When I tell the story about what happened to Alex in Ohio, I mean for it to be a funny story. Instead people usually think it’s sad, and that I am a little cruel, or at least callous.
They always say: that poor guy, which means I must be telling it wrong.
How we looked at the time: short hair, perhaps bleached to look like a beastie boy. Kangols or ball caps, a few piercings, just starting to accumulate tattoos. We wore preppy brands, Polo or Nautica or Tommy Hilfiger two sizes too big. We smoked cigarettes and argued about them—fuck your camels. We still drank soda instead of coffee, we knew how to buy and sell drugs better than how to talk to girls. Our cheeks ran hollow and we had dark circles under our eyes we hid with big sunglasses.
There were four of us on the trip, me and James, who were always together then, and James's friends Alex and Trevor, who were both a few years older than us. It was Trevor's car and he did all the driving. Alex is too fucked up at all times to operate an automobile and James and I are too young. Trevor has a tape of hardcore techno he plays constantly; it's about two hundred beats a minute with an obscenity layered on each beat like:
FuckFuckFuckFuckFuckFuckFuckFuckFuckFuckFuckFuckFuckBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoom
The trip was an adventure in its way, as far from home as any of us had ever gone by ourselves. We stopped at the identical gas station and fast food complexes that grow along American highways and ate hot dogs and corn chips and sticks of processed spicy beef. Our guts ached with fat and salt. We smoked weed and coughed, the inside of the car turned gray with smoke, and outside a sunset cast a subtle light over the world and the trees lining the road were wrapped in gold and the brake lights in front of us stretched out like the red beacons of a runway.
We were on our way to an outdoor rave in Ohio, where I can't remember, to sell drugs and consume drugs and purchase drugs, which is to say to try and enjoy ourselves as we currently understood the term. What we brought to sell was Special K, Ketamine, divided for sale into little twenty dollar envelopes made from glossy magazine paper we had spent the night before cutting and folding, for once industrious and careful (air-dried, we'd say, little salesmen, none of that microwaved shit). Ketamine came in bottles stolen from vets, yellow and white labels with a red-boxed warning stating that the drug was intended for use only in canines and sub-human primates.
CuntCuntCuntCuntCuntCuntCuntCuntCuntCuntCuntCuntCuntWhapWhapWhapWhapWhapWhapWhapWhapWhapWhapWhapWhapWhap
Alex was tall and thin and gangly with skin the color of plaster. He would stay up for days at a time, until his eyes recessed back into his head and his face looked just like a skull, or like someone had taken out his pale eyes with ice cream scoops. Human speech and bipedal locomotion became difficult and he would lurch from place to place, mumbling awkward syllables, his long arms out to catch his falling body when the weight of the world or rather drugs yanked him backwards or slammed him forwards towards the ground.
This time, it was acid that caused the problems. James saw Alex tearing a chunk of blotter off, what looked like maybe half a sheet, and said Jesus how much are you taking? Alex of course just laughed his stupid horsey laugh and stuck the paper in his mouth.
In a few hours his eyes were all black, and he started talking about the quality of the air in the car and in the sweaty, half-collapsed tent, how one of us must have poisoned it because it burned, and that he could feel the powders with which we had poisoned the air scraping at his lungs like little fingers.
Trevor, whose car and tent it was, had been doing speed since we got there and his dense body was taut like a terrier looking at rat. Fuck off then, he said, you don't like my car and tent and Alex said, I will, you'll see, I'm going to the woods. And he got up and backed away from us his eyes shifting in his head like insects.
We laughed, crazy Alex.
That day we sold our K and bought a pound of pungent weed to take back with us that we worried would make our car smell. It was the middle of the summer and felt like a hundred degrees. The party was gritty and not our scene, a few stages scattered over a red dirt campsite surrounded by a sad pine forest, sickly shrubs wilting in the heat and too many people who should only be seen after dark out in the bright sunlight, eyes and faces all folded in on themselves and the merry glow of infection around piercings.
We sweated and sniped at each other and smoked too many cigarettes. We tried to talk to some hippie girls and they blew us off us. Eventually we decided to go look for Alex.
We found him in the woods, like he said, up a tree. He saw us and started throwing pinecones. I know you, he said, I know you and I know what you did. I saw you with the packets. We laughed at first, as if he were joking, but then we saw his eyes and they glowed with something which was ultimately probably just a product of the drugs he had taken, or the drugs we had, or the odd light of the sun, but it was something fundamentally unpleasant, and we stopped moving towards him. After a minute he scampered down the tree and ran off deeper into the woods
We looked in the direction he had gone for a little while then somebody shrugged, probably me. Fuck it. We left.
We didn't really sleep the rest of the time there. The tent was a disaster and we were constantly too hot and half delirious. Alex never came back. We went and asked around about him a couple of times (so it's not as though we made no effort at all), and heard a few reports of a tall thin man staggering about and shouting incoherently, but none of us saw him.
By the last day we were in terrible moods. We didn't like the music or the people or the place or by this point each other. Either we hadn't done the math or had lost some drugs or lost some money, any or all of which was entirely plausible. We were snapping at each other and wanting to get home, not even thinking about Alex really, when after an entirely inconsequential argument Trevor tried to kill, or perhaps less dramatically to injure, but certainly to hit, James with his car.
James was sitting on the hood of Trevor's car smoking a cigarette and Trevor told him to get off. To simplify their complex relationship to the point of meaninglessness, James was smarter and Trevor was tougher and each resented that to one degree or another—though our consumption of methamphetamine, the intense heat and issues of sexual jealousy and class resentment were also factors.
In any case James made a show of how hurt he was that his friend wouldn't even let him sit on his car, asking what kind of harm Trevor possibly thought the car was going to come to anyway? And saying how cruel and slanderous it was to allege that he, James, a good friend of Trevor, would think of inflicting so much as a scratch on the dull silver paint of the Oldsmobile.
To which Trevor said fuck you dude, with genuine venom, and got into his car and drove it at James, not at top speed or anything but not really slow either. James jumped onto the hood as the car came at him, rolled and hit the windshield in front of the passenger's seat hard enough to spider-web it with cracks. Trevor jumped out and yelled, like he had nothing to do with it, Oh my god what the fuck did you do to my car?
So at this point it was understandable, how after throwing our tent away (we couldn't get it back in the tent-bag) and driving to a gas station for tape to hold the windshield together, we forgot about Alex. We were about to pull out of the gas station to start driving back towards Boston, when Trevor turned the music down and said: Guys, seriously, are we really going to leave Alex, because, honestly, that's kind of fucked up. I think.
My skin was caked with old sweat and the lack of sleep was making me see spiders along the ceiling and floor of the car.
Fuck him, I said, rolling a joint and dreaming about a shower and a bed.
James concurred. It's not our fault he's crazy. He knew some other people at the party. He'll get a ride back.
Trevor considered. Yeah. Fuck him. He put the tape back in.
DickDickDickDickDickDickDickDickDickDickDickDickDickBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoom
A few hours later, Trevor was still not speaking to James, who was huddled down in the back and in any case asleep. I was in the front, feeling a bit better after a nap, listening to Trevor complain again about James wrecking his car by not getting out of the way fast enough. We smoked cigarettes and dodged occasional shards of windshield.
A truck barreled past us on the right close so that the wind of its passage buffeted our car. Then, when its trailer was still parallel to our car, it turned sharply into our lane. Trevor said jesus and hit the brakes hard and the trailer swung a few feet in front of our hood.
He must not have seen us. Fucking asshole. That was close.
A mile or two later we passed the truck a couple of lanes over on our left, going up a hill. As we went down the backside of the hill we saw the glare of the lights behind us and the truck bore down and cut right, its white trailer looming. Trevor braked hard and again the truck swung into the lane in front of us.
Trevor looked at me and back at the truck. He dropped into the left lane and drove slow and let the truck fade into the night. He looked over at me and said, that happened because we left Alex, didn't it?
The trucker might have been seized by rage after being up for days on amphetamines, an occupational hazard, or perhaps the sight of our small silver car in front of his large and heavy truck had offended him, in the way the powerful are offended by the weak, and he therefore felt compelled to crush us in order to illustrate a law of nature. More likely he sensed our malignancy, our poisoned guts and badly developed consciences, and decided to clean the world of us as if wiping away an unsightly stain.
Alex did make it back safely, though it was a few weeks later. When I saw him next he was high and I couldn't tell if there were any hard feelings or if he remembered or if he even recognized me. About a year a later I heard that I he had died—from an overdose of course.
James had met Alex's family before, his parents and sisters. He said they seemed like nice people, a little spacey but nice.
They lived in a grey house on a corner in Needham that when James met them in winter was decorated with large inflatable Santas and snowmen, which is to say that the house didn't seem like the kind of place or his family the kind of people to make Alex what he was, but there was nonetheless clearly in his mind or body some flaw or feature that on encountering drugs, which in Alex's indiscriminate and gluttonous usage meant simply the oblivion of the self, had started immediately to resonate at a high and terrible and critical frequency, and the years that had he lived since then had simply been the time needed for this exponential resonance to grow terminal and raze the frail, if long, structure of skin, bones and flesh that had been Alex, sending him falling to the ground one last time like a collapsing suspension bridge.
Which is not something I say when I'm trying to tell the funny story about leaving Alex in Ohio, because after all, I'm not insensitive.
FuckFuckFuckFuckFuckFuckFuckFuckFuckFuckFuckFuckFuckBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoom
We were on our way to an outdoor rave in Ohio, where I can't remember, to sell drugs and consume drugs and purchase drugs, which is to say to try and enjoy ourselves as we currently understood the term. What we brought to sell was Special K, Ketamine, divided for sale into little twenty dollar envelopes made from glossy magazine paper we had spent the night before cutting and folding, for once industrious and careful (air-dried, we'd say, little salesmen, none of that microwaved shit). Ketamine came in bottles stolen from vets, yellow and white labels with a red-boxed warning stating that the drug was intended for use only in canines and sub-human primates.
CuntCuntCuntCuntCuntCuntCuntCuntCuntCuntCuntCuntCuntWhapWhapWhapWhapWhapWhapWhapWhapWhapWhapWhapWhapWhap
Alex was tall and thin and gangly with skin the color of plaster. He would stay up for days at a time, until his eyes recessed back into his head and his face looked just like a skull, or like someone had taken out his pale eyes with ice cream scoops. Human speech and bipedal locomotion became difficult and he would lurch from place to place, mumbling awkward syllables, his long arms out to catch his falling body when the weight of the world or rather drugs yanked him backwards or slammed him forwards towards the ground.
This time, it was acid that caused the problems. James saw Alex tearing a chunk of blotter off, what looked like maybe half a sheet, and said Jesus how much are you taking? Alex of course just laughed his stupid horsey laugh and stuck the paper in his mouth.
In a few hours his eyes were all black, and he started talking about the quality of the air in the car and in the sweaty, half-collapsed tent, how one of us must have poisoned it because it burned, and that he could feel the powders with which we had poisoned the air scraping at his lungs like little fingers.
Trevor, whose car and tent it was, had been doing speed since we got there and his dense body was taut like a terrier looking at rat. Fuck off then, he said, you don't like my car and tent and Alex said, I will, you'll see, I'm going to the woods. And he got up and backed away from us his eyes shifting in his head like insects.
We laughed, crazy Alex.
That day we sold our K and bought a pound of pungent weed to take back with us that we worried would make our car smell. It was the middle of the summer and felt like a hundred degrees. The party was gritty and not our scene, a few stages scattered over a red dirt campsite surrounded by a sad pine forest, sickly shrubs wilting in the heat and too many people who should only be seen after dark out in the bright sunlight, eyes and faces all folded in on themselves and the merry glow of infection around piercings.
We sweated and sniped at each other and smoked too many cigarettes. We tried to talk to some hippie girls and they blew us off us. Eventually we decided to go look for Alex.
We found him in the woods, like he said, up a tree. He saw us and started throwing pinecones. I know you, he said, I know you and I know what you did. I saw you with the packets. We laughed at first, as if he were joking, but then we saw his eyes and they glowed with something which was ultimately probably just a product of the drugs he had taken, or the drugs we had, or the odd light of the sun, but it was something fundamentally unpleasant, and we stopped moving towards him. After a minute he scampered down the tree and ran off deeper into the woods
We looked in the direction he had gone for a little while then somebody shrugged, probably me. Fuck it. We left.
We didn't really sleep the rest of the time there. The tent was a disaster and we were constantly too hot and half delirious. Alex never came back. We went and asked around about him a couple of times (so it's not as though we made no effort at all), and heard a few reports of a tall thin man staggering about and shouting incoherently, but none of us saw him.
By the last day we were in terrible moods. We didn't like the music or the people or the place or by this point each other. Either we hadn't done the math or had lost some drugs or lost some money, any or all of which was entirely plausible. We were snapping at each other and wanting to get home, not even thinking about Alex really, when after an entirely inconsequential argument Trevor tried to kill, or perhaps less dramatically to injure, but certainly to hit, James with his car.
James was sitting on the hood of Trevor's car smoking a cigarette and Trevor told him to get off. To simplify their complex relationship to the point of meaninglessness, James was smarter and Trevor was tougher and each resented that to one degree or another—though our consumption of methamphetamine, the intense heat and issues of sexual jealousy and class resentment were also factors.
In any case James made a show of how hurt he was that his friend wouldn't even let him sit on his car, asking what kind of harm Trevor possibly thought the car was going to come to anyway? And saying how cruel and slanderous it was to allege that he, James, a good friend of Trevor, would think of inflicting so much as a scratch on the dull silver paint of the Oldsmobile.
To which Trevor said fuck you dude, with genuine venom, and got into his car and drove it at James, not at top speed or anything but not really slow either. James jumped onto the hood as the car came at him, rolled and hit the windshield in front of the passenger's seat hard enough to spider-web it with cracks. Trevor jumped out and yelled, like he had nothing to do with it, Oh my god what the fuck did you do to my car?
So at this point it was understandable, how after throwing our tent away (we couldn't get it back in the tent-bag) and driving to a gas station for tape to hold the windshield together, we forgot about Alex. We were about to pull out of the gas station to start driving back towards Boston, when Trevor turned the music down and said: Guys, seriously, are we really going to leave Alex, because, honestly, that's kind of fucked up. I think.
My skin was caked with old sweat and the lack of sleep was making me see spiders along the ceiling and floor of the car.
Fuck him, I said, rolling a joint and dreaming about a shower and a bed.
James concurred. It's not our fault he's crazy. He knew some other people at the party. He'll get a ride back.
Trevor considered. Yeah. Fuck him. He put the tape back in.
DickDickDickDickDickDickDickDickDickDickDickDickDickBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoom
A few hours later, Trevor was still not speaking to James, who was huddled down in the back and in any case asleep. I was in the front, feeling a bit better after a nap, listening to Trevor complain again about James wrecking his car by not getting out of the way fast enough. We smoked cigarettes and dodged occasional shards of windshield.
A truck barreled past us on the right close so that the wind of its passage buffeted our car. Then, when its trailer was still parallel to our car, it turned sharply into our lane. Trevor said jesus and hit the brakes hard and the trailer swung a few feet in front of our hood.
He must not have seen us. Fucking asshole. That was close.
A mile or two later we passed the truck a couple of lanes over on our left, going up a hill. As we went down the backside of the hill we saw the glare of the lights behind us and the truck bore down and cut right, its white trailer looming. Trevor braked hard and again the truck swung into the lane in front of us.
Trevor looked at me and back at the truck. He dropped into the left lane and drove slow and let the truck fade into the night. He looked over at me and said, that happened because we left Alex, didn't it?
The trucker might have been seized by rage after being up for days on amphetamines, an occupational hazard, or perhaps the sight of our small silver car in front of his large and heavy truck had offended him, in the way the powerful are offended by the weak, and he therefore felt compelled to crush us in order to illustrate a law of nature. More likely he sensed our malignancy, our poisoned guts and badly developed consciences, and decided to clean the world of us as if wiping away an unsightly stain.
Alex did make it back safely, though it was a few weeks later. When I saw him next he was high and I couldn't tell if there were any hard feelings or if he remembered or if he even recognized me. About a year a later I heard that I he had died—from an overdose of course.
James had met Alex's family before, his parents and sisters. He said they seemed like nice people, a little spacey but nice.
They lived in a grey house on a corner in Needham that when James met them in winter was decorated with large inflatable Santas and snowmen, which is to say that the house didn't seem like the kind of place or his family the kind of people to make Alex what he was, but there was nonetheless clearly in his mind or body some flaw or feature that on encountering drugs, which in Alex's indiscriminate and gluttonous usage meant simply the oblivion of the self, had started immediately to resonate at a high and terrible and critical frequency, and the years that had he lived since then had simply been the time needed for this exponential resonance to grow terminal and raze the frail, if long, structure of skin, bones and flesh that had been Alex, sending him falling to the ground one last time like a collapsing suspension bridge.
Which is not something I say when I'm trying to tell the funny story about leaving Alex in Ohio, because after all, I'm not insensitive.
FuckFuckFuckFuckFuckFuckFuckFuckFuckFuckFuckFuckFuckBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoom
