I see Duck knock over a mailbox with his skinny arms and kick some potted plants on a white corner house, getting potted soil on the beige bottom of his black karate shoes. Flesh pulls a stream of Christmas lights off a roof as we watch the red and green glass bulbs explode in the street. When they hear the noise, the popping from the lights, they scatter, laughing and running in all directions like a game. I catch up at the next block and see Tony stomping sprinkler heads so I grab a trash can and dump it out, watching the contents spill onto the pristine sidewalk, covering it with leftover bottles and boxes of cereal, envelopes, catalogs, rotting fruit, coffee grinds.
I don’t know why we’re doing it, only that it’s exciting to be here, outside the polite rules of this polite neighborhood as if the order itself demands chaos, and tonight we are its messenger. It’s a black eye to the beautiful face of this upright neighborhood near the airport.
Fuck you and your cars and houses and 2.2 kids. Fuck you and your job at Hughes Aircraft building bombs for the government. Fuck your tie. Fuck your condescending smile. Fuck your garden trolls, your birdhouses, your wind chimes, your seasonal decorations hung on the veranda of your perfectly landscaped front yard. We are proof of your mistakes.
I climb a concrete wall and sit on top to toss a brick into a backyard pool. Duck tips over a black crotch rocket. We scatter when it hits the pavement and the gasoline begins to spill onto the driveway. Flesh and I split off from the group, down an alley at the bottom of a hill next to the Bowl. He picks up a two-by-four leaning against a garbage can and knocks a rearview mirror off a blue Chrysler sedan. I spit on its rear window. He says, “That’s some pussy shit,” so I fish a beer bottle out of a trash can and hold it like a football, aiming it at a corner house with a large picture window. He looks at me, “Don’t act like you would.”
I throw the bottle as hard as I can and hear it break through the living room window with a crash. A dog barks and lights go on in the house and without a word Flesh and I turn and run up the block at a full sprint. There’s a mist that hangs around the streetlights, a light fog from the ocean two miles away, so that each one glows for five or ten feet creating hazy orbs that float above our heads like alien spacecraft. Every few seconds I look back thinking, We are getting away with it. How are we getting away with it?
We run all the way back to the apartment, where the crew is sitting on couches, drinking and eating chips. I start with a beer, then another, then another. We are laughing, everyone bragging about the destruction they wrought. Someone has weed and someone else has some pills. I know they’ve been taking LSD and PCP because Tony once told me he discovered the secret to the universe while “tripping balls” at the top of the Hollywood Bowl. It was the middle of the night and they were all looking at the stars on acid when he realized it. “What was it?” I asked him.
He cocked his head sideways, thought for a second, and said, “I forgot.”
I swallow something small and oval and white and when the little wooden pipe is passed around, I take a couple hits and lean back. Soon the world is pushed to the end of a long, dark tunnel. I hear voices like echoes off the walls and suddenly feel very sober in the middle of my head. I watch the room as if on a TV set a hundred feet away from me in my tunnel. The chip in Duck’s front tooth when he laughs. The way he raises his eyebrows at attention when people speak. Flesh sitting across from me in the overstuffed chair in his green flannel shirt, a beer in his lap, trying to get along with the older kids, saying, “Yeah, man,” “Holy shit,” “Fuckin’ cops, right?”
Someone says, “Your little brother is fuuuucked-up,” and Tony lays me on my side because the world is spinning now.
“You look pretty wasted, brother.”
“I think he’s gonna puke. Dude, do not let your little brother OD on my couch.” I feel hands on my shoulders pushing me down on my side. A warm sticky liquid comes out of my mouth. It drips down my neck, over my hands, under my jersey, onto my chest. Someone yells, “Fuck that’s nasty! Get a towel.”
I look down, trying to hold my head in place, to focus my eyes. The puke is a chunky yellow and green. It smells of stale beer, Cool Ranch Doritos and something like vinegar mixed with sourdough bread. I close my eyes. Just for a second. Just to stop the room from spinning. I’m standing in the tunnel in the darkness by myself and I feel an urge to scream but I can’t make my voice work. Is this what happened to Dad when he OD’d? Is this what it felt like to be Billy at the end? Is he here somewhere? Is someone gonna pick me up and take me somewhere?
I wish the ground would stop moving and I don’t care about the guys or how I look because there’s a feeling like a light being extinguished, like I’m reaching for it but it’s getting dimmer and dimmer until there is only darkness and the room is still and I put my arms around myself and rock back and forth. I see Paul and I see Dad and I wonder if it’s my turn now. I feel so sick, sleepy as I stand three inches tall in my head. How could I forget? I’m so stupid. I’m so fucking stupid.
When I wake up, the living room is empty. My head is heavy. My stomach queasy. The sunlight penetrates the vertical blinds that have been left open. It’s silent except for the sound of bodies breathing on the floor and a noise like a dial tone that seems to get louder with each throb of my skull. My basketball jersey is wet with beer and covered in yellow puke. I go into the kitchen as quietly as possible and take it off to wash it, squeezing the water out, hitting it against the side of the sink to get all the bits of Dorito and vomit. When I put it on again, it’s still clammy and smells of beer. It smells that way as I walk slowly in a haze to the gym at Westchester Park, where I see Ryan Church and my other teammates from school, the ones from the honors classes I’m failing, the ones who are not allowed to invite me to their birthday parties because everyone knows I am a burnout, a bad kid. They’re running in their clean jerseys, practically leaping as they jog laps to warm up for the game.
It’s strange to feel so lonely. The point was to not feel lonely, to be among the men. But I am queasy and tired with a headache, trapped in my mind, sad and apart from my smiling teammates with their clean uniforms, their morning-bright eyes, their futures.
CHAPTER 28
IS THERE LIFE ON MARS?
Mom calls and says she has big news. She’s nearly out of breath. “Are you ready? You ready?” Nothing good ever comes from these moods. “Hold on. I’ll let Doug tell you.”
“Hey, pal.”
“Oh, hey.”
“Well … um … so I’ve decided your mom is a real classy lady and I asked her to marry me.”
“Oh.”
I hear Mom hoot in the background then rush up to the phone and say, “Isn’t that great?”
“Wow.”
She grabs the phone. “We’re just going to do it at the courthouse since we’ve both been married before. I’m so excited to have someone to grow old with! We’re going to be a family. All of us. You and Doug and me and Tony and Doug’s kids. They’re going to be your brother and sister! Isn’t that great?”
“What are their names again?”
“Matthew and Catherine.”