20. The Tuna Witch

“I heard all they found was a foot,” my girlfriend Julia said. Grinning.  

“No, that’s not right. It wasn’t just a foot,” Danny said. “There was more.”

“More person?” she said.

“How would you know anyway, Dan?” I said. I thought Dan was a moron, but he’d been dating Julia’s cheerleader best friend for a few weeks so I was always having to spend a bunch of time with him. 

“Cause my Dad tends the sheriff’s favorite bar and that’s what my Dad told me,” he said. “You wanna hear what they found or not?” 

I hated him. 

“Yes, yes, please, we want to know about the foot,” Julia said. Much to my embarrassment, she loved true crime. She clapped her hands together and sat up in her seat. 

Wolves howled lonely in the distance. The campfire popped. 

I reached from my seat beside Julia for some more wood to throw on. We had plenty of wood so I stacked it big. The flames shot up and flickered an evil orange light off our faces and the tall dark cedars all around us. A tiny island in the impenetrable night. 

“They did find a foot, but it wasn’t the only thing they found,” Danny said, “that’s the way Rick told it my to dad. I guess he got pretty liquored up at the Old Stump last night. Had some shit he wanted to get off his chest.” He watched the flames rise, rubbed his arm like it was sore. He was a thick chested naturally handsome guy with beady blue eyes and something to prove. He liked to wear black jeans and black t shirts from unrecognizable bands and he liked to get drunk and recite Yeats. 

“Do you have to make such a production out of it Danny?” Claire said. She put a hand on his leg and leaned against him. 

“Yeah, why not? It’s more fun that way,” he said. He pinched her shoulder through her down jacket and she jumped a little, flipped him off.

I had to bite, I could tell he wouldn’t say any more until I did. “What else did they find?”

He grinned this devilish grin. “Alright, here’s what my dad told me Rick told him. I guess Rick got super fucking wasted so the story wasn’t all that clear. But this is how he told it to my dad….”

We skooched into a close circle around the fire. Julia reached her hand over and put it in mine and I rubbed the back of her hand with my thumb. Last week she told me she loved me for the first time.

Dan eased Claire off his shoulder and leaned in so the orange fire light illuminated his mouth and nose from below and threw shadows on the sockets of his eyes in skull effect. 

Rick said they got a couple calls a few years back. Maybe a week apart. Campers up in the national park reporting screaming in the woods near their camp spot. Nothing unusual. People are always getting spooked in the woods especially in the winter when it’s so dark and eery like it is now. You figure high schoolers whenever people say screaming in the night.

Anyway, he said they went out and checked the camping areas near where the screams had been reported. When they got there they didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Or it didn’t seem like anything was out of the ordinary when they saw it. He said there was just this one campsite where the ground was all tore up. Like huge deep scratches all around in the dirt. Big branches broken off the trees. But nothing there. So they didn’t think anything of it, you know. Probably just an agitated bear or something like that. 

But the next week they get another call. Same thing. Screaming in the woods. Same place. Way up this long service road into the park. So they go all the way back up. It’s deep in the park, you know. Way up this windy bumpy old road. Not too many people go out there. They go all the way back up and they check all the same dispersed spots they checked the week before. This time a different camp spot is tore up the same way as last time. But this time there’s blood everywhere. Like everywhere. All churned up in the dirt and spattered across the trees. And the whole area stunk like fish too. Bad. I guess it really smelled something awful. So bad some of the guys could barely stand it. But they had to suffer out the smell and investigate the scene all day. And they still found nothing. Like nothing. No tracks. No kill. No camping gear. No vehicles. No reason for the fish stink, as far as anyone could tell at least.

They looked everywhere in the area and took samples of all the shit they could find that had any blood on it. Which was a lot of shit. But they couldn’t find anything at all. The blood tests all came up inconclusive or something like that. 

They forgot all about it for years. The mysterious fish stinky blood covered campsite. 

Until a couple weeks ago…

 “So there was a campsite out in the park that was mysteriously covered in blood and it wasn’t reported on?” I said, “how is that not like a local legend if that actually happened?”

“What would they report man? What would anyone say?” Danny said. “We found a shit load of blood but we don’t know where it came from and we aren’t going to do anything about it?” He raised his hands in a helpless shrug. 

Julia shivered on my shoulder, “I guess there are probably lots of things like that have happened and we’ve never heard about it because it would just make everything more complicated if we did.”

“Right,” he said.

“What about that little girl down the street who went missing last year?” Claire said. She adjusted her pony tail and straightened her yoga pants tight across her skinny thighs. 

“No, not like her,” Julia said. “I don’t mean that sort of thing. Not locals. Everyone knows all about that. Everybody in this whole town knows everything that happens to everyone who lives around here. I mean more like road trippers or out of town campers and people like that. Bikers and transients who could disappear without a trace and we would never have a reason to ever hear about it. I could see it, is all I mean.”

“Maybe it’s Bigfoot,” I said. “Did they find any turned over trees around those campsites Dan? Is that what they found with the foot, turned over trees and six-toed footprints?”

“No,” Dan said. 

“Was it Sasquatch?” I said.

He glared at me. “It was the Tuna Witch. That’s what they’re saying after yesterday.”

“Tuna Witch?” I said.

“What was yesterday?” Julia said. 

“I gotta tell you about the foot before I tell you what happened yesterday otherwise it doesn’t make sense.” Danny said. He pulled a little stainless flask out of his coat pocket and took a sip, passed it to Claire. 

It came over to me and Julia on the other side of the fire. I drank. Julia didn’t want any. She shivered again and nuzzled into my shoulder. I put some more wood on the fire and threw an arm over the blanket of dark hair on her thin back. Passed the flask back to Claire and Danny went on.

So a couple weeks ago, Rick gets another call at the station. Freaked out campers who heard screaming way out deep in the middle of the park. It sounds familiar but he doesn’t really make the connection. 

It was that day last week when it was real foggy and gray, you remember? Super thick fog but it didn’t rain any. Like the whole sky was just one gigantic sponge soaked up and waiting for a squeeze. 

Well, they get all the way up there and they see the same scene they saw all those years ago, blood everywhere, the same fish stink. It clicks then. Everyone remembers. “Holy shit,” Rick says. 

So they get everybody up there, all the investigators and photographers and coroners and techs and all that. And they look everywhere. It’s not just blood this time. They find chunks of gore hanging on tree branches and scraps of eviscerated organ rolled up in the dirt. And the rotten fish smell is so horrible that people are running off all over the place puking and fucking up the investigation. They had to designate a vomit space. 

And they’re not just finding organ meat and skin flaps and viscera in the dirt. They’re finding these tuna cans all over the place. All different brands and sizes. All tuna. All opened and empty. All with strange little engravings scratched all over them. 

So they’re digging around like fucking archeologists coming up with all these fucked up pieces of human meat and these art project tuna cans. And more people are out looking around in the woods. Only the problem is its so foggy you can hardly see ten feet in front of you. 

Then some guy starts hollering from the woods. 

“Hey, I found something! Hey! Come help! Somebody!”

Everyone drops what they’re doing and runs into the woods after the hollering to see what it’s all about. They get in there and there’s a deputy holding a human foot saying he can’t find Mark or Joe or somebody with a name like that. The two of them had been poking around for evidence and found the disconnected foot, torn just below the crest of the calf, tatters of ripped skin like a botched circumcision hanging around the bloody sharp-boned stump at the top. They found it just laying there above them on a tree branch. This deputy climbed up to grab it and when he got down his partner was gone. Not a sound. Not a trace. Just no more deputy.

So you probably heard all about the manhunt and everything looking for the guy, I still can’t remember his name. At first they’re thinking bear, and that’s what they would love to say. Be done with it. A bear killed some camper, maybe hung around and snatched up the deputy or something like that. But the no vehicles and the no gear and the fact that it’s not the first time they’ve seen something like this, the tuna cans, I dunno, it’s all fucking weird. I don’t think they know what to think. And they still don’t have any idea who the foot and the blood and gore and all that stuff belonged to. I don’t understand how those databases work but they must not be very well organized because they can’t figure it out. 

“So why does everybody know about the foot and not the tuna cans?” Julia said. 

“Because it’s some freaky culty shit, I dunno. I think they don’t know what it means or what to say about it and they don’t want people to get freaked out.”

I looked at Julia and shook my head with an imperceptible movement and a slow blink, Claire saw me do it and laughed this breathy full laugh. 

She looked at me with her pointer against her front teeth, licked her lips, “you think it’s bullshit?”

“Of course I think it’s bullshit,” I said. “Dan’s only trying to get us riled up. It’s not even a good story. It was obviously only a bear.”

“And what if it wasn’t?” Claire said. She leaned forward and licked her lips with the tip of her tongue. Shone her wide questioning eyes at me.

“What else could it possibly be?” I said.

“I dunno,” she said. Like she shouldn’t answer. Like it was a dirty question.

Julia looked up at me, then at Claire. She squeezed herself against me. 

Danny held his hands out over the fire, let us talk. Then he said, real quiet, “you heard they found that other deputy yesterday right?”

“Come on man. Stop with this shit.” I said.   

“Wait I actually did hear that,” Julia said. 

“Yeah, I heard it too,” Claire said. She picked up Danny’s flask and shook it. Winked at me. Claire was hot, and she liked drinking as much as I did. 

“Think I got a bottle in my truck,” I said. I got up and walked away from the fire past our tents to the trucks. The night was growing darker, the thick misty oppressive darkness of a Pacific rainforest. I could only see the vaguest impression of my truck where the fire light reflected off the dull rusty paint. Walking towards the silhouette I looked out into the deep dark night and I wondered about it. Out there. If there were things out there that we didn’t know or understand. Would never see. I grabbed a bottle of bourbon and some plastic cups from the cab. Looked back out into the night to see if there might be something looking back. There wasn’t. Or maybe there was. I didn’t know. I closed the truck door and went back to the fire. 

I poured the booze and passed out the cups. Cheersed and drank.

“Yeah well they did find him,” Danny said. “They found that deputy yesterday afternoon.”

They found him when they went to check out another call about screams coming out of the woods. 

They went down a different road, but still pretty close to where they found the foot. This time they brought respirators for the smell. When they got there it was the same scene. Blood. Gore. Viscera. Etched tuna cans. Torn up earth. 

Right in the middle of the process of trying to get everything bagged up and documented and put together and organized, they hear this tortured scream coming out of the woods. Like really awful super loud screaming.

Just like with the foot, they all drop everything, run into the woods to figure out what the fucks going on. They followed the screaming right to the missing deputy. And then nobody knew what to do. 

They found him on the ground under a giant tree writhing and wailing like he was getting a vivisection. His uniform was all ripped up and they could see all these bloody designs cut into his flesh where there were holes in his clothes. He had stars and half moons and little stick figures cut like cave paintings into the skin on his forehead. And all around him there were hundreds of tuna cans engraved with the same designs he had all over his mutilated body. The cans were all piled up into a huge pentagram at the foot of this massive cedar, with him, this superscribed and disfigured deputy, right in the middle as the idol of the rite. 

Everybody, the whole crew of twenty or thirty government trained individuals, just stood there and watched him writhe and scream and gawked at the designs carved into his red flesh. All of them wearing white rain slicks and respirators. Just standing there. It must have been a scene.

Nobody wanted to touch the tuna can pentagram. 

Nobody knew what it meant. 

They just stared.

Rick finally showed up and burst through them all and kicked the cans aside to break the star and entered the circle and knelt beside the deputy. 

“Paul!” Claire shouted. Punched Dan’s arm.

“Oh nice, yeah, it was Paul,” Danny said. 

So Sheriff Rick kneels beside deputy Paul and tries to get him to calm down and quit screaming and flailing around. 

“Paul, son,” he says. “I’m here, Paul. It’s me, Rick. It’s your sheriff. I got you, son. You’re safe now. We’re gonna take you home,” he says. 

So the guy Paul, he eventually quits screaming and just has this empty look of horror on his face and starts rambling nonsense. He won’t stop. At first nobody could get him to say anything. Then they couldn’t get him to shut the fuck up. “Tuna Witch. It was the Tuna Witch. She’s coming. The tuna is coming. It has to eat. We have to eat. Tuna Witch. Tuna Witch.” That’s what he kept saying. Shit like that. Over and over. And nobody could get him to stop. They dosed him down with some go-to-sleep injection and got him over to the hospital. 

Then they poked around and they found an even more fucked up scene. Bodies. A guy and his girlfriend mangled in the trees just next to the camp spot. Turn to pieces. Like they’d been thrown around like tiny rag dolls and ripped apart. The girls torso was impaled on a broken tree branch with all her intestines hanging down out of her like medusa hair. By the time they found her the possums and the squirrels and  birds and shit had already got in and sucked everything out of her guts so they were just like translucent husks, like gory snake skins dangling out of her dead top. They found the boyfriends body all twisted up into a knot around some branches with his eyes popped out  and a leg missing halfway up the same tree. 

The faces on their bodies were way too fucked up to identify. Like squashed rotten watermelons. But there were still a few teeth in their mouths the cops were able to pick out. I guess when they went to get them out they found one of those tuna cans stuffed halfway down the girls throat. Fucking freaky. The good thing is I think they’ll figure out who these ones were after the dental records come back. 

Still, all those cops all together and not one of them can think of what could do that. Not a bear. That’s for sure. Useless fuckers. Took them half the day just to figure out how to get the boyfriends body out of the tree. 

“Wait what?” Julia said. She whispered it and held me tight by my arm. 

“Hold on a second Dan,” I said, “shut the fuck up. Are you saying that two people got legitimately murdered out here in these woods two nights ago?”

“Oh yeah,” Danny said. “Probably the most horrific thing that’s ever happened around here.”

“Why the fuck didn’t you say anything about that before we came out here?”

Julia was breathing hard and quiet and clutching my arm. I stroked the back of her neck. To relax myself as much as to relax her. 

“What the fuck Danny, are you for real?” Claire said. I heard the panic in her voice. 

“I dunno, I figured it’d make the story more fun this way,” Dan said calmly. No emotion. He didn't look up from the flames.

I did my best to keep myself under control, tried to keep the quiver out of my voice. Julia seemed to be doing better for herself than I was. Claire started to cry. 

Julia looked at me with pleading eyes, “should we go home?”

I just kept staring at Danny across the fire. 

“Danny, you’re saying you knew people got murdered out here, right where we are now. Are you fucking retarded?”

He didn’t say anything, he pulled up his sleeve and rubbed at some scratches on his arm. 

“I didn’t tell you how the deputy escaped did I?” he said. It was barely a whisper. He kept rubbing the cuts on his arm and staring into the flames with this blank empty look. 

“Fuck you Danny,” Claire said. She had tears running down her face, glinting like fearful little diamonds in the firelight.

He ignored her. “Yeah, the deputy escaped,” he said. “He escaped and he went around town mutilating people the same way he got mutilated, cutting shapes and stories onto people until the cops finally caught up with him and threw him in a cell instead of a hospital bed. I don’t know how many people he got to but he was running around with a scalpel going into peoples houses all last night.” 

I looked at the cuts on his arm he kept rubbing at, saw them lit up by the fire. Bright red lines forming grotesque childlike designs. Like crayon on a white wall.

I looked around into the impenetrable misty black night hanging heavy in the thick trees around us. Looked back at his arm. 

“Danny?” I said. 

He didn’t answer. H kept looking at the fire. He was hunched over working on something in his hands like a raccoon on a shell.

Claire was sobbing now. Julia clung tightly to my arm and whimpered, “I wanna go home, I think we should go now” she said. 

I kept looking at him. 

“Danny?” I said. “Dan?”

I smelled the fish before I saw it. 

He turned and had a can of tuna in his hand. He used the knife he’d been scratching at it with to pop the lid off. Dumped tuna and juice over the flames.

Claire got up to run for the trucks, and Julia and I followed her. As fast as we could. My truck was only a few yards away. We were halfway there.

When we heard it. 

Somewhere in the woods right behind us. 

This bellowing sub animal roar that sounded like a thundering car woofer from the streetside. 

We froze. Looked at each other with terror on our faces. Looked at the place by the fire where Danny had just been sitting.

I squeezed Julia’s hand as tight as I could. 

The smell intensified. Breath of a thousand tuna cans. Air thick with hot oily fish stink.

We heard the roar again, then this awful throaty cackling shriek.

Then her voice. 

Eat your tuna. You love your tuna.

Then nothing. 

8. Duck Farts With Homeless Guys

After a winter of meaningless covid misery I went back to Alaska to work on a different boat. I’d never seen the boat or met anybody I was going to work with on it.

Bill had told me to try calling the union if I wanted to go with another boat. 

So one day it was the middle of the day and it was my birthday and I was all drunk and stoned and lonely and feeling really hopeless about my life and prospects and I gave the union a call. I told them I had some longlining experience and was wondering if they knew of any boats looking for guys. 

They told me this guy Dewey Yorgerson who ran a boat called the Republic was looking for a deckhand and they gave me his number. I stared at the number all afternoon. I smoked more pot and drank more beers and sat on my couch and looked at that number until it was almost dinner time. Then I said fuck it and I called.

He picked up and said yeah he was looking for a guy. He asked me about my experience. He said he knew my uncle. He offered me the job. 

I said okay.  

He told me to be in Sitka in three or four weeks. 

I said okay. 

The call probably lasted five minutes. 

So three or four weeks later I flew up from Seattle to Sitka with a great big duffel bag. I flew in the morning and I had a seven hour layover in Juneau before the half-hour connection to Sitka took off. 

When I got to Juneau I took a cab down into the town. It’s about a twenty minute ride from the airport into town. This old native cabby didn’t want to talk to me, and we drove down along the Gastineau Channel in the rain with clouds choking the mountains and I thought this must be the dreariest place in the world. 

I got into town and it was like eleven in the morning. Maybe noon. It started to snow and I’d left my jacket in my duffel so I was fucked. The clouds were so thick you could hardly even see the clock tower. 

I walked into a shop and I bought a sandwich. Then I walked into another shop and bought some weed and then I walked into another shop and bought some cigarettes. I went down the boardwalk and sat by the water and ate my sandwich and smoked a spliff and I was colder than hell. I thought, this is terrible, I gotta get inside.

But the problem with being alone in Alaska with no place of your own is that there aren’t many places to go. Coffee shop or bar. I picked bar. 

I found this spot called the Triangle Club that looked good and divey and pretty empty. There were like four or five people in there and a couple of them were talking to the bartender about kids or school or something like that. They only sold hot dogs and bags of chips for food and there was nice old oak wainscotting on the walls and the bar had a big cushion you could lean your elbows on. I thought this was the place where you could get a beer and be left alone for a while. 

So I went in and got a beer and picked a good spot in the corner to go get comfortable for a few hours. 

There was this old guy with a big bushy beard and those eyebrows that droop down over the corners of your eyes sitting at the bar and he was talking to a big native guy. The way they were talking it seemed like they were old friends. 

I probably sat there five minutes before the bushy bearded old guy turned and looked at me and said, “hey, nice boots. You up here doin’ a charter?”

I looked at my boots, I was wearing my big brown rubber Xtra Tuff’s from last season because they were too big to pack. I looked at the old guy’s feet and he was wearing the same boots except his were way more fucked up than mine were. 

“No, I’m up here longlining. I’m going to Sitka.”

“Oh, alright,” he said. “Alright, longlining.

I went back to being quiet with my beer. 

Then he said, “hey, guy over there, yeah, come over here lemme tell ya something about longlinin.”

I went over and sat down next to him reluctantly. 

He held out a massive hand at me. He had these huge knobby knuckles and big lumpy knots in the middles of his palms.

“I’m Jim,” he said. “Soooo, you wanna be a longliner, eh?”

He looked me up and down and I didn’t say anything. He had this thick marbly tongue so all the words he said were all mushed up like he’d just been to the dentist or taken too much Benadryl or something like that. 

“I done every fuckin’ fishery in this whole fuckin’ state,” he took an inch deep swallow from his glass. “I done crabbin, fuckin’ halibut, fuckin’ every kind of salmon, black coddin’.” 

He took another drink. 

“Let me tell you about longlining though because that’s some serious shit, you know, and I gotta tell you, you don’t look like you probably know what you’re doing out there. When you’re out there longlining you gotta always be doing something, always, ya know, there should never not be something in your hands if you’re not sleepin. If you’re ever not doing anything you gotta go find yourself something to do and get your hands on. 

I was listening carefully and nodding along like, “yes sir.” He motioned for another drink and then pointed at me so I thought it went on my tab.

He rubbed his forehead and looked like he was thinking hard for a second.

“Oh yeah, hey, when you’re setting out the gear don’t ever lift up your boots. Remember that. You always gotta be draggin your boots, don’t ever lift em up. I got my foot caught up in the fuckin bight one time setting out the gear. Fuckin’ four of the other guys holdin me down under the rail so I didn’t get dragged overboard before they cut the line. Broke my fuckin leg. Now I got a bum leg.”

“Jesus,” I said. “It broke your leg?”

“Hell yeah, it broke my leg. You know how hard that line’s pulling when you set out the gear? I’m just glad it's still connected to the rest my body.”

“Damn,” I said. 

He turned to the big native guy next to him, “hey Brian, check it out this guy says he’s up here going longlining.”

They looked at me like I was an exhibit. 

Brian thumbed my way, “him?”

Jim nodded. 

Brian nodded. He looked at me, “you ever fished up here before?”

“Yeah I fished last season on a different boat?”

“What boat?” Jim hardly let me finish speaking. 

I sipped my beer, and I started feeling like I was getting a little bit of recognition. I could have been greener. 

“The Alrita,” I said. 

“Don’t know that one,” Jim said. “How bout this year?”

“The Republic.”

He looked like he near spit his drink out of his mouth. “The Republic?” he said. “You mean the old schooner?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You ever fished on a schooner?”

“No but maaan, those used to be fuckin most bad ass jobs in the whole state. Used to be somebody had to die for a new guy to get on one of those boats. How the hell’d you get on the Republic?” 

“I called the union,” I said.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he said and covered his eyes. 

Brian leaned over and hung his beer arm around Jim so he could see me. His eyes were all red at the rims and he talked real slow. “Hey, I don’t know a fuckin thing about fishin but I logged my whole fuckin life all around here in South East and I know a thing or two about workin hard and I just wanna say, I got a lot of respect for what you guys do out there.”

Jim pushed him back. “But you gotta look out for the fuckin bight,” he said.

He leaned real close to me. “I ain’t kiddin, you don’t wanna get caught in the fuckin bight.”

I nodded very seriously. 

Brian said, “hey man, he doesn’t want you lecturing him all day, he’s just minding his own business getting a beer.”

Jim turned away from me so he could like at Brian, he took a big sip out of his beer. I finished mine and asked for another one. “I just don’t want him to get hurt out there is all. Its serious shit out there, man.” 

He turned back to me

“I just don’t want you to get hurt out there man, I care about you.” He put his hand on my back. 

He looked at me for a long while. “You wanna get a shot?”

“Sure,” I said. 

“Hey, Brian! He’s buying us shots!” Jim said. 

“Alright,” Brian said and asked the bartender for three duck farts. 

“What’s a duck fart?” I said.

“You’ll see,” Brian said. 

The bartender brought three shots of this foul blackness that looked like oil and vinegar with some milk in it. 

“What the hell is this,” I said. 

“Just drink it,” Jim said. 

We drank the shots. It was good. 

“What is this?” I said. 

“You’ve really never had a duck fart before? It’s Jameson, Bailey’s, and Kahlua. Good right?”

“Yeah it’s alright,” I said. 

“Man,” Jim said, “longlining on the Republic, that’s pretty sweet man, I’m happy for you.”

“Thanks Jim,” I said. 

I was feeling pretty good and I thought I should probably smoke some pot. “Hey guys,” I said. “I got some weed, you wanna go smoke some weed?”

Jim smiled a big smile and slapped his hand across my back again, “hey man, if you wanna share I’ll take anything you got.”

We went right out front of the bar and they smoked cigarettes and I rolled up a big old spliff for us. All the sudden there were other people around us. And Jim and Brian knew them all. They just kept walking up the street and appearing. There was toothless Frank, who had no front teeth and Moochie, who kept laughing this weird little nervous laugh like something was wrong with him. Brian said Moochie was his brother. And there was Roy, who I really didn’t like and who had this big scar right across his forehead and talked real slow. They said there’d been some kind of accident. 

Jim had the spliff and he asked if he could share it with his friends.

I said sure and he passed it all around.

That creepy guy with the scar Roy kept asking me for a cigarette. I gave him one. And then I gave him another. But he kept poking my shoulder and holding out his hand and saying all slow, “can I have a cigarette?” 

After I gave him two, and he still asked me for another, Jim poked him hard in the chest and said “hey, I got a cigarette for you. Yeah. You want a cigarette? I got one for you.” He pulled out a cigarette and put it in Roy’s hand. 

The other guys Brian and toothless Frank and Moochie were all laughing. 

“Damn, that’s fucked up,” Moochie laughed. 

Then Jim pulled this plastic nip of vodka out of his coat pocket and passed it to me. I thanked him and took a big drink to show him I could. He took a big drink too and then the weed came back to me. It was almost gone so I rolled another. 

We smoked another spliff all six of us and passed around the nip until it was gone. Then Jim was like “hey there’s a liquor store right there. And I was like “cool.” So we walked down the street and went in the liquor store me and Jim and that creepy dude Roy. 

They picked out these gigantic cans of ten percent something that were like two bucks and picked out a couple of those little airliner shots.I realized I didn’t want anything from the liquor store. I had a flight soon. It was at that point that I realized that these were all homeless street people who I was with. I was horrified that it had taken me so long. 

Jim was at the cash register with Roy and he was like “ahhh man, I’m out of cash. I spent my last dollar on that beer in the bar. Hey man, can you buy these for us?”

I hesitated.

“Please,” he looked at me with his pickled old watery eyes with the brows falling over the corners and I saw the sadness and brokenness of his life all wash out before me like a big tide. I saw a young guy like me who was all excited to be a fisherman like these tough old guys and who worked hard and drank himself into a problem and fished away his life and drank up all his money and ended up a broken lonely old soak living on the streets in Alaska asking guys like me to buy him five dollar drunks. 

I bought their drinks. 

And then I went back into the bar and felt disgusted with myself for having accidentally befriended and become entangled with a group of street people. I went back in and sat down at the dark bar and some people were talking about all the crazy people outside and I was so embarrassed. 

One guy turned to me and said, “hey are those homeless guys your friends? I saw you out there with them.”

I explained to him my stupid mistake. 

He thought it was pretty funny so he bought me a drink and we got to talking.

“Duck farts with homeless guys,” he shook his head. He said his name was Glen. I told him I was headed to Sitka to go fishing and I had to head back to the airport soon. I asked him where I could call a cab. 

“Hell you're not calling a cab. I live up by the airport and I gotta head back up there soon anyways. My wife’s coming to pick me up pretty soon here. You can come with us.”

“Alright,” I said. “Thank you.”

His wife came by and interrogated him about how many drinks he’d had. He’d had seven. He told her six. She thought that was acceptable. We walked down the street to their minivan and I got in the back. On the drive up to the airport they showed me some of the Juneau sights and Glen talked and talked the whole time. 

“Hey man I get some time off from time to time, it’d be great to know somebody over in Sitka. I could come over and hang out for a few days. How long you gonna be over there?”

I told him I didn’t have any idea. I told him I was gonna meet my captain in a few hours. 

He gave me his number just in case. 

They dropped me off at the airport and I smoked the last of my pot and went and sat down and waited for my flight. An hour later I walked out of the airport and this white pickup pulled up and a guy yelled at me and said “hey! I’m Dewey. Throw your sack in the bed.”

I was still drunk. “Hey man, thanks for picking me up.”

“No sweat,” he said. “You hungry?”

“Yeah I could eat. You don’t have a family or anything you gotta get back to?”

He looked at me like I was crazy. “No I don’t have a family.”

We went to this pub kind of place to get burgers and beers. 

Part way through my burger and my second beer I had to go to the bathroom to puke. I went in and puked hard in the stall toilet with both hands gripping the rim. I puked up liquor and beer and duck farts and the sandwich I ate for lunch. I puked. And out came everything that was inside me. Out came everything, out came all these things I had kept inside me I didn’t even know were in there but were now all soaked up in liquor and poisoned to death. The puke didn’t even smell like puke, it just smelled like liquor and beer stink. A tiny fish popped up in the bowl and started swimming around in my puke, swimming around in all these little tiny parts of me I hadn’t known about until I’d killed them and puked them up.

I thought, that’s a fish in my puke. And then I flushed it all away. 

6. Gap-Toothed-Blow-Job

My friend Eric had this great big gap tooth he was really proud of. 

He told me when he was a little kid his dentist asked him if he wanted to get braces to fix it. 

He’d said, “no. I like my gap teeth. My dad’s got a gap tooth. My grandpa’s got a gap tooth. I bet my great grandpa had one too. What’s the matter with having a gap in between your teeth?”

I guess the doctor didn’t know how to respond. 

The gap was like his source of power. It drew him into different lives.

The two of us worked together at a fancy steakhouse in Portland called Ox. We became friends right away because we were the only cooks there who hadn’t been to culinary school. One day the dishwasher called out with some family emergency and one of the cooks had to cover. All the culinary school guys got real quiet. They hadn’t gone to culinary school so they could go do dishes afterwards. Eric and I, though, were arguing over which one of us was going to get to be dishwasher. 

“No way man,” I said. “There’s absolutely no way you’re faster than me. I’m doing it.”

“I can wash circles around you boy,” he said.

“Boy?”

I turned for support to the chef de cuisine, Chef Kyle. “Chef, is it okay if I dish the first half of service and Eric does the second half and you can tell us who’s faster at the end?”

He grinned, “yeah sure.”

Then he wouldn’t tell us who was faster. 

But that’s how me and Eric became friends. 

Everybody from Ox would go to this bar called Billy Ray’s right across the street after work. We knew all the bartenders. 

“Hey Tyler, what’s going on,” I said. I never had to order because I always got the same thing. He handed me a mug of Hamm’s and a shot of Old Crow. 

“I'm going with an Eric,” Eric said. He’d created his own drink. 

Tyler handed him a whisky cranberry. 

“Thank youuuu.”

We went to sit down out back on the patio. 

Billy Ray’s had this great patio with lights strung up around the sides and heaters and tables everywhere. It was so big and so dark that the Christmas lights didn’t do anything at all. It was like all the light in the space was getting sucked over into them.

We sat down and I started talking about camping. “It’s been so fucking nice out lately I just wanna sleep outside. I need a reset, you know, sleep under the stars and wake up when the sun rises and the birds start singing. I just gotta get out of the city, man. I’m in a rut.”

Eric said, “you camp much?”

“Not really,” I said. “But I like to and I got a bunch of gear from my uncle when he became a Buddhist and gave all his worldly shit away.”

Eric took a sip from his drink. “Mmmmhmmm.” He smacked his lips and shook his head back and forth. “That is one tasty beverage.”

“You will never convince me on the whisky cran,” I said. 

He grinned his gap toothed grin. Said, “I don’t camp a lot. But I got a sleeping bag if you got the other shit. I like camping. Grilling hot dogs, sitting on a log, looking at stuff. Way of the road.”

“Is that Trailer Park Boys?” I said. 

“Yep, greatest show ever made.”

“You think so?”

“I know so. Ricky is like the Dalai Lama on Xanax. Half of what he says are quotes and proverbs and pieces of wisdom that he doesn’t understand or remember correctly. He’s like drunk white trash Winnie the Pooh. Who grows weed. He’s the funniest character on tv.”

“Hmm,” I said.

We drank our drinks. 

“What days are you off this week?” he said.

“Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,” I said. 

“Me too. Let’s go camping.”

We planned it all out right then and there. 

We would go out somewhere in the desert.

People at work made jokes. I think the term gap-toothed-blow-job came up. We said it was gonna be more like brokeback canyon. 

“Who knows what’ll happen out there,” Eric winked. 

We filled my car up with wood and beer and hot dogs and we got a bottle of corn whisky. I don’t know why we got corn whisky because I never drink corn whisky. But it seemed like something you would get when you go camping.

We got out into the high desert around Sisters and drove down little forest service roads for hours drinking beers and listening to road music like Neil Young and the Doors and the Rolling Stones and shit like that until we found a good spot to camp. It was right under this big steep hill that turned into a craggy spine at the top.

 It wasn’t quite a canyon but it was close enough. 

The first thing I thought we should do was set up camp, which is usually a good call when you’re going to get fucked up when you’re camping. 

Eric was confused. 

“What do you mean set up camp?” he said. “We didn’t even bring a tent with us.”

“Well yeah but you know we can get the chairs all that set up and our sleeping spot and all the other stuff.”

He looked at me funny. Pulled his sleeping bag out and threw it in the grass. 

“Okay my beds ready.”

“You don’t use a pad?” I said.

“Listen here. I slept on a pallet with a sheet of plywood on top for two years when I was a missionary in Nepal. This dirt’ll be like a dream.”

So we just put our chairs up and started a fire and opened the corn whisky. Eric took a big pull and then he passed it to me. 

             I took a big pull too and I coughed. “Woof,” I said. 

He nodded. “Yeah, it’s rough.”

“Corn whisky,” I said. 

We opened some beers and started cooking hot dogs. 

I looked into the fire down at all the little crackling branches and watched them turn red and then white and then disintegrate into one another.

“What was it like living in Nepal man?” I said.

“I dunno,” he said, “different, cool. I liked it there. Tough people, you know, they live hard lives. But they’re kind too. Good people. People there would give you everything they had if you asked for it.”

He looked around at the crags above us, sipped his beer and turned his hot dog. 

We looked at the fire and cooked our hot dogs and nobody said anything for a while.

“The craziest thing is how strong and tough the people are,” he said, like he was really thinking about it now. “The white people who came around could never understand it. Somebody would ask for a light and a Nepali would take a coal out of a fireplace and light their cigarette with it and then put it back in the fire. I actually saw people do that.

“One time I went on a little walk with this English guy who was another missionary at my church. He was this big jacked up gym guy. He was huge. Like six two, probably two-twenty. One time we went for a walk and we were coming up this big hill back to the village and we saw an old lady hauling a pile of wood up the hill. She had one of those big racks that hangs on your back and has a little band that goes on your forehead to even out the weight. The rack was full of wood. Just a giant stack of wood. There was more wood than old lady. We saw her coming up the hill and even we were out of breath it was so steep. We were like damn, that’s an old lady and that’s a big pile of wood.

“So my English buddy, he’s like, I’m gonna carry that wood for this old lady. I spoke a tiny bit of Nepali and he didn’t speak any so I told the old lady my buddy wanted to carry the wood for her. She set it down and took the thing off her head and her back and let my friend have it. He was probably twice her size. 

“He couldn’t even get it off the ground. The old lady just laughed at him. He tried for a long time. Then she picked it up and laughed this loud laugh like, ‘HA!,’ and kept going up the hill real slow.”

“Damn,” I said. 

We looked at the fire, cooked our hot dogs. 

“It was just different, you know, they way they life there.” He pulled his hot dog out and looked at it closely, then he put it back over the fire. “It was just this tiny little village in the mountains,” he said. “I was there for two years so I was pretty much like a local by the end. I knew every person in the village. Everybody came by the church a lot because we gave them all kinds of things like blankets and food and stuff like that there. And we had a doctor and all that so I mean I really did know everybody.” He reached for the corn whisky and took a swallow.

“When I knew it was time for me to leave I sat with some of the elders and we all sat in a circle and held hands and prayed and I had a vision that I would move to Portland and work as a cook at Ox Restaurant.”

“What do you mean you had a vision?” I said.

“You don’t have to believe me, man. I just had a vision. God told me what to do. I’d never even heard of the place before.”

He took a drink from the corn whisky and gagged and drank a big mouthful of beer to wash it down. 

“I don’t think I like this stuff,” he said.
“No, it's terrible,” I said. “We should’ve got bourbon.”

“Hmm, or tequila. I like a nice tequila drunk lately.” He thought for a second. “At least this stuff’s strong.”

“Finish the story, man,” I said.

“What story?”

“Your Nepal shit. What do you mean?”

“That’s the story, we prayed and God told me to go to Portland. So then I went to Portland.” He pulled his hot dog off the fire and put it on a bun. He rooted around behind his chair and came back up with a bottle of mustard. Squeezed a fat caterpillar bead across the frank. 

I passed him the ketchup. 

“What the hell you think I need that for?” he said. 

“I dunno, your hot dog,” I said.

“Ketchup doesn’t have any place being anywhere near a hot dog. Only mustard.” 

“What?” I said. “No ketchup on a hot dog?”

“You wouldn’t put ketchup on a sausage, would you?”
“I dunno, yeah maybe.” 

“No. The right answer is no. You would not put ketchup on a sausage. And a hot dog is a sausage, right?”

“Yeah I guess so, but….”

He held up a finger, “Ah, ah, ah, nope. Don’t even try. You won’t convince me.” He slapped his hand on his knee. 

“Okay,” I said. I put a bunch of ketchup on mine.

We ate our hot dogs. 

Eric Foltz ate with relish the inner organs of the all-beef kosher frank. 

Other than the Big Mac and the combination of imitation crab sticks with Japanese mayonnaise, hot dogs were Eric’s favorite food in the whole entire world. He made a bunch of noise eating. Grunts and growls and burps and slurps. Breathing so hard there was an oscillating whistle, in out, in out, as he panted wind through the gap in his teeth. 

He kept a rotation of hot dogs going on the fire. Ate five before he stopped. I ate two and watched him go. 

I drank more corn whisky. 

“You just left Nepal, though, just like that?” I said.

Eric stuffed the last of his dog into his mouth in one enormous bite.

“Yeah pretty much,” he said through a full mouth. Wiped his hot dog greasy mustard fingers on his pants. “I guess they threw me a goodbye party.”

“A goodbye party?”

He kept chewing. “Yeah, actually I kinda forgot about how fucked up it was.” He swallowed a pained swallow and tapped his fist against the center of his chest and burped. “Oh man, okay.” He motioned for the corn whisky. I passed it and he took a long drink. “Yeah, they threw me a big goodbye party. Every once in a while they’d have a big party for a special birthday or a holiday or something like that. Everybody in the town would get together and basically just have a big picnic party all day. Except the meal was always a goat. And there was always a kind of ceremonial slaughter. The guest of honor got to kill the goat.”

“You killed the goat?” I said.

“I killed the goat,” he said. He shook his head, stuck his tongue between the gap in his teeth. “It was horrible, I don’t like to think about it.”

“Don’t you not believe in violence?”

“No, I don’t. Not at all. But I think it’s more important to God that I not offend people.” 

He passed me the bottle. “So you killed the goat?” I said. 

“Yeah I killed it bad,” he said. “It was terrible. There’s this little hill right in the middle of the village with a clearing on it where everybody would always get together and watch the slaughter. It's not a very steep hill so the whole crowd can see the top, it’s kinda like a stage that way I guess. The goat’s tied up to this post at the top of the hill and there’s a little chopping block right next to it. Normally whoever was gonna kill the goat would get to pick out of a whole bunch of different kukris, you know those curved knives they got? Anyway, normally there were all different sizes of kukris. Usually they’d just pick a big one and chop the goat head off in one swing. But when I did it they only had this one little kukri. I didn’t know if they were playing a trick on me or what, or if they just couldn’t find the other ones.”

“So I had this little knife and the whole town’s watching me below on the hill and I go up to this poor little goat tied up to a post and I take its head and I jam it down on the chopping block. It didn’t make any noise or anything. It was weird. It was so calm. It just had its nasty bugged out eyes staring right up at me and I could see that it was scared, you know, like really scared. It was terrible. I didn’t want to do it but the whole town was watching me. So I choked its neck and I held its head down as hard as I could and I tried not to look at its eyes but I couldn’t not look at its eyes.” 

He took a pull from the bottle, looked down at the fire. The sun was just beginning to set and cast a dusty yellow light over us. All the bugs and birds were out for one last dance. 

I was getting smoked out in my seat. I whispered, “I hate rabbits.” Moved my chair.

“What?” Eric said.

“Nothing,” I said. I threw more wood on the fire and waited for him to go on. 

“So I held the goat head down as hard as I could and I lifted that little knife up as high as my arm would reach and I closed my eyes and I prayed to God that he’d forgive me this awful thing I was about to do and I brought the knife down hard, as hard as I possibly could, so the hooked end came down right on that things bony little neck.”

He took another pull and shook his head. He passed me the bottle and I took a drink too. 

“Such a terrible feeling to have a knife just land thud like that. It didn’t hardly do anything, just cut it all up in this big nasty gash and got tangled in the neck fur. Then the goat started screaming and making these horrible sounds, it was bleating and gurgling and its buggy eyes were wiggling around all over the place and its tongue was hanging out. I lifted up the knife and cut the thing again. Just as hard. And again and again and again. There was blood spraying all over the place and it got all over my face and the goat was just screaming this awful scream.” 

He shook his head. 

“I couldn’t tell you how many cuts it took to chop the poor thing's head off. But I finally did it. When it was done, I had blood all over me, like totally soaked in goat blood. I looked like a warrior coming out of a big battle. I mean blood was dripping off my face and my hands and my shirt was all soaking wet.”

“I don’t even know what to say, that’s so gnarly,” I said. “That kinda thing must happen sometimes though, right?”

He kept looking down at the fire, shook his head real slow, “no. It doesn’t. When I turned around, after I finally killed it, I turned around and the whole village was staring at me just looking horrified. Like totally disgusted and appalled. People had their hands on their mouths and sick looks on their faces and kids were screaming. A couple old ladies fainted. It was horrible. Not normal at all.”

“Ohhhhh, man.” I laughed and put my head in my hands. Looked at the fire. “That’s fucked up.”

“It was extremely fucked up,” he said.

“What’d you do?”

“I dunno, what would you do? I just stood there. My ears were ringing. All I could think about was how freaky I must have looked.” 

He drank more of the corn whisky and then he was quiet.

            A log popped and threw a swarm of firefly sparklings up into the dry ponderous pines above us. 

            We turned our heads to watch them on their way to the Garden of Ascension.

“Did the goat taste good?” I said.

“I didn’t eat it.” 

We sat there looking at the fire for a long time as though goat blood and horrified Nepali villagers were rising up and being born out of the flames. 

             And what from my life could have been resurrected around a campfire? 

             I wanted to tell a story too. But I didn’t know any. 

             The yellow light of the late sun had turned orange and pinkish and had this waxy quality to it that made everything look a little bit soft and unrealistic. 

“Hey,” Eric said. “You wanna catch the sunset from those rocks up that hill? I’ll race ya up there.” He took off up the hill.

I raced him. 

We made it about a third of the way up before we stopped really racing. It was much steeper than it looked and we were pretty full of beer and whisky. I almost puked. But we slowly made our ways to the top just before the sun set. I picked a big flat rock that made a nice spot to lie down on and watch the day end, and Eric picked himself a spot probably fifty yards down the ridgeline from me somewhere I couldn’t see him.

I laid down and I thought I was gonna puke and it took me a while for me to catch my breath. I laid there and panted and I watched the flocks of starlings rorschach the ballet slipper sky. The birds made these incredible designs and I wished that I could only understand what they meant. They were big diaphanous blobs that danced and tornadoed and constricted and expanded and twisted back into something that was always changing before it was ever formed. I knew that there was a way for me to understand it. I just didn’t. I laid there and I felt so lonely because there were so many of them all dancing together up there and they all knew something about life that I didn’t. 

Lying there on that rock with the sun setting all around me I felt like the only person in the whole entire world. I looked around and I wondered how old those rocks were, how long they’d seen the shapes of birds in the sky and how long they’d known their secrets. If the rocks had a story to tell me I bet they’d have told me about death and dying, about a thousand black suns each with a hole in the middle where your life was supposed to be. And they’d have shown me how every bird was the middle of every one of those suns. How every little starling was your life and how they were all different and dying their own little lonely ways and going to their own lonely places that only they knew about. How their dance was all the lives you ever thought you might have lived all together at the same time dancing one dance. Together. As one. 

Or maybe they would have told me to go see a psychiatrist. Or get out of the city for good. 

I don’t know. 

Who the fuck does?

10. Antique Cash Register

I looked at it like it was a herpe—like it can’t be but it is. 

This limp paper sign hanging cheaply over the bar door. The messy sharpie scrawled across. 

KEG CLEARANCE! $3 pints—$3 wells—$9 growler fills—KITCHEN CLOSED 

Green lights flickered from outside the Riverside Corral, the strip club/boat consignment lot just across the street. Where speakers by the entrance doors played Dream Lover. And the music drifted softly up to me through the green glowing fog on the empty street. Made me feel like I was in the beginning of a slasher movie.

Bolt your doors. Lock your windows. There’s something in the fog. 

I walked in through the door under the sign that might as well have been a tombstone. The bar was decorated with a lifelong collection of old weird things from Alaska. With signs from bars that had closed decades ago—The Fo’c’sle Bar, The Elbow Room, Sourdough Bar, Skinny Dick’s Halfway Inn. With ships in bottles. And old black and whites of motorcycle gangs. Ten-foot-long crosscut saws. WWII ration cans. A red lit clock with no hands on it. Nets hanging. A big brass bell.

It was like a museum for Jimmer’s wackadoo life as a hardworking eccentric.

“You see these old ship lights I got in here,” Jimmer told me one time, “that wheel and clock there? There was a boat went down somewhere outside a bay we were anchored up in, oh, somewhere out in the Aleutians. Might even have just been Dutch. I can’t remember. Anyway, this old trawler was about half submerged just outside in another little bay and the half that wasn’t under had all this cool shit on it my skipper thought we might salvage. So I spent like a whole week over there on the wreck taking parts and grinding off everything I thought I could use or keep. I was engineer, see. After a week though, here comes the Coast guard to tell us we gotta to put it all back. Almost arrested us. But those lights and that clock and that ship’s wheel I managed to get by ‘em.

He’d told me stories about lots and lots of the things he kept in the bar. When I’d helped him fix up the old house down the street. We’d call it a day early and go get drunk in the bar before it was open and Jimmer would give tours. 

I remembered them as I walked through the little wood room.

“…..That glass ball up top there behind the bar, I won that in a bet at this big flea market, biggest in the country, I worked at when I was a teenager in central Mass from this little Aleut guy. He traded me that ball for an old skilsaw I rebuilt. That’s how I learned about Alaska in the first place. Got up there and come to find out a glass ball isn’t worth shit. We’d go beachcombing for ‘em and now I got a like fifty.”

He’d take me over to a wall with signs and pictures and antique fishing rods.

“See that sign, Artic Bar, yeah, That was a good place. In Ketchikan. One time we were tied up there and they were having these huge flood tides. We were out on the dock doing boat work in the morning like a regular day. I was working on some hydraulics or something like that. Then I heard one of the guys say, “hey look, there goes the Artic Bar,” and I looked up and the whole bar was floating on its foundation down the channel. The stilts had come loose in the flood. We got a few skiffs together and managed to haul the thing back over. The owner was a crusty old Norwegian guy. Gave me this sign as thanks…..

“…..That little note. Look at what that says. See that name? Jack London. I think that’s a real Jack London note I found hidden in this little box at the top of the Ballyhoo in Dutch Harbor. It’s the biggest mountain near the town. They say he was the one who named it……

“.....That’s a motorcycle chain from Neil Young’s bike right there. I met him on the road one time and his chain busted and I helped him fix it.”

It was all just junk without the stories that were now lost. 

I saw Betty and Sam at our table in the corner by the fireplace and went over. “Hey Betty. Hey Sam,” I said. 

Betty didn’t say anything, just stood up and hugged me. 

She was a big soft woman, nearly as wide as she was short, and it was a good hug. With her messy black hair, black calf-length spandex pants, and Pantera t-shirt she kind of looked like a rosy-cheeked, emo blueberry. 

“You have a beard,” she said.

“I have a beard,” I said.

Sam said hi to me. He slid me the beer he had waiting. 

“If you guys are both drinking, who’s tending bar?”

“Jimmer’s wife,” Sam said without looking up. “She didn’t want to have to pay anybody for only a couple shifts.”

“Yeah, I guess so. She’s practically giving it away though. It’ll probably be busy.”

He looked like a skinny old wrinkly necked turkey vulture. He had this big hooked nose and dark sullen eyes. He looked tired. And old. He lifted up his Cubs hat and wiped a sad hand  from his nose all the way across his bald head to his neck.

“Yeah” he said. “I think she just wants to close up as soon as possible and get on with everything.”

Betty was picking at something stuck to the table with her fingers “can we talk about something else?” she said. 

She looked at me with her eyes faraway. “We haven’t seen you in, what’s it been, two years? Or has it been longer?”

“Four years,” I said. 

“God, that was so fast. It could have been six months since you were back there making pies and playing all that crazy music, if you had to ask me about it.” she said. “You must be thirty now.”

“Thirty-one.” I said. She shook her head and kept her eyes on me. 

We were all quiet for a long while trying to think of what to say next. 

What else was there to talk about? 

I said, “do you guys remember any of the nicknames Jimmer would call you? I was thinking about it the other day. I got ‘sunshine,’’pumpkin,’’curleyqueue,’’bugaboo,’’snookums,’’billyboy,’ and I couldn’t think of anything else.” 

They shifted around and looked at their drinks. 

Eventually Sam said,“I don’t think he ever called us names like that.”

“Oh,” I said. He didn’t?” 

They shook their heads.

I shrugged. Hit the table with my knuckles. Got up and went to the bar. “Three Basil’s please, Leslie,” I said. She gave me a weird look and she pulled down the bottle from the shelf and I remembered that the two of us had never met. I smiled back at her awkwardly. She had dark craterish circles under her eyes. Shoulders slumped inward. A plastic smile.

“Start a tab?” she said. 

“Yeah, thanks,” I said. But I meant, “I’m sorry.” I wanted to tell her that I was feeling compassionate. That I shared in her sadness. To try to enunciate feelings that sound cheap as words. 

Instead I smiled back at her. Let her see the sadness in my eyes. Took the whiskeys back over to the table in the corner and set them down with an air of ceremony. “Here we are.”” 

“What’s that for?” Sam said. 

“For Jimmer, man.”

We all cheersed, “to Jimmer.” Quietly. Hollow voiced. And took the shots.

I leaned in and scratched my forehead. Trying to make myself say it. “So what really happened?” I said. I took a big nervous gulp of beer.

Betty ignored me. She said, “do you remember the time the pizza oven broke and Sam and Jimmer were grilling burgers on the back porch and they were having so much fun that they didn’t notice they set the whole thing on fire? And when the fire department showed up they were still out there grilling right on the burned up porch. Still drinking.” She tilted her head back and shrieked a joyous hyena cackle. Her famous laugh. It was so loud that when I lived upstairs we could hear it echo down the hallway like a clown in a funhouse. 

Sam said, “he thought if we had some burgers and beers for them they might let it slide.” 

“You mean setting the bar on fire with it full of people?” 

“Betty.” I said.

The smile slipped like sand off of her face. “I dunno man, Leslie’s right over there,” she said. “I don’t think even she knows what really happened. Can’t we just tell eachother old stories and get drunk?”

She looked at Sam. Kept rubbing at some invisible smear on the table. “I think I want to get something to eat,” she said. “I’m hungry all the sudden. Maybe we could all just go get something to eat?” she said. 

“Betty why are you being so fucking weird?” I said. I was irritated and I sort of slammed my beer on the table.

It must have been pretty loud because Betty bounced up in her chair. “Just chill dude,” she said. “We’ll tell you, ok. We can tell him right, Sam?”

“Shit, Betty, I don’t know that this is the best time.” He was looking down and held real still with his beer against his chest like if he didn’t move nobody would see him. 

I motioned to Leslie for another round. Said. “You look like you’re about to hold the place up, Sam.” 

He tried to look less unrelaxed. 

We drank. Betty and I both coughed. 

Bohemian Rhapsody came on over the radio.

“Oh fuck,” Betty said. She reached for her phone to turn the volume up and got out of her seat. She grinned at us and gyrated her hips. 

With deep sadness in my voice I said at Sam, “I forgot that Betty likes Queen.” 

He didn’t look away from her. Nodded his solemn agreement. 

We watched in horror while Betty pantomimed a singing performance and air-guitar solo right in front of us. Matt pulled his hat bill low.

“Can’t we just have an honest talk?” I pleaded. 

But my supplications were met by her waggling Freddie Mercury finger. She loved how we hated it.

When the song finally came to an end, Betty leaned in close to me, panted her whiskey breath on my face. The hot beery steam bounced off my teeth. She whispered, “ok he….” took a deep breath…“wasn’t…” another deep breath…“drunk.”

“What?”

She held her hands up. Rolled her eyes. Still panting. Beaming. Proud. 

It took her a while to catch her breath. She looked at me like an indignant child. Repeated. “He. Wasn’t. Drunk.”

“Who wasn’t drunk?” I said. 

“I thought you were supposed to be smart, college boy.” She looked around and lowered her voice. “Jimmer, you dummy.”

I squinted at her in confusion. 

She repeated, slower this time. Staccato. Like an indignant child. “He. Wasn’t. Drunk.” And gave an exaggerated nod as if to certify the statement.

“Yeah, I got that but what do you mean ‘he wasn’t drunk’?”

“When he crashed his Harley. He wasn’t drunk.”

“So what if he wasn’t drunk?” I was starting to get a bit agitated. Who could possibly have cared if Jim had been drunk or not? Besides the police, I mean. He was always drunk.

I looked at Sam in the hopes that he might explain what she was trying to say, but it was like he was intentionally looking away from me. 

Betty closed her two hands into fists and rubbed them together and lowered her forehead into them and almost whispered, “I think they wanted it to look like he was drunk is what I’m trying to tell you. But he wasn’t. I know he wasn’t.”

Sam gritted his teeth and watched something going on behind our backs. 

I said, “who wanted it to look like he was drunk? The cops? Betty, what are you talking about?”

“I don’t know. No, not the cops. I don’t think so. I don’t know. I know I sound crazy. I feel fucking crazy. I’ve never felt like this in my life. But you have to listen to  me. It’s true. I know it’s true. See, there’s this. Right here. Look at this. Just look. See. Sam found this on the bar when he came in to open up Sunday. That was the day.…”

“I know what day it was,” Sam said. 

“Anyway it was just sitting there waiting for us to find it. Look at it, there. Read it. You’ll see,” she said. 

She was holding out a slip of paper, a ripped piece of a small pocket-sized notepad page.

They’re coming. Not what you think. Key in shop. Know when you see.

It was definitely a note from Jimmer. The very distinctive and boyishly neat scrawl. All caps and no style, like an architect. The cryptic concerted effort to use as few words as possible. Skeleton thoughts. 

But what did it mean? 

In her ten or so years of bartending at this place, Betty would have to have been more used to these riddles than I ever got to be. It wasn’t exactly like catching Kaczynski. Minimal linguistic forensics were necessary to figure out that messages like 2. Meat. Or else. only meant something like I had to have a check ready for the pepperoni guy by two or we wouldn’t get a delivery the next day. 

It had to have been something like that. 

She was staring at me from across the table while she waited to see a reaction come across my face. “Come on! How fucking ominous is that?” she said. “There’s no way it’s a coincidence. On the day he died?” She jutted her head forward aggressively at the look I met her with. “It has to have something to do with it. Right?” 

She shrugged her shoulders and raised her hands ever so slightly before she let them fall lifelessly back on the table. Then she turned to Sam. “Right?” 

“Jimmer did drink a lot,” I said. 

Sam looked directly at her for a long time like he was trying to decide what to say and then he said, “I don’t know, Betty. What makes it so hard to think that he was just drunk?”

“This!” She said, “this makes it hard to believe!” She held the note in the air and flapped it around. “You know what else makes it hard to believe? Jimmer rode motorcycles his entire life. All over the whole country. Remember how he talked about following Ken Kesey’s bus from California to Oregon and then down through Nevada? He made it sound so beautiful.” She took a big drink from her beer and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “He had weeks and weeks and weeks on the road. He told me he ran into Neil Young in the South Utah desert and rode right next to him and his wife for two days. He rode with Andrew. He’s right over there smoking outside. Rode with him every Sunday all down through the gorge and up into Washington. You’ve seen how many bikes he has in his garage, maybe twenty?” She stopped, picked her beer up like she was about to drink but then put it back down. 

She went on. “He rode with his kids all the time. I mean, I of all people even let him take my own children out and show them how to ride dirt bikes. That's how much I trusted him. And he was probably drinking the whole time he did that too.”

Sam and I both waited to see if she would continue. To see what was her point. 

“It just doesn’t make any sense that a few beers could have caused him to crash like that on that little street not even ten minutes away from his house here. I don’t know what but something happened. It had to have. I know you think so too, Sam.”

Sam remained completely motionless. 

“See!” she said, “Just think about it. They want us to think he was drunk. I don’t know who, but they do.” She burped and adjusted herself in her seat. She was getting this almost exultant tone in her voice. “We just need to figure out why. And we have this clue. You know, ‘they’re coming for me.’ He left it so we’d find it and then we’d find them. He said ‘the key is in the shop.’ So we have to look there. There’s something in there that’ll tell us who was after him. Something is going on. And he wanted us to know. He wanted us to find out” She rested her hands flat on the table and took a deep breath. Case rested. 

“How long have you two been here?” I said.

Sam shrugged, “we only had one round before you showed up.”

I didn’t know what to say. “Well, jesus guys, I dunno,” I said. I had heard about grief doing this to people but I had never seen it before myself and I didn’t know how to deal with it. That’s what I’m trying to say, I didn’t know what to do. I thought it best to try to appease her. “I guess we better have another round and go see if we can break in and poke around in the shop,” I said. 

“We don’t have to break in.” Betty said. “Sam’s got a key. Manager, remember?” She grinned and jigged her thumb at him.

So the three of us had another shot and then we went out back to the shop. No cars drove by on the street beside the bridge. And the fog drifting off the river still shone a bright emerald green and carried the muffled tones of fifties pop music. Eery under the leafless trees on an otherwise clear night. Sam keyed the lock and we went through the swinging gate door. Into the grass alley behind the bar. And over to the entrance of the shop, a two story gabled building with corrugated aluminum siding and red and green painted trim around the windows and the doors. 

Sam unlocked the big wood door with an iron skeleton key and pushed it open. We followed him in and he turned on the lights. It smelled like sawdust and shellac and stale beer. And just as I remembered, there was still no discernible system for the organization of anything in there. For me, it was complete madness. There were stacks of random lumber to one side and pieces of half-built chairs to another, a tablesaw in the middle of it all so covered with random tools and pieces of scrap wood that it was hardly identifiable as a tablesaw at all. Workbenches buried beyond recognition in cans and rags and laid down tools. And a million unique items. An antique cash register. Two old U.S. army issue motorcycles with sidecars buried in cables. A little blue MG with the hood open and the engine suspended by chains above it. Old wooden doors for old wooden boats. A maidenhead for a sailboat. Porch columns. Vintage neon lights and bar signs. Tools of all sorts and shapes. And grease. And beer bottles. And sawdust and cans of paint and chemicals everywhere. 

I looked up at Betty and Sam helplessly. “Where do we start?” I regretted going along on this ridiculous treasure hunt. 

Sam looked pissed off. “I don’t know,” he said. This is all just fucked up.” He kicked a piece of scrap wood and put his hands on his hips and looked down and took a deep breath. Then he looked back up at us, “I’m sorry.” he said. 

Betty didn’t give him a second thought. She was in a state of adrenal-type fervor. 

“You know what the problem is?” she said. “The problem is that we’re looking at this stuff and thinking it’s a huge mess. But it’s not. Is it? To Jimmer this was organized, you know. I guess it was at least. He always knew where everything was” She looked at me appealingly, “didn’t he? So maybe we just try to think like Jim? I don’t know.”

“Yeah, yeah. That’s not such a bad idea,” I said. I winked at her, “I guess you are a little smarter than you look.” She gave me a fuck you smile and flipped me off. Then turned away from me to see where Sam had gone.  

“Sam, what time you been opening the bar on Sundays?” she said. 

He took a while to respond. When he did, he said it quietly. “I guess I usually get in around ten or eleven depending on the day.” He was looking away from us and stayed like that. He’d been standing off to the side of us just holding still and not saying anything. Thinking, it looked like.

“Get it? Do you get it?” Betty clapped her hands together. “We just think ‘what would Jimmer be doing around nine or ten on a Sunday’ and we look around there.” She turned straight to me. “I am smarter than I look, you fuckin’ dickhead,” she said. 

Sam stiffened. I watched him bring his hand to his mouth and rub his upper lip and stare away from us into the corner of the ceiling. 

“What would Jim be doing at ten in the morning?” I said. I couldn’t think of anything.

Betty repeated the question softly to herself. She pursed her eyebrows and chewed on her cheek. She looked up at Sam and me. “What did Jimmer do in the mornings?” she said. 

  A loud, exasperated breath escaped from Sam’s mouth. He wouldn’t look at us but I saw him blink very slowly and shake his head. 

I didn’t say anything, only took in the chaos of the place. The little objects spotlit by dusty beams from the streetlights just outside the windows. Betty began to root around at the clutter on top of the tablesaw with a renewed sense of urgency and Sam started looking through the tool benches for a full beer. 

I let the futility of it all sink in. Let it wrap me up inside, right around the center of my belly. And for a second it felt like I could just do nothing at all for the whole rest of my life, like it would be better if I did nothing. Like what was the point? “What are we doing in here anyway?” I said. 

“What?” Betty said. She stopped whatever she was doing to look me down. “We’re looking for whatever that note was about.” She was angry but she was trying to act like she was only confused. “What are you talking about? We’re here to get this sorted out. To figure out what happened?” she said. 

“Nothing happened, Betty!” Sam shouted. He turned to face us finally. I don’t think I’d ever heard him raise his voice before. “Nobody killed Jimmer,” he said. “He crashed his bike and died and that’s it. There’s no conspiracy. Somebody just took a left and they didn’t see Jimmer coming and he couldn’t stop in time. There isn’t any plot or scheme or whatever the fuck you think there is. For christ’s sake, he just crashed. It was an accident. He crashed. That’s all. That’s it. Crashed and died. End of story. And it was probably his….” he trailed off. “He was probably….”

He stopped talking. It was like he remembered that we were really still there in that shop with him and he was really talking out loud at us. Betty had this horrified and angry look on her face. I didn’t know what to do. 

Before any of us had figured out what to say there were three loud, hard knocks on the street-side door across the shop from where we’d come in. 

Knock.

Knock.

Knock. 

Quick and even. 

We stood there motionless. Looking fearfully back and forth from each other to the door. I don’t know what reverberated more powerfully in those long seconds, the three ringing echoes, or the hush of the buzzing lights and our heavy heartbeats and sharp breaths. It was alive and taking shape before us. This silence that sucked noise like cold sucked heat. Becoming substantial.

Nobody moved. We stood there stunned and dumb like herd animals. All we could do was hold still. 

Then Betty started to cry. Softly at first. And slowly louder and louder. Louder and louder until I was praying for that enormous silence to come back. Louder and louder. And we just stood there. And she cried. Louder still. Until my ears were about to burst. Until I was crying too. Until there was nothing else but the crying. 

7. Sugar in the Gas Tank

Reed and I were going to fuck up Chef Greg’s Porsche with sugar. 

The discussion got started because Reed and I were sitting around in our apartment drinking beers and I got a call from Chef Greg. And two minutes later I was laid off. 

It was a cold, heartless phone call. And I pretended to be super pissed off about it. Even though really I felt happy because I didn’t want to work the next day and now I didn’t have to. 

We talked about how fucked up it was and how Chef Greg and his wife who together had employed me at their restaurant for the past year and a half were bad people.

Reed worked at a different restaurant that was in the same high-end restaurant group as mine.

His phone rang. He picked it up, looked at me darkly.

“Manager?” I said.

He nodded, answered the call. Walked out of the room.

“Fuck. You too.” I said. 

He walked back into the room shaking his head. Went to the mini fridge by the tv.

“You too?”

“Both in the same hour,” he said. He tossed me a Rainier.

“Fucked,” I said. Cracked it. “Yours didn’t pretend to cry did they?”

“Nope. She said the restaurants’ closing for Covid and everyone’s fired and she told me good luck.”

“Jesus. What a bitch. We wish her the best.”

“Wait Greg really pretended to cry?”

“Yes dude, it was kinda disgusting. He pretended to get all broken up. You know that motherfucker has never even pretended to care about anyone who works at the place.”

“We should fuck up his car.”

“Ah, vigilanteism. Reclaiming justice for the common man. You think we could get away with it?” 

“Don’t you remember Josh’s foolproof revenge scheme? The sugar in the gas tank thing.”

“I do remember that. Wasn’t Josh talking about that shit when he was intentionally overdosing himself on that pine pollen tincture he made to up his testosterone? Wasn’t he gonna do it to his boss and the dean of the college?”

“Uh, yeah. That all sounds right. Still a good idea though.”

“Why didn’t he do it again?”

“If I remember correctly he stopped taking the pine pollen because it was making him too angry all the time and then he started taking a lot of mushrooms and got really chill.”

“Right….You think the sugar thing would really work?”

“I think it would definitely work.”

“Yeah fuck it. Let’s do it. Fuck Chef Greg. That guy’s a piece of shit.”

Reed gasped loudly at something on his phone. “Yo. You know the bartender at St. Jack, Steve? He just hit me up. Said he’ll give us as many free drinks as we want if we come through now.”

“Are you serious?”

Steve had been laid off while on the job. 

We went over to get wasted. 

Right when we got there we saw there was a big email chain with all the restaurant group employees. Someone had asked about this stipulation under the government declared state of emergency lay-off section on the Oregon.gov website which stated that employees were entitled to being paid out on their PTO if they were laid off because of a government declared state of emergency. And the HR guy was dumb enough to tell everyone that the understanding of the restaurant group management was that if they laid everybody off before the government actually declared a state of emergency then they would not be answerable to any PTO claims. They laid us off about five hours early. 

Reed and I read the emails at the same time. A lot of employees were going ballistic in their emails. The people who had mortgages and kids and stuff like that and really needed every cent they could get right then. And the single twenty-somethings like us who needed to buy enough weed and cocaine and liquor to last through the pandemic apocalypse were pretty upset too.

“What the fuck, man,” I said. 

“So fucked up,” Reed said. 

We went over to the bar. “Yo Steve, you see this shit?” Showed the email to the bartender.

“Oh what the fuck,” Steve said. He turned around and grabbed a bottle of Scotch off the top shelf and poured three deep shots. Pappy something. “To never working in service again,” he lifted his glass. 

We cheersed and downed the shots, which weren’t that good for being the most expensive scotch they had. Then he refilled our glasses and Reed and I went back to our seats. 

“You know where Greg and Gabby live right?” Reed say.

“Yeah, I been to their house before. It’s so fuckin nice.”

The Chef’s had a super fancy house with a hot tub and a putting green in the back and hundred thousand dollar cars in the front. It was oozing with all the money that wasn’t my minimum wage. I went there one time for a drink right before I worked a catering event with Chef Greg and Chef Gabby. At the event Chef Greg would yell at me so bad that some random cook working at the event for another restaurant ran over and said, hey man, I don’t know what he did, but I know it wasn’t that bad. 

“Let’s go fuck up their cars.” Reed said.

“Right now?” I said.

“Yeah. Fuck it. Let’s do it.”

“Alright, fuck it.”

“Sugar. Sugar. Sugar,” he chanted. 

We were about to get up when these two waitresses came over and sat down with us. They had drinks. I didn’t know them.

“Aren’t you guys in the middle of your shift?” Reed said.

“We decided we’d be done now,” one of them said. She held her hand at me, “I’m Blair. This is Steph.” They seemed cool. 

I shook their hands. 

We got another round. 

Steph said, “this sucks. I don’t want to not see you guys anymore.”

“We’ll still see each other a lot. What else will we do?” Blair said. They hugged.

“But seriously,” Blair said, “what are we going to do? I won’t know what to do with myself without a job.”

Reed and I looked at each other, and then back at Blair. 

“Drink.”

They laughed. 

I was happy to lose my job. It felt like something worth celebrating. Life felt suddenly exciting again. Like who knew what would happen tomorrow. 

“Alright,” Reed said, “so we’re trying to go over to the owners of Ox’s place and, uh, fuck up their cars.”

“What? Why?” 

“Because they’re pieces of shit. Greg pretended to cry when he laid him off,” he pointed at me. “And the PTO shit. Did you see that? And they’re monsters anyway. Everybody in Portland knows that.”

“Wait what PTO shit?” Steph said. 

We showed her. 

“Oh my god that’s so fucked up. What the fuck,” Steph said.

“We’re down,” Blair said, “fuck them. Let’s do a shot.”

. . .

We were out on the streets in the bright summer night in South East Portland with big bags of sugar in our hands looking for the Porsche. It was dark, and I was pretty wasted. I thought I’d found the right house, and it did have some fancy German cars out front, but I wasn’t certain. 

Steph and Blair were tired. “Can’t we just go back to your guy’s place and drink more?” Steph said. 

“We have to do this first,” Reed said. Tunnel vision. 

“I’m pretty sure this is it,” I said. I was staring at the license plate on this big Porsche like I was trying to do a two-step verification. “I think this is it.”

I opened up the tank door. It wasn’t locked. Out came the plug and then there was me looking into the little darkness. “We need a stick or something to open it, I think.”

Reed picked up a stick and handed it to me.

I opened it up with the stick. I was about to pour the whole bag of sugar in. I was really going to do it. I had the bag all opened and ready to pour and everything. I was going to destroy a car that was worth more than my whole life. In so many different ways this car was worth more than my life. 

It was worth more than I was. 

I stopped. 

As much as I wanted to do it, there was no way for me to do to them what they had done to me.

“Fuuuuck.” I poured the sugar all over the side of the car. 

Reed sighed and closed the gas tank. 

“Seriously?” Blair said.
“So lame,” Steph said. 

We covered the Porsche in sugar crystals. It looked like it was encased in sap. 

Then we went back to me and Reed’s place and then I don’t know what we did. 

I woke up in my bed alone with an outrageous headache. I walked out into the main room. There were pistols and shotguns lying at odd angles on the couches. There were probably five guns all in all.

Reed walked out in his underwear and rubbed his face. “Fuck man, brutal,” he said.

“What’s up with all these guns?”

“What guns?” he said. I pointed at the couches. 

“Huh,” he said.

“I know.”

“Where’d Blair and Steph go?” 

“I kinda thought they were with you.” 

“Huh,” he said.

“Huh,” I said.

I had to sit down. I moved a shotgun over and sat on the couch. Reed got a glass of water. “I feel fucking horrible,” I said. I put my head in my hands.

“Yeah man, not good.”

“I lowkey blacked out all night,” I said. 

“I was kinda embarrassed to say so but I did too, dog,” he said. “I don’t remember anything.”

“Whose guns are these?”

“I have no fuckin’ idea homie.”

“Fuuuuck, you better ask Blair and Steph what happened,” I said.

“Daaaamn, soo embarrassing,” he said.

I looked at the photos on my phone from the night before. There were tons of videos of me and Reed and Blair and Steph dancing and posing with the guns, videos of Reed and me laying on the couches looking like animated corpses holding shotguns in the air and pulling the triggers over and over. 

“Holy shit, this is pretty bad. Check it out.” I showed Reed the videos.

“Awwww maaaaayyn. That’s not a good look at all.” 

“Do you think we went back to my Chef’s house?” I said. 

Reed stood up and looked a little translucent. He hustled down the hall to the bathroom. 

I imagined newscasts and helicopter searches and texts from coworkers—yo you hear the chef’s cars got shot up?

Reed came back a few minutes later. He looked like shit. “The girls are coming over, they say don’t remember anything either,” he said. 

Blair and Steph came over. They were also treacherously hungover.

We all sat around on the couches in me and Reed’s place. We’d moved the guns onto the coffee table in a big pile and were sitting around it in a circle so that it looked like we were planning a robbery or something like that. 

There was beautiful bright summer sunshine blasting yellow at us through the big bay windows in the place. It was the worst kind of weather to be hungover in. There’s an additional guilt associated with being so hungover on such a beautiful day. It made you hate the sun. Which made you feel like a piece of shit. I wondered how this nice yellow afternoon light would look on bullet holes in the side of a grey Porsche.

“Ughhh, I feel so bad,” Steph said.

“I almost went to the hospital,” Blair said. 

They said they thought we’d roofied them. 

We assured them that we hadn’t because if we had we’d also roofied ourselves and we all agreed that that wasn’t really the point of roofying somebody. 

“What happened last night? What the fuck did we drink? No one remembers anything?” Blair said.

“I guess I changed my outfit like four different times because there were four different sets of clothes on the floor of my room this morning,” Reed said.

“Hmm, are they good fits?” Steph said.

“No,” Reed said. 

We reached a consensus that nobody remembered anything. 

I asked if anybody else had weird videos on their phones. Blair and Steph checked their phones. Blair had videos of us pouring a bag of sugar into a tequila bottle and doing body shots off each other. 

“Ahhhhh,” we all said together. 

“That’d do it,” Reed said. 

“Why do cooks and servers always get so trashy when they drink together?” Blair said.

“Wait, why did you ask about weird videos? Do you have weird videos?” Steph asked me. 

I showed her the videos of all of us dancing with the guns. 

They were appalled. 

“Whose guns are those?” Steph said. 

“Why am I dancing with a gun between my legs like I’m riding a horse?” Blaire said. 

Reed and I tried not to laugh. 

“We don’t know,” we said. 

“Huh,” we all said together.

“Why were we playing with guns?” Blair said.

“It does seem a little concerning doesn’t it?” I said. “Especially when you think about how the night started. Let’s get drunk and vandalize my bosses car turns into blacking out and waking up with a bunch of guns. 

Reed looked at me, rubbed his hand across his face.

We sat down on the couches that no longer had any guns on them and Reed started playing some Lou Reed, some of the really chill stuff. The girls laid down on the couches next to us and both fell asleep immediately. I leaned back, laid my dirty hungover hair across the back of the couch and wondered about where the idea of doing the right thing ever came from in the first place.

We sat there listening to mellow Lou Reed songs with our hands on our empty heads. 

“Man, I’m just happy I don’t have to worry about getting yelled at anymore,” I said. 

“That was a fucked up place to work, bro. The Deaton’s are bad people,” he said. 

“Yeah, they’re bad people,” I said. 

“Maybe it’d be best if we shot their shit up,” Reed said.

We stared at patches on the floor between our knees. 

“If we didn’t shoot them and their cars up last night how should we get them back?”

“I dunno,” he said. “We could release lice in their house.”

“That would be a start,” I said.

We sat with our heads in our hands feeling sick and foolish with the bright summer sun shining down through the windows on our tender eyes. I covered mine with my palms. Reed put a blanket over his head. 

And then we disappeared from the earth.

11. Matching White Murder Machines

A captain on a fishing boat gets to tell his crew when to eat and when to sleep. He can say when they can go to the bathroom, and tell them to do everything they do every second of the day There are good captains and there are bad captains just like with anything, but a bad captain is an especially bad thing because he gets to tell you what to do so much of the time. 

My captain was a bad captain. He was so lazy he had the crew doing stuff that we shouldn’t have been doing because we didn’t know how to do it. And he couldn’t get a good crew because nobody who knew what they were doing wanted to work for him. 

We were somewhere in the middle of the gulf of Alaska, maybe a hundred miles away from Yakutat. Yakutat’s this little native village you would only ever know about if you’d been there commercial fishing, or if you were an adventurous cold water surfer. They get some world class surf at the right times of the year. I fished with a kid from there for a while. One time I asked him, “hey Gabe man, how long’s your family lived in Yak?” 

He looked at me like I was a fucking idiot, like it was an insane question. “Forever,” he said. 

“Oh. Yeah,” I said. 

It was that kind of a place. 

So we’re fishing out of Yakutat and we’re like a hundred miles offshore. 

Dewey woke me up the way he always liked to wake us up. He opened the doors to my spot in the aft cabin next to the engine room, and hollered down the fidley, “coffee’s on!” 

I jumped right up and got dressed and put my boots and my halibut hat on. Then I scurried up to the aft deck and took a piss off the stern. The seas were looking angry. A wind blew and the clouds were dark and the waves slapped the hull loudly and threw us all over the place. Ominous shit.

I walked into the galley and sat down next to Dewey and poured myself some coffee. “Looks like it’s coming up,” I said. 

He kept looking at the little Ipad he had satellite weather services on. He poked a short, fat finger on the screen and he fucking ignored me. He loved to withhold as much information as possible from the crew, especially weather when we were at sea. 

I asked again. “Weather coming up today?” 

He gave me the stupid over-the-top angry look he gave me all the time to try to intimidate me. He looked like a big slightly fat balding neanderthal. 

“Is that a yes?”

“Why do you care?” he said.

“I dunno,” I said. “Why do you care?”

“I don’t.”

“So is it coming up?”

“Yeah it might a little.”

“Okay, thank you.” I said and shook my head. Fuck that guy. 

It was always like that. Dewey was a complete moron and the way he kept his power was by secreting away knowledge. He’d never tell us when we were leaving or how long we’d be in town or anything at all related to the plans he was thinking about. He had to do that because none of his crew ever respected him because he was a big angry baby who didn’t know how to be a leader and thought he was better than everybody else because his dad owned the boat. I kept wishing some kind of accident would kill or maim him and I could go home.

I drank my coffee and watched the seas get bigger and I started making breakfast while the younger guys made their way up to the galley and grabbed their coffee and smoked cigarettes. They had hilarious looks on their faces, like sad, angry, exhausted little children. Because we’d been sleeping probably 5 hours a night that trip and working all the rest of the time.  

You had to lift up on the handle on the heavy stainless steel door into the bait shed and it always got stuck so you’d have to wiggle with it. I watched the one kid Joey start to have a tantrum trying to get the thing open. He looked like he might cry. Then he finally got it open. He smoked a cigarette and puffed his chest out and tried to make himself look tough. Both the kids were twenty and it was their first time working on a serious fishing boat.  

I made bacon and scrambled eggs and hashbrowns and toast. 

And then we started hauling gear. 

Dewey was up in the wheelhouse, watching us work—his favorite. I looked up at him. “You wanna haul? I think it’s your turn.”

“Nope,” he said, “your turn.” 

I hauled up the heavy pots full of black cod. And dragged them on board, all fifty. They were heavy, and I growled and screamed and felt like I was gonna black out pulling the heaviest ones in. It was like reaching over a  knee-high railing to do a deadlift. My back was getting all kinds of fucked up. 

I looked up in the wheelhouse and didn’t see Dewey, then I saw his head appear and his face was all red. He was doing fucking push-ups up there. It pissed me off so much when he’d let us work and just sit there and do exercises. I wanted to tell everyone in Alaska that he didn’t have hardly any muscles left from fishing because he didn’t hardly fish anymore. And he was only like five years older than me. 

I looked up again a few minutes later and saw him eating a bowl of cereal. 

Then I looked up a few minutes after that and I saw him reading a book and drinking coffee. 

It was raining, and the seas were even bigger now. I was wet and cold and miserable alone with these two guys on their first longlining trip and pulling these enormous heavy pots on board and my back was fucked up and I watched my captain sitting in the wheelhouse drinking coffee and eating cereal and reading books and doing pushups. 

We finished hauling and I ran back to the galley to start cooking lunch. I got some vegetables going in a pan and then ran out to the bait shed to smoke a spliff. 

Dewey came out and started talking shit. “Whatcha doin over there little bitch boy? Little faggot? Little french looking faggot bitch boy.”

I looked the other way.

“Huh? You say something? You say something little bitch? Little Sideshow Bob looking bitch faggot. You fucking stink. You know that? You got the worst body odor of anybody I ever smelled.”

“Dude shut the fuck up.” I said it quietly. 

“You can’t fucking talk to me like that. You’re the bitch and I’m your captain. You don’t ever get to fucking talk to me like that.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Huh? You hear me? What are you gonna do? Cry? You hear me little pussy bitch faggot? You gonna cry? You stinky little bitch? You look like a little faggot frenchman.”

I closed my eyes and hit my spliff.

“You know you actually are a bitch right? I’m not joking. You’re a fucking bitch. You’re a little faggy looking french looking bitch.”

I blew smoke into his face, pffffffffff, I kept blowing and blowing until every little bit came out of my lungs. Pfffffffff. I blew smoke all over him. 

His face got all red and his watery blue eyes started to bug out and all the gin blossoms he was starting to get in his fat alcoholic face popped like nightcrawlers in a good rain.

“What the fuck did you do that for?” He put his face right in front of mine. 

“Cause I’m fucking tired of you calling me names all the time man. I can ignore and I can ignore but you don’t fucking let me. What am I supposed to do? How much do you expect me to take? Fuck that.”

“Fuck you. You don’t fucking get to tell me what I get to say to you. You know you talk a lot of shit for a guy I could literally BEAT THE FUCK OUT OF anytime I want to. You know that right? I could fucking kill you if I wanted to. You wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.”

“Alright man. So fucking do it. Kick my ass. And you can find a new guy who does all the shit you don’t want to do. Or don’t kick my ass, and don’t fucking call me a bitch five hundred times every day. One or the other. I don’t give a fuck.”

He gave me this disgusted furious look and walked back through the galley into the wheelhouse. 

I was so angry I hardly noticed that the seas were really coming up now. The wind was howling and the waves were cresting. 

We set the gear back out and ate lunch and hauled up another string. 

The seas were probably ten or twelve feet. Any bigger than that and you can’t really fish. I was hauling pots and trying to show Joey how to head black cod. He was struggling because his cut was bad and I was trying to teach him and haul pots in and steer the boat at the same time and if I got it a little bit sideways the waves kept coming through the scuppers up to his knees and dragging him around all over the place. He looked really scared. 

The other green guy, Hunter, was watching the fifty-five gallon garbage can the line puddled into off the gurdy. It was soft line and just went straight into the can. Each can held three hundred fathoms, or eighteen hundred feet, of line and probably weighed over a hundred pounds. If you didn't watch them carefully in big seas they’d fly around like missiles and fall over and get all snarled up. Hunter was exhausted and spaced out and a can he forgot about flew into him and smashed him into the hatch and they both fell over.

“Hunter, what the fuck. Get your head out of your ass! You gotta pay attention when it’s like this.” I yelled at him. He looked scared too.

Dewey was watching us and watching us all fail and suffer and actually came down on deck for once. He kicked me off the roller and had me go head fish. 

He started hauling. I started heading black cod. 

Then I heard a scream. Dewey yelled at me to come help. And I looked up and Dewey was running over to Hunter, who was screaming, and had his hand stuck in the winch. I ran over. All the fingers in one of his hands were stuck between the line and the big steel wheels of the roller that it fits between in a little notch. His fingers had thousands and thousands of pounds of weight on top of them and big steel wheels underneath them. 

Dewey and I started yanking on the line as hard as we could trying to pull it off the gurdy. We were yanking and shouting. Hunter was screaming and making horrible noises, “AHHH! HELP! AHHH! MY HAND! MY FUCKING HAND! AHHHHHHH!” 

“AHHHH,” I screamed and tore my throat and yanked as hard as I could. We couldn’t get the line out. Hunter screamed. Dewey screamed. I screamed. 

Joey watched us and looked fucking horrified. 

Hunter screamed so loud I still hear it ringing in my ears sometimes and pulled with his free hand on his stuck wrist and leaned all his weight and pulled his fingers out of his glove and free. The glove stayed stuck there under the line. Hunter kept screaming and shaking uncontrollably and he held his hand like it was a dead bird. 

Dewey looked at me and he looked fucking terrified and he said, “go take him into the galley and get him cleaned up. We gotta get this gear on board and get out of here before the seas get worse.”

“The seas are gonna get worse tonight?” I looked at him like what the fuck. 

He didn’t say anything. His face was all white and drained of blood. 

Hunter was already back in the bait shed taking his rain gear off. I ran back and helped him. He wouldn’t stop screaming. “Ahhh. Ahh. AHHHHH.” He had tears all over his eyes and his face looked like a wild animal. 

We went into the galley and I had him run his hand under cold water to wash off all the blood so I could get a look at the damage. His fingers looked like nasty dirty old red vine licorice sticks. All the skin had ripped from his middle knuckles to the nail on every finger and all his fingertips were jet black and they were all twisted at fucked up angles. 

I puked. 

He kept screaming and screaming. 

He puked too.

I was freaking the fuck out and got him some water and had him sit down. He kept screaming. 

I ran back out on deck and told Dewey Hunter’s hand was super fucked up. 

“I think we gotta take him into town. He’s hurt bad.”

“Fuck,” Dewey said. 

“Where’s the medical kit?”

“In the aft-cabin in the cabinet across from your bunk.”

I ran back to get it. And then I ran up to the galley. I thought his finger bones were all probably broken into a million tiny pieces. I looked for painkillers. There were bottles of oxycodone and hydrocodone. I opened them up and they were full of all different kinds of little pills like aspirins and antacids and stuff like that. Junkies and derelict crew had raided all the good stuff over the years. I had him eat an aspirin.  

Hunter started to go into shock. His face was all covered with snot and slobber and ferocious tears. He kept screaming and screaming. 

He could hardly talk but he was trying to tell me something between the screams. “Ahh, I. Ahhh. I can’t. I can’t. Ahhhh. I can’t move my arm.”
“What?” I said. 

“Can’t….ahhhhh! Can’t move my arm.”

The whole arm with his fucked up hand on it was locked up and he was staring at it and focusing and screaming and trying to move it. 

I told him to just try to relax. I asked if I could get him anything. He asked for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. 

I made him a peanut butter and jelly and he stuffed it into his mouth covered with snot and slobber and tears and chewed while he kept screaming. 

He told me he couldn’t move his legs. 

I told him to try to relax.

I ran back out on deck and helped the guys haul in the rest of the gear. 

Then we ran back and found Hunter back there still slobbering and screaming and we carried him across the deck and down the fidley into the fo'c'sle and lifted him into his bunk. It was fucked up. 

. . .

We took him in to Yakutat where they don’t have a hospital but they do have a very nice clinic. It took us ten hours. Dewey and Joey and I traded wheel watches the whole way. Then they napped and I went to the clinic with Hunter for five hours, and then rode in the police car with him to the airport so he could get sent out to a hospital in Anchorage. 

Then the cop dropped me back off at the boat and I made breakfast and woke the guys up and then we went back out to pick up the rest of our gear. We traded wheel watches the whole day. We got out to the grounds at night. We fished all night long on almost no sleep. We hauled three strings. Each one takes about four hours. The last string we hauled up Dewey never came out on deck. And I didn’t see him in the wheelhouse. I was deliriously tired and emotionally exhausted and I was fucking furious. I knew for a fact he was sleeping in his bunk. 

He’d left his speaker on deck playing his horrible music. 

I turned it off. 

“Oh thank god, man,” Joey said. Joey’s favorite band was Gun’s and Rose’s. Dewey’s music was that bad. 

We finished hauling in the last of the gear. Two guys with three seasons of experience between the two of us. It was so fucking unsafe. 

Usually when the last of the gear is on board and the trips over, the captain immediately takes off as fast as possible to the port we’re gonna deliver at. But we had all the gear on board and nothing happened. 

I went back into the galley and looked in the state room and saw Dewey asleep in his bunk. 

“Gears all on board,” I said. I yelled it. This was fucked up. I was pissed. 

I went back out and finished putting everything away. I was so exhausted and angry I felt like crying. My voice was all shaky and emotional and I was freaking Joey out. 

When Joey and I were finally finished with everything we went back to the bait shed and took off our rain gear and Dewey came out and pointed at me and glared at me and said, “you got first watch.” 

I took first watch and he went back to sleep. Dewey took second watch and Joey took third. So I was confused when Dewey woke me up for my next watch and I got up in the wheelhouse and we were all three there. 

“Whose watch is it?” I said. I was so tired. 

“Yours,” Dewey said and gave me his intimidation stare. 

“Then why are we all here?”

He didn’t say anything. Joey didn’t say anything. 

I stood there and waited. Then I said, “why are we all here?”

Dewey was pissed off and trying to pretend like he knew what was going on but he had no idea what was going on. Joey was quiet. He looked like he had something to say. 

“Did your watch just end Joey? Don’t you wanna go get some sleep?”

“It’s the middle of my watch but Dewey told me to wake him up when we got here because we’re going around this point.”

I looked at Dewey. “So why am I here?”

“Uhhhh,” he said. 

“I don’t know why he woke you up, I guess,” Joey said.

I looked at Dewey, he wouldn’t look at my eyes. “So it’s not my watch?”

“Uhh guess not.”

“So I can go back to sleep?”

“I just said it’s not your watch.”

I stormed back to my bunk but I was so angry my heart was beating like a little piston and I couldn’t sleep so I rolled a spliff and went back up under the bait shed to smoke and slammed the fidley doors when I went up. 

Dewey ran out. “You can’t be fucking slamming shit and acting like that. Fuck you. That shit doesn’t fly with me. You have a terrible fucking attitude.”

“Dude, I didn’t fucking say anything to you. Obviously I’m pissed off. I got no sleep and I watched you sleep when we worked and took first watch and you woke me up for no reason. My bad for slamming the doors but I’m fucking pissed off.”

He stormed away.

. . .

Months went on like that. 

Hunter had surgery in Anchorage and started to be able to move his fingers again. He’d never fish again though. 

We got a new guy and then he quit. Then one of Dewey’s friends came out with us and he quit too. So we got another green twenty year old and this crazy Russian guy called Paul and we went out West to Dutch Harbor. 

I’d told Dewey a couple months before that I was gonna go to France with some of my buddies in September. He was furious. He told me it was fucked up and nobody ever leaves in the middle of the season. I told him I was sorry but that’s the way it was gonna be. I was out in September. 

We got out to Dutch Harbor in the middle of August. 

Everything is kind of surreal in Dutch Harbor. It's this horrible eeryily beautiful place full of ugly things and ugly people. It has this quiet sad beauty about it. But it's a hateful place. We got there and tied up right next to this Seattle boat we knew called the Sunward. 

The guys on the Sunward were real degenerate hicks. They had tons of guns and loved shooting any wildlife they saw and smoking meth in town and drinking liquor in the mornings and going to the bars to harass the few local women around. I did my best to keep away from them.
But this meth head Joe on there kept coming onto the Republic to bullshit. I was okay at ignoring him. The crazy Russian guy, Paul, though, did not like Joe at all. 

“This little man with the alien eyes took my cigarettes,” he said. “I’m going over there and rip his fucking legs off.”

“Paul man, maybe you should just ask for them back? That dudes been fucked up for days,” I said. 

He growled this terrifying growl and stormed off to go oil his guns. 

Paul had these twin white submachine guns that looked like they were straight out of a video game stashed under his bunk. He called them his babies.

Paul was a scary guy. 

He had prison tattoos on his shoulders and knees. He said after his family escaped the Soviet Union right before it collapsed they moved to Eastern Washington and within a year he was in prison. He was seventeen. I figured if he spent ten years locked up when he was seventeen he’d probably killed somebody. 

One time Paul got really drunk and he showed me the stars on his knees. “These,” he said, “these are not things you get. For you you have to give. These you have to earn.”

“What did you have to do?” I didn’t want to know but I asked him anyway. 

“Ohh little buddy, let me just tell you something,” he made fists out of his massive hands and looked at them. “These fists.” He raised his fists in front of both our faces and stared at me deeply with his watery bloodshot eyes. “These fists. They do not sell. But what I do I give.”

I didn’t know what that meant but it was fucking scary. 

Joey overheard and started laughing. 

“Ay Joey, listen to me,” Paul said. “Listen Joey, okay. Understand me. Don’t ever fucking giggle Joey. Okay. Don’t ever fucking giggle. It’s not funny. Funny is when motherfucker is right there.” He pointed at the deck and threw his cigarette down and stepped on it. 

Joey stopped laughing. 

Paul went somewhere else to go drink more vodka. 

That night he got into an argument with his girlfriend over the phone. She was back at his home in Eastern Washington with his kids. Paul was catastrophically drunk and convinced she was cheating on him.

I was smoking weed with Joey and the new green guy Toma when we heard Paul shouting into his phone. “I know you are cheating on me you fucking bitch. Don’t you fucking say a word to me bitch. I fucking cut you off from everything. No bank account. Nothing. You are fucked now you fucking whore.” He hung up.

We followed him down into the fo’c’sle. He was sitting on a bench down there weeping. He looked at us when we came down the ladder. 

“Fellas,” he said, “tonight I lose everything. Everything.” He kept weeping.

“Aww Paul man, it’ll all work out,” Toma said. 

“You do not understand what it is to lose everything,” Paul said. All the veins in his neck were bulging out. He put his hands on his head and stood up and made wild eyes. He grabbed the sides of the tops bunks on either side of the peak and tried to shake the whole boat. 

I looked at Toma and Joey. It was getting pretty freaky. 

Paul got on his hands and knees and started praying in Russian and weeping. We just stood there and watched him do it. 

He got up and pulled one of his babies out from under his bunk. He opened a case and pulled out the crazy little murder machine. He put it in Joey’s hands. 

“Joey, because of my religion I cannot do what I have to do right now. I cannot do it. Joey, you are my friend. I trust you. You’re my little buddy. Joey, I need you to take my little baby there and kill me. I need you to kill me Joey.”

Joey was so scared he started crying. “Paul, I dunno man. I can’t kill you. I can’t fucking kill you.”

Paul was weeping profusely and screaming in Joey’s face, “I need you to kill me little buddy.”

Joey was crying. 

Toma and I didn’t do anything. 

“Kill me Joey. You have to kill me. If you don't, I don't know what I will do. There are things I could do, I can see myself doing them.”

Toma and I left. We went up the ladder to the main deck and got Dewey.

“Paul’s down there losing his mind super drunk with his guns out trying to get Joey to shoot him.”

“He’s what?”

“I know.”

“What the fuck.” Dewey went down into the fo’c’sle. It took him a couple of hours to get Paul to drink enough to be happy again. Then we got him to smoke some weed and he had to go to sleep. 

When Dewey came up from the fo’c’sle, I said, “hey Dewey, when we getting out of town?”

“I dunno,” he said.

“No idea? I just kinda gotta know cause the trip’ll probably be close to two weeks and I gotta be out of here in a little more than two weeks.”

“Oh yeah. Uhhh, well, I guess we’ll probably be in town for at least another week or two because it looks like there’s a big storm coming through.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” he said.

The next day I called the airport and they told me that if I didn’t get on the flight that was leaving in the next two hours there wouldn’t be another flight for weeks because of the storm. 

I went back to the Republic and packed my shit up. Dewey was screaming at me the whole time. I packed my sack and I went to the airport and I bought my ticket to freedom. Nine hundred and forty seven dollars and worth every penny. 

I flew all night through nightmarish turbulence. The planes from Dutch Harbor are small. It shook and rattled and the oxygen masks fell down and mine hit me on the head. Some of the luggage containers flew open and peoples bags started bouncing and flying around. People were screaming and crying and praying. Lots of people had their eyes closed. And lots of other people had their eyes wide open like goats on a chopping block. They all screamed screams of mortal terror. 

I was there with them but it was like I was hearing everything with someone else’s ears and seeing everything with someone else’s eyes. Like I wasn’t really there at all. It didn’t feel like it was happening to me. All these people around me were so terrified and I wondered what they thought about. I wondered what they had in their lives that they were so terrified to lose. I thought about if the plane crashed what would happen. I wasn’t sure I’d die. I wasn’t sure if I could die even if I wanted to because most of the time I wasn’t sure if I was really alive. I thought if the plane went down that would be okay. But if it made it to Seattle and landed there would be a whole heaven of possibilities and new worlds for to find.

9. Great Colorful Garbage Bags

I decided to go into the Salty Dog because there was nothing else to do in Homer and it was my last day in town. Eagles made dolphin sounds in the trees and a light breeze wrapped me up like a blanket and the mountains shone so gloriously I squinted through my sunglasses as I walked through swinging saloon doors. 

It was dim and quiet, Ray Wylie Hubbard played soft and light on the juke, and dollar bills covered every inch of the walls like a giant shag carpet. I sat at the bar two or three seats down from a group of guys and asked the bartender for a lager. 

“Thanks, Rita,” I said when she put the beer down in front of me. 

“Yeeeuuuuur wulcome.” That’s how she always said it. Like a creaky wooden door and a croaking frog. 

I recognized some guys down the bar. Local middle aged tenuously employed fishermen who lived like single high schoolers and beat up their girlfriends when they got too drunk. 

Two of them were shaking their heads and looking away and giggling. 

The other was gesticulating and getting louder and louder the more his friends laughed. He said, “I’m tellin’ ya, that’s where they start. Always. They got underwater footage and I seen it. When they start eatin’ dead bodies and shit. Cause’ fish’ll do that, ya know. Something’s gotta eat the dead bodies floating out there.” He was looking around with dark eyes like a raving pastor. 

“Yer bullshittin us John. He’s bullshittin’ us.”

“Underwater footage,” John nodded with severity. “They go for the butthole.”

It’s almost like he thinks he’s Quint from Jaws, I thought.

“Now what in the hell are you guys talkin’ about?” Rita said. And I was really grateful because I also wanted to know what the hell they were talking about. 

John remained hunched over the bar and he looked up at her squarely and said with that grave, sermonic look still on his face, “that’s what happens when fish eat ya, Rita. Ever’time. They always start with the butthole.” 

Rita was not shocked and peered over her glasses and into his eyes for a long while. She appeared stoic but inquisitive. “Well, that settles it, I think I’m cuttin’ ya off, John.” The gray had almost completely overtaken the red in her frizzy ponytail, but it swung brilliantly over her shoulder as she turned and strutted down to the other end of the bar like an ancient cowgirl. No matter how hard she’d been knocked around, she was beautiful right then and there and I could have kissed her.

“Awww…Rita…come on…Rita…I didn’t even do anything…” 

She turned back from down the bar and pointed at him and with her own tone of religious solemnity growled, “John, I don’t wanna hear it.”

You never quite knew what you were going to get at The Salty Dog. It was either full of tourists or it was full of locals who for the most part were fishermen. It was always busy and it was usually a good time and I liked the place. 

My captain came in the door and went up to the bar and said, “hey Rita, how’s it going?” 

“Hey, Dewey, been a while,” she smiled at him and she reached for the bottle of Pendleton behind her and said “let me guess.”

I joined him.

“Bless you nurse,” I grinned, “and two IPAs.” She poured doubles like a demon. 

“Here you go, boys. Keep it open?”

I passed her my card, noddedprofusely. 

“Thanks, honey,” she winked. 

We looked for somewhere to go sit down and saw a couple guys we knew. They were off a Seattle boat called The Golden Chalice. We went over to sit with them. “What’s up Clint, how you doing?” I said. 

We started bullshitting, mostly talking about our catches, how the season was going, how much more we had to catch. Talking shop. It was fucking boring. I watched the bubbles in my beer.

But there were some girls sitting at the bench behind Clint and his guys. It was obvious that they were from one of the neighboring Russian villages like Soldotna or Seldovia because all three of them wore matching homemade dresses and hats. And they also had thick Russian accents. 

I thought they were kind of cute.

One of them, who I thought was the cutest of the three, made eye contact with me a few times and I was got focused on figuring out what her deal was. For the past two months we’d been out in the Aleutian Islands, fishing out of Dutch Harbor, and it felt like a lifetime since I’d seen a girl. They say that a beautiful woman is hiding behind every tree out in the Aleutians. They say that because there aren’t any trees that far West. 

To my complete surprise the girl I liked got up and plopped down right across from me and beside Clint. I couldn’t fucking believe it. 

She said her name was Yvonna. Y-von-na. I liked that name. I tried to get something going with her, but before I knew it Clint had snuck his southern charm into the mix and boxed me out. I told myself I didn’t care too much and gave up entirely, looked back down at my beer and thought about something else. I tried to ignore them. But I didn’t ignore them.

They were talking about arm wrestling or something. And then commercial fishing. Then more arm wrestling. I thought it was pretty boring. I wished anybody in Alaska had anything to talk about other than fishing and how tough they were.

But then she pointed at me and said that she wanted to wrestle me. 

All the guys were laughing and I reddened. I had become the butt of some joke.

“She wants to arm wrestle you, you pussy…. you’re the only one of us she thinks she can beat!” They all cackled and clapped and coughed and I scowled. 

“No not arm wrestle for him. Wrestle in bedroom.”

They stopped laughing. I started laughing.

“Oh do you now?” I said. 

“She is slut,” one of her friends interjected from their table behind. 

“You are whore. Do not listen to her, she is crazy whore,” the other corroborated. 

“So you wanna wrestle me, huh? You don’t look like too much to me,” I said. 

“You will be surprise.”

We kept on flirting a bit longer until Rita started to get agitated, and reminded us that the bar was closing in five minutes. I begged her, “come on Rita can I please just get one more round really quick? I’ll do anything.”

“Nope, get out.”

So it was finished, and I was sad. And the Russian girls recovered their wayward friend from me, and strutted out the rickety bar door with their dresses blowing around like great colorful garbage bags. 

We sucked the last drops out of our glasses in silence and followed them out. 

And then when I got outside, I saw them getting into a fancy black lifted Dodge double cab. 

As soon as I saw the tail lights flick on I grabbed Clint and Dewey, and said “come on.” I was drunk and horny and feeling brazen. 

I walked over, opened the door behind the passenger seat and hopped right into the truck. My girl was sitting in the back with her friends up forward. They couldn’t stop laughing and asking us what the hell we were doing. I didn’t know. “Where we going now?” I said.

“Ok, ok, you all get out of truck,” the one who was driving said. 

I just kept asking over and over again, “where we going now?”

It didn’t take long to persuade them to get a few more drinks up in town at the other bar, Character’s. 

I guess the girl in the passenger seat decided she liked Clint, because she swapped her seat with Dewey and crammed into the back next to him, forcing my girl over until she was halfway sitting on my lap. She leaned back against me harder than she had to and looked down the bridge of my nose in coquettish apology. She smelled like beer and body odor and old wood and smoked fish. I put my hands around her belly and she put hers on my upper left thigh. Soft flesh. It felt fucking good. 

Within a minute or two of driving we were kissing and her friends were making disgusted groans and laughing at us. Little shrieks of pervish delight colored with disapproval. 

When I looked up I saw Clint rolling around like a big bear with the Russian girl who’d sat on his lap beside me. For a fraction of a second, we shared a look that might as well have been a fist bump. The night was turning out to be much more than we could have expected. 

We went to Character’s and bought the girls and ourselves several more drinks until that bar too had last call. I fell into a stupor of beer and lust and don’t think I talked much. I wanted to go back in the truck. When they kicked us out, we decided to go back down the spit to the harbor, because there wasn’t anywhere else to go. 

But first we had to drive about twenty minutes outside town to this massive estate with a separate garage bigger than most houses and a stable next to it. I couldn’t understand how anybody in the Kenai peninsula could manage to have that many horses out in the open like that with all the bears around. 

“Who’s horses are these?” I kept saying. 

“Who’s house is this,” Dewey said. 

We could ask and ask, but the Russian girls weren’t going to tell us who the house belonged to. All they would say was that they were staying there and that we had to be quiet because their kids were sleeping inside. 

I don’t think any of us, not even the girls as they tried to explain, really gave one shit about any of it either way. 

They ran inside and came back out to the truck with a very strange but sufficient assortment of beers and seltzers and ciders. It felt like we were in high school. 

“Let me see that bag,” I said, my fingers opening and closing towards myself. I selected a can of pilsner and let out sigh of relief when it hit my lips. 

We went back to the boat. 

Thinking that I might be able to get this girl down into my bunk, I was advocating as well as I could that we go back to our boat, The Republic. But the Golden Chalice was closer, and Clint won out.

When we got on board everybody went in the galley to sit down.

But Yvonna dragged me out of the galley onto the open deck. 

“Where do we go?” she said. 

“To be alone?”

She spanked me and nodded. 

I said maybe the bait shed had a spot so we poked our heads through over towards the stern. I flipped the lights on and we walked around. 

“It smells fish in here,”she said. 

I looked around to see the chunks of bait of guts that had dried to the bait shed walls where the guys had missed pieces when they scrubbed down. I nodded gravely. 

We walked over and inspected one of the baiting benches. It was like a work bench with 2/4’s around the sides to make it like an open box. It was covered in paint and Pliobond glue that looked like hideous dried fish slime, and hideous dried fish slime, and bait pieces, and gills and gore. I imagined her sitting on it and lifting up her dress. “Hello ladies.” 

I walked over and looked at a stack of tied up skates. She started to lay down on it, and then she yelped and stood up and her dress tore. She carefully removed a massive hook from the hole where it had poked into her thigh.

“This isn’t going to work,” I said. 

“Huh, this perfect,” she seemed confused. 

“Nah, let’s go back in the galley. It’s raining anyway.”

We ended up sitting at the galley table there for the rest of the night drinking beers and eating the scrambled eggs with hot dogs and rye toast that Clint made up for us. Talking, laughing, kissing, howling, dreaming. 

When the sun started to poke its head up over the glaciers and the snowcaps across Kachemak Bay like the angry spotlights of so many accusers, the girls said they had to leave so that they could still make it to church on time. 

“Church?” I said. I thought they were kidding. 

But they weren’t.

They said they could drop me and Dewey off at our boat on the way. 

Clint walked us to the rail where we swung down onto the dock. He shook our hands and wished us luck with a sad smile and we stepped off The Golden Chalice and headed back for the truck. 

In my mind, there was still no question that I was getting laid. This girl wanted it bad. All night she’d hardly said much more than “god damn” and then grabbed my ass or my cock. I felt like a supermodel. And I was ready. Church could wait. We were going to my bunk. 

But when we got to the boat ramp and Dewey and I began to get out of the truck and they didn’t move, it sunk in. It was all a ruse. We were never going to get laid in the first place. We were just a kiss-and-fondle joyride for a few orthodox housewives on vacation. Fuck. 

“Bye, bye, fisher boys,” the three of them smiled and blew us kisses while we stood there in the dirt watching them go.

Watching them go. 

As the truck drove down the dusty road into the sunrise like a row of triumphant cowboys, a great melancholy descended upon me and a hangover began to take hold. I watched the great dust cloud their massive truck kicked up. It looked like a big halibut. Then it looked like a raven. Then it turned red like the rising sun and drifted into nothingness. The dust came back and it caught me in my throat and I choked and gagged on it. All the dust in the world was in the air and turning into Alaskan folk-tales and telling me that the Russians were never to be trusted in that place. It was a place of horror and deceit, the dust said. I asked and it told me, it was a place of brutality and murder. It was a place where invaders never stopped invading even after somebody else invaded them. Where there were no conquerors or moral heroes, only animal violence and powerful wills. That nobody ever won or lost, just struggled and changed. That nothing would ever be easy there.

15. A Million Perfect Stars

I got the worst fever of my life right before I left Paris. I think I almost died, but I’m not sure.

Céleste started to get sick first. 

We thought she got it when the record company she worked for threw a party event and Céleste had to work there all night. I think it was a Thursday night. 

We were sad we couldn’t see each other, and even though she had the next day off she said she would probably be sleeping all day. “You could come over to my apartment if you want, but I’m going to be so tired I will have to sleep.”

“I’d come and nap with you. That sounds nice.”
“Really? You don’t think it would be boring? What if you can’t sleep as much as me?”

“No I think it sounds great, we can spend the whole day in bed. And iff I can’t sleep I can just read a book or watch tv or something and you can sleep next to me.”

“You would really want to do that?”

“Yeah I’d love to?”

“You would rather hang out in bed with me than explore Paris more?”

“Yeah.”

She smiled her gorgeous smile.  “Ok, perhaps I can text you when I am coming home and you can meet me here?”

“Okay,” I said. 

“But it’s going to be really early, like seven or something. Is that okay?”

“Yeah, that’s okay,” I said. 

I got a hostel that night and stayed up late sitting at the Sacre Coeur drinking beer and talking to my brother on the phone. I told him all about this amazing girl I was staying with and how I’d never felt so crazy before in my whole life. I told him I was terrified. I was terrified because I knew I was in love but I also knew that it had to end. I asked him how I could possibly leave. I told him I didn’t know what to do. I told him I was scared. He didn’t know what to tell me.

I went back to the hostel and I set an alarm for seven and went to sleep for three or four hours. 

When I woke up I texted Céleste.

You really woke up! So cute!

I’m on my way home now!

Ok, I said, I’ll leave now! Can’t wait to see you!

Moi aussi. 

I made it to to her apartment a little bit after her and she was waiting for me with some weed rolled up. We smoked and went straight to sleep for a few hours. We woke up and listened to Curtis Mayfield and fucked and we went back to sleep. Then we woke up and turned on a movie and Céleste fell back asleep on my shoulder and she made the most adorable almost imperctible snorts when she slept. I took videos of her sleeping on my shoulder and snorting. I was so happy to have her sleeping against me.

When she woke up the movie was over and I was reading a really great book called Hill William. 

“Yuggghh,” she said. “I’m so warm, I feel a bit crazy.”

She stirred around under the covers and ripped off the hoodie she always liked to wear in bed. It was damp with her sweat. 

“I think I’m sick,” she said. 

“Noooo, really?” 

“I think so, I feel a bit strange and hot.”

“Oh I’m sorry Cece, can I get anything for you?”

She shook her head no.

“Maybe we should go back to sleep?”

She shook her head yes. 

We fucked and went back to sleep. 

I made us some pasta for dinner and we slept more. 

. . .

In the morning Céleste was sure she was sick, she was all flushed and sweating. But she said she didn’t feel that bad, and it didn’t seem to have any effect on her libido. We hardly left her bedroom the whole weekend. I took care of her and she slept and made her little snorting noises on my shoulder. 

Even though she was sick it was a great weekend. We’d sleep in and I’d make her coffee and tea during the day and toast with butter and pasta at night and did all the work when we fucked. We fucked slowly and softly and we got our sweat everywhere, we fucked with our hands in each others hair and she put her face in the crook of my neck and I held her hair out of her face so I could see her and she put her hand on my cheek and we put our hands together and held on as tight as we could and she looked in my eyes and held my face when we came.

I could only think about one word.

We’d just had sex and we were laying naked in her bed and playing around. We did eskimo kisses and then pufferfish kisses, and then we tried to do the thing where you suck your cheeks in and make your lips look like a fish mouth and kiss like that but we kept laughing too hard and it didn’t work. I tried to eat her nose and then her mouth and she tried to steal my tongue. 

“Give it back,” I said. 

“Uhhh uhh.”

“What if I said please?”

She shook her head, “uh uh.”

“Pretty please?”

She shook her head. 

So I stole her tongue and we traded. 

“There,” I said. 

She laughed and pushed her forehead into mine. I put my hand against the side of her face and petted her cheek. Then I just said it. “I think I’m falling in love with you,” I said. “No. I am….I mean, I do…..I mean, I think I love you. I mean, I love you. How do you say it? Je t’aime?”

She nodded. 

“Je t’aime,” I said. 

She looked at me with that burning look. 

“You don’t have to say it if you don’t want to, I know it’s kinda weird to say it so soon. They’re giant little words. I just think we have such a special connection.”

“No, it’s okay. I don’t think it’s weird. I think so too,” she said. 

“You think so, too?”

She shook her head yes. 

“Je t’aime,” I said. 

She started glowing and burning me, turning all bright and red and beautiful like somebody had turned on light a inside her. She looked like she was thinking but she couldn’t help glowing red and burning holes into my eyes. “Moi aussi,” she said. 

“You do?”

She nodded a cute fast little nod.

“Really?”

She did it again.

We were both all glowing up red and lighting up the room and smiling so big it looked like our lips had been ripped off. 

. . .

The next morning Céleste had swollen glands under her jaw and she made a doctor’s appointment. She would be gone for about an hour. 

I decided to go to a boulangerie to get us some things for breakfast while she was at the doctor. We were gone for an hour. She returned with sinus medicine, and I returned with bags of quiches and pain chocolats and escargots, and made us scambled eggs and a big Parisian brunch plate. We ate while we watched a Wes Anderson movie marathon and smoked on the couch. 

When we were finished eating, I stood up to put the cutting board away and she said, “I’m so comfy and high and full I think you’re the only thing in the world that could make me get up. Like if you just stay right there and don’t touch me I would have to get up so I can touch you.” I stood in front of her legs where they dangled off the couch and held out my arms out like a pronged magnet and she reached to me. I leaned to grab her and pick her up. “Nooo!” she said, “you have to let me!” She groaned and concentrated and little by little lifted herself up and into my arms. 

I held her and she held me and we turned into our own private galaxy where everything was the way it was meant to be. We were a tiny little perfect galaxy in the middle of her apartment. Everything was in perfect proportion and everything fit together in a perfect cosmic design. There was one sun and one moon and one perfect planet and a million perfect stars. There were lots and lots of birds singing and making everything more beautiful. There were bees everywhere and magic was real and and everything was the way it was supposed to be. We held each other and turned into a perfect galaxy. We turned into our own place. And everything was the way it was supposed to be. 

. . .

The next week I started to get sick. My nose started to run and my throat started to tickle. I walked around in the rain all over Paris. I went to a rock climbing gym at night and went to the sauna because I thought it would help my throat. 

But I got worse and worse. My nose clogged up and I had this horrible cough and I got all pale and clammy. I felt like shit. 

Céleste insisted I stay in bed at her place all day and just rest. 

I slept for hours after she went to work, and crawled to her cough to smoke pot and then back to her bed to sleep. I woke up in the middle of the afternoon and there way a bunch of texts from Céleste on my phone. 

how are you feeling mon coeur?

I hope you’re sleeping

are you ok?

please text me back im really worried about you

I told her I was okay. I’d been asleep for four hours. I took my temperature, and I thought forty one seemed like a big number. My head felt really fuzzy and it was too hard to try to convert it to celcius in my head. I went back to sleep. 

“Coucouuuu.” Céleste came in the door and woke me up when she came home from work. “How are you my darling?” She’d starting calling me ‘my dear’ and ‘my darling’ as a joke and I fucking loved it. 

“I’m feeling a lot better now,” I said. 

“I was really scared earlier, why didn’t you text me back?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, my dear, I was sleeping.”

“It’s, ok was just really worried about you.” She sat on the bed on top of my covers. I grabbed her around her waist and rubbed my face against her chest and she nuzzled her face on the top of my head. 

“Are you hungry? Have you eaten anything today?”

I shook my head. 

“What the fuck! Really? I really think you should eat something!”

“Okay, I’ll eat something if you’re hungry.”

She made us some pasta with pesto. She made really good pastas with pesto or with cream and tuna or with tomato sauce, but mostly with pesto. 

“Do you want to watch a movie mon petit coeur?”

I nodded and laid my head on her stomach and yawned. 

She picked a movie. 

I fell asleep with my head on her stomach. 

In the morning she told me to stay in her bed all day again. So I did. I was all feverish and delirious. 

She came home from work just like the night before and we did the same thing.  

And she asked me what I would do over the weekend because she had to go home to visit her mother. 

I said I didn’t know she had to go to visit her mother that weekend. 

And it was almost Christmas, and I’d already missed Thanksgiving, and I didn’t have any money left in my bank account and I was running up my credit cards, and I was tired of walking around in the rain all day waiting to see Céleste. 

She said she was sorry but she had to, she’d made the plans weeks ago when she didn’t know I’d still be staying with her. We hadn’t expected to fall in love and never want anything to change. 

I said I should just buy a plane ticket and leave. 

I needed to go anyway. And I didn’t want to be lonely all weekend without her. 

I bought the ticket on my phone. My flight was in two days.

I felt like puking. 

Céleste wanted to understand why I had to go. 

I said I was out of money and I kind of needed to go anyway and it seemed like the right time.

It wasn’t. It was a horrible mistake is what it was. There never would have been a right time to leave, but there probably couldn’t have been a worse time than that. It was a fever delusion. There was too much blood in my brain or something. 

It might have been the worst mistake of my life. 

. . .

Two nights later, I met Céleste and her room mate Rémi outside their apartment when they got home from work and we walked to L’Abrevoir to get a drink to say goodbye. 

It was horrible. I couldn’t say anything. I just listened to them talk. And bought the drinks. 

Then Rémi left and Céleste and I went back to her apartment. 

The rest of their night was just like any other from the past month. Except that I was grumpy, and I was annoyed with Céleste. I was trying to find the things I didn’t like about her and focus on them. I made her ambition naivité and her kindness irritating and her love for me smothering in my head. It was horrible. I was grumpy and I was ruining our last night together. 

We fucked one last time. I loved her so much. I tried to tell her with my dick. But she stopped in the middle. She was crying. “I don’t know if I can finish,” she said, “I’m just too sad.”

I started crying. “Me too,” I said. We laid down next to eachother and I held her like a spoon against me. And after a second I was back inside her and we had our lips and teeth mashed together and her tears rubbed against mine and made our faces slippery. 

She was on her period and I came inside her. It was great. Sex with her was always so great. But it was also really sad. So that it was mostly sad and not as much fun. It was a different kind of sex. The kind where it’s way way more emotional than physical.

She turned on Nathan For You, because I’d shown her Nathan For You and she thought it was really funny. She spooned me. 

“I love your back,” she said. “You have a really nice back.” She squeezed me. 

“I didn’t know a back could be nice,” I said. Asshole. I fell right asleep in grumpy feverish angst. 

I woke up in a panic in the middle of the night, soaked in sweat, with this terrible and overwhelming sense of fear right in the middle of my belly like a knife was stabbing me. I flailed around and reached out for her. Where is she? I found her and pulled her towards me and woke her up by accident. She turned towards me and wrapped her arms around me and moved her head next to mine. “What’s wrong? Are you ok?” she said. 

“I realized this is my last chance to hold you.”

We went back to sleep.

When the alarm went off in the morning her face was wet against mine. We kept going back to sleep everytime her next alarm went off like we always did, but I think she just pretended to sleep and kept her eyes closed and cried, because her face stayed wet the whole time. 

We drank coffee and ate cookies and cuddled like every morning. Except that every other morning was amazing, and this morning was only sad. 

It just felt so wrong to leave, so completely wrong.

I was shaking and I felt like the bees Céleste put in my belly were working themselves up into some kind of fervor. I wanted to puke and cry. And then cry and puke some more. But I packed my bag up and took a deep breath and called an uber. 

And then it was outside. 

We walked to her entry way. We were both shaking and Céleste had tiny rivers of tears running down her cheeks, her beautiful cheeks that when they were dry were the most perfect pillows in the entire world. 

“Je t’aime, je t’aime. I love you,” she said, as we embraced outside her bedroom door, my backpack on the floor beside them. 

“You actually said it,” I said. And while I was so excited that she loved me and she didn’t care that it was stupid and crazy and that it would have to hurt and she said it, I also felt fucking horrible. I hugged her as tight as I could in her doorway of her lovely little apartment. It was so fucking horrible. We tried to hold on so tight that time couldn’t move us, we tried to stay in the perfect little paradise we made when we were together where we had our own little private utopia and we got to be our own galaxy. But I had to leave. I had already decided.

The door closed in slow motion, almost frame-by-frame, with Céleste standing there in her blue flannel pajama pants and oversized Michael Jackson t-shirt with tears running down her face and her mouth smiling and her eyes the saddest and most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen. The door closed frame-by-frame, like it was slowly erasing Céleste, each frame slower than the last, her arm on the door, most of her, her legs and her hips, half of her, her lips and her throat, a quarter of her, one of her brown curls and a hand, and then nothing. She was gone. 

14. Raccoons on a Jar of Peanut Butter

I went to Portugal and Spain and all across Morocco and Algeria and Tunisia, rode camels for days and nights in the Sahara, climbed to the top of the Atlas Mountains, and crossed the Mediterranean on a fishing boat, and every day I thought about Céleste. 

I made my return to France in Marseille like the Count of Monte Cristo, and went up the country on my way back to her in Paris. I wasn’t sure what would happen when I saw her again, or if I would see her again at all, so I kinda put it off and went to Annecy and Lyon. I went to Annecy because Céleste told me it was beautiful there, and in Lyon she gave me a number to text so I could buy weed. And from Lyon I was going to go to Strasbourg. But I missed my train. 

The train I got rescheduled on stopped in Paris. I thought about it the whole ride and really struggled with it internally, but when I got to the station in Paris and smoked a cigarette I knew that there was no way I could get on the next train. 

I couldn’t be in Paris and not see her.

Céleste had her mom and her brothers in town visiting her though, and I couldn’t see her. And then the next night all the metros were shut down from some strike so the city was in chaos and Céleste was with all her friends because it was a crazy night. 

I rode a Lime scooter for an hour all the way across the city to the Supersonic. I was far away from everything because I’d picked the closest hostel in Paris to Céleste’s apartment and there’s nothing to do at night around the Eiffel Tower if you’re alone and you like doing anything interesting. I rode the scooter for an hour in sadness, and watched a concert and rode back to my hostel for an hour feeling like an idiot. I’d structured my whole trip around seeing her again and now she didn’t even want to see me. 

But she did want to see me, she told me the next day. She was free that night at 21h. 

I wandered around all day with perfume reveries buzzing around in my head. I was so excited to see her. But I was super bummed she wouldn’t be free till eleven. That was kinda late for me normally. I didn’t know what to do until then, so I went back to the bar with the goat head and got some beers. 

At about nine thirty, I’d just bought another beer, and I realized that 21h was nine o’clock and that I had made a terrible mistake. I started panicking and immediately texted Céleste to explain my foolishness. She thought it was funny and told me to just come to her place and that we could get a drink at her neighborhood spot. I chugged my beer, and half-ran to the metro. I couldn’t believe I’d wasted such precious minutes. 

It was all fine when I got there though. She came out of the door of her apartment building and met me on the sidewalk and we had a big long hug, one of those where you rock back and forth and swing side to side a little. We started walking to the restaurant, l’Abreuvoir, up the street to grab a drink. She grabbed my arm and leaned into me when we walked. I was so happy I had to stop to kiss her. 

I grabbed her face with both my hands.

We kissed each other like a couple of raccoons on a jar of peanut butter. And then we remembered that we were on the sidewalk and we stopped. We wiped our mouths and we laughed and she took my arm and put hers around it and we didn’t say anything. 

We kept walking up the block to l’Abreuvoir with big childish excited grins on our faces. 

Céleste smoked at our table out front under one of those typical Parisian awnings and asked me about Moroccan birds. 

The waiter brought our drinks. 

I kept trying to fix my hair, I was sure my hair looked weird. 

I said, “I can’t remember seeing a single bird the entire time I was in Morocco. Besides maybe gulls on the beaches. There must have been birds but I can’t even remember seeing one anywhere in the whole country..”

“So there aren’t any birds in Morocco,” she said. “This seems a bit sad to me.”

I crossed my legs and leaned forward and rested an arm on the table so that my hand reached way across it close to her hand. She moved it ever-so-slightly.

“Do you think you would like Paris better or worse if there weren’t any birds here?” I said.

“Pffff, I don’t really know. I love the idea of having lots of birds around me. Like lots and lots of birds that are always singing and are making everything more beautiful. But I don’t really like the birds we have here, I think. They just poop.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes, they poop and then nothing else.”

“What about the birds where you grew up? Were they always singing and making things beautiful?”

“Ah, in Amiens? Oui, the birds in Amiens are a bit nicer, I think,” she took a drag on her cigarette and ran her finger across her upper lip. “And you? Are there many birds in your home?”

“Yeah, yeah, there are lots of birds. Woodpeckers and chickadees and stellars jays and crows and robins and things like that. All kinds of birds. In the summers they’re always singing.”

“This sounds so nice. I don’t know any of the birds you said but I think they are really nice. I would love to see the place where you come from.”

“You should come,” I said. “You’re always welcome.” Her hand that didn’t have a cigarette was still resting on the table next to mine and I’d been looking at it for a while. I grabbed it. I touched my fingertips to hers and I lifted her fingers up really slow and put mine in between them and held her hand in mine. We were both looking at the cluster of our fingers, and then we looked at each other’s faces. Céleste got all red and so did I. She was giving me that burning look again. 

The waiter came up and interrupted us and we cleared our throats and he emptied the ashtray and asked if we needed more drinks. Céleste did all the talking and translating for me. “Do you want another one?” she said. 

“Do you?”

“Maybe not, I think. We can just go to my apartment if you want.”

“Yeah, okay.”

She said something in French to the waiter and he nodded graciously and went away. 

Then he came back and said something in French and Céleste said something in French back and seemed really happy. 

“What’d he say?”

“He said the drinks were on the house, ‘for the lovers’” she blushed. The red on her cheeks spread up all the way to her dark brown eyes. She kept getting more red. Redder and redder like she was glowing.

She was burning a hole in my eyes. The way you burn them when you look at a flashlight and then you have a light stuck in your eye after. There was a big bright Céleste in the middle of my eyes and I could barely see anything else. I tried to look around but I couldn’t see anything else. 

I didn’t know if I was home, or back on the ocean, or if I was still in Paris. 

I didn’t know if it was winter or summer or if there was money in my bank account.

I didn’t know what day of the week it was. 

I didn’t know if there were days of the week or people to record them. 

All I knew was all I could see was this girl named Céleste and the only thing I wanted to do was spend as much time with her as possible. 

We went back to her apartment and I didn’t leave for a month.

13. Taxidermied Goat Head

I met Céleste for drinks in a punk bar in Paris with big red candles and a taxidermied goat head on the wall. The bartender wore all black and had cool tattoos and he was playing a bunch of Lou Reed and projecting some insane surrealist film on the wall.

I picked the spot because some guys I met on a bus had said it was the coolest bar in Paris, and I wanted it to seem like I was finding cool places. 

She was late. I drank half my beer before she swung in the door. I saw her come in and she saw me and we both had big smiles on our faces. 

I told her I had a tab open. She got a glass of red and sat down with me and we made small talk, first date stuff. 

I was nervous and quiet and I wasn’t sure if it was going well until she said we should go somewhere else after two or three drinks. I said anywhere. She said there was a nice place to sit outside and have a drink and watch the city nearby. She went to the bathroom, and I closed my tab and then went to the bathroom too. And found her waiting in the little space where people smoked between the bar and the two bathrooms. She wore a pearl necklace with a gold pendant on it, a black lacey tank top, baggy blue Levi’s and her Doc Marten boots. She was leaning daintily against the wall, she smiled when she saw me. It was like she had a gravitational pull and I was in her orbit. I didn’t say anything and I leaned in and kissed her hard and pressed her up against a wall and then I knew that it was going well. 

When we left the bar, I bought a bottle of wine from a convenience store and we walked up to the top of Paris’ only hill and sat up at the Sacre Coeur, her ‘nice spot.’ We drank the wine, the worst and sweetest bottle of wine there ever was, and we looked down on the city without any awkwardness between us. I put my arm around her back and she pressed her shoulder into my chest. We sat there and watched the Paris city lights. And we were distracted by all these guys with huge motorcycles revving around and making tons of noise. 

“They are French red necks, I think you call them.”

“Ahh I see, they’re hillbillies.”

“Yes, they are crazy.” She gave me a playful look. “Let’s do a bet, and whoever loses has to go for a ride with one of them.”

I thought if Céleste got on a bike with one of those guys, he probably wouldn’t bring her back. And I was afraid of riding with them myself. 

“Sure,” I said. And she showed me how to place this game with your fingers where you pick a number and then you choose either a bigger or a smaller number and if the other person guesses the  number you picked you lose. 

Luck was on our side. 

We both won. 

We Ubered back to her place. It was exactly like I’d hoped it’d be, old white plaster and cool posters on the walls and big windows. We went straight to her bed. We got each other naked and I rolled on top of her and put my face into her great big nest of hair and wrapped her body up in my hands.

 I’d expected her to make me wear a condom since she wouldn’t fuck the other night at the festival because we didn’t have any condoms, but as soon as I was on top of her she put my dick inside her. It surprised me. We’re having sex, I thought. She was so beautiful and she was French so I really wanted to prove myself and perform well. I twisted her all around in all kinds of different directions and tied her legs into pretzels, and landed back on top of her, my necklace bumping again and again and again into her face. It felt so good I couldn’t believe it. Everything about our bodies fit together perfectly—like good jeans or your favorite sweatshirt, you would never want it to be another way.

“Wow, so good,” she said after I came, when I was trying to figure out if she came too. 

I looked at her, I was nervous. “You really think so? It was good for you?”

“Whaaat? Oui, yes, when I was on top and you had your hands all over me, this was crazy.”

I smiled. It was crazy. The first time having sex with Céleste and it felt like we’d already been doing it together for lifetimes.  

“I have a little ouuueed if you want to smoke,” she said.

“Do you really?” I said. She was the greatest girl in the world. 

I sat on her balcony in my underwear with Céleste next to me wearing my t shirt like a dress and we smoked pot and traded her phone back and forth and played songs. 

“Is it my turn to choose?” I said. 

“Yes, okay,” she said, and passed her phone to me. 

She’d made fun of me for my last selection of Neil Young “See the Sky About to Rain.” So I put on ‘Moonlight’ by XXXtentacion. “Do you like him?” I said. 

“Mhmm it is difficult with him. Yes but also no.”

“Because he was so fucked up?”

“Well yes, and because he did not treat women well.”

“Yeah, I don’t really know much about it. He was kind of a monster, wasn’t he? But his music is also SO fucking good”

“So good. That’s why it’s difficult.”

I launched into the division between art and artist rant which had taken me down a million misadventures since college. “Don’t you think that no matter how bad a person was, if they made good art, they kinda die and take the bad stuff with them and the art stays. You can’t take it away. Good art is just good art. It doesn’t really matter how awful a person they were, because the art is still good. Don’t you think?”

“Mhmm no, not really,” she said. “Because there are some, like people who have raped women, or beaten them, or things like that, I look at their painting or listen to their music, and all I can see or hear is that horrible thing that they have done. It makes the art bad, for me. It ruins it. Because I cannot appreciate it for what it is any longer.”

I looked at her and I didn’t know what to say. Nobody had ever said anything like that when I said there should be a division between art and artist. Nobody had ever made the most obvious and important point you could make—that some things can’t be ignored, that there are things bad enough to suck the beauty out of anything. 

“I don’t know how I never thought of it that way,” I said. 

“Mhmmm,” she said. She closed her eyes. 

We were both starting to fall asleep. I looked at her sleepy face laying in the bed next to me, trying to suck up every detail, trying to remember every particle of her face. Eventually, I said “do you want me to turn off the light?”

“Mhmmm,” she squeaked, without opening her eyes. Then propped herself up and grabbed her phone, “do you want us to wake up with time for coffee and perhaps chill a bit? Or do you want to get more sleep?” she asked as I got back under the covers and wrapped an arm over her waist and snuggled against her. 

“Mmm coffee and chilling,” I said. 

“Okay, good,” she set the alarm, pushed her warm ass into me. 

In the morning when the alarm went off, I had to shake her to get her up. I sang into her ear, “Cece, Céleeeeste, it’s your alarm. It’s time to wake up.” She rolled back toward me, burrowed into my chest, and we went back to sleep until her next alarm went off. I didn’t know about the next alarm. And then it went off and we went back to sleep one more time, with my face against her cheek and our knees stacked like lincoln logs. When the third alarm went off, we fucked and then chilled in bed and drank coffee with cookies. And then it was time for her to go to work, so we dressed and walked to the métro. 

Before we left we both checked ourselves in the mirror. Céleste was showered and dressed for work and had put on makeup, she looked like she could go down a runway. She was wearing her a white tanktop with a butterfly on it, and dark super baggy jeans, and hoop ear rings. My hair was messy and greasy and my clothes were dirty. I had an old Metallica shirt and a pair of dirty black levi on’s and the jacket I thrifted in Lyon because I didn’t have any winter clothes. We looked in the mirror and saw who was who. And I saw that I had a giant hickey on the left side of my neck. 

“Ohhhh Céleeeessste, look what you diiiid,” I said.

She gasped, “ahhh no.” She winced, “I’m sorry. Are you mad at me?” She touched it like she was touching a wound. She cowered a little bit, and really looked worried. She’d put on her big pink and yellow fleece jacket and she looked like an adorable little pink bunny interrogating my face nervously to see if I waspissed off. 

“No, I don’t care, it’s ok. I really don’t care. I’m proud to have a hickey from you.”

“Pssssssh,” she laughed and rolled her eyes. 

We walked to the metro. And rode together for six or seven stops, thighs close tight on folding seats, her head propped on my shoulder just below my hickey. When we got to her stop, she kissed me hard and fast, and walked out the metro doors, wand left me alone with nothing but her old copy of L’Étranger which she had given to me as another keepsake. She walked off and I opened it to a random page. It was in French and I couldn’t read it. And I remembered that I was not home, that I was alone in a foreign place.

That whole day I walked across the city of Paris drunk on exhaustion and thoughts of Céleste. In the evening time I went to see a band called Guerilla Toss at a bar called the Supersonic that had free live music every night—and overpriced beer. 

 I texted Céleste that she should meet me there. She was too tired, she said, but she still wanted to see me. I immediately called an Uber. When I got back to her place she wanted to walk down to the little island on the Seine, Swan Island, which was close to her apartment. We brought beers and walked down, sat on a bench on the quiet path overlooking the river. 

“What’s your shirt?” she said, leaning against me, and traced the album cover design on my chest with her fingers.

“Oh, it’s just a record I like.”

“I don’t think I know of it. Can you show me?”

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “But I don’t think you’ll like it.”

“Whaaaat, why?” She was offended. 

“Just wait, you’ll see.”

The album cover was The Late Great Townes Van Zandt, a favorite of mine for many years. I turned on ‘Fraulein,’ felt it fitting for the moment:

“Fraulein, Fraulein, walk down by the river

Tonight when those stars start to shine

By those same stars above you, well I swear that I love you

For you are my pretty Fraulein.”

 “Do you like it?” I said. “I don’t think most people in Europe like country music.” 

She laughed and said emphatically, “oh no, no, no. We don’t listen to country at all.” Then she looked at me with that burning look, “but I like this.” She turned away, looked at the river, and her smile became a grin, “even though it’s SO American. Like so much. Really. Even more than the song you played for me last night.”

On the way back I made us stop a minute in the middle of the Pont de Bir Hakeim under the métro rails, because I wanted to look at the lights on the Eiffel Tower, and disrupted what had been a private night on the bridge for a newlywed, and obviously American, couple who had hired some poor violinist to play ‘La Vie en Rose,” over and over again.

And then, we walked the few blocks to her apartment and repeated the night prior. We fucked in her white room with the windows open and the curtains fluttering in the hot summer breeze. We smoked pot on her cute balcony with just enough space for the two of us to sit down with our knees touching. We fucked and smoked pot on the balcony and fucked again. I’d roll us another spliff and we’d go out and smoke it and then sit there and play with each other's hands. We’d hold hands and lean away from each other and stand up into a hug. And then fuck and go back out to the balcony.

Sitting out there late in the night, I scooched forward, my knees moving past hers, my arms wrapping around her bent legs, and rested my head on her knees. She put her arms around me and leaned down and kissed me on the top of my head. We held each other like that, held tight against time. We hardly knew each other. We were hardly more than strangers. But it didn’t feel like strangers.  It felt so good and right. I let her go reluctantly, said softly, “I think I have to leave soon, my flight for Lisbon takes off in a couple hours.”

She sniffed, “ok.”

“Ahh, this sucks, I don’t want to go.”

“I don’t want you to go either,” she whispered.  

“I’ll come back to Paris to see you before I go home, I promise.”

“Ok,” she said. 

“Would you want that?”

“Yes, of course. I would love to see you again.”

“Ok, then I’ll come back.”

I didn’t know if she believed me but I really meant it. I never meant anything more than I meant those words. I would come back to Paris just to see her. I promised myself as much as I promised her. 

Around 3 AM, I finally called an Uber and got my shoes and pants and everything put back on. The air felt heavy and glum. For a moment we just sat at the corner of her bed and stared at my phone and watched the Uber making its slow progress towards us on the map. 

“This is dumb. We are wasting our last minutes,” she put her arms around me and kissed me. 

If a kiss could tell a story then this one told me Jitterbug Perfume. It told me about Kudra and Alobar. About knights and satyrs and mystics and powerless gods. It told me about hot summer nights and buzzing bees. She let me go and blew me a kiss so I could take it with me and shut the door and suddenly I was standing alone on the hallway stairs with my head full of stories about French perfumes and immortal love. I still have that kiss somewhere, I just can’t find it anymore.

19. Instant-Messaging is My Mortal Enemy

The cruelest trick was to fall in love while traveling.

We fell for it so bad in Paris.

It was almost perfect.

We just felt good together.

Really good.

I decided I had to leave.

She didn’t understand.

She wanted me to stay.

I left.

Across the world to Seattle.

She was sad and alone.

I wished I’d stayed.

We didn’t really know what to do.

We tried to go back to our lives.

Tried to hang on to what we had together.

It didn’t work.

We were too far apart.

She let me go.

She moved on.

She had too much to focus on.

She didn’t want to be in love.

Something came loose in my head.

I started to think about her constantly.

I realized I hadn’t done enough.

I’d made her let me go.

I told her I’d move to Paris.

Which was too much for her.

She didn’t want to force life.

I told her I’d do anything to see her.

She didn’t think it was a good idea.

She started to feel weird when she thought about me.

It was my fault.

I was romantic.

I wasn’t realistic.

I didn’t know what to do.

I wrote her a story.

About how we met.

And how we fell in love.

And how much I missed her.

I wanted to write our story.

But I didn’t get it right.

It wasn’t our story at all.

It was mostly about me being sad.

And it was terrible.

She cried when she read it.

It didn’t change anything though.

She’d already given up on me.

And I thought she might be seeing someone.

I begged her.

I had to visit her.

I had to see her.

I was hurting her.

She was being strong.

I was making it hard for her.

She wanted to focus on the things that mattered.

I said that what we had mattered.

It mattered a lot.

I wouldn’t move on.

It meant more than the words when I said “I love you.”

It wasn’t something that went away.

I wanted to be in love so bad.

She asked me to stop.

She said she didn’t feel the same way she felt before.

I didn’t understand.

How could love like that just evaporate?

It was that special.

I wasn’t thinking like it was real life.

I was thinking like it was a movie or a book.

She was still burned into my eyes.

I told her I’d really move to Paris.

To show her how much I cared.

It scared her.

She thought it was crazy.

It was crazy.

How could I move to Paris for her?

Like she was a girl in a movie.

She wanted to see me when it wasn’t all about her.

If that was even possible.

And maybe when she wasn’t seeing someone.

I just wished I hadn’t left.

She knew I didn’t really have a choice.

Or if I did I already made it.

It’s why she moved on.

I didn’t want me leaving to be the end of our story.

I only wanted to see her again.

She was scared of what that would mean now.

It made us think a lot.my

I thought about how good she felt in his arms.

How natural it was to be with her.

She thought about how I came into her life.

And then left it just as completely.

And how she went back to normal.

And how now I didn’t want to lose her?

She didn’t know what to say.

She wasn’t mine to lose.

I’d made things so much worse.

She didn’t want to talk to me.

She did want to.

But she didn’t want to talk to me.

Not when I was trying to make her say it.

Words she couldn’t say.

“Obviously, come to France.”

Words that meant impossible duty.

Words that might as well have meant forever.

Especially not when I was stalking her friends on Instagram.

She was pissed off.

I had no business in her life.

She had her own life and dreams.

And she was with someone else.

And I kept trying to be in love with her.

It was sad at first. 

Then annoying. 

Then infuriating. 

Then leave me alone. 

Then shut the fuck up and never talk to me again. 

She really wanted us both to be happy.

Now that meant never talking to me again.

I made it that way.

I was love blind.

I couldn’t be happy without her.

I wanted it to be like it was before.

It couldn’t be like it was before.

I left.

She moved on.

I was across the world.

That’s the way it was.

The love atrophied.

And then I killed it and turned it into hate.

She hates me now. 

And all I can do is remember our time together.

Almost perfect.

And easy.

And short.

And wonder if things had been different.

And if I’ll ever see her again.

I picture it in my head a lot.

So that it’s always happening.

Over and over in different ways.

She’s walking up to her street from the Bir Hakeim stop.

I’m waiting for her on the corner by the Eiffel Café.

We smile really big when we see each other.

But we’re nervous.

We finally get to have that moment.

When no one knows what’ll happen. 

That’s how I like to think. 

But what I know is you can build love and you can break it but you can’t build it back. 

I might never meet a more perfect match than Céleste.

But she hates me now. 

And she’ll never talk to me again. 

And it’s my fault. 

I remember Scarlett Peters.

And Chloe Moore.

And evil Emma. 

I remember all the things I always forget.

And I think how instant messaging is my mortal enemy. 

And I think how it will probably kill me someday.

17. Kavinksy Death Fucking

After I got home from Paris, every time I ate Pizza I got a boner. 

I’d think about when Céleste ordered pizzas on my phone because we were too exhausted from all the sex and weed to go anywhere. When they got delivered, Céleste went out into the lobby of her apartment building to get them and then put them in the oven to warm them up, and came back into her room into bed with me to wait for the pies to get hot. We laid in the large bed in the small bedroom and watched ‘Nathan for You’ under a massive wrinkled Jacques Brel poster which stared across the room to a smaller poster of Johnny Depp in ‘Cry-Baby’ and a matching one of Sophia Coppola’s ‘Marie Antionette’. Next to the black marble mantle which held among its many scattered jewelry boxes and makeup items and hairbrushes and spiked necklaces the little pink bowl I brought back for her from Morocco. We laid in the bed, and it wasn’t long before we started kissing. We couldn’t stop kissing the whole time I was with her. I broke away. “What about the pizza?”

She rubbed my dick over my pants, straddled me, said “if you had to choose between me and your pizza, which would you choose?” and lifted my hands to her breasts under her sweatshirt.

“I’d choose you over the best pizza in the world,” I whispered, pulled her body down to me. Fuck it.

But when I was fumbling to take her pants off a few moments later she broke free, her eyes wide, “ah, NO, the pizza.” And ran from the room. Then I heard her exclaim some French noise charged with a sense of panic. I leapt up out of back and ran after her. 

She was in the kitchen, which was full of smoke, a scorched black pizza box on the counter in front of her. “What happened??” 

“We were sooo close, like SO close to starting a fire. This was glowing when I came in.” She pointed to the ashen lid of the pizza box. “What if we had decided to fuck? We would for sure have died if we had fucked.”

“Eh, it would have been worth it,” I said. And I started laughing so hard I grabbed out for her and put my arms over her shoulders and swung her around against me. “Why did you put pizzas in the oven inside their boxes?? Is that how you always do it?”

She widened her eyes and twinkled meekly, “well yes but usually it’s just with one pizza and I don’t have somebody trying to fuck with me and make me forget.” Two pizza boxes in a little toaster oven smashed right up against the heating element. 

Back in bed, she said “I can’t stop thinking about if we had been fucking earlier. We would be dead. Oh my god, I feel SO dumb.”

“It would have been beautiful. I can’t imagine a cooler way to die. Wouldn’t it have been a great dramatic movie scene? Like we’re fucking, you can see neon lights through your balcony window, so everything would be like indigo and shadow, Miami Vice night kinda look, and that song from ‘Drive’, you know….?”

“Ahh, Kavinsky?” 

“Yes thank you….that Kavinsky song from ‘Drive’ is playing and when the robot voice comes in the fire breaks through your bedroom door, but we dont stop fucking or even notice the room is on fire because it’s the greatest sex in the world.”

She was giggling “ouiiii, this is perfect. I would have to be on the top, right? 

“Yes, exactly, with your head tilted back and your hair all falling down behind you.”

“And we don’t even care that we’re burning because the sex is soooo good.”

“Exactly.”

“This is SO funny. And so dumb.”

“Kavinsky death fucking,” I said. 

We laughed, we pressed our heads together and kissed, we laughed and rubbed our lips against each other while we laughed until our faces were wet with our mingling tears.

We had been minutes away from burning. 

We got back into bed and held each other and sighed and got comfortable and kissed deeply and took our clothes off and fucked like we were a pair of sleeping otters. We forgot about the pizzas. We fucked and then we smoked weed and cigarettes after and then we ate the pizzas cold in bed and watched the Office in French with English subtitles. 

Cold goat cheese and honey pizzas and the greatest girl in the whole world and I could never have been happier. She put her pizza aside and laid across me with her head on my chest and her hand on my belly. We fell asleep like that in bed with pizza boxes and her laptop on our legs. 

I dreamed of house fires that night. Of house fires and skin melting and burning hair and the smell of carmelized cheese. In my dream it smelled like burning cheese even though it was all about burning people. The ashen cheese-smokey odor of a pizza oven was the same as a flaming scalp. Céleste and I were fucking and loving and the world around us was on fire and people were burning and screaming and their skin melted off and their hair was on fire and the air was thick with cheese smoke and I was so fucking happy. 

12. Star-Shaped Golden Tooth Jewel

After I escaped my tyrannical captain in Dutch Harbor, I went straight to France to a small music festival in Normandy. I was super excited to see cool music and meet beautiful French women after months of isolation. 

But I never could have expected to meet somebody like Céleste. 

On the second day of the festival in the early evening I was waiting in line at the beer tent and the girl of my dreams was suddenly there right in front of me. It all felt designed. 

I was waiting in line and a girl next to me put a little sparkly gemstone sticker on a guy and I watched her do it. And she looked at me and said something in French. I suffered through my little spiel, “desolée, je ne parle pas plus de Francaise.” 

“Ahhh,” she said. “Do you want one?” she held out the sheet of gem stickers. 

I said, “sure, yeah,” and offered her my cheek. 

She stuck it on my cheekbone. “You’re American?” 

“Yeah,” I said. 

And then there she was, next to the girl with the stickers. 

“You’re American? And you came here just for this festival?” She’d overheard me talking with the girl (who turned out to be her cousin Jeanne) who put the sticker on my cheek. I looked over and there was this was this beautiful girl! With long wavy brown hair I could already see in my hands. And deep, bright brown eyes. She wore a motorcycle jacket on top of an oversized red turtleneck, wide, worn black Levi’s, and classic Doc Marten boots. 

I was mesmerized. I stared at her for a long time with a look on my face like I was trying to pop my ears. Really I was trying to think of anything but “wow she’s cute” or “wow I love her style.” Eventually I said, “yeah, pretty much. I don’t know, it seemed like super cool music and a cool festival!” 

All I could think about was how pretty I thought she was. 

“Where in the U.S. are you from?”

“Seattle,” I said. 

“This is crazy! You come so far for just this tiny festival. Most French people don’t even know of it. How did you hear of this in the U.S.? I just want to understand,” she said. 

“I’m sorta friends with a guy in one of the bands so I kinda made that an excuse for a trip.” I said.

“So cool! Which band?”

“Acid Tongue.”

“Oh I don’t know this band,” she said. “Are you only visiting France or will you go to other countries as well?

“Yeah, Paris for a few days before and after this and then I’m going to Lisbon. After that I don’t know where I’ll go but I have a few months to travel.”

“Ahh this is so cool I want to do this SO much!” she said. She was gushing. I blushed. “Sooo, what did you do in Paris before you came here?”

“Oh, you know, just the tourist things. I went to the Pantheon and the Eiffel Tower, and I had to see Jim Morrison's tomb in the Pére Lachaise obviously. Lizard King lives!” I said, and knew it was a bad joke. “It’s right next to the place where I got a tattoo.”

She was nodding along and then brightened. “Ahh oui you get a tattoo! Where is it? Can I see?”

I told her it was on my thigh and that I’d have to take my pants off to show her, she blushed again. But I pulled up a picture on my phone instead. And as I held it out before her, my arm came slightly around her and her body moved slightly against mine. “I think this is really nice.” she said, beaming up at me from under my shoulder. “A really good tattoo.” 

“Thanks,” I said, unable to suppress a juvenile smile, like a shy little kid getting his birthday sung to him. “It’s my first one. I’ve been pretty excited and nervous about it.” Suddenly, I remembered myself, and stuck out my hand in awkward ceremony, “my name’s _____ by the way.”

She looked at me, laughed at me, and then offered her hand too, “so formal!”. She had small hands with long fingers and a medium-length white nail job. “I’m Céleste,” she said. “Nice to meet you.”

I suggested that they go back over towards the music, since cousin Jeanne with the plastic diamond stickers had already left. 

She waited while I bought another beer and they went over to the outdoor stage. The festival was hosted at an old viny farm with old buildings with old red tiled roofs in the countryside of Normandy and they walked in the mud over hay alongside the festival’s namesake brick and plaster barn. 

“Is this your first time at Rock in the Barn?” I said. 

“No, no, I was here last year as well. I think this is so fun here.”

“It’s super cool. I love this old farm way out here in the middle of nowhere. It’s really beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like it before,” I said. “What did you think of the shows last night?”

“Ahh I missed them. I was so sad. I work last night so I came with my friends from Paris this morning,” she said. “Was it good?”

“Ohh noo, what a bummer! It was super good!” I said. “All the bands were way, way cooler than I expected. It was almost overwhelming,” he laughed. “You have to check out Lebanon Hanover, they were so weird and crazy, kind of a little bit like The Cure.” And then I paused thinking of what to say next. “That sucks you had to work last night. What do you do?” I hated myself for asking what might be the most boring question in the world.

“Ah mhmm, I work in the music industry,” she said. “For a—I don’t know if my english is good—a record company.”

I swooned. “Whoa! What a neat job!” 

“Neat?” she said. “I don’t know this word.”

“Oh it’s like a dorky”—she raised her eyebrows—, “or funny, way of saying cool.”

“Cute.” She smiled a cute smile. “And you, what do you do?” 

“Right now I’m a fisherman,” I said. “I work on fishing boats in Alaska most of the time.”

“Ah wow, okay!” she said. “So crazy, I would love to learn about this. How long are you on the ocean? Do you go far away?” 

“Uh yeah, we go pretty far out, and all over Alaska. It’s called longlining because we tie lines—I mean ropes—with hooks on them together to make a really long rope that lays on the bottom of the ocean.” I held out my hands in ‘okay’ signs, pulling taught between them an imaginary string. 

“Wow, and you sleep on the boat?”

“Yep, we’re usually out there at least a week?”

“A week!”

“Sometimes two.”

“This sounds so crazy. I’ve never met a fisherman before.”

“So, I’m your first?” I said. 

She smiled big and bright, exposing the tiny star-shaped golden tooth jewel which was plastered to her upper left incisor.

“I like your tooth gem.”

“Ah thanks,” she said. “You should get one! I think this would look really cool on you! No really, it would fit your style a lot I think.”

“Maaaybe, my old roommate had a heart-shaped one,” I said.  

“Oh! A heart! Perhaps he is—how do you say— a bit of a slut?”

“Yes!” I said, smiling. “He is.”

She shook her head, “men, pppsssshh.” She laughed, and then thought for a moment. “What I want the most—like so much—is a greel.”

“A what?” 

“Greel? A greel?”

I shook my head. 

She showed her teeth and pointed at her mouth “greel! Like a greel for your teeth, you know, like rappers wear. Is my english bad?”

“Ohhhh,” I said, “a grill. My bad. No, no, I’m just dumb.” I wished he could record her speaking a few sentences so that I could study the way she talked later.

“I think it would be SO cool looking. Not one of the big greels that goes over all your teeth, no. Just a little one for one tooth.” She posed and pointed at one of her canines.

I was fucking googly-eyed. But I snapped out of it in a sudden realization and bumbled, “your english is really really good, you’re way better than most of the other people I’ve met here.”

“Really? Are you making fun of me?” She looked almost offended. 

“No, no! Not at all. You’re actually very fluent and you have a good vocabulary! Super good!” 

 “Wow, ok! So nice. Thank you! No really, this means a lot to me because I worked so hard on my english. It was very important to me when I was growing up that I would be really fluent one day, because I knew that you just have to be good at english. You know? It’s really important. So, I always took my english very seriously, even as a little girl. Like I always studied the most for english classes and really tried so hard to do well in them. Moreover, I came to America to study in Massachusetts during high school.” 

“Oh no way, that’s awesome. With a host family? Where in Massachusetts? One of my friends I came here with is from Mass,” I said. 

“Ah, no way! Yes, I was with a host family—in Stoughton, do you know if it? The family was nice but it was kind of strange. They had a son who was a few years younger than me and became really, I mean really—what is the word in english, oh yes—obsessive with me. Like totally in love. He followed me around everywhere I went. On the way to school and when I was…ahhh so weird…..when I was in between classes. Even in the afternoons when I would go with my friends. It was SO awful.”

“Oh go-o-0-d, that’s sounds fuckin’ terrible. You must have been miserable! I’m so sorry you had to deal with that.” I reached out and cupped her arm, didn’t know the right words. But I could see how someone could fall dangerously in love with a girl like her. “Nope, I don’t, I haven’t heard of Stoughton, I can ask my friend. He grew up in a super fancy yacht club kind of town somewhere in Mass. I’ll ask him about it.”

Suddenly, she looked over her shoulder as a haphazard procession of concert-goers migrated away from the outdoor stage and into the barn. I looked too and suddenly noticed that the crowd was no longer around us and that the band had left the stage, taking the chance to continue talking aimlessly with them. The ongoingness of our conversation became impossible to ignore. Unease crept into the open space around us. “I think the next show is about to start,” she said. “Perhaps we should go over there?”

Holy shit. I’d fully expected her to say she had to go find her cousin so she could disappear from me forever.

 “Yeah, sure, let’s go check it out,” I said. Casual. No pressure. 

So we walked the fifty meters or so (which Fleur had estimated the distance to be) over to the barn. And we stepped into the large doorless entrance and could see that the barn was already pretty full of people, the band already aggressively engaged in their set, ancient straw and raw timber in the roof reverberating with the clang of guitar and the eruption of drums. Conversation impossible. I looked to her and her to me, then back to the stage, and like a pair of marionettes moved forward together into the crowd towards the stage. We stood in the crowd and moved beside each other and nodded our heads side-by-side to the drum and guitar. I pretended to pay attention to the music. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t help himself—I didn’t care about the band at all—I looked down at her, but as I turned to look I caught her mouth swinging into mine, her arms reaching out for my shoulders. Lightworks. Kaleidoscope. Soft, full lips. I had a fistful of her beautiful thick hair in one hand and it felt even better than I’d imagined it and I pulled it and tilted her head back. I pulled her close. The music faded away into the background until all that was left were her lips against mine, her faded perfume and stale beer sweat, and hands, and heat. 

The rest of the night was no longer about music, and became an indistinct fugue of kissing Céleste. We went from one stage to the next, to stand and sway before the collision of drum-machine—as the night transitioned to more of a Euro-techno sound—or sat off to the side, anonymous in the crowd, alone in our embrace. An older man heard us speaking in english back inside the barn and was curious about what was going on. She explained the situation to him in french. He looked at them for a long while and seemed very drunk and his dirty black crewneck looked soaked with beer. Then said to me in a thick accent,  “you are an American,” he paused, “here,” he pointed at the barn floor, “and you met a french girl?” He raised his eyebrows, lifting along with them the small orange beanie atop his hairless dome. 

“Uh yeah, I guess so,” I said. 

The older man grinned and nodded, making me and Céleste uncomfortable.

Soon we forgot about it and kept on dancing and kissing. 

When the music was over we sat in the muddy grass among the tents with the straggling few who were too stubborn to give up on a good night. She spoke in French to another guy who sat beside her. And I suffered in my attempts to understand what little french I had learned after so many years of study—middle school, high school, college. Eventually I abandoned my manners which instructed me to wait patiently for them to finish speaking and touched her arm, “you want to go walk around a bit?” I asked. 

“Ah oui, yes let’s go.” She bounced right up. 

They walked around a tall tent and instantly embraced in feverish kissing. “I want you so much,” she whispered in my ear. 

“Where can we go to be alone?” I asked. I was sharing a tent, and the other guys were already sleeping in it. 

“Ah, I know, this is just the problem,” she said. She paused for a while, then said, “do you have a condom?”

My legs nearly buckled, and for the first time in my life, I genuinely prayed: ‘dear lord,’ I thought, ‘please don’t let me fuck this up.’

“Ohhhh fuck” I said, thinking hard. “I don’t buuut….”

“Ah it’s ok, we can still have sex if we find somewhere we can go, if you want to. Just no penetration. You can fuck me if you come see me when we’re back in Paris.”

I didn’t push it, only looked around desperately. And there, bright under the lights in the distance down the field, saw it: “we could go in one of the showers in the trailer over there,” I said, “that might be the only option.” 

“Yewwww,” she groaned, “but they are so dirty. No, I don’t think so. I don’t think this is a good idea. But Jeanne is at the private afterparty with the bands, perhaps our tent is empty but I don’t know. We can go see I suppose. But I don’t know where our friend is. If he’s inside I think I will have to just go to sleep.”

“Ok, let’s try.” 

Her tent was much farther than I thought. She explained that because of her various ‘industry connections’ she was allowed to camp among the band members in a separate area. It took maybe ten minutes for us to walk there through a small path in tall grasses, in silent, boiling, hopeful, expectancy. 

We finally got to the tent, saw it illuminated before us like a Guadalupe by the light from an adjacent farm structure which seemed to burn all night long. We were utterly alone except for the captive shadows imprisoned there past their time by that little light. “Ok, wait here just one second,” she said. And approached, cat-like, opening the tent zipper with extreme care, inch by agonizing inch. I waited and watched and held my breath. After what seemed like eternal minutes, she stuck her head inside and turned back to me with a big, excited grin, “it’s empty. Ok, let me just text Jeanne. But I think you can come in for a bit.”

I looked up into the cloudy night sky and nodded a silent ‘thank you,’ proceeded with her quietly towards the tent, quaking with anticipation. My legs felt weak and my stomach felt like I’d swallowed bees. She reached for the zipper to open the door the rest of the way and stopped, turned back to look at me. “No penetration, though, remember,” she said. 

My body sagged slightly but I said, “that’s ok. I don’t care.” 

“Ok good.” She disappeared inside. I almost fell over in his urgent struggle to kick off his mud-encrusted shoes. And then dove into the tent and started rolling around with her. 

First, I took off her leather jacket. Said, “I love your jacket, you look so cool in it. Like a girl James Dean.” Kissed her deeply. 

She rubbed her hands all over my pants and stomach, panting. She said, “thanks, it belonged to my grandfather, my sweater as well.” So the sweater came off too. 

“That’s cute….and hot for some reason.” I said.

It didn’t take long before we were fully naked and kissing each other all over, our whole bodies twisted up together in a big knot. Legs with arms, arms with legs, on top of clothes and pads, and bags containing makeup and toiletries. I put my head between her legs and my arms around her thighs and reached my hands up to her breasts. Until she pulled me up, rolled us both over, and knelt, and kissed me down past my waist to put my dick in her mouth. But there was a problem: there was hardly anywhere to get water at the festival and both our mouths were so critically dry that it was inhibiting us from any serious engagement in these, our non penetrative options. Eventually, we were in a missionary-type, not-so-dry hump position. “Arrête,” she said when I rubbed my dick` gently between her legs, ever-so-slightly against her clitoris. “What are you doing?” she breathed.

“Don’t worry,” I whispered, “I promise I won’t, I’m just teasing. You can trust me. I promise I won’t.” I went on, hoping beyond a hope that she would lose control of her desire and allow it to happen. We both began to pant and moan slightly. 

“Arrête. Arrête. It’s too much,” she said after a minute or so. 

“Ok.” I stopped.

Then we lay there in the tent, nakedly entwined, me on top of her. And blurted out random thoughts: “If you could only eat peanuts for two years or bananas for three, which would you choose?” I said.

“Uh neither, I would die. That’s disgusting.” She was laughing. “Can I eat things with bananas in them or just bananas?” 

“It has to be just bananas or just peanuts,” I said. 

“Ok, yeah, this is dumb,” she laughed. 

“Weeelllll….if you could shake a toe and go anywhere in the world right now where would you go?” 

“Hmmm, ok, this is a better question. But so hard! I never had a chance yet to travel the way you do. Attends! Attends. Ok. I would looove to go to South America, all over, and also to North Africa, perhaps Thailand or Vietnam as well. But I think I will go to South America first. Right now, I think maybe Peru. Jeanne, you know, my cousin, she is leaving to go traveling for a year just a couple months from now. I’m so sad she’s leaving, but I’m also so happy for her. I think I will try to travel for a long time too, perhaps in the end of next year.” He moan-grunted his approval, laid my head down on her bare chest. She ran her fingers through my greasy hair. “Where is your favorite place you’ve been, it seems like you travel so much.”

“Hmmm,” I thought about it. “Right here!”

She delicately scratched my back along the length of my spine with one long fingernail. I shivered. “No really, your favorite.”

“Really! This is it.” I looked into her eyes. They twinkled up at me with a radiance that made me melt into a big puddle. Smooched her. Put my hand on her big soft cheek. 

 After a while she said, “I think I must sleep soon.”

I had no idea how long I’d been in the tent. “Yeah, me too, but I don’t want to leave you.”

“Mhmm, me either.” She squeezed me tight where she held me under my arms.

But it was time to go. We both knew it. And moved slowly apart. Sitting up slightly, I noticed the tent door wasn’t completely closed, and the tiny gap at the top allowed a spotlight beam from the all-night-light outside into the tent. It fell perfectly across her stomach and over her slightly protruding ribcage onto her left breast, up her little neck to the ridgeline of her jaw, and ended on her face. She was stunning. It made me dizzy, gave me this funny sensation way down in my belly like whatever moving parts were in there had gotten confused and worked themselves into a knot. I thought that she really was probably the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. And, seeing her like that, naked in the half-light, I wondered what I could have possibly done to deserve getting to spend any time at all with a girl like Céleste. 

I held her chin and kissed her one more time, said “okay, good night. See you in Paris. Sleep well.” Pulled on my muddy shoes. And with one final look at her, stood out the door and zipped it closed. I walked away and I couldn’t help turning back to look at the tent where it sat brightly one last time, right where I’d left it with her falling asleep inside, and I wished I was still in there with her. 

The walk back to my tent felt like I was walking on castles in the sky. The name ‘Céleste’ and the image of her sitting up watching me leave with the light falling across her naked body swirled around in my head. I went down the winding skinny path through the head high grass and cried out into the country night. “Life is alive! And I’m fucking real!” I shouted. Dogs barked on the other side of a fence but I didn’t care. Because I’d remembered that I was young and the world was full of magic, that there were ghosts and monsters and fairies and beautiful women, and that miraculous adventures and true love were real and dreams really did come true. 

18. Courage the Cowardly Dog

Mitch told me all about his childhood. Mitch was this lunatic house painter I would work for from time to time. His life was full of cigarettes and bad days and things in the shadows. 

Always bad days. 

Everyday, “good morning Mitch.”

“What’s so good about it,” he’d say, and he was never joking. He’d suck on his cigarette and mutter “the misery” and puff out smoke like he was blowing out all the space for joy inside of him. 

He said he was traumatized from being raised by hippies. 

He talked about it a lot. 

He said it started when they moved into this haunted farmhouse. 

He said he heard the ghost in his new house only moments after arriving there. 

His family had just finished the haul up from the barren mountains near Visalia, California, to this big, old, dilapidated farmhouse in Bethel, Washington. It had been a torturously long journey of road songs and detours to non existent or closed sights and missed turns and extended “tea breaks” for the parents—three days of driving, serpentine. Mitch had hated every second of it. Dreary days. Gas station nights. 

The adults were so anesthetized with weed smoke and idealism, they didn’t realize that they played the ‘California Dreamin’ tape for four hours straight on the third day after they got destructively baked before leaving Crater Lake. 

Mitch heard it, even though he tried not to. Because it fucked him over and over again with sadness. Because they were no longer in the promised land—the only home he’d ever known. By then they were nearly in Washington, and under dark rain clouds, and tall ominous trees, and he was, for the first time in his life, wishing he was in California. 

What he saw out the window seemed a terrible place to live. 

He didn’t want to live on a fucking farm where it was always raining. 

He looked out the window at the dismal grey and green which was his future and listened to the song as it played over and over and wept silently.

His world had been reduced to his three younger siblings, his psychotic, delusional hippy mother and stepfather, their recovered heroin-addict friend, Chartreuse, her son, and this great big field to plant whatever they wanted in. There was nothing else around.

Only the field. 

Mitch never did know why they’d moved to that strange and ugly place. He’d ask himself again and again so many times over the years—years which would not be good to him—and would look back hard against them, so that time folded in upon itself and Mitch Marmont became a lonely, old toothless man and a misguided father and a disconnected boy all at once, always asking himself the same question forever: where did the horror all begin? The story was that his mom and step dad had just bought the house with their ex junky friend on a whim. But that never made sense to Mitch. You don’t exactly find a deteriorating farmhouse in a shithole town states away, and move your family there on a whim. 

Especially not that farmhouse. There was nothing good or right about it. As soon as Mitch saw the place, he knew it was a fucked deal. It looked like something out of a horror cartoon—like the place in Courage the Cowardly Dog but in a forest. It was situated between the surrounding trash maples so that the farmhouse never took direct sun. Which was strange, because it looked about as weathered as any house possibly could, the decayed white paint peeled away from rain rotted siding, the chips littered the bare ground below in a ditch that formed where the gutterless, patchy roof spilled rain away. The windows were all either shuttered or boarded up, the porch sagged dangerously, and as the wind blew the whole frame of the house creaked and moaned. Everything about it looked like the kind of place no kid would ever want to set foot in—except for the sake of sheer valor. And yet, it was now his—their—home. An air of solemnity and mourning fell upon the children in the Vanagan as they first caught sight of the place pulling up the drive. 

They didn’t look around when they first went inside—didn’t want to, didn’t need to, were too scared, or in the case of the adults, too stoned—they just started moving stuff out of the van and unpacking it on the rough brown carpet of the living room. It was cold and damp in there, and they all complained. So Mitch’s mother sent him down into the basement to start a fire in the wood-stove furnace. Their new sustainable central heating. The other kids looked terrified just by the prospect of going down there, but Mitch didn’t care. Actually, he couldn’t have been more happy at the beautiful opportunity for a moment of solitude. He went down the crooked hallway with the paper peeling off the walls, bobbing his head and making a slight O with his mouth as he went—like he was whistling without noise, the kind of pretend whistling that makes suspicious things look casual—and snuck down the stairs innocently. 

When he got down into the basement, he waited and looked up at the doorway above to make sure he wasn’t being watched or followed. A single, naked lightbulb hung from a bare wire and threw warm light on the aged framing of the staircase above him. The bulb rocked back and forth slightly, creaking rhythmically like a metronome, as though in sync with the motion of the house in the wind—Mitch’s pendulum. Suddenly it stopped and held rigid and straight and the stillness in the staircase became this tangible and almost overwhelming thing. Mitch wasn’t paying attention anymore, he was looking too intently past the light to see if he might be followed. 

He didn’t really know why he went about with the sneaky charade. What were they gonna do if they caught him anyway? They were just insane hippies after all. If they were letting his ten year old sister get stoned from time to time, how could anything be off limits?

He shrugged, walked out of sight of the stairs, pulled the packet from his breast pocket carefully, and checked the precious seeds. He grinned. They were still intact. Soon the field would be full of stinking, billowing waves of green-gold Sinsemilla. He could see it in his head already: acres and acres of weed. Hundreds upon hundreds of plants. He couldn’t wait to get them in the ground. He stroked the packet lovingly, placed it with care back into his pocket, and began to start the stove as slowly as he could. 

There was a little woodpile beside it, and he threw a few pieces of  the old dry maple in—sloooowwwly—taking as much time as possible so as to avoid unpacking whatever skrewy antics his unbalanced mom and step-dad would undoubtedly try to rope him into. He found a piece full of pitch and took his time knocking chunks off it with a hammer on the block beside the stove, put them into a pile of kindling with a little paper under it and lit a match. And as he closed the cast iron and glass plated door, and stared into the orange flames bursting and sputtering on pitch pockets, it almost looked as though there were a face staring back at him in the flickering ash stains on the glass. He shook his head, looked back and it was gone.

He watched it for a while until he was really sure that the fire was going and that there was no face in there, and then he started to walk back up the stairs, but s-l-o-w-l-y, glacially slow, like he had to consider the purpose of each step before taking it. So slow he actually lost himself in thought, his head cocked slightly to the side, staring at his feet, thinking about the insanity of his life, lamenting the inequity of his circumstances. That, of all the times and places and people the world has held and will hold, of the glorious infinitude of possibility, he, Mitch Marmont, had been dealt the cosmic injustice—the almost incarceration—of being stuck with a bunch of deranged hippies. What a joke! He wished desperately he could have only been born to Republicans. To normal people who had normal things. Instead of just beads and crystals and dream-catchers, masons jars and patchouli oils and exotic rugs and fabrics, huge bunches of desert sage “in case they didn’t have any up in Washington,” and…. 

He stopped abruptly at the top of the stairs, snapped out of it, scratched his head. Had the piano down there just twinkled? Or was he imagining things? He went back down the stairs to look. A little quicker this time. Nobody there. He crossed the dirty concrete floor, beams of cloudlight from the slit windows spotlighting through the dust before him, over to the piano, a dusty old Spinet covered in cobwebs and mouse shit. It didn’t look like it’d been played in centuries, every key covered in dust and grime. He decided to pull down the keylid, just to be safe. But as he did, it caught in its tracks—he had to pull hard. It was making this terrible scraping noise. He winced, pulled harder. It scraped and screeched. But there was more than just a scrape. It was punctuated by a quiet peripheral regularity, a muffled—thud, thud, thud—,the distinctly indistinct sound of unrushed footsteps going up the basement stairs. He crossed the floor again back over to the stairs quick as a bunnyrabbit, looked up them. Nobody there. 

“Oh fuck this weird old farm. I hate this place.” Mitch muttered and started doing the math for how long it would take for his seeds to produce, headed back up the stairs. 

He heard the sounds starting before he got all the way up. And the dread settled in him like a great boulder in his belly weighing him down, making the last steps feel impossibly heavy. He thought he would like to just lie there on the stairs rather than face the horrors which he knew would be waiting for him. Those sounds. He had to swallow his fear and face the music, and take the impossibly heavy steps. With lifeless eyes, he walked up out of the staircase and into the hallway, down the creaking floorboards to the living room, where his parents and friend (Chartreuse) had stopped packing and begun to form a drum circle. His siblings looked up at him like a group of hostages, a deep and timeworn exhaustion casting strange shadows across their youthful faces. Chartreuse had produced a massive joint from somewhere in her drapey cardigan and was now beginning to hum, her eyes closed, one hand arhythmically slapping the drum between her legs, the other arm, which held the joint, raised above her head, swaying back and forth like a pendulum. 

“When the valley went dry…..” she moaned. 

His mom and step-dad, Paul, had their drums ready and joined in: bum ba-dum bum bum-bum bum ba-dum bum bum-bum. “WHEN THE VALLEY WENT DRY….” they cried, harmonizing. 

“To the fields they roamed!”

“TO THE FIELDS THEY ROAMED.”

“And the love that they shared!”

“AND THE LOVE THAT THEY SHARED.”

“In the plants they sowed!”

“IN THE PLANTS THEY SOWED.”

Chartreuse sprang into chorus: “Oh what a lovely, peaceful dream….”

Mitch was frozen in horror. He was overwhelmed with a sense of disgust. So much so that he did nothing to aid his helpless younger siblings as his parents enthusiastically gestured at them to join into the chorus. Only stood there, his mouth agape, his shoulders slumped. What could he do? These people were clearly delusional. 

He turned back down the hall to go find a good place to hide but stopped immediately. He suddenly felt cold, so cold, an oozy, sticky, nauseous feeling crawling up the back of his throat. A sensation of terror clouding over all his thoughts.. He felt weird, and bad, and stuck, like there was something in the hallway that his body was reacting against. He could almost feel a cold breath on the back of his neck. One of the many cats they’d brought with them walked past the drum circle and stopped abruptly to look at Mitch there at the mouth of the hallway. Then, the strangest thing happened. The cat hissed and jumped five feet in the air like in Looney Tunes and ran full-tilt the other direction. Mitch took that as sign enough. Time to go somewhere else. It was a farm full of hippies and ghosts.

He ran out the house without a word or a question from the drum circle, which had fallen to them beating the drums at random and singing “Our House” by Crosby Stills and Nash in unison. Mitch ran out the house after that little calico cat, and pulled his bike off the rack on the back of the van. And just as he was about to ride away a thought occurred to him. Yes, he thought, why not? Why shouldn’t I? He turned back to the van and checked under the passenger seat. And found, just as he had expected to find, a massive bag of pot. The sun fell in a beam below the trees and into his face. He squinted his eyes, and his face fell into shadow, an evil grin hooking across one side of his mouth, and he nodded slowly—very pleased. And then hopped back on his bike and rode down toward the main street, the bag of weed dangling from his hip pocket. 

He rode down along the poorly maintained back roads, whistling a tune—he thought it might have been Jim Croce but he didn’t really know and he didn’t care either way. The air was crisp and the trees actually looked kind of pretty and he stood up from his seat and peddled with everything he had. His body felt good even after the long journey in the car. He lowered his head and shoulders, raised his hips up into the air, legs pistoning. He imagined himself riding like that, a rush of desperate speed, his long unwashed blonde hair blowing unhelmeted in the wind, a liberated smile on his face, and his family chasing and shouting behind him with tears and looks of horror on their faces, and the frontier ahead, with dreams and fantasies and french women to find, as he rode off into the sunset never to return. He peddled as hard as he could and tried to make the scene real. He closed his eyes tight and tried to make it real. 

He crashed. 

He got up off the street and held his bloody elbow and then picked up his bike. And started riding home. 

He dreamed and dreamed of running away to somewhere beautiful and regimented, to a place where nobody believed in spirits and mystical things, and instead believed in taxes and retirement plans and the stock market and stuff like that, but he was always too afraid to take his dreams seriously, to leave what he knew. He never believed in anything enough to really see it. It was safer to just stay haunted with the hippies. “The 60’s were too good to me,” is what he’d say.

16. A Strawberry and a Little Toy Soldier

My mom was worried about Christmas so she couldn’t sleep. When she looked outside first thing after getting up from bed the morning before Christmas Eve, she saw that the fear that had kept her awake had come true. Although the yard was still nearly too dark to see, what beams of early sunlight did shine through the thick cedar trees glistened and shined on everything they landed upon. Everything was iced over just like the weatherman had predicted. 

Immediately, after one look, even though she had known in her heart what she would see, she felt sick to her stomach. The fear and worry felt cold and dull and heavy as the blanket of ice outside. Because they weren’t going to make it home that day. Their rescheduled flights would again be rescheduled; which meant they wouldn’t make it home for Christmas. And she went about her day hoping that she would be wrong, buzzing around organizing what had already been organized and cleaning what had already been cleaned, so that she could pretend to be a thoughtless automaton without stresses or problems.

But when she was right, and the flights were rescheduled, and they didn’t make it home, and she wasn’t even in the end a thoughtless automaton, she went on. And things worked out. And she got her hair dyed up again to pretend like she didn’t have all those stresses and problems that had long ago turned her hair gray. She didn’t even know exactly how gray her hair really was, she’d been dyeing it for so long. 

“We’ll just have to wait on Christmas until we’re all here together,” is what she told us. 

My brother and I didn’t mind much, even though Christmas (which was no longer Christmas) day was a bit strange. Nothing to do and nothing to celebrate. I guess it’s like that for a lot of people on Christmas. But for us, it was a first. 

Anyway, we had a regular day on Christmas day. And on December 27th she had the  Christmas of her dreams with the whole family there. From coffee cake and scrambled eggs all the way through to the rib roast, civility and sensibility. A true Christmas miracle. And it was really great for her. Perfect almost. 

“I was so worried the flight delay would set your sister off, but I think she did pretty well. I actually think she seems ok. It’s just a big relief for me. You know she really has been through a lot,” she said, regarding the maintained sobriety of my twenty-two-year-old recovered alcoholic sister. 

“I just wish you and your brother didn’t have to drink all those beers right in front of her. That couldn’t have been easy for her, you know,” she said. 

The point is that we made it through. Christmas was late but the emotional crisis was controlled; not averted, but finessed. Taken into stride, as they say. 

And things went on like normal. Except that everybody left besides me. Usually everybody left. No besides me. But this year I just didn’t exactly have any place else to go. I had worked out a job laboring for a builder who was working on a new house up the street. I guess that's about all I had. 

So we stayed there, my mom and I, together. We went to work in the dark in the morning and came home in the dark at night, talked about our days, made dinner, cleaned up, watched a little tv, went to bed. Laundry cycles. Dishwasher days. 

My mom worked up at the elementary school helping out the special kids and, for the most part, my Dad wasn’t around. He always traveled for work, my whole life. But now he really traveled  for work. I’d been home about a month and seen him probably four nights. So it was pretty much just like he wasn’t there at all. That’s how we treated it anyway. We just didn’t care.

“I have no idea where Dad is,” my Mom would say. Or something like that.  “He said he’d be home Friday and he won’t text me back.”

I didn’t respond. 

“I just wish I knew where he was…” 

I looked at her hard. She had old surgical scars on her chest. Because of the way she dressed you would never see them. But you could hear them in her voice. 

I hated hearing the scars in her voice.

It was around that time, maybe a week or two after Christmas, when it started happening. My mom was still having trouble sleeping, but it seemed like she was always complaining about not sleeping well so I didn’t think much of it. 

One night, a particularly dark night—it was always so dark—, I was reading a book on the couch, a collection of stories by Larry Brown (excellent). My mom was next to me watching Chicago Med or Friday Night Lights or something like that. I didn’t know how she could stand to watch shit like that. More distracting than the show itself was my thinking about how she could stand to watch shit like that. It kept me from my reading. 

But then there was this sound. This eerie gurgling from the top of the stairs that had the dogs jumping and growling just like somebody didn’t know had stepped onto the front porch. 

And it was late. And it was dark. And nobody was on the front porch. 

“Did you hear that?” my mom said. This wasn’t really very out of the ordinary. We heard lots of noises. She heard lots of noises. The house was surrounded by old looming cedars with drooping, sweeping branches which stirred in sneaking winds rising off the water to the East. And one of the dogs had an anxiety problem so a branch would scrape along the house and he’d cower and howl. 

“No,” I said, and kept on reading. 

She paused her soap opera so she could listen hard.

  Silence, other than the shuffling noises the dogs made getting up and circling around in their agitated attempts to resume comfortable sleeping positions. 

Then it came again, a deep, wet purling gurgle sound. Like an old guy struggling to breathe through a big lunger. The dogs barked really ferociously this time and backed toward us on the couch and whimpered quietly when they quit barking, turning circles and shooting nervous looks at us then back up the stairs. 

“You heard that one, right?” 

“Yeah,” I said and put my book down. 

Then a creak. Then a slam. 

“What the hell,” I said, getting up. I went up the stairs, the dogs whimpering and pacing and watching me as I went. 

My bedroom door just at the top of the stairs was closed the way I had left it, but the lights were on and I distinctly remembered having left them off. So I opened the door. Slowly. Cautiously. I stood tall and spotlighted in the bright open doorway with the darkness behind me. But there was nothing. The light was on. That was all that I could tell was out of the ordinary. Still, I thought the whole deal was strange. 

So I told my mom I thought it was strange. And that was all it took. I wish I could have kept my thoughts to myself for once. I was always telling her too much. 

After that she started hearing things all the time. And after a while she started to supply herself with a narrative for what she was hearing. 

“I think there’s someone living in this house,” she said one night. “Not a regular person though, a spirit. He’s a grumpy old farmer who used to live here. But I think he’s one of those grumpy guys who’s actually a nice person, you know what I mean. Gruff but kind, that type. I hear him coughing all the time. Lately it seems like I hear it more and more every day. Like he’s started to get more comfortable being around me with my knowing that he’s there.”

“Mom,” I said without looking at her—I was microwaving myself the last of the pot pie she’d made for dinner the night before, “what are you talking about? This house was built the year before you and dad moved in. It’s not fucking haunted.”

“It is. I really think it is,” she said slowly with her eyes faraway. “And please don’t curse at me. I don’t want to have to ask you again.”

I turned to purse my lips and squint at her. 

She ignored the lazer beams I was attempting to burn into her and went on, “yesterday I heard that awful gurgling again like he really had a big one he was working on. It just went on and on. Disgusting!” She was getting herself all excited. “And then, I swear to god, the chair next to me pulled out real slow and then, squeeeeaaakk, went right back in. Like he was sitting down, you see, next to me. And then the newspaper I was looking at yanked over. Pulled right against my hands. Like he wanted to read it with me. Isn’t that creepy!? And also maybe a little cute I think.”

I was shoveling hot pot pie into my mouth while she talked and had to breathe slowly through my overful and open mouth. So I couldn’t give her the kind of look I wanted to give her, nor could I respond in the way I would have liked to respond. All I could do was grunt and moan. In order to maintain my dignity, I had no choice but to ignore her and walk away. But she had gotten to me, kind of. I just couldn’t tell why the thought of having a ghost in the house had her worked up in this unusual and almost perverse way. She didn’t seem scared at all. The way she was talking she sounded like a damned schoolgirl.

 She even started wearing makeup after that.  

I never once heard another sound even remotely resembling a gurgle after that first night. But now she was saying it followed her around the house wherever she went, even said she thought it was sleeping in bed with her some nights, not that she could say for sure “his being ghostly, and all that” as she had put it.

“This is getting very fucking weird, mom. I hope you are aware of that.”

She turned to me so fast her hair fanned out like an anime warrior, “please! Cursing!” she said. This was rather scary for me, for my mom did not normally get mad or tell me what to do because normally she didn’t want me to get mad and tell her to “fuck off.” But just as I was about to Vesuvius her in a rageful diatribe, she softened, “I don’t think it’s weird.” She paused. “You really think it’s so weird?

I had to blink slowly to control the vitriol all but oozing from my eyes. She was my mother after all. “Yep. Very very weird. The way you talk about it it sounds like you want to f…” her hair bristled with electricity and fires leapt up behind her eyes “...bang this ghost. It sounds like you want to bang it. Like a sexual haunting” I said. “Which is weird and gross.”

“What!” she said, offended. “I do not! How would that even work?” She laughed nervously. Then she got quiet for longer than a moment, like she was really thinking hard about how to put the next part. “I just think he’s nice, that’s all. And I think it would be nice to be able to communicate with him.”

“Ok, first of all,” I said, “where do you think this spirit, this *(spooky voice) oooold gentle farmer man*, came from in the first place. You think somebody got murdered here on Bainbridge fff….reaking Island?” 

“Thank you,” she said, then “no, no, no.  No, he wasn’t murdered. That would be awful. No, there was a battle here. He fought and died like an honorable man.”

I threw my hands up in the air, yelling in a old-timey Yosemite Sam kind of voice “an oooold battle on Bainbridge Island! The Antietam of the North West!” I made wild musket-wielding gestures and poses. “But seriously, what would they have fought over?”

“Strawberries,” she said flatly. (Primary crop farmed on the island historically).

This was just too ridiculous to believe. “So, you mean to tell me an old farmer, who is gentle and sweet, fought in a battle over strawberries on our suburban land over a hundred years ago and has now chosen to manifest in and haunt our house, but in a cute and nice way?

She nodded, “yes, pretty much. His name is Tom Wilson.”

I shook my head, then had a thought. “Ok, Tom Wilson,” I said, “and you would like to communicate with him?”

Again, she nodded, “yes, I would like to.”

Now I had her, “how do you know all this if you can’t communicate with him?!” HA. 

“He moves things around. It’s kind of creepy. But also sweet that he wants to talk to me, you know. He moves things and leaves little messages and symbols. Pieces of book covers and corners of magazines. A strawberry and a little toy soldier, for example, tattered rips, one from Better Homes and Gardens and the other from Guns and Ammo.”

“That’s what happened to all my books?” I screamed.

And now it was my mom who had me, she pointed “so you admit he is real!”

Once again, in order to maintain my dignity, and my cool, I had no choice but to ignore her and exit the room. 

But after that she started talking to him. A lot. To me, it sounded like she was talking to herself everywhere she went. But she said she was talking with him, because he was with her. 

“Flowers!? Oh thank you Tom,” I would hear, “you old sweetie.” And things like that.

“What was that, mom?”

“Oh nothing,” is what she would say.

But it was making her act different, like she didn’t have a second in the world to spare. One night I asked her, “hey mom, I’m hungry, what’s the deal with dinner tonight?” 

I thought I could see individual hairs on her head straightening out and lifting up from her shoulders, shimmering with rageful kinetic energy. 

“I have other things to worry about than cooking you dinner tonight,” she snapped, not looking at me. “And I don’t give a damn what you eat anyway.” Whoa. She cussed me. Then she walked away muttering her grievances to old Tom. It sounded almost like he was consoling her.

I just couldn’t take it. I could no longer ignore this stirring madness, this dark fantasy which was now threatening my very way of life. Something had to be done. Because I could no longer read in peace. And because I was beginning to starve. 

Naturally—it seemed at the time there was no other choice—we turned to the ouija board as a means for communication, a medium is what I think they call it. We knelt before it, solemn as sinning children in church, and placed our hands upon the planchette. And it moved. I stared at her deeply and carefully, saw that she hadn’t been sleeping still, saw that hollow-boned look of exhaustion in her face, and looked harder still as though interrogating her very soul, yet I could not tell if she was secretly manipulating the movement or not. It kept moving, and spelled out, slow and steady the letters L-O-N-E-L-Y.

“Awwwwww,” my mom said. She had her fingers interlaced under her chin and was leaning her head on them slightly sideways. Imagine how awful that must be for him knowing that we’re over here together and he’s right there alone by himself.”

He flipped the lights on and off rapidly and shook the chairs. 

The hair on my neck stood up—horripilating. And, suddenly, for the first time, I was afraid. Really afraid. 

He was there. And he was agreeing with my mom’s interpretation of the message.

“See!” my mom said. “He is here, and he is lonely!” 

She shouted out to him, and the furniture continued to shake like the bed in the Exorcist, and the lights flickered off and on rapidly, “I’M RIGHT HERE, TOM! YOU’RE NOT ALONE! I’M HERE!!” Is what she shouted over the cacophony of wind and the moaning, shaking, rattling furniture. Then, “I LOVE YOU, TOM! I LOVE YOU. I WANT TO BE WITH YOU FOREVER!.” 

“What the fuck is going on!? Mom, what are you saying!?

She didn’t answer. She was entranced, lost in this spectral rite I had unwittingly commenced with a game board. I cursed myself, then realized that nothing in the world could have been more ridiculous than to curse myself. 

And then I sniffed. It smelled funny. 

“Mom, did you fucking fart??”

“YES!” she cried, ecstatic now, “YES, TOM! I’M READY! I WANT TO BE WITH YOU!”

And then I knew, she had not farted. That smell was propane gas and there was my scratched up old zippo lighter rising, levitating, out of her open and upright facing palm, her hair aloft and rigid in an electric current, her eyes closed.

“TAKE ME HOME, BABY!” she howled. 

5. Pink Socks

Pink Socks

I signed the lease for the apartment above my favorite bar. Pencil on legal pad. 

Got the key. Went inside. Opened Tinder. 

I looked around at what I thought would be the battlegrounds of my sexual redemption. Where I would be reborn. Rise up from the ashes of my heartbreak.

Everything would be moved inside and organized in order to fit this ultimate vision of me bringing girls there. So that I could find someone exactly like Emma but prettier and cooler and nicer to me. 

The next day, I was lying around with all the windows open trying to find a girl to come over. And then an innocent little breeze swirled in. It didn’t mean me any harm. It was actually kind of beautiful the way it ruffled the curtains and stirred the pages of the books on my coffee table. But it carried something ominous with it. A sound that I thought must not be real. 

I ran for the window, and I saw to my horror that it was in fact real. My ex-girlfriend was sitting outside. I was hearing her laugh.

She was there the next day too. 

And then the day after that. 

She’d only been to The Muddy Rudder for a drink one time before. The first time she told me she loved me. And she told me she didn’t like it very much then. My choice. 

Now it was hers. 

I lived upstairs and she liked to drink downstairs.

Weeks went on and she kept coming by. Not every day but often. And always outside. So that when the windows were open I could hear her laugh floating into the house like a birdsong coming out of the trees. And I would wonder if I was imagining things. 

It got to be that I would close the windows in an attempt to shelter myself. And then I would fear that I wouldn’t know if she’d come and gone already if they were closed. 

So I always kept the windows open. 

Sometimes I could hear her laugh and she wouldn’t be there. Other times, there she was under my kitchen window. 

Sometimes she was with a friend. Or with a guy. Or sometimes she would call up to me to have a drink with her so we could fuck afterwards.
It made me want to go hide somewhere I couldn’t be found. 

Emma and I were ritually broken up as of about one week before I moved in. We still talked and fucked pretty much just like we weren’t broken up. A slow transition. Except she really did intend to be done with me. She was playing with me and she liked to rub it in my face. 

I was helpless. I was heartbroken. She could have me any time she wanted me.

That’s how my fantasy apartment turned into the heartbreak version of a Saw trap. 

. . .

I laid in my bay window with all the windows in the place open and I watched this big black bumblebee flying around. I pretended to study the arcs of his flight. And waited to hear her laugh in the trees.

The bee flew around in wide arcs above me. 

“Parabola,” I said. 

I held an empty can above my head and patiently let him fall into the trap. He did. He came over like a big bomber and landed on the rim of the can.

I took a long drag and filled my mouth with spliff smoke. I remained as still as I could. Then I blew a big mouthful all over the bee. 

“You’re fucked,” I whispered. 

He didn’t move so I did it again. And again. 

Then I think he didn’t like it so he got up and flew away. 

I watched him fly so I could see if it had worked. 

And then I didn’t want to look anymore. I felt guilty. Suddenly, I understood that little bumblebee. Like me, he could only idle under the illusion of safety and control. Like me he had this crazy foolish faith. That he could fly and live again. That there wasn’t somebody ready to destroy him at any moment. 

My phone buzzed and I saw Emma’s name. 

U free latr? 

I responded immediately.

Yeah, I’m free. 

She wanted to fuck. She already knew I was free. I was always at my apartment.

The only place I ever went after Emma had dumped me and started to emotionally torture me was to my job cooking at this cafe a little ways across the Willamette. I’d ride my friend Peter’s 25cc baby blue scooter, the Buddy, in the rain every day with the brakes hardly working and the wheels about to fall off. This was a vehicle which could only be ridden in total desperation. I’d be getting honked at the whole way going ten miles an hour under the speed limit hanging on for dear life in the ruts on Macadam. I thought it was great. A lot of days riding the Buddy to work was the best part of my whole day. 

The job itself was pretty okay. We mostly just had to make avocado toast and it still paid seventeen bucks an hour. I tried my best to make it work out. I really did. But I couldn’t handle the monotony. The intensity my meth head friend, Leonard—who got me the job in the first place—and the coke-addicted manager, Spenser, brought into the environment. I was sad and lonesome and they kept trying to fight me every time something went slightly wrong with the avocados or the toast. 

One time, it was like eight in the morning on a Sunday and I was the third guy in so I was just showing up. My tweaker compatriots had already been there for an hour or two getting fucked up on their respective stimulants of preference. 

When I came in there was a pretty big rush going on. 

Everything in the kitchen was in complete disarray. 

“Check out the new system,” Leonard said from the line. 

I looked around in horror. At the bubbling contents of the steam table, which was cranked to high. At the scrubbed and bleach-stinking cast iron panini press. The senselessly reorganized shelves and racks everywhere. I was too afraid to look in the fridges. 

The guys were both scurrying around like tester mice making avocado toasts and things like that but they were acting like they were on Hell’s Kitchen and they were real fucking chefs. 

Spenser, my manager, was fully in the zone. He was hunched over a thick slab of toast. Knees slightly bent. Wrists cocked. Forehead dripping sweat directly onto the toast. He lifted a hand over his shoulder like a crack-presenting mechanic requesting a tool. Said, “avocado.”

I said, “scalpel.” 

He shouted, “avocado!” And I realized that he was talking to me. 

Fuck that, I thought. Go get your own fucking avocado. I haven’t even clocked in yet. 

“Get me a fucking avocado! Now!”

He thought he was Gordan Ramsay because he went to culinary school. I hated when he went Michelin in the cafe like that.

But I still went back to grab the thing. 

Only I couldn’t find any avocados anywhere. On account of those two tweakers having rearranged the entire back of house in the one hour before I arrived. 

I searched around tables and under counters in the back and in boxes and baskets and tubs and in fridges. But I couldn’t find any avocados. 

I pulled out a step ladder and looked on top of the fridges. No avocados. Checked inside, under, behind the ovens. Still no avocados. 

I dragged aside the dry good shelf and checked under the stairs. Under the office desk. Behind the Guatemalan prep cooks’ beer stash. In the safe. There were no avocados. 

After a few minutes Spenser came back with his face looking like a big veiny red balloon. 

“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING!?”

I laughed. He looked like a humongous baby in basketball shorts. Like the giant disgusting talking baby in Spirited Away. He was bald. And I wondered if Emma’s bald fetish (which had haunted me since she told me about it) was so bad that she’d still want to fuck a guy this dumb and ugly just because he was bald. 

“Dog, I’m just looking for avocados like you fucking asked me to do,” I said. 

“What did you say to me?” he said. Quieter now, colder. 

“I said I’m doing what you fucking asked me to do. I can’t find the avocados because you bastards hid them somewhere.”

He turned into a statue, a cherubish gargoyle frozen in time with this stupid furious look on his face.

Finally he said, “you cannot speak to me like that. I am your chef.” He was white like the  cocaine that fueled his rage. 

“Spenser. We make avocado toast and you do coke at work everyday and try to get me to do it with you. Forgive me if I speak too casually.”

“It’s not casual. It’s fucking disrespect. We need to talk outside. Now.”

I just looked at him. I thought it was bullshit. Everything about that place was bullshit.

“NOW!” he shouted. He pointed over my shoulder at the door. 

I was pissed off and turned too fast, and bumped right into Leonard’s meth inflated chest. 

He immediately shoved me into one of the fridges. 

“Back the fuck off, bro! Don’t you ever fucking touch me! I’ll fucking kill you bitch!”

Genuinely startled, I looked up into his addled face. And saw little of Leonard left, of Leonard who had been a good friend to me the past four years, of Leonard who had been debate captain and class senator and who had introduced me to Thomas Pynchon and Yaeji. I only saw the amphetamine fever. The perimeters of his eyeballs. Real hatred. And I saw myself reflected in his red-rimmed bloodshot eyes. The frightened look on my face. And I saw myself for the shit friend that I was. We all thought it was dumb and funny when he’d started smoking that shit. I had laughed. And now he was a meth fiend. 

I walked outside without saying anything and got on the Buddy. Rode home against the wind.

I got home and laid down on the couch. Finally safe. But then I heard Emma’s voice asking for a glass of wine. I looked out the window. Saw her smile pointed up at me. 

“Can I come say hi?” she said.

“Yeah, come up whenever,” I said. I put my head in my hands. 

She came upstairs to fuck me. And of course this is what I wanted and I loved it. It made me feel good that she wanted me. 

But she’d been doing this thing where she said loved me whenever we had sex. And then after she’d tell me she only said it because I had my dick in her and it didn’t matter. 

Every time it was like getting stabbed in the stomach. 

And I’d think that maybe next time I could fuck her so good she’d actually believe herself.

We fucked. Said we loved each other. Came together like we’d never left.

She wiped herself with the old Sublime t-shirt I kept for the purpose. To scorn the band. Said, “my ex used to play that record when we fucked.”

“Everyone listens to Blonde when they fuck, Emma,” I said. Not that I ever would again.

“You wanna get some food?” I said. 

“Ughhh, I would love to eat a peach,” she said. “I think I’ll just go home though. I don’t think we should go out to dinner anymore.”

“How can you do that? You do it every time. You say you love me and then you say you don’t mean it at all after. And you act like you can’t get out of here fast enough.”

She was putting her clothes back on and trying not to look at me. I watched her face her boobs away so I couldn’t see them when she pulled her shirt on. 

“Huh?” I said. “Can you please just answer me?”

“Because I love fucking you,” she said with her back to me. “But I kinda hate you in general.” She whispered the last part as she pulled up her underwear. 

I pretended not to hear it. Didn’t say anything. 

There was nothing in the world shittier than watching the girl you loved put her clothes on like that. 

“Kaaaay, see ya.” She walked out the door and left me there naked in bed holding the covers up to my neck. 

I was miserable because I knew that if she could like this now it could never have been love before. Even though I knew it had to have been. 

Whatever it was, it wasn’t real. Is what I told myself. 

It was some horrible fiction.

All those velvet mornings in between time in her big brass bed in the yellow morning light. When we could stay there until noon fucking and listening to music and drinking coffee. And talking about things we thought were beautiful. I liked to hear the way she thought. 

One thing we talked about was love. We both really believed in a fairy tale type of love. We talked about that one time. I can’t remember when. Real love though. That’s what she said she believed in. The kind where you just get swept away in each other.

“I want to get married young, like really young,” she told me. 

I didn’t know she wasn’t talking about me. 

“I would love to be a young bride. So we can fall in love and then just keep falling in love more and more and more. And when we get sick of the things we loved about each other at first we’ll have already found new things that we love just as much.”

“Don’t you think though that if you get married too young, you won’t know yourself well enough? Like you’ll never get a chance to really get to know yourself?” I said.

“No, not at all,” she said. “Because I think being in love is the best way to get to know yourself. Through someone else’s love, I mean. Like a really true love.”

“I kind of think that the best way to get to know yourself is being on your own. Doing exactly what you want to do the way you want to do it. And then you figure out what you want. And you know, you deal with your own mistakes. Shit like that.”

“Yeah, maybe. But I think being in love shows you the kind of person you want to be. Not who you are. You get to see yourself the way the person who loves you see you. All these tiny little things they love about you. Like the tiniest little details that you didn’t even know about. You learn about yourself and you get bigger inside and you see the kind of person you could be, like the very best versions of yourself. And it feels so good.”

I thought she was talking about me. 

She was smiling her big smile that made her look like a little kid. And I got all entranced thinking about ideal love and Emma. 

There was always this kind of storybook quality to Emma’s life that made me feel like I’d landed in a dream I didn’t have to wake up from. 

I thought for a while and then I said, “do you think you can fall in love with the idea of being in love?”

“I dunno,” she said. 

“Me either,” I said. But I was starting to think that you could. 

Like being hypnotized by yourself. Or by the person you imagined yourself being. 

There were so many things about Emma I wanted to be in love with. Things which I envisioned making my life feel like a story. 

There was the big Klimt print on the wall above her bed and the mole by her belly button and the little ruffles on her pink socks that made it so easy to take them off.

And the way she kept butterflies around her. In books, and little picture frames on the wall. In poses in the windows, and on strings that hung from the ceiling. In the mirror next to the bed. So that it always looked like there were butterflies flying around me when I was in her bed with her.

4. Twenty-Two-Year-Old Guinness

One Saturday or Sunday morning in the middle of August, my buddy Peter called me up. 

“Ohhhhhhh good morning sweet prince, me and Lobito just got dropped off over here at Hair of the Dog. Come through. Let’s get drunk and then go lay on the dock.” 

“You’re at Hair of the Dog right now?”

“Yes. Come.”

“Word, yeah, I’ll be there in twenty.”

Hair of the Dog was our favorite brewery, with inexplicably strong beers and delicious classic American sandwiches. I can’t express how powerful the beers were. My friends and I drank a lot and three to four beers at Hair of  the Dog would have us close to blacking out. There was just something about them.

We had a few beers and some sandwiches like reubens and turkey melts and stuff like that. And then we noticed that their most expensive beer, listed as the most sought after beer in the whole world, The Dave—an award-winning English Barley Wine produced in 1994, barrel aged, and bottled in 1996—we noticed that it was half off and now only seven hundred dollars for a regular twelve ounce bottle. 

Peter looked up from his menu with saucer eyes. “Boys,” he said. 

“We have to.”

Reed and I were resolutely against it.

But Peter is a fucking conman and we were drunk and he talked us into it. Something like we owed it to ourselves for graduating, and we didn’t know how many bottles were left. It might be our last chance. Anyway we bought the stupid bottle. 

In part, I hold George, the bartender, responsible for even allowing us to buy it. He got us drunk and then encouraged us to make a terrible decision. I can’t really blame him though, because George was just a degenerate—he was always trying to get us to come do blow with him down at the poolhall, and giving us free beers and food and talking about hating his job and smoking weed with us in the parking lot around the corner. He was a regular degenerate just like we were and if I’d been in his position I would have done no different. For the sheer comedy of the situation. He must have loved it, these drunk broke idiots are about to spend seven hundred bucks on a single beer.

We did. 

“George, bring us a Dave please,” Peter said. He said it low and solemn, like some absurd patriarch in a regal manor.

“I can’t tell if you’re serious or not.”

“He isn’t,” I said. I still didn’t want to spend hundreds of dollars I needed for rent and food on one little beer.

“Don’t listen to him George, we want a Dave. It’s time.”

George looked at me, then back at Peter. Then he gave me this wicked grin.

“Alright, one sec.”

He came back a few minutes later with this dusty little bottle. It didn’t look like anything special, but it was older than I was. 

“Last chance,” he said. And then didn’t wait at all and just opened the bottle. 

Poof! Seven hundred bucks.

Poof! Twenty-two years. 

He poured us tiny little cups and we told him to pour an extra tiny one for himself. And we drank the ancient syrupy thing.

And then we acted like it was the best beer we’d had in our entire lives. 

The honest truth was it tasted like a twenty-two-year-old Guiness. 

Or I don’t really know what it tasted like. If you went through your grandpa’s garage and found an old mason jar of a half drunk old stout or porter from who knows when and decided to drink it, it might have tasted like the Dave. I don’t know.

But we drank the beer, and discussed the flavors like we were scholars and brewers ourselves and not drunk twenty two year olds. 

And then we left in this holy sudsy afterglow and hauled ass to go meet Emma and her friends over at the public docks in Sellwood. 

I drove. 

There was a lot of traffic on Milwaukie. It was pretty stop and go. It started to go and I sped up quick and changed the song on my phone. Then traffic slowed back to a stop. And I was looking at Makonnen songs on my phone until I looked up and saw the bumper of a little navy Saab hatchback a few feet ahead. 

I slammed on the breaks. 

And into the Saab. Hard. 

I looked at my friends. They looked horrified. We were wasted. 

The people in the Saab got out. They were a middle-aged couple. They looked justifiably very pissed. 

We didn’t know what to do. 

I looked at Reed. “We might have to dip.”

“Fuck dude, yeah, I dunno. Might be the call.”

“License plate.” Peter slurred it from the back seat. 

We looked at his limp, blank face, into the dark raccoon circles under his eyes that made him look like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. 

He said it again. “License plate.”

He was the most drunk out of the three of us. He’d had as much beer as I had, and I wondered how Peter had gotten so drunk.  

“License plate.” He pointed a wavering finger straight at the windshield. 

We looked through it and saw on the bumper of the Saab a distinct letter and number imprint of my license plate. 

I got out of the car. 

“Are you fucked up?” the lady shouted at me. 

“What are you talking about?” I said.

And acted businesslike and took pictures when they took pictures and was extremely apologetic and respectful and traded insurance information. I still have pictures of the damage with Peter in the background looking cartoonishly incriminating with his confused, wild-haired Jack Nicholson look. At one point he declared that it was impossible that we had caused the damage to the Saab, which he called a piece of shit. The husband of the couple almost hit him, I could see it in his eyes.

I’d slammed into the Saab so hard that it rolled into the car in front of it, which was a brand new Toyota Highlander which now had a slightly dented rear bumper. The lady who’d just bought it was also super pissed. 

She called the cops. 

I started to get back in the car but Reed calmed me down. 

She put her phone down and said the cops had just asked if everybody was okay and if the vehicles were driveable and if so to trade insurance and carry on. This made her more pissed. I’m sure they all wanted to see me in handcuffs. 

I was so grateful I could have cried. 

But I was also devastated because my car was fucked up. The front bumper now hung at a sorry angle and the driver side door made a terrible creak when it opened and closed. 

We drove the few minutes through Sellwood to the docks in silence. 

And met Emma and her friends down at the docks and drank more beers and smoked some pot to cool off. The weed made me feel a little better, but still I remained quiet and pouty. It was pissing Emma off. She thought I was being a bitch. I was an idiot for getting into the situation in the first place and now I was acting like a big baby. Mostly, she was mad that we’d spent seven hundred dollars on a single beer. She thought we were fucking morons and douchebags. But it was fair of her to think so. Spending seven hundred dollars on a beer is something only a moron or a douchebag would do. 

I just hoped I was only a moron. 

Everybody split up and Emma and I went to a bar down the street for some burgers and more drinks. The whole time we were there she was kinda making fun of me and I was kinda sad and grumpy. I drove us in silence back to Peter’s place where I was living at the time. And took her straight up to the bedroom Peter and I were sharing and fucked her viciously on my mattress on the floor. I picked her up and fucked her in the air with her legs wrapped around me and her torso dangling and only her head on the mattress just sort of swinging around. Oh, oh, oh, oh, thud, thud, thud, thud. I lifted her all the way up and set her on her feet and pushed her up against Peter’s bed so that she bent over, and held her by her hair and fucked her standing up. It felt like the house was shaking. We came together with all the tenderness and fury of a bumblebee landing on a flower.

Afterwards she laughed at me and said I looked ridiculous when I fucked.

“Why’d you pick me up like that? You had the stupidest look on your face,” she laughed more and squinted her eyes at me disparagingly. 

“I dunno, I just did it. You weren’t into it?”

She was still naked on the other side of the bed looking at me over her phone. 

“I dunno. No, it was kinda weird.”

“Alright, sorry. I guess I just wanted to try something new.”

“Yeah, it was new,” she smirked. 

I didn’t know how to stop being pathetic after I got insecure about her and she loved to prey on it. 

My friends were right. 

She was a reptile. 

She was a killer. 

She told me all kinds of terrible things like how I was too much of a baby, and how I was a loser, and how she wanted a real man and shit like that. And she told me that she had a bald fetish. Which really really got to me. I never let it go. 

I couldn’t stop seeing it. I’d look at anything, a toilet, a plate a food, a frisbee, and see her fucking bald guys. I’d watch her staring out a window and wonder if she was thinking of bald guys. Everything started to look bald. Kids, tennis balls, women at the grocery store. Everyone and everything except me. I never wanted to be bald.  

3. Dumb Sappy Crying

Emma came back to Portland like a spanish bomb and exploded my life.

She was unhappy the second she got there. I met her at the house she was going to temporarily stay in after she finished the drive up from San Francisco. I was so excited to see her I felt like a frog riding a horse with a sword and a pistol by my side. 

We carried her stuff in and checked out the room her friend was letting her use. It was alright. We checked out the bed, it was alright. The sex was also alright, even though we hadn’t seen each other in months. Because Emma was worried about the rest of the house hearing. The bed was made from cinder blocks and plywood and made a ton of noise. And we didn’t want to shake a block loose. She was weird about me sleeping there too, and since I was currently sharing a room with my friend Peter, we didn’t have anywhere else to go. 

Emma was quiet and inscrutable and difficult to talk to.

“What do you wanna do? I can go grab us some food and we can watch something. Or do you wanna grab a drink somewhere? Where are you at?”

She shrugged her shoulders and shook her head in miniscule motions. 

“Are you pretty tired from the drive?”

She shrugged again. Her face was placid. She looked like a child. 

It was like some witch had put a curse on my girlfriend, or she was possessed by a hateful shade, or a dark personality. She was like a different person. All the time after she came back to Portland. All the time just quiet and impassive and bad-tempered.

We broke up after a couple weeks.

It happened in her car.

She had picked me up from Peter’s place, where I was living at the time, with her friend Kayla, who was visiting from San Francisco. We went out for dinner and drinks and then back to Emma’s new place. She hated her new place because before her old roommates were her best friends and her old house was her house and now since her old roommates had graduated like me, her new roommates were some nice girls who went to school with her and her house was their house with her room in it.

We went there and hung out a while and had some more drinks, I think Kayla fell asleep on the couch and Emma and I went and fucked in her room. It was okay, like fucking a blow-up doll. She’d been weird and emotionless towards me all night. Then she wanted to take me home so Kayla could sleep in her bed with her. 

I thought it was all fucking weird especially because Kayla had been so cool and said she wanted to sleep on the couch so that I could stay and then we could all hang out in the morning. But Emma wasn’t into it. She wanted to take me home. And then in the car she was being super cold and kinda mean. I couldn’t take it. 

“What’s your deal?”

She looked at me, just barely, kept driving. 

“Why are you like this all the time?”

“Like what?”

“Like mean. You act annoyed at everything I say.”

She didn’t look at me, only shrugged a quick careless little shoulder lift. 

“It wasn’t like this before, why are you being this way now? I just don’t get it.”

“I dunno.”

“Everything feels so weird and forced with you now. I don’t want it to be. It was so easy before. I just don’t get it, I hate this. It was so good before. Why isn’t it good now?”

“It just isn’t,” she said. 

She still wouldn’t look at me. 

“That’s it?” I said. We were getting pretty close to being back at Peter’s place. 

“Yeah, that’s it. It just isn’t good anymore.”

“I don’t get it. Why not? I feel like it’s just because you’re so mean all the time, what’s been up with that?”

“It’s all my fault?” she said.

“No. No, that’s not what I mean. You know how I always say things completely the wrong way when I get emotional.”

“Yeah,” she smiled, and it seemed like she couldn’t help it. “It’s cute when you’re being lovey and super dumb and annoying when I’m mad at you.”

“Thank you,” I said. I smiled at her even though I felt like crying. “I don’t think it’s all your fault, I just feel like I feel the same way about you and I feel like you don’t feel the same way about me.”

By now we were stopped in front of this abandoned church down the little residential street Peter lived on. One or two street lights cast ominous shadows off the alders and the jagged glass in the churchyard.

She still wouldn’t look at me. Only shrugged that infuriating little shrug again. 

“You don’t feel the same way you felt about me before?”

Now she was crying, I could just barely see the streetlights glinting off the wetness under her eyes, a single teardrop on her smooth cheek. She shook her head. 

“You don’t?” I said. I had to choke on the words. 

“No,” she said. And finally looked at me, looked me square in my face and said it. “I don’t. I don’t know why, but I don’t.”

“And there’s nothing we can do?”

“I don’t know what to do. No, there’s nothing.”

“So what? Do we just break up?” I didn’t mean it as a real option at all. 

“Yeah, I guess we just break up,” she said. 

Then we had some dumb sappy crying and kissing and maybe we’ll talk soon thing in the car and I got out and walked into Peter’s place like I’d just committed a murder and still had blood on me. 

I went out on the porch to smoke a spliff. My hands were shaking and it was hard to roll. I rolled an ugly little thing. I smoked and I listened to Neil Young and I cried. 

I looked up at the few stars that shone through the polluted sky. I looked for angels or ghosts or aliens. I tried as hard as I could to see them. I squinted so the tears got squished and my eyes got blurry and I tried to see them. I tried even just to see a constellation. The way they were supposed to look. Like Orion the Hunter could tell me what I was supposed to do to make things work out. All I wanted was to meet a girl and have everything go right. I wanted aliens or ghosts or angels or Orion the Hunter to tell me what to do. I squinted and squished my tears and tried to see something. But all I saw were a few sad quiet stars.

2. Poolstick Rodeo

Emma was crying sexy tears like a she was hobbyist thespian. 

They made her look hot the way real tears make you look ugly. 

She stood in the streetlit summer night trembling in my arms with her hard nipples pressing into my chest—all the way to my heart. And the way her slanted tearful eyes looked so tantalizing and nubile, I don’t know. I fell for all of it. 

I wiped the dewdrops from her cheek. “It won’t be that long, Em. We’ll talk every day,” I said. Kissed her. 

The image of her face beaming down at me from the bleacher seats the day before at graduation still burned in the backs of my eyelids. Her pride. Her eyes lighting up deep brown when they met mine. Her thick black hair falling straighter than threads on a loom. 

I didn’t notice how she was up there all alone. One semester behind. 

Now she looked at me with her eyes all full of love and tears. And I thought I had nothing to worry about. 

She loves me, she’s loves me, she loves me, I thought.

Even though those tiny fuck-me tears signified the opening of a rift. That things wouldn’t be the same anymore. 

The summer. 

The fifteen hour drive.

I looked at her one last time. While things were still the way they were. Never thinking she’d forget about me. 

And then she left. And we did talk everyday, just like I promised. 

I love you, I miss you, I wish I could be with you, etc.

Then she came back to Portlad for a quick visit after a month or so and we fucked all the talking out of each other. It was probably the best time I ever spent with her. But we fucked all the love out of our hearts in five days. 

Without obligations. Without cause for independence. With only each other. Something wasn’t enough. Fucking and talking and pretending to be in love wasn’t enough.

In five days, the only time Emma and I were apart was one morning when we had nothing but whole coffee beans left and no coffee grinder. I tried to use two metal bowls to smash them up but it wasn’t working. I had achieved a pile of small cacao nibs out of sweaty effort. So I had to run to the store down the road for grounds. And we were apart for ten minutes.

Other than that, we did nothing but fuck and talk and go out to eat. 

We fucked thirty-nine times. 

Then she flew home. 

And I was lonely again. And I didn’t know what to do with the big empty space my heart that cleared out for her. It was a black hole that sucked and sucked with an unquenchable thirst. It sucked me down to my couch. It sucked up cigarettes and weedsmoke and beer and blue adderall powder. White oxy’s. Sucked the sadness out of Hank Williams yodel, Neil Young’s androgynous whine. It sucked up all of Amy Winehouse’s boozy tears. The phlegm out of Tom Wait’s throat. It sucked every sorrow and soporifc in the world and nothing could fill it back up. 

And she roasted me for sending her songs which I felt described the emptiness in my heart. She said they were lame and I was being lame. 

Then she said she didn’t see why we had to talk everyday.

It became a point of contention between us. 

I didn’t think it was weird at all to want to talk to my girlfriend. 

She didn’t have that much she wanted to say to me. 

. . .

Out on the back porch of the Cat’s Paw in Portland my friend Reed and I drank tall Rainiers and well whiskeys. Reed smoked. I was disconsolate. I filled him in about the shit with Emma. 

“Emma’s a fucking assasin, bro,” Reed said, “lose her. There are way hotter chicks in Portland anyway.”

I shook my head. “I dunno, man. Emma’s fucking cool. We fit so well together. We’re in love.”

“Something’s not right about her, man. She’s got a weird vibe.”

He thought she was cheating on me. Which she probably was. Given that he thought so because her friends had done everything but tell him in absolute and condemning terms that that’s what she was doing. 

We finished our drinks and got some more. The bartenders poured stiff shots. Right to the rim so you couldn’t walk away. You had to go down like a hummingbird. We idolized them. Big burly guys with beards and tattoos. Who made us feel so special each time they poured us a shot. Like we’d done something to deserve the extra half ounce. 

They were playing Pavement or The Replacements or Dinosaur Jr. or something like that over the speakers. And I was into it. It fit my mood. I watched blue smoke curl under the red heat lamps and listened to the nasal wails and crying guitars. And I thought about how in two weeks I would be with Emma again. 

“Yo this bar’s dead, man, let’s go see what’s going on at Joey’s spot.”

“Yeah, I’m cool with that,” I said, and slugged my beer and let loose a gaggy pantomimed burp. “Lemme just close out real quick.”’

. . .

Reed drove his busted old—“snaggletoothed darling”—Toyota pickup, Ruby, and smoked cigarettes and wore these goofy sunglasses that looked like goggles. He always wore them when he drove. Even, like now, when it was nighttime and he could hardly see. He’d just buzzed his hair and he looked like he was right out of Trainspotting. 

Reed told me about his dads buddy in LA who chopped the top of his El Camino and drove around wearing a full wetsuit and scuba goggles whenever it rained. 

It was a hilarious image. But it made me sad. Reminded me of Emma. The way the roof came off my life without her. 

We blazed down division. Crossed the Burnside bridge. Cut up into the Pearl to my friends place by the fire station.

When we got up the stairs into their duplex the four of them were all huddled in a circle around a coffee table, the lusty amber throat of a bottle of Bulleit Rye peaking over their shoulders. 

Joey didn’t turn to look at us. He remained there on his knees bent over the table. Said “you guys better have some fucking money if you’re gonna want any of this.” Then he did turn and exposed the big bag of cocaine and cut lines and rolled bills and such which covered the table in a classic scene. 

“Oh yeah, I got some money,” I said. 

We dug into the bag for an hour or so, until we ran out of whiskey, and had to go across the street to Paymasters, the local dive. Two dollar Rainier drafts. Massive smoking porch. It was like heaven there. The bathrooms had nice wide flat countertops too. 

Reed and I went straight into the bathroom while the other guys were ordering drinks. 

Every fifteen minutes or so Joey would give me this murderous wide-eyed look, like a drill sergeant, and say bathroom. Nothing else. We’d all four of us go pack into a bathroom and do a bump. Walk out casually past amused patrons waiting to use the bathroom for its intended purposes and not as a cocaine booth. 

We talked about all the insane, stupid, emotional bullshit people talk about when they get wasted and do a whole bunch of blow. 

At one point Joey had me gripped by the shoulders. Seemed close to tears. “I love you brother,” he said, “but I gotta tell you what I think about Emma. She’s cute and cool and all, I get it, dude. I get it. Trust me, I really get it. You know I do. But what I’m telling you is she’s no good. She’s got ice in her veins. You’re too nice for her.” My other friends, Reed and Apollo, nodded solemnly behind him, their arms crossed and their heads cocked sideways, and grunted approval.

“I dunno man. I love her. She’s cool.”

He threw his hands in the air. “Alright well FUCK! Do whatever the fuck you want, man! I was just…I want to look out for you because you’re my fucking brother and I fucking love you!”

Apollo had him right away and whispered in his ear, “hey, hey, hey, man, it’s all good, chill out bro.”

“You’re right, you’re right, you’re right, you’re right, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Joey said. He was still kind of shouting. 

He looked at me hard and deadly. 

“Bathroom.”

We kept at it like that until it was last call, and the bartenders started blasting ACDC or something like that. We fucking loved it. 

We had to dance. 

Already we’d been wearing sunglasses. When the music turned up we took off our shirts and started dancing on the pool tables out on the porch, smoking cigarettes with our sunglasses on. Poolstick rodeo. The bartenders were pissed off. They 86’d us. Banned us for the whole fucking week. 

The rest of the night was classic. We went back to Joey’s shitfaced and gakked out of our skulls. Didn’t have any more blow or any more liquor. So Apollo drove twenty five minutes to Beaverton to his super sketchy dealer, Ninja, who we had begged to bring a bottle with him. It was too late to go to the liquor store. We met in a parking lot and he gave us fucking vodka, and charged us each a hundred bucks a gram. We thought it was bullshit but we were already there so we didn’t have a choice. 

Then we went back to Joey’s and drank the disgusting vodka and smoked spliffs and snorted our cocaine until we didn’t have any left and the sun was back in the sky. And we tried to go back to Paymaster’s for “breakfast” and to see if there were new bartenders. There were. But they had been informed of our behavior and we were not allowed in. And we couldn’t go to the other good bar nearby, Yur’s, which I thought had actual breakfast because I guess Joey had been 86’d there too the week before for shouting at a bartender after they’d declined to serve him another drink. 

We wandered the streets angrily fixed at seven in the morning for probably an hour before we decided to give up on whatever we were doing and go back to smoke weed until we could fall asleep.

We sat on the roof of Joey’s duplex and smoked huge spliffs and dranks beers and watched the fire trucks come and go across the street under the hazy orange sun. 

It was just another night for me to fill up my time and thoughts until I got to see Emma again. 

But when I think about it now, I think it could have been one of the best nights of my life. 

I remember watching the sky over the Willamette turn a dirty pinkish yellow.

The clouds looked just like peacocks with great wispy plumes. They stood up and started moving. Pecking. Like I was. 

I watched them strut around aimlessly.

They looked at me and something about the way they looked made me know that they were only clouds. That I gave them life in my head and that was it. That they didn’t exist.

There were all these things that were only real inside my head. 

I looked at Joey to tell him about the peacocks and was blown away by the colorful, abstract designs on his shirt. 

“Your shirts sick,” I said. 

“My shirts white,” he said.

“I think you did too much blow. You should smoke some more pot, man.”

1. Plotting Digital Affairs

When I was twelve, I found out that I could take things out of proportion in my head and make imaginary people to fall in love with. 

The first time it was with Scarlett Peters, who was a real person. 

Scarlett was cool and popular, she was pretty and good at soccer and everybody talked about how much fun her Bat Mitzvah had been. She had this shoulder length dark brown hair that made her look like Lucy van Pelt and I thought she was cute and everybody liked her so I picked her as the girl I wanted. My parents taught me that it was really important what everybody thought of you and it was really important to be in the in-crowd. 

At that time, texting hadn’t quite taken off yet but all the kids had Gmail, and Gchat was what it was all about. You could customize your screenpage, and mine had a graffiti wall as the background image. There were all these names with either red or green circles next to them on the left side. The circles let you know when someone was on Gchat or not. I’d sit in front of that screen for hours in my free time to wait and see who was online. 

Mostly girls. That’s how I started talking to Scarlett Peters. 

Her light turned green. 

And I sent her a message, heyy wats up.

And she sent back, hey. 

watchin tv. 

wats up.

We kept talking everyday about mundane things and sometimes about nothing at all—just long exchanges of lingo. Empty, meaningless conversations that meant everything to me. Because as much as we were talking about nothing, it was our lives that we talked about. She was like this pen pal and we’d share little things I’d never think to tell anybody else about, like the amazing feeling when the tv is turned up loud and nobody in the house could hear what you’re doing, or hating the smell of dish soap or the feel of raisins on your fingers, or stuff parents did that pissed you off. You get a lot from something like

brb gotta talk to my dad.

back sry.

parents suck lol.

Or,

hold on.

best pt of dragonball ep.

Or,

Omg prnts trnd off the tv & hrd me listening 2 Flo Rida

SO embarrassing.

In some ways it felt like we talked about everything. And it felt good to know that Scarlett Peters wanted to message me. It’s the first time I can remember feeling the seratonin hit of seeing a notification with my favorite name next to it. I felt it right in the middle of my tummy, and it made me feel warm and happy and good. 

Scarlett and I had different lunches so we hardly ever saw each other at school. When we did I was too nervous to talk to her, but I would go home and send her a message, wats up ?! saw you at the buses. 

I was weird and didn’t know how to talk to girls. That was a big part of it. But I also didn’t really want to see her in person. Because she was so much more beautiful in my head. She didn’t look right in person and sometimes she didn’t act right either. All I needed was her name and her words on the screen and I had this vivid infinite girlfriend. 

Obviously, nothing ever happened. Because I never talked to her. And eventually we chatted on Gmail after school less and less, and then not at all. Which was okay with me actually. Because there was this one day when for some reason things got switched around and we had the same lunch together. The sun was out and all the cool kids were sitting on the hill above the kick ball field eating. So I was there too, like a barnacle on a rock. People were kind of messing around with each other and running around, which was normal, and a bit annoying I thought. What was so terrible, though, was that I had to see Scarlett doing it too. I watched her knee this kid with glasses called Dabney in the ass and shout “CORNDOG.” I was crestfallen. The illusion went to flames before my eyes. My Scarlett never would have behaved so foolishly. 

Everyone has their own tastes, but, for me, corndogging and table-topping were among the most hateful of pranks. 

To my horror, I realized that my Scarlett did not exist, that this was she, a vicious corndogger, in her truest form. This was the girl who had been talking to me all along. A bully. This was the girl who I thought I loved. 

Scarlett Peters was the girl I loved but the thing was that the girl I loved was also somebody different. 

. . .

I went on chatting with girls after school—plotting digital affairs. 

One day I messaged Chloe Moore, who I had recently become friends with. She was cool and blonde and pretty. I liked Chloe. And she didn’t have a boyfriend at the moment. 

I said, heyy.

And she said, hi. 

wat r u doin.

And I said, nothin bored.

you.

To which she replied, bored too. 

This gave me the opportunity I had been waiting for, praying for. I took it. 

we should date. 

Then waited in fucking agony until I finally saw her typing a reponse. 

sure. 

And just like that I had done it. Confetti cannon. Fireworks. I had a girlfriend. And she was cool and cute. 

Sometimes we sat next to each other on the bus ride home from school in mostly silence, and shared a pair of headphones, and listened to Fall Out Boy or the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus or some twelve year old emo shit like that. But usually I just sat with my friends on the bus and I would talk to Chloe on Gchat afterwards. And I was afraid to see her at lunch too. Because I was afraid I wouldn’t act right or say the right thing. I would see her from across the lunchroom and feel like somebody had punched me in the stomach. So I would turn and go the other way.

After three weeks she told me it was awkward and she wanted it to be like it was before when we were friends. 

I was crushed. 

I’d never even kissed her. 

Chloe was much more painful for me than Scarlett. I went to hide in the garage and cried when she sent me the message. 

It wasn’t heartbreak that I felt though, it was humiliation. On account of how I hadn’t known how to act right. There was this space between the me in real life and the me that sent messages on my computer at night. This wide and unbridgeable gap between two incompatible versions of myself. I didn’t know how to bring them both together. 

There was the way it was in my head, which came to life on the screen in messages, and there was the way things really were. I didn’t know why they were different. They just were.