The Crossroads of Logan Michaels

by James Roberts

  “Driver, get home immediately,” I heard out of his telecom. You have to be kidding me, I mumbled under my breath. The ride home was just five minutes, but felt like it would never end.

  Have you ever been so drunk that you thought the night before had been a dream? Yeah, it had been one of those nights. The next morning I ran outside to my van to see if I had dreamed that I smashed into ten cars last night. PHEW! Wait, shit, my rearview mirror fell off; wow, it had happened. “Screw it,” I said, and drove over to Rory’s to tell him the story and to get high. You would have thought after that I might have toned it down a little, but I didn’t.

  Since we had found our great abandoned hideout, we decided to throw parties there every night. Kids from town would join us and we would drink, smoke, and hook up; it was a blast to have fun without cops breaking up our parties. However, on a night about midway through the summer, we must have been followed.

  It must have been around ten p.m., and we were partying and having a good time until we heard sirens. Seemingly out of nowhere, the cops busted in the door. I immediately put my car keys in my sock; I didn’t want the police to know I would be driving. Of course, it was the school officer who had said he would be watching me.

  “Logan Michaels, I knew you would mess up eventually,” he said snidely. I rolled my eyes and acted like I wasn’t fazed; after all, I hadn’t been caught yet.

  “Show me your keys,” he said.

  “I didn’t drive here,” I replied.

  “Bullshit,” he said. He then patted me down in front of the whole party and found nothing. He told everyone else to get out of there if they didn’t want to be arrested. Little did he know that right after he left, I jumped into my van and took off, laughing. Rory lit up a blunt with a couple of girls and drove in the other direction. The cops can’t stop me; the adventure makes me feel alive. Who needs school? I want the life of an outlaw….

  Chapter 8

  BAD BOYS DON’T GO TO HEAVEN

  If there was an award for worst role model, I definitely would have won it. My brother and I didn’t talk much anymore. I would walk by him and ignore him; he would spend all of his time with his girlfriend. My father tried to spend time with Jared and me as often as he could. Jared was still angry with Dad and wanted nothing to do with him. I didn’t really talk to my father anymore; I was angry at him, too, but honestly it didn’t bother me that much. I loved having the freedom and parties, and I figured I’d let him live his life and I’d live mine. My life, of course, could have used a lot of guidance and direction from a role model, which I didn’t have. But at my age, even if I had, would I really have listened?

  It was the end of my summer of being seventeen, probably a couple of weeks after I crashed my van against all of those cars. It was Rory, Tyler, and me all hanging at Rory’s house. Rory said that his pot dealer had just gotten some mushrooms, and of course I’d heard about them, but had never actually tried them. We got a little over an eighth of them; they looked like actual mushrooms, except they were dirty and smelled awful. I had heard that they would make you hallucinate and trip pretty hard. I was nervous to take them at first, but was so depressed from life in general that I figured, how could it get any worse?

  We each ate a handful of the mushrooms. They tasted dry and gross, and were mushy and crunchy as they went down my throat. I had to swallow them with a huge glass of water. We all waited aimlessly on the couch, watching TV; I must have asked Rory and Tyler a thousand time how long it would take to kick in. Yeah, I was that guy. The air was crisp and the screen door at Rory’s creaked louder and louder.

  We were watching Master Chef as the drugs started to kick in. I found myself amazed, watching a simple dish being cooked. My jaw felt like it had dropped down to the floor and I couldn’t stop laughing with excitement. The walls started to show images and I thought I was losing my mind. This isn’t reality; what is life? What’s the whole point to this? Everything felt so lucid and like a wonderland as we all realized we were each “tripping balls,” as the kids would say. After tripping for about an hour, we decided to go outside, and I remember walking down the street feeling like I was the only man on earth, or like I was an alien from outer space. We walked a mile to the woods, where there was a huge hill. We hiked up the whole hill like three men on a mission, having no clue why we were doing it. Finally, we arrived at the top; we had reached our destination. As I looked up at the stars, I could swear God was talking to me; He said something, but I couldn’t hear, and then I looked over at Tyler and Rory as they started to roll down the hill. I laughed and joined them; we rolled all the way to the bottom, cracking up.

  “Mushrooms are the shit,” we all laughed as we hit the bottom of the hill. This, of course, was the first of the many times that I did mushrooms.

  By the end of the summer, my mother knew that I was drinking and smoking, and she had a feeling that I was starting to explore other drugs. She tried her hardest to stop me, and told me that I needed to live with my family. That conversation still haunts me, as I can remember the scene so vividly. I arrived home one night, high out of my mind; I mean, my eyes looked like they were bleeding red.

  “Why are your eyes so red, Logan? Why are you doing this to yourself?”

  “Leave me alone, mom!”

  “You need to live with your father for discipline. I can’t stop you anymore.”

  “Fuck that. I’m not living with him.”

  “If you don’t, I’m kicking you out.”

  “Sounds great,” I replied, as I slammed the front door shut and drove to Rory’s house.

  I can’t imagine how long my mother cried after she watched her first son leaving. Rory accepted me, of course, and said that I could crash on his couch. I didn’t move completely into his house, but I never visited my mother; I would only stop by the house to get food while she was working. I left Jared alone as his relationship with Vanessa grew stronger; they were almost inseparable. He continued to do community service three days a week. My father tried calling me because my mother had told him what had happened, but I ignored his calls; I didn’t feel like getting lectured.

  Rory, Tyler, and I took a little trip one night. We were smoking at Rory’s house and taking shots, but we found ourselves bored. We decided to hop in my van and take a cruise. We had a bottle of vodka that we put in a bucket of ice under my seat. We rolled a blunt and lit up as I drove aimlessly.

  “Where the fuck are we?” Tyler asked. We all laughed as I saw a sign for a town; I had no clue where I was. Eventually, we found our way back to the neighboring town, North Reading.

  “Fuck, Rory, put the bottle away. Hide the weed,” I said, cursing again and throwing on my seatbelt. Blue lights were approaching us from behind and I pulled over, thinking this would be the time that I would lose my license. We had vodka on ice under my seat, weed in my glove compartment, and we were all, of course, drunk and high.

  “How are you, officer?” I asked.

  “Step out of the car, all of you.” There we were, the all-star team, sobered up instantly with two cops interrogating us. “Do you know why I stopped you?” asked the first.

  “Not sure, officer,” I replied.

  “Well, a couple reasons; It’s three in the morning and you’re driving and, second, you had no lights on while driving.”

  I’m such a fucking idiot, I thought, but quickly replied, “We all just got in a fight with our girlfriends, so we just wanted to take a drive to clear our heads. And also I’ve been having issues with the lights; I need to get them fixed.” There was a silence afterward, as I could feel my heart racing to the point where I thought I was going to have a heart attack, and my knees felt like they were going to collapse from the anxiety.

  The officer replied, “Well, leave your car in the parking lot. We are going to take you to the station and have your parents pick you up.”

  I left my van in the parking lot as the police took us to the station in their squad car. I guess I couldn’t complain becau
se they never searched my car, but I still had a bottle of vodka sitting in there under the seat, and weed in the glove compartment; I needed to get that out of there before they found it.

  We arrived at the station; it was the first time I had ever been there and we were so high and drunk that I don’t know why the cops didn’t arrest us. They stood right behind Rory as he called his parents; his mom picked up, yelling at him, but said that she’d take him home anyway. Tyler’s parents were out and he needed to get a ride from Rory’s mom. I was next; I dialed the phone as I could feel the heat of the cop behind me. I thought my mother was going to kill me; I had left her house and now was calling from a police station—she didn’t need this shit. First ring, she picked up, and I hung it up quickly, prompting the officer to ask what had happened.

  “Call again,” he said, as I swallowed my tongue and dialed a fake number.

  “No answer, officer,” I said.

  “Dial one more time and put it on speaker phone,” he said. I could feel my face flush and my heart sped up like I had just run an hour-long marathon.

  Here goes nothing, I thought as I dialed my mom’s number for real. No answer, thank God. I got a ride home with Rory’s mom and crashed on their couch that night, but all I could think about was how I would get my van.

  First thing the next morning I said, “Rory, wake up! We need to take your mom’s car to get my van.”

  We slowly started his mom’s car at six a.m., knowing that she wouldn’t wake up until around eight. We drove to the parking lot where my car was, thankfully, still parked. I jumped in it right away and took off, driving to Rory’s house. We had made it back just before his mother woke up. I was hoping the cops wouldn’t realize the next day that my van was moved. The cops, however, never called or showed up; I couldn’t believe that I had gotten away again. I should probably have lost my license by now, but my mother never found out. Of course, what goes around comes around. I was not sure if I had believed in karma before, but a week later, I would start to believe in it.

  •••

  Summer was coming to an end soon, but, honestly, it didn’t even matter because I wasn’t returning to school and I was working as a cashier at the convenience store. I could get high and ring people’s items up all the time. Plus, the store I worked for sold beer, so I would grab a six-pack and a pack of cigarettes every night and just leave the money in the drawer. Of course, there were cameras, but I had been doing this throughout the summer and had yet to be caught. I would also scratch tickets and “forget” to count them when I totaled up the day’s lottery sales. I was a degenerate when it came to scratching those tickets.

  My buddies would come into the store some nights when I was working. Of course, we were only seventeen, but I would sell them alcohol anyway. I’m surprised that the store didn’t get shut down; there must have been kids who looked like babies walking out with thirty-packs of beer. I even sold beer to my younger cousin who was sixteen and lived in the town. Her girlfriends would come in and buy alcohol, their friends would come in; I would sell to anyone—what did I care?

  Like they say, bad things come in threes, and they sure did for me. I arrived at work for my shift, and my manager was there. He looked at me, concerned and nervous.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  He replied seriously, “We need to talk.”

  I played it off cool, knowing that he had probably found out everything.

  “You know the cameras haven’t been working, so I don’t know what else you have been doing, but I totaled up the quarter in lottery sales and we were short over one thousand dollars, unaccounted for. The beer and cigarettes have been off track, too. Listen, I’m not sure what you’re doing, and I think you’re a good kid, but I have to let you go.”

  I thought, thank God, I probably could have been arrested or sued. I shook his hand and casually hopped back in my van. It had been a shitty job anyway, I thought as I pulled out. The only problem was that I needed money for my usual alcohol, weed, and gas, plus money for munchies. I’ll figure something out later.

  I went over to Rory’s to smoke a blunt. I decided that I wanted to drive around our town and get high, fish-bowling my van. After smoking most of the blunt, we realized that we were in the middle of downtown North Andover, with my car completely filled with smoke from weed. Blue lights flashed, and I was pulled over with a blunt still burning in the ashtray. How the hell am I going to get away with this one? I wondered.

  The officer approached casually, and as I rolled my window down, smoke poured into his face. No fucking way; it was the officer from school who hated me.

  “Finally,” he said as he took me out of the car and searched me from head to toe right on the side of the street. I was so embarrassed; I looked like a bum, wearing sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled over my head. It was like I was on an episode of Cops.

  He then proceeded to rip my car apart, more than he needed to. He found the blunt burning in the ashtray and smiled. He loved to see me struggling. He took me into his police car, but not the back seat—the front seat.

  He turned toward me and said: “Listen, maybe we can make a deal.”

  I looked him in the eyes as he stared back into my bloodshot ones; I couldn’t believe this was happening. I was so high, and I was sitting in the front seat with a cop.

  “If you tell me who is supplying the marijuana to the high school, I will let you go and won’t even send you to court,” he said. Maybe this would have worked on a wimp, but I replied differently.

  “No clue, officer; I can’t help you.”

  He replied, “Okay, then I will see you in court for possession.” He took my weed and followed me home; of course, I was kicked out of Rory’s, so I had to go to my mom’s house. Not only did this cop know where I lived now, but he had also forced me to go inside and see my mother.

  My mom was fortunately the most forgiving person. She hugged me and told me that she loved me. I loved her so much deep down inside, and it was just that I was depressed with my own life at this time. I couldn’t give her any love because I had no love in my heart—only anger and hate.

  I was arraigned and had a hearing in two weeks, and I was dreading it. I drove with Rory to the Lawrence District Court. It was filled with criminals and punks like me, but for some reason I knew that I was more than what I had become. I don’t belong here, I thought as I saw kids with gang tattoos, and other people who looked really rough.

  “Logan Michaels,” my name was called. My heart was racing as I stood up with my lawyer. He was a family lawyer; he knew my mother’s brother pretty well and was doing us a favor by defending me. He told me to just plead guilty, promising that he would take care of the rest.

  “How do you plead, Mr. Michaels?”

  “Guilty, your honor.”

  My lawyer then made his statement: “Your honor, my client is recently undergoing his parents’ divorce, and this is his first time being arrested.” The judge gave me a break and fined me two hundred dollars. That was it? I had gotten off easy compared to other kids; maybe the judge could tell that I was a good kid? I shook my lawyer’s hand and left the court. I never wanted to go back to that place; it was very depressing and gave me anxiety.

  The second time that I did mushrooms must have been two weeks after my court hearing. I was feeling kind of sad because school had started and I didn’t go anymore. One night, Rory, Tyler, and I met up with a couple of buddies who had also dropped out, and we all went to a high school hockey game. We started to pregame at another kid’s house whose parents were gone. He had almost a pound of mushrooms that he was trying to sell. We bought a bag off him and took the drugs right before we drove to the game. Driving on mushrooms was one of the funniest experiences. I didn’t care what happened to me anymore. We had all jumped in my van and I started to drive; I felt like I was in a video game while driving down the street. We arrived at the game as we were tripping our asses off, walking into the crowd of people I hadn’t
seen all summer.

  I felt so alien when I walked in, like everyone was staring at me. The game was starting and everyone stood up for the Pledge of Allegiance. We all sat there in the corner with our hoodies pulled over our heads. Everyone must have known we were on something; we were the only five guys sitting in the whole crowd.

  Halfway through the game, Rory tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Follow me.” He walked quietly into the hallway and then into the other team’s locker room. It was quiet and no one was in there. He rifled through the other team’s wallets and bags, stealing about one hundred bucks. It was a crazy rush as we ran outside, called the guys, and took off. We laughed as we drove off with the stolen money.

  In celebration of that, we called up a couple of girls who were always up for sex and, for old time’s sake, we had a party at the abandoned house we used to go to. What did we do with the money? I’ll break it down:

  $35 for a bag of mushrooms

  $30 for a handle of vodka and chasers

  $20 for a gram of marijuana

  $15 for snacks

  Knowing that it wasn’t our money made everything so much better. We rolled a blunt and took more mushrooms before the girls arrived. We took shots until we were fucked up. The night was amazing; we were tripping, high, and drunk, having a blast. We all got laid that night, too. Sex on mushrooms was unreal; it almost felt as though it wasn’t even happening, and the adrenaline was almost too much. The girls went home that night and we ended up passing out there on the floor. The morning arrived, pouring with rain and an awful hangover to go with it. It was dreadful out, and the after-affect from mushrooms was miserable; it would bring us back to reality.

  The reality was that I couldn’t picture myself ever getting out of this hole that I was in. I was heading for rock bottom and couldn’t stop myself; I was so depressed that I didn’t even want to wake up anymore.