“You know we could kill all these people, and they wouldn’t even see it coming,” Aaron said, as we were walking around Nick’s neighborhood in Pelham, after getting shot at by farmers on four-wheelers in a cow field in Chelsea for trespassing to harvest mushrooms. Psilocybe cubensis, if you wanna get specific. We all just looked at Aaron, pretending to be in shock. We weren’t wearing flowers in our hair.
***
“Serena will fuck you, Lewis. No problem,” Wes said as we were eating octagon pizza in the school cafeteria.
Somehow, I, a lower-middle-class country bumpkin transplant from St. Clair Springs to Birmingham, had impressed Wes. And had therefore fallen in with an upper-middle-class cadre of wannabe hippies. I was fifteen. Serena was twenty-one and going to a university in Arizona. She could really play the didgeridoo, and, per Wes, she’d also mastered the skin flute.
Serena was a sweetheart. She reminded me of Gail, the babysitter who’d burnt me with a cigarette as a kid and unknowingly determined the prerequisites for all of my future exes. Big heart. Blue eyes. Blonde. Buxom. Besotted with white magic, whatever the fuck that was. The optics of my twenty-one-year-old girlfriend pulling into the Shades Valley H.S. parking lot to pick me up so we could skip school, fuck and smoke dope was just another Tuesday. Nobody, including my mama, gave a fuck or thought she was any kind of predator. The magic wore off, like absolution from a priest for a dirty Catholic, after we’d done a do-what-thou-wilt blood ritual and had sex in a cave behind an Altamont private school. Then Wes’ dad, a researcher at UAB, gathered all of us together to get tested for HIV…
The best things in life weren’t free, especially not “love.”
***
“I got a quarter for you so you can call somebody who gives a fuck!” Derek yelled at Jonah. This was back when there were actually payphones, and Jonah, Nick and his brother (Thomas), Derek and I were standing in the morning dew in my mama’s front yard in Crestwood. Jonah was schizophrenic, and we were long past being sympathetic to his nonstop bullshit, even though he was our dope dealer. Jonah was in his forties, lived in a shitty Southside apartment and sold tie-dyes, among other things, to make a living. His autobiography was that he’d once been a prospective Olympic swimmer, and his family had pushed him so hard that he’d developed an eating disorder and, as a result, became schizophrenic. Who fucking knows? I just know when he was off his meds it wasn’t pretty, and I must’ve told him a hundred times, “I just can’t with you, man.”
***
“Is this the one where they cut the bitch’s tits off in the Amazon?” Timmy asked. We’d stolen Timmy’s daddy’s pick-up truck at twelve years old and drove into town to five-finger a carton of cigarettes from the Burton’s supermarket, because the narcoleptic lady down the holler had gotten wise to us stealing cigarettes outta her freezer. “Town” was a generous description for what consisted of a Dairy Dip, a gas station, a feed-and-tractor supply, a city hall and a video store, amongst other struggling businesses in the trickle-up Reagan economy. We’d rented Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust. The clerk didn’t even bat an eye and gladly took the money we’d earned bailing hay—the sign read: BE KIND, PLEASE REWIND. We were latch-key kids living in homes that weren’t a home in bumfuck nowhere—the only recognizable landmark the House of Pain maximum security prison—and parental supervision was a luxury our folks couldn’t afford when they were working multiple jobs to put food on the table and having a VCR and TV was a big fucking deal. I guess we were supposed to be horrified by the movie. It was supposed to be found footage, but even at twelve years old, it didn’t add up that the natives kept the film rolling. This rural-rot shitshow kept rolling, though, till my parents were splitsville and we’d moved to Birmingham to live with my nana, before she disowned my mama for being a toxic, narcissistic cunt. My best friend, Devon, who’d died from Covid, made fun of me for how I pronounced Dr. Pepper. Must’ve been DDT crop-dusting, lead paint on the window seals or the genealogical clusterfuck of a poor Scottish-Irish family tree literally eating pets during the Depression that accounted for my country grammar.
You can take the boy outta the country…
***
“Should we be doing this?!” Serena asked as I lit and tossed a thousand-pack of firecrackers in front of an upper-crust Brookie white wedding at the Arlington House, and they all hit the ground thinking it was some Blacks from the projects doing a random drive-by—the same projects the city had cleared out for the sake of appearances during the Olympics. The revolution wouldn’t be televised, and we were just its misguided children looking to fuck shit up, channel-surfing for something, anything, post-everything. Derek was drunk-driving his Chevy Caprice Classic earlier that he’d crashed into my nana’s queer neighbor’s retaining wall with little to no damage to his car, and we had gotten the fuck outta there before anyone could survey the damage or bear witness. Surprise, motherfucker! The queers had revitalized the entire neighborhood of geriatric white people and property values soared. This was back when LGBTQ wasn’t even a thing and the bastion of queer pride in Birmingham was a gay bar, Mable’s Chainsaw Repair, and random pool parties to raise money for AIDS research. And the only facts anyone cared about in the South were between the covers of a book written by child-sacrificing pedos using Leviticus as justification to dehumanize people who didn’t love the way they wanted them to love.
Bible-thumpers had tried “love” for over two thousand years and still couldn’t muster up human decency.
***
Jim Morrison was crooning, “No one here gets out alive” from Derek’s tape deck and, none of us being acrophobic, Derek, Serena and I had decided it’d be a grand idea to scale and climb the water tower behind the old Baptist Montclair hospital and fire up a jay while overlooking the industrial hellscape of what remained of Birmingham after the steel industry bounced.
All these dudes were trying to angle for Serena. This wasn’t a love triangle, it was a multi-level marketing pyramid scheme built upon hormones, heartbreak and delusion. I was no angel, but I knew enough about love to know it wasn’t about controlling nobody, and here I am, fifteen, running circles around Derek and a gang of crackers. Nietzsche said if you stare into the abyss long enough, the abyss also stares into you. I’d kick Nietzsche’s sister-fucking ass into the abyss and tell him, “Stop staring!” Just like I did when I shoved Derek off the water tower and he splattered on the rocks below after saying something shitty to Serena.