We looked at him with confusion.
“Grayson.” He turned to me. “You want to walk down to Colonial Car Wash with me?”
“What? Why?”
“Eric is going to meet us over there with a twenty.”
“Why doesn’t he just come here?” said Chris.
“Because his girlfriend is being a cunt and will only take him partway.”
“It’s, like, not even an extra half mile,” I argued.
Freddy sat there stabbing a hooker in GTA.
“It’s whatever. It’s only eleven. We’ll be back in, like, a half hour if we leave now,” Nico said.
“Fuck it. I’ll go,” I declared.
It’s funny how when you’re that young, something so simple can feel like manning up. We went out at night all the time and never had any issues, but I felt like I was backing Nico up for some reason.
It was probably 80 degrees. Buzzing streetlamps lit our way as we took the back way from Chris’s house, on Spry Lane, over to the Colonial Car Wash on Altamont Avenue.
Nico and I were in great spirits once we started walking. We loved to bullshit. As we carried out our mission, we pondered the great questions teenagers have debated for centuries.
“Pre-cum isn’t premature ejaculation, right?” Nico asked.
“Nah. That’s just, like, pre-lube...I think...”
“So if I’m fingering a chick and there’s mad jizz in my pants, it’s not really jizz? It’s pre-jizz?”
“Well, yeah,” I said with convincing sureness.
“What if I’m jerking off the whole time that I’m eating her out, then when I go to stick it in, I’m in for like a couple seconds before I cum?”
“I don’t think that's premature ejaculation either. I feel like that’s just...mature ejaculation, right?”
Grayson Winters, M.D.
I added, “I think if you didn’t make it in, then maybe it counts as premature.”
“Huh.”
Neither of us had any idea what we were talking about.
* * *
When we got to the car wash, Nico called Eric.
“Hey, Nico. What’s going on?” Eric's voice was surprisingly loud through Nico's Sony Ericsson.
He sounded kind of drunk, and there was garbled techno music playing in the background.
“How far away are you?” Nico demanded.
“Far? I’m still at my apartment. Why don’t you guys come down here?”
“What? You said you were going to meet us at Colonial on Altamont.”
“Yeah, but my girl doesn't want to drive me right now.”
“Dude, come on. We walked to the fucking car wash. Now we're just standing here.”
“Whatever, man. I got your twenty if you come down here. She won’t leave. I can’t drive right now.”
Nico looked at me. I shook my head and whispered, “What the fuck?”
Nico got Eric’s address and hung up. I threw my arms in the air
“Dude, fuck that,” I said.
“Do you think Chris will drive us?”
“Tough call.”
Nico dialed Chris.
“Chris, Eric needs us to pick up the weed from his apartment in South Gate now.”
“What? Fuck that. Fuck that guy.”
“Can you drive us?”
“I’m not driving to South Gate. It’s, like, midnight.”
“Yeah, but if you drive us, we’ll be back by, like, twelve-thirty. We’ll still have time to smoke and hangout.”
“No. Just come back here and chill. It’s not that big of a deal.”
Now, Chris was right. It wasn’t a big deal to not have weed for the night; but what pissed Nico off more than Eric not showing up was Chris, the only one with a car, refusing to help us finish our quest. It was a matter of principle. Nico was determined to get that weed now.
“Alright, dude, fuck it. Whatever,” Nico bluffed. “We’ll walk, I guess.”
“You’re going to walk to South Gate? It’ll take hours. We’ll probably be sleeping when you get back,” Chris said.
“Leave the back door unlocked, then.” Nico ended the call.
“Are you fucking serious?” I said.
Now I was pissed. Pissed at Chris for not picking us up and pissed at Nico for committing us to an hours-long trek on foot to the edge of town, in the middle of the night, for a twenty-dollar bag of weed from some sketch-ball that could have honestly waited until the next day and certainly wasn’t worth the trouble we got into on the way there.
Three
South Gate Avenue
We didn’t talk much as we walked down Altamont towards South Gate Ave. For as much as we screwed around at night, we never went in this direction. Rather than shoot the shit, we decided to keep on the lookout for trouble.
It was already about one in the morning. The streetlights were getting further apart as we made our way to the edge of Schenectady. There was far more foot traffic on that side of town than we had ever seen in Rotterdam at that hour. We passed abandoned houses, sidewalks lined with shopping carts, stop signs tagged with graffiti.
My heart would race as anyone approached—crackheads, hookers, and bums. Our intimidation would have been too obvious had we crossed the street to avoid anyone, so we stuck it out every time we walked past someone and tried to act like the two of us young teenagers had business being there.
When we rounded the corner from Altamont Avenue onto Watt Street, the few streetlights still alive were almost completely burned out. We marched on, relying solely on the summer moonlight for guidance.
As we passed the Steinmetz Homes neighborhood, we saw a group of about ten guys playing basketball in the street.
“Fuck,” I muttered.
“Just walk.”
We kept pace and continued down the right sidewalk as we approached the basketball game on the left. We knew kids who had gotten beat up in this neighborhood. You'd think I would have been in more fights than the average sixteen-year-old but I’d never been jumped. Nico had never been in a fight, but he was big enough that no one usually fucked with him. What I’m trying to say is, should this situation go sour, we knew we had absolutely no chance of surviving it.
We walked fast. Not so fast as to seem like we were nervous, but we walked at a clip, man. After walking for so long already, suddenly increasing our stride while my heart was beating through my chest made my legs burn. It felt like we were walking through mud up a goddamn mountain.
As we started to own it, we heard the basketball game completely stop. Every person in the street turned toward us and stared silently. Nico and I shot each other a look. Sweat was beading down from his cool-kid summertime beanie. Every thought in my head was RUN, but I knew if I started sprinting, it would trigger them to chase us. We kept marching, completely unsure.
That’s when they sent a fucking scout. One of the many picked up a twenty-inch freestyle bike and began peddling in our direction. My brain was stomping the gas and brake pedals at the same time. Every step I took confused my nervous system. Adrenaline told me, Get the fuck out of here while you still can. Common sense told me, Showing fear would make the situation much worse. I was stuck in purgatory between fight and flight.
The scout caught up to us—then blew past us. At this point, we were about thirty or forty feet past the basketball game. Twenty feet ahead of us, he turned around and coasted slowly back in our direction. It became apparent he was trying to use the direction of the moonlight, which lit us up from the front, to figure out if we were worth their time. He never made eye contact with us, but we could see the wheels spinning in his head. He looked us up and down, made an analysis, then pedaled back to his gang.
Once the basketball game resumed, we assumed we were in the clear. I glanced over to Nico and he nodded back at me.
“Left,” he said.
We turned onto South Gate Avenue.
* * *
“Jesus Christ. Can you call this motherfucker?” I wheezed.
We walked down a large block of identical two-story red brick low-income housing buildings. Four to six white doors lined the front of each.
“I think it’s the next one. I was here once, but I was just giving him a ride home. I never went in,” Nico said.
He pulled out his phone.
“Yo, man, we’re here. You said 106, right?...Yeah. You told us to come down. Alright.”
One of the doors to the building in front of us opened. Light and music blasted from the apartment past the tall slim silhouette of Eric, who stood in the doorway.
“Over here, Nico.” He waved us in.
We knocked our shoes on his front step and walked into a beat-up two-bedroom apartment. The stench of cat litter and moldy carpet punched me in the face. Nico shook Eric’s hand and introduced me.
“This is my boy Grayson.”
“‘Sup?” Eric said.
“Hey, man.” It was the only thing I bothered saying the entire time I was there.
What I wanted to say was fuck you for making me walk all the way here, you cocksucker, but I had more important shit on my mind. Once we had the weed, we still needed to walk all the way back to Chris’s house.
* * *
Eric’s apartment was a shithole. Something was off about him too. Something was off about all of this, but I stood there while Nico attempted to move the situation along.
Eric walked over to a computer desk against the wall just outside of the kitchen where a haggard blonde, probably twenty-something, was pouring vodka into a red plastic cup.
“That’s Jess,” Eric pointed.
“What’s up, Jess?” Nico waved and smiled as if we weren’t just looking death in the face a couple minutes ago. “This is Grayson.”
I waved.
“Hey!” Jess responded.
She walked toward Eric, sipping the vodka, then passed him the cup. Eric sat down in a desk chair and picked up a lit cigarette from an ashtray overflowing with butts. Jess sat on his lap as he took a drag. Beside the ashtray, the desk held an old Gateway PC tower hooked up to two ten-inch tall speaker boxes and a subwoofer, where music too loud for 2 a.m. was coming from.
“What are you guys up to tonight?” Eric asked.
This dude was oblivious.
“Not much. We’re staying at our boy Chris’s house. We came through for that twenty,” Nico reminded him.
“Ah sheeeit. All I got is roaches, dog.”
“Roaches? Eric. You told us two hours ago you had a twenty for us.”
“Aw, sorry, man. My brain gets a little fuzzy. I’m on day two of this fentanyl patch.”
“Fentanyl patch?” Nico asked.
“Yeah, Jess is a nurse. She gets these for me when my back hurts. You wear it on your skin for three days and it lights you the fuck up.”
“Damn, dude. So what the fuck? You had us come down here and you don’t actually have weed?”
“Um, Brad can probably get it for you.”
* * *
Just as I was trying to process why this stupid motherfucker had been lying to us all night, a shirtless muscle guy walked in from the hallway.
“‘Sup, guys?” he said.
Nico didn’t bother saying hello this time.
Eric shifted in his chair and looked over his shoulder at his roommate.
“That’s Brad. He just got out of Schenectady County so he’s staying with me.”
Brad walked over to a loaded barbell sitting on the living room floor, picked it up, and started curling it.
“Yo,” Eric said, “these guys are looking for weed.”
“How much?” Brad asked.
“Twenty,” said Nico.
“Yeah, I know a spot.”
“Is it far?” Nico asked.
“It’s back towards the end of Watt Street. The Chinese Buffet side.”
“Oh, alright. Yeah. We were going to pass that on our way back to our friends house anyway. Cool.”
Brad lowered the barbell to the floor.
“Let me grab a shirt.”
We headed back out into the night with just-out-of-prison Brad. I wondered what Chris and Freddy were up to. I had no idea when we were going to get back. Were they wondering what was taking us so long? I think even if they were concerned, they wouldn’t have directly shown it. They hadn’t tried to call Nico to check up on us.
Brad walked us from Eric’s apartment away from South Gate, over towards Albany Street. Nico and I were just happy we weren’t headed back in the direction of the basketball gang.
I mulled over all the mistakes we had made that night while Nico chatted up Brad.
“Twenty-four? That’s what’s up. How long were you locked up?”
“Six months. Stole a fuckin’ set-up car. Shit had cameras in it and shit.”
“No shit? Gray and I saw a show about that once.”
“Yeah. It’s whatever. Being on probation is bullshit, though.”
“How’s that work?”
“Motherfuckers call me in once a week. Make me fucking pay them to be there. Ask me this, that, and the third, then give me a piss test.”
“Word. So you can’t smoke and shit?”
“Nah, ‘cause weed be in your system for, like, two weeks after smoking one time, no matter how much water you try to drink. Coke and pills are different, though. Three days and you’re good.”
“You do coke?”
“Sometimes.”
“I've never,” Nico said. “But I'd try it.”
* * *
There was a Mobil gas station on the corner of Albany Street and Route 7. It wouldn’t be open until five. Brad walked us into the parking lot and said,
“Give me the twenty.”
“This is the spot?” Nico asked.
“Nah. It’s over at the top of Watt Street over there.” Brad pointed about a block away from where we stood.
“I thought you were taking us to the spot?” Nico pressed.
“It’s two thirty in the morning,” Brad said. “They know me but I can’t show up with you two at two thirty in the morning. I’m not trying to get shot.”
That’s all we needed to hear. Nico handed the twenty to Brad.
“Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
We were too young and street-dumb to realize what had happened until it was too late. We watched Brad walk off into the dim light of Watt Street, truly expecting him to return with our hard-earned bag of weed at some point. We never took into account why Brad, a criminal fresh out of prison—whom for whatever reason knew Eric, a useless shitbag in his own right, wanted to help two teenagers he just met get a twenty-dollar bag of weed in the middle of the night while asking nothing in return. Out of the kindness of his fucking heart? Yeah, right. Brad took our twenty dollars and walked the fuck home right in front of our faces, and we didn’t put two and two together until it was 3 a.m.
“He fucking robbed us, dude,” Nico said, “Cocksucker.”
“Nico, what the fuck? After all this? I thought Eric was your friend.”
“Eric is a fucking retard I know from Price Saver. Why would he let his roommate rob us? I’m going to see him at work at some point!”
“Jesus-fucking-christ, man. It’s not your fault, but shit. Chris and Freddy are going to fucking laugh at us.”
“Fuck Chris and fuck Freddy,” Nico grunted, “Fuck!”
* * *
We trekked down Route 7 against oncoming traffic with no shoulder. It was an illegal and dangerous shortcut, making it the perfect Walk of Shame.
Once we made it onto Chrysler Ave, we stopped outside Laurie’s Ice Cream to rest and mull over the night’s events. It was about four in the morning. We sat on the wood that boxed in their big lit-up sign and swore we’d be smarter about this shit next time.
We stayed at Laurie’s for maybe twenty minutes. My feet and legs were killing me. I was hungry and exhausted, but the sun was starting to come up and we had survived. In our sleep-deprived teenage mania, we decided to rearrang
e the words on Laurie’s sign for one last hurrah. It originally said “NATURAL ICE CREAM, NOW OPEN,” but we pulled off all of the lettering and simply left “ANAL CUNT” in its place.
* * *
We continued down Chrysler and took a left back onto Altamont Ave as we witnessed Rotterdam slowly coming back to life. We followed Altamont Avenue all the way down to the Hannaford Plaza, strip mall. We walked around the back to the loading docks and slipped into the woods. There was a small creek back there, somewhat active in the summertime and about knee-deep if you wanted to get wet.
Lucky for us, there was a fairly reliable bridge built out of shopping carts. We carefully made our way across. For just a couple minutes, we decided to stop at an overgrown spot off the beaten path to check on some pot seeds Nico had planted a few weeks earlier hoping they might grow unassisted. They hadn’t. Then we followed the path all the way to the end, which exited between two houses on Deforest Street—right at the intersection of Deforest and Spry where, just a block up, Chris’s side door was waiting for us, unlocked.
Four
Trouble Bored
I woke up on the floor of Chris’s laundry room. Nico was nowhere in sight, but I smelled coffee so I knew Chris was around at least. I stumbled downstairs.
“Yo,” Chris started.
“Yo,” I replied.
“Coffee’s ready.”
“Sick, thanks.”
“You guys got robbed last night?”
“Bro. My fucking feet are killing me right now,” I said. “What a waste of time. Where’s Nico and Freddy?”
“Nico’s mom called early and needed him for something quick. Freddy went to help, but they said they’re gonna come back later with his mom’s car for the day.”
“Awesome. We should go scout for skate spots.”
“Hell yeah.”
Trouble Bored Page 2
