Hyena

by Jude Angelini

  Vaughn’s like, “Dude, I don’t get how you’re gonna smoke some fucking PCP, but you’re worried about smoking cigarettes.”

  We find a parking spot right in front of the smoke shop. Some white dude with a cholo accent helps us out; he’s throwing us deals cuz he loves the dog. They don’t even have the herbal smokes I drove halfway across the city to get, so I cop some Newports instead and some Whip-Its and a cracker for good measure.

  We’re back at Alex’s getting ready. The sherm I got from Solo is in a vial inside of a prescription pill bottle. Vaughn cracks it open and it makes the room smell like a morgue.

  He’s like, “I don’t know, man. I might like myself too much to smoke this shit. It smells like the inside of a dead body.”

  Alex is trying to figure out how to work some expensive camera. He thinks it’ll be good for Vaughn’s rap career to document this. It probably will be. These new rappers play at being crazy. We don’t pretend. We eat shrimp heads and smoke sherm.

  I dip my Newport in the vial and watch the liquid seep up the paper. Alex is hitting me with a light monitor. I’m blowing on the cigarette, trying to dry it.

  I’m nervous. I’m pacing. I’m clowning his tiny sweater hanging up on the closet door. His housekeeper shrunk it.

  He says, “Yeah, I need to put NO LAVAR signs on my wool shit to keep her from fucking it up. She keeps ruining my sweaters, but what the fuck? These are white people problems.”

  I’m like, “Fuck that, you worked hard to get your white people problems. Tell her to stop fucking up your shit. My housekeeper threw out two hits of my acid last month. I keep telling her not to fuck with shit in the butter drawer, but she don’t listen.”

  Lito comes by; he’s Middle Eastern with gold teeth and a knife scar across his forehead. He does graffiti and Muay Thai. He’s smoking spliffs with Vaughn. I’m doing Whip-Its, waiting for Alex to figure out the fucking camera.

  I’m like, “Just film it with your fucking iPhone; this camera shit’s taking all day.”

  He tells me to chill the fuck out.

  I hit the nitrous and lean back; my ears go all wawawawa on me. I see Lito sitting across from me; he hits the spliff, gold teeth smiling. I keep doing the Whip-Its till I get rotgut.

  I need food. I’m in his fridge trying to get a cupcake but Alex won’t give me one. He says I won’t like it cuz they’re all natural.

  I’m like, “Bruh, I came up all natural. My folks are some hippies.”

  “Yeah, but it’s like vegan or something.”

  Vegan? What do I care? That shit looks delicious. He just doesn’t wanna give me one. He gives me some Paul Newman Oreos instead.

  I mash like ten of ’em. Alex finally figures out the lighting.

  Let’s get this show on the road.

  We’re in the window. I put a flame to the sherm-dipped Newport, blow it out, and pass it to Vaughn. Alex is snapping pictures. I tell him don’t take my picture, I’m not a rapper, I don’t need photo documentation of my drug use.

  Alex is complaining about the smoke. He says it smells like death and chemicals. I can’t tell. I can just taste it. It tastes like shit, it tastes like you’re smoking toxic chemical shit, but it’s not that bad cuz there’s this minty Newport finish.

  I feel the effects in minutes. Me and Vaughn are amped; it feels kinda like K but way dirtier, way shittier. It’s not bad, it’s just different. I keep clenching my fists and flexing my chest. Ten years ago when Alex was smoking it, he said he ran through a screen door. I get it. I don’t wanna break anything but I would do the fuck outta some Tae Bo right now.

  Vaughn sparks up another ’Port. He dipped his cigarette too much and he’s not getting a good hit.

  I say, “Here, lemme see it.” I put the flame to the tip and take three or four monster pulls off the ciggy and blow that shit out. Lou Reed’s playing, that’s my shit. “Walk on the Wild Side.”

  That’s when I go. I don’t even see it coming. I’m dancing by the window and then I’m gone.

  Alex said it looked like I was trying to read the table, I was hunched over it for such a long-ass time. On my feet, bent over, with the cigarette in my hand burning. That’s when they laid me down. Eyes wide open. Snap snap snap in my ear. Clap clap clap in my face. “Jude, you there? Hey, asshole, you there?” Nothing.

  Sometimes tripping out is kinda like dreaming; whatever you were thinking about that day comes to you in your head. Months back, I was in a K-hole, talking to the Mid-Life Crisis on the couch and she was telling me about how her white-trash homeboy would punch his girl in the stomach a gang of times when her period was late, and I started going in and out of reality.

  I’d been reading this fantasy book about an enchanted forest. I was convinced that she was one of the tree people from my book and I’m thinking, since she’s a tree person made of wood can I get her pregnant? Is the kid gonna be like half a tree or something? Will we raise it in the forest, will it have roots? Am I gonna be stuck in the forest forever? I was kinda freaking out about having a tree child but then I came to and remembered that she’s a human and the condom came off in her but I finished on her belly so we should be fine.

  It’s the same thing here, but this time, I’ve been rereading Game of Thrones and I been trying to talk to my daughter all day. It’s her birthday and I keep leaving messages but we keep missing each other, it’s weighing on me. So I’m on another planet with my kid and the midget from Game of Thrones, and I’m not such a shitty dad after all. Alex’s shih tzu is laying on my chest and I’m thinking it’s the Luck Dragon from The Neverending Story. Now we’re all cruising around the universe on the Neverending Story dog.

  I’m gone for a while, like a half hour, laid out, eyes wide open, dog on my chest, planet surfing, when the Frenchman checks my pulse.

  “His blood, he’s still pumping.”

  I jerk up. I try to talk, my tongue’s swollen, it’s clumsy. I say, “Did I shit or did I cum?”

  They’re like, “What?”

  “Did I ejaculate?”

  I’m worried about both because of what happened at the art show and because Solo told me I might wanna get buck naked off that sherm and the last thing I wanna do is be on a good one, playing with my dick and not knowing it.

  They tell me it doesn’t smell like I shit, and just like that I’m gone again. Back to my midgets and Luck Dragons.

  I’m still on the floor when the Frenchman leaves. Someone turns off the lights; hours have gone by. My spit’s foamy; it’s hard to swallow. Vaughn’s worried. They put on my iPod, they think I might recognize something and come to. I wanna tell you I heard some Bob Seger and some INXS but I don’t know, I just don’t know.

  Universes and scenarios keep flipping on top of each other and on top of each other over and over again. I think I’m in the bowels of a spaceship shoveling coal. The room is pulsating with a cuuuuuhhhaaaaaaa cuuuuuuhhaaaaaaa. I’m toiling away with the slaves in the orange glow of the ship’s furnace and Gladys Knight is singing to me. I recognize it. I come back, it’s 5 A.M.

  The cuuuuuhaaaaaa cuuuuhaaaaaa is Alex snoring. Vaughn’s curled up in a ball on the couch. My stomach’s wrecked; my mouth tastes like formaldehyde. Moving’s difficult; my head’s on a swivel. My feet feel ten feet long. Somehow I make it to the bathroom.

  If ketamine’s a digital buzz and mushrooms are wavy, the world of sherm is that of an abused child who has been asked to draw a picture of how he’s feeling. It’s a fist-gripped crayon drawing of a bad man screaming. It’s not good or bad, it just is.

  I don’t know if I need to shit or puke, so I drop trou and lean over this toilet that feels like it’s as big as a swimming pool and a hundred feet away. I’m this retarded baby T. rex, in the dark, wobbling over the toilet bowl trying to stay up and just like a baby dinosaur I open my mouth and “Raaaaaaarrrrrrrrrr!!”

  Out comes this black crayon scribble of Paul Newman Oreos.

  I keep roaring till my stomach is empty. I flush.


  I’m back on the couch, diagonal, and Vaughn’s looking for milk because milk is supposedly like kryptonite for PCP, and I just need this fucking thing to be over with. But there’s just almond milk, to go with the vegan cupcakes. Vaughn gives me Xanax and yogurt instead. I fall out again.

  When I come to at seven, I’m still tripping balls but I can walk and I can talk, kind of. I ask Alex to show me the pictures. I need to see what happened. I don’t recognize myself. I look like I’m dead on the floor. Eyes wide open, lost.

  I say, “Don’t show those to anybody. I got a daughter.”

  They’re driving me home in the Volvo. I’m leaning my face against the window watching normal people go to Denny’s as a family. I’m helpless. Now I understand doped-up sex workers and white slavery. Right now they could take me anywhere they wanted; they could take me to the moon.

  I’m thinking about what I told Brad the night before on the fire escape, after I just finished off a plate of ketamine. I said, “Brad, I don’t do drugs—I all-the-way do drugs. These motherfuckers out here are doing shit to numb themselves, that’s cool. Not me, sometimes I gotta stretch my mind, make my brain do karate.”

  “Make your brain do karate?!”

  “Make my brain do karate.”

  And we laughed about it.

  stained

  I MUST’VE BEEN THREE OR four at the time. I was little. I remember that. I remember being little and dropping my sister off at school and running errands with my mom. I remember driving in the car with her, J. Geils Band on the radio. My angel is the centerfold. That song broke my heart. My dad let me look at porn, I knew what a centerfold was. I remember looking at Little Golden Books in the backseat and kicking my feet to the time of the blinker. I remember the generic aisle in the grocery store and the black-and-white labels.

  I remember Rochester Park, the pond there, the creek, the swings, and the monkey bars. They were metal then. My mom took me there to play.

  I was playing by them in the water when I found my duck egg. It was laying there in the bed of the creek by a cluster of stones. It must’ve rolled out of some duck’s nest. I didn’t know that. I thought they just hatched them underwater.

  I picked it from the creek. It was brown and bigger than a chicken’s. I ran and showed it to my mom. We drove back to Countryside. I played with my little egg the whole way. I was gonna hatch it when I got home; I told it so.

  We pulled up into the parking lot, I climbed to the front seat, jumped out of the car, and ran up the sidewalk to show my dad the egg I found.

  He was waiting for us to get there. He came out of the house, hollering.

  He storms right past me and goes for my mom. I follow him.

  He heads my mom off at the sidewalk. She backs up. He’s yelling about something. I don’t know what. It’s violent. They’re in the parking lot, he’s standing over her.

  I keep tugging on him. I’m like, “Look, Dad, look! Look at this egg I found!”

  Nothing.

  I keep pestering him. I got it in my head that if he just sees this egg and how cool it is, he won’t be mad anymore. He’ll stop yelling.

  He shakes me off.

  My mom’s yelling back now, trying not to cry.

  I’m scared. I’m begging for ’em please to stop fighting. His back is to me, and he’s pushing her.

  We’re by the Dumpster now, the three of us, out in the middle of the parking lot. Now my mom’s crying.

  I yell, “I’m gonna count to three!! If you guys don’t stop fighting, I’m gonna break my duck egg!” I hold the egg over my head and count, “One . . . two . . . three!”

  It’s like I’m not even there.

  I slam the egg on the ground and watch the yolk splatter across the blacktop.

  It’s so orange against that asphalt.

  There goes my egg.

  And they kept on fighting till the cops came.

  a brand-new you

  I THINK I SMOKED TOO much PCP. I wasn’t concerned about OD’ing on sherm while I was doing it; intergalactic space travel is kind of the shit. I still wouldn’t call it an overdose per se, more like “overdoing it.” I overdid it and ended up catatonic for hours.

  When I wake up on Sunday still high, I don’t even trip. I just take a cab up to the Standard hotel and eat fish tacos pool-side while Detroit Daniel spins techno.

  When Monday comes and I’m still disoriented with no motor skills, that gives me pause. I wake up high the day after and the day after and the day after that. I’m thinking, maybe I’m not high, maybe I’m just broken.

  I don’t even try to drive; I can’t see straight. I walk to work every day repeating my mantra, “Sharpen up. Sharpen up. Sharpen up.”

  But in the quiet confines of my studio, sitting by myself, waiting to drag my ass through the next talk break, one thought goes through my head: Fried your little brain.

  I still can’t remember things on Thursday, I can’t do math, I suck at Scrabble, I get headaches, my dick doesn’t work the same, people talk to me and I get confused. I come to terms with the fact that the sherm took a piece of me. Maybe I damaged my head; maybe I’m stupid now.

  Rachel asks, “Did you google that drug?”

  I tell her, “It’s a little late for that now. I shoulda googled that shit before I took back-to-back sherm sticks to the face.”

  “You should look it up.”

  “Fuck that.”

  I don’t want to, the same way I used to not like taking AIDS tests after fucking with no rubber for months.

  “I’ll look it up,” she says, and she’s banging away on the computer. She’s reading to herself. “Jesus Christ, Jude.” She’s shaking her head. “Jesus Christ . . . Jesus Christ. Do you know what that shit does to your brain?”

  “Yeah, it makes you fucking retarded. Don’t tell me what it did, just tell me how to fix it.”

  She reads some more. “I don’t know, this blog says niacin. Try some B vitamins maybe? That’ll detox you. It says the effects can last up to a couple of weeks.”

  I take niacin. I take niacin till my piss turns orange, till it looks like a toilet bowl full of orange Crush. Till I start busting orange nuts. When I cum, it looks like a Creamsicle. My boxers look like a Pollock painting.

  I go to bed every night hoping I’ll sleep it off. And when I wake up with my brain slow and my head still swimming, I’m like, “You fucking idiot.”

  I work on forgiving myself for wrecking my brain, for wrecking my dick.

  Now I’m stupid. It’s not so bad. I’ll go with my gut more. It’s making me patient. My show sucks but I’ll work that job till they fire me. Maybe I’ll meet a nice girl now, maybe I won’t be so picky, maybe I won’t give a shit if she watches reality shows and reads Us Weekly.

  A few years back I used to talk to this little young chick Josette. I’d call her up at five in the morning high on ecstasy talking crazy and she’d just say, “Oh, Jude, what am I going to do with you?”

  That’s what I’m saying to myself now. “Oh Jude, what am I gonna do with you?”

  I’ll work hard, I’ll do my exercises, I’ll take my vitamins, and I’ll get better, I tell myself.

  I’ll get better or I’ll get used to it.

  acknowledgments

  WHEN I SELF-PUBLISHED I EDITED this book with one of my best friends, Andrea Grano. She’s one of the few people I trust with my voice. Thanks, Andrea. Frank Ryan drew the illustrations. Kevin Beebe handled book design, cover design, typesetting, and layout on my first batch of books; not this one but he still gets a shout-out.

  Danny Angelini, Ross Rowe, Toni Prieto, Greg Adkins, Rebecca Diliberto Adkins, Brian Liesegang, Tien Nguyen, and Nicholas Palos gave me notes. Cindy Chyr told me about perpetuity. Jetta and Pendarvis helped me send the book out. Rachel Angelini wrote “About the Author.”

  Karyn Bosnak helped get me to Simon & Schuster and held my hand through the whole process. Thank you. I was lost. Thanks to Alison Callahan and Jeremie Ruby-Strauss for givi
ng me a shot. Thanks to Dennis Ardi, my lawyer.

  Thanks to Marshall Mathers, Paul Rosenberg, and Steve Blatter for keeping me employed while I wrote this book.

  Thank you to my friends and family. These stories aren’t just mine, they’re ours, and you let me share them. And thank you to everyone who bought this book early on. . . . You all really helped grow this book and I truly appreciate it.

  Hyena Go Hard.

  about the author

  JUDE ANGELINI was born and raised in Pontiac, Michigan. He got his start as a guest and comic on The Jenny Jones Show. He now hosts his own show, The All Out Show, on Sirius XM Satellite Radio. His great love of music has influenced every aspect of his life, including the rhythm of his writing style. He was first inspired to write after reading Bukowski’s Notes of a Dirty Old Man. He felt he could share his stories without being hindered by the rules of grammar.

  Although he writes from his own experiences, he loves reading Elmore Leonard, science fiction, and medieval fantasy. He also loves antiquing, and a good game of backgammon.

  Jude currently lives in Los Angeles.

  FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR: authors.simonandschuster.com/Jude-Angelini

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  Copyright © 2013 by Jude Angelini