You tell yourself you have a handle on it, that it’s not so bad. You catch yourself looking down at that once-precious, bleeding, now-scarring arm—blisters reddening, rotting boughs hemorrhaging, far from on the mend, things swelling where they shouldn’t. And those twitches you have . . .
I shouldn’t have dropped acid today. But then, that’s what I always say. I live on the third floor of the Mars Motel in Yuba City. If you lived in the Mars Motel in Yuba City, you’d drop acid, too. But this time is different . . .
10. If you can count backwards from 10, you are not drunk . . .
I’m not a complete monster. It pains me to hear her beg for her life. She says she’s got two kids. Little kids. A boy and a girl. Maybe she does. Maybe not. People will say anything in these situations. I wish she’d shut up. This is hard enough without the hysterics . . .
You had seen once long ago when you were an eighth grader the JFK Eternal Flame at Arlington National Cemetery and you marveled at the idea that a flame might flicker eternally . . .
Gumbo and I tossed a Frisbee, waiting for our mamas to call us in for dinner, while Danny, another one of my brothers’ friends, screamed by from one end of the block to the other, passing within a few feet of us on his gigantic chopper . . .
And in all the feeding of fine foods . . .
Les’s twenty-foot RV was parked in the gravel drive of a little house with a sagging roof. Plastic deer nestled into the flower beds around it, among clumps of zinnias and cracked planters full of wilting petunias. Some friends of Les’s lived there with their ailing grandmother, no doubt appropriating her Social Security checks and pain meds. I’d only met them in passing, a lank-haired woman and her scraggly-mustached boyfriend.
I hated myself for being there, but I parked next to a dirty old Toyota sedan and hauled myself out of the car anyway. Fuck it, I told myself. Are you really trying to be one of those dorks with a clean life and an office job? Who are you kidding? I sank down beneath my guilt and worry, settling back into the comfortable hog wallow of my ignominy as I mounted the stairs of the RV.
The door rattled when I opened it, and I stepped in, very nearly falling back out again when I found myself at the end of a pistol . . .