Chapter 8

SEPTEMBER 1995:

“Huh… Huh… Huh… Huh… Huh…”

            Freshman year of Wall High School. Cousin Myra had graduated the year before. She had not put the word out for me; talked to the Juniors (now Seniors) below her; the “jock and cheerleader crowd” elites who looked up to her. She had neglected to wax-stamp a royal letter of introduction to a cornucopia of preppy pussy; had not scanned my Wonka Golden Ticket to the exalted ranks of microcosmic fame and fortune.

Though a “look out for him” or “do not fuck with him” or “make sure nobody fucks with him” order would have been enough, especially in such a prison-like environment.

“Huh… Huh… Huh… Huh… Huh…”

“Like a twister I was born to walk alone…” Whitesnake is bland and overplayed.

“Huh… Huh… Huh… Huh… Huh…”

I never breathed, but only hyperventilated. I never perspired but dripped the sweat of a savage, the last member of an uncontacted Amazonian tribe, a Neolithic hunter running from sadistic Bolivian narcotraficantes.

“Huh… Huh… Huh… Huh… Huh…

            Like the heartbeat at the beginning of GN’F’N’R’s (what us diehard fans called Guns N’ Fuckin’ Roses) “Coma,” the greatest “Prog Rock” song ever written, hipster faggots be damned. Why the fuck do hipsters always put De Bussy’s “Claire De Lune” at the end of their boring documentaries? The effete piece of music always suggests that the documented subject is at peace with the end of a Sex, Drugs, and Rock N’ Roll lifestyle. Who could ever be at peace with the closing of that chapter? My wild life started too late! Never – ever – renounce Dionysus! Even the bardolating critic Harold Bloom – who worshipped at Shakespeare’s proto-capitalist feet - flogged his playwright hero for making Falstaff repentant at the end of “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” Never repent for lust! Everything else. But never lust.

            I swallowed a lump of saliva, gritted my teeth, and attempted the suppression of a jagged, jittery, unsteady, back and forth breath: “Huh…(pause) Huh… (pause)

             I pressed my sweaty palms against the laminate desk top. The fragile mitts left a Kirlian outline of sweat, an ephemeral trace that evaporated back to a microscopic ether. Some smart-ass had etched the word “FUCK” onto the upper left of the desk. It must have taken some effort to dig an obscene Indo-European-derived word into the glossed particleboard. In the middle of the desk, another (or perhaps the same) smart-aleck had carved the word “nigger” into the semi-porous material. Transgression. The teachers, preachers, and po-lice used to worry about Elvis Presley shaking his hips on live t.v., but from the mid-90s on the moral panic was over racism. Now everyone has it good except for white guys who can’t get laid (and, thankfully, I have not been a completely sex-deprived whiteboy since the end of the Clinton Administration back in 2000.)

            But back in 1995 I had not yet seen a pair of “tiddies” in real life. Had not even watched a porno video by that time (but my dad’s collections of Playboys, Hustlers, Penthouses, and Ouis had given me a good idea of what tits, pussies, and assholes looked like.)

            FUCK nigger. Well, it depended on the nigger I guess (I would have certainly fucked the girls from “Salt N’ Pepa.) I had not yet, unfortunately, fucked anyone of any race (though I would grow up to proudly, and with gratitude, fuck women from all over the world.) But back then the thought of fucking – or of just about anything - made me anxious. The thought of African-Americans made me anxious. Lastly, the thought of fucking African-Americans (or anyone) made me anxious. Everything made me so damn anxious… Woody Allen’s most neurotic characters seemed downright self-possessed compared to a fearful Gentile like me.

            “Huh… Huh… Huh… Huh… Huh…”

            A genetic predisposition to anxiety and hyperventilation. Like father, like son.

            But the anxiety was also a result of bad conditioning and poor parenting – let’s not forget that part!

Mother seldom took me on playdates when I was little. Like Travis Bickle, I never learned how to be a person with other people.

            The 20 other kids in our First Period Freshman English classroom seemed just fine. Talking or thumbing through their notebooks. Equally equanimous.

            Lucky mediocrities.   

            The girl seated in front of me whipped around and almost lashed me in the eyes and tickled my nose with the crusty locks of her long, thick, curly, jet-black hair.

            Yes, her hair was like this: 

           

            Not pinned up in a bun, but rather puffed out (though too flattened by product to fully flower as a ‘fro.)

            What the fuck else kind of hair did you think I liked?

            “Dude, are you okay?”

            “Yes…”

            Her icy blue eyes (icebergs that had dislodged from the Arctic shelf and drifted to the Caribbean Sea) turned downward to inspect my sweaty hands. Her speckled, light cyan orbs tilted up to my yellowish-brown corneas and, perhaps, took a subconscious gauge of my pupil dilation. She held her stare, bold and comfortable in such a penetrative act of biune intimacy with a stranger. She dissected me, but for my own good. I obviously had a problem and like a benevolent clinician, she would get to the bottom of it and try to help me.

            “Are you sure?”

             “Yeah…”

            “Huh… Huh… Huh…”

            “It’s okay. We’re all nervous. I’m nervous too.”

She pointed to Brian McCallister, an unremarkable schmo, interchangeable with other unremarkable schmos.

“He’s nervous.”

She pointed to Kathleen Renner, a dull and unattractive blonde.

“She’s nervous. I mean, it’s our first day of Freshman year of High School. Who wouldn’t be nervous? It’s okay if you’re nervous.”

“Thank you for saying that.”

“What’s your name? I’m Jesenia.”

“I’m Will.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too!”

Someone – a stranger no less – was being friendly toward me. Weird.

“This is my first year in Wall. My family just moved here from Neptune.”

That must have been why she was so nice. Were black people nicer? Nicer than John Dyne, at least? Mike Tyson said he was bullied as a child, so there must be some mean black people too.

“Oh, cool… Huh, huh, huh… What was Neptune like?”

“Not as many white people. But that’s okay because I’m half-Irish and half-Puerto Rican. West Belmar is more like Neptune than the other parts of Wall.”

I’m glad she offered that information.

Wait… West Belmar… Did she live next to Alisa? When Mr. Alvarez took an early morning arroz con gandules y cerveza dump, did Jesenia hear it through his wall and then through her wall, like one may hear their pet iguana defecating on the wood chips of a glass terrarium? Did she hear Alisa’s shits too? Oh…

But wait! I still had more than a year to go before I would encounter Alisa for the first time; before I would ask her for her shitty bowling pencil.

Let’s talk quantum physics here for a second (not that I have the Math I.Q. to crunch the numbers.) According to some radical physicists, time does not exist as a line, an ever-forward-moving arrow, what Martin Heidegger referred to as “vulgar time”; what the British poet Robert Graves considered the product of an Aristotelian “cause and effect” ontology. Some suggest that past, present, and future are simultaneous, a vast, open field of time for all possibilities, from the movement of subatomic particles to the everyday interplay of fate and free will.

“This explains why the first Muse of the Greek triad was named Mnemosyne, ‘Memory’: one can have memory of the future as well as of the past.” – Robert Graves

My future with Alisa was such a morass of psychic energy – a charge of emotional trauma – that perhaps my future with her was somehow looping back to the past and influencing the present of 1995 (much as 1995 may be looping forward and influencing my present/future as I write this.)

Was it possible that Alisa’s pungent yet delightful (to a perv like me) odor particles could – like neutrinos - pass through the earth’s crust or move backward in time? Richard Feynman should have lived long enough to come up with a diagram for Alisa’s turds. Were Alisa’s turds the world’s first time travelers? Were Alisa’s turds present at the signing of the Declaration of Independence?

But back to 1995 and Jesenia.

Jesenia said she was half-Irish? Did a humor of damp melancholic mist cool her blood? Dublin (and the Island as a whole) has an Oceanic Climate (one of the worst climates of all.) Did she derive depth from the dregs of her ancestral memories, unconscious recollections of peat fires burning in the pre-Patrick mound?

Even the beaches of Eire are uncanny-looking, like a shore of purgatory on the coast of heaven. Dante’s virtuous pagans sat on the cliff – impatient for the Resurrection - as Stephen Daedelus inspected a dead, maggot-eaten dog, the rotten smell fusing with the “summer” (do they even have summers there?) miasma, an Ossianic mist (okay, now Ossianic – not Oceanic – mornings inspire heroism.)  But overall, not cozy. Creepy-seeming. Especially during the season of a characteristically cool summer. Here’s the beach from “Ulysses”: 

Just as I pictured it – a great writer will take you where he wants to take you.

Yet Jesenia’s blood also came from Puerto “fuckin’ Rico. Like most tropical places, Puerto Rico is “canny,” as in the opposite of uncanny. Except at night. The tropics are odd in that days are the excited stomach butterflies of Disney morning magic (with a few limed-out Coronas for the older crowd), but the nights are low-watt-lighted living rooms and bedrooms. Night-silhouetted palm trees assert themselves against end-of-life lounge chairs and, like everywhere else, bluish-black t.v. screens flicker in other people’s windows.

That being said, every tropical location is much less uncanny than Ireland, even at night (though it helps to party hard on tropical nights to suppress the pit of existential dread in one’s stomach.) Jesenia also originated – as if directly from a Platonic realm - from the ultraviolet light of this beach, one of the least-uncanny beaches I’ve ever seen:

A sanguine girl from a sunny shore! Half-Hot-Blooded, as I say. Alisa’s blood came from “canny” (as in the opposite of uncanny) Puerto Rico too (though I first mistook her as a Mexican.)

“How do you like Wall?” I asked.

“I don’t know. It seems all right, so far. I don’t know.”

“Cool.”

Everything was “cool” with me. How dare I be any less than ebullient with someone who was good enough to treat me like a human?

Like Jesenia. I already loved her.

She reminded me of Lori Petty from “Point Break,” but with that curly Rican hair. She had the exact same eyes, skin tone, and even facial structure as Lori Petty in this still:

She was tiny. I did not usually fall in love with petite girls, but her bubbly personality dwarfed her body twofold.

She wore a white, oversized (two sizes too big) Tommy Hilfiger sweater (or Hilnigger as we called it.)

She sagged her light blue Hilnigger jeans, which were also at least two sizes too big; a translucent beeper (remember those), hung from her loose waistband, a cartoonish, rounded (like the curvature of space-time), prismatic capsule of wires and chips.

Jesenia was a Six Flags Great Adventure Bug’s Bunny caricature of 1995 Hip-Hop culture (how much “heart” even post-Cobain 1995 had compared to the awful aughts or – even worse – the Obama years.)

She wore the tiniest Adidas sneakers (as in the Korn song “All Day I Dream About Sex” – but Korn was too gross and creepy for a good half-Rican wiggeress like Jesenia.) The white high-tops binded – in the spirit of a traditional yet sadistic Japanese foot-binder – the most miniature feet I have ever seen: an East Asian ideal dressed for a nouveau-L.L. Cool J video (he had reinvented himself for the 90s by that time – no more tight leather pants.)

Some Puerto Ricans – or half-Puerto Ricans – are tiny; a genetic expression, perhaps, of the upper Mongolian “Native American” genes they share with the rest of their New World brethren, from the flutists of Lake Titicaca to the mouthwash-drinking Eskimos of Kavik.

“So, don’t feel nervous. Just relax!”

“Okay. Thank you so much for saying that.”

Then the English teacher walked in and started talking about Shakespeare or some shit like that.

***

            Tommy stood as tall (or short) as Tommy.

            Tommy from “GoodFellas” that is:

           

            “Sawed-off” like him (as in short and stocky.) Juiced-up-looking and musclebound, like any mini-Benny (Bennies are what us Jersey Shore folk call tourists from Bayonne, Edison, Newark, and New York.)

            Though dark-featured like some kind of greaseball, he confused amateur genealogists with his WASPY surname: Bryer.

            He kept his “nigger hair” (how the then-politically-incorrect Stephen King described the perm of one of his primate villains) as shaved and close-cropped as that of a jack-in-the-box monkey from the insensitive 1920s.

            But he wasn’t black.

            Tommy Bryer = The Don Corleone of Wall High School. Except that Don Corleone sat around in a musty room, stroking cats and talking to ingrate morticians.

            And he was only a Sophomore!

            He had moved to our suburban town at some point, but from where? He might have been from Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, the Bronx, North Jersey. Or even just one of the next towns over. Who knew? Who knows?

            Tommy menaced through his Being itself rather than through any publicized action or actions. He never seemed to do much harm to anyone.

            He carried himself as a genial enough fellow, like John Gotti walking through the streets of Howard Beach and buying ice cream for every little kid on the block; putting money aside for widows; hosting a come-one-come-all Fourth of July Fireworks show on the sands of Jamaica Bay. Just a good guy, a guy’s guy, a “guy.” If you needed something, he would do it for you (but you better send him a “Thank You” card.)

            “Godfather…” Then bend and kiss his ring.

            But what could he do for me?

            And why did everyone who knew him or knew of him fear him so?

            After the first few weeks of the school year it became apparent that Jesenia and Tommy were dating.

            What did he find under those baggy Tommy Hilnigger jeans?

            The only goal worth seeking, I suppose.

            And she wasn’t even my type despite being half-Puerto Rican. I never found Lori Petty attractive.

            But, oh, her big personality made up for all of it. I wanted to be a bald-headed, Newport-smoking wigger just to get next to her; a blue-collar guy; a guy who makes good money as an electrician or something. Just so we could drive to Florida together on a wigger vacation to Disney World. I would blow Newp (what we called Newports back then) smoke out the window as I navigated our SUV through the winding by-ways of D.C. area I-95.

            All while listening to Tupac.

***

            Jesenia was a no-go. Even if she wasn’t dating someone as scary as Tommy, I would have respected that she was in a relationship with someone other than me. Let’s spout the ultimate “emo-beta” line of all time once again: “I would just want her to be happy.”

            So, I had moved on to Amber, a white girl. What was wrong with me? At least Deirdre and Amanda were Jewish. They had a little bit of exotic, “gypsyish” sort of blood in them.

            Amber was as crackerish as a Cracker Barrel. I’ll bet they went to a Methodist church!

            What choice did I have? Tommy and Jesenia sat in a tree, f-u-c-k-i-n-g (most likely – a guy like Tommy wasn’t going to waste any time getting into those Hilnigger jeans.)

            “Moved on” implies that there was any kind of reciprocal relationship between Amber and I, which was ridiculous, of course.

            “Moved on” also means that Amanda Goldstein had moved to Florida at the end of our 8^th Grade year. Now she lived in a rich part of Broward (from the gossip I had overheard) with her Jewish dad (a whole lot of palm trees and lightning strikes along her new bus route) and, well, that was (for the time being) the end of the Amanda Goldstein crack pipe dream (unless I stalked her all the way down to Florida a la the Ben Stiller character in “There’s Something About Mary.”) I would just have to hope that Amanda would get sick of her dad, move back to Jersey, and live with her mother and much-hated (from what I had heard) stepfather.

            Amber was a third-rate substitute for both Jesenia and Amanda, but I refused to admit that to myself. I insisted that she was the Earth Mother lifted to Illuminati heaven at the end of Michael Jackson’s “Captain Eo” show at Epcot Center: 

            I apotheosized a mediocre (though pretty) girl because, like Romeo, I was in love with being in love (and, yes, I needed love.) I forced myself to love her and it worked!

            Amber should have worn a Rockford Peach uniform. Yes, Amber was also a bit Lori Petty-ish, but more a quasi-gingerish “A League of Their Own” Lori Petty than the dark brunette “Point Break” Lori Petty. What was it with Lori Petty that year?

            The picture below is what Amber “sorta” looked like except that she was much, much, much prettier than Lori of Petty (and not quite as “ginger” as Lori Petty appears in this shot): 

 

            By the way:

            “We’re the members of the All-American League, we come from cities near and far; we’ve got Canadians, Irish ones and Swedes, we’re one for all, we’re all for one, we’re All-American!”

            I copied those lyrics from memory! I’ve seen “A League of Their Own” too many times to call myself an alpha male. I’m a faggot. But that’s okay (I write this in A.D. 2019 and everyone is a faggot now.) And they should have included permed-out Dominicanas and bamboo-wearing Puerto Rocks on their wack-ass softball team! Darn segregation (though Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X both supported segregation, the Uncle Toms or non-Uncle Toms!)

            At least the film featured Madonna from back when she was still a piece o’ ass (“Madge” went on to become as old and ugly as the Ms. Hawkins lesbo-villain from Chapter 7 – who’d have thunk it?)

             Amber sat next to me in Study Hall. We had spoken twice. Once when she had asked me for a piece of paper and once more on the day of the O.J. Simpson verdict.

            “Do you think they’ll show us the verdict in here?” she asked.

            As in prison, mounted television sets dangled from the walls of every room, erect, like gargoyles with satyriasis.

            “I don’t know…huh…huh…huh… I think they (the teachers) want to see it themselves, so wherever they are they’re going to want to watch it and have to bring us along. So I think so, yeah… Huh… Huh… Huh…”

            Gulp.

            “I think he’s innocent,” she said.

            Typical dumb, race-traitor white girl.

            Shut up! Don’t say that about her! Don’t say that about her! Don’t say that about her! Don’t you dare say that about her. She’s not a mediocrity for thinking decadent, mediocre, race-traitor thoughts! She just has her own opinion. I’m going to shut my stupid mind up.

            “Yeah, he could be…huh…huh…huh… I think he probably is innocent…”

            What a sell-out I was! Like most semi-intelligent people, I thought O.J. was guilty, but who was I to argue with a hot girl like Amber?

            From those two minor, inconsequential interactions I constructed a narrative that Amber liked me almost as much as I liked her and that she would give me a chance if only I were bold enough to make the first move.

            For the next three months I fantasized about our life together: those first few dates; clammy hands; the awkward peck on the lips; the juicier kiss; then the French kiss; enjoying each other’s company; loving one another; High School sweethearts for the rest of High School; marriage; children; old age; death (holding hands, like in “The Notebook” – I told you I was a library of clichés.)

            I convinced myself that she must have had a great sense of humor (though the opposite was likely true.)

Shut up! Don’t think that.

Think instead of our pillow talk; our post-coital laughter; our pranks, inside jokes; tickling and wrestling – and then more lovemaking (though I had no idea what actual lovemaking was even like.)

            I was her Kyle Reese and she was my Sarah Connor. I would die for her, throw myself in the path of a Terminator to keep her from harm:

            I worked up my nerve for the next three months and then resolved to ask her out on the first Friday of January so that I could hide for the weekend if anyone tried to humiliate me over my bold and inappropriate entreaty. I felt like such a loser for “jumping the gun” after having talked to her only twice.

            What a loser I am. A girl talks to me twice and I think she likes me.

            I had spent weeks planning every step of the operation. I knew that she always stopped at her locker after 6^th Period. The path from one of my classes to the next led right past her locker, number 332 (332 had become my favorite number – it would have taken a Ramanujan to find something spectacular about such a random three digits.)

            “Huh… Huh…. Huh…”

            And I was nervous under ordinary circumstances.

             I role-played through the fear.

I had decided to play the character of a greasy dumbbell, a simple but goodhearted wop: Rocky Balboa. Rocky buying turtle food in the pet store and flirting with Adrian. “Yo Adrian…” “Yo Amber, if you wanna like go like ice-skating with me…” All I needed were weight-lifting gloves as tight as my leather jacket and a 70s-era fedora. Yo Amber…

           

But there she was, standing in front of her locker (instead of a canary-cluttered pet store) and I suddenly felt more nervous than Rocky was when he entered the ring against Ivan Drago.

I walked up to her, my heart beating in my ears (has my heart ever not beat in my ears?)

            Just be Rocky. Ask her very quick and get out of there. Be Rocky. Ask her very quick and get out of there.

            But Rocky wouldn’t have asked her “very quick” and then gotten out of there. He spent a lot of time in the pet store, flirting with Adrian.

            Shut up.

            “Y… (I thought the “Yo” would seem too forced and artificial, so I changed it to “Hey.”)

            “Hey, Amber.”

            She looked up at me.

            “Would you like to go out with me I?” I speed-mumbled the question.

            “What?” She leaned her ear toward me. Oh God, I would have to say it again.

            “Would you like to go out with me?”

            “Oh, no thanks.”

            “Okay.”

            I walked away. I had proven my courage to myself, but that didn’t ameliorate the hurt and disappointment. The fantasy I had built over three months collapsed into the Event Horizon of reality.

            Why would she want to go out with me? We had talked twice and then only for a few seconds. Another guy would have initiated conversation with her every day and then kept working on her; badgering; hounding; downplaying the seriousness of the situation while refusing to take “no thanks” for an answer.

            But I did not know how to act. I did not know how to be human. No one had ever taught me.

***

            I walked through the burglar-alarmed front entrance of home that day, stepped onto the pristine foyer, and removed my Reeboks. I would have traded our big house for any of my fantasy girls: Deirdre, Amanda, Jesenia, or Amber. Didn’t Lynyrd Skynyrd call love the “rich man’s gold.”

            Mother sat at the kitchen table, leaned over materials, and leafed through booklets, examining every line of the documents as if she were a Talmudist scholar. And for her the Royal Caribbean cruise itinerary was a religious text. Mother’s religion was Bourgy Consumption and her churches were the sumptuous and over-the-top ships that sailed from exotic ports of call.

            She proudly owned stock in Royal Caribbean and daily checked its performance in the financial pages of the newspaper. God forbid some old lady caught Legionnaire’s Disease on an Alaskan excursion – the corporation would take a dive on the NYSE (if that’s how it works.)

            “Hey Will,” she said, chipper as could be. Of all days for her to be in a good fucking mood! “Come look at our ship. This is what we’ll be sailing on. It’s one of their newest ships, the Monarch of the Seas.”

            “Oh, wow…” I said, faking enthusiasm as best as I could. What did all the cruises in the world mean without the love of a woman?

            “What crawled up your ass and died? I thought you would be more excited! You’re about to visit Grand Cayman and Saint Maarten. Do you know how much discount gold we can buy there? How many kids get to do that?”

            The GM corporation cared (somewhat) about Americans back then and they gave cruises to my dad if he sold enough cars for the year.

            I guess that’s why she kept him in the fourth bedroom.

            “I am excited.”

            “Oh, you’ll love it. I heard that this one has even better food and buffets than Majesty. And you remember how nice Majesty was. I think all we’re going to do is eat. I even picked up your tux for formal night. I want you to try it on this weekend and see if it fits.”

            “Thanks.”

            “You don’t seem excited.”

            “No, there was just a lot going on at school today.”

            “Most kids would be more excited. How many kids in your class even go on cruises? I guess cruises are nothing for you. What do you want from us next, a yacht?”

            Some of the more upper-middle-class kids in my class do go on cruises, you cunt.

If only I had been lucky (like Alisa) and born into a humble but loving home.

            “No, I’m excited, mom. I’m just going to go up to my room and put my backpack upstairs.”

            Once in my masturbation den, I reached under my bed and pulled out a fifth of Jack Daniel’s (the whiskey most associated with drunken foolishness.)

            I fingered the black label – as black as the tar in Slash’s lungs - and then thumbed it (if only I could finger a girl like Jessica or Amber.) And cuddle them too (just as important if not more important. Probably more important – I needed the love of a woman.)

            The fluid looked like iced tea, but the smell – stimulating a kind of synesthesia – tinged the harmless summer drink to a dirty and dangerous auburn sunburst, the color of the Les Pauls pictured below, a South Carolina sunset:

           

            Ah… “Jack Daniels, If You Please…” by David Allan Coe. David Allan Coe spent most of his childhood and youth in jail, so at least he was a late bloomer too and therefore someone I could relate to (at least in terms of sex-deprivation – his family certainly never took him on Caribbean cruises.)

            I had stolen the liquor from my parents’ lonely living room bar (in our house that was perfect for hosting - but we never hosted.) Mom and Dad didn’t drink much – and certainly not J.D. – so how would they notice it was missing? They wouldn’t. Nor would they notice the pilferage of the souvenir “Swallow the Worm” shot glass from Cozumel, Mexico.

            Slash (or was it Axl – YouTube didn’t exist back then, so I wouldn’t have been able to check) had once worn a “Swallow the Worm” tee-shirt.

            I wanted to be like Slash: drunk.

            But I didn’t even know what “drunk” felt like. I only had an idea from the cartoonish portrayals of drunks in film and television. It must have meant just being dumb and silly for a few hours – and I needed to be dumber and sillier than I already was.

            I wanted to be like Jim Morrison, the Lizard King, and marinate my brilliant brain in cell-destroying poison.

            Not that I was even that broken up about Amber (though three months of dreaming had just gone down the toilet like the fizzing vomit of a teen drinker.)

If only I had been out with other teens, drinking (not alone) and getting in trouble, hooking up with girls. Nothing serious – just normal hijinks. Then I would have drunk like a normal person and not as one who cries – blinks fat, salty tears - into his hooch.

            Oh, Amber. Oh, Jesenia. Oh, Danielle. Oh, Amanda. Which one was I really mourning for anyway? I didn’t know. I wrote poems about all four of them.

It was a Friday night (so I could hide out all weekend if Amber told people that I had asked her out because she had made the mistake of talking to me twice.) Nothing to do in the morning. I could “sleep it off.” I would wait until mother, father, and mediocre sister went to bed and then I would start tippling.

            Mother clicked off the t.v. around 11pm. I picked up my room phone (see, my parents weren’t that bad all the time – they allowed me to have a room phone) and called a new friend: Lewis.

***

            “Did you take the first shot?” drawled Lewis, like some kind of redneck boy (though some Brooklyn had gotten in there too – he pronounced “wash” as “waRsh.”)

            “Yes.”

            “Now drink some water.”

            “You sure?”

            “Yeah, you should definitely drink some water after each shot.”

            Lewis Stinson knew everything about drinking. He drank every night after school. His dad drank at least a 24-pack of Coors Gold a day and sometimes more (after “more” he usually beat up on Lewis’ mom.)

            “Should I take another?”

            “Just wait a minute or two.”

            I didn’t know that Lewis was trying – like a good friend – to mitigate the effects of my inexperienced imbibement.

            I waited a minute or two. I sensed disappointment on the other end of the line. I was Lewis’ only “pure” friend.

            “How about now.”

            “All right, go ahead.”

            I tilted a shot of Captain Jack down my gullet. A stinging burn, not entirely unpleasant; sweet and smoky, like a Tennessee barbecue, as amber (don’t say that word/name dammit) in synesthetic taste as the glare of a Les Paul “geetar” body against the setting Dixie sun, a Tequila Sunrise (or, rather, sunset) less sherbet-colored than the ones in South Florida (there are still just enough early spring ice crystals hovering in the hills North of Fort Lauderdale but South of the Mason Dixon Line.)

            I thought of Lewis in his dank, moldy, dark, windowless room; the side room of a near-windowless apartment on the second floor of a tile warehouse; a two-bedroom without walls. Lewis, Mr. Stinson, his four much older brothers, and his sister Trisha had kicked and punched out all of the drywall whilst in the throes of drunken rages. What should have been the cozy perimeters of a small, shared space were stripped down to the bare mechanics: plywood, 4X4s, pipes, and wiring; an obscene autopsy of the mechanics that sustain our modern lives and, aesthetically, about as cozy as an H.R. Geiger painting.

            Lewis had never been on a cruise. He had never been outside of our county. But he was, somehow, slowly, climbing up the ranks of Freshman popularity… Hmm…

            “Are you drinking right now?” I asked.

            “A little bit. Mostly smoking weed.”

            Lewis smoked weed all day, every day. He smoked a blunt every morning before boarding the bus to school. He hit the bowl in the Boy’s Room between the periods of his Special Ed classes (he was illiterate but smarter than the teachers who judged him – they confined him to the Re-Re Room because he was a serious behavioral problem.) After school, he smoked in the woods with various kids from his neighborhood (yes, Lewis was much more popular than me and some of his weed-smoking buddies were the most popular kids in our class – popular enough to have traveled in Amanda Goldstein’s inner circle.) After smoking with his friends, he smoked another blunt or two at home while drinking a few beers or something else. Sometimes he stole or bought an alcoholic item of greater strength or quantity than the small number of beers he could pilfer from his dad without catching a beating (though with Lewis’ recent increase in size, strength, and viciousness, the beatings were fewer and further between: an old, dusty, drunk father was no match for the thuggish predator his son was becoming.)

            Lewis’ appearance was that of death itself: He looked like the Grim Reaper from Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” (but without any interest in chess – only pussies played chess.)

Except that the features of Bergman’s reaper are too soft and delicate. Though 100% Caucasian, Lewis had Negroid facial characteristics – a flattish nose, thick, livid lips, and squinty eyes. If anything, he looked like a ginger version of the young Max Von Sydow (if Max had played the Reaper and not the knight.)

Bright blue veins pulsed from his milky-white, sub-albino skin. He self-cut his hair to the skin and sometimes shaved swastikas into the side of his head, a stunt which usually resulted in his suspension for the day/week (he was also fond of carving bloody swastikas into his shoulders and forearms.) His shock of fire flared red until it passed a color scale visible to human eyes. The invisible declined to a subtle glow, which gave the observer an odd suspicion of a purple or mauve aura around Lewis’ head (a royal blaze just barely detectable by a fifth verging on a sixth sense.) Those who felt safe around him called him “Ronald McDonald,” but very few people felt safe around him.

            “You shouldn’t smoke so much weed. It might mess up your brain.”

            Who was I to talk? I downed another brain-destroying shot. Without telling Lewis. And without an H20 chaser.

            “Who the fuck wants to think about shit anyway? I want to be fucking stupid.”

            “I guess I can understand how you feel now.”

            Though I didn’t.

            I was just playing at being “hard.”

            Lewis and I had become friends the year before, in 8^th Grade.

            Before that he terrified me, as he did everyone else in proportion to their pussyness (the biggest pussies in the school were in Honors classes or whatever and so many of them were not even aware of Lewis’ existence.) He was cruel (mostly toward those who deserved it) and he was violent – and proud of it.

            It had all started in Gym class.

            Veronica Taglialucci, a voluptuous Italian girl, was showing off her latest gymnastics moves. Somersaults, cartwheels, flips, and splits. The splits were obviously the best part of her impromptu routine!

            Lewis stood next to me, not by choice but by assignment (his “Re Re Room” class joined us “normal” kids for Gym.) Our boys’ class was lined up against the wall, awaiting instructions from our gym teacher. I looked to my right and saw Lewis looking at me. He bit his lip and suppressed a joyous laugh-smile.

            “That’s so fucking sweet…” he said.

            “Yeah, it is.”

            I may not have been a bad-ass like Lewis, but I was a pervert to the teeth, a pervert’s pervert (and I still am, more than ever, TBH – as the Millenials say, To Be Honest.)

            “Look how good her ass looks in pants,” he said. “Imagine how good it looks bare.”

            Wolfish lust beamed – like Superman’s lasers – from Lewis’ “serial killer blue” eyes.

            “Oh, God,” I laughed. “Don’t get me started.”

            Veronica continued to leap, bound, twist, and twirl. Soon, the legendary Amanda Goldstein, Veronica’s friend, joined in the acrobatics. All the hot girls in our class must have taken gymnastics classes – oh, what guys like Lewis and I dreamed of doing to those bourgy bitches.

            We dreamed – and talked – about it. After weeks of commenting on the backsides of both Veronica and Amanda, Lewis made the first move and slipped me his phone number.

            “Here, give me a call tonight so we can talk more about what we can do to those sluts.”

            No, he wasn’t a fag – he just sensed that we were brothers in perversion. And we were.

            I went home that night and called this scary person – this “psycho” that everyone feared – and we talked for hours and hours (all the way until 6 in the morning.)

            By the end of the night we both admitted and then rejoiced in the unconcealment of our greatest sexual desire: to eat the turds of Veronica and Amanda.

            “I thought I was the only one who wanted to do that!” said Lewis.

            “I thought I was the only one too!”

            “I think we’re going to be best friends,” he said.

            From that point on we talked seven nights a week about everything we wanted to do with Veronica Taglialucci and Amanda Goldstein.

            Like two world-class chefs talking shop, we discussed the various ways we would prepare and consume their turds.

            We both seemed to prefer the shit fried and served on various sandwich rolls. We agreed that some sauces and spices would better bring out the flavor of the culinary gems.

            After a few weeks, Lewis and I were like blood brothers. I still sat at the table with Pat and Dustin (Lewis ate with the “special kids” from the Re-Re Room) but he soon – at least temporarily – eclipsed their place in my heart.

            And here he was, teaching me how to get drunk (only because I had asked him) and hating himself for it. Lewis tried to protect my innocence. At least when it came to mind-altering substances. Our desire to eat the shit out of hot girls’ asses was as innocent as could be. We were both romantics and hippyish Marquis de Sades when it came to our beloved fantasy women and so we encouraged one another in our passions. But, unlike shit, alcohol can ruin lives (and who knew that better than Lewis?)

            “Wow, I think I’m fucked-up,” I said. And I was. The tension dropped from my brow (alcohol relaxes the muscles better than yoga.) No “huh-huh-huhing…” Booze drowned “huh-huh-huhs.” My heart – for once – did not beat between my temples. Bukowski seemed right: alcohol was like a symphony (but not a boring symphony – it starts out like Beethoven’s 9^th and then finishes like a punk rocker smashing a gutter kid over the head with a pair of cymbals.)

            In the words of Browning, “God is in his Heaven, all is right with the world.”

            Amber who?

            Oh yeah. Amber. Well, in the words of Nicholas Cage from “Leaving Las Vegas” (a very inaccurate portrayal of alcoholism, by the way): “Well, fuck it all anyway!”

            Jack loved me. I think Lewis loved me too, in his own, super-macho, completely heterosexual way. We had found lionhearted company in one another.

            “Hey Lewis. I think I’m going to go now.”

            “All right. Just make sure you sleep on your stomach so you don’t choke on your own vomit.”

            “Okay.”

            “Sleep on your stomach or you could choke on your own vomit.”

            “All right, bye buddy. I love you, man. Hey… Wait… Say hi to Trisha for me. I fuckin’ lover her too man.”

            Captain Jack’s love coursed through my body like viscous morphine. I loved enough to say something “homo” to my best friend (though I did not feel “homo” toward him at all) and  “pay it forward” (a neo-lib term that would come out a few years later) to his sister, Trisha.

            Trisha Stinson was a year behind me, in my sister’s grade (which was also Alisa’s grade.) She liked my mediocre sister, looked out for her, and hung out with her (in school, but not out of school.)

            Trisha drew horoscopes and read tarot cards. Her stringy red hair – more brownish than her brother’s – hung over the spread on the table and she studied the figures as diligently as my mother combed through a vacation brochure: The Magician, The Chariot, The Hierophant, The Devil, The Lovers, Death, and then The World.

            Her stubby fingers shuffled the cards and shuffled again. Those fingers, rolled into fists, pounded the faces of any girl who fucked with her. They grabbed hair. Black girl hair. Trisha only dated black guys from Neptune and Asbury. If a jealous black girl said something to her she would grab her by her weave and tussle with her on a cracked sidewalk. She didn’t give a fuck. Black girls on Ridge in Neptune/Asbury fought six days a week and three times on Saturday night – and Trisha fought just as much for those black men. Ya’ win some, ya’ lose some, but ya’ always brawl. And if they hide under a car you drag them out. If they run in the house, you throw a brick through the window. You fight until the cops come. And then you’re friends again the next day.

            Even most black people aren’t that cool/tough/scary nowadays. In 20 - pussy – 19 (at least we have Trump to bring us to our gutsy, red-blooded essence) black kids are nothing but a bunch of “milleninegros.  

            But black people were cool back in 1995/96. And Trisha was just as cool.

            Trisha was old school 1990s decadent and even – dare I say – decadent in a “good way” (and it’s very difficult to be “decadent” in a good way.) She was a pugilist numerologist.

            And she often drew the Love card from her Aleister Crowley Thoth deck (the Stintons did not have a bucket to throw up in or – literally – a bedroom window to throw it out of) but yet she somehow procured (and tarot cards must always be given to the reader by someone else) one of the most expensive decks on the market.

            Love. Trish would turn out to be a Cupid; perhaps a Cupid shooting an unlucky arrow into a vulnerable heart that thrummed under inauspicious stars, but a Cupid nonetheless.

            Trisha (though I didn’t know it at the time) did not just hang out with and protect my sister. She also hung out with and protected Alisa.

            And when the time would come – and the time would come soon – she would serve (in the manner of Hermes, founder of tarot) as messenger between Alisa and me.

            “Oh, I fuckin’ love Trish. She’s great.”

            I had no romantic/sexual interest in Trish Stinson at all (and she only dated black guys anyway), but she was a guy’s girl, a “cool chick.”

            “I love Lewis and I love Trish,” I said, just like Scarface when he finally realized how much he cared about Manolo.

            Well, if five shots made me feel so good, why not take a sixth or a seventh or an eight or a ninth or a tenth?

            Fuck it!

           

***

            Amber who…? I would have thrown the commonplace bitch in front of a fuckin’ train just to stop the bathroom from spinning. Why not? She didn’t love me. Not as much as Jack Daniels did (though I was starting to have doubts about my friend, Jack.) She didn’t fuckin’ love me at all. No one did (the earlier feelings of agape had given way to drunk-bum anger and resentment.) Who would ever love me?

            Vwooooooooooolaaaaaaaaaaaaa

            Vwoooooooooooolaaaaaaaaaaaa

            Vwoooooooooooolaaaaaaaaaaaa

            The room spun like a cheap carnival ride, one of the rickety ones assembled by sex offender carnies.

            It’s okay… I’m not going to throw up… I’m going to sober up and not throw up.

            I hated vomiting.

            It’s okay. Just try to read a book.

            I picked up one of my mother’s bathroom books, “Emotional Intelligence” (how ironic) by Daniel Goleman. The words jimble-jumbled on top of each other and my ethanol-induced ADHD and bad attitude made me not give a fuck what the book had to say anyway.

            Fucking book.

            Vwooooooooooolaaaaaaaaaa 

            Vwooooooooooolaaaaaaaaaa

            Vwooooooooooollaaaaaaaa

            Oh, I feel sick…

            BLLLLLLEEEEEEEEEEECCCCCCHHHHHHHHHHHH…

            I vomited all over “Emotional Intelligence” by Daniel Goleman. Obviously I had none.

            Oh, am I done? I hope so… No…

            BLLLLLLEEEEEEEEEEEECCCCCHHHHHHHHHHHH…

            Maybe Jack doesn’t love me. Maybe he doesn’t love me. I don’t love him.

            And then I said the famous last words (which never turn out to be true): “I’ll never drink again.”

            (Though the thought of Alisa would one day compel me to drink again and again and again and…)

            I did a post-vomit spit into the toilet. Post-vomit spit. Post-vomit spit. Huh… Huh… Huh… The Huh Huh Huhs were back, accompanied by post-vomit spitting. Jack exacted a price for his symphony turned seasick Baroque harpsichord tilt-a-whirl.

            A knock on the door. The warlord. The cunt. The one who had fucked me up with women in the first place.

            I loved everyone more than her: Danielle, Amanda, Jesenia, Lewis, and Trish. Even Amber. Amber who?

I would go on to love Alisa more than her. And after Alisa brought me to ruin, I would still care about her – and to this day – more than I would ever care for my mother.

            “Will! Are you sick? Why are you throwing up? Open this door right now!”

            “I opened the door.”

            “Are you drunk?”

            “I’m so fucking drunk…”

            BLLLLLLEEEEEEEEECCCCCCCHHHHHHHHHHHHH…

            I vomited all over mother’s breasts, the dry sacs that had never once fed me.