“You see,” Josh settled into a bag of pumpkin seeds, “the East doesn’t really exist. Austin is almost already as far as it goes for us. San Luis is pushing it to the South. All those awkward jackassholes in New Jersey just seem so fuckin corny. I don’t know how else to put it. Theirs is the land of dorks.” The Other Washington was the only Eastern place they were willing to acknowledge. DC was okay. The scene there set off a firestorm of humorless, stageless hardcore acts that popped up across the country, where sometimes the stage was just the patch of floor where a band played, surrounded by all kinds of kids freaking politically. In these cases, instead of feeling like I was on their level, I always felt like I was looking down over the proceedings, watching the events unfold and therefore sanctifying it like witnessing a birth or a live sex act. Always overlooking. Always occurring underneath my gaze.
Josh and Knowles sat and debated the proper direction of the lucky horseshoe. One said it went like a U so that all the good luck would collect inside.
“But if it were the other way, luck would still collect in it,” the other one said.
“What do you mean?”
“Luck could come from below…”
He scoffed. “Good luck comes from Hell — ”
At the Black Bear Evangele had set up shop in the corner booth. He parked his cart in the aisle and the restaurant went down eight notches on the classiness scale. He laughed wildly to punctuate every casual remark but nothing was actually funny. He opened the small nondescript paperback book he had with him to reveal intense numerological calculations filling the margins, often obscuring the very words his figures were meant to expound upon. I heaved a giant sigh of relief: he was just a crazy fucker, a manic jackass and it wasn’t just me… Across his table were arranged, painstakingly in neat piles: three rolls of masking tape, two lighters, various ripped-in-half cigarettes, empty cigarette packages both foreign and domestic, multiple piles of two quarters, a banana, two jackets, newspapers, and some leaves. Evangele mind you, was up at the counter spinning around in his chair to the tune of “Oh Sherrie,” which he had playing on his boom box. If only the other guests knew he had infiltrated their little private club… his eyes raced to all of the sets of keys sitting on their tables next to plates of breakfast. His eyes stared at the keys for so long he saw them in his hands. All these people sitting there eating and talking didn’t even realize: he would be sitting comfortably in their Jacuzzi tubs with two redheads by dawn — of that he could be sure. He scribbled some lyrics on a receipt paper and passed it to a woman seated next to him. She slapped his face and stared hotly out the window… Shop dust has formed a protective coating on an old bucket of coffee on the floor of a 7-Eleven. The coffee is getting thicker and thicker, leathery and rare. Seth didn’t see me watching him like a lech as he climbed down a handful of stairs to the parking lot, his legs buckling out of starvation as he lowered his way down. I looked upon this fragile display lustily, and with perverted curiosity. I was drunk enough to fuck some way no two people had ever fucked before. Problem was, we couldn’t even stay awake, being out of our minds in the reek of DM syrup fumes, falling all over each other. I decided to take a nap in the bathtub. Sitting in the middle of all this steam I noticed pieces of flesh sloughing off in great grey sheets, plunging into sticky bathwater, each dissolving into a layer of ash on the surface of the anonymous liquid. Spelling ominous secrets.
Shortly before running away Kim brought home two puppies she bought out in front of the grocery store. They went nuts at our house and ate our stepdad’s slippers and peed on our paperwork from the county office. He sent them to a shelter where one was put to sleep and the other went to live with a woman in Eugene. The dead one was dying anyway, and had a series of shots to finish him up. Our stepdad was the head of our house mom like Jesus was the head of the church, “This is not a matter of dominance; it is a matter of love.” Kim danced in circles on the kitchen floor; she said, “I’ll play this song till I can’t take any more.” As for her friends Rick, Ronnie, Peetie — that whole other gang of slutty teenage hobo junkies — all those guys came from bad homes. They’d had enough and they ran away. They pissed off cops with their screw you attitude and fucked up bodies, got beat up too many times for being fuckup transient whores. They got holes in their throats from spewing bile in the general direction of city limits. Peetie had a patchy flat top and a tattoo that said JÅCKE OFF + DIE in block letters and wore the same brown t-shirt every day with the sleeves rolled all the way up. He used to look normal, his cheeks were filled out in well-fed youth, his teeth used to be straight, but several months on the road and all the drugs and stuff had made him totally skinny, leathery skinny. More like a cart horse that got whipped all day. At our foster house jars of half-formed houseplants sat along every horizontal surface. Some were just collections of sprigs of green threads — weeds really — in cups of water. How do they do that, grow a little plant in a cup of water? Orange roots twisted around in the murky glass. I thought I saw one twitch and send up a line of bubbles, but no… Other plants looking like paper mâché wings dipped in slime rested on pieces of cardboard on the floor. Those ones were actually rooted in dirt. Flat green flaps of shell on a stick. I’ll water it in a little bit and it will gurgle at me for more till all the mites living in its soil have scrambled up its stalk for safety. The safety of mites? Did I just care about that? Kim folded the cat’s ears back like felt-covered leaves. She was surprised how perfectly they seemed to fold into little compact darts. They look better this way, she said. She remembered folding her dog’s ears down and back so the skin side was showing. She used to say that it was his hairdo… “Wait a minute,” Kim said, sitting in her darkened bedroom with Rick in the afternoon, “Just cuz you bought me a video doesn’t mean I have to put out. Anyway, we’re friends.” She had just finished saying this when he snuck back up into her face and for a second she felt sure it was going to happen: First Contact. She bristled as he moved in for the kiss. Sharply she pulled away. “Fuck man, your breath smells like a taxidermist’s workbench — ”His face reminded her of many she had seen who came to Oregon to die. There was pathos in Rick. He was dark and squirrelly. Shy and eager to please, untrained and raw. Needful… Kim couldn’t get him to stop shifting around like a dog smoothing out a place to sleep. Problem was, sleep proved elusive those days. They would have to lessen their death-grip on speed/consciousness/life for that one…