A cat's the only cat who knows where it's at.
Another story. I am going to break my printer and cut up all my clothes and drop out of school. That's how irritated I am this morning. And I even skipped class.
If you really want a good place to get high, you have to go out to this garden. This big, symmetrical I think Japanese garden, and then there’s all this open space and all these fuckin trees. We used to go out way past where the garden was, with all these flowers and a pond and some benches, out to these big, thick trees spaced out in a huge field of grass. When the flowers were in bloom you could really smell them, but I liked going farther out because then it felt like being in the middle of nowhere. I think that’s why we liked getting high there, because we felt so isolated. There was so much space to run around in, and no one to see it or catch us. The smoke evaporated into the air and mixed with the greeny smells of the grass and the leaves and the bark and the sky. We’d drive down to the baseball fields and park at the meters, and then kind of hike, if you could call it that, out as far as we wanted, far enough so we couldn’t see anything back where we came from, but not so far that we started to see the end of things. And we’d kind of camp out at the base of a tree, a little circle, with a light up Frisbee or someone’s cell phone giving everyone a little bit to see by. Otherwise, if Anna forgot the Frisbee or the lights on our phones died out, it would be pitch black until someone flared up a lighter, a little circle of glow lighting their face and then snapping out, leaving the bright spot of a cigarette to float on its own in the once-again dark.
It’s hard to pack a bowl at night, with little to no lighting, but Anna could do it. It was about getting high, but it wasn’t just about getting high, not like we sat down and started in right away. We had to kinda settle first. Figure out the seating, what was comfortable, where to put our stuff, have our conversations. And then, eventually, after not too long, someone would pull out a bowl and a little baggie and pack it full, enough for five people, and ever so carefully so as not to drop, waste, or lose the commodity. Like I said, it’s risky business doing this in the dark.
Those nights are some of my fondest memories, dragging and coughing off a bowl under the stars in a big circle, doing nothing but still doing something, so much better than passing out on a couch, giggling to shitty TV and eating popcorn (although that, too, had its proper place and time). I don’t want to say we were immortal; I don’t want to say we were infinite. That’s going too far and I’m not that Charlie character from that one book. All I’m saying was that it was good. The kind of good you don’t want to go home from; the kind that sorta makes you sick to your stomach when you think about it later, after it’s gone, when it stops happening. And things like this always stop happening. Somewhere down the line you gotta face reality and stop running off to waste time in a field. Or maybe you don’t, but you still can’t control when things fall apart.
Estha was one of our five, a kid from my hometown that for some reason I still talked to after I moved away. We were both surprised we hadn’t moved to the city, and once we got over that and figured our decision was okay anyway, we found out we actually suited each other. It’s nice knowing someone isn’t just a leftover from your past, some tin-foil wrapped obligation that you pull out and sniff every so often to see if it’s rotten yet. And even though we talked about home and high school a lot, there was more going on there. Sometimes it feels nice to have someone to talk about home with. Estha, in fact, is the one who found the place. I don’t know how; I think he used to go running and found it that way. Maybe one night he wandered around high and stumbled on it. I have no idea. But I do know that the kid was genius. He could find things no one else could, and he’d pull you into things like that was where you belonged the whole time.
One Friday night we drove to my friend Wendy’s house, way out in the country. If that little slice of open space seemed like the middle of nowhere, this was really it. The backyard was hemmed in by great yellow corn stalks (this was around mid-October), the turn-off of her road was gated by huge silver grain silos, and except for ourselves we could barely hear a sound. We made a bonfire, like an entire dead tree Wendy’s dad had cut down earlier that day that we sent up in flames, stark and almost blinding. The cracking sound, if you stood in the right place, sounded like it was coming from the corn, and we all imagined the enormous spread of corn fields being licked and devoured by the bonfire we’d made. We sort of relished in this, drank our beer because we didn’t have any pot, and then brought out a radio to listen to some local country station.
“D’you think you can shit standing up?”
“What the fuck?” Nate asked, popping the top off a new beer with the bottle opener we had laying on a stump.
“Yea. I mean, do you think you can take a shit standing up?”
“I dunno. It has to be, like, one of the hardest things you can do. Right?”
“The hardest fucking thing you can do? Bullshit. What about, like, trying to finish a Rubik’s cube in three seconds.”
“Well, I don’t know!”
“You drink a big ass cup of coffee and go stand in the bathroom with a Rubik’s cube in your hand and you tell me which one gets finished first.”
Estha was silent for a second, took a swig from his beer and then looked at me, shrugging his shoulders. “I guess you’re right.”
“Where the fuck did that even come from, Es?” asked Anna. She lit a cigarette, passing one to me because I was out and there certainly wasn’t anyplace to get more. Not this late, anyway.
No one said anything; Estha didn’t answer and it didn’t matter where it came from anyway. As the night got colder and the fire got lower, we hefted the stumps a little closer to the fire.
Somewhere around one in the morning Anna thought it would be a good idea to go in the hot tub. The five of us, drunk, stumbled up onto the deck, dragging what was left of the beer up with us. None of us had our bathing suits, so we all stripped down and sank into the scalding water. Our clothes lay in a heap on the deck’s wooden surface, and when eventually when the beer ran out, we started raiding Wendy’s fridge. Nate hopped out into the cold, disappearing through the sliding door into the kitchen, and coming back out he yelled “BOMBS AWAY,” tossing the cans into the center of the hot tub.
“Shit, Nate!” I said, hopping back, irritated. Water splashed up and around, wetting our discarded clothes. Wendy and Estha dove in for the beer, trying to grab it all before it got warm.
“Will you parents care that we’re drinking their beer?”
“No. It’s my little brother’s. They confiscated it.”
Nate lived on my floor in the dorms freshman year, right around the hall. He used to idly play the guitar with his door open and invite people into his room to watch The Office on Thursday nights. I used to always sit on his bed and chill. His roommate was almost never there; I hardly knew who he was. But, I mean, that’s how we got to know each other. Living close by and figuring each other out. I feel like that’s what we were doing the whole time- figuring out what we could. I know he was from somewhere down in southern Illinois, not too far from St. Louis, and I know he used to want to go to art school. But it all sorta slipped out from under him when his parents refused to pay for it and when he realized he might not have that much talent. Who fucking knows. I never saw anything he’d ever done. Hell, I don’t even know what he wanted to do. Maybe it was painting or something; he had good hands.
Wendy was, like I said, from Godknowswhere. Duncan or someplace. About a two hour trip from school on 74 West, all the way past Peoria into the farms, even out past Princeville, this little shit town with a convenience store and some houses. Pretty much nothing else. I knew her through Nate; they met in some gen ed class. We started out going to frat parties together; she came along. From there we started smoking weeknights in Nate’s room, stuffing a towel under the door crack and blowing through empty paper towel rolls and plastic bottles with the bottoms cut off. If you rubber band a dryer sheet to the end of it the smoke comes out smelling like laundry. Nate’d always get paranoid about the smell anyway and would call this kid Jeff from down the hall. Ask him to walk past the door and see if it smelled like weed. The RA’s didn’t care anyway. Lynsday, at the one end of the hall, got high all the time. She was always wearing these big aviator sunglasses, presumably covering up some red-ass eyes. And Chris, the other RA, was always at meetings and shit. Neither of them did much to regulate things on the floor. We liked it that way.
The first time I smoked weed was senior year of high school. Out in the woods with my friend Rob. We walked all the way across town to get his bowl from this kid everyone called Duck John. I didn’t think I was high. By the time we got back to his house, sitting in his room watching Independence Day on TV, I couldn’t stop giggling, but because Rob was so fucking quiet I couldn’t get comfortable. I just stifled everything until I got out of there to go home.
Do you know the way autumn smells, right when it’s getting started? The cold starts winding up, and even before leaves are getting brown and orange and yellow, something about the way everything feels changes. That fall two years ago was the last real one I remember. It was the, you know, high point of all our time together. Most nights we didn’t go anywhere, didn’t always hang out, but about once a week we’d make it out to the garden fields, and I think that might have been the first time we knew what to call it. Probably before that. I don’t know. Does that seem like a long time to go without knowing what a place is called? But it was Anna who figured out that it was an arboretum. I looked it up in the dictionary because I’d never heard that word before. It said, “a plot of land on which many different trees or shrubs are grown for study or display.” I don’t know if that garden was part of it or not, if it was just out by the trees where we usually sat. Because there were these two lines of tall, bare white-ish trees running parallel to the road before you got to the garden. But even once it had a name it didn’t hold that much significance. It was still our place. Us kids know, no cars go and all that.
One night Estha got into some trouble. It happened sometimes, with one or the other of us, a little bit of trouble to bail us out of. Money problems, girl problems, drinking too much, frantic phone calls after getting pulled over with weed in the car. None of us really did that much; none of us ever really got caught. But one night Estha did acid with these kids he knew, I don’t know, and started freaking out. We pretty much kept it to weed and shrooms as a general rule, but Estha was always did more drugs than us. The occasional like of coke at parties (and eventually more than occasional), a tab of Ecstasy, God knows what else. He’d done acid before, I know that, but I think this was the first time he’d ever freaked out on drugs. I got a call from this stupid fucking kid, whoever’s place Estha had been at.
“You gotta come fucking get him. I can’t deal with this shit.”
“What’s up, Julie?” Wendy emerged from her kitchen as I hung up my phone, trailing Nate.
“I don’t fucking know. I have to go get Estha?”
When we got to this kid’s apartment, Braden I guess his name was, Estha was sitting on the floor in the living room, wide eyed and sweating. When he looked at me walking through the door there was so much terror in his eyes I couldn’t fucking believe it.
“There’s shit in the walls. There’s fucking people in the walls and they want me to…”
“What do they want you to do, sweetie?” Wendy asked, always the motherly one, hoisting him up to support him on her shoulder.
“They want me to see if I can bite through my fingers.”
“Okay, well baby, you don’t have to do what they say. You hear me? No worries, we’ll get you right out of here, right away from the people in the walls.”
We brought him back to Wendy’s place, Nate still sitting on the couch where we left him, waiting for us to come back. By now I can’t remember why he didn’t come with. Maybe we though it’d be easier with less people in the car. Whatever. Estha kept fucking staring at things, even crying at one point. When he started screaming, I couldn’t get him to shut up. Not at least for fifteen minutes. He kept insisting on all this shit, like his skin was boiling, that he could see flesh colored bubbles popping up all over, burning hot, and then when it stopped he got real silent again, and the whole thing felt worse. Even worse than the screaming, and worse than before he’d started it. The three of us didn’t know what to do. How do you calm a person down when their whole world is falling apart, when all their sense are betraying them? But I guess some people can’t help themselves. And if Estha wasn’t quite the same after that, well then that didn’t mean he’d stop doing what he was doing. That wasn’t his style.
Anna didn’t need it but she liked it. I think (I hope) that’s the way we all were. But Anna did it more than all the rest of us. Maybe she wasn’t as bad with the drugs as Estha, but that didn’t change the fact that she went through pot like water. Smoked it when she woke up, had one of those cigarette one-hitters for the car; I don’t really know when she wasn’t high. Sleeping, probably. But then again, she used it to help herself fall asleep. She said she didn’t need it but she liked it. Made her feel tall. I mean whatever. We all did it. Anna was the oldest out of all of us. Technically she should have graduated already. But she was finishing some stuff up, going part time to make up for lost effort. This fifth year would be her last one, or so she always said.
I guess Nate was the most stable out of all of us. He was on the straightest track, which was funny because he was the one who’d ended up coming to college for something he didn’t want. Like Nate, he was always the one who could turn us down for the responsible stuff. We were always putting things off to get together, but because he was so fucking determined, he put us off to do other things. That was how we saw it. But sure, we couldn’t resent him for being the only smart one. Or the only one who got good grades. But Nate wasn’t above trouble, even if it was little trouble. Small time; no overdoses, freak outs, arrests, no real addictions. He was the only one who didn’t even smoke cigarettes. Nate’s real trouble was chicks. He was always fucking too many girls at once and we’d have to keep his ass from getting kicked by angry girls. I mean, really, why did he hang with us? I think it just went back to history, old times with me in the dorms and the way the five of us snowballed into some tight jumble or other. A huge, beautiful mess. That’s all I can say we were.
“Wendy baby, where you been?”
Wendy was late to the arboretum that Wednesday night, early November, right around when we’d have to stop going. We were milking the place for all it was worth now that it was getting seriously cold. I could see Nate getting his panties all in a twist over Wendy by now. All of a sudden he’d s stopped with the girls. I hadn’t heard of any in weeks. And when she hadn’t showed up right away he’d been the first to ask where she was, if she was coming.
“I had this, like, response paper to finish. I put it off all day and then I forgot about it. Gotta do our shit right? So whose got it this time?”
I pulled out a gram bag, one I’d just bought earlier that day. I handed it to Estha, let him do the honors. With studied, stoic precision he squinted in the Frisbee’s red light, packing the bowl tight. Handed it off to Nate to spark it.
“Yo, Natey, you got greens.”
“How about Wendy takes it this time?”
“Sure, fine, whatever you want.” And with that Estha passed the blue blown glass off to Wendy.
I think when Anna actually graduated that spring we were all surprised. Everyone else had another year to go, and because she was still hanging around that extra year we kind of thought she might be around for another one. That would have been the first sign that things weren’t going to be the same.
“Well, where are you going?”
“I don’t know. Philadelphia maybe. I have a friend who lives out there and I figure I could so some…thing? out there. I just have to get out. I’ve been here way too long.”
“Brotherly fucking love? That’s awesome.” Estha was the only one who could say anything. We may have known each other longer, but Anna and Estha got along best. I think they really understood each other, with all the shit they put themselves through. They kind of understood the whole feeling behind what makes you feel good driving you. I can’t say I was all that privy to their inner workings. Some of them, yea, but I think Nate Wendy and I…just did it to fuck around. To be high, to get a break. To enjoy somethings and someones.
“Yea. Yea that’s great,” Wendy stepped in and hugged Anna. “I’ll miss you. But now where’ll we get our dank?” Wendy smiled weakly, taking an ever so slight step back. I saw her hand move behind her back and graze Nate’s waiting, subtle, corresponding hand. It may have been crass, but Wendy was right. Things wouldn’t be the same in other ways either.
So we didn’t ride off into the fucking sunset together, so what? We didn’t go off on some epic road trip across the country together, following Anna out to Philly and following our dreams. We did anything else but that.
A week after we found out Anna was leaving us for good they painted Wendy’s living room green. And they made love (their term, not mine) on the plastic tarp with the door unlocked, and fell asleep that way. When they woke up three hours later with the sun going down and with cracked, stiff backs from lying on the floor, they were pretty much inseparable. So there that went. Three down. Two to go? You know when your friends get together you’ll never see them ever again.
And as things disappear, so do we. And as we disappeared, I felt like everything else did too. I can say it as many times as I want to make it sink in: no dreams, no sunsets, no fucking nights under a tree in a circle. Not anymore. It still isn’t sinking in. We didn’t need it but we liked it. Pretty soon it turned all around, and no one else liked it enough to use it at all, but me and Estha. We were in it for the long haul. Him more than me. I mean, I sure can’t say how Anna was doing out there all alone in Philly, but she was probably still mostly the same. Just in a different place. Like anyone else who thinks they’ve moved on. And if Wendy and Nate…if they already had their shit together then I guess they didn’t change much either. Probably just smoked in their room, their brand new one bedroom apartment, blissfully stoned and blissfully fucking responsible. I couldn’t keep track of everyone, and I certainly couldn’t be the one running around after Estha and making sure he wasn’t…I don’t know. I can say that as many times as I like too. And I guess it isn’t all bad. No sunset, shit, no together. But there’s still always something, right? Can you grudge other people for being happy? Es and I have done it. But yea, maybe now we can get out and away too. Separate, apart, and leave all the nights, running arounds, bailing outs, middleofnowheres in a box where they belong. Polaroids with permanent marker dates at the bottom. And now I’ll give them up for a shitty place to live on my own, and a crazy homeless guy on the El mumbling to himself next to me, and a different place that I have to get used to. There’ll be other people; there’ll be other places. Besides, I’ve still got Estha’s number, not in a box. In case it turns out I’m too stubborn to change.
If you really want a good place to get high, you have to go out to this garden. This big, symmetrical I think Japanese garden, and then there’s all this open space and all these fuckin trees. We used to go out way past where the garden was, with all these flowers and a pond and some benches, out to these big, thick trees spaced out in a huge field of grass. When the flowers were in bloom you could really smell them, but I liked going farther out because then it felt like being in the middle of nowhere. I think that’s why we liked getting high there, because we felt so isolated. There was so much space to run around in, and no one to see it or catch us. The smoke evaporated into the air and mixed with the greeny smells of the grass and the leaves and the bark and the sky. We’d drive down to the baseball fields and park at the meters, and then kind of hike, if you could call it that, out as far as we wanted, far enough so we couldn’t see anything back where we came from, but not so far that we started to see the end of things. And we’d kind of camp out at the base of a tree, a little circle, with a light up Frisbee or someone’s cell phone giving everyone a little bit to see by. Otherwise, if Anna forgot the Frisbee or the lights on our phones died out, it would be pitch black until someone flared up a lighter, a little circle of glow lighting their face and then snapping out, leaving the bright spot of a cigarette to float on its own in the once-again dark.
It’s hard to pack a bowl at night, with little to no lighting, but Anna could do it. It was about getting high, but it wasn’t just about getting high, not like we sat down and started in right away. We had to kinda settle first. Figure out the seating, what was comfortable, where to put our stuff, have our conversations. And then, eventually, after not too long, someone would pull out a bowl and a little baggie and pack it full, enough for five people, and ever so carefully so as not to drop, waste, or lose the commodity. Like I said, it’s risky business doing this in the dark.
Those nights are some of my fondest memories, dragging and coughing off a bowl under the stars in a big circle, doing nothing but still doing something, so much better than passing out on a couch, giggling to shitty TV and eating popcorn (although that, too, had its proper place and time). I don’t want to say we were immortal; I don’t want to say we were infinite. That’s going too far and I’m not that Charlie character from that one book. All I’m saying was that it was good. The kind of good you don’t want to go home from; the kind that sorta makes you sick to your stomach when you think about it later, after it’s gone, when it stops happening. And things like this always stop happening. Somewhere down the line you gotta face reality and stop running off to waste time in a field. Or maybe you don’t, but you still can’t control when things fall apart.
Estha was one of our five, a kid from my hometown that for some reason I still talked to after I moved away. We were both surprised we hadn’t moved to the city, and once we got over that and figured our decision was okay anyway, we found out we actually suited each other. It’s nice knowing someone isn’t just a leftover from your past, some tin-foil wrapped obligation that you pull out and sniff every so often to see if it’s rotten yet. And even though we talked about home and high school a lot, there was more going on there. Sometimes it feels nice to have someone to talk about home with. Estha, in fact, is the one who found the place. I don’t know how; I think he used to go running and found it that way. Maybe one night he wandered around high and stumbled on it. I have no idea. But I do know that the kid was genius. He could find things no one else could, and he’d pull you into things like that was where you belonged the whole time.
One Friday night we drove to my friend Wendy’s house, way out in the country. If that little slice of open space seemed like the middle of nowhere, this was really it. The backyard was hemmed in by great yellow corn stalks (this was around mid-October), the turn-off of her road was gated by huge silver grain silos, and except for ourselves we could barely hear a sound. We made a bonfire, like an entire dead tree Wendy’s dad had cut down earlier that day that we sent up in flames, stark and almost blinding. The cracking sound, if you stood in the right place, sounded like it was coming from the corn, and we all imagined the enormous spread of corn fields being licked and devoured by the bonfire we’d made. We sort of relished in this, drank our beer because we didn’t have any pot, and then brought out a radio to listen to some local country station.
“D’you think you can shit standing up?”
“What the fuck?” Nate asked, popping the top off a new beer with the bottle opener we had laying on a stump.
“Yea. I mean, do you think you can take a shit standing up?”
“I dunno. It has to be, like, one of the hardest things you can do. Right?”
“The hardest fucking thing you can do? Bullshit. What about, like, trying to finish a Rubik’s cube in three seconds.”
“Well, I don’t know!”
“You drink a big ass cup of coffee and go stand in the bathroom with a Rubik’s cube in your hand and you tell me which one gets finished first.”
Estha was silent for a second, took a swig from his beer and then looked at me, shrugging his shoulders. “I guess you’re right.”
“Where the fuck did that even come from, Es?” asked Anna. She lit a cigarette, passing one to me because I was out and there certainly wasn’t anyplace to get more. Not this late, anyway.
No one said anything; Estha didn’t answer and it didn’t matter where it came from anyway. As the night got colder and the fire got lower, we hefted the stumps a little closer to the fire.
Somewhere around one in the morning Anna thought it would be a good idea to go in the hot tub. The five of us, drunk, stumbled up onto the deck, dragging what was left of the beer up with us. None of us had our bathing suits, so we all stripped down and sank into the scalding water. Our clothes lay in a heap on the deck’s wooden surface, and when eventually when the beer ran out, we started raiding Wendy’s fridge. Nate hopped out into the cold, disappearing through the sliding door into the kitchen, and coming back out he yelled “BOMBS AWAY,” tossing the cans into the center of the hot tub.
“Shit, Nate!” I said, hopping back, irritated. Water splashed up and around, wetting our discarded clothes. Wendy and Estha dove in for the beer, trying to grab it all before it got warm.
“Will you parents care that we’re drinking their beer?”
“No. It’s my little brother’s. They confiscated it.”
Nate lived on my floor in the dorms freshman year, right around the hall. He used to idly play the guitar with his door open and invite people into his room to watch The Office on Thursday nights. I used to always sit on his bed and chill. His roommate was almost never there; I hardly knew who he was. But, I mean, that’s how we got to know each other. Living close by and figuring each other out. I feel like that’s what we were doing the whole time- figuring out what we could. I know he was from somewhere down in southern Illinois, not too far from St. Louis, and I know he used to want to go to art school. But it all sorta slipped out from under him when his parents refused to pay for it and when he realized he might not have that much talent. Who fucking knows. I never saw anything he’d ever done. Hell, I don’t even know what he wanted to do. Maybe it was painting or something; he had good hands.
Wendy was, like I said, from Godknowswhere. Duncan or someplace. About a two hour trip from school on 74 West, all the way past Peoria into the farms, even out past Princeville, this little shit town with a convenience store and some houses. Pretty much nothing else. I knew her through Nate; they met in some gen ed class. We started out going to frat parties together; she came along. From there we started smoking weeknights in Nate’s room, stuffing a towel under the door crack and blowing through empty paper towel rolls and plastic bottles with the bottoms cut off. If you rubber band a dryer sheet to the end of it the smoke comes out smelling like laundry. Nate’d always get paranoid about the smell anyway and would call this kid Jeff from down the hall. Ask him to walk past the door and see if it smelled like weed. The RA’s didn’t care anyway. Lynsday, at the one end of the hall, got high all the time. She was always wearing these big aviator sunglasses, presumably covering up some red-ass eyes. And Chris, the other RA, was always at meetings and shit. Neither of them did much to regulate things on the floor. We liked it that way.
The first time I smoked weed was senior year of high school. Out in the woods with my friend Rob. We walked all the way across town to get his bowl from this kid everyone called Duck John. I didn’t think I was high. By the time we got back to his house, sitting in his room watching Independence Day on TV, I couldn’t stop giggling, but because Rob was so fucking quiet I couldn’t get comfortable. I just stifled everything until I got out of there to go home.
Do you know the way autumn smells, right when it’s getting started? The cold starts winding up, and even before leaves are getting brown and orange and yellow, something about the way everything feels changes. That fall two years ago was the last real one I remember. It was the, you know, high point of all our time together. Most nights we didn’t go anywhere, didn’t always hang out, but about once a week we’d make it out to the garden fields, and I think that might have been the first time we knew what to call it. Probably before that. I don’t know. Does that seem like a long time to go without knowing what a place is called? But it was Anna who figured out that it was an arboretum. I looked it up in the dictionary because I’d never heard that word before. It said, “a plot of land on which many different trees or shrubs are grown for study or display.” I don’t know if that garden was part of it or not, if it was just out by the trees where we usually sat. Because there were these two lines of tall, bare white-ish trees running parallel to the road before you got to the garden. But even once it had a name it didn’t hold that much significance. It was still our place. Us kids know, no cars go and all that.
One night Estha got into some trouble. It happened sometimes, with one or the other of us, a little bit of trouble to bail us out of. Money problems, girl problems, drinking too much, frantic phone calls after getting pulled over with weed in the car. None of us really did that much; none of us ever really got caught. But one night Estha did acid with these kids he knew, I don’t know, and started freaking out. We pretty much kept it to weed and shrooms as a general rule, but Estha was always did more drugs than us. The occasional like of coke at parties (and eventually more than occasional), a tab of Ecstasy, God knows what else. He’d done acid before, I know that, but I think this was the first time he’d ever freaked out on drugs. I got a call from this stupid fucking kid, whoever’s place Estha had been at.
“You gotta come fucking get him. I can’t deal with this shit.”
“What’s up, Julie?” Wendy emerged from her kitchen as I hung up my phone, trailing Nate.
“I don’t fucking know. I have to go get Estha?”
When we got to this kid’s apartment, Braden I guess his name was, Estha was sitting on the floor in the living room, wide eyed and sweating. When he looked at me walking through the door there was so much terror in his eyes I couldn’t fucking believe it.
“There’s shit in the walls. There’s fucking people in the walls and they want me to…”
“What do they want you to do, sweetie?” Wendy asked, always the motherly one, hoisting him up to support him on her shoulder.
“They want me to see if I can bite through my fingers.”
“Okay, well baby, you don’t have to do what they say. You hear me? No worries, we’ll get you right out of here, right away from the people in the walls.”
We brought him back to Wendy’s place, Nate still sitting on the couch where we left him, waiting for us to come back. By now I can’t remember why he didn’t come with. Maybe we though it’d be easier with less people in the car. Whatever. Estha kept fucking staring at things, even crying at one point. When he started screaming, I couldn’t get him to shut up. Not at least for fifteen minutes. He kept insisting on all this shit, like his skin was boiling, that he could see flesh colored bubbles popping up all over, burning hot, and then when it stopped he got real silent again, and the whole thing felt worse. Even worse than the screaming, and worse than before he’d started it. The three of us didn’t know what to do. How do you calm a person down when their whole world is falling apart, when all their sense are betraying them? But I guess some people can’t help themselves. And if Estha wasn’t quite the same after that, well then that didn’t mean he’d stop doing what he was doing. That wasn’t his style.
Anna didn’t need it but she liked it. I think (I hope) that’s the way we all were. But Anna did it more than all the rest of us. Maybe she wasn’t as bad with the drugs as Estha, but that didn’t change the fact that she went through pot like water. Smoked it when she woke up, had one of those cigarette one-hitters for the car; I don’t really know when she wasn’t high. Sleeping, probably. But then again, she used it to help herself fall asleep. She said she didn’t need it but she liked it. Made her feel tall. I mean whatever. We all did it. Anna was the oldest out of all of us. Technically she should have graduated already. But she was finishing some stuff up, going part time to make up for lost effort. This fifth year would be her last one, or so she always said.
I guess Nate was the most stable out of all of us. He was on the straightest track, which was funny because he was the one who’d ended up coming to college for something he didn’t want. Like Nate, he was always the one who could turn us down for the responsible stuff. We were always putting things off to get together, but because he was so fucking determined, he put us off to do other things. That was how we saw it. But sure, we couldn’t resent him for being the only smart one. Or the only one who got good grades. But Nate wasn’t above trouble, even if it was little trouble. Small time; no overdoses, freak outs, arrests, no real addictions. He was the only one who didn’t even smoke cigarettes. Nate’s real trouble was chicks. He was always fucking too many girls at once and we’d have to keep his ass from getting kicked by angry girls. I mean, really, why did he hang with us? I think it just went back to history, old times with me in the dorms and the way the five of us snowballed into some tight jumble or other. A huge, beautiful mess. That’s all I can say we were.
“Wendy baby, where you been?”
Wendy was late to the arboretum that Wednesday night, early November, right around when we’d have to stop going. We were milking the place for all it was worth now that it was getting seriously cold. I could see Nate getting his panties all in a twist over Wendy by now. All of a sudden he’d s stopped with the girls. I hadn’t heard of any in weeks. And when she hadn’t showed up right away he’d been the first to ask where she was, if she was coming.
“I had this, like, response paper to finish. I put it off all day and then I forgot about it. Gotta do our shit right? So whose got it this time?”
I pulled out a gram bag, one I’d just bought earlier that day. I handed it to Estha, let him do the honors. With studied, stoic precision he squinted in the Frisbee’s red light, packing the bowl tight. Handed it off to Nate to spark it.
“Yo, Natey, you got greens.”
“How about Wendy takes it this time?”
“Sure, fine, whatever you want.” And with that Estha passed the blue blown glass off to Wendy.
I think when Anna actually graduated that spring we were all surprised. Everyone else had another year to go, and because she was still hanging around that extra year we kind of thought she might be around for another one. That would have been the first sign that things weren’t going to be the same.
“Well, where are you going?”
“I don’t know. Philadelphia maybe. I have a friend who lives out there and I figure I could so some…thing? out there. I just have to get out. I’ve been here way too long.”
“Brotherly fucking love? That’s awesome.” Estha was the only one who could say anything. We may have known each other longer, but Anna and Estha got along best. I think they really understood each other, with all the shit they put themselves through. They kind of understood the whole feeling behind what makes you feel good driving you. I can’t say I was all that privy to their inner workings. Some of them, yea, but I think Nate Wendy and I…just did it to fuck around. To be high, to get a break. To enjoy somethings and someones.
“Yea. Yea that’s great,” Wendy stepped in and hugged Anna. “I’ll miss you. But now where’ll we get our dank?” Wendy smiled weakly, taking an ever so slight step back. I saw her hand move behind her back and graze Nate’s waiting, subtle, corresponding hand. It may have been crass, but Wendy was right. Things wouldn’t be the same in other ways either.
So we didn’t ride off into the fucking sunset together, so what? We didn’t go off on some epic road trip across the country together, following Anna out to Philly and following our dreams. We did anything else but that.
A week after we found out Anna was leaving us for good they painted Wendy’s living room green. And they made love (their term, not mine) on the plastic tarp with the door unlocked, and fell asleep that way. When they woke up three hours later with the sun going down and with cracked, stiff backs from lying on the floor, they were pretty much inseparable. So there that went. Three down. Two to go? You know when your friends get together you’ll never see them ever again.
And as things disappear, so do we. And as we disappeared, I felt like everything else did too. I can say it as many times as I want to make it sink in: no dreams, no sunsets, no fucking nights under a tree in a circle. Not anymore. It still isn’t sinking in. We didn’t need it but we liked it. Pretty soon it turned all around, and no one else liked it enough to use it at all, but me and Estha. We were in it for the long haul. Him more than me. I mean, I sure can’t say how Anna was doing out there all alone in Philly, but she was probably still mostly the same. Just in a different place. Like anyone else who thinks they’ve moved on. And if Wendy and Nate…if they already had their shit together then I guess they didn’t change much either. Probably just smoked in their room, their brand new one bedroom apartment, blissfully stoned and blissfully fucking responsible. I couldn’t keep track of everyone, and I certainly couldn’t be the one running around after Estha and making sure he wasn’t…I don’t know. I can say that as many times as I like too. And I guess it isn’t all bad. No sunset, shit, no together. But there’s still always something, right? Can you grudge other people for being happy? Es and I have done it. But yea, maybe now we can get out and away too. Separate, apart, and leave all the nights, running arounds, bailing outs, middleofnowheres in a box where they belong. Polaroids with permanent marker dates at the bottom. And now I’ll give them up for a shitty place to live on my own, and a crazy homeless guy on the El mumbling to himself next to me, and a different place that I have to get used to. There’ll be other people; there’ll be other places. Besides, I’ve still got Estha’s number, not in a box. In case it turns out I’m too stubborn to change.