June 2009

She puts her head on my shoulder and I think I smell ketoacidosis on her breath. I’ve been listening to this chick brag to me for, like, the past hour about her acid trips and methamphetamine abuse during the good ‘ol days back in rural Wisconsin, and she’s got this valorous tenor in her voice like she’s telling me heroic war stories or something, and while she drones on and on in nostalgic detail about those wild experiences, I’m massaging her hands and counting the minutes until her ecstasy wears off. As she slackens her posture and leans a bit more heavily against my body — and this might be the first time anyone has ever mentioned V– and “heavily” in the same sentence — I smell that same syrupy odor on her breath again and try to divert my olfactory attention to the more well-balenced, oaky aroma of Marlboro Lights emanating from her jacket, and this whole time I’m wringing my brain trying to decide whether I should ask her to grab a condom or a diabetes test.

We have the house to ourselves because E–’s daytime acid trip is over, so he and M– took some molly and sashayed down the street to a park they’ve never visited. It’s M–’s first time on ecstasy, and since her limerence for E– isn’t quite as tenuous as her commitment to their relationship, I imagine they’re “on-again” tonight and she’s professing her life and her love to him as she giggles in the grass, rhapsodizing syrupy bromides about how the little green Casanovas are caressing the peach fuzz on her shoulders, or something, while he’s stoically enjoying his high, smirking, because he knows he’s won her over, again. Another one of his premeditated mistakes gone right, I guess.

As a flash-flood of envy washes away my capacity to find joy in knowing my friends are elated with one-another, I grab V– tighter — she doesn’t react — and in the amorous gesture, try and squeeze out some of that nostalgia for myself. For better and for worse, everyone deserves to fall in love at least once.

Besides the intoxicating pairing of techno music, blacklights, and glow sticks, I’m sober tonight, although I vividly remember a time when taking a hit of weed wasn’t in my domain of temperance. I’ve been living with these people, my friends, for half-a-year, and after riding this garbage disposal like it’s a carousel, I’m fed up. I feel like I’m the biggest larvae in a stagnant gutter-puddle, and maybe one day I could be a bigger fish, if only my habitat wasn’t so irrelevant and fleeting. Saying this kinda shit is the exact reason why E– and M– give me shit for being judgemental, but I’m just fronting this smug attitude because it helps me avert my focus from the more troubling aspects of living here, like how depressing it really is to watch five friends passively killing themselves and living in the attempt.

“What fucking day of the week is it, anyway?”

I breathe out deeply and don’t reply, but it’s Wednesday night. V– has slumped down further on my shoulder, so I decide to change my position and spoon her on the couch. Our unified motion into the spoon is so bored that it’s almost graceful, like a ballerina’s effortless arms swiping the air without a sound. Boredom makes sense; why the hell else would you so regularly try and burn cigarette holes in your brain? Draping my arm over her frail body, I’m amused by how kinesthetically similar this position is to the one I was in earlier this evening while I tended to Scott, my arms embraced around his chest as I pulled him to his favorite side of the bed while his legs uselessly fibrillated during a muscle spasm.

Existentially, I am sympathetic about the issues that ostensibly cause my friends to act this way. It is very important to E– that I understand that he and his friends are suffering as badly as anyone else in pain in their own, veritable way. Yeah, yeah, I get it, I see his point: one’s suffering from any corporeal malady, from drug abuse to quadriplegia, is ultimately located somewhere in everyone’s brains. The body breaks, but pain is a state of mind. So to that extent, E–, troubled genius that he is, is right: who am I to compare the magnitude of anyone’s suffering? Someone needs to set high standards for blunt-rolling, might as well be a white kid from the hills who’s too sad to do anything else.

But if I’m really honest with myself, it’s hard for me to maintain an impartial sense of empathy for the fungibility of pain. Sure, like every other American kid born to clean-your-plate baby boomers with class guilt, I’m also tired of being reminded about the starving kids in Africa and all that — if only the hardship we’ve endured from our obnoxious parents was as charasmatically awful in the world’s eye. Yet the truth is that for many of us, it really just ain’t as bad. Three nights per week, my part-time job with Scott reminds me that people like him or those starving kids have too many problems they’re born with to seek out new ones to cripple them further. Necessity isn’t the mother of invention; it’s the mother of pulling your head out of your ass. When I get home after changing Scott’s catheter, I can find things to be thankful for, things to divert my attention away from my depressions and insecurities. After all, it’s pretty nice to be able to wank myself to sleep instead of “vigorously cleaning” my junk to avoid septic infections.

As we lie in this facile embrace, I’m insecure about whether or not our spooning is a nuisance to V–, and since it doesn’t seem like she cares one way or another, I abruptly pull my arm out from under her neck.

She screams. “Owe! What the fuck?”

The friction from the skin on my arm sliding past her neck somehow torqued her head down and pinned her eyelid open against the cushion, causing her eyeball to rub against the couch. Oh shit, are you OK? I ask her. My surprise, at least, is earnest. I feel kind-of embarrassed, but this is also the most intimate moment we’ve shared all night, maybe ever, and for that it’s meaningful to me — although maybe we should see how I’d sing if the whole “eye for an eye thing” were taken literally right now. As she rubs her eye, it seems like the injury provides a unifying metaphor for the night, like her pain is the banality of our suffering manifest. And the suffering from all that denial, escapism, addiction, and sexual frustration that we’ve all been feeling all these months is infused into V–’s torn cornea while I faux-trip out on this symbolism to the familiar soundtrack of ambient bong rips.

“I wish I had another cigarette.”

I find a pack on the coffee table and hand her one. After she walks outside looking aggravated, I think that maybe an ice pack would have been a slightly more appropriate donation. In the most general sense, I’d still rather be getting laid, but the rest of my body that lugs my penis around all day long is actually having something like a catharsis from the whole eye-pain incident, even if it was the ultimate auto-cock-block. As V– lights her cigarette and fulfills her most recent wish, I stay inside on the couch and think back to the last time that I ever wished.

In 8th grade, I walked to school every day alone, learning everything there was to learn about my shoes. I only glanced up if I noticed CF– out of the top of my eye frisking to class thirty paces ahead of me in her tiny Daisy Dukes. She was all those things that girls who occupy young men’s daydreams are supposed to be: beautiful, fun, popular, and sprouting a post-pubescent pair of ideally shaped sweater puppies like the ones they show you during the “women’s maturing bodies” section of sex-ed class.

Every time I saw her on the way to school, I drafted the same escalating set of wishes about middle school social eminence. First I’d wish that CF– would be my friend, and that I’d have lots of friends. As I fantasized about the particulars of my social ascent, I’d wish that everyone would just give me a chance to show what a great friend I would be, and if this wish was granted, then I’d never wish again.

One spring morning I headed to school a bit early for a change, which positioned me several paces ahead of CF– for the first time. She caught up with me, and for the first time ever, we walked to school together. Who knows what we talked about, but I guess it was engaging enough to secure an invitation to party with her and her friends that evening. Of course, I didn’t realize that to pretty 8th grade girls, the usage of “party” as a verb with which to do with an invitee like me really means that she and her friends would come over to my house and drink my mom’s only crusty bottle of god-knows-what while she was out.

Partying with CF– and her friends was great! We climbed onto my roof and I drank for the first time. One of CF–’s friends even exclaimed, verbatim, that I was pretty cool; the paramount mark of wish-granting achievement. And from then on, it seems, I had friends. You can bet that I was also early to class for the rest of the year.

I glance outside and V- has just started a second cigarette. I thank whoever I used to wish to that I don’t share her predilection for nicotine. She takes a drag and exhales fully, and for the first time since she asked about the weekday, so do I, but this time without the smugness. I feel ashamed, because even now, nine years of that Daisy Dukes’ waistband sneaking up ever-higher and ever-deeper into CF–’s ever-maturing hips since my last wish, I still feel fortunate to have any friends to criticize at all.

Deep down sometimes I worry that I’m going to turn into one of those semi-depraved people who needs Scott or these friends to validate my own efforts in life. Maybe deep down I’m grateful for all the flaws in the world, each one an opportunity to juxtapose my own life against something tangibly much uglier.

Usually when someone starts effusing that sort of fear, the easy reproach is to reassure them that no, they won’t turn into one of those sorts of people; those people are semi-depraved, YOU aren’t semi-depraved! But maybe that’s not right. Maybe, actually, being one of those people isn’t so depraved. Everyone needs external validation, right? If it’s not my place to judge amphetamine abuse, is it anyone’s place to judge what people get out of their relationships, no matter how semi-depraved the nature of the codependence appears to outside observers? In spite of my apparently taxometric analysis of my friends’ flaws, It is very important to me that deep down, my thankfulness, that fundamental unit of our kinship, shines through all my superficial judgments. Yet somehow I doubt whether that was supposed to be the take-home message from elementary school about what a 'true friend' really is.

V- comes back inside and after settling back into my arms, all indiscretions forgiven, I make my move. She politely kisses me back, but I can tell that there is nothing there past that disconcertingly syrupy flavor on her lips.

Published on June 17, 2009 in Other