I was fine when I got on the road that morning—a little nervous, but I’d taken two Ativans. The pills were supposed to be strong enough to get me on the plane and all the way across the Midwest to LA. Not like last time . . .
Harry was a twenty-two-year-old junkie who made his living pedaling marijuana to sailors on Telegraph Avenue. He would buy lid bags of Mexican for ten dollars apiece and resell them for twenty. Some nights he would sell five . . .
On Monday morning I woke up to the beat of electronic music drumming in the living room like it were Saturday. Or at least Thursday. I slipped into my jeans, half angered, half asleep, and walked outside looking more for an explanation than a fight. Except for my flatmate, the room was deserted, the subwoofer booming. His head bobbled from side to side like a serpent making its way up a tree, his left hand twitched not so much nervously as involuntarily, and he shuffled from one foot to the other as if he had been standing for a long time . . .
A typical Thursday. A typical night.
Jerry stretched his feet under the dining table, yawning. His eleventh grade math homework seemed to glare at him from the fluorescent white of the overhead light. They were covering probability in class, something Jerry knew plenty about.
There was a thump above him.
Typical Thursday night . . .
Mom steps away from the CD player and as the music spins to life I think: Oh fuck me, please no. It’s Michael Bolton’s cover of “When a Man Loves a Woman,” from the world’s most undeserving greatest hits collection . . .
Megan—she was a stunner, the first woman I ever asked out on a date after my painful history of being the awkward nerd in high school.
I gave her my time and friendship. I even let her cry on my shoulder when she had no one else to turn to. She didn’t know I was in the next room listening to her talk to a girlfriend over the phone . . .
“Hardest thing you’ll ever do in your life. Mental equivalent of hog-tying the meanest steer this side of Odessa . . .”
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 . . .