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.