clusterlizard

I had the day off and spent it camping with Tracy, her dad, sister and brother-in-law. It was the first day I had spent both sober and out of the apartment in years. We found a stream and followed it, holding hands and spotting deer, snakes, fish and even a bobcat. Lost in conversation, laughter and each other, we walked a couple of miles without even realizing it. We stopped at a spot where the stream opened to a large pool resting at the bottom of a small quarry. We spent a couple of hours making small sculptures in the mud before returning to the campsite.

Tracy’s dad looked us up and down. I was wearing blue jeans, sandals, a black t-shirt and a green flannel. I was covered with mud. Tracy was wearing a dark green dress and was barefoot. She was covered with mud.

“So, what have you two been doing out there all this time?”

Tracy giggled, “Oh God. Shut up, you freak!”

I laughed nervously but relaxed when I realized Tracy’s dad really didn’t care what we had been doing. This was my kind of family.

Everyone else had started cooking before we returned and we ate hot dogs and sat around the fire singing Beatles songs while Tracy’s dad played the guitar, finishing with the “Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill.” Tracy’s dad put down the guitar.

“So, Tracy tells me you work at the Phillips there next to the police station.”

“Oh, yeah,” I wondered if I was being interviewed, “I’m going to be starting college in the fall.”

“You know just this past winter, I had an accident out front there.”

This was interesting. Tracy hadn’t said anything about it, “Oh really?”

“Oh yeah. Some woman pulled out in front of me on my motorcycle. I’d just started going from that stop at the intersection there so I wasn’t going too fast, luckily.”

“Holy shit, that was you?!”

“Yeah, that was me. You were there?”

“Yeah.” It figured. That damn hick’s mother had almost killed Tracy’s dad. The world had such a sick sense of balance to it. I shivered and hoped this wouldn’t induce some sort of acid flashback.

“So what’re you studying in college?”

At that moment, my choice had become crystal clear, “I think philosophy.”

We all talked into the night until the air chilled and the fire died. Tracy’s sister and brother-in-law retired to one tent, her dad to another and we had one of our own. Years of lying in bed for hours, tossing and turning, or passing out instantly in a pool of my own vomit melted away as I easily slipped into unconsciousness warmed by a cocoon of our combined body heat.

The next morning I awoke to the feel of the cool, damp air and the scent of Tracy next to me. I was struck by how natural it all felt. We were both still covered with mud and dried perspiration, but I felt cleaner than ever before. It seemed like I’d known this girl all my life, like a piece of my broken soul had been returned in the night.

I had to work that day, so Tracy drove me home. We had the White Album going at full volume, singing along loudly. We both knew every word, every accent and every staccato.

I walked into the building, my head swimming with clarity. It was like an opiate high without the distance from the outside world. And just as quickly, with the sound of the Probe faded into the distance, a melancholy came over me. Many things were changing rapidly after years of stasis. I knew, somehow, I’d be leaving this apartment soon. In some ways, that brought me relief, in others it left me saddened. In truth, I’d always felt more like I had abandoned my mother as a child to stay in the more stable comfort of my grandparents’ home. Now, I would be abandoning her again and this time she would be alone. This led to another complication.

I unlocked the door and swung it open energetically. There was a thump as it hit something. I cringed, knowing what it was. Sung had quickly lost a tremendous amount of weight and was nothing more than a skeleton now. She would move from spot to spot, half-sitting and half-standing in discomfort. At some point, she moved to a spot near the door – perhaps waiting for someone to come home. I rushed inside to see if I’d hurt her. She appeared to be uninjured.

She was fading quickly. She could barely lift her head. It was too heart-wrenching to bear. Sung was eighteen years old. I almost couldn’t remember I time when she wasn’t around. She’d survived two stepfathers, countless gerbils, a handful of fish and an opiate addiction. All I could do was helplessly watch her slip away.

Guiltily, I got myself cleaned up and headed to work. Aaron was sitting at the side of the desk with the “Thousand Yard Stare” everyone who worked with Toad acquired. He was a tall kid, almost as thin as I was, with long, black hair. People often confused us for one another and we called each other our “Evil Twin.”

“Hey dude, how’s it going today?”

He glared at Toad, who was talking in hushed tones on the pay-phone, and rolled his eyes.

I sat down on the safe, feeling a tension in the room. Aaron and I sat in silence while Toad alternated between long pauses of compulsive rubber straw sucking and low-volume emotional bursts. Suddenly, Toad slammed the phone onto the receiver. His face was red and his eyes watery.

“It just isn’t fair.”

Aaron knew better than to ask, but I was always fascinated by the bizarre, “What’s up, dude?”

“Sally and I have been fighting.” Shaking, he took another draw from his vodka and Mountain Dew mixture, “Now she’s dragging Kacey Bleau into it. I was supposed to take him to get his hair cut this weekend.”

Incredible. Kacey Bleau was Toad and Sally’s dog. Evidently, he was now being used as a helpless pawn in the continuing battle that was their marriage.

Maybe I should warn Toad that Kacey Bleau is in danger of becoming a morphine addict if he doesn’t get some counseling or at least some semblance of stability in his life.

I knew Toad was taking all of this completely seriously. I had worked with him long enough that I had controlled my initial instincts to laugh out loud at such situations and to instead feign genuine concern.

“So, what happened?”

“She went and took him to Pet Mart during lunch.”

“Man. How could she do that?”

Aaron watched in fascination, probably frightened that I seemed to actually be as serious as Toad about the situation.

“I don’t know, Darren. I try to work things out rationally…”

My mind strained to imagine such a thing.

“But she goes and pulls shit like this.”

Toad was visibly shaking. He jaunted to the men’s room and closed the door. I had his island that night, so I went ahead and did the shift-change so he could go home and work out his family issues–and leave Aaron and I with some sense of sanity.

We watched, laughing, as Toad sped off, sucking on his rubber straw with chunks of rusted blue metal falling off the Death Trap which still proudly displayed the “Watch That Child!” bumper sticker.

After work, I hung out with Tracy only an hour or so. I had to see her, but still felt I needed to go home for a little grounding. I also knew Sung would be dying any day. I returned to the apartment and planted myself on the couch and watched whatever garbage the television decided to feed me. I helped Sung up onto the couch with me, but she didn’t stay there with me long. It was too uncomfortable for her in her usual position nestled between the fold of my bent leg.

My mom got home and put her things away and started some soup in the kitchen. She burst out in tears. I went in and held her.

“She’s dying, Darren.”

“I know.”

The next morning my mother awoke me in tears. She had been awake all night with Sung. She passed away a few minutes before.

* * *

I sat in Toad’s chair at work, in dazed silence after having smoked a joint with Roy. Josh stopped by and was getting on my nerves a bit, as he was doing nothing but hanging out in the back room snorting coke. Just the image of the black Ford Probe pulling into the lot lifted my spirits. I had talked to Tracy earlier on the phone, so she knew what was going on. She came inside and hugged me, then sat down on the desk next to me.

“I feel like shit. I grew up with that cat. My mom’s a mess.”

I expected the usual, “It’ll be okay… it’s a part of life… blah… blah” speech. What I got instead took me completely by surprise. It was like the Theory of Relativity. After reading it, one can only think, “Of course. This is so simple, so obvious. How could I have not seen this?”

“You should go to the shelter and get your mom another cat from there. That way Sung’s death will have some meaning. She’ll have saved the life of another cat.”

I looked into her big brown eyes and an explosion of emotions bursted in my head. The cacophony finally congealed into a single thought, “I don’t deserve you.”

I convinced Josh to cover my shift while Tracy took me to the animal shelter. He was so hopped up on coke, he would have lifted a dump truck if I’d asked. As Tracy and I pulled in, a scrawny farmer-looking guy was walking in with his son. He was carrying a small, incessantly meowing kitten. Having grown up with cats, I knew it was starving, or at least thought it was. I stared at him and he glanced back at me. Then glanced again, noticing I was still watching.

“Want a cat?”

“Yeah!”

He handed the kitten to me, “There ya go.” It was a female tabby–gray with black stripes and a black “M” shape on her forehead.

And that’s how my mother got Mathilda.

That poor Monte Carlo. I got such a great deal on it—you could almost say it was a steal. With only forty thousand miles on it and in nearly flawless shape, it cost me 1200 dollars.

It only took me three years to completely destroy it. Well not completely—it threw a rod. I sold it to a cokehead customer at the gas station for four hundred dollars. He seemed happy about the deal and managed to get it running for about four months before the transmission locked up.

Now, I was without a car. It made little difference at first, as I was spending practically all of my time with Tracy and she drove wherever we went. Things would be trickier in a little over a month, though, when school started. I also felt bad that she always had to drive 15 minutes north of Kansas City proper, where I lived.

One evening Roy and I were roasting to a crisp inside the station. The place had two large bay windows, one facing west and one south. The west window made it especially pleasant during the summer evenings, when sun blared obnoxiously through it. There was a smaller window next to the south window. It was the perfect size for holding an air conditioner. In fact, I suspected there had been one there long ago, before Tom and Lee got hold of the place. We constantly begged Lee to put one in and he put no effort at all into concocting a lie to dodge springing for one, “It would make it too easy for people to break in.”

What an insult. At least he could just tell us the truth—that he was too fucking cheap to buy a goddamn air conditioner and pay the electric bill. All the money was stored in that safe. Travis tried to lift the damn thing once and couldn’t do it. It was either cemented to the structure of the building or was so heavy only a crane could lift it.

Our only weapon against the heat was to helplessly keep the door open by tying it to an eye-bolt Toad had screwed into the wall. We had a fan that efficiently sucked out hot air and replaced it with even hotter air. Our only real relief was to either go down to Amoco to buy something—which we frequently did—or sit in the ice machine. Both interfered with gas-pumping and pot-smoking, so we usually just suffered.

We had the small black and white television turned on and sitting on a chair next to the safe. I took a large gulp of fruit punch Gatorade—a drink I had become addicted to when I almost overdosed at the station that one hot day. We were watching an old rerun of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Roy nudged my arm, “Isn’t it supposed to be impossible to go the speed of light?”

He knew I loved to talk about stuff like that and would often egg me on, “Yeah, man. As far as anybody knows.”

“I don’t see why that is.”

My brain twitched with excitement, “Well, to speed something up, you have to have energy, right?”

“Yeah.”

“The thing is, that’s easy to do at lower speeds. But once you start talking about speeds that are larger percentages of the speed of light, you have to use an enormous amount of energy to speed them up. In fact, the closer you get to the speed of light, the closer the amount of energy you have to use to accelerate nears infinity.”

Roy looked at me suspiciously, “Why?”

“Well, when things speed up, they gain mass. Mass and energy are equivalent. So the faster something is traveling, the greater its mass. As its velocity approaches that of light, it’s mass approaches infinity. In fact, you’d become so massive before you ever hit the speed of light, you’d just collapse into a black hole.”

Roy looked at me with glassy eyes, “That’s fucking cool.”

I nodded in agreement, “Yeah. Black holes kick ass.”

Our scientific interlude was interrupted by a customer. An orange Volkswagen bus pulled in on the near island, which was mine that night. I stood up to go take care of the customer.

A kid with long curly hair hopped out of the bus and scurried inside. He was eighteen or so and was wearing sandals, jeans and a t-shirt. He looked like he could have been my brother. But in fact, he was my cousin.

“Dude, what are you doing here?!”

His eyes were wild and they lit up, or flashed with some sort of bizarre psychotic energy I’d not seen before, “Darren!” He sounded as if he was surprised to see me. He just lived down the road, though it had been a few months since I saw him last. He’d never even met Tracy.

I withdrew a bit, becoming somewhat cautious. Dustin was obviously stoned out of his mind, but I couldn’t tell what it was that he was on.

“I need a pack of cigarettes!” His eyes widened and he blew forcefully through pursed lips.

“No problem, man.” I grabbed a pack of Marlboro reds from the cigarette machine and handed them to Dustin.

Shaking, Dustin opened the cigarettes and lit one, “Oh man, Darren…”

It sounded like he was about to tell me about some crazy thing that had just happened. It took me a few moments to realize he was just confused in general. His confusion and jitteriness gave him an air of unpredictability that made me nervous, which was crazy. All of my cousins and I had always been extremely close. At least they were with me, I guess since I was the oldest.

“So… what’s going on, man?”

“Oh, man!”

I waited a bit, confirming he wasn’t going to finish his sentence—or he already had finished his sentence. I couldn’t be sure which.

“Yeah?”

“My mom says she talked to your mom!”

Good God! He’s completely fucked out of his mind. I’ve seen people act more sanely on LSD!

“Dude, what are you on?”

“Ohhhhh! I did some meth. Can you tell? Am I acting fucked up or something?”

I chuckled in disbelief, “Jesus.” I’d never actually seen anyone on crystal meth before.

“Okay, so what about my mom… or your mom… or whatever the fuck you’re talking about?”

“Oh yeah. My mom’s moving back down south. Are you wanting to move near here?”

“Yeah…”

“I wanna stay up here man! Maybe you can move in with me.”

I despised the thought of living with someone else. I was a deeply private person and even having a close friend as a roommate seemed intolerable. The only person I had imagined living with, other than my mother, was Tracy. But Dustin’s offer was perfectly timed. I could easily live with one of my cousins, too.

“Yeah man. That would be awesome!”

* * *

Less than a month later I had moved in with Dustin. Things went pretty smoothly—we were a lot alike. My Aunt had left most of the furniture at the apartment, which was fortunate since neither Dustin nor I had much of anything. I had a bed, a dresser, a desk, a television, a computer, some clothes and Tracy. Dustin had a couple of shotguns, a blonde girlfriend who left him shortly after I moved in, a rat named Kalyptis and, much to my dismay, a considerable meth habit.

The main reason I had agreed to move in with Dustin was because I had remembered him being as hermitic as I was. That had changed significantly with his plunge into the world of pixie dust, as I came to call crystal meth.

Usually, the pixies would stay out having wild adventures in the Dustin’s VW bus – which we called the “Family Truckster.” Sometimes, they’d hang out at the apartment—coming and going at all hours of the night, sweating, talking nonsensically and picking at scabs on their face.

It became a hobby for Tracy and me to watch the pixies, the way other couples may go to the park and feed the birds. They all accepted me readily, a few of them knowing me from when I was a heavy drug user. They seemed a bit nervous of Tracy though. I suspected it was because she was so beautiful. The girl really could have been a model if she’d wanted.

Eventually, there was one final addition to our chaotic home. Toad’s mother-in-law had found a batch of abandoned kittens out in her barn. She was looking for a home for them and Toad and his wife took a couple. They offered me one and I ended up with a pretty calico that Tracy named Joon, after the movie Benny and Joon, which we had rented recently.

I soon discovered that Dustin’s strange behavior at the station that one hot day wasn’t so unusual any longer. He often went over a week with no sleep at all and I was quite certain any qualified professional would declare him to be completely insane. He managed to get himself fired from his job shortly after I moved in. We had to be extremely careful about paying rent on time, since the apartment manager was already harassing us about taking over the lease from my aunt. It was extremely easy to get Dustin hired at the station. He fit all of Toad’s criteria for an employee: he was heavily into drugs.

But even with the pixies, I considered the arrangement ideal. I would have a steady ride to work—I pretty much used the Family Truckster whenever I needed—and I was within walking distance of the station and the school. Not to mention, Tracy was now only five minutes away.

Lawrence was like a post-secondary education graveyard. I’d seen several people proclaim their intent to move there to take up their studies at Kansas University, only to fall into a trap of constant partying. Sometimes, they’d take a class or two one semester but rarely more. Roy called it the “next cultural Mecca.” Obviously, he was interested in something other than “finishing school” there.

Roy’s departure ushered in a new age at the station. Josh started college at UMKC and filled in from time to time, while Dustin covered most of the night shifts with me. Toad also started hiring a new crop of teenagers, all of whom were Dead-Heads, from the high school to cover some weekend shifts and fill in when somebody was sick or hung-over or driving to some other unpredictable state on a pixie binge.

By my estimation, there were over a hundred Dead-Heads. Tracy was friends with a few of them and we joined them for a movie one night. Half the theater was filled with Dead-Heads. They would usually cluster together inside a Winstead’s hamburger joint and overflow the inside of the building so there was always a large crowd hanging around outside in the parking lot playing hacky sack or whatever it was they did. But the core group—the lead Dead-Head, Trent, and his closest friends—were always inside.

It was the end of the Summer and Tracy started her last year of high school with the Dead-Heads while I started my freshman year of college. I never really officially declared a major. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to study mathematics or philosophy. Math seemed to be at the core of everything in which I was interested, but philosophy really intrigued me. I ended up taking a mish-mash of classes that added up to eighteen credit hours. All of the math classes were first thing in the morning, at hours I hadn’t experienced since working the day shift with Toad.

The first week of school was somewhat of a shock. The first day consisted mostly of standing around in lines. Long lines. I ended up taking out several charges at the station to buy books, since I was out of money after making the “down payment” on my student loans. I found it somewhat annoying that a large chunk of the student body seemed to be coming from outside the United States and seemed to be getting more in the way of grants than I was. As the day wore on, though, I snuck outside several times to get high and began to find the foreign students more and more fascinating as I would overhear random pieces of babble while standing in line.

“In Namibia, we are a nuclear-free country!”

“I heard an amusing story about a genus in a bottle.”

“A genus?”

“Yes. A genus. A magical person.”

“Oh, you mean a genie.”

“Yes. A genus in a bottle.”

After spending the day waiting in lines, getting high and performing miserably on various tests, I was informed that the freshmen and seniors would be given a new test called the “ACT-COMP.” The college had decided to begin giving those tests that year so they could find the difference in a student’s score at the start and end of their college career and measure how much they learned in school. I made a mental note to be sober that day—whatever day it was.

I was happy when that first day came to a merciful end. I headed to the station, where Dustin had already taken over for Toad. I could immediately see he was completely pixied up.

“Darren!”

“Dustin!”

“Come here! Hurry!”

I followed Dustin outside, knowing better, but deciding “what the hell.” He pointed across the street, to the Texaco.

“What?”

“Look! That fat-ass motherfucker was in here a minute ago!”

The “fat-ass motherfucker” he was speaking of was Fat-Time Charlie. Fat-Time was a gas pumper at the Texaco across the street. Recently, he had decided to come to Phillips and make us pump his gas for him. He would always get small amounts, usually never exceeding five dollars worth, and make us check everything under his hood. His final insult was to leave us with a tip that was usually a quarter but sometimes as much as fifty cents. He also had a nasty habit of spitting his tobacco-browned saliva at our feet. Dustin hated him with a passion, even more than I did. Probably because he had to handle him more often, for some reason.

Indeed, there was Fat-Time waddling across the lot to start a customer, “Yeah, what about him?”

“Look!”

Finally, I noticed what Dustin was excited about. There was a small humanoid figure hopping in and out of a Jeep.

“What the fuck is that?”

Dustin’s eyes widened, “It has to be a midget, Darren. It has to be!”

I’m not sure what the significance was, but I did have a feeling it was significant. I’d never actually seen a live midget before. Maybe that had something to do with it. I guess they were rare around this part of the world, so it was like spotting a duck-billed platypus or something. I rushed into the back room to grab the pair of binoculars Toad kept on the shelf—I guess for hunting down unidentified flying objects.

I could hear Dustin calling after me, “Hurry, Darren! Before he goes away!”

I returned with the binoculars and focused in on the small figure in the distance. Texaco wasn’t that far away—just across a two-lane road. But it was far enough that the midget could have been a pudgy child or something—which would still be somewhat amusing.

“Yep. It’s a midget.” The midget was hopping in and out of a jeep for no apparent reason. It reminded me of something out of Twin Peaks. The skin on my back crawled as I handed the binoculars to Dustin.

He marveled at the figure for several minutes before turning the binoculars to Fat-Time, “I’m gonna get that fat son-of-a-bitch.”

I would have thought that with everyone in school, the station would be a little less hectic than it was during the vacation months. I was wrong. The first to visit us was Josh, who made it a habit of coming by the station to get high in the back room whenever he didn’t have someplace better to do it.

“Josh, you should have seen that midget across the street!”

Josh came out of the back room, glassy-eyed and almost as confused as Dustin, “What?”

“A midget! Across the street! Right after that fat-ass motherfucker came in here spitting all over!”

Josh’s laugh quickly decayed into a deep, hacking cough and his face reddened, “Dude, you’re ate up!”

Josh hung around a few minutes, squirting Visine in his eyes and collecting himself as best he could before going off to some sort of family function. He was followed by a pack of Dead-Heads who filled the parking lot with their old, junky cars.

“Oh Goddamnit,” Dustin rolled his eyes. “Not them.”

I wasn’t especially fond of the Dead-Heads myself, but I knew their arrival meant Tracy probably wasn’t far behind.

Trent came in, followed by a cluster of the Core Group, “Hey Darren! Hey cuz,” he exclaimed brightly.

“Hey Trent,” I tried to hide my disdain, unlike Dustin who merely scowled in response as he went outside to start a customer.

“What’s wrong with your cousin?”

“Oh nothing. He just saw a midget earlier.”

“And he’s all grumpy because of that? That ain’t cool. Midgets are people too.”

I analyzed Trent’s posture, tone of voice and facial expression, concluding he was serious. I began to feel some of the visceral hatred Dustin had for the Dead-Heads. I decided to ignore them and Dustin until Tracy arrived and browsed through my textbooks.

One of the classes I had taken was a writing class that was centered around war. The professor had been in Vietnam and put together a textbook that was a collection of essays about war. That was our textbook for the class. I found a nice picture of a mushroom cloud. It was in mid-explosion and the cloud was emitting a light that was tinted green. It was a spectacularly gorgeous photograph.

I held the page up to Trent, “Isn’t that beautiful?!”

Trent looked away, “Man, that isn’t cool. That’s a nuclear bomb.”

My visceral hatred deepened, swimming and bubbling in my chest until Tracy’s arrival calmed me.

Work turned out to be a bust. Dustin was spun out of his mind on pixie dust all night and the Dead-Heads stuck around to “give you and Tracy some good company instead of just all the meth-heads.”

At least the pixies weren’t a bunch self-righteous jerk-offs who could afford to buy jeans with the holes already in the knees. Finally, Tracy and I made it to my place and went to my room to “watch a movie” while the pixies buzzed around in the living room. We were in bed talking when she giggled.

I smiled, “What’s so funny?”

“Trent.”

“What about him?”

“He told me I should be careful of you. He said you’re a war monger. You showed him some picture of a bomb or something and said it was cool. I thought it was funny.”

I just rolled my eyes. Fucking Dead-Heads.

* * *

I said goodnight to Tracy early in the evening and headed straight for bed, determined to be on time for my first class at eight in the morning. As it turned out, getting to class on time was easier than I had thought it would be. I woke up with enough time to get myself ready and smoke a joint with Dustin, who hadn’t slept all night. He was only too happy to give me a ride to the campus.

As it turned out, I rather liked my weekly schedule. I ended up with a few large gaps in the day when I didn’t have any classes. I could hang out at the station and savor Toad’s torment of Aaron or I could go home and sleep a bit or I could hang around campus with a friend I had made there—a bisexual guy named Tate who had come down from Minnesota to go to school. He had a Mohawk and wore skirts once in a while. He had no trouble identifying me as a pothead and came to me looking for a bag. We ended up smoking a joint together in some secluded spot on campus before a class one morning. When we got into the room, we were told to go to the underground building to take the “ACT-COMP” test. I cringed.

I don’t remember how many hours that test took. It was excruciating. We had to watch stupid videos and then answer questions based on what we saw… or thought we saw… or whatever. Some of the tests were more traditional. There were language tests, spelling tests, math tests and tests the nature of which I couldn’t identify.

When it was all over I went to the soda machine, got myself a Dr. Pepper and headed out of the building to have a much-needed cigarette.

I overheard a couple of Eastern-Europeans and an American girl talking behind me.

“Doug too skinny. No good eat,” one Eastern-European observed.

The others grunted in agreement. Evidently, this Doug character wasn’t their type.

“No good eat, no good fuck,” the Eastern-European continued, “No good fuck, no good work.”

I slowed my pace a bit, wanting to be sure to get all of this.

“No good work, no good money. No good money, no good eat.”

I smiled as I fished a cigarette out of the hard pack I was carrying in my shirt pocket. So that was the circle of life.

I leaned against the square brown canopy pillar waiting for the minivan to fill up. I could hear the muffled babbling of the driver over the churning of the pump. I made it a point not to remember her name, even though she came in at least twice a week. She always had a McDonald’s cheeseburger in one hand and a mobile phone held up to her ear with the other. She was grossly overweight and used her stomach as a table for her fries. It seemed like I always ended up getting her, much to my disgust. I’d walk up to the window and she’d lift her cheeseburger hand up and down, sending grease and bits of food flying. She couldn’t even stop eating long enough to speak on the phone in any intelligible way.

I decided not to do her windshield. She wouldn’t even notice. She was so absorbed in all her artificial bullshit. It occurred to me that she was just a junkie. Her world was consumed with input and she contributed nothing to society except the waste into which she converted that input. She was a giant, overweight entropy machine. I guessed, in the end, we all were.

On the far island, Dustin and Josh were having a little more fun than I. Fat-Time had come in again. He was standing outside his car, spitting at Dustin’s feet and keeping watch while Dustin overhauled his engine. Josh was stoned. I heard him laugh in between deep hacking coughs.

“So, why do you come in here?”

I failed to hold back a snort. I was the closest thing to an authority on the night shift and didn’t want Fat-Time to think he could come to me and complain. I grabbed the nozzle filling up the minivan and squeezed it to full speed. I would probably end up with gas all over my arm, but I wanted to get inside before Fat-Time decided to complain to me about the crappy service.

A tint of indignation mixed with genuine confusion was in Fat-Time’s voice, “Huh? Whatta ya mean?”

What a fucking idiot.

“Why do you come in here and make us pump your gas? You work at a gas station, dude.”

“I work hard all day. It’s nice to have someone else do it for me.”

Josh laughed and coughed while Dustin cursed his way inside to grab various fluids for Fat-Time’s engine.

It took Josh a few moments to recover from the coughing, “Dude, it’s not like pumping gas is hard.”

“Well then why are you complainin’ about it?”

“I’m not complaining, dude. I just asked why you come in here.”

Fat-Time fell silent.

Dustin caught my gaze on his way back to Fat-Time’s engine. We scowled and shook our heads in mutual hatred for him. The gas wars were heating up.

Josh waited with me while Dustin finished off Fat-Time. He was chuckling and coughing uncontrollably, “Dude, fuck that idiot.”

I nodded in agreement, “Maybe he won’t come back now.” I hoped.

I was still holding the pump at full speed. I wanted to get the minivan out of the station as soon as possible so I could go back inside and hang out with Tracy a bit. Even with the pump at full speed, I wasn’t fast enough. Tracy came outside, damp with perspiration from the hot humid air.

“I’m going to hang out with my dad and sister for a while. Give me a call later!” She smiled.

“Okay.”

I waved at her, somewhat disappointed. I was so entranced by her, that I didn’t notice the gurgling sound the minivan’s gas tank was making. A wave of gasoline spewed out to soak my arm.

Josh gave me a sly look. Then he watched as Tracy hopped in her Probe and drove away. He stared into space a moment then turned back to me, “Dude, I think that Tracy chick likes you.”

I started to laugh, then realized Josh was serious, “Ya think so?”

“Yeah, dude. If I were you, I’d get on that.”

I paused for a moment, pondering and patting gasoline off of my arm with a paper towel from the squeegee bucket, “Yeah. You might be right. Maybe I’ll call her tonight.”

I finished off the fat bag of entropy and Dustin got rid of Fat-Time and we all retired back in the office. I started to light a cigarette and noticed my lighter was missing. Josh had a bad habit of stealing lighters, though it wasn’t intentional. Usually, I tried to keep my lighter in my pocket whenever Josh was around. Once in a while, though, he’d catch me by surprise and my lighter would always end up missing. Not even Josh knew what happened to them. He would use them a few times to smoke out of his bowl in the back room and then they would vanish. He’d end up walking over to Amoco to get another one.

“Man, where’s my lighter? Josh?”

Josh looked around, confused. He patted himself down and went to the back room looking over the shelves, “Sorry, dude. I lost it.”

“Jesus. Okay. I’m going to Amoco to get another one. I’ll be back.”

* * *

With a pocketful of lighters that evidently violated the first law of thermodynamics and materialized from pure vacuum, Josh headed to Lawrence with Tracy and me to visit Roy. I never did explain to him that Tracy and I had been seeing each other for some time now. I think he just assumed we started dating shortly after he pointed out she might be interested in me. It was a long drive and we spent the time smoking joints, talking, laughing and, in Josh’s case, coughing.

Roy had moved in with a friend who was attending Kansas University. Randy was Roy’s and my age – we were a bit older than Josh and Tracy – and sounded like he was a career student. I think he’d been taking classes at KU for a couple of years and wasn’t anywhere close to a degree.

Josh, Tracy and I sat on the floor while Roy and Randy sat in some torn-up chairs. The apartment was small with four rooms – a small living room, two dinky bedrooms and a closet that was converted into a bathroom. It was sparsely decorated with beads and Christmas lights, and had a strange, surreal feel to it with the pot, the Flaming Lips background music and the multicolored lights and lava lamps.

We ordered a pizza from Pizza Shuttle, which was some sort of mobile pizza task force and, while not much better than a frozen pizza, it sufficiently eliminated the munchies. We settled in after finishing eating and Randy nodded at me, “Can I bum a smoke from you, man?”

“Sure.” I tossed him a Marlboro Light.

Randy lit the cigarette and took a deep drag, then slowly exhaled the smoke with his eyes closed. I wished I could enjoy a cigarette that much anymore.

“So what are you majoring in, man?”

“I dunno. Math and philosophy I think. I think I’m going to double-major.”

“Wow. That’s hardcore.”

“Why’s that hardcore?”

“Those are like on the opposite sides of the planet.”

“Not really. They’re kinda complimentary.”

Randy shrugged.

Josh had already lit up another joint, “I think I want to be a weather man.”

Everyone laughed. Tracy passed me the joint and I took a hit. Immediately, an image congealed in my head, “I could just see it. It starts out with Josh on camera, ‘your local weather coming up after these commercial breaks…’ then after the commercials, Josh is back on screen, red and coughing with his eyes watering, ‘hang on, dude!’”

Randy’s laughter melted away after a few moments and he became gravely serious, “I like burning stuff, man. I burned down a shed last weekend. It’s better than sex.”

I grinned. Randy looked harmless enough, kind of short and squat with curly brown hair. But Lawrence did seem to have some indescribable effect on people, “An arsonist eh? Where else but Lawrence? What is it with this town? I mean other than it being the ‘next cultural Mecca’?”

Roy ignored my attempt to poke fun at his ‘Mecca’ comment, which had become legend around the gas station, “It’s the thirteenth gateway to hell, man.”

“Huh?”

“Yeah. The pope flies over it any time he’s in the United States. That’s a fact.”

“Hmmm.”

“I’m serious man. I went to the church on mushrooms once. There’s some weird shit going on there.”

“Mushrooms?” I pointed out, suspiciously, “Dude, you can see all kinds of shit anywhere in the universe on those.”

Roy was adamant, “No man. This shit is real. I saw some weird lights in the sky too.”

I couldn’t believe it. Roy always seemed so rational. This was crazy. Even when I was doing so much LSD that it was a felony to be in possession of my own brain, I could figure out what was real and what wasn’t.

Randy nodded, “Wait ‘til we get that frog,” He nudged Roy and they laughed at their shared secret.

Josh’s interest was piqued, “Frog?”

“We have a frog coming in from South America. It’s hallucinogenic.”

“What the fuck?” Tracy laughed, shaking her head.

“It secretes a liquid that makes you trip,” Roy explained, “It’s supposed to be awesome.

Licking frog juice didn’t sound too appealing, “I’ll stick with LSD.”

We talked for hours about our experiences with hallucinogenics. Everyone had some story about what they saw, or how they saw it. Tracy remained silent, listening intently. She seemed fascinated by the whole idea. She had never done anything like LSD or mushrooms. After several more hits off a few more joints, everyone slowly wound down. Roy and Randy went to their respective rooms, divided from the living room and each other with beaded “doors.” Tracy and I huddled together at one end of the living room while Josh passed out at the 0ther end.

“What is acid like?” Tracy whispered.

“I can’t really describe it. I wish I could. It does make you see things in a different way, though.”

“Do you think I should try it?”

It was two o’clock Wednesday morning when my feelings for Tracy betrayed me. I had a math class in six hours but I didn’t hesitate to get out of bed and answer the phone once the ringing awoke me. The only person I could imagine calling at that hour was Tracy and there might be something wrong.

“Hello?”

“Hey man!”

Oh Jesus Christ. It was Wayland, the King Pixie. Wayland was tall and thin and wore a purple-dyed mohawk. When he was a child, he got into a cabinet in the kitchen and ate some soap. The chemicals did severe damage to his stomach and he got some sort of settlement from the soap company. Since he had turned eighteen recently, he finally had access to the money. With that, he set himself up in a bare apartment and bought large quantities of pixie dust. He supplied all the pixies I knew.

Even with his vast riches, Wayland still chose to work at the hospital as a janitor. He worked nights and shamelessly stole all manner of objects from the premises, including a wheelchair, a laser pointer, a stethoscope and a hand-held tape recorder. He usually gave these items away and the aforementioned adorned our apartment. They proved useful in keeping the pixies occupied when they’d been up for a week straight and couldn’t think of anything more to do.

“Dude, it’s two a.m. What the fuck do you want?”

“I need to talk to Dustin!” His voice was wild and trembling. He sounded terrified.

I shook my head. What an idiot. I imagined him on the other end of the line, sweating and his eyes, which looked buggy anyway due to his thick glasses, wide and confused. I always thought of him wearing dirty coveralls and green rubber fishing boots while cooking meth in a musty basement.

“Dustin’s asleep, dude.”

“It’s an emergency!”

I chuckled and went into Dustin’s room. He seemed to be sleeping fitfully. He was tossing about in sweat-soaked sheets. His body spasmed periodically and he kept mumbling, “Kalyptis.”

“Hey, Dustin! Dustin!” I walked over and shook him awake.

“What?!”

“Wayland’s on the phone, man. He says it’s an emergency.”

“Fucking pixie!”

Dustin threw the wet covers off the bed and answered the phone angrily, “What?”

“Hey man, I’ll kick you down if you give me a ride!”

Even with all that money, Wayland didn’t bother to buy a car. I’m sure Dustin didn’t mind the arrangement. He could always use another helping of pixie dust.

“Where do you want to go?” Dustin asked, still groggy.

“Your place!”

Within an hour, there were pixies all over the apartment jabbering incomprehensibly to each other. I closed the door, leaving my poor cat in the outer apartment with them. It was hopeless; even with the door shut I could hear them chattering and breaking stuff. I tossed and turned for a few hours and decided I wasn’t going to bother with classes. I shut the alarm off and fell asleep sometime around six a.m.

The next thing I knew Dustin was waking me up for work. I wasn’t in the best mood and I quickly tied my hair back, threw on some jeans and a t-shirt and headed out with him to the Family Truckster. It was covered with graffiti, painted with tan latex house paint. Along one side were the words, “Sausage Republic.” The other side read, “Squirt Gun Farmers Unite!” On the back was painted “Kalyptis.” He loved that rat.

“Dude, what the fuck happened?”

“Darren, I’m a mess! I drove all the way to Platte City on the wrong side of the highway last night!”

“You mean you drove to Platte City in the south-bound lane?”

“Yeah!”

“Man, you’re lucky you didn’t get arrested or killed.”

“Oh my God!” He spoke as though he had just had a sudden realization from God, “I’m so fucked up, Darren!”

“Yeah.”

I jumped in the Truckster with Dustin. He took it out of gear and released the parking brake. Slowly, the van started to roll forward.

“What are you doing?”

“Something happened to the starter last night.”

“Great.”

Eventually, we had enough momentum and Dustin took his foot off of the clutch. The Family Truckster lurched into operation with a strong jerk and cloud of exhaust and we headed down the road.

There were at least five crossroads we could have taken to get to the station. Dustin chose the one that passed through the Texaco lot. He turned the van around and headed away from the building, out toward their pumps. When he reached the end of the lot, he turned around and revved the engine.

I was becoming a bit nervous, “Dude, what are you doing? Do you know?”

Dustin’s eyes were wild and sparking, “I’m going to get that fat-ass, Darren!”

I grabbed the seat with both hands and squeezed tightly, as though my very life were at stake. It probably was.

Dustin took his foot off the clutch and sped toward the open door of the Texaco building. I could see Fat-Time sitting in a chair inside. He was watching us with a look of complete shock. He appeared frozen, unable to react to something so completely unexpected.

Dustin pushed on the horn and it pierced the air in a continuous wail. His window was rolled down and he stuck his head into the wind yelling at the top of his lungs, “Fuck you Fat-Time! You fat son-of-a-bitch!”

He stuck his tongue out and made a growling sound.

Fat-Time remained frozen, watching as we got within a few feet of the door. I looked away, certain that Dustin was going to drive us straight into the building. I felt the inertia as he stomped on the brakes. He took his hand off of the horn long enough to put the Truckster in reverse, backing up and turning so we were facing away from the building. I turned and looked back, out the side window, and saw Fat-Time still staring at us, his mouth hanging limply open. I broke out in laughter.

Dustin hit the gas again, weaving around the two islands of pumps. He drove back to the back of the lot and turned around, heading for the building again. Once again he slammed on the horn and yelled obscenities out the window at Fat-Time. This time, I kept my eyes open, watching and laughing in delight.

A few other Texaco workers joined Fat-Time. They all stood and sat at the back of the office watching us with confusion and horror through their opened door. Dustin hit the brakes again, just in time to not slam into the building. He backed up quickly and then drove forward several times, honking and yelling.

My sides were hurting from laughing and tears were rolling down my face as we pulled out of the Texaco lot and headed to our beloved Phillips across the street.

Fat-Time never came to Phillips after that.

We parked the Family Truckster and headed inside to begin our shift. Toad was deadly silent and Aaron was smiling slyly. I was still chuckling a bit and Dustin was… confused.

“What’s up?” I asked, somewhat cheerfully. The adventure had put me in a better mood.

“Hey,” Aaron chuckled.

Toad remained silent a few moments, then headed outside to read the pumps.

“Toad have too much vodka today?” I asked Aaron.

“He always has too much vodka.”

I couldn’t argue with that, “Yeah.”

Toad came back inside. I think reading the pumps gave him some sense of clarity. He took a deep, audible breath, “Yep.”

I looked at Dustin. We both knew what was coming next.

“Fuckin’ employees. Fuckin’ with other gas pumpers.”

I had no control over my laughter. Dustin, having maybe had an hour of sleep in the past four days wasn’t quite as laid back about it, “Oh Jesus. Wha-a-a! Wha-a-a! Poop. Poop. Poop. Poop-poop. Poop.”

That made me laugh even harder and not even Toad had a response for such a bizarre reaction.

Once we cleared the station of the day shift, Dustin and I flipped on the television and settled in to watch our favorite series, Thunder in Paradise. We laughed and supplied our own dialog in between cars until the show was over and the Deadheads started collecting in the gravel parking lot to play hacky sack.

I watched with disgust as the motley collection of teenagers mindlessly kicked the bean bag around and around, “What a cluster-fuck.”

Dustin had the portable tape recorder with him and pressed the record button, “Darren, what is your reaction to the cluster-fuck playing with each other in the parking lot?”

“Turn that fucking thing off, you damn nut.”

“Darren declined to comment on the cluster-fuck.”

Dustin turned and noticed a car pulling in on the near island, “We’ll return after these important customers.”

He pushed the stop button on the recorder and headed outside. I watched as he approached the window of the customer, then I grabbed the recorder. I opened it so I could remove the tape and throw it away. There was none in it.

I walked outside rubbing my forehead. The decay of sanity around me was giving me a headache. Was this some sort of punishment for my own extensive drug career? As if detoxing wasn’t enough. I grabbed the squeegee from Dustin’s bucket and cleaned the windshield for him. The customer was a teacher at the high school. At least that’s what Toad had told me. He often chatted with the customers, in what I can only guess was some warped attempt at making them feel welcome.

The customer turned, noticing Trent and the other Deadheads playing in the gravel. He rolled down his window, “Hey, Trent!”

Trent smiled and waved amicably. I wanted to drop a cinder block on his head.

“Come here!”

Trent walked over to the passenger-side window and stuck his bushy head in the car.

“Hey, I wanted to ask if you’d mind if I presented you with your diploma this graduation?”

Trent shrugged and grinned, “Sure, why not?”

“I think that would be beautiful. One generation of the Dead to the next.”

I cringed, my spine chilled. I closed my eyes tightly, hoping that when I opened them I would find myself in bed realizing it was all just a bad dream. Dustin snorted, making no attempt at discretion, “Jesus fucking Christ.” I had to go back inside before I vomited.

Trent, in his vapid bliss, was too clueless to realize he probably shouldn’t follow me, “Hey, Darren.”

My back crawled at that bright, shiny voice, “Hey, Trent.” My tone was somewhat more emotionless than his.

“I was wondering if you could pick up some booze for us tonight?”

“Having a love-in out in the cornfield, eh?”

Trent looked at me, somewhat hurt, “I guess.”

“Yeah, I’ll pick you up some. What do you want?”

The ingenuity that people demonstrated when wanting to get intoxicated never ceased to amaze me. The Deadheads had scouted out some remote location off of some old road I hadn’t even known existed. There was a sharp bend, with an old dirt road leading off in the opposite direction – directly into a corn field. There was a clearing where the Dead-Heads collected and did whatever it was they did.

Stacy had always wanted a Jeep and she finally had one. Her dad bought it for her, since she was nearing graduation. It was green and had a black cab with plastic windows that could be peeled back like a sunroof. She drove me to the clearing with two paper bags filled with various bottles of hard liquor. She and I mostly kept to ourselves while the Deadheads broke open the bottles and, I assumed, celebrated the joys of life – or something equally inane.

We were there nearly an hour in the dark, when I saw a pair of headlights heading toward us. The Deadheads were well on their way to intoxicated hacky sack bliss and didn’t notice the car. I knew immediately what it was, even before the bright spotlight beamed on to blind me.

My heart sank and my stomach knotted.

Great. Here I am with a bunch of fucking kids getting drunk and I’m the only one here old enough to buy alcohol.

A couple of Deadheads realized what was happening, once the cop got out of the car, and threw their bottles into the corn field. Every muscle in my body tightened and I slowly began the process of unwrapping the fingers of reality clenched around my mind. Dissociation was the only way to survive the monster ass-raping I was about to get. Tracy grabbed my sweating hand and squeezed tightly. I was proud of her, she maintained her composure much better than her friends.

The cop walked over to the crowd, shining his flashlight from one naïve, terrified face to the next.

“What are you kids doing out here this time of night?”

The Deadheads looked around at each other. Finally, Trent answered, “We’re just hanging out.”

The cop walked over and picked up a dropped bottle of wine, “Hanging out and drinking. Where’d you get this?”

Some of the Deadheads glanced over at me. I refused to acknowledge their gaze. I bit my lip, praying that the terrified little bastards wouldn’t rat me out.

Just keep your mouths shut and he’ll let us all go. Don’t let him psyche you out. The first one of these kids that rats on me is going to end up at the bottom of that filthy, polluted Missouri river.

The Deadheads remained silent. The cop prodded further, “Which one of you is old enough to buy alcohol?”

The Deadheads glanced at me again as the cop shone his light around the group. He seemed to be ignoring Stacy and me. Finally, he settled the light on one of the Deadheads, “You. Let me see your license.”

The Deadhead, trembling, reached into his back pocket and removed his license from his wallet. The cop looked it over and handed it back.

“Alright. I want you kids to clean up this mess and get out of here. Go home.”

Tracy and I helped the Deadheads pick up their bottles and discarded paper bags before getting in the Jeep and heading out. I took a deep breath, “Jesus. I would have been so fucked if that guy had decided to mess with me.”

“I’m sorry,” Tracy was shaking.

I kissed her on the cheek and stroked her leg, “It’s not your fault.”

“I don’t want to go back to the pixies,” Tracy said, “Let’s go somewhere and watch the storm,” She pointed ahead at the lightning on the horizon, which was followed moments later by a gentle rumbling.

“Let’s go to Riverfront Park,” I suggested. It was across the road from the college, next to the river.

Tracy nodded and we went to the park, finding a good bench to sit on, overlooking the river to the west and the coming storm. The lightning had a red tint to it and was diffuse behind the thick black clouds. It lit up the night and reflected off the river and Tracy’s black hair.

“So, how do you like your Jeep?”

“I love it!”

I smiled. Her enthusiasm was intoxicating.

“My dad said he’s going to give you my Probe, if you want it.”

That was unexpected, “Really?”

Tracy nodded, smiling, “He likes you.”

“That’s cool. I like your dad too. He’s laid back. Anything I had as a dad was an asshole.”

“I know. Sometimes I think that’s some of the reason why we fit. I have no mom, you have no dad.”

“Yeah,” I hadn’t thought of it that way. I realized at that moment, I had never met anyone so insightful. And we did fit. It was almost as though something in Nature was trying to balance itself out. No mother, no father. Female, male. Trusting and kind, cynical and sarcastic. We even had the same birthday, a few years apart.

“I told my dad something tonight. I want to tell you, but it’s kind of hard for me.”

My nerves twanged, as if they had been strummed by Jimi Hendrix, what could possibly be so hard to tell me? Was she pregnant? Did I give her a disease – I didn’t think I had any to give? No. She was dumping me. I never understood how a girl that impossibly beautiful, who could have virtually anyone she wanted, would hang out with me. Now, she was going to hit me in the face with a brick. I could feel the tentacles of despair reaching out from somewhere in the ocean of night, feeling for my legs to grip onto, ready to pull me in to drown.

Stacy looked down and closed her eyes tightly.

My heart sank. Here it comes.

“I…”

A wave of adrenaline washed through my gut at the sound of her voice.

“I love you.”

The shock of that sentence was fleeting. It quickly melted away like heated butter and the phrase stuck inside my head like honey. I felt like an astronaut who had just escaped the immense pull of the Earth’s gravity. It seemed I had been waiting a lifetime to hear those words from this one single person.

I held Stacy tightly and buried my face in her sweet, dark hair. This feeling couldn’t come from any plant I had ever smoked, swallowed or injected. No person could synthesize this molecule. It was too pure, too real.

“I love you, too.”

I had completed my first two semesters of college with a 3.8 GPA. It should have been a 4.0, but I forgot to include citations in my final paper for HI302. It was the first weekend since school had ended and I stood in my room holding a vial in my hand. An inch tall, a bit thicker than a pencil, it contained two purple microdots. I cradled it, staring, wondering. Did I really want to do this? Did I want to be the Serpent in the Garden of Eden? Tracy had expressed interest in trying acid. Before, I had encouraged it. Now, I didn’t know. Did I want to send her down the same path I’d traveled? The moment of truth was approaching, in a green Jeep and I was growing anxious with doubt. Maybe I should flush them down the toilet and that would be the end of it. I wouldn’t have to think about it again. But then…

That soft, familiar knock came at the door. My uncertainty vanished, as it always did when I heard that sound. I opened the door and hugged Tracy, maybe for the last time. The fair-skinned angel with the long dark hair and perfectly-shaped brown eyes. Innocent and young, perhaps now only in my memories. What I was about to give her would change her forever. She came inside and we walked into my room, closing the door behind us.

“I’m not trying to scare you, but you know once you do this, you’ll never be the same.”

“You’re OK,” she smiled in such I way I could never doubt she loved me.

“But sometimes I wonder if I would have been better off never having done this. I mean, I don’t regret anything. I never will regret anything. I just want you to be sure.”

“You said it makes you see things differently…”

“It does.”

“My paintings suck. I want them to be different.”

I hated it when she said that. That girl couldn’t produce anything that wasn’t beautiful.

“I want to see things differently. I’m an artist. I should see things differently.”

She had a point there. Her certainty convinced me. “OK. You’re right. Let’s go for a ride!”

I made sure I had a couple of blue Valiums—10mg—in my pocket in case of a bad trip and we made our way to the Jeep. “Drive careful. If we get busted with this shit…”

“Don’t worry.”

I didn’t. I trusted my very soul with her.

We drove to the park with the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” playing on the cassette deck. We approached the airport and, off to the side, there was a hill where a bridge was being constructed for a new highway. A giant mound of sand was piled next to the new road which ended right where the bridge was being built. I had noticed it before with interest and kept my eye on it as it drifted off into the distance. It was so inviting.

As we continued along the highway, I wanted to make sure Tracy was completely comfortable with everything. Maybe I was more concerned with my own uncertainty. “Remember… you won’t ‘get stuck this way!’ Whatever happens, I’ll be there. I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you.”

She smiled and nodded in complete trust.

“Don’t be self-conscious or anything. Just be free. Be yourself. I will always love you.”

She giggled and put her hand on mine. I was certain she was prepared and I didn’t want to overdo it – that might have the opposite effect from what I was after.

Deep down inside, I hoped her mother wouldn’t haunt her today.

After fifteen minutes, we arrived at the park. It was Sunday afternoon and I was surprised there were so few people there. At least we wouldn’t have to go looking for a private spot. All the better—more freedom.

We popped the pellets in our mouths and I threw the vial to whatever sprites or elves happened to be in the woods at the time. We sat around in the grass a while, drinking water and smoking Marlboro Lights and talking about Tracy’s dad and her sister and her poodle and school and painting and what this journey was going to be like.

Then she giggled. I giggled, “You’re starting to feel it now.”

Her eyes widened, “Oh… wow… everything is so… beautiful!”

The spring air was warm with a touch of chill in the breeze. We stood holding each other swaying in the wind, our eyes closed, for what seemed like hours. Not speaking or laughing. Just swaying ever so slightly in whatever direction the breeze nudged us—we were a part of it now. That minute… that hour… that day… experiencing just existing with her had more meaning in it than the past two decades of my life. Eventually we let go of each other and kissed and opened our eyes to see what had changed.

The grass was thick and a lush green. In the distance, there were some purplish-pink flowers that had grown in a crescent-shaped pattern. The petals barely broke through the top of the grass. A speckling of blackbirds waded in the flowers, pecking around for food. Random blobs of people walked through the grass, admiring the flowers and feeding the birds. The sun was bright, the sky clear and the image so vivid it almost burned my eyes.

I put my hand on Tracy’s back, gently sliding it to her shoulder. I pointed at the grass, the flowers, the birds, “A slice of watermelon.”

She saw it immediately. Her face lit up. Her perception changed. She saw things differently now. There weren’t birds. There weren’t flowers. There wasn’t grass. There was a single whole thing, “Oh my God!”

I had just witnessed a birth. A new person had been created. She would no longer see the world as a collection of separate objects classified by senses evolution randomly decided we needed. She saw the truth now. There was no distinction between matter and the forces that glued it together. The Universe was just a giant piece of marble, sculpting whatever forms it saw fit with no regard to our small expectations. We may see an eye, or a nose or a toe; but never all of David.

She held her arms out, the breeze blowing her dark hair back. I knew exactly what she was feeling. She was a part of everything around her. All the trees and clouds and birds and water and leaves and paper cups and stones. Everything we’d come here and observed before we were now a part of.

We ran about the park, barefoot, savoring every single gift Nature offered us that day. We played in the water fountain until the sun dissolved into a deep orange glow that seemed to ignite the clouds. I remembered the giant pile of sand on the side of the highway near the airport. I looked at Tracy with the enthusiasm of a child tearing open a Christmas present, “You wanna do something really cool?”

We hopped in the Jeep and headed for the sand pile, managing to get lost only twice. We parked at the end of the road, where construction had stopped. The sand pile was huge and we dove in without hesitation. The air had chilled since the sun had gone down, but it kept us comfortable as we labored to shape the sand pile with our hands and legs and bodies. We worked for hours, sweating in the cool night until we had created a Sun and a Moon, both with faces smiling at the traffic that passed by on the highway below. The sky was beginning to take on a faint blue glow as morning approached.

We made love there in the sand, sometime between night and day, between the Sun and the Moon. The acid had worn off significantly by then, but I could still feel it. I think. Maybe it was something else now. That oneness of things existed between me and Tracy. One heart pounded against the other, each with its own beat, both contributing to a new rhythm. I couldn’t tell which was hers and which was mine. It could have been her blood flowing through my veins, her sweat evaporating from my skin. Why did our consciousness have to remain separated? That stubborn, elusive thing we call “I.” I couldn’t even define what “I” was.

Then that warm explosion began to flood me. The moment of creation. The Big Bang. An incomprehensible chain of events set forth so many unimaginable years ago that all impossibly culminated in this event. Two beings, aware. Aware of themselves, aware of each other, aware of the Universe. But we weren’t separate. Nothing was separate. Like the watermelon in the park and the smiling Sun and Moon in the sand, everything was one, connected by different things—sometimes by subatomic forces, sometimes by gravity, sometimes by electromagnetism. None of that mattered to the Universe. My consciousness was its consciousness. Tracy’s consciousness was its consciousness. It was self-aware, seeing different parts of itself through different eyes, just like my two eyes formed a complete image in my mind.

And in that way, I realized we were one.

Dustin and I were becoming increasingly annoyed with the apartment complex management. They didn’t seem to relish the fact that my aunt left us in possession of the property and often cited wordy legalese in some meaningless lease agreement. Dustin had a hard enough time deciphering the instructions on a TV dinner and I couldn’t be bothered to care. They also constantly harassed us about the Family Truckster, claiming it was always “inappropriately parked” and an “eyesore.”

After a long night shift at the station I walked into the living room with Dustin and plopped down on the couch. I had been feeling increasingly ill the past few days, with a worsening rattle in my chest and a weak stomach. It was so bad that even pot was tasting weird. We had been searching for apartments all week and brought a vacancy listing paper home with us.

I analyzed the large wooden entertainment system Dustin’s mother had left with us while he scoured the apartment for CC. CC was Dustin’s black cat, given to him by Wayland, the king pixie. CC didn’t take well to his move and spent most of his time on top of the refrigerator growling and hissing at anyone passing through.

“Dude, what the fuck?” I rattled.

The entertainment system had been converted into a shrine sometime overnight. Dustin had taken the television out of it and left it on the floor. He had a new aquarium—the source of which I didn’t even want to know—and put it where the television used to be. The opening in the cabinet around the aquarium was trimmed with Christmas garland and “KALYPTIS” had been sprayed across the cabinet with gold enamel paint. He loved that rat.

“Oh, man, I used Kalyptis’ old cage for target practice last night!”

“Now I understand.” At least as much as I wanted to.

“Are you hanging out with Tracy tonight?”

“Nah. She’s staying with her sister. She’s taking Tracy to the dentist tomorrow to get her wisdom teeth out.”

“Some friends are coming over tonight, if that’s cool. You should hang out with us!”

I was feeling somewhat listless, but hanging out with insane pixies would probably take my mind off of missing Tracy, “Yeah.”

“You don’t look too good man!”

“Yeah. I think I have bronchitis or something. I’ve been coughing up blood and shit.”

“Oh shit, Darren, you better get to a doctor!”

“I’ll get right on that.”

Slowly, the place filled with pixies running in and out of the apartment and chattering meaninglessly among themselves. Dustin and I sat on the couch looking through apartment listings and passing a joint between us. We had the infamous she-male porno going on the television but nobody was really watching it.

“Oh my God, Darren, look! LOOOK!” Dustin pointed at a listing with his shaking finger, his eyes widened with excitement, “It has washer and dryer hookups!” He jumped up off of the couch and ran into the kitchen waving the paper, “Look CC! Washer and dryer hookups!”

The next thing I heard was a shriek, but it wasn’t Dustin’s usual pixie-anxiety, “Oh my body!” shriek. There was a crashing sound and a thud and CC ran bullet-like through the apartment and hid under my bed. I walked into the kitchen where Dustin was sprawled out on the floor. His eyes had a look of confusion and betrayal in them, “He attacked me, Darren!” His voice trembled. That was only the beginning of a long, pot and pixie-filled night.

* * *

The next morning, I dredged myself from bed at 7:30 with my head spinning from the four hour reprieve from pixies and marijuana. I went to the bathroom, vomited and washed my long hair. I was greeted by Kalyptis, who was sitting in the bathtub for some reason. I went back to my room and threw on some jeans and a black shirt and pulled on my sandals. I hurried through the living room, where Kalyptis’ brand new glass cage was shattered into a million shards all over the carpet. Outside, it was pouring down rain, so I ran to the Probe. I had decided to visit my mother at the only time I could—before she left for work and while Tracy was getting her wisdom teeth pulled.

I felt like collapsing by the end of the fifteen minute drive. I stood dizzily until my mother opened the door. I rushed into the apartment, to the bathroom and vomited.

“Are you okay, Darren?”

“Yeah. I think I have bronchitis or something.”

“You better get to a doctor!”

“Yeah.”

“Guess what I found out,” My mother had a sly look on her face.

“What?”

“Shafto was arrested last month.”

My eyes lit up for the first time since I last saw Tracy, “For what?”

“Statutory sodomy. Molesting his stepdaughter.”

“Gee, I didn’t see that coming from a mile away.”

“I know,” my mother replied, shaking her head, “I heard he’s on oxygen now too. Emphysema.”

We talked a couple of hours, sharing fantasies about what might happen to Shafto in a state prison. Eventually, I fell asleep on the couch.

* * *

I parked the Probe along the curb in front of Tracy’s house. Her sister answered the door and let me in. Tracy was still passed out in bed, no doubt having wonderful dreams on the painkillers the dentist had given her and the Valium I had given her to help calm her down before the procedure. I kissed her on the forehead and joined Susan in the kitchen.

Susan was my age, and she was definitely pretty, though in a different way than Tracy. She had short hair and was not quite as tall or thin. She had the same dark brown eyes and baby-smooth skin. Her husband worked at Ford with their dad. She stayed at home with her daughter and made extra money babysitting.

“Are you feeling OK?” she looked at me with concern as she slid a cup of hot chocolate toward me.

It was starting to make me nervous that everyone was suddenly asking me that.

“I don’t know. I’ve been feeling like crap for the past week. I think it’s bronchitis.”

“You better get to a doctor.”

“Yeah,” I croaked.

I chatted with Susan for about an hour, reassuring her several times, in between gulps of hot chocolate and bouts of painful coughing, that I would get to a doctor. I still had a couple of hours before I would have to be at work. I decided to head home and ask Dustin about the weird-tasting pot.

Dustin was sprawled out on the couch, obsessively pasting together a collage he was making out of some of Toad’s porno magazines he’d stolen. I sat in a chair, staring blankly at the video Dustin had going in the VCR—“Hey You, Fuck My Ass!”

“Dude. That last bag I got from you tastes different or something. What’s up with that?”

Dustin twitched and grabbed a lump of pot from his own bag. Shaking, he cleaned it and stuffed it into his pipe. He lit it and inhaled deeply and passed it over to me, “Tastes cool to me, man.”

I took the pipe and inhaled carefully. My lungs stung from the smoke but the taste was normal, “This is the same stuff?” I coughed.

“Yeah, man.”

This was getting weird. I sat and chatted with Dustin a bit about Tracy, CC and Kalyptis before we headed out to work.

* * *

It was two days later, and I was still feeling terrible. I was awakened by the phone around 9am. It was Tracy and she was sobbing, “My mouth is swollen and it hurts so bad!”

“I’ll be over in a minute,” I replied, hazily.

I went to the bathroom and pulled my hair back into a pony tail. My head was spinning and I vomited into the toilet. I rinsed with Listerine and went to my room to throw on some clothes. I went through the yellow pages until I found an oral surgeon who was close and who would take us without an appointment. Dustin came in, completely spun out of his mind on pixie dust, carrying a glass aquarium.

“Dude, you don’t look so hot.” Dustin observed, once again.

“Neither do you,” I pointed out, annoyed. “Tracy needs to go to the doctor—I’ll be back in time for work.”

Dustin trembled, his eyes were aflame, “Ohh cool, man. I was just gonna get some sleep before work.”

“Good luck with that.”

I rushed out of the apartment and went to pick up Tracy. We sat in the waiting room at the oral surgeon’s office for one miserable hour. I was rattling with every breath and pale and sweating. Tracy was wrapped in a blanket with her head on my shoulder, tears streaming from her eyes. Everyone in the room kept glancing at us, no doubt wondering which one of us would be the first to drop dead in front of their eyes.

They had Tracy in the room for twenty minutes or so. They drained the infection and then stitched it up. I paid her bill and walked her back out to the Probe. We got back to her house and I passed out with her until I had to get up again to go to work.

I pulled into the gravel parking lot where Toad was busy under the hood of his old primer-gray Ford pickup. I morosely walked over to him.

“What’s up?” I coughed.

“You don’t look so good,” Toad noted.

I grunted.

“I’m just fixing the fuel line.”

Toad had a piece of metal tubing and a screen, “What’s the screen for?”

“I was going to make a filter, but it looks like that’s OK.”

I wondered why he wouldn’t just buy a new filter, but shook my head, realizing that was Toad’s way. He would rather spend a few hours cobbling together some nutty contraption out of duct tape and window screen than spend a few dollars just to buy the right part. I eyed the screen suspiciously, “Is that where you’ve been getting the screen you’ve been giving me for my pipe?”

“Yep!”

The screen looked strange. It mostly looked like a normal metal mesh, but there was something odd about the way it reflected light. I grabbed the piece of screen and ran it between my thumb and finger. It all became clear.

“Dude, this is fucking plastic!”

“No it isn’t…”

I took the screen out into the parking lot, pulled out my Bic lighter and held the flame to the screen. When I took the flame away, the screen remained burning with a sweet, all-too-familiar odor. I dropped it to the ground and stamped out the fire.

“No wonder it kept clogging up! Are you trying to fucking kill me?!”

Toad ran over to me, grabbed me in his arms and squeezed me tightly, “Oh, man! I’m so sorry! Honestly, I didn’t know!”

I stood there weak and breathless while Toad began to weep on my shoulder. When he finally let go, I went inside and made an appointment with Doctor Horton.

Later in the evening, during a lull in business, I sat with Dustin who actually seemed more upset about the whole screen deal than I was. We had the television on and were making fun of a “Beverly Hills: 90210″ rerun. In my sickness and disgust, I had thrown my pipe in the trash, deciding I was completely finished with drugs.

“What the hell was he thinking? Was he trying to kill you?” Dustin wondered.

I just shook my head, preferring not to use my lungs to utter a sound.

Dustin grabbed a pen from the ceramic jar on the side of the desk. He took his lighter and started burning the cap of the pen, “Fucking Toad.” His eyes stared intently at the flame he was holding to the pen cap, “burning… burning… plastic… plastic… burning plastic… plastic burning… plastic… plastic… pla… stic…”

I watched with a furrowed brow as the pen cap warped from the heat. Dustin threw it on the desk as a car pulled in, “A customer!” he exclaimed with joy.

I folded my arms on the desk and lowered my head to rest on them, my face covered in a futile attempt to hide from the chaos around me.

* * *

I painfully explained every detail to Doctor Horton. He gave me a lecture about the perils of chronic marijuana use and prescribed me some syrup which I drank like Dr. Pepper. He said it would probably clear up within a couple of weeks and told me not to smoke – anything. I assured him I was finished with drugs for good.

Dustin and I pulled into the station and got started with our shift. A Gladstone Plumbing truck pulled in and Dustin went to get it. I went over to the desk drawer to pull out the receipt book for their account. I saw the melted pen cap sitting there with a yellow Post-it note attached to it. I removed the note and read it: “IS FIRE A COOL THING TO PLAY WITH IN A GAS STATION? IS TOAD A COOL THING TO PLAY WITH IN THIS GAS STATION? CUT THE SHIT NOW!!!!”

I threw the Post-it in the trash and dreamed of setting fire to that pen cap and shoving it down Toad’s lungs.

The decay of a human being can be a fascinating thing. And if pixies did anything especially well, it was decay. Over time, I had developed a pixie classification system. The breakdown went something like this: First, there were regular pixies, who mostly just sweat a lot and had a constant pallor; these pixies could also have strange tics like making farting noises with their mouth. The second kind of pixie was the scabnetti; these pixies constantly picked at their skin so they had sores all over. They often reminded me of starving dogs—skeletal and missing patches of fur. The third form of pixie was the sausage; they were always red—most likely due to high blood pressure—and sweated profusely, resembling an Eckrich smoked sausages. Finally, you had sprites who were usually female pixies who just dabbled in the drug and didn’t appear as diseased as the other pixies.

Dustin had found himself a choice pixie specimen. She was a scabnetti. I was almost envious, because she had special features I doubted Tracy could ever develop. One of her special pixie powers was the ability to spontaneously leak fluid from her nipples. I could only imagine the fun Dustin had with that. I rarely ever saw Leslie in person—she would usually run and hide in Dustin’s room the few times she was over. However, she never seemed to mind leaving my bathroom a complete mess or eating half the lasagna I made for Tracy and myself. I wasn’t really certain why pixies needed food—I guess they used it to manufacture nipple fluid. Unfortunately, pixie relationships seemed to last about as long as a pixie nap. In a moment of comical insanity, Leslie abruptly decided to drive to Arkansas at 8pm to move back in with her mother. Dustin and Wayland chased after her in the Family Truckster.

It was about 2am that night that Tracy and I sat in the living room, the only light coming from the flickering television. Kalyptis had climbed out of his aquarium and was sitting on the entertainment system. Sometimes I swore I could detect a deep intelligence behind those beady red eyes.

Tracy shivered, “Does Kalyptis ever get loose in the apartment?”

“Nah. He’s pretty lethargic. He just sits there mostly.”

I heard a key rattling in the door lock followed by a whirlwind of chaos. Dustin rushed into the living room, completely disheveled. He was pale and sweat was rolling down his face, which was framed by a wild, tangled mass of golden brown hair. His eyes were wide and sunken. Tracy and I both jumped. Kalyptis was the only one to remain unperturbed.

It was almost impossible to have a quiet moment in that place.

“Hey Dustin,” Tracy smiled.

“Hey. Oh my God, Darren, you should have seen that fucking pixie!”

“Which fucking pixie? There’s only a million of them.”

“Wayland. We went down to my mom’s. Every time we passed a weird building or bridge or something he’d point to it and say, ‘Tweakers did that!’”

I remembered all of my acid trips and painkiller episodes and how songs always seemed to be about whatever drug I was on at the time, “Jesus, what an idiot.”

“Oh that’s not the worst of it. He brought his machine gun with him.”

“What?! Where the fuck did he get a machine gun? What idiot sold that nut a fucking machine gun?”

“Some Mexicans he knows. Man, I don’t want to know any more than that.”

“Yeah, me either.”

“So, we parked out in the middle of this field and he was just shooting that thing into the air. He was laughing and he was like, ‘I’m so high! Look at me! I’m so cool!’”

“Holy shit!”

Tracy was mesmerized by the story, her jaw hung limply open.

“I almost left him there, Darren.”

“You probably should have, dude. What about Leslie?”

“Fuck that pixie!”

The phone rang and Dustin answered it. There was a few minutes of hushed mumbling and then a piercing, “I’ll be right there!”

He was summoned back to Wayland’s place to get some pixie dust. Wayland stole a triple beam scale from the hospital and couldn’t get it to work. Dustin arrived at the apartment where Wayland was helplessly moving counterweights on the scale and slapping it in confusion. Eventually, they sorted everything out and ended up outside some store with a fire going in an old trash barrel. Wayland, in a flash of extreme brilliance, threw an aerosol can into the fire, which exploded and burned his eyebrows and hair. Pixies always knew how to throw a wild party.

The next I saw Dustin was at work. He was standing in front of the cigarette machine, preoccupied with something I couldn’t quite figure out, while we waited for Toad to finish the books. Dustin made a slight shrieking sound, wrapped his arms around his chest and stomach, opened his mouth wide and, with utter terror radiating from his eyes, he gasped and shrieked again, “Oh my body!”

“Dude, what the fuck is your problem?”

He took several quick, panicked breaths, “Darren, I’m a fucking mess!” He laughed insanely.

The image was sickening. I was watching my cousin decay in front of my eyes. He was skeletal and, as I concluded with my untrained analysis, completely psychotic. I couldn’t imagine something destroying a human being like that. I couldn’t begin to guess what manner of tortured thoughts haunted him.

“How long have you been up?”

“I don’t know. Nine days or something.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, man.”

He laughed again.

“Do you really think it’s funny? Go fucking look at yourself in the mirror!”

I was somewhat surprised by my own anger. I sat back in my chair and analyzed the source of it. I realized I felt rather helpless. I couldn’t bear to watch someone I loved—someone I’d known since he was born—do that to himself.

Dustin managed to compose himself to some degree, “I have to go to the bathroom!”

I watched him amble for the women’s restroom on the outside of the building, which we sometimes used out of courtesy to our coworkers, “What a fucking mess. Meth is just filthy.”

Toad got up to drop a stack of bills into the safe. He closed the door and spun the combination, “Moderation is the key.”

I shook my head and chuckled, “Ugh…” was all I could muster in my frustration.

“It isn’t a moral question, Darren. People aren’t bad because they use drugs!”

“What?! What the hell are you talking about? When did I ever say that? Are Tracy and I the only people left on the planet who aren’t fucking completely insane?” I began to wonder about my own sanity. If everyone else seemed crazy, maybe I was the one who was really breaking down.

Toad collected his cooler and plastic Vodka mug and headed home to use Kasey Bleau as a pawn in his ongoing marital struggle.

After about twenty minutes, Dustin walked calmly back into the office. He seemed more collected than when he’d left.

“Darren, I think I just took the biggest shit of my life.”

I couldn’t help but laugh as I cradled my head in my hand.

“I broke the toilet. There’s water everywhere!”

“Fuck it. Let Toad deal with it tomorrow. He lives for that shit.”

I longed for the only thing left in the world that didn’t seem completely surreal.

* * *

The next day, I pulled into the station and noticed the door to the women’s restroom was open. Toad was kneeling down over the toilet, his pale ass crack peeking through his official olive-green Phillips 66 work pants that nobody else would be caught dead wearing. I laughed to myself.

“What’s up?” I called, unable to suppress a wide grin.

Toad turned to look at me, scowling as I approached. As I got closer, I could see more detail. The floor of the restroom was flooded with water. There were thin clumps of feces congealed in random spots. Toad’s shirt was soaked and stained. His rubber-gloved hands were muddied as he reached into the drain at the bottom of the toilet scraping out chunks of Dustin’s intestinal fetus. Sweat rolled off his unusually reddened face. He panted heavily and flies were buzzing all over the place. A broken plunger lay on the floor next to him.

“There was a fucking tampon in here! Why the fuck was there a tampon in the fucking toilet?!?!”

“Maybe because it’s the women’s restroom…”

Toad reddened even more, “I know that, Darren! What the fuck is wrong with you?! Oh, don’t worry, Toad will fucking take care of everything!” Toad always referred to himself in the third-person. His bushy beard quivered with anger, “Fucking idiots!”

“OK, dude!” I replied, as I walked toward the front door, satisfied I had squeezed no less than six “fucks” out of him and perversely relishing the thought of a man with a masters degree in history being reduced to scraping shit and tampons out of a toilet.

Aaron was out getting one of Toad’s customers. He appeared rather morose and shook his head as I went inside where Tracy was waiting for me, her long dark hair braided down one side. A greasy L.C.’s Hamburgers Etc. bag sat on the safe next to her. I gave her a peck on the cheek in gratitude for the food, “What’s wrong with Toad today?” she inquired in fawn-like innocence, “He’s usually nice to me.”

Everyone was usually nice to Tracy; her naiveté was part of her charm. “I guess it’s that time of the month,” I shrugged.

I plopped down next to Tracy and watched as the Family Truckster lurched across the street and pulled into the lot. Dustin had been out all night but was at the apartment when I left. He still hadn’t slept.

“Darren! Darren! Hartwood Manor called! We’ve been approved!”

This was certainly good news. I was tired of constantly being harassed by the management of our current apartment. They wanted me to apply for a new lease, since they didn’t allow subletting. I was somewhat resistant to putting my name on legal documents I found too boring to read.

“No shit? When can we move in?”

“As soon as we pay the deposit!”

“Fuck it man, let’s make some charges and move. I’ll cover your island if you want to go pay them now.”

Pixies were easily suggestible, “Alright!”

Dustin managed to pay the deposit without any problem and we spent the rest of the shift planning our move. I even closed thirty minutes early so we could get started. We moved everything in a few loads. I left behind my bed and some other furniture, only bringing along my computer, clothes and a few trash bags filled with miscellaneous junk. Dustin did the same. Once we filled the Truckster with our final load, we sat on the floor of the emptied living room, resting a bit.

I laughed evilly, “Man, these people are gonna be pissed when they find out we’ve moved.”

“They don’t deserve to have us as tenants, Darren. They don’t deserve these cats living here. They don’t deserve Kalyptis.”

“No shit man, they fucked up! I say we evict them!”

“Oh my God, Darren! You’re right!”

Dustin went out to the Truckster and fished out a paper plate and a black marker. He drew a star in the middle of the plate and across the top he wrote, “You are hereby evicted!”

I laughed and took the plate and marker from him and added at the bottom, “by order of Ponch and John, CHiPs Patrol.”

We laughed at ourselves as we taped the paper plate to the outside of our door and left the key in the lock. We hopped into the Family Truckster and headed for our new home.

Tracy went with her dad to visit her grandparents in Kentucky. I would miss her for two weeks, but I was also looking forward to the time alone. It always seemed I needed a base of isolation to which I could retreat and gather myself. I felt lost without that and I hadn’t had anything like it since I met Tracy.

I took the Saturday off that Tracy left with her dad. I stayed up with her until 4am, watching bad movies and talking about anything and everything while bathed in the warm, orange light of soft tungsten bulbs. Sometimes we’d pause to make fun of whatever movie we were watching, especially when Back to the Beach came on.

“Oh my God, this fucking movie is making me have a flashback or something.”

“This song is awful, Darren! Hey, isn’t that the guy from the Sonic commercials?”

“Holy Jesus it is! Frankie Avalon! He probably fed the crew for this cheap piece of shit with free Sonic burgers!”

“Yeah, he’s so desperate for money, he invites all his rich Hollywood friends over for a party and then serves them Sonic!”

“No shit! That’s probably how this movie got made. They all came up with it while sitting around a sauna eating a burger and tots.”

“And malts.”

“Look at Annette Funicello. She looks like a piece of rubber! They probably had to dope her up on PCP to get her to do this. Somebody needs to be beaten with a hose for committing this crime to celluloid.”

I lay down on the floor, with my head in Tracy’s lap while she ran her fingers through my hair. She knew the perfect place on the back of my head to massage. The feeling, judging by its reaction, was the same as that for a cat when its back is scratched near the base of its tail.

In a moment of quiet, I realized how fast the hours had streaked past. Time used to beat so slowly, like the pulse of my heart on 120mgs of hydrocodone. Now it was pecking away like the ticks of a Geiger counter dropped on Hiroshima after the Summer of ’45. I also realized I was no longer thinking in terms of I, me, mine. Quietly, deep in my subconscious, things had evolved into we, us, ours.

Tracy drove us to my place and came upstairs, to the third floor apartment to “say goodnight.” I opened the door to a full-scale pixie invasion. The apartment was freezing—the thermostat had been set to 60 degrees. The pixies were meandering around the apartment, confused, covered with sweat and shirtless.

I looked around with incredulity, “What in the name of sweet Jesus?”

Tracy tightened her grip on my hand, “This is insane.”

In the kitchen, a couple of pixies had the blender going—they were making pancakes with grape juice. In the living room, where Tracy and I sat on the floor to watch in disbelief, pixies were making collages, running in and out to the balcony, playing with a laser pointer and a stethoscope and listening to Blind Melon at full volume.

Some pixie I’d never seen before ran up to me, shoved his arm out toward me and injected himself with liquid pixie dust. After the injection, he threw his head back, took a deep breath and moaned, his lower jaw quivering orgasmically. After mere seconds, he turned to Tracy and repeated the maneuver.

I pushed him away, “Dude, get that shit away from her.”

He repeated the process for Dustin, busy making a collage. It reminded me of a cat rubbing against furniture to mark it as its own. After his ritual, the pixie walked around the apartment babbling about how he absolutely had to get downtown. It seemed to be a matter of life and death with him.

Tracy and I never managed to “say goodbye.” Something about the pixies took it out of us. I ended up in my room, with the door closed and my cat hiding under the blankets I had piled on the floor as my bed.

It was the first chunk of time I’d really had to be alone and reflect in quite some time. My living situation was starting to depress me. The more time I spent completely sober, the more annoying the pixies became. The gas station was becoming an issue as well. I could never give Tracy the kind of life I wanted working there. A life of squalor was fine and exciting for me, but I wouldn’t dream of putting her there. The only way I could see out of it was finishing three years of school. It seemed like such a long time and I was already bored with it. I’d barely managed to hold on to some enthusiasm my last semester—mostly riding the high I got from Tracy. But I found myself immensely enjoying the summer and not having to take one pointless test after another. I decided long ago that freedom meant more to me than almost anything. School just seemed to drain that away.

* * *

Dustin was cutting up various pornographic magazines with which Toad had stocked the “porn table” in the back room. His intense concentration was broken only by the occasional customer. “Man, this is a masterpiece!” he exclaimed, admiring the collage he was working on. It was a picture of a vagina with a midget’s head pasted over the clitoris.

Dustin had the far island that night. Over my years at the station, I had made several interesting observations about human behavior. The far island was always the slowest and I noticed its patrons usually seemed less confident and drove lower end cars, while the people who used the near island seemed to have better cars and often came in wearing suits or other office clothes. I generally thought the people who used the far island were of better character. A ’60s blue skylark pulled into the far island. It was Ms. Whipple looking inside impatiently awaiting service.

“Ms. Whipple is waiting for you, dude.” I informed Dustin.

“Oh, fuck!” he snarled, “Goddamnit!”

He stood up quickly and swayed a bit before making his way to Ms. Whipple, his hair flying in all directions and his wild, sunken eyes aflame.

I watched with interest as Dustin grappled with Ms. Whipple’s hood. He finally opened it, but in his psychosis he hadn’t planned to get a towel beforehand. He turned to get a rag from the squeegee bucket and the hood fell shut again. I could see his lips moving quickly in what I imagined was a stream of obscenities that would make the Exorcist sound like a Disney movie. I went to help him, otherwise Ms. Whipple could be out there all night.

I had been at the station long enough to know the trick to getting Ms. Whipple’s hood open, so I manipulated the lever with my thumb and moved the hood from side to side until it popped free. I held it open while Dustin checked the oil, which looked like chocolate milk from the mixture of radiator fluid in it. Dustin grimaced and shoved the stick violently back into the block.

He walked around to the window, grumbling, “It’s low. It’s not even showing on the stick.”

After a muffled response from inside the car, Dustin trampled back to the building, disgusted. He returned with four quarts of Pennzoil 10w-30. He filled the engine with oil, testing the dipstick after each quart, and I noticed a strange man standing at the divider between our station and the Amoco next door. He was thirtyish with short blonde hair, a mustache, and wild blue eyes. He stood there watching us and laughing to himself. He behaved like he knew us. Every time I glanced down at him, he chuckled and nodded his head.

“Do you know that guy?” I asked Dustin.

He finished up with the oil and we shut the hood, “No. What the hell is he doing?”

“I don’t know, dude.”

We walked back toward the building, Dustin carrying Ms. Whipple’s Phillips 66 credit card and two unused quarts of oil. The freak next door kept watching us, chuckling and nodding until we got inside. Dustin ran the card through the credit card machine and waited for the receipt to churn out of the printer. He spit on the card and shoved his finger into his nose, digging out a large glop of mucous which he wiped on the card. He wiped the card on a blue paper towel used to stock the squeegee buckets, so as not to make it so obvious the card had been defiled.

“Dude!” I shook my head.

Poor Ms. Whipple. She was annoying at times, but she didn’t deserve that. Dustin took a side route on his way back from Mrs. Whipple and began talking to the freak at Amoco. “Oh God,” I thought, knowing no good could possibly come of this. Sure enough, the freak appeared in the window next to Dustin and followed him inside.

“HI!” he beamed. He was wearing a light-blue jacket. He had a Walkman in the pocket and earphones around his neck.

“What’s up, dude?” I greeted him.

His eyes were wide and sharp, “YOU CAN CALL ME JACK!”

“Hey Jack.”

This was just the sort of person Dustin could identify with, “So, Jack, what’s going on?”

Jack’s eyes widened even more, “OH MAN, I JUST GOT OUT OF PRISON. PROBATION. I STOLE A BUNCH OF MONEY FROM MY FATHER-IN-LAW’S BUSINESS. TOO MUCH COKE, MAN! HAHAHAHAHAHA!”

Dustin’s eyes lit up.

“I FUCKING HATE FAGS, MAN! THEY THINK I HAVE SCHIZOPHRENIA! HAHAHAHAHAHA!”

Ohhhh. Wow. I watched this exchange in disbelief.

“Wait, the fags think you have schizophrenia?” Dustin asked, genuinely concerned.

“NO MAN! THE DOCTORS! THEY DON’T GET IT MAN!”

“Fucking doctors,” Dustin agreed.

“THE CATS UNDERSTAND MAN! I WALKED OVER HERE FROM MY SISTERS!”

“Cats?” I asked, wondering what person could possibly understand this character. Was he talking about the guys at Amoco? They were a bit off—and insanely jealous of us. This guy could be a plant.

“I’M STAYING WITH MY SISTER! HER CATS GET IT!”

I gasped audibly. He had been referring to actual cats, not “cats” as slang…

“What do they get?” Dustin asked, getting sucked deeper and deeper into this madman’s world.

“A WHOLE BUNCH OF SHIT, MAN! I JUST WANT TO BE LEFT ALONE! LEFT ALONE WITH MY TUNES!” He stroked his headphones.

“Dude, you probably ought to go,” I said. Getting nervous with a giant wad of cash in my pocket.

“WHAT ARE YOU WITH THE FBI MAN?? YOU GOT THAT PAPER THERE WRITING DOWN EVERYTHING I SAY! ”

“Well, I haven’t touched…” I stopped, realizing I was allowing myself to get sucked into this person’s delusions, “just leave.”

“I’M FUCKING OUTTA HERE MAN! BOTTOM LINE, YOU PEOPLE ARE FUCKED UP!”

Jack left hurriedly and scurried back down toward Amoco. Dustin shrieked as yet another wave of anxiety gripped his body. Unfortunately, that wasn’t to be my last dealing with Jack.

The pixie scourge seemed to be overtaking the city. Sausages were rolling into the gas station. Scabnettis picked their way through convenience stores. Sprites popped in and out of the apartment. They were all completely mad and no matter where I went, I couldn’t escape them. Toad and Josh both succumbed to the disease.

I was sitting at the desk, morosely watching Jerry Springer with Dustin. Stefano, one of our regular pixie customers decided to pop in and try to cash another bad check. His thin black hair was matted to his head. I didn’t know if it was from grease or sweat. His moustache twitched and his blue eyes pierced, “Come on man! I really need you to do this for me!”

You couldn’t turn around in the gas station without a giant white sign with big red letters reading, “NO CHECKS!” smacking you in the face, but everything was always a matter of life and death with the pixies, “All I can do is call and see if Toad will make an exception.”

The reality was, we did accept checks. But only if the customer was on the “approved list.” When I first started at the station, the “approved list” was just a piece of ordinary white paper with fifteen or so names scrawled on it in varying colors and styles of penmanship. The paper was old and wrinkled and some names had been scribbled out. Toad changed that by making a new list with PageMaker and printing it out, probably while on pixie dust.

We were all given the power to accept a check or not, at our own discretion. If we accepted one and it bounced and we couldn’t talk the customer into paying for it, it came out of our paycheck. I knew Toad would approve Stefano; he always did. But I wasn’t going to pay for the idiot’s pixie dust when his check inevitably bounced. By clearing it with Toad, I made it his responsibility.

I watched while Stefano’s shaking hand scrawled sharply-edged lines onto the blank check. He made it out for twenty dollars more than he originally requested. I put my initials in the memo line, followed with “by order of Toad.”

I took out my wad to give Stefano his money and noticed an old lady stalled at our north entrance. She was just sitting in her broken car, looking around with a confusion that was evident even through her blue-blocker sunglasses, “Dustin, go see what’s up with that old lady out there.”

“Fuck her!”

“Dude, come on.”

Stefano turned to the window, “I’ll handle it!”

I watched him lunge eagerly to the stalled car. He spoke animatedly with the old lady for a few seconds, then ran behind the car and single-handedly pushed it uphill all the way to our pumps. He came back inside, seemingly elated, “She just ran out of gas!”

I gave Stefano his money and headed outside to deal with the old lady, knowing Dustin was in a foul enough mood that he’d chase the pixie off before I was finished.

When I returned, I opened the desk drawer to put the check away and noticed a stack of credit card receipts. Toad had left the charges out! Normally, the stack of charges was no more than 10 or so receipts thick—a few charges by random employees for random amounts. We were supposed to try to charge no more than a single paycheck’s worth. I thumbed through the thick pile of receipts—“Toad,” “Toad,” “Toad,” “Toad…” Toad had accumulated nearly three thousand dollars in charges. It all went to pixie dust and vodka.

I added my own charges up and found they were pushing six hundred dollars. Most of that was books for school and part of the tuition not covered by student loans and the paltry grants I received. I longed to be a single mother when it came time to apply for education grants. As if being dumb enough to screw somebody who’d abandon his own kid somehow qualified one for a college education.

I’d never be able to pay off that much money with my paltry income. Even with the reduction in our rent for our new apartment, money was tight. I needed to find a way to make more money or reduce my cost of living.

Dustin had more immediate concerns, “Darren, let’s get something from L.C.’s.”

There was a lull in customers and I could use some food myself, “Yeah. That sounds good.”

I went to L.C.’s and picked up the greasy bags of food while Dustin handled any random customers that decided to annoy him. I sat down at one of the circular plastic tables waiting for them to finish up with our order. I noticed a man standing at the take-out window. He looked vaguely familiar but I couldn’t quite place him. I searched the cobwebby recesses of my mind until it finally dawned on me – it was Jack, the paranoid schizophrenic who had visited the station a few months earlier. He was having what seemed to be a heated discussion with the clerk.

“I’m sorry, sir, you’ll have to come back Monday and talk to the manager about that.”

“Come on, man, don’t be an asshole. I don’t want to wait until Monday,” he laughed nervously.

“Sorry, I can’t help you.”

Jack stood at the window, clearly flustered, though he was smiling.

“Number 102!” The clerk called out.

Shit. That was me. I hoped Jack wouldn’t remember me as I went to the window to pick up the food, being careful not to make eye contact with him.

“Hey man! You’re from that fucked-up gas station aren’t you?!”

I smiled vaguely, “Yeah dude.”

“Are you guys hiring?”

“Sorry, dude.”

“Fuck,” he laughed maniacally.

I shrugged, paid for my food and left before he got a chance to strike up a conversation. While Dustin and I sorted our food out and began eating, I told him about spotting Jack at L.C.’s.

“Oh my God!” Dustin called out as though he had just realized something utterly horrific. I thought it was a bit unsettling to have run into Jack, but Dustin’s reaction was extreme. As far as I knew, he wasn’t on any pixie dust that night—otherwise, he wouldn’t be eating.

I darted a furrowed brow at Dustin and then realized he was looking outside. I turned toward the window and saw Jack walking toward the door, “Oh my God!”

* * *

Jack visited us every day at the station and stayed for hours at a time. He wasn’t as bad as my initial experience had led me to believe. Once I accepted the fact that he was just going to spout stark raving madness most of the time, it became easier to ignore it and appreciate him when he was making sense.

Jack was on parole after being in prison for a few years on a cocaine possession charge. He was living with his sister and brother-in-law and had no job, surviving on food stamps he’d use to buy drugs from Dustin. Jack preferred cocaine, but I guess pixie dust was a good-enough substitute. Jack was also fond of vodka.

Jack wanted to move out of his sister’s basement and Dustin and I needed the financial break of a third person sharing the bills. Once he finally got a job at the Hen House supermarket, we offered to let him move in. Jack accepted and we drove to his sister’s in the Family Truckster and collected two trash bags filled with all his worldly possessions.

Jack had been married and I guess his wife divorced him when he got busted. She left him with basically nothing but his clothes. He seemed afraid of women and usually avoided Tracy, though he was obviously fond of her as he liked to talk about her. He was also afraid of homosexuals, which made me wonder what exactly had happened while he was in prison. He would constantly talk about how much he hated “fags.” Sometimes, we would be with him around town and he would ask people who he disliked or distrusted if they were gay. Other than coke, pixie and vodka, Jack was only interested in music, for which he seemed to have varied tastes. The only time he refused to listen to a song was if he had identified the artist as a homosexual. Sometimes, as was the case with Jane’s Addiction, that didn’t even matter, “Yeah, Perry’s a fag, but this song is pretty good.”

Jack would randomly burst into tears, leaving everyone wondering what the hell was going on. When asked, he’d only shake his head and run to his room. As far as I can tell, he did most of his confiding in the cats and insisted that they “knew things.” It was never made clear what it was, exactly, they knew, but we guessed that Dustin’s cat, CC, knew more of it as he seemed to favor him.

One morning, after Tracy had spent the night, I was awakened prematurely by the sound of the shower and Jack blabbering away in the bathroom. I realized Tracy wasn’t next to me, then heard a crashing sound in the bathroom and scratching at the door. Jack continued talking up a storm with the shower going.

“Bottom line, you’re going to see… Yeah, things may be fucked up now… But the rewards will come.”

The rusty cogs of my mind ground slowly into motion.

“Most people don’t understand. I’m trying to explain to you… I just want to be left alone with my tunes.”

Wait a minute, is that Tracy taking a shower? Is he in there fucking talking to her while she’s taking a shower??

I got up and opened the bathroom door. The curtain was closed and Jack’s voice was still rambling non-stop from the steamy shower. My cat, Joon, immediately shot out the door and hid in my room. Jack had trapped her in the bathroom so he could have a conversation with her while he took a shower.

I guess in some alien way, he was right… the cats did know. Joon would never go near him after that.