Driving the highway past my old hometown I remember the exits, the ramps, the secondary roads. But I’m not sure I remember which way to turn. And I wonder why we never stopped back then to discover the surroundings, to walk out into the rough grass that slowly turns to woods and get down on our knees and touch it, feel it; to really know where it is we live.

I was at work texting with a friend back home and he let it be known our other friend’s in a bad way. He has some kind of complication related to his Lyme disease medication, a neuropathy, a numbness in the arms and legs. The cure is worse than the disease. And plus his dad is dying. I got in a group chat with some others, what’s going on? It was unclear to me whether he was waiting to take steroids that would cure him or getting off of steroids that would kill him. There was talk of a special diet and botanicals. He may be in the hands of hippie witch doctors, I don’t know. I sighed and returned to my workflow dashboard.

A High School Party in Connecticut in 1985

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. 

I read the police report off my phone, glasses up on my head so I could get up close and see the print. Witness #1, Witness #2. The alleged perpetrator’s unlikely alias, Hugh. By one account he was Puerto Rican, by all the others Italian. White. Heavy-set. 5-11.

One passage described the blood as magma-like.

I peered away from time to time to watch a documentary about an extraordinarily successful singer from the nineties whose song may or may not have led to the suicide of the man who coined its title. She collapsed in tears in her interview on her rickety wooden chair.

He was described as having a widow’s peak. Upon his arrest out of state he had been using “some sort of cane.”

The perpetrator and one of the witnesses arrived at the victim’s house in the perpetrator’s thirty-year-old pickup truck. Something was broken and the victim and the perpetrator spent a few hours troubleshooting. Then they came back in the house together.

There was something of spring in the air today in spite of the temperature.

John the bookseller was a distant relative of one of the five families and he had the last name to prove it. Maybe not so distant. But he was mild-mannered, kind, gracious. Not given to eruptions of murderous anger.

I spent weeks reorganizing and tidying up and dusting his store, at five bucks an hour, when finally he told me what are you doing? I didn’t ask for this.

Turns out the disorder and the dirt were beneficial. It’s what his customers liked to see when they came in. Made them feel like they might discover something in the rubble.

There was a girl who worked there too for a while. Can’t remember her name. A goth. The daughter of a friend of his. She never did much work but John doted on her. Kept her employed. Just like he kept me employed. In those weird, dark times between the band breaking up and getting a real job.

Blink

I don’t know whose idea it was. Maybe mine. But one night we got drunk like we did a lot of nights and drove the back roads home. At a fork there was an orange-and-white striped barrel with an orange light on top, blinking stupidly into the dark, guarding nothing, warning of nothing.

We stopped and I got out. No cars around, no houses. I grabbed the thing—could it even be lifted? Was it weighted with cement or somehow affixed in place, per some regulation? No. I had it in my arms like it was waiting to be taken. I carried it back, hurriedly, conscious now of the illicitness of my deed.

I placed it in the trunk and we drove off, happy, laughing. Satisfied. A fuck you to the Man under cover of the night.

At home we displayed it in the kitchen for a while. We formed a circle around it and watched it blink at us. We laughed. We stopped laughing. We drank. We laughed again.

Finally we dispersed and I took it upstairs to my room. I examined it in the quiet and the solitude. It blinked relentlessly. If I focused on the light everything else around it disappeared. I could almost hear it. Feel it. I put it in the closet and went to bed.

I awoke fitfully before dawn, disturbed by an alien presence, menacing and nameless. The light was pulsing through the gaps around the closet door, filling the darkened room with orange bursts. It seemed to have grown brighter in the night. Stronger. I pulled the covers over my head.

In the morning I opened the closet, hoping somehow it’d be gone. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. I opened the window and leaned out. There was a basement window well below, maybe five feet deep. I dragged the thing over and heaved it out. I watched it fall heavy through the air, wobbling a little. It landed softly, quietly, in a bed of copper-colored leaves. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. I went down and buried it good under the leaves and dirt. Soon winter would come with ice and snow. We’d all move out eventually. Get married, have kids. Careers.

But the infernal blinking would go on and on.

Adventures in Smoking pt. 2

A cigarette machine was magic because maybe you could sneak away from Mom and Dad just long enough to plonk in three quarters, pull that plastic puller and hear the whoosh of the cellophaned pack shooting down the chute to land right there for the taking by your illegal, little hands. You’d grab it furtively, looking over your shoulder, and tuck it in the waist of your pants, above your cock, so your shirt would drop down to hide the bulge.

Now you’re home and the thing is more or less safely in your possession, in your bedroom, right there on your bed. You didn’t have much time to think when you bought ‘em but here’s what you chose: Camels, unfiltered. Camels because there’s something about them, the pyramid on the front, the letters. Not like Winstons or Kents. Unfiltered because why would you to let anything come between you and this experience?

When to smoke was another problem. You couldn’t light up in your room, blow it out your window. For sure they’d know. You know someday you’ll take them to a friend’s house and share them in the woods, something like that. But you want one now. It’s snowing outside, piling up.

You offer to shovel the back porch and the stairs down to the yard. Mom’s a bit surprised, but pleased. And in the glow of her gratitude, almost as though she gave her blessing, you bring out a pack of matches and a cigarette. You hold them in the bottom of the pocket of your coat, not afraid they’ll fly away really but just wanting to hold them. To feel the pulse of their illicit power in your hand.

Outside you shovel, shovel, shovel, long enough to establish that you’re really shoveling and then you stop. Down a step or three on the stairs, mostly out of view. You pull one out and put it between your lips and take out the matches, tremblingly, and make two false starts before a spark flies and the thing is lit, and you protect the nascent flame, you bring it to the tip, and draw in the fire then the smoke. Glorious, sweet, poisonous smoke. You discard the match and it hisses in the snow.

In the apartment where we lived after they sold the house my mom and dad slept on a mattress on a box spring in the living room. There was a fifth of Jack Daniels and two glasses upside-down on the bedside table—actually an old door on cinder blocks that held books, the stereo, the 12-inch, black-and-white family TV. Every night they’d have a nightcap like this was a motel and they’d bought the bottle from a liquor store on the other side of the highway on-ramp. But it was home.

I had a flash sitting at work in the middle of the day, I don’t know why. I saw the intersection of two country roads we used to pass a lot when I was a kid. It was a bit far from home, deep in the beautiful, monotonous landscape of Connecticut farmland that stretched all around us. It was about halfway to somewhere we used to go—a bookstore, a restaurant, friends of my parents, I don’t know. I measured our trip there by the two pieces before and after it for some reason. An ordinary, winding little road branching off a bigger, straighter one, in the hazy golden light of an autumn afternoon. There was nothing remarkable about it or the way it made me feel but I remember it like it was a dream.

Where Are They Now?

Ken was a cool kid, a jock. He had a nonchalant bearing that I envied, that I knew I could never replicate. It’s as if he was incapable of ever appearing awkward, and yet was utterly unconcerned with not appearing awkward. These paradoxical characteristics were not in tension. They potentiated each other.

To this day when I’m in the kitchen late at night, all alone, trying to wrestle the recycling bag full of old newspapers out of the plastic can, and failing miserably, instead lifting both the stuck bag and the can by the drawstrings of the bag, I think to myself: Ken would never look like this.

One day in science class we were all sitting cross-legged on our tables to view a demonstration Mr. Pinkston was giving of a dissected frog. Except for Ken. He was lying flat on his back.

Mr. Pinkston had been a military man and liked to bark like a drill sergeant.

“Ken!” he shouted.

Ken lifted his head drowsily and rested on his elbows, a little sheepish. Somehow this flash of self-consciousness did not appear self-conscious. It appeared calculated—and it appeared not calculated at all.

Mr. Pinkston asked Ken what part of the frog’s anatomy we were presently discussing and by some miracle, or obviously, Ken provided the correct response.

“It seems to me, Ken,” Mr. Pinkston declared, “that you do some of your best thinking in the reclining position.”

We all laughed. Ken laughed. I laughed. All I could think was: Did Mr. Pinkston just make a joke about Ken getting laid? We were twelve years old, maybe thirteen. But if anyone was getting laid it was Ken.

Some time later Mr. Pinkston was fired for groping a student.

Ken spent the rest of his life skiing in a rich and secluded Rocky Mountain resort town.

Or so I heard.

When I lifted the cutting board away from the faucet the wet wood emitted a striking odor—musty, winy—that immediately took me back to my childhood. But I didn’t know what it was it reminded me of. I was eight or nine, in our house in Storrs. What was it that smelled like that? Probably our wet cutting board.

On TV the race cars were under full-course caution because a cheap canopy and poles had blown onto the track. They type that always shade a table with credit card applications. There it lay crumpled on the edge of a corner as cars steered clear and a marshall waved his red and yellow flag.

On the first day of spring it’s been snowing all day and it’ll snow most of the night too. I like to be surprised by the weather but I decided to look. Here’s what the hourly forecast says for tomorrow: Mostly Cloudy, Mostly Cloudy, Mostly Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy, Mostly Cloudy, Cloudy, Mostly Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy, Mostly Cloudy, Partly Cloudy.

In the end there’s no way to really avoid surprises.

Mom didn’t follow sports but she loved sports. The folklore of it, the mythology, traditions. The idea that people could get so happy about nothing at all. Or get so sad.

For the Super Bowl in 1979 we were at our neighbors up the street, the kid I’d been friends with all my life, Henry. The parents were having proper pre-dinner cocktails in the living room while Henry and I watched the game at the kitchen table. That was what went down in a house in a little college town with four grownups who didn’t give a fuck about football.

At a certain point my mom walked in and asked us who was playing. She didn’t even know who was playing on the goddamned day of the game.

“Cowboys and Steelers,” I said, with some idiotic pride, like I was in the know.

Without the slightest hesitation she said: “GO STEELERS.”

She knew, instinctively or through some convoluted experience, that the Dallas Cowboys were despicable and the Pittsburgh Steelers were worthy of love and support.

Until that moment I had no real idea of my own. I’d grown up without TV because this is how my parents chose to express themselves. To take their stand against vulgar American commercialism and conformity, dragging their children up alongside them. So today I was happy enough to watch any kind of flickering pixels on a screen, be they white and silver or black and gold.

But the moment my mom said that I knew she was right. One team is obviously, always, fundamentally, morally superior to the other. Cowboys suck.

So I rooted for the Steelers and they won.

Into the Mouth Again

When I was in fourth grade at Northwest Elementary School there was some event when old people came to visit. They must have been from a nursing home nearby. Were they invited to tell us their stories growing up, about schools and teachers long ago? Or were we meant to entertain them, to lift their spirits on their long, dull slog towards death? All I can remember is lunchtime, when they joined us in the cafeteria. They sat segregated from us—for their comfort, or for ours, I don’t know.

The menu that day was grilled cheese sandwiches. For dessert, canned peaches in syrup. I stared at a sclerotic man with unkempt white hair. He wore a tan windbreaker. Why didn’t he bother to take it off? His spotted face hung low over his food, as though he were scrutinizing something unfamiliar. Like the others he ate silently, mirthlessly, paying no attention to his tablemates.

He speared a peach wedge and lifted it out of its pleated paper cup. Luscious drops of golden syrup ran down along the edges of the technicolor fruit, and down the white tines of his plastic fork, and onto the institutional pale-green tray. He placed it into his mouth and chewed. The sight was jarring. An old man eating little kids’ food. Accepting something designed for juvenile appetites. Was it humiliating? He didn’t care. Was it delicious? No. But I’ll never forget his air of duty, of determination. Into the mouth. Chew, chew, chew. Into the mouth again.

Motor Oil Memories

I took a sip of my cold coffee at work today and the taste of it gave me a powerful memory of motor oil. I was at the garage in Storrs, Connecticut with my dad getting the oil changed on our VW Bug. There it was up on the lift. The wheels, relieved of their burden at last, hung down on the axles. Now the mysterious bottom was revealed. You could see the weight of this thing. The potential danger. And yet the mechanic strolled around under the car, unconcerned. He rolled up the waste oil drum, unscrewed the plug from the pan. A stream of thick, black liquid arced into the funnel as he wandered away. All there was for a while was that smell.

I took another sip of coffee and it didn’t taste the same.

Disturbing Memories of Youth, Part 1

There were two Jennys, Across-the-Road Jenny and Up-the-Road Jenny. Across-the-Road Jenny didn’t really live across the road. Two dark-haired girls lived across the road. I waited for the bus with them each morning, at the end of their driveway. The older one just kept looking at her shoes. I don’t even remember her face.

Across-the-Road Jenny lived across the road, two houses down. One day she came over to play. We must have been six or seven. I didn’t know what to do with her. She was a girl.

I found a pear, lying on the ground in my backyard. I held it up for her by the stem.

“Whose pear?” I asked. Then I threw it onto the roof of my family’s split-level ranch.

Jenny shrieked with laughter. We watched as it struck the shingles with a bonk, rolled back down, and landed in the grass.

I looked at her. She wore OshKosh B’gosh overalls, a white shirt with ruffled cuffs, blue Nike waffle trainers. It was 1975. She stood awkwardly, a little like she had to pee.

Suddenly she ran at the pear, picked it up like a hand grenade and turned to me.

“Whose pear!” she howled, and threw it back onto the roof.

We continued like this for an hour, taking turns, Whose pear? Whose pear? Whose pear?, the fruit deteriorating into brownish, mealy pulp as the sun sank over the ridge.

Around dinnertime she went back home.

Her mother committed suicide some years later.

Up-the-Road Jenny lived way up the road, the other way. She had a very nice mom and dad. They both wore thick glasses that made their eyes look big.

One day Up-the-Road Jenny told me her mom and dad liked to sit on the living floor, naked, and piss on each other.

“That’s how babies get made,” she declared.

I saw her dad wiping her ass one day. Her struggling on his lap, panties around her ankles. Him scolding her, too flustered and impatient to close the bathroom door. I wasn’t supposed to see this. But I did.

In high school Up-the-Road Jenny wore an elaborate neck and back brace for scoliosis. Later on she fell into a vegetative state. People visit her and talk to her. Read to her. Sometimes they think they see something flicker in her eyes.

She’s still alive today.

Notes About Home

My mother and my brother playing badminton at dusk, at the back of the backyard. My dad limping out of the car after coming home from far away. Waiting for the school bus with the girls from across the road. Hoping it would never come. The paths in the woods through breaches in old stone walls, past overgrown foundations, across the post road wide as a horse and carriage, an Atlantis buried in the leaves. There were two or three abandoned cars, rusted, skeletal. We'd sit inside them to be spooked by spirits. The brambles and blackberry bushes on the left side of the house, past the entrance to the driveway loop. Down the road the cemetery, and further still the river, the bed of pine needles on its hilly banks the color of dried blood. Pale pink winter morning embers buried in the ashes. Lying on the living room couch with an ear infection and staring out the picture window, tracing my agony through the maze of branches and sky. The garden and the compost heap. Rain pouring off the inside corner of the roof like a faucet. We never did have gutters.

I remember observing a couple on their first date at Kathy John's. He was burly, musclebound. She was slim, girlish, attractive. She ordered hot fudge, I'm not kidding. An entire fucking parfait glass filled to the top with hot, brown goo. It was the most disgusting thing I'd ever seen in my entire life and it must have contained 12,000 calories. He ordered a cheeseburger with bacon.

"Bacon on top? Where did you ever get that idea!?" she asked. This was in probably around 1982, before the great bacon cheeseburger revolution of the late '80s and the advent of the bacon cheeseburger era in which we now live.

"It's something I got used to having in the Army," he said. Honest to Christ, that's what he said. Can you make that type of shit up? No. He told her he got used to having bacon on his cheeseburgers when he was in the Army.

She coyly dipped her slender spoon into the chocolate muck and made sure to get a frothy dab of Reddi Wip on top. She plunged it between her pretty lips and pulled it out, leaving a slick, dark stain of goopy residue in the silver concavity. She held it like a lollipop and licked it clean, giggling. It was unclear whether she was laughing at him and his wacky taste in cheeseburger toppings or at herself for being so cute. It was a formidable quantity of unalloyed fudge.

Where are they now?

April 23rd, 1985

The era in which we now live began on April 23rd, 1985. On that morning, word of a momentous event spread through the halls and classes of my high school like a virus: New Coke was here.

It was a Tuesday - how could it not be? And April - of course. And it had to be 1985. The day, month and year bespeak a radical mundanity. April 23rd, 1985 is a date that wanted to be forgotten even as it loomed. It's a date we all might have skipped by accident. Tuesday. Nothing day. Neither Monday nor Wednesday, neither fish nor fowl. The day of low blood sugar. A day not to be lived so much as endured. April. The month of cold, gray rain; of ambiguous, uncertain spring. The doldrums in every pupil's odyssey to recess. 1985. A year in which it might well be said that nothing whatsoever happened. April 23rd, 1985 was the sort of date that was in danger of falling off the calendar. And such dates, of course, are ideal for mass exposure and response to a seismic event, be it glorious or cataclysmic.

The news itself hung in the air like a vaporous mist - it seemed we began to talk about it before we'd even heard. "Hey, New Coke." "Did you try New Coke?" "I heard Mark had some already." "Some what, New Coke?" "New Coke." The marketing really was brilliant, if it wasn't completely disastrous. New! Coke! What melodious and sunny syllables to set upon the lips of a nation.

There was another aspect of our reaction to the event, and this is why I know it was the moment in our history that became now: we didn't really care. Even as we chirped the brand message, there was a wryness in our voices, sly smiles on our faces. For this virus had a second, unintended component: irony. Perhaps it was a product of the phrase itself: New Coke. Or perhaps it just happened to be hanging in the air that morning too, also waiting for this non-day when there'd be a break in our defenses. In any case, we now knew two things: New Coke was here, and New Coke was here. These two truths were antagonistic but not incompatible; they were the manifestation of a nascent reality. Yes, we bought it; yes, we drank it. But not the way we did before. Not automatically, but knowingly. Not with alacrity, but nonchalantly. Coca-Cola thought they were the mama bird and we would be her babies, letting her belch into our eager gullets. In the past, we'd given every indication we would play that role. But not on April 23rd, 1985.

No Such Animal

Scott was a compulsive liar and a fat fuck besides. He had straight, brown hair in a bowl cut, bangs and braces. The rosy cheeks and skittish gaze of the serial dissembler. He wore corduroys and big, striped polo shirts and carried around an Adidas bag all the time. Back in the seventh grade we said it meant "all day I dream about sex."

Scott would sooner lie than tell you the time of day. He had a famished ego and he'd scramble and claw like an urchin in Calcutta for the least appetizing scraps of social advantage.

Anything. I been to Sweden. My dad owns a Porsche. Anything at all. I touched a girl's nipple. I was outraged. If someone lies like this, what good is it for anyone to tell the truth? I developed a burning desire to call him out on it some day. I wanted to see him stammer in denial, his protests growing more strident and absurd until the only path remaining was to accept his humiliation - the Truth! - in a baptism of tears. I thought this would be good for him, good for the world; I felt justified and righteous.

One day Scott sidled up to me in the hallway.

"Hey, you like Jimi Hendrix, right?"

"Yeah." I loved Jimi Hendrix with a mighty passion.

"I've got a really rare Hendrix single at home." Everything was always at home.

"What song?"

"No Such Animal."

I'd never heard of this song. Of course, I didn't want Scott to know that. If he knew I didn't know a song he knew, it didn't matter if he'd lied about owning Hendrix's exhumed skull. He'd have beaten me somehow. The title, I figured, he couldn't have invented. I recognized the ring of authentic Jimi Hendrix-title truth. Scott must have read about it somewhere and drummed up this obvious fib. I was a hunter with a big, dumb buck in his sights; I was nearly trembling with eagerness.

"Bring it in."

"What?"

"Bring it in."

"Bring it in where?"

"Bring it in to school. Jesus."

"Why, dontcha believe me?"

"Yeah, Scott. I just wanna see it. Bring it in."

"When?"

"Who the fuck cares when? Tomorrow." I was feeling good about this.

"OK, OK. I'll bring it in." Scott's face seemed a little ashen now. I felt like I'd landed a good first shot. The kill would come soon, and it was gonna be sweet.

I badgered Scott about it later that day. When he didn't bring it in the following morning I reminded him that I absolutely wanted to see it. Why? he asked again, and I just told him I wanted to and that was that.

"You don't believe me," he said.

"I don't know, Scott. If you have it, you can just bring it in, right? I wanna see it."

"You can't borrow it."

"I don't wanna borrow it. I just wanna see it."

This went on for a few days, until I decided to inflict the death blow.

"Scott, let me come over to your house after school. We can go play video games."

"OK," he said warily.

I got off at his bus stop with him that afternoon and walked into his house behind him, through the screen door to the dark and cluttered kitchen. There was no one home.

"Hey," I said, "where's that Hendrix single?"

"Oh, hold on a sec," Scott said, and disappeared upstairs. He walked back down a minute later. "Here, check it out," he said, and handed me a 45-rpm single in a tattered paper sleeve. I scrutinized the label in the sleeve's circular window. Here's what it said:

Jimi Hendrix
NO SUCH ANIMAL
(Hendrix)

I handed it back to him without saying a word and I've never been the same since then.

Jesse went to our 20th high school anniversary a couple of years ago and I managed to bow out under the pretext that my dad was getting a heart operation that he didn't end up getting. Jesse reported back. Bill Suits is clean and sober - "18 years" Bill declared sunnily, or some such number. Not a surprise there. The least surprising thing about Bill would be that he was still drinking; the second least surprising would be that he got sober.