Mom steps away from the CD player and as the music spins to life I think: Oh fuck me, please no. It’s Michael Bolton’s cover of “When a Man Loves a Woman,” from the world’s most undeserving greatest hits collection . . .
The cop’s fingers were as thick as the sausages he stabbed with the fork and stuffed in his mouth. Probably as greasy, too, Tual thought as he drank coffee in a booth. He watched the cop sitting at the counter . . .
When Cold-bone described beating his girlfriend unconscious because she threw up on his shoes while giving him a blowjob, Burnadette decided that she wasn’t hungry after all . . .
The train lurched forward like a giant hiccup. Holiday awoke from his hiatus, opening his eyes just enough to make out light and dark shapes. You coulda blindfolded him with dental floss . . .
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 . . .
It took the bulky female bouncer all of five seconds to find the stash in Sallie’s bra: “Now, what’s this, love? Next time keep it in your knickers.”
Damn it—now she’d have to try to score inside . . .
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 . . .