SYNAPSE UPDATED AND EDITED 12/11/09 (Pages 1-47)

            I watched as the trash piled up around the only desk in the cabin: A few microwave food wrappers here and there, and crumpled pages from the typewriter, but mostly it was empty beer cans, cigarette butts and packages (Christ was I sick of the packs in Canada.  The butts were all short, tasted like garbage, and the packs themselves were more complicated to open than could ever be rationalized). 

            It wasn’t all that bad, but it was a synergy of shit like that: the way time passed like water did when you stood and stared at the Merrimack when you were high.  I got fucking SICK of reading Dharma Bums, but at least I had my poetry.  That is to say, I had what I had already written: I could barely write while we were on that damn boat.  It came to a point where I’d just sit around and wait for the next time Roderick brought out the opium.

            Sometimes I’d curl up in the storage space under the rug and my body would shut down.  I’d wake up a couple of days later when Roderick would open the hatch to get a new typewriter ribbon or to rummage through the other assorted bullshits that were down there.

            You’ll find desolation in crazy places when you need it.

            Like I said, I had trouble writing while we were there. It was as if Roderick hogged inspiration.  Sometimes he’d find me in that crawlspace with something I’d written roundabout the time I’d lost consciousness, but we can only approximate when that was, because most of the time neither of us were ever really sure just how long I’d been down there.  Sometimes I just got lucky and wrote something new to read.  The opium made it happen, I suppose, in an indirect manner. It was that smell of light amounts of licorice and orange, and of some unidentifiable nut, mixed together in smoke. That black obsidian paste was the color of a writing block.  Kind of tasted like it, too.  I remember it more than I remember the taste of food.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

              Roderick glances at the last in the pack and, luck of the draw, it’s stamped with a star:  one more added to the spatter hidden behind the distant skyscrapers.  The air here on the ramparts feels old, like I could choke on the unbrushed-teeth breath of Sam Champlain if I sit long enough on this cannon atop the slanting ramparts tonight.  I can see the fluids churning behind Roderick’s eyes, as if he’s having a similar (albeit darker) version of the same thought.  Moments like this make you wonder about free will.  This is life as it’s found. Life as lived in the moments that directors don’t edit together from their cameras.  The downtime.  The thoughts in between action.  Like a year alone in a houseboat, waiting for the next chapter to start.

A year in a houseboat, watching sculptures arise from the pile of empty cigarette boxes and cans of appallingly cheap beer.  A year reading words from your own knuckles that you don’t remember writing.             

A year of watching Roderick wave a gun around on the deck as if he had the balls to use it .

This is not to say that it wasn’t time well spent.  As I’ve said it was just downtime.  And this night, on the walls of old Quebec is the epiphany, so to speak.

I flick the butt at the river out of habit, but it falls a few thousand feet short.  It’s a hell of a change from staring at the Merrimack, and somehow after that past year of living on the Seaway I still forget where I am sometimes.  Chartered streets have no choice but to look the same the world over; I may as well have passed all that time on the Thames: the syphilis on the dock-front air has an unmistakable taste of shit and infected fatherless children. These are the places that make me wonder if free will is worth the universal evil it implies on its other hand.

A while ago I used to think I should’ve stayed in school.  I spent a year at St. Andrew’s College in Manchester way back.  I left because I don’t deal well with mannequins, and the idea of three more years with 2900 of them didn’t really grab me by the balls.  The only reason I considered sticking it out was the campus.  It was like they took a traditional New England college setting and slapped an ancient Roman square in the midst of classic ivy-covered English mansions, and tacked on about fifty acres of 18^th century farms hidden in forest.  It was great, but that shit wasn’t enough to keep me in a WASP bubble for another semester, so I transferred to the University of Massachusetts.  Mixed blessing.  

I stuck around, so to speak, for another semester, but over the course of that semester, the more I saw Roderick the more I realized that he was getting as tired of the paradox of getting a college education as I was. That was when we cut our ties, pulled together some scraps and hauled our asses up to Montreal.  Will power will get you places sometimes.

I read once about a fifth century monk by the name of Palagian.  Palagian believed that everybody had the power to make themselves good.  He rejected the doctrine of Original Sin, suggesting that it hadn’t really ruined us all, and that we could earn our way into heaven by means of what he called “will power.”  Palagianism is the belief that it is possible to save oneself by means of tempering the soul to be virtuous and right. 

The backlash from this submission was massive.  It absolutely terrified the Christian world, this claim that the soul’s salvation was in its own hands. 

If there’s one thing I learned in college it’s that we fear the void.  We naturally dread the idea that there is no higher meaning.  We refuse to believe that we are our own gods, and this is Olympus.  Will power is paradoxically threatening to us.

            Thoughts in between action.  Mind-forged manacles.

So we sit here on walls of slumping Quebec, smoking Lucky Strikes, damn near incognizant, without a plan or much purpose to our visit, other than the driving force of a bottle of red wine consumed by each of us.  And will.  God knows what Roderick’s thinking about, if he’s able to think right now; I’ve learned that red wine kicks his mind’s ass raw.  He’s usually not much for sharing thoughts, anyway.  I’ve watched him pull a lot of remarkably crazy shit for over a year, but lately he’s got this look when he gets this way, this look like he got a lobotomy in the instant you looked away, and you turned back and he was a vegetable.  The crazy thing is in that exact look you can see he’s got a Molotov thought-cocktail in his head, but he doesn’t know what the fuck to do with it.  Fucking nutty.

“Jesus I need to get my ass off this thing, I’m fucking retarded right now,” I say as I swing my legs off the old acid rain-pitted iron cannon and hit the ground, damn near eating shit on the way down.  I gather my balance as best I can and turn to Roderick, who was looking like a first grader sent to the office for talking.

            “I was talking to Jack.”  He’s staring right past me.

            “Oh yeah? What’d he have to say?”

            “He told me that I knew time.  We were atop Olympus Mons, on Mars.  It wasn’t really Kerouac, it was just his spirit.  It was bizarre.” 

            I’m actually not confused or concerned by this statement.

            “How bizarre?”

            He smirks.  “Fuck you.”

            It wasn’t the first time either of us had run into Jack.  Growing up in Lowell I’d had my run-ins with his ghost.  I just wish I could still get in touch with him.  We haven’t seen eachother much lately. 

            Palagianism was declared a heresy in the Catholic Church in 416.  The idea of will power scared the shit out of Augustine.  Martin Luther denied the very idea of free will altogether.  Free will makes us all gods.

            Roderick looks at me.  “Do you remember Soma?”

            “Who the fuck is Soma, man?”

            “From the bus stop THAT NIGHT, back in Manchester.” 

            “Vaguely. Was she one of those girls we scammed the tickets to Montreal from?”

            “Yeah--”

            “Ohhhhh right, I had the scratcher and you had the screamer.  Which one was Soma?”

            “The screamer.  Are you that bad with names?”  Sometimes I am.  Especially when I’m drunk.  Give me a break.

            “Why, what about her?”

            “I don’t know.  I keep on thinking about her for some reason.  She could’ve turned my ass in back then.  I still don’t get it: she gave the cops a bullshit sketch of me.  Why? We scammed her and her friend and robbed them blind.  They could’ve completely fucked us.”

            “Ugh.  Yeah, good call.”  I let that go long ago, and I think the cops did too.  The U. S. isn’t the only country that doesn’t waste their police resources on dead no-bodies and the poor plights of illegal immigrants turned small business owners.

            “Well, whatever, I’m really not worried about it.  What I’m thinking about is Quebec.  These walls.  Have you even noticed the air?”

            “What about it?”

            “It’s the purest tasting fall I’ve ever had.  It tastes like 1829.  It tastes like fuckin’1608.  This is knowing time, man.”  But I could tell Roderick was still piss drunk.  I started to walk along the wall toward the outcropping we’d somehow managed to climb without killing our drunk selves, and wondered how the hell we were going to get back down.  Roderick followed.  It looked as though the world was moving in hyperspeed for him, judging by the wideness of his eyes and the dilation of his pupils.

            For some reason I thought of the summer we spent before we came here.  The days we spent smoking marijuana in the freckle-shadows of beech trees in the kind of summer warmth that feels like you’re emanating it all yourself.  Smoking butts in a basement bare but for a couch, a desk and a cracked old television.  Days spent manhandling the time between shifts as line cooks.  Time passed around a trashcan fire pit tucked in a corner of a backyard forest, any given night of any given season.

            Life as it’s found.

            We slipped down the rocks, down from the archaic ramparts, and back into the city, and looked around blankly, trying to dredge up an idea of what to do next.

***
II.

            In all my life I never had cabin fever so bad as in that houseboat.  It was markedly more difficult to deal with due to the fact that Roderick had lost around two thirds of his mind, but on second thought that was why we were there in the first place.  It started with calling himself Cedric, which wasn’t odd at first, but I soon realized that was all he’d answer too.  It was kind of roundabout coming to that conclusion, because the only people he’d given a name to in weeks were some girls we met at a bus station right before we caught the bus to Montreal in the first place.  Come to think of it, if he hadn’t taken the time to drop that name, we’d still be back in…Manchester.

            Actually, yeah. At least it wasn’t Manchester.

surgical masks
give direction to heated
blankets in chilled

white chambers.
I haven’t healed yet.

the morphine  is conducted

through marked tracks.

I write the past

in platinum veils

of smirking excess.

            “Whatever happened with Gen?”

I’m never much for giving background when I ask questions.

“I’m certainly gonna need more info on what the fuck you’re talking about to help you,” Roderick asserted in his renowned big fat smartass tone.

 “You know who I mean.”

“No, I clearly don’t.”

“Well we only know two Gens that I’d ever bother mentioning for any actual reason.”

“Why don’t you just tell me what you’re talking about instead of bullshitting about it.”

This is when I wish we still had a fight club, because I need to lay his ass out once in a while.  I’m never one to point it out, because it feels as though thought often travels on a kind of parallel circuit between us (as much as William James might tell you that that’s impossible), but sometimes I just want to give him a nice, solid tolchok to the side of the head and tell him to cut the bullshit, because I get deathly sick of the act.

As I said, I’m not one to bring it up.  We know, and our brotherhood is largely founded on a certain nearly healthy level of mutual hatred.

“Fucking Gen, the chick from that coffee shop we were in that night and we tied the dude up…you know, the Lebanese girl. We asked for her number and she said if we really wanted to find her we would. You know exactly who the hell I’m talking about asshole.”

            Roderick was silent. 

I put my cigarette out in the nappy carpeting, that rotten-orange shade from the late sixties or early seventies that’s looked filthy since the day it was installed, and stood up to leave.  “I’ll be back”.

I headed out the door, navigated past the piles of trash bags on the deck, and stepped off onto the pier.  I needed to go for a walk before I had an aneurism, or suffocated in the staleness of the smoke.  I was getting physically sick of the docks, and furthermore I was damn near through with Montreal if everything remained stagnant, smoky and wasted like this. 

I headed up towards Saint Catherine Street.  Dusk in the city always helps to occupy the mind: there are  enough blazing-rainbow neon lights and filthy crippled bums to keep your eyes moving and your mind on autopilot.

Life as it’s lived in the moments directors edit out of their films.

I was getting hungry, and I was very sick of microwaved burritos.  I turned right onto Rue Peel and walked until I saw the glowing red sign of the O’ Leary Pub.  I was about to run a routine I hadn’t worked in weeks, and I was a little nervous about it because I knew I was rusty, but I was hungry and had no money, and hunger and poverty are two remarkably effective motivators.

 I swallowed hard; my sinuses were blocked and my eyes were itchy.  I must’ve been allergic to something in that damn houseboat. 

What I needed now was to find a very specific type of girl: she needed to be between a 5 and a 7 on the 10-point attraction scale for this trick to work.  I started to walk slower and with a slight swagger, pushed my shoulders back, and straightened my spine.  I was definitely slipping: my posture was usually perfect.  I cleared my mind and took some deep breaths.  God, I forgot how good this felt. Fuckin’ go time! I told myself.

And it took about two minutes for me to find my target:  as I walked past the fourth pub up on the right side of the street I spotted a girl about nineteen years old, with olive skin and jet-black hair a little more than halfway down her back, an impeccably tailored black pea coat tight around her body, and a particularly sexy pair of low-rise Express jeans accenting her hips and ass.  She was a solid 7, which generally meant I wouldn’t be able to get quite as much meal as I could hope for from a 5, but everything following the meal would be much more enjoyable.  The thing about girls within that rating demographic is that they tend to be more eager to please attractive men; they try harder to get laid than 9‘s and 10‘s, as Roderick and I had learned.

We had this crap mastered.  The only question in my mind was which line I should use to open this deal.

I was about ten feet behind her, so I had a bit of ground to cover before I could initiate this part of the scheme, but the sidewalk traffic was heavy enough that I wouldn’t be too conspicuous.  I sped up my pace a bit, but not enough that it’d draw attention.  After another two minutes I was a good four feet ahead of her and to her left.  Perfect.  I slowed a little bit and casually but spontaneously looked over my shoulder, clearly with a question in mind, searching for someone to ask.  My eyes crossed hers once and passed on, but then they backtracked and locked.

“Excuse me?”  She was completely flustered. That was definitely the face she should be making.

“I kind of like the atmosphere there, but I’m in the mood for Italian tonight, so I’ve been thinking about De Luca’s.”

“It’s just a way farther walk, you know what I mean?”  I made sure to maintain eye contact, and keep it firm but inviting.

“…yeah I guess so. I mean…”  She shivered a little bit from the needly fall air.

“Agh, why the hell is it so cold, huh?” I wrapped my arms around myself and looked slightly irritated. She laughed a little and absentmindedly touched her hair, still a tiny bit nervous, but visibly curious now. 

“Alright, well O’ Leary’s is right there anyway.  I’ll let you buy me a coffee when we get in to warm me up.”  I gave her a grin, a little cocky and slightly conspiratorial.

At this moment, she let out a short, incredulous laugh.  “Are you serious? I have no idea who you are! Why would I buy you coffee?”

“Because now you’re curious about me, and you want to know what it’d be like to just follow me into that pub and get a bite to eat with a handsome young man like myself.  And because I’m hungry and going in there anyway,” I said and gave her a friendly touch on the arm.

She was still in a state of complete disbelief, but amused and invested in the moment: it was like something you’d read in a book. 

The next thing I did is illogical, but it’s exactly the right move in this situation.

I acted offended and taken aback.  I said “Whoa, hun, let’s take this one step at a time, huh?” and gave her a playful push on the shoulder.  She responded by screwing her face up into a goofy smile and turning slightly red, and followed it up by punching me in the arm.

The silly thing about most humans is, for all their brusqueness and bustle-along-on-their-busy-way outer presentation, they’re all just waiting for human interaction, for someone else to draw them into a shared human moment.  She wanted to see where this fantasy-moment was going.

We climbed the short granite staircase up from the street to O’ Leary’s, went in and sat at a crude wooden table on the right.  I love pub furniture. 

I leaned back in my chair and began to talk about my day (of course, I neglected to mention where I lived) and my life.  It’s all a matter of pacing your speech in such a way that the listener becomes comfortable with the rhythms and patterns, and manipulating your words in such a way that they remain interested.  I talked about when I lived back in Lowell, Roderick, my friends back in the States.

“Ha, no you haven’t I just haven’t told you yet, because you didn’t ask,” I say.

“I’m Gideon, what’s your name? Wait! don’t tell me.  I’m usually pretty good at guessing.”  I looked closely at her, feigning intense scrutiny.  “You’re a Sandra.”

She let out a short, surprised, comfortable laugh and gave me a you’re-so-not-a-psychic look.  “Not even close!” 

“I’m Lynne.  I live up in the brownstones a couple blocks from McGill.”

From here I let her take the conversation her way a little while.  This is crucial, because this way she becomes much more invested in the experience, and is sharing herself.  I commented and joked with her occasionally, but I let her take the stage here. 

It’s all a game with specific but fairly lax rules.  It’s counterintuitive at first, but when you come to think about it, attraction isn’t a choice anyway; there‘s not much room for free will here, it‘s perceptional paradox.  All you have to do is facilitate that attraction and make yourself available, but not needy.  Learn the rules, and you can always get a meal. And you can always get laid.

Turns out Lynne was Third Year at McGill, and she’s actually a pretty intelligent girl. She’s got some interesting stories and she’s got some wild friends, it sounds like.  But I wasn’t really listening to Lynne anymore, because I was remembering that I was pissed at Roderick, and that I kinda wanted to go back and slug him for being a smartass and not coming out anymore, for always staying on the damn boat with his asshole typewriter.  I should go do that.

Even as we ate our food, even as Lynne picked up the check and we left, I was responding to her but I was back on the houseboat telling Roderick to cut the shit and think about the next step, because we were going nowhere and accomplishing nothing more than bleeding ourselves dry staying there. 

Even as we got in bed, even as we went through the awkward tentativeness that is the first sexual experience with any new person, I was just getting more and more frustrated and enraged that I had let Roderick talk me into leaving school, that he’d hooked me into extending the Montreal stay, even though it was my idea to go there in the first place.

I wasn’t even in the moment when I started slapping Lynne’s pretty little face as hard as I could, reddening her Mediterranean skin and bringing forth the tears from her needy, watery green eyes, and when I started to choke her I was ready to go and give Roderick a piece of my mind.

As I headed back downhill through the streets leading towards Saint Catherine, I started to calm, and I let it go:  Montreal wasn’t really that bad, I just needed to get out more often. 

Regardless of what you may believe, I do have a soul, and a conscience.

“I don’t know, I was just really pissed at you and started unloading on this chick because she was in hitting range.”

“While you were fucking her?!” Roderick thought this was the funniest thing in the world.  My sense of humor was quickly expiring.

It didn’t really sink in til I got back home.  Even then I wasn’t thinking about it.  Roderick wasn’t around, which was odd. I cooked up a little ball of opium and fell asleep on the nappy, scratchy couch.  I woke up hours later when I heard the door snap and creak open and Roderick cursing it under his breath.  I didn’t move much at first, I was still an opiate cinderblock, sunk oh so comfortably into the cushions, but I started to get my mind out of the smog of spacial contemplation and assembling the order of events of the past day. 

At first I thought it was an odd dream, beating a girl to the cusp of consciousness, but it wasn’t long before it gelled into a real memory. I felt the trap door of that realization drop so fast I didn’t even fall, but it still hit me like only a nine iron to the temple could manage. 

As had become something of a theme at our place, I was at a loss for words or thoughts.  I was waiting for Roderick to make a move.

It was my turn to be silent.  Roderick needed to do something about this immediately.

            “Damn man, I don’t know what to tell you.  What’s you’re deal lately, anyway? I know you don’t need me tellin’ you what to do, but you’re a mess.  You’ve been fallin’ apart: you’re smoking to much, you’re disappearin’ on me, you’ll have those catatonic periods that you’ll just fuckin’ lose yourself and write useless bullshit and wake up and say you don’t remember it, and now this shit?  What the fuck’s going on with you?”

            Damn straight you don’t have to tell me that.  Free will be damned: sure as Reaganomics I didn’t plan any of this for myself.

            It was like an itch on your leg when you’re fully comfortable. 

            And I thought everything had finally been starting to gel.

            My immediate thought was that I should go for a good long walk, but considering what had happened last time I did that, it probably wasn’t the best course of action.  Roderick got up and walked towards the typewriter as I rolled over and slid back to into sleep, but it was a riddled, pins-and-needles sleep this time.

            Session 3: “Sixty-four thousand, nine hundred and twenty-eight…”

        -Gideon Harp-

            I don’t remember the specifics of the time that Roderick tried to kill himself.  I didn’t even realize it was a for real suicide thing back at the time; I can only speculate about the better part of the story, really.  Hell, truth be told I didn’t understand the scope of the situation til about a year afterwards. 

            I thought I was just being clever with the Cassady reference.  Turns out I wasn’t far off.

            I remember being out late one night, drinking, smoking, doing whatever it was I was doing back in the terminal stages of attending college other than homework I was driving my mom‘s new Jeep Grand Cherokee, all metallic black paint and pompous four wheel drive.  The call actually came from my mother:

            “Hello?”

            “Hi, it’s mom.  Listen, your friend Sean called…I think he’s drunk or something…”

            Leave the psychoanalysis up to my mom.  Such a brilliant bulb.

            “Oh yeah? What’d he say?”

            “I could barely make it out, he sounded rough, Deon.   He said something about he’s lying in the middle of the road somewhere, he asked where you were…he said something about Neal Cassady.”

            As it turns out, I picked the wrong week to tell Roderick about the Beat Movement.

            He was pretty much homeless at the time: he’d moved out of his house for good around fourteen, and though usually he was staying somewhere with someone he did occasionally manage to hold down a shitty apartment from time to time.  This being about two and a half years ago, as I recall he had been living with this girl Rachel, some girl he’d met through an acquaintance of mine at UMass Lowell.  They’d been together maybe three months.

            Rachel was really nothing special: she had a pair of unremarkable B cups and a weaker smile than Anne Frank on a bad day.  She never had much to say of value, she just sat around in her bland clothes that didn’t correctly highlight any of the bland parts of her bland body. She always acted as though the world was inconveniencing her by following natural order.

            I’ll tell ya one thing: for being nothing special, she sure was full of herself.

            Roderick spent the better part of those three months telling me all about how when they were alone there was “just something” that made her bitchy boring stupidity worth it.  I told him it was just a vagina, but he wouldn’t let it go.  I’m usually not one to pry into his romantic affairs, because he gets like this about every girl he’s with.

            And they almost all have sucked.  I guess he’s got more time for bullshit than I do.

            Anyway, like I said I’m not really privy to the details of what happened that night, but Rachel and Roderick had been fighting for about a week.  If I remember correctly it involved some slob she worked with sexually assaulting her, and her thinking it was funny and cute (Michael Jackson Theory, probably: for people like her there’s no such thing as bad publicity) rather than alarming.  She let this go on at work for weeks.

            Finally one night (from what I’ve put together) he called her out on how fucked that whole situation was, and how fucked up she was in general, and disappeared from her house. I guess she reached him on the phone and even managed to find him at one point, but he threw a bottle at her parents’ Lexus and lumber-sloshed into the woods.

            And then I got that call.

            The only words I could make out from the sea of streamed syllables he spat when he finally got through to me were something along the lines of “Come find me, I think I’m about to have myself a Neal Cassady moment.”

            I realized he was referring to the story I’d told him about Neal Cassady’s death: Neal had wandered off from a party one night with Jack Kerouac and the gang after being forbidden from seeing them ever again by his new wife.  Neal had finally been talked into slowing his jet-turbine lifespeed down before it caught up with him, but this night it finally did.

            Somehow no one noticed him leaving, but he was found the next morning in a comatose state on the train tracks between that town and the next; he had worn just his jeans and t-shirt into the cold night.  They got him to a hospital, but he was delirious and near death already.  His last words were “Twenty-nine thousand, nine hundred and twenty eight,” the number of railroad ties he’d counted along the way.  They say that that was the day Superman died.

            You can see why I was concerned.

            I didn’t think about much on the way, other than the new mix CD I’d made before work that evening, and the blowjob I’d be getting tomorrow from Kris, my girlfriend at the time. 

           

            I found Roderick, scented of beeswax, diesel fuel and fried food in the light of a nine-starred sky with no moon, lying on his back in the middle of the left-hand curve of a rural Pelham forest-road.  The only additional light was that of the Jeep’s headlights falling across him as I dismounted and stood by. The soundtrack: frost and the clicking whir of the background music of the clockwork universe. Yes’ Heart of the Sunrise was just coming to its climax through the closed door of the Jeep. The far-off scent of marijuana emanated from his dreadlocks as I slowly approached.

            For the first time since we met, I was unsure as to how to proceed with the situation.

            “I didn’t have any railroad ties to count,” he slurred in a barely coherent mumble, “but I’ve been lying here counting as many stars as I could find in the sky, and there are only nine.  That’s a hell of a lonely thought.”

            I walked over and grabbed his arm.

            “Get up” I commanded.

            And with that I guess I saved his life. 

            I finally woke up in earnest at 9:34 p.m., according to the digits amongst the grime on the microwave in the corner by the typewriter desk.  I felt like I had done penance while I slept.  I looked up and saw that Roderick was sitting at the desk, but he wasn’t typing: he was facing the door.

            “I know, I’m almost done with it but there’s still some symbolism and shit back towards the scene with the bum that I need to fix and smooth out, and I want to work the tin can radio back in somewhere…”

            He didn’t sound right.  And he clearly wasn’t talking to me.

            I’d caught him in similar states two or three times prior in the previous weeks and at first I thought I was confusing my reality, like those times when you’ll catch yourself telling a story and then realize it never happened except while you were dreaming the previous night.  It was becoming increasingly obvious that I wasn’t the one seeing things.

            “Fuckhead,” I prompted.  He didn’t respond but he did turn back to his typewriter.  This is just what I needed: I left home to get away from living with a headcase.             

            He needed to get out of that damn shithole for once: I don’t think he’d left more than twice in four months.  He was starting to turn the color of that crusty brown-orange carpet.

            I got up and dusted the lint off of my sweatshirt.  “All right, man, we’re going into town tonight.  You’re done writing, and I’m done waiting.” I walked over and put my hand on his shoulder.  He raised his head and gasped as though he’d just been resuscitated with shock paddles.

            Clear.

Flustered, I fell back a step: it must’ve been Alternate Universe Day, and no one had given me a heads up.

I slowed the tempo of my voice, and softened my tone.  “Hey man, we’re going out.   Let’s get cleaned up, we need to have a Night.  A wine-and-broken-glass Night.”

“But one where I don’t fuckin’ batter some random during sex this time,” I said, which earned me a worn chuckle and a half-smile, which slowed my heart rate, which finally got my mind working on this night I’d decided we were about to have.

“Yeah, yeah, alright,” he said in his casual near-grumble as he rubbed the remnants of whatever he’d seen from his eyes and stretched his arms.  I watched as he paused and screwed his face up, and let out a squeaking fart of cartoon proportions which lasted a solid three seconds, and we both laughed, mirthfully for the first time that week, at least.

“Fuck man, what day is it anyway?” he asked as he got up and looked toward the door.  I turned towards the back of the room and began to walk around aimlessly, looking at the various loose collections of paper scattered around the floor.

“Uh, I think it’s like…” I bent over and pushed aside the weather section of a tattered Montreal Star (the presence of which was odd, I don’t think either of us ever really read the news) and found a calendar of beach scenes which we’d had nailed to the wall at some point, and started pointlessly flipping through the general vicinity of Fall.  I narrowed it down to either late October or early to mid November.

“I dunno it’s something like two weeks from Remembrance Day, I think.”

He looked at me with that same half-smile and his eyebrows knitted. “The hell’s that?” he asked.

“Nope, not yet. I wanna say it’s…I’m pretty sure it’s Thursday, so it’s probably October twenty-something…ish.”

“Okay, so we know we need to figure that out while we’re out.”

“Sounds like a plan.  I’m gonna go jump in for a sec, I’ll be right back.”

“Jumping in” consisted of stripping down on the deck, grabbing onto a grimy loop of rope we tied to the wooden rails, and jumping directly into harbor water.  It was the closest thing we got to a bath or shower on a regular basis.  Well, regular til (I would estimate) mid November, when the hour you spent shivering yourself back to life in the cabin finally outweighed cleanliness. 

Not that the water was exactly “clean,” but it was better than stewing in your own filth.

I hit the water and realized that I better make this one count, because from the feel of it I probably had two more of these sessions left in the year before the water got cold enough to turn me into a mansicle.  I dunked myself under the surface two or three times, the whole time reflecting on how absurd this would appear to anyone who might be walking by: a naked guy overboard in the marina, clinging to a rope for dear life, rubbing his body furiously with the murky water, the whole time swearing at the river under his breath.  Lucky for us, not a lot of people came down this way, if it could be avoided.

The taste of the air of my nostrils was familiar, but not in the way the bland, stagnant water smell of the docks was: the air carried current, an olfactory sensation that I recognized as a unifying essence that ran as a recurring theme through some of the most visceral and critical moments in my life. 

            R e a c t i o n.

I clambered back up the rope and over the railing, and grabbed my threadbare towel, wrapping it around myself and pushing my way back inside.  Roderick was donning what looked to be the worst man-slut shirt I’d ever seen: it had the cloudy shimmer of faux silk, and it was mauve. 

“What the hell is that shirt!” I laughed so hard I started coughing.  I could tell he was glad I’d brought it up.  “How awesome is this! I found it in the closet in an old Molson box.”

“Dude, that’s probably the worst shirt you could possibly ever wear.  You’d be better off with a Hawaiian flower shirt!”

“All right smartass, why don’t you go get your awesome camouflage jacket and throw that on! They love that shit!”

“Please, as though I need clothes to get laid.  What, are you trying to look like an asshole?!” I threw an empty box of Strikes at him and laughed as I walked to the pile of clothes I kept by the couch.

I grabbed some clothes, deciding to dress comfortably/functionally rather than fashionably this night: I knew I wouldn’t regret it.

            I finished belting my jeans and turned to Roderick.
            “Est-ce que tu est preparée?”

            He looked calm, collected, but with a subdermal electricity capable of destabilizing any well-constructed plan I could muster.  He was ready.

            “Allons-y.”

Montreal is a city that looks for its own meaning in its inhabitants, the result of which is a construction of so many souls bustling through lively streets, but without the darkened hesitance to interact that is standard software in so much of America.  Montreal is a city with beauty scribbled in the margins, played as a ghost note.  Sculpture hidden in the landscape. as a city, it is a work of high art, but nonchalantly crumpled and tossed in the corner by the artist, waiting for his bum friends to pick up and glance at.  In winter the haze of snow will hide a street, showing only the fuzz of streetlights through bare maples lining the sidewalks, and at the head a park, presenting an avant-garde sculpted fountain lit in the colors of a late summer sunset, a lighted fur tree beneath which two young men openly share a joint, all of this raised above the flow and current of the street by heavy stone steps leading down from a great monolithic raised park.  In fall, the death of leaves highlighting the arms of the very trees they left behind, the shadows of queen Victoria that seep from the bricks of McGill University.

            It is a city built on colonialism and a perfect balance of seclusion and open mindedness that wavers in the space between the thick rivers and stacks of lights in the so-often cold but always comforting night.

            In Montreal everything seems to taste better, smell fresher, feel cleaner.  Me, I used to feel like I was getting away with something because it was all so comforting.  Being loose in that city was like having free reign on a life-sized, scale piece of postmodern art in a universal museum. This was life lived in the city as its own art form.

            Lights. Camera.

            This wasn’t my first trip to Montreal: I’d been twice with my mother as a kid.  I’d loved Montreal since the first time I’d seen it from the highway at night.  Of course, trips with my mom were a completely different breed.

            I don’t really know how to go about describing my mom in a way that could ever capture her panoramically; she’s the full package in all the wrong ways.

            At sixteen I was emancipated from her custody.  This was at her request, mind you. Naturally, I’ve become fairly skilled in providing for myself, out of necessity.  Only (relatively) recently had I started to become what I was beginning to perceive as dependent on Roderick, and perhaps it was ultimately our mothers that facilitated that shift.  They’d come looking for us last year, though we’d disappeared to our current obscure home base so quickly nobody could’ve found us if they wanted to.

            I think we moved fast enough that I even lost us.  And that was why we were going out that night: I needed to get my bearings back. 

            The docks no longer suited Roderick, and they sure as hell didn’t do me justice.  I was ill: that place had been sucking me dry like the House of Usher.  But then again, maybe it wasn’t just the place.  Like I’ve said, we’ve all got our ghosts, and maybe mine were starting to catch up with me.

            We descended on the city like junkies with no stash left and no more cash for a fix.  We went out driven by some vague idea of robbing the world that night.

            “Dude, we gotta check out the Peel Pub first.  I need summa them cheep beers, now.”

            Guy hadn’t changed a bit.

            We were working our way into the center of the city, to where all the good stuff was: the stairways leading down from the street to the posh themed café/restaurants with full walls of windows; a little further in the crazy Irish pubs you had to walk down the steps to the lower levels of these weird old buildings, and a little up and around the corned from that you started to get into the strip club belt where the neon lights that left a clear but coloured warm fog that filled the area between the sidewalk and a kind of invisible ceiling that covered the space between the rooftops.

            We walked into the Peel Pub and got slammed with one of the most infectious electronic dance track I’d ever heard. It sounded as though someone had picked out everything that was right about 80’s music and found a place for it in a modern context, interspersing clever samples from unlikely sources like Bill Nye The Science Guy and Mumia Abu Jamal speeches. It was terribly incongruous, but I instantly felt pumped, and I knew I was right about this night, and it looked like everyone else was on the same vibration with me.  We sat in the back corner with huge projection screens on all sides, showing every hockey game happening in the world that night. 

            Our waitress approached, a dark haired girl with freckles but a good, dark-toned skin.  about 10 feet from our table the grip on her shoe caught suddenly on the smooth floor, and she stumbled towards us, with an utterly flustered look on her face, and just as suddenly as she slipped up she caught herself and took a deep breath.  Roderick and I looked at each other and smirked.

            As she recovered and gracefully continued towards the table I gave her a conspiratorial look in the eyes.  She blushed as she reached the table.

            “I saw that, but I won’t tell anyone if you bring me a beer.  What’s lookin’ good tonight?”

            She flashed me a beautiful only slightly embarrassed smile. 

            “Well, if you like darker beers Black Label bottles are two for the price of one tonight.”

            “Oh hell yeah, I’m sold.  Set me up with that little number then, please.”  She nodded and shot me a cute little glance over the top of her notepad.

            “Mhmm, and for you?” she asked, turning to Roderick, who sat straight up, made a spiraled gesture towards the ceiling with his right hand as he opened his eyes wide and said “I would like a pitcher of Molson, please!”

            I looked at him, slightly surprised, but decided he was entitled to it, after staying away from the vigorous publicity of the city at night.  By all means, why not?

            “Allllright, I’ll be right back guys,” she beamed as she turned back towards the bar.

           

            I looked at Roderick as he lit a cigarette, and I suggested it was time to make a game plan for the night.

            “Ok,” he mumbled around the butt, “Here’s what I’m thinking.  I’m only planning on getting like a sandwich and drinking this pitcher before we move on, right?” 

            I nodded my approval.

            “Right, then I say we wander around up by the underground mall for a while, talk to some randoms, get loose.  We go to a bar or two, see what we can see, maybe get some girls…”

            I didn’t like where this was going.  After the previous night’s events I wasn’t sure it would be a bright idea.  Not for me, anyway.  I had been thinking about that, hoping it wouldn’t come up in the papers, but I was banking on Lynne having reported me to the cops, and despite the fact that there would be no logical way for them to find me, I wasn’t down for, first of all, making a name for myself in that city any more than I already had, and second, for subjecting another girl to the same fate.

            “I dunno man,” I said, glancing over my shoulder at the three guys occupying the next table over.  They were about our age, but had the short-sighted gaze of too-many-blunts-a-day American college students, no doubt on their own personal long weekend of underage drinking here in the safe haven of the Canadian side of that crawling North American border, where most every New England college student finds himself at some point or other, stark raving mad late at night with the distinct feeling that he’s getting away with something.  Sometimes the American Dream was across the border somewhere, and that went for both north and south.  These young men had undoubtedly absconded on the basis of a vague vision of some youthful rebelliousness and the prowess of public drinking.  For all I cared they could be discussing Seinfeld in some drug-ruined drawl, unsure as I was of what to do next.  This sudden attunement of our otherwise-leagues-apart mind vibrations gave me a bad jolt.

            “I’m thinkin’ something new tonight.”

            Roderick flashed me a purely American look that belied all of his apparent disdain for that country he had become so convinced was lost: an expression of some downtrodden hope remaining that there was more fun to be had, more distraction to seek, something that might drag him out of the quaint existential slump he appeared to have become so entrenched and comfortable in.  Hope that there was somewhere else to explore that wouldn’t lead to the same back-alley anxiety attacks to be found the world over, from every major city right through down into the backwaters of the slouching shouldered countrysides.

            I had his attention now.

            “Mhm.  I’ll let ya know when I’m sure, I’m still kinda kicking it around.”

            He was surely dying to know what I was thinking, but to tell the truth I wasn’t entirely sure myself of what I was thinking. I knew what my first order of business was, though.

            I glanced at the bar where our waitress was picking up our drinks and making her way back towards us.

            “Let’s make this quick, man.  We’ve got some city to cover.”

            After that one round of drinks and a handful of fairly forward comments to the waitress courtesy of Roderick’s alcohol-lubricated tongue we quickly left without paying the bill, which wasn’t difficult, as the waitress was glad to see us go regardless of the circumstances. We strode up the street towards the crowds crashing through the streets of the nearly-weekend city, all undoubtedly out for a good old-fashioned bout of Human Experience.  We weren’t walking anywhere in particular, but we found ourselves eventually down in the strip club district, by the infamous Club Super Sexe, a legend among New England college students.  It was something I never really understood: the idea of a stripper sticking her bare ass in my face for twenty bucks never really took hold of me, and the one time I had done it it was more comedic entertainment than anything: all I could think was “if she farted right now I’d never let her hear the end of it.”  It wasn’t the same visceral thrill of a shared moment, that feeling of a live current flowing between lips and eyes that I missed so much. 

            Maybe that same lack of synchronicity was what set me off with Lynne.

            I looked over at Roderick on my right, primed, dreadlocked and donning that inane mauve silk shirt, and I thought back to those guys at the Peel Pub, that air of “getting away with something.”  What were we getting away with?  I mechanically started a short list in my head: fraud, sexual assault, murder in Roderick’s case…but those weren’t it.  Come to think of it, yeah, I suppose we were getting away with murder, in a sense: the same kind of murder Hunter Thompson got away with, that celebrities get away with, on a smaller scale…  

            I had come to realize my convictions were stilted from the years of drug use and avoiding confrontation from those that thought differently than I, but I’d come to accept it. But these thoughts were moments from becoming irrelevant.

            Ahead of our feet on the pavement, just beyond the next parking meter, my eyes wandered slowly and almost unknowingly up the slender legs of some vaguely familiar form, and up to the very familiar, round and healthy ass of the most interesting person I’d met in Montreal to date, the same girl I’d been looking for for some months now.  Perhaps I knew I was looking for her.  Perhaps I wasn’t even really thinking about her at all, maybe in the back of my mind I’d been looking for her harder than I realized at this moment, but at that moment it was a surprise, regardless. 

She was leaning through the broken window of an older, but not quite old, maroon Honda Civic, carefully perched amongst the diamond ground cover of glass shards.

The body above the ass and legs suddenly appeared as she pulled herself from the car and wheeled around at us, adrenaline all but dripping from her wide and alert eyes.  She was undeniably Arabic in descent, Lebanese as I recalled.  Her hair was dark brown and flowed in such a way that it kind of naturally feathered  as it hit her shoulders. Her eyes were dark, nearly black, her cheeks were just a little bit chubby, enough that it was cute.  Her lips were thick and veiled a mouthful of very white, very straight teeth. Remarkable.

“Who the fuck are you?!” she shouted at us, but I caught a look of semi-recognition sneaking in behind the forefront of confrontation.  I grinned.

It seemed that that was enough to jumpstart her synapses into a proper memory mode.  She returned my smug vaguely conspiratorial smirk and executed a turn on her heels that reeked of controlled fluidity. 

“That’s right!” Roderick mumbled around the cigarette he’d brought to his lips.  “And if it isn’t Miss Lebanon herself!”  She rolled her eyes at this.

I pointed to her and refocused my finger to target the Civic. “And what the fuck are you up to tonight Gen?”  I was too amused to even think about acknowledging the pure haystack-scouring odds of our crossing her path on the one evening that we finally set out to complete a night we never ended together.  It was more fulfilling if she believed we’d planned it the whole time, I decided.

My mouth felt like the model of a shit-eating grin.  Why?  Had I planned this? That would be the more incredible story…

She looked at us, performing a quick mental calculation of whether we’d find it acceptable if she were to tell us she were stealing the car or if we’d make a scene, maybe even turn her in.

“Good answer! Proceed,” I waved her back to her work.  We stood and watched as she leaned back in through the shattered window and fumbled with the doorlock and got inside.  She resumed her battle with the mess of wires under the console for about a minute and a half, and the starter began to make tentative groans and electrical metal sounds.  It was around this time that Roderick and I looked at one another and moved to the passenger doors.  Gen must’ve noticed this motion, and again squinted her chestnut eyes into Calculation position, and decided it was safe to unlock the doors for us, and we got in.  After another thirty seconds her expression became one of bewilderment: the engine wasn’t quite catching.  I looked down at the console between us.

“Pssssst!” She looked over at me as I motioned towards the shifter.

“It’s a standard, and it’s still in gear.  Good luck starting it, girl!” 

“Oh, what the FUCK!” she sighed angrily, now donning the look of a cornered animal.

“Wait a minute.  You can’t drive stick, can you!” I laughed at her.  “Get out, I got it.”  She shot me one more glance of defiance with a nearly hidden twist of surrender behind it.  She opened the door and stepped out of the car, and I did the same.

“So how the hell did you guys happen to find me?” she asked as we crossed in front of the hood.  “Get in and we’ll tell you all about it,” I winked at her and patted her head.

I slid into the driver’s seat and closed the door, beaming openly and wondering at how quickly our situation had improved.

 I pressed the clutch to the floor and motioned to Gen to try the wires again.  She did and the car turned over without protest. I looked up and adjusted the rearview mirror, and caught Roderick’s eyes and smirk as I did so, and gave one in return.  Scanning the rest of the car, I reached into the storage space in the console and pulled out a handful of bills ($28 when I counted it later) and a beautiful corrugated box, the most glorious thing I think I could’ve hoped for: a nearly-full pack of filtered Lucky Strikes, filtered.

                        Upon opening the pack I discovered one more secret surprise: two fat joints had been rolled and put in with the cigarettes, presumably by the car’s now previous owner.  I pulled them out, looked at them, and looking at Gen and Roderick, who had been watching me intently, decided to light one right then and there.  But first thing’s first.

            I put the Civic into gear and casually pulled out into the street, dusting the broken glass from the window hole as I went so it would just look open rather than broken, and off we drove down St. Catherine Street as fast as the pedestrian traffic allowed us.

            “Alright, hold up, what the hell’s going on here?” Gen asked in that boisterous tone that  girls (specifically Lebanese ones) seem to unconsciously switch to when they realize they’re no longer in control of their situation and might be comfortable with it, but must appear confrontational all the same.  I leaned into the seat, pulled out a lighter and lit the fatter of the two joints.

            “What do you want to know?” I asked her and grinned around the jay.

            “Ok, well first of all, what the fuck makes you think that you can just come up and steal this car right out from under me?” 

            I turned to look at her, a bit surprised.  “You’re kidding.  For starters, you stole it, and second, you’re still in it with us.  We took nothing from you: you just can’t drive. Now,” I said, “Where oh where have you been Gen? We missed you!”  I breathed out a heavy fog of smoke and passed the jay to Roderick in the back.

            Roderick spoke for the first time since we’d seen her: “Yeah man, remember that night, ‘bout a year back, after we tied up your boss and you came out with us and told us you didn’t have a cell phone, but regardless you pulled one out, threw a brick through the window of the place, and called the cops?”

            “Yeah, I mean I know who you guys are…”

            “Well,” I said, “it seems like we finally did find you.  What are you up to tonight?”

            She relaxed a bit, absentmindedly slipping down into her seat.  She looked back at Roderick and then at me, seeming almost pleased now. 

I am a passenger,
                      and I ride and I ride

                   I ride through the city’s backsides

                           I see the stars come out of the sky…

It was the first time since I could remember that I felt totally confident of my state of affairs, and pleased with what I saw.  Oh, but I forgot…

“Thursday, I think?” I looked over at her.  “Well, that’s no help.”

“No, it’s definitely Thursday, because Saturday’s Remembrance Day.” 

“What! You’re telling me I missed Halloween?!” I was fairly disappointed, and a bit more than surprised.  Had really managed to gloss over my favorite day of the year?

“Yeah,” she said tentatively.  It didn’t look like she was sure she should believe us.

“Damn man, I was kinda lookin’ forward to that,” Roderick sighed. 

As I looked in the rearview I caught him looking down at his hands.  Why was he being so quiet now, I wondered?  It hadn’t really occurred to me until then, but he looked markedly uncomfortable in that back seat.  Was he offended that I’d let Gen take the front seat instead of him? I wouldn’t put it past him.  He was sort of slumping in his seat, and his eyes were grey behind a wall of dreadlocks that had fallen out of the bundle that ran down to the small of his back.  I remembered this look: he used to get it when we hung out with my friend Alex back home, and I thought it might’ve been for the same basic reason.

Alex Draven was a chunky, hairy, sporadic guy we met back when I was in school.  No one called him Alex, except for our friend Megan who knew him from high school; everyone else called either just “D” or Zeno, the origin of which I never bothered to ask, because it seemed like a name that just fit for him.

The night we met Alex I was still back in school.  Roderick and I were still in the terminal stages of that starving-artist-tragic delusion that was college, wandering drunk and high around Lowell, looking for any hint or clue as to the whereabouts or nature of the American Dream.  Instead we found Zeno.

We walked through the north campus of the University of Massachusetts, wide-eyed and hopeful, gradually descending on the brand new football/track field (mind you, there was no football team) in that blank space between twilight and starlight.  We neared the field, and as we did Roderick became aware of a tall, heavy figure hunched over in the center of the field.  We slowly approached the figure from behind.  As we left the lights of the sprawling parking lot adjacent to the field and stepped into the darkness, it became much easier to see the figure of a man in his early 20’s, bent over at the waist, working intently in the turf, like a giant dog trying to bury a bone.

“What the hell’s he doing?” Roderick whispered in a high incredulous tone.

“HEY!”  I yelled, hoping to startle the figure, but he didn’t respond at first, just continued digging for a few seconds more and then looked over his shoulder at us before rising to face us. 

“Hello hello hello, fellas.  What’s the good word?” greeted The Figure.  Now that he was facing us he looked simultaneously more intimidating, jolly and inviting as he dusted his hands off and reached for the cigarette at his teeth.  He looked like the Cheshire cat, if the Cheshire cat were a six foot tall goliath with long hair.

“Whatcha doin’, diggin’ for a white rabbit?” I asked and dug into my pocket for a cigarette of my own.

The Figure suddenly became very animated as he spoke, jerkily pointing then fluidly lowering his arms, crossing and uncrossing his legs as he shifted his weight.  “Well, no of course not, see that’d be absurd; actually what I’m doin’ here is planting an oak tree.”

            “What?!” Roderick demanded, amused. 

            “Ha-HA, see I’ve dipped this seed in…well, it amounts to a kind of liquefied amphetamine, you know to make it grow faster and what not…”

 I looked at the seed in his hand.  I could swear it was glowing a faint sickly green.

            “…and if it all goes through as I’m hoping, this bastard should be fully grown by morning.”

            I couldn’t help but stare, more incredulously amused than anything.

            “I’m sure you realize this is a football field,” I pointed out.

            “Oh yeah man, that’s the best part!  When those sunsabitches come out here in the morning for their soccer practice, just imagine their faces when they see a big old oak tree right at center field!” he giggled almost childishly to himself as he took a drag from his butt.  This guy was out of his mind, and somehow I was sure he wasn’t on drugs.

            “One last thing.”

            “Yeah?”

            “I’m also sure you realized this is turf. You know. Artificial,” I said.  He must’ve.  Was there a method to his madness?

            “Well yeah, but it can’t be helped.  At any rate,” he took a last drag on his cigarette and flicked it over our heads, “what can I help you boys with?”

            I decided to let Roderick take it from here. I didn’t know where to start with this guy, but I knew I liked him.  He reminded me of Charlie Chaplin fifty pounds heavier with long scraggly hair and a manic personality.      

            “Well shit,” offered Roderick, shrugging, “wanna have a couple drinks?”

            And so he joined us. We introduced ourselves on the way to the liquor store down the street, where Alex (he introduced himself as Alex, of course) bought 40 ounce bottles of malt liquor for all of us, and as we set off fixedly to wander through the streets of Lowell we opened them and began to talk. We walked and talked all night, and covered entire sections of Lowell I’d never seen before.  We shouted to one another nonstop as we walked up Christian Hill to the rich neighborhoods, and we came the darker decaying parts we spoke all the louder, gesturing frantically to be heard over one another.  As daylight came we headed back towards campus, and Roderick left to go to sleep, and Alex and I continued our babbling back on the stairs of the library. 

            Quickly over the course of the next couple of weeks Alex became a close and trusted friend, largely because despite his absurdity and apparent apathy and unreliability, I learned that he was actually a remarkably intelligent and dominatingly persuasive person, but I could tell from the way that Roderick came to act when he was around, or when I mentioned his name, that he resented that connection, that he somehow felt threatened.  As though he thought Alex was encroaching on his claim to our friendship.  Or brotherhood, as you might call it.

           

            And that was the way he was acting now, here with Gen.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Roderick it’s that he needs to talk, and he needs you to listen when he does, or sometimes he’ll sulk.  Sulk.

            I turned around in my seat and grinned at Roderick, passing the second joint as I thought.

            “Well, I suggest we take immediate action,” I submitted.  I thought for a moment, and looked to Gen.

            “What are your plans?”  I asked. “After all, I suppose we have intruded on your night.”

But as she opened her mouth to respond, I changed my mind. 

            “On second thought,” I cut her off, “tonight’s our make-up Halloween.”

            “Fuckin’ right! I’m down for smashin’ some pumpkins!” Roderick said with a tentative excitement in his voice.  Gen made a sort of short, nasal-whiny sound that was presumably made to denote dissatisfaction with the decision, but the sound melted back into her sinuses as quickly as it had spawned.

            I like this girl, I thought.  From my one prior experience with her I knew that she was a girl that was confident, comfortable with herself, and at least spontaneous if not borderline manic.  She wasn’t one to think twice about throwing a brick through her employer’s window after aiding two young punks in terrorizing him and tying him up in a basement, and then turn around and call the police on aforementioned young punks.  At the same time, she knew when to save her breath and not piss me off by complaining when she didn’t get her way.  “You see?” I thought, “We’re already getting along beautifully.”

About three blocks later the weed hit me all at once, and let me tell ya, that was good shit.  It was like someone, or at least some force, had suddenly grabbed the hands of the Official Clock of Universal Time and was holding it at a dead crawl.  My mind was aware of this, and seemed to be working at its regular pace, but I couldn’t get my body to follow at full speed.

I am a passenger,
                      and I ride and I ride......

            Something didn’t feel normal.

            “Uh….hey guys?” I said.  The words came slow, but not the way they do on a slowed down tape or in the movies.  They were just slow, drawn out.  After what seemed like several minutes (but in “reality” probably no more than five seconds) with no response I turned to look at Gen.  She was staring off into the distance, eyes wide her mouth a gaping zero of incomprehension. My head continued its slow, dreamy rotation to the back seat, where Roderick was slouching deeply into the upholstery, head rolled off on his right shoulder, eyes gazing vaguely upward. 

            I remember trying to say something like “I think that shit was laced,” but I don’t think I finished the words.  I looked back at the road as a confetti of tiny colored bubbles, up and down and meandering from side to side, fell before my eyes and obscured my view.  I tried desperately to focus as I drove, until suddenly it occurred to me that perhaps it was unnecessary to worry so much about navigating.  We were outside of the city now, on forested back roads that I didn’t recognize.  Tiny pins and needles like an acupuncture tattoo gun massaged my feet and the tips of my fingers. I felt like I was about to pass out.  Should I pull over? No, I thought to myself, I can probably ride it out. 

Public school kids, at least those in the Northeast, have a tendency to grow up faster and harder than those of us that got shipped off to private schools.  It starts early, in grade school.  For some reason public school kids just look years older than they should:  a twelve year old girl will have tits that belong on a high school senior, and her boyfriend’s unibrow will be so thick that you‘re sure he be old enough to hold a real job by now.  But it’s not just that: they look a couple of years worn harder that tend to show at the corners of the mouths and in the furrowing of the brows.  It might all just come down to street smarts, but the kids in Catholic schools have that too.  Maybe it’s more a collective realization that for public school kids, reality is measurably closer.  There’s a certain no-bullshit air about them regardless of what they may behave like on the outside.

            Or maybe not.  Maybe public school kids look at their more “well-to-do” counterparts through similar eyes.  There’s no way to know without asking, and even then, what can the two sides share without a middle ground to anchor to?  Sometimes I wish I’d been one of them, one of the kids that didn’t have to wear a uniform to school, who got a hot lunch rather than one packed from home.  When it comes to it though, it’s all just a façade on both sides: some of those kids’ parents just sent them to the town school because it was there and it was free, that didn’t mean they weren’t well off and well-adjusted .  On my side, though, I think I only got that lunch from home because my mother realized there’d be paperwork and more unpleasantness involved if someone took notice that I was malnourished.  Not that she didn’t care, I think she just didn’t have time somehow.  Money was always an issue somehow despite the new shoes and suits she managed to acquire, the cruises and trips to France she was always able to finance for herself while I stayed with my cousins for a week.  It may be a bit exaggerated in my memory, I was fairly young, I suppose.  But I think I picked up my strongest personality trait from her: I always look out for myself first. 

            Some public school kids live the same way, I’m sure.  But that night in whatever suburb of Montreal we wound up in I found myself wondering if public school kids had a tendency, through their fine-tuned frames of reality, to cope with a car crash.  If there’s a statistic available on the frequency of controlled substance-related accidents in regards to type of schooling I’d be curious to see it, because to me it seems likely that it’s a pretty clean split.  The grisly flypaper reality of it is kids will never learn until they fuck up that one time.

You little shit, you went on all of those trips with your Mother, and your shoes were imported from Italy.

You came first, Brat; I hope you learned that from your Mother.

New suits so I could work more jobs, to pay for you, Punky Dude.

I knew my toes were broken as soon as I woke up. My right foot was twisted around the gas pedal in a manner unnatural enough that I puked all over the steering wheel. Fuck, I thought. I must’ve been laying into the gas right until we crashed. The driver's side door hung open, an afterthought like a freshman girl tossed aside at a frat party after the house president is done fucking her.

            I put my hands to my face to take stock of the situation there, because the rearview mirror was twisted away from me. Everything felt in order, aside from a small cut above my left eye. I looked over myself, assured myself that I still had four limbs, which would be comforting. Finding this to in fact be the case, I turned to look around the rest of the car. The dome light was on, and the radio was whispering white noise with snippets of a small, mousy sounding man rattling off a tin can new story about the Quebecois separatists and some upcoming vote. The passenger side door wasn't completely closed, and three cigarettes lay broken on the floor near it. The rest of the cigarettes were Gen and Roderick, however, were nowhere to be found.

            I looked back at my foot, at my mangled Chuck Taylor sneaker, imagining a pile of broken cocktail weenies stuffed inside of it. I imagined the kind of thing that would make PETA shit a wall's work of bricks if they got their hands on the image: some small, defenseless, mostly hairless rodent, eviscerated in a burlap sack.

            I thought about what it'd be like if I'd gone to public school.

            I thought about a big old rock of opium and how good it'd be right then. In my hand.

            I wasted fully seven minutes, by the count of the still miraculously functional car clock, just trying to think of ways to avoid facing the fact that it was time to try to get the fuck out of the wrecked fucking car, the one I'd just crashed head on into a small tree in a ditch off the side of a country road fuck-knows-where, before it attracted attention. Then I got the fuck out.

            When Roderick and I were still in school we used to be so much worse. 

            That might not actually be true. I think we've kinda always been the way we are.

            When I was still at St. Andrew's we used to go out and explore the woods when I had math classes, or a useless freshman core lecture on St. Thomas Aquinas or some other pointless bullshit, we'd pick a trail and walk down it just to get lost. The best times, though, were when getting lost meant finding an old building or whatnot. See, thing about St. Andrew’s was they had so much land, and so little got used, you never ran outta places to go, if you were curious, and/or didn't want someone to find you, which a good portion of the students didn't.

            Catholic school kids aren't so different.

            We came across this place called The Observatory one day. Now, this "observatory" was ridiculous, because it was wholly unfunctional as an observatory, but I'll get to that later.

            At any rate, we'd heard of the place in walk-by conversations as upper classmen talked about weekend fires in the woods (Which never ended well by any account I ever heard). It was just a place we'd heard about tacked on at the end of statements, but at nineteen our senses of adventure and curiosity were keen as obsession, so it could only follow that late one night in fall we set off blind into an old field that, along with most of the land off in that back corner of the school's property, was farmland in the 1600's, according to my archaeology professor. There were stone walls and foundations and old roads snaking through the woods for acres, right back to the old turnpike you need to take to get to the school. It was a graveyard with no headstones, no bodies, and filled with so many stories I'd never hear. I remember Professor David telling us about a colleague of his who could determine the age of a brick by licking it, and deciphering the various components that it was composed of, and could from there figure out around what time those components were commonly being used in a given ratio. 

            I was only vaguely familiar with the area from a single field study I'd done in the woods with Professor David, but I figured walk long enough in any direction, we'd find something. Like I said, there was only so much land between the main campus and the turnpike.

            So we made a night of it. First, we hung out at this kid Alan's small, lame party until everyone left (at like ten o' clock) . Alan was a character we’d met in high school, where he’d been given the nickname “Meathooks” because of his fat, stubby fingers. He had anger management issues and suffered on and off from bouts of clinical depression. He had a habit of bottling up his emotions and lashing out at people or objects, whichever was closest at the time, or else drinking himself til he sobbed and bawled himself to sleep. This night was one of the latter situations. It was times like this, when he was unconscious and had liquor and beer lying around and no one else to drink it, that it was good to know Alan. We took a handle of Southern Comfort and a half a rack of cheap beers (Keystones, I think), stuffed them into a backpack we found and walked out of the building.

            The path to the woods, however, wasn't so easy. We started out of Stevens Hall, the freshman dorm, and turned left towards the break in the glowing black-sparkle woods up past the dry dorms, where students lived in cocoons. We hopped the gate that feebly attempted to stop cars and trucks from carting kids down into the fields to waste away their Thursday nights in firesparks and glistening glass bottles of malt liquor. Beyond the light brush lay the first field. We stepped out of the shadows of the tree cover and into the starlight that played off the tall grass, babbling inane drunken things about music, alcohol, philosophy, people and art. We tripped down the uneven hill that was the back corner of the field, falling onto a beaten trail that ran into the woods. 

            As soon as we stepped back out of the field, the darkness was like black patent leather. We continued on, by the light of Roderick’s cell phone screen. As we crackled through the leaves that covered the stone dust on the trail, I started to wonder if we were going the right way. I knew there was a lot of land back here, but we’d been walking already a good half hour.

                We continued talking as we rounded a bend in the trail, which was leading down further into the woods. The trail forked off to the right towards what I remembered was the old farm site that Professor David had shown us. I had a fantastic image of the whole area as it would’ve been in the 1700’s, completely leveled of trees, stretching in the dismal wet Technicolor gray light of fall in New England, smoke billowing low and decrepitly from chimneys as farmers rode horses down the mucky stale-coffee-colored road that was now the trail. I choked on a cough.

            Up ahead about a hundred yards I could sense light in the space framed by the trees. As we neared the light we could hear the faint sigh of a slow shallow stream, tired and old like the foundations and walls around it. I knew that this stream was spanned by a poorly executed but functional stone bridge built by those same unskilled farmers that had diverted the stream through the woods away from the field up ahead three hundred years ago. They could’ve done a better job: the bottom half of the field we were coming up on was perpetually flooded right where the dirt path skirted the trees.

            In this second field, brilliant orange and maroon leaves floated on the surface of the water while broken veiny chocolate-colored ones sank to the muck beneath. The path curled around to the left, but we had to uphill towards the middle of the field to get around the water and wetland its flow created. Here, at the peakof this small hill, a large rock peeked through the surface of the gentle grass that covered the soil. The moon and stars dusted the tops of the grass blades and held the flat, chipped rock in a darkened frame. It looked as though in years past someone had gone to work on it with a chisel. Maybe a farmer. Maybe it was flint. Maybe it was useful, but maybe it was just in the way and he was breaking it up.

            Whatever the reason, he was working, because work is what he knew. Work was all there was for him. Why, then, didn’t he come fix the waterworks that flooded his field now?      

            I could see him, wiping the sweat that had gathered on his brow and the top of his fat, long nose below the brim of his felt hat with the back of his hairy arm. He looked towards the bridge we had just passed over, sighing deeply as he rested his dry elbow on his knee. He rose in the dusk grays and turned to the far corner of the field where his slumping old house stood, hung up the felt hat and sat down to the meat-and-potatoes dinner his plain, very English wife had been struggling to prepare since mid-afternoon. He went to bed and never questioned his life, the fact that the only mark he’d ever make on this earth would be the neglected field in the woods of a college campus in New Hampshire. He would die alone. His work would be for nothing but to feed himself and maybe a neighbor or two. 

            I threw an empty beer bottle and watched as it shattered on the rock with the import and gravity of a mysterious instrument in a space capsule and spat a mucus plug out in the grass. We turned back towards the trail, on the other side of the water blockade.

            Finally we found ourselves in the last field, beyond the third battlement of tree cover. This field was a plateau, on the edge of which was The Observatory.

            The Observatory was not an observatory, not at all. Really, it was just a kind of concrete storage shed with a small concrete courtyard, about 10’x7’, concrete walls surrounding it painted white but chipped down to the grey powdery rock beneath in an almost surgical simulation of rusticness, as if to pretend that farmer was still here somewhere. The walls of the shed itself were all white, too. Of course, this made the area utterly useless for any kind of stellar observation, because the white reflected all light in the area, obscuring the view through even the best telescopes the school would dare let its students touch. The roof was the only black spot, and thus the only place for observation, which meant climbing atop the short walls of the courtyard and pulling oneself up to the roof, then presumably having the instruments handed up. Needless to say, observation of this kind rarely occurred.           

            We walked into the courtyard from the north. Roderick lowered the black backpack to the cement and stooped to open the zipper as I looked out over the field around us. The way the field sloped I could see the high stone bell tower of Alumni Hall over the treetops. Many years ago one of the monks that taught at St. Andrew’s hung himself from that tower; as a result rumors circulated that his ghost haunted the fourth floor of the building. I’ve never put much stock in ghost stories myself, but I have to admit that that fourth floor is superbly creepy at night. 

            Actually, I remember there was a picture in the basement (well, the bottom floor. It was a basement, but the classroom kind of basement) of the original faculty of monks all in front of Alumni Hall, staunch and very 1890s.  It was a fantastic photograph, and I walked by it to class every day for about a semester. Often I’d stop and look at the faces of those grumpy old men, sitting so straight, making a very fine point of not smiling through their beards and (more often) over their moustaches. I wondered who’d taken the picture, if it was originally a daguerreotype or if it was a real photograph. For some reason the idea that someone had said, back then, “Alright, at 3 o’clock we’re all going to gather in front of the college for a group photo” in stuffy turn-of-the-century lingo struck me as a totally nonsensical scenario, despite the fact that it was an entirely reasonable and natural thing for these guys to be doing. They certainly didn’t seem to think there was anything funny about it.

            One day I started looking at the building, to see if there had been any visible changes since then. The brickwork on the façade always struck me. The steep granite stairs leading up to the main door of the edifice, and the lovely windows that framed either side of it. Those windows with the watery glass panels that were mostly original even today, the panes watery and uneven from the shifting of the glass molecules over time. You could almost see inside from the photograph, and in the window on the left side of the door…

            There was a man’s face in the window, and I’d never seen it before. It was just subtle and subliminal enough that I only caught it because the blackness of the eye sockets in the black and white graininess were so unexpectedly framed in the white mist that was the face of this photographic anomaly. My heart humped my ribcage furiously. 

            Of course the first thing I thought of was the story about the monk suicide, but then I tried to rationalize it as just another monk who was late for the picture, and peeked out just in time to catch the flash.

            Then I realized, this was the early 1890s. He’d have to be peeking for at very least a good 5 seconds or more, the exposure times were too long, unless they were using a Kodak, which they definitely weren’t: The quality was far too suspect, it had to be daguerreotype or calotype. Probably calotype, I thought. But then, who would be standing there for minutes at a time in the window?

            Then, too, why the hell would he have been late? What the hell else could he have possibly had to do that day, when all the other faculty were out for picture time?

            The problem presented by the guy in the window in this picture still bothers me even now, and I really still don’t know what I think about it.

            I thought about all this while I looked at the bell tower, until Roderick tapped my arm lightly with the unopened beer he held in his outstretched hand as he stooped over the nylon bag. I took it from him and grumbled a “thanks” from somewhere in the back and top of my throat.

            “Well this place sucks,” I said as I raised myself to sit on the low wall.

            “I dunno,” he offered loudly and deliberately, to let me know he was about to disagree. “I think it’s kinda cool, I mean we’ve gotta be a fucking mile deep in the woods, and here’s this field. Hell, back home I never saw stars like this.” 

            I looked up too. I felt a very strong urge to tell him that this was nothing, that I remembered night skies from a trip I once took to my uncle’s out west, the kind where everything was so clear you could pick out the satellites circling above the earth as they moved not-all-that-slowly across a plane so stained with stars that Milky Way is the only name that could ever make sense of it. The kind of skyscape where you could hear the northern lights crackling against the horizons hundreds of miles north in the Yukon, and the desert floor you sat on felt like the most glorious grave in the fire and starlight. I knew, however, that he knew a little something about stars and what they could mean to a person, and I think he had a much better working knowledge of the loneliness of the cosmos than I.

            “Yeah, too bad whoever built this place was a goddamn fool and painted it white,” I said instead. I pulled myself up onto the wall and walked along it towards the shed, placed my beer on the low, flat black roof and hoisted myself up after it.

            I stood as I rearranged my underwear, which had bunched in the process, and looked around the field below as Roderick followed me up. We sat for a while, again quiet and drinking to ourselves. 

            I’d seen this conversation coming for a while now, and I knew he knew I agreed. I just didn’t want to talk about it.

            “Yeah,” I said,half a frown, squinting despite the dark. “I know.”

            I wasn’t comfortable talking like this. The way he was phrasing things, he was putting me on the spot, waiting for me to say “yeah, me too. I’m going to drop out.” It was horrible, and I really, really didn’t want to talk about it.

            “We should just get a place in Manchester or something, get outta school and just work, then--”

            Divine intelligence saved me a big steaming heap of conversation at that moment as from the edge of my peripheral sight I caught the false dawn of a headlight on the trees that lined the stone walls to our left. We both turned quickly to look. 

            Cops, we both thought. Cops were the last thing I wanted to see on any given day, especially at times like right now. I began to think very quickly.

            We were both lying flat on the roof already, and I began looking around. About 100 feet away across the field there was a road that we hadn’t noticed before, as it was obscured by trees. The car was pulling off the road onto a faded dirt track that ran a short way into the field and subsequently blended off into the grass in a fan shape. About 200 yards up the road was a beautiful old white farm house, again obscured by trees.

            “Those fuckers must’ve seen us and called!” Roderick exclaimed. 

            Our options were as follows: hop down the six feet into the courtyard, where we could hide behind the walls, but had no chance of running if these guys got out of their car and came poking around, which they surely would, or jump off the back side of the shed, away from the road and into extremely dense woody brush on a sharp slope and probably still get caught, but also have a good chance of hurting ourselves in the process, but have the outside chance of hauling some serious ass across the field and into the woods, back towards the campus, or jump towards the road and the approaching car.

            We quickly lowered ourselves into the courtyard, leaving our beer cans behind on the roof. We squatted down, hazarding a glance over the cement walls here and there as our blood flowed above flood stage in our veins. The image of caged gorillas before a pointing, “ooh”-ing, critical crowd came to mind. 

            The car bounced over the bumps hidden in the grass, its high beams bobbing through the trees across the field. As it came closer we crouched near the entrance, just barely peaking around the break in the wall as it slammed by. It wasn’t a cruiser at all.

            A well-worn early-90s Toyota Camry hauled past the courtyard, towards the gentler westerly slope we had walked up, rather than the compressed fall-away behind the shed section of the mini-compound. By now we were no longer crouched, we were following the car, incredulous, still mildly terrified, but for entirely different reasons.

            “What the fuck!” was all I could come up with as the mystery driver whipped the car around in the grass, leaving dirt tire scars all over the ancient farmscape. I heaved myself atop the wall once again so I could get a better look at the scene down below. I could just see the driver, a male face that was hard to make out through all the ditches and bumps the car was rolling with. I thought I saw the Face glance towards us, and perhaps his mouth moved.            “Dude, we’re about to get fucking murdered,” Roderick chuckled, sounding about a quarter convinced that he wasn’t kidding.

            The navy blue Camry had stopped mid-donut to face us. It barked as its gears ground and then caught, and it slowly advanced to ascend the hill, digging war trenches as its tires spun furiously.

            As the car climbed I dismounted from the wall and we walked out of the courtyard, partly to see better and potentially greet a madman, partly so it would be easier to run from said madman if said madman was the kind of madman you don’t want to greet.

            Finally, the Camry, filthy from the dirt it had thrown all over itself, swung around next to us so the driver was facing the Observatory, and finally stopped. The Face looked at us and we at It. In a moment I wasn’t worried anymore, just perplexed.

            He couldn’t be older than 23. His hair was short, almost a crew cut, not scraggly and shady like a killer. Through the window I could see his right arm, the sleeve completely covered in tattoos, hand still gripping the wheel. He definitely didn’t look like a cop, either.

            “Hey guys, what’s goin’ on?” He asked casually in a deep, slightly scratchy voice. Roderick and I looked at one another. Roderick moved first, swaggering towards the car.

            “Hey, man. What the hell are you doing?” he asked, with a kind of amused excitement in his voice that I’d hear again years later when we met Alex. Why did we run into all these kinds of people?

            The Face chuckled to himself and glanced towards the road, relaxing his shoulders, leaning back into his seat the slightest bit. 

            “Ah, nothin’, just lookin’ for a place to crash. Do you guys know who owns this field?”

            Roderick started to speak, but I interrupted, encouraged by the alcohol that smoothed my blood.

            “Oh, yeah dude this is St. A’s land, I go to school here, this is my buddy Rod. Did you say somethin’ about crashing here? I mean clearly you almost did down there,” I pointed down the hill, “but I assume you meant somewhere to sleep?”

            “Yeah, yeah. I’ve been drivin’ around for like three hours, I don’t really know where to go…” he trailed off and again looked around him through his windows. The car idled.

            “Shit man, what’s your story?” I asked and turned to find the beer bag. “Hollon one second, sorry. Shit, you want a beer?”

            “Ah, nah I’m set,” he seemed slightly uncomfortable at this offer. Maybe he was straight edge? “Hey, wait, so what are your guys’ names?”

            “That’s an ill name, I’m Bry,” he offered his hand through the window, and we took it in turn.

            “So,” Bry asked, “What’re you guys up to, just hangin’ out out here?”

            “Yeah man, we came through the woods from the St. Andrew’s campus cuz we’d heard about this place, and we’ve been drinkin’ all day so we thought we’d take it on the road,” Roderick said, wincing out the last few words as if anticipating a burp that never quite surfaced, and instead exhaled.

            “Ah, that’s cool. Like I said, I’m lookin’ for a place to crash, been out for a few hours now.” He scratched the back of his head. “My girlfriend’s parents are visiting her place this weekend, and they don’t like me that much, and they don’t know I’m livin’ with her, so I just packed up this afternoon, gonna be kickin’ around for a couple days.”

            “Well yeah, but I mean…” Roderick realized his mistake, looking slightly uncomfortable. 

            “So what, you don’t know anyone in the area or anything? No one that you can crash in on or anything?” I sat again on the wall of the courtyard, facing the Camry.

            “Naw, not really. That’s why I’m here: I saw the field off the road. I figured I wouldn’t run into anyone in the middle of this place so I came in for a look around, haha you guys scared the shit outta me when I saw you!”

            “Yeah, exactly. This is the last place we figured we’d run into anyone, too.” I killed the beer and stomped down on the can. 

            I saw Roderick look at this character, a studious squint forming at the corners of his eyes. 

            “I dunno man, I—I should really find a place to stay for the night…” he pulled at the strap of his seatbelt as his tentative explanation trailed off.

            “No, no, come on we’ve got all this drink and we’ve found ourselves a new and exciting companion…We must drink!” Rod smiled brightly as he made his grand thundering point and slammed his empty beer can down on the wall and then raised it up high, as in a salutation to some obvious tradition that we had to understand.

            When he said this it seemed like the obvious answer, like this single fact had been nagging at my ear to fill me in on itself since Bry started talking. Suddenly his wandering eye made sense in its rounds: he’d been sizing us up. Like so many other hateful straight-edge kids he completely distrusted us and our intentions based on the sole fact that we’d admitted our drug intake habits. I looked at Bry and felt betrayed. Fucking straight edge. He would be straight edge. He would be the one type of person besides a cop that could ruin this night.

            Roderick stood straight with a slightly dumb look on his face, which I’m sure I to some extent shared.

            I looked at Bry and thought of all the shitty scenester kids I’d had to deal with in the last few years, their bad attitudes and snobbishness. The hostility with which they asserted their abstinent values. Hell, the very concept of Straight Edge was probably the reason I started drinking and smoking in the first place, other drugs were just a logical inclusion in that chemical blanket.

            So many of them. Not all but most of them end up congregating at hardcore shows, sapping energy and leaving a bad taste in everyone’s air.

            All weakly called from the ranks of pale tree branches swaying in black straight legged jeans and cheaply printed band shirts, thick markered X’s glowering like the eyes of the dead from their hands. Whatever happened to tolerance and goodwill towards men? Most of them didn’t even look healthy.

            I coughed and glanced at the black gap in air where I knew the road was.

            “Wh—“ I started, but wasn’t sure what letters to follow those with.

            “Fuuuuuuck.” Roderick breathed out, still staring stupefied at Bry, still tucked safely away in his car. I stepped closed to the Camry.

            “Look, man…I—“ but I didn’t get any farther, because the moment I stepped closer Bry began to frantically roll up his window. He looked less uncomfortable and more on the side of panicked at this point.

            “Get the fuck out, man!” I heard him yell frantically at the glass as he jammed the car into reverse, and turned to reach for something on his passenger seat. This kinda got me panicking. What if he had a gun.

            At any rate his tires were spinning in the dirt, and he was cutting the wheel hard; it looked like he was bent on getting the hell out of the field and away from these mad junkies that had interrupted his attempts at a peaceful night’s escape from hostile girlfriend-parents. As I was watching his efforts a couple of things happened simultaneously, or at least I remember them as happening simultaneously. Maybe they didn’t. Anyway, what happened was that Bry’s front left tire finally caught purchase on a large rock buried in the mud, and secondly a large bottle flew into my view from the left and shattered on the Camry’s windshield. I turned, surprised at first, but as I turned I realized that Roderick had just wailed the near empty bottle of Wild Turkey. I saw a lok in his eyes that was a combination of stupendous drunkenness and stone-faced indignation.

The car immediately shot back and away from us in a sweeping arc, and it was a damn good thing I’d say, because I have a feeling nothing very good would have followed had Bry stayed. Roderick was growing enraged, by the second. However, just as the Camry finished its spin and came to a stop as Bry gathered himself to shift into first gear there was a loud, compressed processed-metal-and-deep-stone sound that snapped in our ears, hit the trees behind us and reverberated back. 

“Good!” yelled Roderick, a deep furrow developing in his brow.

Bry hesitated for a moment, quickly assessing the sound, making that quick decision: Is it bad? No, I don’t think it’s that bad… We heard the gear catch and the car stumbled forward like a runner walking off a rolled ankle. We watched as the tires caught once more and Bry tore off back to the backroads pavement of the marginally more civilized streets of Manchester.

“What the fuck dude, what the fuck is up with those straight-edge dudes man, seriously,”   Roderick smashed his cigarette to the dirt. Here it came.

“I cannot fucking fathom what the fuck they think they’re accomplishing. Every single fucking straight-edge kid I’ve ever met has been a fucking hypocrite: “Oh, I’m fucking straight-edge,” bullshit! Then they’re off fucking some underage girl they’ve never met before, or next day they’re smoking butts or some stupid bullshit. Shut the fuck up…” he paused to light a fresh cigarette. Like so many times, it didn’t really matter whether his facts were straight, he was right in a truthy sort of way. I knew what he meant. “And the way they get in your fucking face about it. Jesus fucking Christ on a pogo stick.” He shook his head and pulled the cigarette from his lips as he looked out towards the road.

Sometimes I’m not sure the events of that night happened, it all seemed so outrageous, I was severely slammed on Wild Turkey and Southern Comfort, as well as whatever beers and other detestable chemicals we’d managed to scare up that evening and consumed since late afternoon. I do know, however, that when the police finally did show up and started chasing us it was very real, and I was very, very aware.

            I fell to the ground as I landed my first step in the dirt, my toes crumbling as they failed to take pressure.

            I managed to work my way to the rear of the car in a kind of awkward hopping/ groping combination, leaning on the side of the wrecked Camry.

            Somehow I’d managed to wedge the car mostly lengthwise between an enormous oak in the front and a smaller white birch in the back. The front end was totally trashed.

            “Sean, where the fuck are you?” I yelled, not too loud though, I didn’t know if there might be houses around, which would create an even larger problem for us.

            “Sean, you fucker, you took my goddamn cigarettes, I know you’re here somewhere!”

            I hopped a bit beyond the car, finding another tree to support myself on. The toes were well on their way to swelling and ached something awful, but I kept moving; I was starting to get whiffs of that damp mossy smell of cigarettes in the forest.

            Why the hell would they leave me? I mean, I couldn’t help but feel a bit insulted that they’d leave me, the driver, behind the wheel to answer to the fucking authorities if and when they eventually arrived. 

            I followed the smell a bit into the woods towards a shallow sound of running water I hadn’t picked up on before. My toes broke over and over in my mind with every step. The trees were spotty in my eyes, as I was losing focus on them. I leaned against an oak tree and slid around its scratchy side, and there they were; or at least, there was a weak, low cloud of smoke in the half-aware moonlight ahead, where I presumed the water broke the tree line. I slumped close enough that I could finally see the finer shapes of Gen and Roderick through the moist woodsy haze.

            “Shut the fuck up!” Roderick hissed, and pointed across the small brook, no wider than I was tall and only maybe 6 inches deep. I didn’t get it at first. I looked towards where he was pointing for a good couple seconds.

            There was nothing there but trees and brush. They were still fucked up, or freshly re-fucked on something. My whole leg throbbed.

            Jen was staring, stupefied in the same general area, but not focusing anywhere in particular. She was a little less than a human being, at least at the moment.

            “Oh, yeah? What do you see there buddy?” I asked, partially interested.

            He turned on his heels, in a low crouch, his knees scraping the gravel of the brook’s bank.  “Sean you’re freakin me the hell out dude. Seriously, we need to get—“

            “Fuck you,” he hissed. “It’s fucking Roderick!”

            At this point I was so dazed by the pain and the nonsense that Roderick was feeding the air that I hit the ground. I could still see Roderick, crouched, transfixed and almost panicky staring at that same spot and for a second it made sense what he was getting at, but that kind of sense that you lose immediately after it clicks.

            “Oh shit, Deon?” Gen was finally moving, and she was coming at me. “You look worried,” I mumbled. I hoped she was, I realized.

            Life is a constant reinvestment. We don’t intend these moments; these moments happen.

For a long time I’ve been very bad at relating to people that are my age. For the most part everyone I’ve ever been close to has been either a few years younger or older than me, and usually those people are the same way. For that reason I think it’s no accident that close as we are, Roderick and I have never quite seen eye to eye, because deep down our friendship is, as I’ve said, based on a certain degree of mistrust and mutual doubt. 

And for that reason, as well, Montreal was a terrible idea in the first place.

Session 5

Everything was slightly dim and hurt my eyes, like the screen of a laptop computer running on battery power. Like looking for the horizon in a nighttime picture of the coast. I felt as though there was something I wasn’t getting, like the most obvious punch-line was waiting expectantly for me to get it; then I realized it was that I’d been unconscious and jammed on morphine for some time. All this from one quick glance around the sheet-walled room I was stashed in, and the warm, comfortable, sunk-in feeling of the bed that was absorbing me. My cheeks ached at the corners of my mouth, which was dry. Must’ve been asleep with a morphine smile. All a flashback to being a kid with a broken arm.

Of course, this all made a bit of sense at least. I kind of remembered the woods, the car, Gen and Rod, my toes, but with every fitfully slow glance around the little hospital curtain cubicle, with every second that the most recent dose of anesthetic metabolized, I looked more and more vividly at the space where Roderick and Gen were not; nor was any doctor, nurse, or anyone at all, for that matter. 

Being a dumb little bastard while growing up had given me a wonderful sense of familiarity with the feeling of being in the emergency room, and subsequently that short, awkwardly disassembled moment when they roll you into surgery and clap the mask on your face. And with the opiate stupifecation that so often controls the next few days of in-patient life. I’d jumped off enough reasonably (at the time, anyway) high cliffs, played enough pickup games of all sorts on pavement to know when the morphine was coming, and there was nothing a hated and loved more, and that, to this day, scares the ever-Christing fuck out of me more than pretty much anything. I can handle opium once in a while, but once that IV is dripping in my vein, everything positive that I pride myself in goes right up the line and into that little clear bag, and while no one can see it in there, while it’s accepted as a matter of recovery’s course, my will to live is bobbing around in there, embarrassing, for all to see, while I lie back and smile a big old-fashioned minstrel show smile directed at nothing in particular. I melt into the pile of warm blankets, a womb for an addict. Waking up like this, however, is very very difficult to be alarmed by.

Except for when the blankets are starting to cool down, and the bed’s sat up a little too high, and your arms are kind of itchy, and you’re thirsty but you have to take an epic piss but you really can’t, and you feel the fiery stab of a catheter and now things are getting a little bit stressful.

And goddamn it it’s time for another shot, where the hell is the nurse?

With all the itching and bladder pressure, the added alarm at the absence of the only two people I knew and hadn’t fucked or beaten in the whole of Montreal, and Canada for that matter, made me feel like popping. Would I put it past them to dump me here like this? I started breathing heavy.

“Ah, you’re up!” a cheery voice fluttered from the other side of the curtains. I pictured a bouncy blonde nurse in a white skirt and little Red Cross bonnet walking towards me, Midwest smile stuck in place, but the curtain opened to reveal a heavyset woman maybe 5’4”, brown hair and a baby blue knit sweater over her apron. The smile was there, though.

Wwww…what is this?” I managed, still slow and goopy-eyed.

“Well, this is a hospital, dear, and you’re a patient, but not for much longer by the looks of it.” This seemed a slightly odd way to put it, but I chalked that up to my condition. “Looks like you’re doing much better today. Are you in pain?”

            “Can I have morphine?” I knew I’d skipped a step but I didn’t really care.

            “Sorry, I can’t give you that unless I know you’re still in serious pain. Does it hurt anywhere?”

            “Uh, yeah, my foot is killing me.” There’s no shame in an addict’s lie. She looked at me and I knew she wasn’t buying it.

            “You can’t bullshit a bullshitter. You’ve been here for four days, the swelling in your foot went down yesterday morning. You’re sure nothing else hurts?”

            “Good, because when we found you your appendix was burst. Your torso was bruised up pretty bad. What happened to you anyway?”

            “Hey, where are my friends? Why aren’t they here? I kind of want to talk to them before I say—“
            “Your friends? I assume that means whoever dropped you off here. No one’s been here for you since you came in.”

            “Yeah, security cameras show a girl and someone else drag you to the front door and then hit the bricks pretty fast. Real good friends.”

            I scratched my arm like old paint that needed scraping. “I wish I could say I didn’t believe that. I guess I kind of don’t, still…” My stomach was getting unettled, though I had no idea what I’d had to eat for at least the past four days.

            “I wish I could say I didn’t see it all the time,” the Nurse sighed. “Where are you from? Heck, what’s your name for that matter? You didn’t have any ID on you, we haven’t even made up a clever nickname for you.”

            “Call me Red. Look, what’s the situation?” I asked. I was still feeling the morphine, but the warm fuzz was splitting to either side of my vision and I was seeing like real people see again. I was also feeling the nose of a panic bout sniffing at my mind. Foreign country. No ID. Broken toes, no friends to speak of. No ID….

            “Well, we’ve been waiting for you to regain consciousness before we make any decisions. Well, I mean, first of all, we’re going to need you to tell us what happened, and who you are, so we can get you situated.”

            Not good. Not good at all. I was pretty sure nothing good would come of telling the truth, in any respect. I took a quick assessment of my situation.

To my left was a small table upon which my personal effects were stacked: boxers, a pair of well-worn and now bloodied Boy Scout issue socks with holes developing in the heels; olive green pseudo-dress pants (more along the lines of hiking pants, but passable as either)  a red button-up shirt; camouflage jacket, the contents of which pockets I hoped remained (knife, lighter, spare change, Mini-Mag flashlight, pencil). No hat, no wallet, and as far as I knew no money. 

            “Can I get something to eat please? I’m fucking starving. Sorry.” She blinked.

            “Sure hon, I’ll go see if I can get something sent up from the cafe.”

            “Thanks. Hey, what time is it?”

            The nurse, nameless as I, exited the room, I assumed in the direction of the cafeteria. That solved my first problem: I was alone again.

            I got dressed, the whole time my foot throbbing but not quite hurting yet, thanks to the tail end of the morphine. 

            I love drugs, if for no other reason than that when used for their intended purpose, they work. Amazing, no?

            In the hallway I saw nothing I’d come to expect of a hospital: no shrieking bedlam, no battered wives or baby mamas crying black and blue. It didn’t look like Lowell. That must mean I’m not in the ER, I supposed. I had only been overnight in a hospital overnight and realized I had no idea how a hospital might be laid out beyond the ER and the ground floor. Where was the trauma? Where were the people waiting for the judgement of their medical maker? Because that was the direction I needed to be heading in.

PART II: The Continuing tale of degenerates and the Good who Die as a result

I need to be on lockdown. I need to be fucking put away.

            One must learn by demonstration, and it has been demonstrated to me that I am not a friend worth sticking by.

            I seem to be capable of so many levels of deception, have I topped it all with one epic lie to myself telling people I’m right, that I’m not the kind of person people should be listening to? That I’m maybe some kind of monster? Roderick planted the seed of doubt back then. But who the fuck is he to judge me? A drug addict suffering deeply sewn delusions of grandeur. With his family to thank for them. He should have been aborted.

            Roderick and Gen too. Who the hell is she anyway? What makes her so special that after just a night she’s in on the scam to fuck me like this? Fuck em both, I thought.

            But wait. What about me? Who would be there for me if my friends wouldn’t, as I had been for them?

Scrap 2a. 8/31/98

God loves you. God created you. You have a purpose in life.

In every photograph your smile must be convincing. In every smile you must hide your lies from yourself.

            Who are you, then? if neither you nor those you thought were friends is telling the truth?

            I, Gideon Harp, synchronicity a lie, no one to fall back on. No one to scheme with. No one to rob the world with.

            Life as it’s found, all over again. No editors, no talent. Just people, professionals, fuck-ups, parents and children.

            So I sit atop the walls of lame duck Quebec, in the dead of winter, lost and forgotten. But then again, who am I to feel so exclusively sorry for myself? The same mistake I’d made perhaps my whole life. But fuck, what do I know anyway.

Patient appears to have responded well to XX mg dosages of Ritalin abministered 2 times daily. Since last visit has become notably docile and signs of hyperactivity have lessened but have not subsided.

            Mother Andrea Harp was insistent that his dosage be increased, however in my opinion this may be detrimental to the natural growth of the childs brain, as results of studies on subjects of such a young age are inconclusive on this matter.

            Patient appears not only docile but aloof, and though hyperactivity has seen a reduction, the urge to lash out is still apparent in his words as well as his body language. Next session in one month.

            I—we, used to live in an old man’s basement. It wasn’t exactly luxurious but it was free and I never had to run from anything or anyone.

            I missed Manchester, I missed the exquisite fucked up mess, the train of unplanned but monumentally eventful nights I’d spent in bars, drunk and scheming. I missed trusting my friends, in the rare event that I had any that weren’t just people who bought drugs from me.

            Roderick surely blamed me for a long time for many of his own problems, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that I think he blames me for the death of Julia Murphy, the only girl I’ve ever seen him with that seemed paradoxically right for him, despite the fact that she introduced him to the horrible drugs he’s been habitually involved with ever since. The reason I felt responsible is, I sold her these very same drugs.

            Julia Murphy was an Irish girl, red headed and green eyed, nominally Christian of course. She had a strange energy about her, always. a manic kind of rush that she never abandoned except for when she crashed out after a several days binge of Adderall, coke, Benzedrine. Whatever she could get, usually uppers, but weird shit too sometimes: special K, DMT, adrenochrome. Things like that.

            “Yeah, why?” I turn from the door of her apartment. She’s rummaging through her purse, through empty pill bottles with phony prescriptions stuck on them

            “Can you grab me a pack of butts? Mustangs, USA Golds, whatever,” she asks as she assembles a handful of change, more dimes than quarters.

            “Just wondering if you wanted a forty,” I lie. I think I can cover my own. I nervously reached into the pocket of my camo jacket.

            “I’ll be back.” I turned back to the door and turned the knob. I heard a deep, fast snort. I turned down the hall and kept my eyes on the floorboards.

            I stepped out onto Kelley Street and started walking. I hated when she did this, whatever it was she was doing. Drugs, whatever. I can’t watch people put things up their nose. It’s disgusting, despicable. I can’t respect people who use nose drugs, and that went for Julia too. I hated when Julia did the drugs she did. I hated myself more for the fact that I was more often than not the one she got the stuff from, indirectly. I wanted to kill every friend we had in common.

            I crashed out at her house when I was at St. Andrews, and for a while after I dropped out, too. This was one of the nights after I’d left. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to stay, despite the fact that I had nowhere to go at the moment. I’d figure something out, I always have.

     I met Julia at a frat party on campus. A frat-guy yah-dood had decided it was a good idea to clean a girl's clock in front of me, because she told him off when he tried to drunkenly drag her upstairs and date rape her. Call me old-fashioned, no one gets away with hitting a girl. I took him out behind the house and beat him unconscious with a tree branch. He woke up two days later in the hospital with permanent brain damage. I don't think he'll hurt anyone ever again. 

     This, of course, was after I'd dropped out. I wouldn't go around doing this shit with my name still on the books at the place. These kinds of guys are exactly why I left.

    I opened the door to the 711 and walked to the snack aisle without thinking. I grabbed a bag of Pizzeria flavored Combos, and slipped a Power Bar in my pocket. I'll be damned if I ever pay 2.50 for something that small and flavorless, but I try to keep one on me at all times, just in case. 

    I turned down towards the beer cooler, perusing the large amber bottles and decided on a Steel Reserve and walked to the counter. 

   "Can I get a pack of Lucky Filters and....." there were a few options in Julia's price range, and I decided to treat her. "and a pack of Marlboro 27's," I told the Middle Eastern clerk.