down on the bigger girl and she kept on trying to wrap her legs around the back of him. I was transfixed, really — I couldn’t help but stare, nor could I help feeling good for her. That’s around the time I realized that this was her thing. Her secret life.

When we were leaving to drive back down to the city, I reached under the seat and put a towel across the bench seats in the back. My closeted friend was drunk as hell — alcohol always hit him really hard and fast and he would always get loud and kind of crazy when he drank — so I leaned in and tried to whisper in his ear what I had witnessed. His face turned into a ruby and then he tried to kiss me on the mouth. I laughed at him and kind of hugged him a little tighter than usual and he let go of the idea and slunk back into his seat, belting out “Here I Go Again” in all its glory.

I can’t even hear that goddamn song now without picturing that huge bear of a biker pounding away on her. It forces a smile across my face no matter the circumstances.

******

I fell asleep drunk in my car one Christmas Eve in front of my high school English teacher’s house.

This was after I had already served my country and come back. We had been drinking beers, scotch, and smoking a lot of weed while listening to The Stooges at ear-destroying levels all night long. He had sort of hired me to help him do a bunch of work on his house with him — which was really nothing more than an excuse to hang out and get loaded together. We shared the same birthday and the same taste for literature, destroying brain cells, women — all of it.

He was really my first and most influential mentor.

After a day of bottomless beers and stucco, I was wiped out. He had passed out in the middle of his living room floor, so I covered him with a throw blanket and came to the ridiculous conclusion that I was okay to drive home — my apartment wasn’t far, and it was so late I figured there would not be a soul on the roads. As soon as I sat down in my car and turned the key, one of those waves of fucked-upness hit me so hard that I swooned and wobbled in my seat and immediately turned the key into the off position.

I wasn’t going anywhere for a while.

In my half-lidded state, I decided to drop my seat all the way back and try to sleep a little of it off before trying to resume my journey. December in Phoenix is not very cold, so I was fine sleeping there in just a jacket. I remember looking up at the light coming off of the streetlamp and thinking it sure had a pretty halo around it, and then I was gone.

I’m not sure how long I was out before I heard the tapping on my window. I just know it was metallic, loud, and it startled the fuck out of me to open my eyes and see a cop shining a light in my eyes.

“Roll down your window.”

“I can’t — they’re automatic.”

“I asked you to roll down your window.”

“I have to turn the key to roll it down, Officer.”

“Do not turn the key — just open the door and step outside.”

He took a couple of steps to the side and I did just that — I opened up the door and unfurled myself from the position that felt pretty good into one of being upright, which did not feel good at all. He asked me if I had been drinking and I told him that I had. He asked me why I was sleeping in my car and I told him that my friend had passed out on the floor in the house right behind me and I thought I was okay to drive home, but realized I wasn’t, so I was going to try and sleep some of it off.

“You know I can take you to jail right now for sitting in that car with the keys in the ignition when you are drunk, right?”

“No, I didn’t know that. Merry fucking Christmas to me, right? Sorry, Officer.”

“How far away do you live?”

“About two miles or so. I can get there without using any of the busier streets and it’ll take me less than five minutes.”

“I’m going to make you a deal, okay? I’m going to follow you home — is that alright with you?”

“Yeah, that’s really awesome of you. Thanks.”

“Merry Christmas. Let’s get going.”

When I got back into my car to start it up and head home, I noticed I had left what was left of my bag of pot on the passenger seat right next to me, along with a small one-hitter. I must have thought about smoking a little bit to ease me into sleep before I passed the fuck on out. There was no way that cop didn’t see it — it was right in the middle of the seat. Fuck.

The cop followed me all the way back to my apartment, even following me into the parking lot and waiting for me to get out of my car. I walked over to his cruiser to thank him, and then he said to me –

“Be careful with all this driving while fucked-up stuff. It’s one thing if you want to wrap your car around a pole and kill yourself, but don’t go killing innocent people, especially on Christmas, you know? Be careful.”

“I will, Officer. Thanks for following me home and making sure I got here safely.”

******

“The Twins are pregnant.”

“Which one?”

“Not one — both of them. Both of them are pregnant.”

“Jesus Christ. Really? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Are you serious?”

“Totally serious. Fucked up, right?”

“Just a little bit.”

“You know what this means, right?”

“Fuck. Abortion Party.”

******

The crew I ran with, well, to put it lightly — we were a bunch of misfits, ne’er-do-wells and miscreants. Living in the desert wasteland of Phoenix, Arizona in the mid to late 1980s was pretty much as awful as it gets. Living there while not fitting in and finding yourself a part of the punk rock scene kind of compounded that awfulness. It made everything seem like some codeine-tainted dreamscape. Life was a wash of colors and tracers flying by in slow motion and double-time all at once. Desert parties. Abandoned pools to skate and destroy. Cheap drugs due to our proximity to Mexico. Lawlessness. Bathtub drugs concocted in cookie-cutter tract homes by bikers. Drive-thru liquor stores that would sell to anyone with a whisper of a moustache.

Wealth was usually the main divider among us.

Most of these kids actually came from pretty decent homes — the part of Phoenix we all lived in was pretty well-to-do, although the reasons why I was living in that part of town were misleading. My family did not have any money at all, we were just a family that had sold a home back east where real estate was valued much higher than it was in a rapidly-expanding municipality like Phoenix. Extra loot meant an extra nice home. My family? We were totally out of our element.

The kids I ran with, though — they all had money, or at least were much better at assimilating into the look and feel of having the money my family did not. They all had cars, for fuck’s sake. All I had was a skateboard that I had to work most of the summer to save up for. Very few of them had newer cars, but the ones that did always seemed to be the same kids who always had extra money hanging out of ripped pockets whenever we would all congregate at Denny’s after a hardcore show or something — not just chipping in for the seven or eight orders of fries, but ordering actual meals that they would hoard.

We were an odd posse, for sure.

*****

This circle of people was very incestuous, like most control groups of teens would turn out to be. Whenever anyone new would rotate into our little family, they would invariably end up attached to the hip of whomever was single at the time. Everyone made out with one another, at least everyone in the opposite gender. Some of us made out with each other regardless of gender, but that didn’t happen very often — usually at the aid of some narcotics that were purchased from some scallywag outside of our circle. Sometimes people would drink entire bottles of cough syrup and “Robo-fry,” the effects of the flood of the medicine supposedly being akin to taking low doses of LSD.

We were that bored.

******

“Which house are we going to have it at?”

“Fuck if I know? Maybe we should just get some generators and have it out at The Power Lines?”

“How many bands?”

“We’ll figure it out. Someone is going to have to pony-up some front money for the kegs, too. Let’s get the girls started on making calls.”

******

There were really only a few predators out there that really had any of us worried at all.

Cops were obviously one of them, no matter how inevitable it was that they would show up and shut down whatever thing we had going on. Half the time we would be sitting around somewhere doing our thing when someone would mention the police and we would all snicker because we knew it was a fucking jinx, and lo and behold if they didn’t show up within ten fucking minutes flat. Most of the time the cops would show up at the party and tell everyone to clear out while they stood around and made whichever sad soul whose house it was pour out all the liquor. There were always cops lurking around the usual parks we would gather in, too. Just hiding two or three blocks off the spot and watching until they saw we were actually having a good fucking time — then they’d roll up onto the grass and into the playground with the gumball machines on rotate to shine that awful light on whatever meek attempts at teen debauchery we had going for us.

Parents really weren’t that big of a deal to most of us. Because some of the crew had folks that had important gigs, there was almost always some set of parental units somewhere within our crew out of town on any given weekend — and if not, someone always knew someone who had parents that were in Aspen or Mazatlán. Every now and then someone would also find out that a family outside of our circle that had a guest house on their property was out of town. Those parties were always notorious and legendary.

We didn’t necessarily fear The Jocks or even The Hessians much — most of the time when they ran out of connections for weed or other drugs they would come to us to help them hook up what they needed. Sure, there were appearances to maintain — peer pressure always drove our groups apart, usually with either the threat of violence or actual violence happening. Whenever actual violence would go down, someone would always come and get me so that I could stare/shout down whatever possible assailant[s] there might be.

In most cases, that tactic, coupled with the entire crew standing behind me ready to throw down if the need actually did arise, worked.

Our biggest obstacle at all times were the packs of roving and unorganized Nazi skinheads that seemed to rise up out of the earth at every turn, foaming-at-the-mouth for violent confrontation. It didn’t matter what part of town you were in — at any given time you would spot two or three of them watching you, studying you as if they were taking notes for a history exam. Phoenix was [and still is, really -- look at all the lunacy going on over immigration right now] a breeding ground for hate-filled boneheads. The complicated part in dealing with them was also maddening — because the scene itself was so small and insular, most of us knew one another. Hell, a lot of them all went to fucking private school together, since most of my friends all went to the ritzy Catholic high schools because their parents were setting them up to get into better colleges and whatnot. Like I said — I was just white trash from Brooklyn that didn’t really belong, along for the ride with a gang of kids playing the rebel card to the fullest.

Basically, it was mostly the threat of violence from them that kept us on edge. The older punks and “traditional” skins we knew were much more likely to take up fists with them, and many times we would end up taking our lumps from those elders for not matching violence for violence with the Nazi skins.

******

“Everything is set for Saturday. Do you guys want to play first, or do you want someone else to?”

“We might as well. Hopefully we can get a full set in before the fucking cops show up and shut it down. How much are we charging per cup?”

“Five bucks and people can drink until the kegs are gone.”

“How much do we need again, four hundred?”

“Yeah, four hundred. We should be able to pull that in, right?”

“As long as nothing fucked up happens, it should be easy.”

“Did somebody make flyers or something?”

“No — the girls have been calling everyone. This is going to be fucking huge.”

******

The harsh reality of teen sex: someone will eventually slip one by the goalie.

When this happens, it usually creates a ripple throughout not only your peer group, but the splinter groups throughout whatever scene you’re a smaller cog within. In our little punk rock world, we would hear stories about someone across town getting knocked the fuck on up and not believe it until we saw that person at a show at the VFW Hall and saw the baby bump with our own eyes, witnessing whatever poor sad fuck of a guy who was responsible for creating it trying to keep her out of harm’s way in the seething and roiling masses of angst-filled teens trying to destroy one another in the cacophony of a five-dollars-to-see-seven-bands punk rock show. We would see the girls within our own group, and watch the way they would witness this activity — some of them with wet eyes, others with the glassed-over coldness of the knowing.

******

The Power Lines was this place way out in the desert north of Phoenix.

To get to it, you’d have to drive for what seemed like miles and miles on a bumpy as fuck dirt road that twisted all the way back into the northern edge of what was then the unincorporated part of the city, on the back side of a small mountain range. None of us ever knew who really found it or heard about it first — it was just part of the city’s folklore and seemed like a magical place that had been handed down from high school class to high school class as a spot that kids could go and congregate, buying themselves a little extra time to party and get loaded before the police chopper would swoop down and shine that million watt spotlight on everyone, scattering them throughout the desert.

The area was immense. On any given Friday night you would have seven to ten different high schools out there partying around their own bonfires, eyeballing one another and flashing those “you don’t want to step to this” glares that testosterone-filled teen boys are so wont to throw off instead of a smile. Of course, you would have all of the different cliques from each school intermingling with one another around their own fires — Preps, Jocks, Hessians — all seemingly getting along on the surface of things.

No matter what schools we were from, the punks were relegated to our own single bonfire as far away from the other schools as humanly possible without setting the desert on fire. We didn’t mind being outcasts, we were used to it. We were only useful when people wanted drugs. We were only necessary when they were looking for someone to fuck with. We were fine in our freak tribe — if anything, we reveled in it.

Every now and then there would be bands out at The Power Lines. Mostly terrible thrash metal bands, as that was what was all the rage in Phoenix at the time. Bands like Flotsam And Jetsam and Sacred Reich were getting national attention, bringing every bedroom mirror Malmsteen out to try and out-shred the next. Sometimes some of the more daring punk rock bands would trek all the way out there, schlepping their gear to try and plug into their generators and play for all the kids. Most of the time they would get laughed at or have rocks thrown at them by all the Hessians and Jocks.

This was just the natural order of things in that era. We were the lowest on the hierarchy then. This was still a period of time when grown men would jump out of their pick-up truck at a stoplight and kick the shit out of you for having blue hair and riding a skateboard. This was when people still saw that episode of CHiPs with the punk rockers on it and felt a little bit of terror. This was way before the plague of mall punks and t-shirts with tattoos on them.

We didn’t have roadies — we had friends who would help us set up our gear.

******

“We’ll get The Twins to hang out over by the kegs and collect the money while some of the other girls hand out the cups. You guys should pretty much start playing right away before all the other people come over to see what all the noise is about.”

“That’ll work. Who do you have manning the kegs for security?”

“Some of the older guys are on their way — Kong and a few of the old SVS dudes.”

“You think the Nazis found out we’re out here? That would be kind of fucked if they showed up and started a bunch of shit.”

“Look — I heard some of them are coming. I don’t think they’ll start any shit out here in the middle of the fucking desert, dude. They know why we’re out here. Some of them are friends with The Twins.”

“I know, I know. I’ll just never understand why anyone would be friends with dudes who are full of hate, I guess.”

“Do you need any help setting up all your equipment?”

“No, we got it. How much juice is in those generators?”

“My brother said each one of them will probably run for about an hour or so. How long is your set?”

“Twenty minutes, tops.”

******

Whenever a band starts playing at a party where kids are already fucked up on a gang of different chemical libations, there is this really intense moment where time totally stands still. If you’re one of the musicians, the first thing you notice is how loud you actually are, and the moment you strike the first note you see nothing but a sea of eyes flicker to life at the same time. When you’re a punk rock band playing in the middle of the desert and the only light you have is the glow coming off of a row of bonfires, those eyes look like a pack of hungry jackals.

As you’re halfway through your first song you glance toward the gathering storm of a crowd and you see blood being shed — some of the Hessians from other bonfires have made their way over, and they’re doing that fucked up thing they like to do when people are trying to genuinely enjoy a band — they start to slam-dance with no regard for anything remotely human around them. Elbows and fists. Full-on flying bodies. Loaded morons in moccasin boots careening toward the drummer, plowing through the singer.

Someone screams.

As the song comes to an end, you feel flush with endorphins. You see the old heads — the guys who raised you into this scene — trying to keep the peace with the Hessians and now the Jocks, separating them and explaining to them that this isn’t how things are done. This is controlled violence. When the drummer counts off for the next song in the set, the set you’ve all memorized through hours of almost-mechanized precision rehearsing in the garage, you don’t think — you react and dive right into the opening riff.

You look over toward The Twins and the rest of the girls in your crew. You see them counting money, smiles on their faces. You see the shadowy outlines of a bunch of guys in braces and boots skulking around in the shadows near where the girls are stationed, and then you see some of them come into the light near the kegs, plastic cups in hand. You see some of them nodding their heads along with the rhythm, nemeses helplessly caught in the wake of the noise. You feel the rush and roar of your amplifier at the same time you see nothing in front of you but a whirling cloud of limbs and hair in the desert light.

Someone screams again, this time loud enough to be heard over the rumbling and crashing end of the song. The singer says something to the gathered mass about how we’re all out here trying to get along, about how nobody out here should be violent toward anyone else. The singer tries to duck but the bottle hits him in the side of the head, shattering and raining glass all over the drummer. Someone screams. The next bottle hits your guitar and a terrible sound rumbles from your amplifier. You can feel warm beer and glass all over your hands. You see the old heads trying to grab up the throwers, but now the torrents of bottles and cups are almost too much to defend against.

There is nowhere for you to hide.

You cover your eyes and look over to where The Twins and the rest of the girls were and you see them running toward their cars. You get hit in the shoulder with another bottle. Someone screams and then you hear gunshots. The same swirling crowd becomes a scattering, a conflagration of flight. You see hundreds of kids running across the desert floor and into the brush. You see kids running through the bonfires as you hear the sound of a chopper. You see the bouncing headlights and the flashing gumballs. You hear the ATVs.

You hope they made that four hundred dollars.

******

I’m not sure if other groups of kids within that scene ever threw Abortion Parties. I’m not sure if we even realized what it was that we were actually doing — for the most part, it just seemed like a very natural pack mentality way of dealing with something nobody could ever dare go to their parents with. I never heard of anybody in my group ever telling their parents they had impregnated someone, let alone did I ever hear tell of any of the girls telling their folks they themselves were pregnant.

What was clear, was that nobody within our little crew was ready to be a parent. Being a parent meant no more LSD. Being a parent meant you couldn’t hide out on a golf course until the sun rose, huffing engine coolant and playing grab-ass. Being a parent meant growing the fuck up.

None of us were ready for that noise.

*****

Hindsight is a motherfucking wrecking ball.

Sometimes I have these moments of an almost spiritual clarity that are so overwhelming that I can do nothing other than stare off into the void and then every molecule in my body feels like one giant tear welling up and trying to work its way out through my face. These moments always happen when I least expect them — pretty much confirming for me that to truly seek answers one must consciously cease seeking answers, which is something I have always felt intuitively.

You know what I am riffing on — those moments when you are standing in line at the bank and in the innermost part of your mind you suddenly see a face from your past and realize that the thing you said to them when you were angry not only really hurt them deeply, but also sort of freed you up from having to deal with being their eternal sounding-board for every little fucking thing in their life they were incapable of dealing with solo?

Yeah, that type of shit. It happens to me all the time. When I least expect it.

Being the type of cat who always seems to be looking for a much deeper spiritual/Universe-level type of meaning, I invariably end up spending some time digging through the mental hard drive after one of these episodes. Looking in between the interactions, trying to find nuggets of infinite wisdom that slipped between the cracks. Trying to make sense of the nonsensical.

Some folks might find that to be a waste of time, but not me. I find it to be fascinating and energizing — nothing feels better to me than learning something, even when it is something I thought I already had all figured out.

That’s why this here piece of ancient wisdom matters so much to me –

“It is not good to settle into a set of opinions. It is a mistake to put forth effort and obtain some understanding and then stop at that. At first putting forth great effort to be sure that you have grasped the basics, then practicing so that they may come to fruition is something that will never stop for your whole lifetime. Do not rely on following the degree of understanding that you have discovered, but simply think, ‘This is not enough.’

One should search throughout his whole life how best to follow the Way. And he should study, setting his mind to work without putting things off. Within this is the Way.” — from Chapter One of The Hagakure

*****

Free advice from a salty dog: you could take that there piece of ancient wisdom and apply it to every last thing you do.

*****

Fithian, Illinois is a very small town. There are maybe five hundred residents that receive their mail there, and on a good day there might be two or three hundred people in the town proper. Fithian is not the smallest town I have ever been in, but it is very close — the smallest being the four days I spent stranded at a small roadside diner outside of the Zion National Park in southern Utah, where it was almost impossible for me to hitch a ride out of there. Probably had something to do with my heat stroke-driven delirium and all of the tattoos right there in the heart of Polygamy Nation.

Interestingly enough, I did get picked up by a long haul trucker who took me all the way to Flagstaff, Arizona — which sort of ties in to my experience in Fithian, Illinois.

*****

I was moving back home. Back to my roots. Back to what was left of my family. Back to Brooklyn. I was making my way across the country in a Mitsubishi Eclipse that was dangerously overloaded with the weight of far too many personal belongings, a couple of angry and scared cats and a girlfriend who was in the middle of a nervous breakdown. Driving through Oklahoma in the dark of night, I rocketed right through an armadillo at ninety-five miles per hour. The under-carriage of the Eclipse felt like it was about to fall out at the moment of impact. I let go of the wheel, secretly hoping that the car would careen into oncoming traffic and kill the both of us.

The car had a mind of its own and worked its way over into the soft shoulder of the highway, out of harm’s way. My girlfriend woke up screaming at me, demanding to know what had just happened and why we were stopped in the middle of nowhere.

“What the fuck, Sean? Why do my feet feel like they are on fire — is something wrong with the car? What did you do?”

I didn’t say a word. I just opened up the driver’s side door and stepped right out onto the highway as a semi went roaring by — the rushing wake of air felt like a blast furnace, like a crematorium. Crouching down next to the car, all I could see in the darkness was blood. I had put my hand down into something wet beside the left front tire, and when I picked up my hand it was covered in the gore of the armadillo.

I took off my shirt and put it on top of the hood and then slowly slid myself underneath the car, to where most of the remains of the armadillo were stuck to the under-carriage. It was hot and sticky, and the smell was unbearable. I managed to break loose most of what was wrapped around the beginnings of the drive train and scooped as much of the armadillo out of the brake pads as I possibly could without taking the tire off — there was no sense in having that mess cooking itself to the brakes and hampering my ability to drive. When I pulled myself up from underneath the car, I could see the look of horror on my girlfriend’s face — she immediately began writhing in her seat, covering her face with her hands and crying.

This was an atypical outburst — I‘m the one covered in the blood and inner-workings of a recently deceased armadillo, but she is hysterical.

*****

Part of the reason why we were in such a rush was because her step-grandmother had passed away. Granted, I had never in the period of time we were together heard her mention this woman other than to talk shit about how mean she was to her — but she was sure as shit flipping out on us somehow driving 1700 miles in twenty-four hours to get there in time for the wake/funeral. We slept for brief periods of time in rest stops — usually no longer than half an hour or so — cats crawling around at our feet, the car full of so many different scents that I didn’t know where I ended and the smell of beef jerky or cat piss began.

“Do you want to take a couple of these pills I have?”

“The fuck are they?”

“Erin said they were Adderall or something? They’re like uppers. You should take a couple of them, and then we can just drive all the way through. I have to get there, Sean. I just have to get there.”

“I’m not taking some fucking pills you got from some cunt of a co-worker. This is the same fucking girl who fed you lines of meth at your going away party you neglected to tell me about nor invite me to, right? The night you came home spun the fuck on out, grinding your jaw and decided it was cool to hit me? Fuck that.”

“Fuck you, Sean. I have to get there.”

*****

The first time I met her, she came into the coffee joint I was working in. I had just got off the streets and landed a job as a barista. She ordered a large coffee — “leave an inch of room for cream, please.” She tried to pay for a $2.07 cup of Sumatra with a credit card. When she handed me the card her hands had that alcohol poisoning shake going on. The card was declined. So was the second one she shakily handed me. I just stood there half-smiling while she rummaged around in her purse for enough change to pay for most of it, then I told her to put her money away.

*****

When she finally fell asleep, I crept out of the car and went to a picnic table to smoke and gather myself. I pulled out the cell phone and called her father — a long-haul trucker who chewed tobacco and liked to joke around with me on the phone, his big raspy voice saying things like “I never once in my life thought my little girl would go with a New York Jew — how come you don‘t sound like Jerry Seinfeld?”

He picked up on the fourth ring.

“Hey — it’s Sean. Unless you know some magical back-door route where I can somehow do two-hundred miles per hour and not get caught, we’re not going to make it in time for the wake or the funeral.”

“I figured. How’s my little girl holding up?”

“She’s a fucking mess. I hit an armadillo a couple of hours ago in Oklahoma and that set her off pretty bad. She’s sleeping now. We’re at a rest stop just inside Missouri.”

“An armadillo? Did you fuck up the car?”

“Nah — it was a hell of a mess for me to clean up on the side of the highway in the middle of the night, though. That fucker exploded something terrible.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t get killed. I’ve seen those little tanks take out whole semis — that’s why I refuse to work in fucking Oklahoma.”

“Can you do me a solid? I need for you to wait about an hour or so and then call this phone. Please try and tell her that this idea that we can make it there in time is impossible and insane? I’m doing the best that I can, but I cannot take her freaking out any more. It’s insanity.”

“You got it, buddy. I’ll call her up in about an hour. See you guys soon. Please be careful.”

*****

When she and I first started dating, she lived in a two bedroom apartment stacked from floor to ceiling with boxes, four cats, and her bi-polar mother. She was bi-polar as well, but she went untreated. Her parents divorced when she was young, and the custody battle was told to me as a horror story. From everything that I was told, her father was a very intelligent man — and in some ways his arc reminded me of my own, an outsider with intelligence and the albatross of potential hanging around his neck — who ended up falling into a life bound by his environment as opposed to his natural intelligence and abilities. The marriage fell apart because he took it upon himself to work hard for his new family, but working hard meant being away from home most of the time — taking long haul jobs all across the country.

When a partner is away, well, we all know that type of story.

The first time she and I had an argument I totally lost my shit — so riled the fuck on up and full of pressure that I actually screamed inside of the fuselage of the car, causing the windows to rattle and shake. I should have known right then and there that what had just happened was the biggest and brightest red flag I could ever ignore — losing my shit should never be on the menu.

I moved in with her and her mother shortly after.

*****

We arrived at her father’s house only a couple of hours after the funeral. Everyone was milling around in the yard, folding chairs scattered all across the driveway. As we pulled up I felt queasy — like I had been up for days on crank and the world was just settling around me like flakes in a snow globe. I had never met any of these people before, and here I was, meeting them for the first time at a fucking funeral after party.

She shot out of the car before I had even turned it off, racing across the yard toward her father — a fucking mountain of a man with a huge beard and a can of beer in his hand. As I was closing the door to the car I got another whiff of the armadillo — like the fucking thing was haunting me, taunting me from Critter Heaven. I watched her father pick her up in his arms and squeeze her. I watched the faces of everyone else gathered and saw so many different emotions on display at our arrival — some people looked totally gassed-out and drained, other people looked nothing short of annoyed.

I’m sure it was a big to-do.

I slowly made my way over to her and her father. I nodded my head at a few people who were staring me down — I am sure I was a sight to see for people in a town that small. A man they had never met who was dating a member of their family — moving her to Brooklyn of all places — covered in tattoos, shaved head, road-weary and completely tapped-the-fuck-on-out.

“So — this is Sean, eh? Come on over here and shake my hand.”

In person, his voice was even louder, raspier. Kind of like how Wolfman Jack sounded to me as a kid. Familiar. He stuck out his hand and I put mine in it, his huge meaty paw enveloping my hand like it was a child’s. He started to laugh this amazing and booming laugh and pulled me into him, giving me a hug. He reeked of Copehagen and beer.

“You want a beer, Brooklyn? We’ve got plenty of them over in those coolers — since you’re taking my little girl to New York City, I suppose what’s mine really is yours, isn’t it?”

“Thanks. Actually — I’m not much of a drinker. Is there a cooler full of soda?”

“What? Are you some sort of New York sissy? Get a load of this guy — ‘not much of a drinker.’ You sure can pick ‘em, honey!”

Everyone got a good laugh out of that one. I noticed that my girlfriend already had a beer in her hand. She liked to drink — so much so, that during our relationship I hardly felt the urge to drink, because her levels of consumption made me ill inside. She could not handle her liquor well, even though she professed to being a Professional Drinker.

I found the cooler with the sodas in it and opened myself a 7-Up.

I was then paraded around the front yard and introduced to everyone. They were all very polite and seemed to be good, decent people. Someone made each of us a plate of food, and told us to go ahead and sit and eat, as we looked like we hadn’t had a meal in while — which was true.

Things started to settle inside of me, the queasy feeling fading into the background.

*****

I am sitting on a stump beside her father’s woodworking shed and smoking. I made my way back here to kind of give everyone some room to breathe and mourn. Death is always such an odd thing, the way it brings people together or drives a wedge between them. Every family goes through those things eventually.

I am watching as a squirrel jumps from branch to branch in a small tree at the far end of the yard. I hear a crunch of a footfall behind me, and then I hear the bang and recoil of a gun go off as I watch the squirrel explode into a mist of blood and fur and fall to the ground behind the tree. I turn around to see her father, huge grin sneaking out from behind his beard, slowly lowering the .38 in his hand and pointing it at my fucking head.

“Please don’t point a gun at me.”

“Aww — I’m just playing around, Brooklyn. Can you believe the way that little rodent blew up like that? Damn, that was a good shot.”

“I’m serious here — please do not point a gun at me. It isn’t something that’s going to make me feel very comfortable, you know what I mean?”

Her father lets a slow whistle seep out from his teeth and lowers the gun. Nobody from the rest of the family even bothers to come into the part of the yard we’re sitting in — as if the gunshot is something that they are all too used to hearing. He stands there for a minute, half glaring at me, possibly trying to gauge what kind of motherfucker it is that is dragging his daughter off to the wild jungle that is the Brooklyn in his mind.

“Come on into the shed, Brooklyn — I want to show you something. I think it’ll flip your wig.”

*****

One of the things that I learned very quickly while cohabitating with a mentally ill mother/daughter combo-platter was that they spoke to one another without speaking most of the time. The verbal cues they used had much deeper meaning — mentioning something about one of the cats was usually some sort of secret code that was actually referring to something altogether different. There was also some kind of preternatural sexual energy floating around in the apartment which always left me feeling unsettled, as if the two of them and the swirling nature of their mental illness were up to some form of witchery unknown to me.

I came to find out later that their collective history was intertwined with far too much for me to ever reveal to anyone — so much so that even they would never dare speak of certain things while together, with only hints and allegations slipping free in singular conversations. Names muttered in quiet tones between bong hits. Scenarios revisited after a mouthful of vodka, told to me as if I myself were there.

Lord have mercy if I wasn’t able to connect for pot — the two of them would go into death throes. My girlfriend once obsessed and freaked out so badly she scared off my most consistent connection by calling and leaving harried voicemail after harried voicemail while I was sleeping. She even accosted a friend of mine in a tattoo shop, getting into her face and personal space and saying “well, if you don’t know where we can get some pot, you should at least roll us a joint or two of what you have on you, you know?”

Every day was a party around there.

*****

Her father walked over behind where he had his array of table saws set up and pulled a very old and weathered-looking footlocker out from behind a false wall. I stood back a bit, watching as he dusted it off with the back of his hand. He bent down and worked the combination on the lock while holding his can of beer clamped tight between his teeth. Looking around the room I noticed there were a lot of unfinished projects hanging around — what looked to be bookshelves, a rocking chair, what could possibly be part of a bed frame.

“Come on over here, Brooklyn — I ain’t gonna bite you. Check this out.”

As I walked over to where he was standing I could see that the footlocker was Army issued. He had the top of it propped open, and inside there were some compartments with memorabilia and flags. That’s when I saw what he was holding in his hand.

“Look at this thing — ain’t it pretty? You think the handle is made out of real human bone?”

My heartbeat. My heart was beating so hard that it felt like my entire ribcage was about to burst and splinter across his workshop. I could feel the cold sweat breaking out on my forehead. It felt like my balls had decided to turtle up into my body. My eyes got blurry as I stared at what was in his hand, what he was holding out to me as some sort of offering.

“This here is a genuine article, Brooklyn. Got it at an estate auction not too far from here. I have a lot of this stuff — never served my country like you did, but I sure do have a lot of respect for everyone who has. Go on — you wanna hold it?”

“No. No I do not want to hold it.”

“Aww, c’mon. How many Jews you think were skinned alive with this knife, Brooklyn?”

My mouth would not work. All of the saliva was hardening inside of it like cement. I had to put my hand on a table to steady myself. As soon as he noticed how pale I had become, and how I could not really hold myself up under my own power he broke out with his giant laugh yet again.

“Oh, man. I’m sorry, Brooklyn. I figured this would be something you might want to see. I didn’t mean anything by it. Look — I’ll put it away. I’m really sorry.”

I just stood there, frozen. I had no idea what had really just happened. Did this man, the father of the woman I was moving back to Brooklyn with me — did he just in a span of no less than five minutes not only point a gun at my head, but also just pull out a genuine Nazi dagger with a bone handle? How was any of this real? Why am I involved in this?

*****

Later on that night I was pacing back and forth in their driveway, smoking a joint and chewing up a handful of Xanax while talking to my cousin on the phone about what had happened. I was trying very hard to relay the terror I felt without coming off as too alarmist, but failing miserably.

“You already knew this relationship wasn’t going to work. Just try to make the best of it and get yourself home — everything else will work itself out when it needs to.”

She was dead right.

*****

One of the things I learned way later on — after the dust and carnage of the relationship settled and I was able to look at my own actions and truths clearly — was that she and I were on similar trips.

Me? I was trying to pull a Prodigal Son type of return to my roots. I wanted to be close to my family. I wanted to walk the very streets that spawned me. I knew there was no other place in the world I was supposed to be, and that I had no choice but to try and escape from the life I had out in the desert that I never wanted to be a part of to begin with.

Her? Well — she was trying to escape her past as well. Trying to erase that small town she was born five miles outside of in a trailer. Trying to take herself and put herself into a place where she could spread her wings and be who she always wanted to be. I know it seems corny, but New York City appeals to a lot of people in the same way, people from small towns all across the world get caught up in the romantic ideas that surround a place like this.

Irrespective of the emotional terrorism of our doomed relationship with one another, we both ended up getting to exactly where we needed to be.

*****

“May you have the hindsight to know where you’ve been, The foresight to know where you are going, And the insight to know when you have gone too far” — Traditional Irish Blessing

*****