HIV
My brother’s out of prison and staying at our parent’s. I’m living there too, when I’m not out partying, gone for days on end. I come home one day and go upstairs to shave before going out for the night, my ride parked out front and waiting. I hum some stupid song, ignoring my dad on my way up to my bedroom. On my way out, my dad calls me in to talk with him for a minute. He’s engulfed in a cloud of cigarette smoke when I get downstairs, watching the news. He tells me to have a seat. I sit down. Then he says, Your brother’s old roommate called. And I’m like, Yeah, so what? What’s it have to do with me? And then it starts. He tells me about how this roommate of my brother’s said that one of the guys my brother used to share needles with had recently been diagnosed with HIV. We’d been sharing razors since he’d been back, out on parole, and, being the clumsy fucks we were born to be, we always ended up with blood on our faces — to this day I massacre my face when I shave. My dad says, Your mom took him to get tested. He says, Don’t share razors or anything until after we know a little more about what is going on, and all I can think is, Too late, but I don’t tell him that. Instead of staying at home to brood, I leave to go out for the night, a scalding clump of fear in my chest like a cannon ball, and keep thinking, My brother has just sentenced me to death. He has finally done it. He is killing me. Two days later, I make another trek home and my parents tell me not to worry about it, he tested negative. Your brother is going to be okay. My relief is astounding, like, I can’t even explain it. I guess it was a thing like quasars or black holes or the universe expanding — incredible, nearly extraterrestrial, something you can hardly scratch the surface of before being forced to confront just how small and inconsequential your entire existence is and has been and will always be. And in the midst of all of this, I’ve been having revelations about my future. I’m in love with a good friend of mine, maybe the best I’ve ever known, and what a feeling it is to love someone more than you’ve ever loved yourself, or anybody else for that matter— something I find difficult even now to describe. If I were infected, I wouldn’t date. It would be unfair. But now, now that I know for certain that I’m not infected, the gumption to spill the ooze is bubbling. It’s scalding. Maybe my new love and I will build something beyond us. I want to live with her in the middle of the forest, in a tiny castle made of wood.
Freshman
Freshman year of high school I’m in a band. They are new friends with mutual interests. Knowing how to play music is secondary to everything. Being in a band, that’s what matters. We play crappy covers of nu metal songs, sometimes grunge. We suck, but who cares? We alternate between each other’s houses for practice. We don’t even have a drummer. The first time they ever come over to my house, my brother tells us to come into the basement and hang with him for a while before we start. When we get down there he has all this cocaine cut up and in lines on the end table. He asks if we want any. I say no right away, and then look at my friends, hoping their responses echo mine. They look nervous as fuck. I get it; they’re trying to play it cool. I tell my brother, Fuck that, we aren’t doing that shit, but he’s determined to get somebody in on it, either because he’s the loneliest person I’ve ever known, or because, if he has some company, maybe he’ll feel less guilty about doing it by himself. Oh, c’mon. It isn’t that bad. It hardly even does anything, he says. I leave the basement, calling for my friends to take my lead. But they stay behind, feigning small talk, as I walk up the stairs and into the kitchen. Not five minutes later, they emerge, all jittery, with young hearts about to pump out through their chests and onto the floor. This is the first impression, the thing that stamped our friendship into the battered thing it was destined to become.
Acid Phone
My brother wanted me to do acid with him, but I was only thirteen, and I was too scared, so I told him I didn’t want to do it, and he shook his head and said, Fuck you, then. He liked to mess with me, so he told me if I was going to be a pussy about it and not do it with him, be careful about what I touched or ate or drank for the next few days. Liquid acid, he said. I can put it on anything and you’d never know it was there. Next you know, the carpet’s licking at your feet and the walls are dripping sweat into your eyes. For some reason, an irrational fear, I was convinced that he’d smeared it on the telephone receiver. This was back in the time of landlines, and it was the only phone in the house. I’d have to touch it sooner or later, I knew that, but I already felt like a crazy person and I couldn’t afford to be any crazier than I already was. It was all a grandiose setup, a trick. I left the phone alone for nearly a week. I was trying to preserve my sanity.
Breaking, Entering, Smoking
The first time I inhaled I was thirteen or fourteen. I’d smoked cigarettes before, but I’d been faking it, I’d never inhaled. It burned like hell, that first time. I hated the way it felt, the smell, the burn, I hated all of it. But I kept doing it anyway. I had something to prove. We chain-smoked a whole pack, me and two of my friends, late one night after spending a few hours out and about in various neighborhoods, breaking into cars. That’s how we got them, the cigarettes and the lighter. We’d been getting into unlocked cars for a few months already, because that’s what the boredom of this town bred, but one time we actually came away from it with something more than just our shame. We got forty dollars, a Walkman, some shitty CDs, and three packs of cigarettes — all from one car. Afterward, we lay out on my friend’s trampoline in his backyard. It was a summer night, clear, and we admired our loot in the moonlight, filling our lungs with smoke and talking about all the girls at school we couldn’t stop thinking about, how we’d love to sweat into their palms, feel our saliva swath across their tongues, and, if we played our cards right, tremble inside them in the comfort of their homes while their parents worked nights to put food in their stomachs and meat on their bones.
Tennis Balls
My dad had this friend he hadn’t seen in like twenty years. Supposedly he was a great jazz musician who just couldn’t seem to get his shit together. He drank. Too much, they said. And he lost everything because of it, became a homeless untouchable who walked the streets by day and slept under our city’s bridges by night. My dad saw him on the street one day, recognized him beneath his raggedy-ass street clothes, and brought him home, set him up with a cot in the basement, helped him dry out, and then told him to get back out into the city and find himself a job. Sometimes my mom would give him rides. I’d go with them. We’d take him downtown, or sometimes farther east, and just drop him off. My mom would ask him what time she should pick him up and he’d tell her, No, I’ll walk back. Truly it’s okay. You have done more than enough. And, remarkably, he would always make it back by dinner, no matter how far it was we’d left him. I remember that he spent Christmas with us. He gave me an old tennis ball as a gift. I think it was even wrapped. It was brown from use, worn nearly smooth. It was a little strange to be honest. But he had nothing, absolutely nothing, except for some raggedy clothes and a guitar he considered his soul. And truth is, I came to really love my tennis ball. It was the gesture, really. I don’t recall him giving anything to anybody else, and, at the time, I thought that meant something. A week or two later, my parents kicked him out. He’d been drinking the Listerine to get a good buzz going, both in the mornings and in the evenings. Once night my mom said to my dad: What’s going on? I’ve bought two bottles of Listerine in a week. My dad’s heart had sunk into him. I could see it on his slack face. He knew what was what, he always does.