by Moshe Kasher
“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck yooooooooooooooou!!!”
We clashed. Well… more like, I crashed into Miguel’s belly. It was like the Ghostbusters going after that forty-foot Stay Puft Marshmallow Man or Westey when he fights Andre the Giant in The Princess Bride. I ran into his belly and nothing happened.
No movement, no effect.
“Fuck,” I thought. “What have I gotten myself into?”
I looked over at Joey and Donny, but their eyes contained no answers for me.
“You fucked up now, you little bitch,” Miguel whispered into my ear.
I thought, “Believe me, I know.”
Miguel, in his mercy, perhaps bemused by my valor, never punched me. He just kind of laid his weight on me, collapsing me to the ground. I was trapped, helpless under the weight of his blubbery countenance. He started laughing. He was always laughing.
“You done, faggot lung?”
“I guess,” I wheezed, my lungs popping like a novelty squeeze toy’s head.
“Just say, I got faggot lungs, woo! And I’ll let you up.”
“Are you serious?” I began to fuse with the gravel beneath me, sinking into the earth.
“Hell yeah, bitch, serious as a heart attack, woo!”
Oh God. “Fine. I got faggot lungs,” I relented.
“Say woo.”
I was losing consciousness. “What?”
“Woo, motherfucker, say woo.” Miguel was grinning like a Mexican Cheshire cat.
I wheezed, “Woooooooooooooooooo.”
Miguel rolled off me, and I felt a relief more pleasurable than a thousand orgasms.
As I lay there, waiting for my body to re-inflate like Wile E. Coyote after being flattened by a steamroller, I felt a pretty nice sense of pride, like I’d fought a grizzly bear. Sure, I’d lost, but at least I’d tried.
Miguel sat there next to me for a few minutes, smoking a cigarette. He patted me on the shoulder.
“You were pretty down back there, man. Órale!”
I grinned. “Órale.”
“If you ever want to join the Nortenos, you let me know. We got a new white boy expansion program right now.”
“Thanks, Miguel, but I’m more down with the Surenos.” A look of anger flashed across Miguel’s face. I urinated on myself and then whimpered, “I’m kidding.” Miguel stared at me for a second with death in his eyes and then started laughing maniacally. He grabbed my shoulder and pulled me close to him. “Órale! You fuckin funny!”
That same weekend, Larry and my mother had gone out of town, presumably to get away from me. I was supposed to be staying at Donny’s, but you know, empty house, no parents, what was I supposed to do?
I broke into my own home and invited everyone over. Party time. Joey Zalante brought mushrooms. We all sat around and broke the mushrooms up into pieces, which we then downed with handfuls of CornNuts to mask the taste. Classy. There is no better way to begin a psychedelic trip than with chile-picante-flavored CornNuts. That’s how the ancient Mayans used to do it.
After the mushrooms came Donny’s Ritalin, which we crushed up and snorted. Speed and mushrooms—to make the cartoons play faster.
Now that we were high, it seemed like a really good idea to steal the car. Larry and my mother had spent years slopping together a VW bug out of two non-working cars. It was an eyesore of unparallelled proportions. Multicolored, unpainted, and rusted through the floorboards, my mother and Larry had been foolish enough to leave it at home, thinking I’d be too embarrassed to be seen in it. Little did they know that the mushrooms I’d be eating would make it look like a Transformer. I loved Transformers.
We all piled into the bug and Joey climbed into the driver’s seat. I didn’t know how to drive. None of us had a license. We picked up forties to drink and a bag of weed and headed into Tilden Park, a kind of wilderness reserve in the hills of Oakland.
We drove through the hills, pounding our beer, trying to find a spot to smoke and look out at the city. At one point, we went too far and attempted to turn around by pulling onto a steep dirt hill on the side of the road and then rolling back down it in the other direction. At least that was the plan. What happened was, due to the instability of the dirt, the shoddiness of the car, and the weight of five idiotic stoners in the backseat, the bug began to tip over backward, ready to flip on its end. We all jumped out, like an insane Chinese fire drill, and coaxed the car, by hand, back onto the ground. We sat in the car panting in fear and decided not to keep driving but to smoke where we were, right at the side of the road.
Then, as if on cue, the exact moment we lit the pipe, light flooded the car. The cops. We were busted.
Fuck.
This was it. My mother told me that one more bust by the cops and I was going to be sent away to a group home or, even worse, to study Talmud in Sea Gate with my father. Armed with that information, I had promptly stolen her car. These were the kind of decisions I made.
I couldn’t believe how stupid I was. It seemed like, in the face of the most obvious answer in the world, I always chose the dumbest thing to do. It was like I wasn’t in control of my own brain. Well, there was no use in trying to figure that shit out now. There were more-pressing issues at hand.
I dropped the pipe out the passenger window and sat staring straight ahead, trying to will the smell of pot out of the car.
The cop, making the closest thing to a joke possible for a police officer, walked from his car, right over to the pipe, and handed it back to me with a grin, saying, “I think you dropped this.” I tried to look like I’d never seen a pipe before.
“What is this thing?”
“You mean the pipe that I just saw you drop out of the window that’s still warm from you smoking from it? Is that what you are asking about?”
I sighed. I was fucked.
“So…” the cop began, “what are you guys doing?”
I took a deep breath. “Okay, well, here’s the thing. I just finished the final touches on this car—as you can see it’s a bit of a project car!” I laughed hysterically as my speedy shroomy brain spun into action, pulling the next line of bullshit directly from out of the sky.
“Soooooo then I thought, well, jeez, just like a boat needs a maiden journey, so does a car! AM I RIGHT? So we piled in and took her for a spin, in fact we were just on our way home when you stopped us, which I appreciate because it’s like… TIME TO GO HOME! Am I right?”
The speed was coursing through my veins, pumping me up. At that moment, though, Miguel, seated in the backseat, leaned forward and broke the awkward silence.
“He’s lying to you, Officer!”
What. The. Fuck.
Every head in the car spun around in shock at Miguel.
“He just stole his parents’ shit!”
Miguel had had some kind of psychic break. Or at least, it seemed as though he had. Even the police officer looked a little surprised at what a weird snitch Miguel was being.
I looked at the cop. I exhaled, deep.
“Look,” I started, defeated, “this is my parents’ car. I lied to you because if I get busted again, I’m completely fucked. Sorry about the swearing, my mom lets me. She’s deaf. Like totally…”
I was cuing up the string section, trying for pity. If lying wouldn’t work, maybe heavy indulgence in the truth would.
“It’s tough having deaf parents and sometimes I act out to get attention. They just told me that if I fuck up again, I’m going to be sent away to like a group home or something. I know I fucked up, and if you could just give me a chance and let me call my sister and have her come meet me and drive the car home, you would be essentially making sure my life doesn’t get ruined. This is the moment. I could get sent off, fall into the cracks in the system, fall into crack, catch AIDS, and die. Or you could let me call my sister.”
The cop stared at me for a second, his face showing something in the middle of pity and bemusement.
He smiled. “All right. Let’s call your sister.”
&n
bsp; I tried not to look shocked. Amazing. He was going to let us go. All I had to do was call my sister. Only one problem. The only sister I had was ten years old and lived in Brooklyn.
“You follow me down the hill and we can call your sister from a pay phone when we get back into town.”
To clarify, a real-life police officer allowed a drunk, high, unlicensed kid in a stolen car to drive down a windy mountain road at night. Sometimes there is only one set of footprints in the sand. That’s when God carries you. And that night, he carried me with a gentleness that suggested, “I forgive you for the phone sex, I totally get it.”
Donny turned to me and exhaled, the first one of us to do so in many minutes. “How is this happening?” he asked.
We arrived at the base of the hill panting, our hearts beating in fear, sure that somehow this would turn out to be a trick.
When we reached the bottom of the hill, I sighed. “Here goes nothing. Hey, thanks for the help back there, Miguel.”
Miguel was too busy talking to himself to hear me, though.
I opened the car door and walked to the phone like a convicted killer walking to the gallows. I stared hard at that pay phone, willing my mind to work quick. I picked up the phone and dialed a neighborhood girl named Seena. We’d hardly ever spoken on the phone. Hopefully she wouldn’t be too surprised to remember she was my sister.
I plunked a quarter into the phone like a gambler playing his last cent on a slot machine. “God,” I thought, taking refuge in the prayer of the coward, “I know maybe two times in one night is too much to ask but… help me out here?”
The phone rang…
A click. A sleepy voice. An angel.
“Hello?”
“Sis! My sister! Oh, the girl with whom I share parents! It’s me, your brother!”
Confused and a little pissed, Seena spat back, “Huh? Brother? Why the fuck are you calling me this late? Wait, why are you calling me at all?”
“Totally!” I said, masking relief as brotherly love. “Hey, look, I stole Mom’s car. I know, I’m an idiot! Anyway, the cops are here and they said they’d let me go if you just come pick up the car and drive it home.”
A pause. I could hear the gears turning in Seena’s head.
“Oh, wait. Is there a cop right there with you? Are you pretending to be my brother to get out of trouble or something?”
DING.
I turned to the cop. I smiled big.
“Yes!” I yelled, hoping.
“You fucking asshole. You better get me high if I come out there.”
“Of course!” Hearing her agree to rescue me was so amazing, I might as well have ejaculated a river of relief all over the sidewalk and paddled home in that. My sister was coming! My sweet, sweet, fake sister.
“I love you, sis!” I panted.
“Go fuck yourself,” she snarled. You know how my sister can be!
I turned to the cop and shouted, “She’s on her way!” From inside of the bug, I could hear my friends cheer like we’d won the lottery. This was a good night.
Seena showed up bleary-eyed and glaring at me just like a real sister would. I loved her more in that moment than I’d ever loved anyone.
“I’m so sorry about my brother, Officer,” she said as she pulled up. “I was sleeping and didn’t hear the boys take the car out.”
The boys. She should have won an Oscar.
“No problem at all, glad you could help.” The officer smiled.
“My boyfriend will drive my car home and I’ll take the bug. Thanks again.”
The officer stared at Seena’s blond hair and anti-Semitic features with a grin.
“No problem. You know, you two look exactly alike.” He smiled. Was that sarcasm? Jesus, who was this cop?
Just at that moment Dean Stockwell appeared and the cop quantum-leapt away (nerd joke!).
Or rather, we all drove away, waving the most amazing police officer since Robocop a disbelieving good-bye. We drove home in silence, awed by the miracle we had witnessed. All but Miguel, who suddenly came out of his mushroom stupor, leaned forward, and asked “Hey, what just happened?”
If he hadn’t been huge and Mexican, I might’ve hit him. As it was, I just laughed.
When we arrived at my home, Seena turned to me and said, “There’s no way you are going to get popped twice in one night, let’s take this hooptie out and go have some fun.”
Made sense to me. I ran upstairs, grabbed more booze, and we continued on with our evening, the majesties of the Lord forgotten the instant a suggestion for more fun was made.
Have you ever pushed a Bug on its last legs into the 100-miles-per-hour zone? It will make you remember past lives. Seena gunned the Bug down Highway 580 as we passed a forty around and laughed at our luck. As we sped down the straightaway, the poor little engine screamed, trying to keep up with our party. As the needle redlined, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the car’s radio, which hadn’t worked for decades, squealed to life, blaring oldies into our insane night.
My brain was spinning as we pulled back to my place at four in the morning. I was shaking with speed and mushrooms, slurring with booze and pot; I was fucked.
It seemed, at that point, like a logical next step for me to snort some Zoloft. Keep in mind that Zoloft has no psychoactive properties. But I figured, what the fuck, why not give it a whirl.
I shook out a couple of pills alone in the kitchen. I could hear the sounds of my buddies laughing and partying in the next room, but no, this rare delicacy I would keep for myself. I squinted at the pills, willing myself not to hear the thought that was creeping in the side of my head: “This is a really lousy idea.” I chose instead to heed the other much less logical but much more compelling thought, “What the hell, why not? See what happens, it could be awesome. Fuck it.” Fuck it is the great battle cry of the drug addict. It’s the rebel yell we all scream as we charge into the dumb, the ridiculous, the dangerous pool of bullshit that we inevitably drown in.
My hands were shaking as I crushed up these pills that had been jacking up my brain chemistry for the past year. Chunks of the protective easy-swallow coating stuck out from the white lines like coral rocks jutting out from a foamy surf, warning, “Bad idea! Pain Ahead!” I grabbed my surfboard and jumped in.
I leaned down and snorted half of a comically large line of Zoloft. I could feel the grit fly into my nose like sinking into quicksand in reverse. The back of my sinus cavity filled up in a split second and the inside of my face caught on fire. Pain shot through my head like the devil was giving me an old-school, ice-pick lobotomy. My head shot straight up as I slapped at my face, desperate to make it go away. I ran screaming to the bathroom, hoping there was something there to make the pain stop. I ran to the sink and looked at my face. Scary. My right eye was literally bloodred. The right side of my face felt like there were a thousand little elves on it, aerating a lawn with spiky little golf shoes. I felt like I was going to die. There was poisonous pain shooting into my brain. Oddly, the left side of my face was just fine and looked like my handsome old self. I should have gone and fought Batman with a face like that (nerd joke!). Getting to that threshold of acceptance that you must come to in moments of great pain, I accepted that, perhaps, I was going to have a stroke. I waited. My face still hurt, so that meant it wasn’t paralyzed. Tears were streaming down my face that were opaque with medicine. I think my eye turned purple. I crawled to my bedroom window and spent the next hour sitting there, spitting out loogies filled with rocks of Zoloft onto the sidewalk below. If a depressed dog had walked along just then, he could have lapped it up and tasted happiness for the first time in dog years.
I slunk out of my perch, my poison face having backed off to enough of an extent that I could walk upright. I walked into my living room, where my friends were all sitting and drinking with each other.
As I walked into the living room, everyone screamed.
“A zombie!” Jamie yelled. “This happened to my uncle!”
Seena wept.
Miguel crossed himself. “Dios Mío. Es El Diablo!”
Donny and Joey approached me like I was a feral animal.
“Dude,” Donny whispered. “You all right?”
Right! My eye.
“Oh, this? Ahh, this is nothing. I was just snorting a little Zoloft, you know? Seein’ what would happen.”
“Looks like you’ve been snorting a little cyanide, bro.” Joey sounded genuinely concerned.
“I’m fine, I’m fine. I can see the future in my right eye, but other than that, I’m fine.” I laughed and coughed up a full pill of Zoloft. “Anyway, let’s go up to the roof.”
One by one, we all, even Miguel’s huge ass, climbed up to my roof. The bastard sun was making its threats on the night, revealing to us all that this dark night was going to crash to an end. Teenage vampires we were, sucking down whatever blood we could find in the bottom of a bottle. Donny and I stood there, looking over the city lights to the west, the purple-red middle finger of the sun to the east, passing a cigarette back and forth. Just me and my friend Donny smoking again. I felt okay. In charge. Alive. The magic luck of the drug addict had been sprinkled on me, and I’d had a night to remember. But drug-addict luck always runs out.
I woke up the next day groggy, hungover, and ready to die. Donny was up and said something about going to the store to get booze. I threw him the keys and rolled over back to sleep.
I woke up a few hours later to my grandmother’s voice shrieking, “Wake up! Get up! Where is the car?”
Shit. The car. Where was the car?
Right! Donny. Fuck.
I was pretty fucked. I’d been given a thousand second chances the night before, but I’d fucked up and lost anyway.
But right then all I could do was vomit in my lap. I did so.
“Ugh, disgusting,” my grandmother sneered. “Just like your grandfather.” This was her version of the worst thing she could say to me. “Where is the car?”
“Well, I don’t know in the classic sense of knowing. Well…”
