Cockeysville Ghosts Haunt Willow Street

I was turning my beat to shit Dodge Caravan on to Willow Street from Houcksville Road when I saw the ghost of Erin Primeaux. Not that Erin's dead. At least not that I know of. For all I know she's either been rotting under the dirt for the past ten years or laying beside her own private pool sipping gin and tonics or any of the limitless possibilities between the two. But for a second she possessed a little girl strutting down the street and made me wonder for a second whatever became of her and her younger brother Kurt.

The first time I met Kurt Primeaux I think I was eight years old and for some reason had been seated next to him in class that day. He was a wild eyed poorly dressed kid with a spider vein under his left eye and an attention span way too short for anything that might have been going on in class that day. He showed me his Wolverine trading cards and told me that if you hold one nostril when you sneeze it'll make snot spray out of the other one. He'd been trying to aim it so it would hit the teacher's shoe. We became friends due to our obsessions with Nirvana, Green Day and porn, or at least whatever porn we could find, being eight years old. In those days we were limited to what our Dads had poorly hidden or sometimes, just sometimes, you'd find an old water damaged copy of Cheri or Hustler under some leaves in the woods. It was like fucking Christmas. The next year me and my Dad moved to a different apartment and I ended up on the same bus as Kurt and a couple of the other "bad kids." The kids with parents that weren't really around and didn't have any money or clean clothes and didn't give a fuck. The kids that grew up surrounded with filth and negativity and divorced parents and had no future and knew it and wore it like a badge of pride. While I was always too much of a pussy to be one of the bad kids, I never had the money or clothes or manners to fit with the good ones. My fifth grade year I remember they started a "gifted" English program and put me in it. I failed out as quick as I could because I couldn't stand being in a room with these kids and their pressed clothes and pumpkin pie haircuts when I could be talking about tits or Beavis and Butthead with my friends in the dummy class. I smoked my first cigarette that year with this kid Eric that hung with us who was in my Boy Scout troop. We snuck off in the middle of the Boy Scout car wash and went to 7-11 to buy firecrackers when we found a Virginia Slim on someones doorstep and blowing the smoke out of my ten year old mouth after that first drag I felt like I was saying 'fuck you' to my Dad, my teachers, and all the well dressed and well fed uninteresting clones in my school along with the rest of the world.

Middle school rolled around and my little brother's family moved in to the same shitty row houses Kurt and his family lived in and I'd constantly spend the night at his house to have an excuse to hang out with Kurt and his friends. We'd stay up all hours watching skin-a-max movies and daring each other to call girls that were in the Student Directory or smoke cigarettes and play truth or dare in his older sister's room with a couple of the other neighborhood kids and feel like bad asses. His Dad was dying of cancer and his Mom was never really the disciplinary type so Kurt's house was always anything-goes. "Kurt, its time for bed!" "Fuck you, Mom!" Jesus Christ. You grow up fast when you're that young and you know your father isn't going to see you graduate high school. His mom used to just throw the hospital bills in the trash without opening them. Its not like payment was an option. Their neighborhood was infested with drugs and thugs and filth and while in the younger days he wasn't more than an acquaintance with any of it, as time passed he sunk further and further in until we eventually totally lost touch. I smoked my first blunt under the aqueduct with him, our friend Travis and a couple other guys when I was thirteen, but with the short leash my Dad kept me on at that age I couldn't let it go past that even if I wanted it to. Eventually in eighth grade Kurt got expelled for punching a teacher in the face and I totally lost track of him. The teacher had tried to intervene in a fight and Kurt knocked him flat on his middle-aged ass at the ripe tough age of thirteen.

Kurt ended up never going back to school after that. The next time I saw him was at his father's viewing and while everyone was standing around in suits mourning or laughing about old stories or offering condolences Kurt was in his usual thug gear in the parking lot with some friends getting ready to fight some assholes that had just drove by in a car and yelled something disrespectful and he wanted to know, was I in? It was like he wasn't even aware that his father was laying in a box just a couple hundred feet away. The next time I saw him me and my friend James were walking to his house when we ran into Kurt and a couple of his dope head friends by the old aqueduct. He was begging me to buy a dime bag of pot because he owed this dealer money and the guy was going to kill him later in the afternoon if he didn't give it up. I quickly threw him a ten and took the bag back to my friend's house only to open it and see what looked like oregano and Italian seasoning. Fuck it, I was buying it more for Kurt than for me anyway.

I only saw him one more time after, it was by the old aqueduct sometime in tenth grade shortly before I moved to Carroll County. He was rail thin and asked in a quavering voice if I "wanted to buy anything." I could tell by the look in his yellowy pinned eyes he had no idea who I was and I just pretended like I didn't recognize him and kept walking. At that point, whats the point in conversation? The last word I got about him and his family was that they were living behind this hotel in Cockeysville and his sister Erin had HIV. I don't know how true any of it is but I wasn't really surprised, in fact I think I was more surprised to know both of them were still alive. Me, I prefer to remember them like we were the summer after sixth grade when they both came with me and my little brother to my grandparent's trailer near Ocean City for a week. For a short week they forgot about their Dad's cancerous cells, the hospital bills, the eviction notices, and all the shit and filth in their neighborhood and under the bright boardwalk lights on a clear night got to kid themselves into thinking they actually had a chance. I'll think about it every time I drive past that little girl on Willow Street.

I Was a 9th Grade Pussy

We were ushered into the auditorium like cattle to see some motivational speaker tell his story about how some fucker drove an 18 wheeler through his house and ran over his wife and all kinds of other over dramatic inspirational horseshit, but it was getting me out of gym class so I was all about it. I reached down to my backpack to find something to focus my attention on other than the Matt Foley-esque action on the stage, and there it was- a fresh glob of spit and snot all over the gigantic Misfits logo I had drawn at the top of my backpack. This would not stand. I had painstakingly drawn the Crimson Ghost out with a Sharpie then filled it in with a WhiteOut pen to proudly display my Misfits fandom, and some dickless fucker had to hock a loogie right on it. Jesus Christ. Instantly voices erupted "Oh shit, Wetzel spit on your backpack!" "Stearns is gonna beat his fucking ass!" "Yeah, with his big fuckin boots!" Well, half that was true. I did have big fucking boots. I refused to leave the house in anything other than these giant Ronald McDonald combat boots that thoroughly ensured I wouldn't get laid throughout the duration of high school. Ah, hindsight. At the time I was convinced it was all true and temporarily forgot that I only weighed about a hundred and forty pounds had never beaten anything other than my cock to the "My Sister Dresses Too Trashy" episodes of Jenny Jones after school. Plus everyone around me assured I'd be ok and that they had my back and we were going to effectively tear this jock prick a new asshole.

We piled out of the auditorium about an hour later and I instantly went in for the kill and totally fucking lost all nerve. Fucker was like 6'3 and built like Van Damme in Bloodsport, whereas I hadn't yet learned to shave and was built like a half gallon of ice cream with pants on. And of course everyone that said they'd back me up had fled to the back of the crowd and was anxiously awaiting seeing this guy pound me to a pile of raw burger. All I managed to muster out was a quavering "Why'd you spit on my backpack?" as he yelled "Come on you fucking pussy" over and over again in my face till a teacher approached and I let out a sigh of relief that my face would not be rearranged and got the fuck out of there with my tail between my legs muttering about the various disgusting ways I was definitely going to kill him later in the week.

Lunch time rolled around and me and my table full of fellow pussies and dorks and punk rockers (and for some reason a huge tough as shit looking black kid named Andre who barely spoke) were all discussing the previous excitement when Wetzel strolled up with his army of jocks and proceeded to taunt me and give me shit and throw food while my friend handed me a huge hunting knife under the table. I wasn't quite ready for that yet. I handed it back and stared at the floor and waited for them to saunter back to their table and spent the rest of the day playing out various scenarios in my head of me rushing over with an assault rifle and sending that whole table full of Adidas and Abercrombie straight to hell. Fuckers.

The next morning I was waiting around outside the school alone when two guys strolled up that I had never met before. The one said "Wetzel's gonna kick your ass today" and the other spit a giant snotball right on the front of my hoodie while I just stood there like a hot dog turd on a cold day. I stuffed my hoodie into my locker then went back outside and met up with my friends Jim and James. I told them what happened and James opened up the wierd circular thing on his necklace to reveal a razor and asked me who it was. I couldn't remember and was kinda glad. Jesus Christ. People in that school were fucking nuts. Later in the year another kid would try to slit another kids throat in the cafeteria with a torn Coke can over drug money. James was on his third year as a Freshman and would later be expelled for repeatedly sexually harassing a teacher. Three months later he had his GED and the next fall enrolled in community college. Fucker managed to totally bypass high school. I went out back to smoke a cigarette by the track and was approached once again but some kid I didn't know. Fuck, not again. "I hear you're gonna stab John Wetzel," he said as he quickly walked toward me with no sign of slowing. "No, man..." I didn't get a chance to finish when he grabbed me and threw me into the fence and said "What the fuck did you say it for then?" and started slapping me in the face repeatedly telling me I was fucked. And I was. There wasn't much I could do, the people out there I knew knew better than to get involved and the guy slapping me around like a housewife on Cops had his whole crew out there of guys that looked like they'd love nothing more than to remove my colon through my asshole the second I did anything in my own defense. He left after a minute or two and I strolled up to my friends embarrassed and terrified. Someone packed a bowl and they handed it to me and said "Yeah, if he's after you, you're pretty much dead." Luckily this was before I discovered Youth of Today and fully embraced straightedge, so I happily puffed away and tried for the life of me to think of some way out of this horrible horrible situation. I imagined dozens of lacrosse players taking turns curbing me outside while my parents look on in horror and confusion. I went in to homeroom with my head down and did my best to think of anything but my impending death.

The mood had lightened a little by lunch as James had once again brought a dozen donuts he had stolen from his job at Krispy Kreme and was reading us out loud pages from a gay porn mag he'd found in the woods. Soon enough a teacher came over, took the pages, instantly saw the images of dudes on all fours getting stuffed with pastrami like a Subway cold cut and escorted James to the office. Fucking James. I insantly reverted back to being mortally terrified as this was, after all, the cafeteria. The perfect place for these guys to make their move and thoroughly kill me in front of the entire student body. The girl I had spent most of the semester staring at on the butterfly machine in the weight room during gym would never know the extent of my affection. I'd never get to finish learning the solo to Master of Puppets. I would never eat another Whopper from Burger King and then piss on the floor in the bathroom. Fuck me. Suddenly out of no where Andre opened his mough for the like maybe the fourth time in the six months he'd been sitting with us. "Man, ain't nobody gonna beatcha up man. You be aight, man don't worry 'bout it man," Then he got up and walked over to the table full of hardass black kids from the city and I saw him talking to them and point over at Wetzl's table. The whole table got up and walked over, and I dont' know what was said, but I didn't hear another word out of Wetzl till like three weeks later he told me his brother was a probation officer and supposedly four girls in the freshman class had HIV so I should wrap it up. I thanked him for the info, though it was pretty unhelpful to me, and went back to lacing up my gym shoes hoping I could find something to do in the weightroom close to the butterfly machine.

Colt 45 Behind the Old High School or Assembling Random Phrases Into Some Form of Narrative

No thanks to the guidance counselor, I learned to camouflage feelings and be forever guided by the things I hate. It wasn’t a bad way to live. The only down side was dealing with people on a constant basis and having to give the impression that I could relate on some level and all the while only being able to afford a meal plan of essentially soup, day in and day out. After a while I couldn’t tell which was the bigger problem, soup or man.

I was sitting against the wall around back of the old high school sipping on Colt 45 pondering how things ended up this way- I mean going from primordial soup to four dollars for a Big Mac all in only a matter of a couple hundred million years or so. What the fuck? A voice broke my staring contest with the sidewalk asking if I had a light and I looked up to see a girl in jeans so tight it looked like her legs were spray painted black and a T-shirt that read “BLUNTS, BROADS, AND BEATS.” Well, now this was some severe external stimulus. A total fucking rarity in this town. I finally managed to stammer out a “yeah…” and handed her the half dead Bic I had borrowed permanently from my stepmom a few hours earlier and she lit up a joint the size of a Sharpie, smiled and sat down. “God, fuck summer school…” she sighed through a thick cloud of smoke and passed it over to me. (She was in summer school?!?!?! What the fuck?!?!?) I asked “What’s in this?” took a couple pulls and handed it back. “I think it’s called Moody Cheegon.” Who the fuck ever heard of moody cheegon? This girl was full of surprises, but what else could you expect from a 16 year old with a necklace that said Menstrual Steak? Within a couple hours we were in my room red eyed and grinning discussing what makes up the anatomy of a pop song and how in her world Jesus drives a red sports car. She was somehow all the things I loved about myself with none of the things I hated, almost as if she was the greatest hits and I was the full discography complete with filler tracks and the shitty reunion album no one ever likes.

Eventually we hopped in her car she said she won in a sucker bet from her ex boyfriend to see who could shoplift the most whipped cream in a 6 hour period. “We hit every corner drug store in that fucking city. Lucky for me I had a purse the size of Kentucky. Fuckers didn’t know what hit’em. I’m pretty sure they still hate us in New York.” Her and her mom were now living in a trailer a mile or two outside of town and she said her mom was strung out on barbiturates and liquor and had over time pawned everything they owned except for a microwave that barely worked and a shitty old radio you had to slap every five minutes to keep a tape playing. Well, all that and a bag of chips that looked like it had been sitting out since the Reagan administration. There were more creatures calling that decomposing pile of sodium and starch home than there were people in the next three towns combined. Fuck. We sat up most of the night killing a fifth of Old Crow and a pack of smokes she said she lifted off some old drunk that tried to pick her up one night outside of Jiffy Mart and smoking some weird Turkish blend of hash she had brought back from New York or wherever she was before she stumbled into my universe behind the old high school. I told her I could get her a job at the store I was working at and get her started on her own and put her up at my place but she shrugged it off with some bullshit about how sexual tension inflames a career, whatever that means. Fuck, it was worth a shot.

She dropped me off around dawn and I went back a day or two later to find the trailer empty with the door open and no trace of her or the car or the moldy bag of chips or moody cheegon or the fucked up old radio or anything. Last I heard her mom had bailed with some pimp that operated out of a row house on Pennsylvania Ave and she had hit the road in her ex boyfriend’s old car and was waitressing in a Waffle House in some other time zone. I grabbed another Colt 45 and hit my usual spot behind the old high school and engaged my friend the sidewalk in another staring contest think session. It’s not like there was anything else to do and after all, there was still another couple hours of daylight left.

Its Just Biology

She said "You're really cute" then leaned in and shoved her tongue in my mouth. "Well," I thought, "This doesn't happen every day." Her mouth tasted like hell, but that's where I'd always been told I was going anyway so I figured I'd dive in and burn a while to see what eternity had in store for me. I moved my mouth to her neck and she turned her head and let out a moan while I slid my hand up the seam of her jeans as if it were the Israelites looking for the Promised Land. A guy could get used to this. Though its probably best not to. Nights like this can fill a man's head with hope and gladness, and all hope and gladness have ever brought me are lonely nights and hungover mornings. Hope can kill a man faster than bullets. She fucked like a 9 to 5er takes their morning coffee- quick, easy, routine. About as exciting as a traffic jam in the rain. After various triumphs, failures and embarrassments we sat on my bed naked smoking cigarrettes and I fought the awkwardness by talking too much about things that were probably somewhat less than interesting. She eventually got her shit together and rolled out. I packed up the bong, chalked it up, took it down, held for about 8 seconds, exhaled and made peace with the night.

Fucked Up, Vincent Black Shadow, Deep Sleep and Surroundings at the Talking Head

I finally made it out of work at around 4:25 or so. It was supposed be four, but one thing led to another and I ended up stuck there late, as is per usual for a Thursday, so I was already in a shitty mood and the day wasn't even half over. I hit Jiffy Lube on the way home since a 45 minute drive to Baltimore was in the works and my car had been sounding more and more like a dying calf as the weeks went on, but eight cars in front of me and the thoughts of dealing with the guy that writes down your info, the people in the waiting room, the guy that tells you what they did to the car and the guy that takes your money was a bit much for me so I chalked one up for laziness and turned around and got the hell out of there. No fucking way. I get home in time for a quick Active Sac practice then run out for a sub, practically swallow it whole, throw the bass and head into the car and roll out. It was a little after 8. We were already supposed to be there by then so I hauled ass down 695 while my half chewed Subway Big Philly Cheesesteak tore at the walls of my stomach as if it were the final act of revenge from a poorly made and overpriced meal. This wasn't an uncommon feeling, but indigestion takes on new meaning when speeding down a crowded highway. There's no way out. You're fucked till you reach you're destination and on top of cursing yourself for the burning hell you just paid $7.99 plus tax for you have to deal with slow drivers, cops, shitty bumper stickers and badly written directions you scrawled in half-words and symbols that you don't remember the meaning of while trying to maintain a conversation with your passengers. Fuck. I finally get there and carry the shit in, go through nine or ten "Hey, how've you been, whats new, not much" conversations and finally get a chance to relax for the first time since 7 am and drink a beer and take it all in without too much interference. Surroundings hit the stage around 9:30 or so and blast through a tight set. I think that was the first time I've seen them since the Spark played with them like 4 or 5 years ago. Solid. They played around twenty minutes or so and then it was time for Deep Sleep so I got my shit together and set up. We hadn't played or practiced since a show at my house a month or so earlier when Darick fucked his shoulder up but the set went over pretty good with no major malfunctions or further injuries so we were all pretty stoked. I stepped out for a minute or two for a quick smoke and said hello to some people I had seen in a while then made it back a minute or two into Vincent Black Shadow's set. The more I see that band the more their songs catch my ear and though I wasn't really into'em before I like it more every time. They were rock solid tight and kinda remind me of Mudhoney a lot. By now the free Pabst tall cans I had gotten with drink tickets were starting to take their toll and my attention was straying to the ridiculous amount of insanely hot girls running around the place. Jesus God Almighty. Fucked Up rolled on next probably around 11:30/midnight-ish and once again, I never really gave a shit about them before but their set won me over. Of course, it also makes a difference when you get to see a band in a venue where you can hear all the instruments. Thick as hell with a solid rhythm section, pounding yet catchy songs and a very entertaining frontman who made his way at one point all the way to the back to sit at the bar without missing a beat once. I traded Jonah from the band a Head Home 12" for the new Fucked Up LP, loaded out and made my way back to the hideous cop infested streets of Westminster. Ugh. Despite seeing more cops on one stretch highway in Westminster than I did in all of Baltimore, we made it home without incident and were soon all safe in our beds with dreams of workdays and hangovers to come. Another successful night.