dless: The Novel By Author Drew Stepek
Product Description
Eating disorders are a choice, not a disease! Doing everything but providing the reader his finger to purge, first time novelist, athesist and 17-year bulimic Drew Stepek proves his controversial theory in his new novel titled GODLESS. A combative, heart-wrenching novel, the psychological and physically distressing drama played out in GODLESS leads the reader through a surprising and shocking path that could only be told by someone who has lived the experience and the pain first-hand. D, the primary character in GODLESS is obviously a tormented soul. Underneath the torment, we discover a secret, a secret so horrific that D doesn’t even remember it, until the day his father makes known what is at the root of D’s suffering. Mr. Stepek shares a provocative tale that zeros in on the trauma of male bulimia and addiction that is both compelling and forceful. And while there are many books, both fiction and non-fiction that are superbly written and which address the subject of bulimia and addiction, none genuinely tap into the heart and soul of the subject quite the same way as GODLESS.
From the Inside Flap
Mr. Stepek shares a provocative tale that zeros in on the trauma of male bulimia and addiction that is both compelling and forceful. And while there are many books, both fiction and non-fiction that are superbly written and which address the subject of bulimia and addiction, none genuinely tap into the heart and soul of the subject quite the same way as GODLESS.
Born in Royal Oak, Michigan on October 21st, 1970, the 35-year-old Drew Stepek has worked as a writer in all areas of the entertainment industry, including television, print and the Internet. After moving to LA in 1993, Drew began his career as a writer for Larry Flynt and eventually moved on to work for major shows writing, producing and directing online and on-air initiatives for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Saturday Night Live, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Profiler, The Pretender, TNBC and ESPN. Other major accomplishments include receiving 200,000 downloads of the Godless eBook on Storybay in less than two months. What's more, he wrote and edited for several LFP Publications including Film Threat, PC Laptop, Hard Drive, CD Rom Power, Sci-Fi Universe, Wild Cartoon Kingdom and many more. Adding to his long line of credits, Drew was the winner of the Ministry eCard competition, won the 1999 Standard of Excellence “Web Award” both for Saturday Night Live, as well for The Tonight Show and received honorable mention in an NBC Writing Contest. He took 1st Place in a poetry contest and received the highest award for Brushings Literary Magazine. He has also been featured in Rolling Stone, USA Today, The Industry Standard and Details, as well as CNN, The Today Show and NBC News. Currently, Drew is the Web Producer of Full Tilt Poker where he oversees all web editorial content and functionality for the online television poker company. He earned a BA degree in English/Anthropology from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.
My friends and family have told me for almost twelve years now that bulimia and alcoholism are eventually going to catch up with me. Even though I understand their concern and their love, I didn’t begin to come to terms, or at least try to come to terms, with that reality until recently.
Not long ago, I returned to Los Angeles from a college friend’s bachelor party in Las Vegas. The debauchery was everything I expected. From what I remember, it was a nice time. What I didn’t expect was the strange new feeling I returned with. It wasn’t any kind of catharsis or revelation about my self-destruction or any kind of bright idea that maybe I’m getting too old to be treating myself that way. That shit is for reborns and guilty assholes. I’m not hurting anyone. What the fuck do I have to feel guilty about? Rather, I returned with a feeling in my chest that I hadn’t felt before. My lungs were clenched and I found it extremely painful to eat. I thought maybe I was going to feel that way forever, that maybe I had either finally blown my heart or torn my esophagus beyond repair. I guessed that the twelve years of self-induced vomiting was finally taking its toll. I spent three days feeling like someone hammered a bunch of rusty nails in my chest whenever I ate, drank, or smoked. Three days, that’s nothing, right? When you fear for twelve years something is going to happen, three days seems like the final stretch and the end of the line.
The next day, after I was positive it was some fluke—maybe an old college chum sat on my chest while I was passed out—I returned to the bathroom. I threw up, and I didn’t even think twice about it. I told myself that I had once again triumphed over the laws of the digestive process.
That instance is important to the story you are about to read, because it’s real. GODLESS, although filled with fictional settings and fictional characters, comes from someone who knows what alcoholism and bulimia are and how deadly they can be when mixed together for a long time. I’m not preaching. I would never preach about this. I have nothing to say that would make you change your mind. I refuse to change.
The closest I came to overcoming my mess was when I spent some time in a hospital. Even then, I decided that my primary objective was to get the fuck out of there by cheating the system and lying.
I’m lost, and I’ve lost so much because I’ve failed to recognize. I’ve lost friends, loves of my life, and pieces of my former self. Everything fades away every time I enter the restroom with the purpose of throwing up. I can’t blame anyone, and I can’t listen to anyone. It’s all fucking void. For those three days, though, I felt the gears of mortality and the price I will eventually have to pay for my refusal to change. Did I find God? Did I want to live so strongly that I found a higher power? No. I found myself right back where I started.
Our society is godless. We sit on our thrones, point our fingers at each other, and yell obscenities so we can have bragging rights to play and pray for the winning team. We throw sticks, stones, knives, and bullets at each other so we can pound our chests to flaunt our strength and allegiance. We love to see others in pain, because it makes our lives seem better by comparison. We masturbate on our successes, because we think we have triumphed over evil. We don’t care what anyone else has to say, and why should we? When it is important to speak, we don’t say anything, because we can’t admit when we are wrong. Is this why your god put us here? Is your mission in life to brag about your personal eternal bliss and wipe your ass with the convictions of others?
In our quest to find the meaning of life, to justify why we are alive, we chose sides and criticized our childhood playmates for accepting a higher power we don’t agree with. They were perfectly acceptable before they decided that they wanted something other than the misery we stew in every day. We create antagonists in our minds rather than realizing how similar we all are. We misjudge helping hands as adversaries and good deeds as selfish acts. There isn’t anything wrong with thinking differently, but there is something wrong with thinking that you’re better than anyone else. I don’t consider myself a prophet for profit or a martyr for barter; I’m just sad at the way we look at each other. As a race; as living, thinking, functioning beings, we should all be fucking ashamed.
Isn’t that what it has come to? Do you sleep soundly at night knowing that the faithless vagrants on your street, in your alley, in your garbage, can do nothing more that hallucinate about collecting welfare faith? If they could manage to get roofs over their heads to block God out, don’t you think they would?
Not everyone can be classified as a fuck up or an invalid either; some people have just lost their way and their will to live. Can you blame them? I’m not a saint or a champion of human justice; I ignore the cries of the street urchins just as much as you do; however, I am willing to recognize that something is wrong.
What do you see when you look at the dysfunctional mayhem we’ve created? Do you think someone upstairs cares about our misfortune? Are we led like cattle to a slaughterhouse because we are indeed imperfect? Are we alive because we need to fulfill the wishes of someone else? Have you ever stopped to shake hands with people who are different from you rather than snickering at them because you can’t understand their beliefs?
Do you care that kids bring guns to school or that others choose death rather than life? Of course you do, but aren’t you glad they aren’t your kids? Do you honestly think that your god, whom you have never seen or spoken with, is better than your neighbor’s? Somehow, I believe the comfort of a higher power got obscured behind opposing jerseys and defending goals. Sure, things were like that from the beginning, but it has gotten much worse, even as we are told that we have grown wiser.
It seems all too easy to poke fun at religion or scrutinize it because we have lost track of who we are. My intentions aren’t to demean or lessen the effect of religion or the positive lessons to be learned from it. I don’t look down on people because of what they believe. As a matter of fact, I envy them for having the power to see something I can’t. In my world, one shocked by reality, I can’t accept that I was created by anyone other than my parents. I can speak with them, and they can give me advice. They are tangible. They are my gods, because they guided me as best they could. They are my gods because they were the first people I listened to or thought about when I was born.
Life is a miracle. It should be accepted as that and cherished. Your pain isn’t going to go away if you believe in anything in particular. Choosing a doctrine because someone regards it ethical isn’t going to grant you a permanent invitation to the game. The game will never end, and the pursuit of happiness, acceptance, and dreams will never go away. Everyone does have the right to find happiness.
I can’t apologize for all the mistakes of the world and its inhabitants. I can’t justify bad things. I can’t mop up your tears and tuck you in at night. I don’t want to. I can’t apologize for the way that I feel. I hope you’re right, and someone else is caring for us, watching us. The world would be safer if someone cared enough to tell us how wrong we are. I can, however, apologize for my mistakes. I hope someone, somewhere, someday, will understand why and where all of my pain and hatred come from.
Every day of my life, as I attempt to put the puzzle pieces together, I end up back where I started, asking myself four questions.
Do I know who I am?
I mean, really know who I am?
Do I know where I come from?
Do I know where I’m going?
Be true to yourself and respect other people. Most importantly, don’t ever leave any words unsaid, even if you think other people aren’t listening.
Drew Stepek
BOOK ONE
NAZARETH
"They said with one accord that I got drunk oftener than was necessary and that I was wild and Godless, idle, lecherous and a disconnected and unsettled rover.”
Samuel Langhorn Clemens
CHAPTER ONE
Some things are best left unsaid.
“You go to school with my stepdaughter, don’t ya, boy?” It was difficult to hear Rick Conroy, the owner of the AutoRX, over the cranking of ratchets and humming of nut drills. He was talking about my friend Lori Conroy. He wiped grease and piss off his forearm and started writing up my paperwork. Not realizing it, he licked his pen and got a glob of ink all over the side of his blistered lips.
Conroy’s skinny frame hunched over. The grease dripped down his face.
“Yeah, I know her.”
“I thought so, I seen ya around her all the time. What’s your name? Deece?”
“My name’s D. Lori and I hang out.” He didn’t answer, so I kept talking. “I’ve known her since you all moved here when I was in grade school.” Trying to take my attention away from Conroy’s lazy eye, I looked up at the clock behind him, which a bikini-clad model was holding a mug that said, “Time for a beer.” The model’s non-existent head was the clock face. I attempted to speed the conversation along, as his eye was making me uncomfortable and my shoes were swimming in crusty rags. My friend Freddy Brubaker would be waiting for me at our high school homecoming game in an a few hours. “So what’s the damage, Mr. Conroy?”
A huge thud rang out in the garage area. Deteriorated plaster and dust snowed from the ceiling and a makeshift shelf of die-cast racing cars behind the register collapsed. “Oh shit!” I screamed, hoping the disaster didn’t involve my car.
Conroy spun around. “What the hell’s goin’ on back there?”
“Nothin’, boss, just dropped a fender,” came a voice from the garage.
“Be more careful, ya fucking invalids.” Mr. Conroy turned back to me and slapped me on the shoulder. “There goes your car.” He laughed, but it wasn’t a warm or mirthful sound. “Just jokes, boy.”
“Hilarious.” I looked down at my watch. It seemed like a safer place than trying to choose which of Conroy’s eyes to make contact with. I tried to look at his sleeves-optional T-shirt that said “Muff Diver” across the front, but I could feel the wandering eye hovering. “So, what do I owe you?”
Conroy drummed the pen a few times on the paperwork and tapped away on his calculator. Then he ran his blackened hands through his hair plugs. He tore off the receipt and looked at it. Defeated, he chucked his first estimate by the trash, the cemetery of all his mathematic mistakes over the past year. Crumbled up paper littered the corner of the register.
“You ever poke her?”
“Huh?”
“You ever poke Lori? I know all you kids are fuckin’.”
A year earlier, I would have jumped at the chance to have sex with Lori. She had it all--big full lips, dirty little eyes and a slight gap between her two front teeth. However, something was wrong with her and the distance that she was keeping from her close friends was reflected in the thirty pounds she had dropped over the summer.
He paused and smirked. “Come on son, you can tell me; she ain’t mine by blood.”
I sighed and closed my eyes for a second. “Can you please just give me my bill so I can pay it? Jesus Christ, Mr. Conroy, all I had done was the oil.”
Lunging forward, he snatched me by the collar. I turned my head. “Don’t you take the Lord’s name in vain, boy. If I find out you’re fuckin’ my daughter, I’ll beat your sack through your throat.” He put his fist under my chin. I didn’t answer; I just looked at him with cold eyes, waiting. “Don’t get smart. What’s the matter? Did your daddy get canned from the mill like all these other poor bastards? Are times tough? Not for me, ya little prick. Even your poor ass has to get around somehow.”
“Relax! I’m not having sex with your stepdaughter.” I shook away his grip. “I just need my car so I can go to the homecoming game.”
The eye glanced at me one last time and he pointed his finger at me. Shaking his head, he retracted whatever thought passed through his mind. “Homecoming game. Yeah right, they ain’t gonna never win in this town.” He strutted back toward the garage, flipping the pen backward that left an ink-stained money shot on his mouth. “Jose, get your Spic ass up here and do this little shit’s paperwork.”
I thought my town was shit, and my conversation with Rick Conroy at AutoRX backed me up. It was poor and dying. If I stayed there, I would most likely die, too. I wanted out so bad that I met my mailman every day after school, anticipating my college acceptance letter. Every day. It never came.
I paid Jose and he drove my car around for me.
“Have a good time at the homecoming game. Go Badgers.”
“Here you go, Jose.” I gave him a couple of bucks for his trouble and got in my car. “Go-fucking-badgers.”
The smell of oil still burned in my engine, making me sick. That fucker Conroy hadn’t done shit to my car. The smell inside, though, was better than the stench I would suck in by rolling down my windows. The paper mill upwind shut down about nine months before, leaving most of our town, including my workaholic father, unemployed. Its closing, however, didn’t rid the area of the pulp-burning stench, punctuated by the odor of dead animals. The combination smelled something like the aftermath of a bombed sweatshop. Most of the wildlife was killed drinking the foulness that filled the water. I stumbled on carcasses frequently.
In one respect, though, I guess I could thank that paper mill. It gave me the resources to fill out the paperwork necessary for a scholarship. I’m not an environmentalist, so, forty some-odd years of toxins from the mill didn’t seem to affect or bother me nearly as much as their absence had destroyed the town and its people.
I drove through the town and observed its decline. You’d think that on homecoming weekend there would be banners and signs welcoming home the alumni. But in my town, there were two kinds of alumni: those who never left and those who never wanted to come back. I wanted to be one of the latter.
I drove by the few storefronts that were still in business. The wooden signs hung on by one nail, and the burned out neon signs were indecipherable. The only store that still had a neon sign intact was Rick Conroy’s AutoRX. “Get In Check.” It boomed in my rearview mirror. “Get Auto RX.”
Over the summer, Lori and I used to break into her stepfather’s garage and drink. Every time before we left, we’d cut the circuit breaker and shut down the pulsating sign. We figured we were doing the town a favor.
No store stayed open after five. What was the use? Nobody had any money to buy anything. Most of the stoplights were malfunctioning in the center of town, but I always stopped, whether it was working or not. At a flashing red light I saw the town barber, Remy Woolfe, sharing a forty with a loiterer.
“Hey, D,” he waved, jogging up next to my car. “Need a haircut?”
I held my breath and rolled down my window. “Sorry, I’m a hippie this year, Mr. Woolfe.” I nodded back at his companion. “I think you might want to cut your buddy off.” The barber turned around to see his loiterer dropping a deuce in the alley next to the shop. The bum’s uncircumcised cock dribbled into a pile of trash. Woolfe ran back to the shop and started chasing his pal down an alley with a broom. Shit streamed down the man’s leg as he scrambled to pull up his pants.
Driving by the homes proved even more depressing than driving through the center of town. Rather than having space between them, they were all sewn together by discarded appliances and the rest of the shit in the yards. I stopped at one of the homes. I knew my mom was looking for a filter for her dryer and I actually saw a dryer that looked like ours.
A woman came to the door with a baby attached to her tit. “Yeah?” She coughed.
“Can I look at your dryer?” I said, averting my eyes from her boobs. “My mom is looking for a filter.”
“You getting a good look, kid?” I must not have looked away quickly enough.
“Sorry, I wanted to know about the dryer.” The door slammed shut. It turned out to be the wrong model anyway.
“Thanks. Wrong dryer. I don’t need any milk. Shit.” Too busy trying to be a smartass, I got tangled in boob lady’s fence. Wrapping and covering almost every other inch of the town was “the virus vine.” In our part of the country, people called the uncontrollable kudzu weed the virus vine. Kudzu spread, covered, and swallowed our town, eliminating it and all of its value from the face of the earth. It grew on houses. It grew on phone lines. If you left your car unattended long enough, it grew on your car. Maybe the town was best that way, unseen, unsaid, and unnoticed.
Before I went home, I met my pal the mailman. Nothing. No ticket out. Once again. Then I changed out of the shirt that Rick Conroy stained with oil when he threatened to knock my nuts through my throat. Looking a little better, I left the house. I had to make my afternoon stop at Nazareth.
You see, I’d discovered a way to cleanse myself of the confines of prom dates, football pep rallies, and lame tri-screen-enhanced motivational speeches in an auditorium. The latter interested me the least. Although the intention seemed honorable, those presentations were always M.C.-ed by some hack ex-cop who had evidently honed his audio/visual skills rather than his filling-out-retirement-paperwork skills. Besides, I didn’t believe these “Drink, Drive, Die” speeches were what George Lucas envisioned when he created THX. Instead of indulging in the lackluster rah-rah of high school life, I chose to pay my respects to a tree.
“Paying my respects to a tree” wasn’t slang for getting high or anything like that. The tree offered a place where I could write, think, and be alone.
The tree stood at the center of my Nirvana. I never understood how it grew from the tainted soil of my town. Standing about thirty-feet, the tree, which I jokingly dubbed Nazareth, nestled on the side of a bog bank contaminated by the atrocities of the paper mill.
Quite a persistent old bastard, the tree had been there for as long as I could remember. It had two extended limbs that sprouted out, reaching eternally for some sort of hope. The shaft displayed the agony of a martyr’s face: twisted, torn, and weathered. Brought to the tree by the moisture from the venomous swamp were thousands of gnats and marsh bugs that sucked at its tears of sap. Although the oak was a landmark, its beauty never stopped me from “baptizing” it after a good night of writing and a few too many beers. When I was about five, this scumbag neighborhood kid Tommy Horton took a piss on me when we were out catching toads by the mill. I guess pissing on the Nazareth was my revenge.
A behemoth from top to bottom, the tree wasn’t going anywhere. The base was so thick and soundly embedded in the ground that even the swampy muck that sucked the life out of most seedlings was pissed back down into the bog.
“Hey fucker.” I tapped at the base of Nazareth and sat down to write about my confrontation with Rick Conroy before I went to the game. To avoid having to change my clothes again, I brought a bleacher seat with me every time I visited Nazareth. It was better than walking around with sludge on my ass, and having to explain that I didn’t shit myself. Usually, I sat with my back against the tree. This method produced the best results for writing. Sometimes, though, I sat in front, admiring it. These writings usually turned out to be kind of pussy.
I never brought anyone to the tree, except for one time when Lori and I had been out throwing apples at cars. We had accidentally nailed a cop car and needed a place to hide. Since we didn’t want to risk breaking and entering the Auto RX, I took her to my place. She wasn’t so skinny then.
CHAPTER TWO
The wind that homecoming night smelled like burnt embers as it breezed through town, fighting away the always-lurking stench of the old paper mill. The fall of my last year of high school wasn’t an Indian summer. Quite the contrary, the weather was bitterly cold.
That night our team delighted us with the homecoming football game. The cheerleaders were so cold that not even their team spirit and mascot-blessed sweaters could help them avoid the crowd heckling them. The home team fans were no better off because seating was scarce. In the center of the bleachers was giant hole that we called “the shit pit.” During the final game of the previous season, some idiot kid doused the termite infested seating with kerosene before the game and lit the center on fire. I think he’d played on the golf team and had decided to protest the sale of the local golf course to a waste disposal company.
Outside the field, I met up with Freddy Brubaker, bundled up and tribally face-painted red and black, the school colors. In a furry-hooded winter coat, the blushed, scrawny Freddy looked like an order of cotton candy. From under the coat, part of his straight, brown hair fell in his eyes.
He shot me a shaka. “What up, D?” Then, he made an idiotic face like he was cool.
“Nice shaka, fag. Did your small ass go surfing in the toilet this morning? There is nothing going on. Absolutely nothing.”
“I think we’re gonna win this year. Don’t you?” He laughed, and we headed out to the game to cheer on the team. Even though there wasn’t anything to cheer for. We were the weakest and smallest team in our conference. Our homecoming rival blasted through our rag-tag bunch of maybe-they-should-have-played-soccer contestants and left them for the over-worked janitorial staff to clean up. The homecoming game, like every other game, wasn’t much of a contest. We hadn’t beaten our rivals in more than twenty years. We lost 45-3. As in every game that season, the golf team rooted from the opposing team’s bleachers.
Luckily, our field goal kicker, Jim “Launch” Lonchar’s day job was playing soccer. As the team’s only asset, he helped save a little bit of face.
Nothing felt worse than losing our homecoming game every year, but that year it didn’t seem to faze football fanatic Freddy. The primetime feel of bright lights and shiny helmets impressed him, but he insisted he could never play the game, because of his inability to concentrate. I’m sure Freddie’s setback had nothing to do with the fact that the kid stood five foot six on his tiptoes and weighed a buck twenty.
I’d known Freddy almost my entire life. We grew up directly across the street from each other. He was rich, at least by our town standards. His father, Buck Brubaker, had made some sound investments years before the mill closed, and his mother, Trudy, came from old money. The youngest of four Brubaker boys--Billy, Timmy, Tommy, and Freddy consecutively--he wasn’t the brightest kid I knew. He spent much of his early life juiced up on Ritalin to control his outbursts of hyperactivity. Also plagued with ADD, he spent his school time in those “special” classes; still, all of his birthright setbacks never stunted his optimism.
As my closest friend, Freddy always spotted me when I was low on cash. I wasn’t making much money cleaning up at the local bookstore. The money aside, I loved him like a brother. As small and as silly as he was, Freddy always stood up for me in any situation.
“Hey, man, you’re not going to believe the news I got today.” We jumped into his overly lifted Jeep CJ-7. He popped the clutch to take off, and kicked his theme song, “Stigmata” by Ministry, into the CD player. The thundering drums and stinging vocals of one of the evilest songs in history blared out of his swass five-speaker system. He raised his hand for a high-five. “I got into State early admission. I’m out of here, kid.”
It looked like Freddy was to be the first to escape. I changed the subject.
“Don’t worry about me. I should be fine working at the tollbooth on the Bay Bridge. Maybe I’ll hook you up some time.” Bringing snacks and drinks to my mailman, helping luck along, were in vain.
“And check this out, bro.” He reached into his center console, and he made a real face. It was one of pride. His little eyes blinked and his perfect teeth sparkled. “Look what my old man got me. He opened the letter before I got home from school today.” Like pulling a sword from a stone, he flipped the object out of his pocket, and shined it off the interior lights of his Jeep. Freddy showed me the one gift from his hard-ass father that wasn’t a token of his wealth, at least to Freddy. It was a Mont Blanc pen. He didn’t care about the price, maybe because he didn’t realize it was worth more than I made in a month. He just cared about what the pen, with his name engraved on it, symbolized. I wanted to grab it from him and throw it out of the plastic windows of the jeep. Jesus, Freddy, I thought, it’s fucking freezing out; would it kill you to put the hardtop on your truck?
Freddy had been pinned as an underachiever and a dunce by ignorant teachers most of his life, so the gift truly reflected his rising above the expectations. To me, he’d just gotten lucky. His dad probably bought Freddy’s way into State.
Shit.
“Dude, this pen can write on anything,” he began, “and according to the little manual, it’s indestructible.” He complemented his ridiculous sports-fan outfit by placing his trophy in his front shirt pocket.
I said the unthinkable. “Oh, so you can read, Freddy?” I don’t really know why I said it. I just kind of fired it out, out of spite and jealousy.
He down-shifted the jeep and cut off another car. Then, he lifted his ass and lofted a fart my way. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? I haven’t seen any acceptance letter for you yet, pal.” He gripped onto the pen.
Realizing I’d been an ass and managing to care, I tried to salvage the conversation, as well as our friendship. “No, man. I didn’t mean to say that. Shit. God, Freddy your ass reeks.” I blew the gas back at him with my gloves and got back to my apology. “I just want to get out of here. I hate this place. I’m starting to hate myself for being here.”
He didn’t answer, so I kept talking. “Life doesn’t revolve around an old, abandoned paper mill. The desperate assholes in this town, they really believe it’s going to reopen. I only write on paper. I don’t give a fuck where it comes from.”
“Whoa! Fair enough, dickhead. Don’t worry, D; your letter will come.” He gave me a shadow boxer duck and punch and blew through a red light.
I looked away from him, back out the window at the dead town. “Thanks. I’m an ass. Where are we going, anyway?”
“I don’t know. A few of the football players are having a party. It’s probably to honor Lonchar for putting some numbers on the board.” That was Freddy’s way of dressing up shit with a cherry, a skill he had mastered. Like how he didn’t really see himself as a slow learner. He saw the teachers as moving too fast. “Hey, man, what’s up with Lori’s step dad and the Christmas lights?”
At first I didn’t want to discuss it because of my conversation with Rick Conroy earlier that day. I didn’t see Lori at the game. I guessed she had learned to accept losing. Freddy didn’t know that, though, and took my silence as an invitation to keep talking.
“Check it. It’s the middle of fucking October, and he’s already building a shrine to the baby Jesus. First one to get them up every year. Last one to take them down.” As we drove by Lori’s house, I looked out the plastic Jeep window--now icing up--and saw Rick Conroy, whistling away and lacing the house with bright flashing lights. The guy couldn’t have looked happier. After the paper mill closed, the locals did anything they could to raise their spirits and keep them busy.
All the Christmas cheer in the world didn’t justify the shitty things he said about Lori.
“I don’t know,” I said at last. “Lori has kind of a strange family. She’s a little messed up.” I knew her well, but I didn’t have a clue to the motivation behind her stepfather’s holiday excitement.
“You’re telling me. When was the last time that twig had a burger? She needs to get with it.” He laughed. “Maybe she fasts all year and feasts on Christmas.”
“Fuck off, Freddy. I think there’s more to it than that.” I knew Lori had eating problems, and I didn’t think it was any of Freddy’s business.
“What’s gotten into you tonight?” He said. “Shit, the girl gives you the Heisman one night when you try to tag her and it’s my fault. You’re being a dick.”
I squirted a gleek of spit in his eye. “I never tried to tag her, Freddy. She’s a good friend of mine and I’m worried about her. You used to be friends with Lori, too.”
“Not anymore.” Freddy got pissy over the summer whenever I decided to spend nights kicking around with Lori. He felt that I had some deep love for her. I always thought that he liked her.
After driving around for close to an hour, Freddy and I ended up parking at McDonald’s, the usual meeting place for all the anxious seniors looking for the locale of the night’s festivities.
“Hey, Freddy, you fucking little bitch,” yelled Lonchar. “I heard about State. You outta here, boyeeeeeee!”
“Nice field goal, Launch. Maybe I can talk to the State football coach.” He nudged the kicking champ in the ribs.
Lonchar buffed his knuckles on his jersey. “Football! I want to play soccer!” They both shared a laugh. As much as Lonchar joked, his part-time football career paid fairly well. An entourage of star-struck girls surrounded the field goal hero. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have sworn that Lonchar had just won the Super Bowl and signed a seven-figure commercial deal with McDonald’s. I knew his parents could never afford to send him to college. As far as his grades were concerned, maybe it was a good night for him to be The Man. “Hey, boys, Dodge is having a jammie at his house. Parents are gone. Two kegs. Pick your poison.”
“Sounds good, man. We’ll catch you there,” I said as we headed out of the parking lot. Both Freddy and I anticipated a messy night.
Freddy pursed his lips, “Hey man. I didn’t get anything to eat before the game. Can we stop at the doughnut shop and pick up a snack? I don’t wanna get too wasted.”
I looked at Freddy and I couldn’t think of anything worse than doughnuts and beer for a hyperactive kid having the most exciting night of his life. But I just shrugged. “You’re drivin’.”
We pulled in front of the doughnut shop, and I kept thinking about the horrible thing I’d said to him. I hoped he had forgiven me.
“Do you want to come in, D? Maybe you can get something.”
“Yeah, that’s cool.” I’d come to terms with the fact that I would be babysitting a drunken maniac that night. It didn’t bother me; I owed it to him.
On our way into Al’s Do-Nuts, we noticed an unfamiliar, aggro kid ranting nervously at passersby and screaming into the payphone. He had a bushy home-sculpted Mohawk pulled into a ponytail--the kind of haircut we called “The Bolt”--a cheap pleather jacket, and sweat beading up on his Cro-Magnon brow. The guy’s face looked more like it was covered in scales than skin. We passed him; he gave us a once over and remained fully tuned into his conversation. I’d never seen the kid before so I assumed he was passing through, probably picking up a package from one of the unemployed town folk striving to make ends meet. Judging from his sunken black eyes and beyond-pasty skin, the only place he would qualify as a familiar face was a cockfight in Kentucky.
“Take note, young Freddy,” I said as the glass door closed behind us. “Butane is not a proper inhalant when mixed with crank.”
“Ya think? That kid needs some booger sugar about as much as I do right now.” He laughed and shuffled through his pockets and we entered Al’s to the ringing, distorted doorbell. “Hey, D, order me a bear claw, a honey glazed, and a couple of the gross old ones to throw at people at Dodger’s house. I left my dinero in the car.”
“Cool, I’ll be inside,” I said as he turned around and headed back out. Al’s wasn’t any different than any other brightly light doughnut shop in town. It seemed like a great place for homeless people to sit and sip away on a small cup of coffee for a few hours to stay warm.
“Hey, Barry. What up?” The doughnut man of the night was our football team’s ex all-star running back Barry Denn. I pointed to a framed photograph behind him. “Employee of the month, huh?” The picture was of Barry in his Al’s uniform smiling. Some time during his night shift, Barry rolled up a napkin and pasted it onto his mouth like a blunt.
“What up, D?” He returned. “Deed mine boys sing redemption tonight?” A funny thing about Barry was that after his junior year he began speaking like a Rastafarian. He told everyone he was born in Jamaica and moved to America at a young age. If you didn’t know any better, you’d swear he was the long lost descendant of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer, and Jah himself. As a matter of fact, he always wore a ring that was rumored to have belonged to Marcus Garvey: the father of Black Nationalism. I suspected his birth records would tell a different story and that the whole charade was an excuse to smoke weed. Besides, I knew Barry before he grew his high top fade into dreadlocks and traded his dookie chain in for a leather necklace with a red, yellow and green African medallion.
“Take a guess who won, Barry.”
“I and I did not think so. I saw you out by dat old swamp again today. Why you go dere? It smells.”
The feeling of my hidden place being exposed crawled around on my tongue. “I don’t know. It’s away from this shit. The smell there seems better than the smell of the rest of this dead city.”
“Gotcha. Any partying going on later?”
Barry was the one great hope our football team ever had of winning a homecoming game; however, after one article too many in the local newspaper about the great Barry Denn, he dropped out after his junior year and tried to go pro. It didn’t work out the way he expected. After that, he took some night classes and successfully completed his G.E.D. Unlike most ex-sports heroes who still lusted for the glory years, he tried not to talk about the past. The rest was doughnut history.
“Yeah, Dodge and those clowns are having a party. Can you grab me a bear claw, a honey glazed, and a couple of those old heinous ones?”
“Is done.” He flicked open a bag and masterfully juggled the doughnuts into the bag. Something caught his attention. “Ey, D, looks like Freddy’s havin’ some trouble with dat ragamuffin.”
I’d forgotten about the living dead lingering outside, so at first I didn’t register Barry’s comment. Nonetheless, before I could turn around, the bell signaled that Freddy was already on his way in. As usual, he was all smiles.
“What was that all about?” I asked.
“That freak just wanted to borrow my pen to write down a number.” Freddy didn’t even seem to think twice about lending his trophy.
“Where is it now?”
“He’s bringing it in when he’s finished.”
“He better.” Before I dug into Freddy about lending the pen, the bell chimed, and the mystery man plunged through the door. He picked at the scabs on his face, and his right eye twitched like someone had sprayed him with a sandblaster.
His eyes fixated on a neon sign behind Barry. “Hey, man. Can I buy this pen off you?”
“No. It’s a gift. Why don’t you fuck off down the street to Rite Aid and buy one?”
“Because I need to copy down this information now. You got any paper?” Once again, Freddy fumbled through his pockets. The only thing he had was his acceptance letter to State. Funny how no one has a piece of paper when they needed one.
“Nope,” Freddy answered, a little perturbed. “Just write it down on your hand. That pen writes on anything. Maybe if you wash your hands first, you’ll be able to read it.” He was heating up; his red-and-black face paint ran together and he ripped down the fuzzy hood on his coat.
Frenzied, the neurotic kid yelled and spun around. “Goddammit!” He streamed his long, yellow fingernails through his bolt, and headed back to the phone. The sick bell chimed.
Freddy cooled down. “Maybe we should invite psycho to Dodger’s house. Looks like he could use a beer.”
“Fuck that,” I shot. “Let’s take him there and give him a blanket party,” A blanket party was our way of letting an asshole know he had stepped out of line. Usually performed as a joke or homage to the infamous “Code Reds” of the military, we pulled a blanket over some sucker’s head and beat the shit out of him until he begged for mercy. Nice, huh?
“Oh, relax, D. What’s happenin’, Barry?”
“Not much, Freddy. Here’s them donuts.”
Once again, the scumbag plowed into the shop. The bell didn’t work.
“Don’t be a dick, dude. I need this pen. I’ll give you twenty bucks for it.” One of his face pickings had started to bleed.
Freddy showed early signs of the hyperactive youth who had once lit himself on fire and jumped into the lake as a joke. “Look, fuck, just write down your info and give it back.” The pleather-clad hesher kicked the door open and returned to the phone.
In an attempt to alleviate some of the stress, I stepped up to the counter in front of Freddy. “I got it, Fred. I owe you something for being a cock earlier.” I reached across the counter and gave Barry my money.
Fwap!
Fwap!
Fwap!
Three gunshots rang out behind me. They shook my teeth and burnt my gums. Terror thrusted up my veins. My balls shriveled into my chest and my dick got wet. I jumped behind the counter with Barry, who had already taken cover. I didn’t hear Freddy cry out, so I figured he had taken cover with us as well. Barry’s employee of the month picture fell and the glass smashed on my head.
Two seconds later, the reluctant bell rang, and the gunman squealed out of the parking lot.
With my eyes closed, I propped myself up slowly. Barry hunkered down, shivering in shock. I shook so hard that the cheap imitation glass doughnut case rattled and the cakes inside fell off their shelves. With one eye, I looked up through the display case, peering beyond the mixed pile of doughnuts.
I saw the twitching remains of college student Freddy Brubaker.
It was difficult to tell where his blood stopped and his smeared makeup began. It was even harder to tell who he was. I lost control of my breathing. I looked down at my mangled life long friend, the first of my allies to escape from the town, and saw his Mont Blanc pen gripped in his hand. Engraved on the base were the words, “You did it. Love, Dad.”
He shivered. His arms fluttered and his last living squirt of blood spat all over the front of the counter. I jumped over Barry as he fired up a joint.
“Breathe, Freddy. Breathe, Goddammit. Breathe,” is all I managed to get out. My heart pounded and my palms where soaked with sweat.
I tried with napkins to make the bleeding stop and I tried to plug up the three holes with my finger like Freddy’s chest was a bowling ball.
“Fucker. Goddamn it, fucker,” I screamed at myself. With that last look, I blacked out.
A week later, I crossed the street to the Brubakers’ house. Buck, Freddy’s father, gave me the pen, saying I should have it. At first, I felt reluctant to take it, but he insisted it belonged to me. He couldn’t bear the sight of this last trophy, all that remained of his youngest son.
In an attempt to console him, I told Buck the killer didn’t have any idea of the pen’s value.
“The bastard didn’t even have the balls to face his crime.” Buck sniffed. His lips quivered and his voice cracked during accented syllables.
After the killer bailed from Al’s, he headed down the highway, where the local cops pursued him. While driving toward the Bay Bridge, his only escape route, the only escape route, he crammed the gun into his own face, fired it, and swerved off the road. Flames engulfed his car.
Coward.
The entire hell night didn’t faze the cops of Kudzutown. Freddy was just another kid in the wrong place at the wrong time. Since the rest of the apathetic assholes of the town were too busy fucking off, not many people seemed to care that Freddy had been killed. Lori cared, though, and she called me.
“D, I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch,” she said weakly.
“It’s okay, Lori. Where have you been?”
“I’ve been busy. Do you miss him?”
I tugged on my ear and bunched up my face so that I wouldn’t break down. “I haven’t had time to think about it.”
“You can’t just ignore it, D. You loved him.”
“I love you, too.”
“D--” she began. I hung up the phone.
That night, I went to visit Nazareth and bury Freddy’s trophy at the foundation. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to write with it.
Much to my chagrin, some neighborhood kids had constructed a rope swing by hammering two railroad spikes into the tree’s hands, securing a long nylon rope connected to an old tire. Furious, I ripped down the apparatus, tearing the nails through the limbs of the tree. Then, I hoisted the plaything into the sewer.
The fiery rage pumping through my arms froze when I realized what I’d done. I weakened the appendages. Sap gushed out. The limbs dangled like the ornaments on a pathetic Christmas tree.
After my initial shock, though, it didn’t upset me. Without looking again, I dug a hole at the base and buried Freddy’s trophy. Then, I sat down with my back to Nazareth and wrote.
CHAPTER THREE
Winter added another ring to Nazareth’s long life. In that season, I spent the day home from school “sick” so I could crank out a couple poems that were due for my creative writing class. I knew they wouldn’t take me that long to complete, and I wanted to leave high school with a bang, making my presence as a writer remembered. How heroic of me. I felt that nothing made people listen like the written word.
My love for reading and writing began when my mother forced me to read a bunch of books each summer. When the post-school season began, she would take me to the bookstore, where I picked out half, usually something from C.S. Lewis or Robert Newton Peck, and she picked out the other half, usually classics. As I got older, each summer would be stacked with more and more classics until the kid’s books were ignored altogether. Reading became an easy outlet for me to disassociate myself from my fear of dying. I let the authors guide my life, like they did their characters’.
As far as competing with other students, I had no worries. What did I have to compete with? I wasn’t afraid of the theater kids and their obsession with the bored rebellion of Holden Caulfield. I scoffed at the stoners and their Gonzo-esque carbon copies of Hunter S. Thompson. I turned up my nose at the countless caustic attempts at metaphorically mutating “roses are red” by paying tribute to Jimi Hendrix or John Lennon.
I wanted to tell something bold, something true. Oddly enough, when I was young, I always dreamed of writing horror stories. The new poem, however, couldn’t be horror or fantasy. It had to be real.
After pacing in an unconstructive way around Nazareth, I concluded that every other kid in my class was going to sum up the closing of the paper mill and how it had taken its toll on our town. I hadn’t taken the time to deal with Freddy’s death, so I decided to leave that topic to one of the many girls in class who fancied themselves his widow. I diverted my attention elsewhere. Lori Conroy’s misery and my short confrontation with her stepfather at AutoRx were the first things that came to mind.
Lori had always been a close friend, but kept secrets from me. I knew she suffered from anorexia, and it consumed her. One time when I went out to get some frozen yogurt with her, she threw a fit at the employee who refused to measure the non-fat yogurt into exactly ten ounces. She was obsessed. All the warning signs were there.
A couple of my friends and I used to make fun of her mustache and call her “Hitler.” Whenever she walked by, we stood at attention and saluted her, our arms into the air, exclaiming, “Heil!”
One day she took me aside in tears, explaining that because of the affliction, her body produced a soft, thin layer of hair everywhere on her body--except for the hair on her head, which had already begun to thin. All of her friends ignored her cry for help, relying on a societal debate concerning high school females and their infatuation with supermodels. Another time, she admitted to me that she had to be re-hydrated and medicated regularly by an IV. No one knew. Myself included, we were a typical bunch of self-absorbed high school assholes.
I owed her something. I didn’t want to expose her shit to my teachers or make her uncomfortable around her friends, but I did want to let her know I cared. I worked all that day under the weakened arms of Nazareth. The trunk supported my back and kept me attentive to the task I had outlined; however, the stench of the bog, combined with stale beer made me gag every couple of minutes. I wrote poem after poem and just balled up the shitty ones and chucked them into the water. Sure, a plea for forgiveness drove my poetry, but the result painted a picture of how I saw Lori.
At dusk, I finally produced a finished product that satisfied me. I read the poem to myself over and over. It was poetic, everything I’d hoped it would be. Lori’s maze always led back to the beginning. I searched what I knew about her for an answer to her perpetual self-destruction and found nothing. Deep down I thought it a little selfish for someone to refuse food.
IV
It would seem as if Lori
Is locked in the cold,
Ignoring demise
Struggling for her
Life.
“Help me get out,”
Her gentle eyes cry.
A pile of bones,
Burying regret
Under lies.
Coaxing reflections beyond,
are her creatures within?
Eating is forgotten,
Beauty under her
Knife.
She will never know
Where and when
Death will strike.
Every calorie skipped
His sickle delights.
Those who are forced to mature
When their parents divide.
Can weep all they want,
Their tears best left
Unsaid.
She reaches for support
With her skeletal wrist,
Love for all others.
To herself
Love went missed.
If Lori is my teacher,
Why am I alone?
Am I also confined
To her spidery
Web?
As I watch Lori bowing
To her personal harm,
I notice
A bracelet,
An IV in her arm.
Excited about my poem, I went home, checked the mail, and, disappointed again, called Lori to ask her to meet me at the McDonald’s parking lot. She agreed.
“You can’t bring this to class!” she screamed after she read the words. Her lips were bleeding. “You’ll totally single me out!”
“But--“
“I don’t have a problem, and I don’t want to be your secret little joke. I’m not your freak.”
“Lori, I just wanted to--”
“Fuck you!” She pulled a cigarette, probably the first of her second or third pack of the day, from behind her ear. In one swift, circular motion, she pulled her trademark Zippo out of her pocket, lit the cigarette, and returned the lighter to its home. She must have practiced that move so many times to get it right. I watched in admiration as she filled my car with a huge puff of smoke.
“What? You wanted to tell everyone how fucked up I am? You don’t understand, D.” She continued to look at my poem as tears poured passed the dark circles around her eyes and down her cheeks. For a long time, neither of us said anything, not a word. After a long time, she took a deep breath. “He fucks me, D.”
I searched through my mind and came upon a frightening realization.
“He fucks me all the time.” Once she found the courage to start, she didn’t want to stop. “When my mom goes out, even when she just goes to the store to pick up a couple of things, he rapes me. He beats me like his bitch and calls me by his dead wife’s name. ‘Angie! Angie, you whore! Angie!’ All over the house! He won’t stop!” Smoke clouded the car. It was too cold outside to roll down the windows.
I touched her shoulder. Unable to comfort her, I retracted my hand immediately. Lori’s lip curled up as she snarled at my touch. “Rick?” Rick Conroy, stringing up his Christmas lights, whistling “Jesus Loves Me.” It all made sense. I finally understood how such a beautiful girl with everything going for her would want to reinvent herself as something unappealing, and skeletal. She looked horrible. Her thick beautiful hair had become thinned and patched, like the rodent carcasses that I sent swimming weekly down at the bog. “How come you never told anybody?”
“Would you tell anybody? My mom? She’s always so piss drunk, she ignores what she may or may not know. She doesn’t care.” She took a huge breath, fighting down the tears. “She’s so fucking stupid that she doesn’t notice the ant traps that I have surrounding my bed. Rick uses greasy towels from his shop as nut rags and throws them under my bed when he’s finished fucking me. I’m not touching that shit; they’re covered in ants.”
“Lori, as your friend I have to tell somebody. Jesus Christ, you should have told someone other than me!”
I didn’t want to be the sole protector of her secret but her black eyes pleaded with me.
“No way. I don’t want to be the freak. I know what people say. I hear those tweaked cunts that pretend to be my friends say they want to help, when they secretly wish they were as thin as me. I see how all of you make jokes about me. She pulled up the arm of her sweater and revealed her lifeless bone of a limb.
“You aren’t a freak, Lori. You just need help.”
“It’s not that easy. You don’t know, D. Please, please keep it to yourself. If I find out you told anyone, I’ll kill you. You hear me?”
Reluctantly, I nodded.
“I’m getting out of here. I’m going to stay with my sister until summer, and I’ll find out next week whether or not I got into State. My mom has the money tucked away from when my grandfather died. My grades are pretty solid, er, at least until this year.” She flicked her cigarette out the window and lit up another. Same motions, same precision. I was surprised that she could lift the lighter.
“You have to quit. Now!” All I could do was offer simple solutions to her terror. Back then, I didn’t realize that all she saw was her stepfather’s cock staring back at her from the mirror. I couldn’t feel her pain.
She opened her eyes wide. “Keep your mouth shut, D. You aren’t God.” She pulled deep on her cigarette. “Shit, asshole, I think one of my contacts fell out.”
“Okay, I promise.”
“Thanks.” She continued to look at the poem and cry. “Can I keep this? I’ll give you my lighter.” From her pocket she pulled out her precious Zippo, this time, slowly. Her fingernails were yellow and frail. It was an offering for secrecy. I shooed it away, but she insisted. “Take it. I have to quit smoking. It’s killing me.” We both laughed as we made the exchange. I heard her bones creak as she left the car carefully. She poked her head in and blew me a smoke-scented kiss. She followed her token of love by performing a crazy skeleton dance. She bounced around aimlessly, flapping her grossly thin body around like an uncontrollable marionette, her way of letting me know everything was okay.
The next day, I ended up turning in an obvious poem about the closing of the paper mill and how it would have affected Mark Twain. Apparently, my teacher didn’t agree with my views on obscure literary references focusing on Twain and his hatred for James Fenimore Cooper’s fraudulent, romantic writing style. I thought it was funny, but my teacher fancies herself quite a Deerslayer when it comes to grading. I got a C. At least Lori’s secret was safe.
A few weeks later, Lori’s friend Kelli told me that Lori had been taken to the hospital after collapsing in her physics class. According to the teacher, she’d been giving a speech, and, in mid-sentence, toppled over and nailed her head. The teacher blamed exhaustion, but I knew better. Lori was in trouble.
After school, I went down to the local hospital to see if everything was okay.
The hospital sickened me. I’m sure that dirty floors and donation cans next to the ashtrays were common practice in most non-third world hospitals. Our town and everything it was third world. Just a shithole. If you were born there, you were born into shit. Most likely, judging from the upkeep of the hospital, you’d die in shit, too.
“You okay?” I asked as I yanked open the curtain that sheltered her from the molester.
“Yeah, I’ll be all right. I just got dizzy and hit the ground.”
At the risk of sounding like a typical eating disorder bully, I nudged at her. “Then why do you have an IV in your arm, Lori? You need to fucking eat.”
“Fuck you, D. This has nothing to do with that. I think I drank too much this weekend at Dodge’s house. I’m still a little dehydrated.”
I grabbed a three-and-a-half-legged stool over to her bedside. “Listen, we both know that’s bullshit. Don’t worry; your secret is safe with me.” After her reaction to the poem, I didn’t want anyone to know about her condition. Seeing her pale beyond belief, shriveled up with an intravenous bag filling her with water, I thought my safest bet would be to keep quiet rather than lose a friend. I didn’t want her to keep suffering, though.
“I love you, D. I have your poem hidden in the glove compartment of my car. If I ever feel unloved, I read it. How’s the lighter?”
“Great, except for the fact that I don’t smoke.”
“You will.” She lit up a cigarette with a match off her bed post.
“Miss, you can’t smoke in here,” a nurse walking by stated.
“Fuck you, bitch,” Laurie grunted.
The phone rang at around 2:00 in the morning. My mom answered it and rushed into my room. “Honey, Lonchar is on the phone. He says it’s important.”
Great, I thought, Dodge must have been having another one of his epic all-nighters.
“Where were you tonight?” She’d heard me sneezing. I’m allergic to alcohol.
“Out.” I ventured through the desert of writing and paper all over my floor and picked up the phone. “What do you want, Launch? I’m sleeping,” I grumbled as I wiped the snot away from my eyes.
“Dude, Lori jumped off the Bay Bridge. They found her car parked out there with a note. They haven’t found her yet.”
I acted surprised. “What? Shit!”
“She may still be alive. I’m going up there and search around.”
“What did the note say, Lonchar?”
“It was a letter from State, refusing her admission and something else.” Shit. The poem. The phone dropped from my hand and I walked away. Faintly, I heard Lonchar yelling, “D! D! Are you there? D!”
Refused. No way out. Lori knew she was trapped. I walked into my room and put on my clothes. Mom peeked in through my door. “Honey, what did he want? Did something happen? Did you do something?” I couldn’t help but think about my own fate if I was refused.
“Don’t worry about it, Mom. I’ll be back in a little while.” I should have told her something, but I had another agenda.
I picked up Lori’s Zippo from my bed stand and headed out. Voices in my head reminded me of recent tragedy. I didn’t wait for them to search for Lori. I didn’t have to. I already knew.
When I went to Nazareth to bury Lori’s lighter, I saw him in a completely different light. The darkness may have been deceiving, but at night he didn’t look as strong. He seemed weathered, beaten down, tired. He didn’t reflect any tangible form other than a big pile of kudzu. I fell to my knees and dug directly next to the burial location of Freddy’s pen. The smell of death and the town made me gag but I sucked the vomit back down and swallowed--something I’d become accustomed to over the long years in Kudzu captivity. Never looking down, I dropped Lori’s flame into the hole and covered it up.
The authorities eventually found her decayed body a couple of days later. It washed up on the banks of the bay. I’m sure that even in her decomposed state she was still as beautiful as she had always been. As much as I wished it never happened, I knew deep down that she hadn’t any other way out. I kept her secret. At that time, I wanted her beauty to live on forever, untarnished. Her problem wouldn’t have been solved by an extra two ounces of yogurt.
CHAPTER FOUR
I was stretching out my knotted back from my hard mattress when I peered into the mailbox one unexpected spring day. Unlike the previous few months, during which I opened the box only to be showered with the avalanche of delinquent bills my parents tried to ignore, that day I found a sole letter. I knew what it was. I bit my lip, pulled it out, and my stomach howled. I felt my eyes welling up and premonitions of working the toll both on the bay bridge stabbed me in the head. As Lori and Freddy’s murderer proved, the bridge was the only way out.
The envelope felt thin, not a good sign. I smelled it. It still smelled like the bog. Negative thoughts shot through my mind. “Why would I, a kid from a shitty little town, beat out every other aspiring writer to get a scholarship to Palmbrook University?” The letter was for me. It was either a ticket to paradise or a sentence to death.
Luckily, my parents were gone. They wouldn’t have to see my disappointment as I unfolded the letter. More thoughts raced through my mind. “Well, I could always go to the community college and raise my grades.” I would then hear my personal devil’s advocate answer. “This isn’t about grades; it’s your only chance.” Fuck that. If I had to walk across the fucking evil bridge, I was going to get out of town. I hated it that much.
I closed the mailbox and headed up my walkway.
“So, D?” The mailman I had pestered that entire year asked. “What’s the word?”
I said nothing and slammed the door behind me.
“Don’t shoot the messenger,” he yelled after me.
I walked to me room and I sat down on my messy bed, playing with the letter, holding it up to the light, bending it for contents. I expected nothing but the worst. Was it any better than the dying town where I lived? Where exactly was I going? What did I expect to do with my life? I thought about Freddy Brubaker and Lori Conroy for the first time since they had passed.
“Is our world so fucked up and deranged? What did they have to look forward to?” I yelled at myself. “What could they change? Murderers get off because of their social status. Good people are killed for saying what they want.”
What was so good about the world? Everything that I looked forward to, everything that I had ever wanted, was on that one piece of paper. Like so many other times, like the night Freddy was killed, I needed a piece of paper. It would surely fix things.
I tore open the envelope. There was a single piece of cheap paper stock inside, nicely folded--something I wouldn’t have noticed, except I always envisioned my college acceptance letter printed on a thick paper, laced with gold and ripe for framing. I unfolded the first flap. What if I didn’t fit in? What if paradise was a scam? What if I couldn’t cut it as a writer? I unfolded the second flap revealing the contents of my life. It was only about three paragraphs in length. It was fairly unimpressive for the foretelling of my future. I read.
Assholes! They spelled my name wrong! Well, that wasn’t important. I read the first line.
“Congratulations, you have been accepted on scholarship to attend Palmbrook University.”
Paradise found.
Fuck. I did it.
I actually fucking did something.
When my parents arrived home that evening--my father had taken on a part-time job as an engineering consultant a few towns over and my mother worked at the local bookstore--I proudly showed them the letter. They both went to college. As a matter of fact, they both went to better colleges than the one I had gotten into; however, the military brainwash of my father’s academy school and the Lutheran teachings of my mother’s mid-western school didn’t appeal to me. I wanted to write, and I wanted out.
“Good job, son. You did it,” my father, who I called the general, said, extending his hand for a firm shake. He was a big man. He brushed his dark Pollack hair over his protruding forehead caused by years of boxing and football. He smiled.
“I don’t know, Honey. Are you sure you want to leave?” my mother pleaded. My mom tried to hug me in like I was a cub. She was no bear. Always a small woman, her dyed blonde hair showed roots--the result of unpaid bills. Her green eyes watered as she wiped her calloused hand across my face. Her rich parents would have been ashamed by what Kudzutown had done to her.
I handed my father the letter. “Assholes! They spelled our name wrong,” he muttered.
After a good dinner, I took my letter off the fridge.
My mom, still a little shaken up that I was leaving home, took her eyes from the stove. “Are you going to go and show it to your friends?”
“Something like that.” I had one last sacrifice to offer Nazareth. One last duty.
CHAPTER FIVE
Sitting on the stump of the drained Nazareth, I counted the days before my triumphant escape. The tree, which once stood proud, an enigma in our town, had been reduced to just a pew surrounded by a lump of torn kudzu and leftover bark. Unbeknownst to me, someone had leveled the entire area sometime over the previous couple of months. Even the smaller disciples across the bog had been mowed down.
It was also really nice of the workmen to knock down a powerline and add to the smell of the area by electrocuting the few living creatures that managed to stick it out and survive in the swamp.
When you’re forced to grow up, security blankets, crutches, idols, and even religions fade away and you lose interest. Why did I give faith to something based solely on its test of time and its importance to my past? My dependency on God disappeared, becoming nothing more than a lesson. I don’t think that spending any more time there would have made any difference. It wouldn’t bring Freddy and Lori back. I picked up a blackened raccoon by the tail and tossed it into the big green dumpster in the middle of the stream.
I was a realist, not a dreamer. I was sure they would build a strip mall or something equally worthless. The type of place no one in Kudzutown could afford to frequent. It didn’t matter. The entire town was fucking scatter, and no matter how they dressed it up, scatter was all that it would be. All we were was a bunch of dead animals.
Bending over, I lunged my index finger down my throat, and vomited. It didn’t seem strange at the time. I was sickened by everything that had happened during the school year. My agony and hatred, coupled with the smell of my world, made it easy. I didn’t retract and swallow the barf back down. I enjoyed letting it go. I wiped some mucus onto my pants. I felt relieved. I felt cleansed.
Clearing away the piles of Nazareth, I dug up Freddy’s trophy pen and Lori’s precious lighter. I wanted to cry. Senseless. What could I have done to prevent their deaths? Nothing. First, I pulled out the lighter. I lit the Zippo flint as I envisioned Lori’s one-motion trick. All I saw was her pain. It was about more than escaping for her. She wanted to be loved, but not by that fucking lazy-eyed asshole Conroy.
I held my acceptance letter up and, in one circular motion, torched it. They’d spelled my name wrong. I knew the general would make sure they sent another. The paper burned slowly away. The breeze broke the ends off and shat them into the disgusting waste of the bog below. The thin paper burned brightly, but eventually the flames burned uncontrollably. The letter doubled over and collapsed, singeing the skin on my thumb, but the stomach bile that remained on my index finger controlled it.
I held up Freddy’s trophy. Sure enough, just like he’d said, it proved indeed indestructible. I read the inscription aloud to the fallen Nazareth. “You did it. Love, Dad.” It was roughly the same thing that my father had said to me. Sure, the general wanted me to go to some military school, but he was proud of me, just as much as old Buck Brubaker was of Freddy. I’d tried to shut out that fateful night for the rest of my life, but certain elements always flashed by: Freddy masked behind his ridiculous face makeup, Lonchar the hero, Barry the dreamer, the speed freak coward, and me, the jealous asshole.
I’d tried as hard as I could to plug up Freddy’s bullet wounds. I’d tried so hard but the blood kept pouring out. The sight of Freddy’s shaking body haunted me, but I shut it out. He just lay there, begging for a minute, a second, a moment, and twitched. As his leg quivered, the blood from his wounds pumped out, as if his leg were a death machine, pushing him to the end as quickly as possible.
Fumbling around in my pockets, I searched for a piece of paper to write on. Just like Freddy at Al’s Do-Nuts, though, I didn’t have a piece.
“If he only had a piece of paper!” Anything for that freak to write down whatever information had been so fucking important. Why is that every time someone needs a piece of paper, they can’t find one? But of course, I knew the answer to that one. The paper mill closed down.
I stomped around like a lunatic, crushing the worthless remains of Nazareth. Frantic, I threw Lori’s lighter into the bog. I shredded pieces of the vine. I kicked at the stump and smashed scraps of bark.
“I fucking hate you!” I yelled at the stump. “I hate you so much!” I blacked out for a second. Time took its toll on the town and I had been just another animal. I might have felt release, but I would always be a prisoner. My arms and legs were ripped apart by limbs and bark. I was bleeding all over myself and I sucked snot into my mouth to get it off my face.
I vomited again. I jumped to my feet, unleashed, uncaged. I still wasn’t free. My head banged against the cage that held me from escape. I would never be free. Just as I lifted my arm to throw the Mont Blanc, that terrible fucking pen, a memory surged through my head. Dude, this pen can write on anything. I stopped and slowly picked up a piece of bark from one of Nazareth’s two reaching limbs. I wrote the truth. My truth. I paid my last respects to the tree. For once, it proved useful. The bog, the paper mill, the tree, they weren’t my hiding places anymore, nor were they the burial ground of my friends.
Darkness surrounded the swamp, so I fished Lori’s lighter out of the smelly pissing hole, put the piece of bark under my arm, proudly placed Freddy’s pen in my front pocket and headed home.
For the second time that year, I observed. The dilapidated homes, the beaten up cars abandoned in the streets, the rummage growing in the yards--it was all so wrong. After an hour of disgust, I reached my school, most likely the cleanest high school in the country. Our good-natured principal hired an over abundant amount of out-of-work custodians when the mill closed. I walked by the football field and saw Lonchar kicking field goals. Since Freddy’s death, Launch stayed late after soccer practice to warm up for next year’s football season.
“Good job, D,” he yelled across the field when he saw me. “I heard the news from your mom when I called you to tell you about a shindig tonight at Dodger’s pad. A real kick-ass party. Honeys everywhere. Pick your own poison. You up?” I wasn’t close to him, but all the same I could tell he’d been crying. His voice cracked as he screamed. I’m sure he cried every night.
“Yeah, I’ll be there; I just got some shit to take care of first.”
Lonchar booted a forty-yard field goal. It was all in vain; he never scored another show-time point again, at least not in high school. After he lifted his arms to signal three points, he dropped to his knees. I wanted to comfort him, but I was a bloody mess and I was out of words.
He got up from his knees, placed another ball on the tee and wiped sweat and tears off of his forehead. “Kind of a fucked up year, huh?”
“Yeah, kind of a very fucked up year.” I turned around.
“Oh, your mom told me to tell you to call if I ran into you. Use the phone over there by the locker room. It’s free.”
“Thanks.” I headed toward the locker room, listening to his grunts and groans. Provided he got that soccer player nonsense out of his head, Launch was going to make it out of here. I picked up the phone and started to dial my house. I hesitated, and just as easily as I had picked up the receiver, hung it up. I fell into the wall in front of me. The bricks crumbled as the dust blinded me. That time, at last, I cried. Some things are best left unsaid. Some things aren’t. I dialed a different number.
It was strange how everything came together. After I walked by the high school, I caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye. To be sure I wasn’t dreaming, I looked down at my watch. Sure enough, April 16, nowhere near Christmas. Shocked, I dropped everything I was holding. There he was, Rick Conroy, whistling away, tearing down the lights that still covered the house like an overgrowth of kudzu.
After collecting my memories, I walked up to his ladder and shook the base. “Nice night, huh, Mr. Conroy?”
“Wha? Oh, ya scared me.” He looked up at the sky. “It’s all right. I can feel something’s coming in from the west, though.” He readjusted his hat, snorted and spat onto the ground. All I did was stare at him. I stared directly into his aimless lazy eye. I wanted to gouge it out with Freddy’s pen.
“You gotta problem, son? What’re lookin’ at?”
I woke myself from the death stare and got myself together. “I just think it’s brilliant how you leave your Christmas lights up practically all year round. It’s almost like you want to constantly bring joy to the town.”
“Ah, yeah,” he scratched his nose, checking to see if he had a booger on his face that would warrant my stare. “Somethin’ like that.” He shook his head, confused.
I placed the piece of bark at the bottom of the ladder and walked away. “Well, here. I’ve decided to bring joy to this town as well. I hope you get what you deserve, motherfucker.”
“Boy, what in the hell?” I heard him step down from the ladder, but I didn’t turn around. I just kept walking. Walking away.
“Is this some kind of joke, kid?” He screamed after me. “Why are you all bloody? Are you on PCP?” I didn’t answer. “Hey, I’m talking to you, ya little shit!” I continued to walk, and he continued to scream. “What does this mean? I know you Deese, ya little fucker.”
He didn’t run after me; he didn’t understand the message I’d scrawled on the Nazareth’s bark. As his rants became more distant, nearly out of my reach, I heard the police sirens. For once, a phone conversation had indeed paid off.
“Merry Christmas, rapist!” I whispered, thinking of the message I carved on the bark with Freddy’s pen.