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.
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