On Monday morning I woke up to the beat of electronic music drumming in the living room like it were Saturday. Or at least Thursday. I slipped into my jeans, half angered, half asleep, and walked outside looking more for an explanation than a fight. Except for my flatmate, the room was deserted, the subwoofer booming. His head bobbled from side to side like a serpent making its way up a tree, his left hand twitched not so much nervously as involuntarily, and he shuffled from one foot to the other as if he had been standing for a long time . . .
This is axiomatic. This is easy. The hard part comes when you have to say, hello I am an. My name is and I am an. I am alcohol. I am an alcohol named and I am an. Well, we are not Saints . . .
“A congressman, a senator, and a lobbyist walk into a bar.” Rich tipped his beer in the direction of the bar’s latest arrivals. “Anyplace else that would be the start of a joke. Here it’s business as usual . . .”
We used to sit in my friend Stevie’s tree house and huff nitrous oxide out of a gas cracker we had stolen from Crate & Barrel at the mall. Stevie’s older brother bought the cartridges for us at the local head shop. They were silver and shaped like bullets. They looked the same as the CO2 cartridges we used to operate Stevie’s BB gun, which we also kept in the tree house. The tree house was where we kept everything we held dear that summer . . .
The last time we moved was because she said an ex of hers had shown up and zigzagged a razor through her wrists. The time before that she said a pair of meth heads broke in during the day and left her barely living after wrapping a shower curtain around her neck . . .
