I was pressed into service at the bar. J. had to go deal with something, I don’t know. Broken furniture and spilled beer. The line was long and the kids were thirsty. Maybe they just wanted vodka, scotch. Gin and tonics. I was pouring as fast as I could. Everyone I satisfied might just be satisfied with me. Kirsten came up to the front with her friend Kim. Kirsten with her radiant smile, her glasses. There was a trace of mischief in her face, I always thought, or maybe just thought in that moment and thought I’d always thought. She was beautiful but easy about it, unconflicted. Laughing at the world and everything in it, ‘specially me. So she was a powerful person. Intimidating.
“I’ll have a gin buck,” she told me with her grin.
At once I knew she was fucking with me. She had to be. This is what happens. A girl like that and me. I was powerless to admit I didn’t know what the fuck that was. I didn’t have the strength to be so weak. I fumbled with the bottles, finding the gin and stroking it uselessly by the neck. A few awful moments passed. The line behind Kirsten and Kim stretched from the dining room into the hall.
“Ginger ale,” she said full of wisdom. Smiling her smile. “It’s gin and ginger ale.”
I muttered yeah yeahs in my humiliation. I made her drink. I made I don’t know for Kim. And I never spoke to her again. Today she lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
Later we sat in the living room, seven or eight of us. The untiring inebriation of youth. We needed to go somewhere and do something. When you’re sixteen and drunk you have to take it somewhere. You can’t lean on a bar or watch TV. There’s sparks flying out your fingers.
We piled in the back of Sean’s pickup with a bat. Drove two miles to our math teacher’s house. His driveway was long and it twisted through the woods. Erik stood unsteady. Took a hard swing and bashed the mailbox off its wooden post. The violence was astonishing. The senseless malice. We saw the lights come on behind the trees. The poor put-upon teacher howling, running out the house. His son—our classmate—by his side. Flashlight beam zigzagging in the night. Go, go, go! Sean peeled out and we were gone down the hilly street, knocking against each other in the bed.
We got back and drank some more. In elated wonder at ourselves. Still it wasn’t enough.
We rode to the 7 Eleven in the strip mall near the house. Stormed in and took what we wanted of Ho-Hos and Funny Bones. The guy behind the counter was just a couple years older than us, some poor fuck who just wanted to disinfect the counters and make it through the night. We ridiculed him brazenly, to his face, behind his back. We came back an hour later for some more. He didn’t even look at us from behind the register. Ducked his head, pretending to be busy.
Mark said he fucked his girlfriend and J. said what’d you do with the condom and Mark took a drag off his Camel and he smiled and he said he flushed it.
"Good," said J.
In the cold, bleak light of the morning we took stock of the damage. Bottles, ashes, miscellaneous trash. Mysteriously an upstairs door was torn off its hinges. That was all apparently.