Amen.
On the bus back to Wichita something in me clicked. I experienced the mind-numbing madness of depression for the first time in my life. And later that night, after getting home and telling my parents how great the trip had been, I crawled up into my bed and pulled the covers over my head, prayer-less, and fell asleep. It was a conscious decision I made, not praying, not even going through the motions. I just didn’t feel like doing it anymore, not even for the souls of the living. I didn’t feel like doing anything. But I couldn’t stop thinking about things. As I lay there, all cocooned in my bedspread, I couldn’t stop, my mind reeling through thousands of memories, thoughts, questions and questions and questions, all rapid-fire and all at once. God? God? Are you there, God? Are you listening?
Racist Bill
My buddies used to buy weed from a guy who had a Confederate flag draped across the wall in his living room and a stuffed monkey hanging from a noose in his entryway. They called him Racist Bill. He wore tank tops and cowboy boots and spit his tobacco spit into empty Bud Light cans. I personally never met Bill, but I listened to their stories with quite a bit of interest, especially the one about the time they took our friend A. J. over to buy some weed. A.J. was six feet five inches tall, about three hundred pounds, and he happened to be half-black, too. Bill wasn’t so big and bad anymore, with A.J. around. He took him into his home without a word. In fact, he laughed when A.J. made fun of some of the items he saw laying around his house. What the fuck is that? Ah — man, why would you want to hang a monkey? What do you have against monkeys?
Bill shrugged, face red, a bit of nervous laughter, and said, Guess I just thought it was funny.
The Yak-Yak Girl
This girl I knew in eighth grade had the hugest crush on me and wouldn’t stop talking to me whenever I saw her. Sounds nice, but it was actually a big problem for me. I was unapologetically in love with her best friend, who wasn’t in love with me, and I made no bones about it. This Yak-Yak Girl’s enthusiasm really pissed me off. She’d come up to me in the morning near the vending machines, and in the halls during passing period, and outside near the busses at the end of the school day, suffocating me with her I ❤ U sign language and bear hugs. It was like being waterboarded. Not to be a dick, but I wasn’t that into her. Every single place I went—poof—she’d be there too. She’d just come along and start talking about the stupidest shit, messing with my musical tastes and personal flavor. She’d yak-yak my fucking ears straight off if I let her.
And then my birthday came. I had to invite this yak-yak girl, otherwise the girl I liked wouldn’t come. At my party she tried to kiss me. I pushed her away and said: Eww. I don’t want you. I want her, and I pointed a finger toward the girl of my immediate obsessions, who happened to be right there, standing in my best friend’s backyard, sneaking a cigarette. And the girl I wanted, the one who I was painfully in love with, she gave me what I thought I needed — out of pity. We made out for a good twenty minutes, and the whole time, I thought: I love you, I love you, I love you. But I could hear the Yak-Yak Girl crying during all of this, one of my friends over with her on the porch trying to tell her it just wasn’t meant to be, you know. When it was all said and done and the night was over, I started crying, too. I lay there, on the floor, drunk and alone, my eyes stinging, cheeks red, thinking out loud in the hoarsest of whispers: Next year we’ll all be in high school. This kind of shit happens all the time in high school. These are the moments that lives are made of.
Songs by Tori Amos (in no particular order)
“Putting the Damage On”
“Silent all these Years”
“Winter”
“Cornflake Girl”
“Pretty Good Year”
“Mr. Zebra”
“Icicle”
“Crucify”
“Little Earthquakes”
“Leather”
~ ~ ~
Rich Kids
A few years after high school, this rich kid I knew got really fucked up, started looking like a clone of himself, only thirty years older and dead in the eyes. Meth. Turns out he did some time in jail. Like I said, he was rich, but apparently, even though he was back living at home, mommy and daddy had cut him off financially and he found himself out of dope one night when they were out of the country on vacation. Out of money, too, and probably going through the first throngs of withdrawal. So he tried to find a way around that. Instead of doing what my brother did and stealing from his own family, he did the respectable thing. He decided he’d call in a pizza. Pepperoni, cheese, supreme, doesn’t matter — he didn’t give a shit about the pizza.
When the pizza delivery guy got to his front door, this rich kid, he pulled one of his daddy’s guns on the poor man, robbed him blind. Surely didn’t make off with much. But the kicker, the thing that gets me going is, he went and got the drugs and then returned to the scene of the crime to do them. So when the cops came banging on the door of his parent’s mansion, he thought he’d just be able to talk his way out of it. It’s that poor immigrant’s word over mine, he probably thought, as the rich often do. Wrong. He got locked up for quite a while.
I saw him at the gas station the other day. Nothing has changed. People who use, you can spot them a mile away. His skin looked like ancient, tattooed parchment, teeth all rotten, and he only put two dollars’ worth of unleaded into his car so that he could get to wherever it was he was going. I felt his defeat seep into me. Driving away, I kept thinking, I should have said hello. I should have said hello. So I pulled around, drove back into the gas stall and cut the engine. He was just sitting in his car, rolling a cigarette or a joint, I wasn’t sure which, and listening to Mariah Carey on the FM dial. I walked up and knocked.
He rolled down the window. Who the fuck are you?
Troy, I said. Troy Weaver. We went to school together. Maize High School.
He looked at me with this blank expression — he didn’t remember me — and then he said, Yeah, I remember you. It was a cigarette he was rolling. He lit it, blew the blue smoke through his nose like an untamed bull. I have to go. Then he turned the radio up even louder. It was nice seeing you, he hollered, and drove off. I just stood there for a minute, thinking, I should have just said hello.
Revision I
Turns out my grandmother didn’t die in the mental hospital. She spent some time in a mental hospital, but didn’t die there. She was treated for paranoid schizophrenia. They would strap her in and shock her into not hearing voices anymore, at least for a while. The reality is she died in a Salvation Army homeless shelter. Fasting remains her cause of death. And here I thought, all this time, that fasting was supposed to be a good thing, a holy thing, something that gets you step by step and inch by inch closer to god. I don’t know — I don’t believe it anymore. Suffering is still suffering. I don’t find any virtue in it. So, tell me, who was it? Who was there to save her from the voices in her head? Other voices, I suppose — voices named after angels. Well, they found their purchase, didn’t they, the fuckers.