4- Gone

            I have my eyes closed but I know that it’s morning because I can hear the birds chirping in separate, random bursts, like a bunch of clocks each with a different alarm announcing the arrival of another daytime.

I have such an intense headache I feel like I’ve had an axe driven through my skull by Paul fucking Bunyan himself. 

Do I have any aspirin?

My eyes are open now, and I’m staring through the venetian blinds, trying wake up, and I can see that the sun is rising somewhere past all the apartments, past the city and out over an ocean I can’t see and never take the time to go to. 

The light from that burning ball of gas lingering out there in the heavens will break through the blinds and burn my eyes and I’ll stare right at it until the last bearable second because that’s how stubborn I am.  It’ll burn my corneas and my rods and cones and whatever else is in these eyes, and I’ll feel like I’m dying but I won’t back down until I have to. It will be bright, and it will hurt, and I’ll hate it, because I’m hung-the-fuck-over.

I blink a few times to wet my eyeballs, as I finally pull away from the light. You win, Sun, you win.

I stand up and slam some Tylenol down my throat. When I take my first steps I feel like the room is on a tilt and I grab at the air, as if there were some imaginary handle I could grasp in an effort to hold myself up. I get a foothold that my hangover and I can agree with, and slowly I creep to the bathroom to puke the night out of me.

I’m staring into the toilet at someone else’s puke, which means someone is in the place with me, because I know I didn’t erupt last night. Or did I?  At least I think I didn’t.  It’s probably Tim Tim’s puke.  I think he’s still here. I flush the toilet and listen to the water flow through the pipes as I get comfortable and wait to get my sick on.

I start to comb through last night’s mental inventory. I remember the night was hard drinking with Kevin and Tim Tim and with Pink. I remember Tim Tim passing out after he had explained to me all about a tank of nitrous oxide he had with him, and that he had stolen it from a dentist he turned a trick for.  I remember him saying that he was going to do the whole fucking tank before the night was over.  That was his goal.

It’s good to have goals.

I’m dry heaving.

I remember Tim Tim going on about each type of fucking anesthesia as he was sucking gas off the tank, and how each has a different effect on a specific part of the nervous system, which results in a depression or numbing of nerve pathways.

I need numbing.

It’s been about forty-five minutes, and still I’m gripping the porcelain, white-knuckling the edge of the bowl. I reach my hand back and take a blind shot at the handle of the toilet tank. My finger tips hit the edge of the lever and flush the old puke stink away, which is instantly replaced by fresh stink. Again, I listen to the water gush through the pipes, knocking and bumping it’s way to wherever shitty water ends up in this city, and though as sick as I am, the shot of fresh stench in my face isn’t even enough to pop my cork. My stomach locked in tight pain.

Here I am, stuck in vomit limbo thinking of Tim Tim going on and on about that stupid tank he stole.

“General anesthesia affects the brain cells, which causes you to lose consciousness.”  Then he took another hit off the tank.  He said, “Regional anesthesia has an effect on a large bundle of nerves to a particular area of the body, which results in losing sensation and shit, to that area, without affecting your level of consciousness.” Tim Tim took another pound off the inhaler attached to the tank and then he said, “The cool thing is that local anesthetics cause you to lose sensation in a very specific area.  I mean…that’s pretty fucking cool- it’s control, man!” I remember watching him hit the final huff off the tank, and then I remember him hitting the floor. Yeah, that’s “control”. 

With each beat of my heart, another intense flash of pain through my cranium and outside I hear the sounds of cars on the highway. People coming, people going, productive people in the world moving and alive as I’m playing contortionist over the edge of the toilet, my gut wrenching with the pain of death.

Finally, I get to my feet. I open the medicine cabinet.  I skip the mirror because I hate what I look like.  I slap more pills down my throat from an unmarked bottle in the cabinet. I chew them into a bitter paste and wash them down with my own saliva because I’m too lazy to turn the faucet on even though there’s a cup on the edge of the sink.  I’m starting to remember pieces of what happened last night beyond Tim Tim and his tank, it’s all in fragments right at the moment, vignette with the residue of excess.  I close the medicine cabinet with my head hung low, I skip the mirror-look again, and I glance at the cup on the edge of the sink, and scoff to myself as my laziness really knows no bounds.

I look out the bathroom door, and I see Tim Tim, passed-out on the living room floor, cradling his nitrous tank, which is probably empty by now, like a teddy bear, or a blankie. I walk in softly, but kick Tim Tim hard; he wakes up from his coma.

“What time is it?” he asks.

I watch Tim Tim rub the gunk from the corners of his eyes.  He looks like a child in this light. The whole place filled with that morning, yellow-angled hue. He’s a mess, such a scrawny little mess. He looks like the Artful Dodger, from “Oliver Twist”, crossed with the rug from the set of a porn film from about 1976.

             “Day time,” I say.  I spark up a smoke and sit in one of the rickety kitchen chairs.  Tim Tim sits up with his legs folded over one another, and stands his nitrous tank at the foot of the couch noticing how light it feels.

            “Shit, Laird, how much did I do last night?”

            “All of it, I think. You did so much of that shit I thought you were going to float away.”

            “Far out,” he says; a grin on his face stretching from pointy ear to pointy ear as he playfully knocks on the tank and stands up, making fists into the floor with his bare tiny feet.  He takes another drag on my smoke and he hands it back.  “Where are the chicks?” Tim Tim asks, sitting down next to me while taking a cigarette for himself from my open pack and lighting it.

            “Were there chicks here last night?” I look around the room and I don’t see any chicks, but the place is a mess on top of a mess on top of a mess so maybe a “chick” could be hiding someplace, but I doubt it. Anyone in their right mind would be half a click away from this dump. I guess that’s why we’re still here.

“Maybe I dreamed them?” Tim Tim says, rubbing his head quizzically.

            “Gone back to hooker-land, I guess,” I say as I tap my cigarette ashes into an empty bottle of High Life and watch Tim Tim stand up and stretch his thin body in the yellow of the sunlight.  He’s a marmalade-colored boy skeleton, and he cracks at the joints softly.

            I take a deep breath of smoke-filled room air.  I run my fingers through my hair as I scan the mess.  “I’m not going to clean this place up.  I should just torch the whole fucking building.”

            “I know a guy that can help you out with that,” Tim Tim says looking out the window.

            “Torching the building, or cleaning this place?” I say, still scanning the mess until my eyes meet every piece of garbage, every bottle, every can, and I stand up and start walking towards the bedroom. And that’s when I notice Kevin is gone.

            “Torching the building,” Tim Tim says with a half crooked yet very serious grin splitting his boyish face.

             “Figures,” I look around the place some more, still no sign of Kevin. “Is Kevin still here?”

            “No bro, I don’t think so.  He got super-bummed towards the end of the night and went to chill out by the pool.  I was gonna go with him, but I got too blitzed and I couldn’t pull the tank that far. So, I just stayed here sucking fumes. You were passed-out already.”

            “Where the fuck around here is there a real pool? Kevin’s not going to just go chill out by our cement hole.”

             “Fuck…yeah, good point, I don’t know what he said, I was really fucked up.” Tim Tim stands up and grabs what’s left of my coffeemaker pot, which is essentially just a handle with a big chunk of broken glass attached to it.

“Use your fuckin’ head, kid.”

“I guess he’s not here,” Tim Tim says smoking the cigarette, which has been dangling between his lips the entire time as he tries to make heads or tails out of the busted coffeemaker pot.  He doesn’t so much as take the cigarette out of his mouth.  He just talks around it, holding the broken coffeemaker pot. “You do know your coffeemaker pot thing is broken, right?”

            “Where the fuck is he then?  We had a thing today, man.  We had to meet a guy about a…thing.”  I pick up another cigarette; I light it and let the nicotine warm my lungs as I try to calm down.

            “Maybe he went for breakfast?”

            “Fuck that.  Kevin hates breakfast.”

            “Kevin hates breakfast?” Tim Tim asks. “Shit…I love bacon.”

            “Yes, Kevin hates breakfast, so that’s not where he is.”       

“Why does he hate breakfast?”

            “Because breakfast beat him up in the school yard when he was a little kid, breakfast stole his girlfriend- how the fuck do I know?  You could ask him yourself if he was fucking here.”

            Kevin and I have an appointment.  I don’t usually have appointments, and he doesn’t usually break them.  The clock over my stove says that it’s almost nine o’clock.  The appointment is for an hour from now, at a little Greek diner near Crossbay Blvd.  I don’t own a car, and I’m wishing the clock could be broken. But it’s not. The coffeemaker pot thing is.

            “That’s the most important meal of the day,” Tim Tim says.  He’s got his nitrous tank parked near the kitchen table now, and he manages a small hit from it.  I thought it was empty.  He hacks a little bit and laughs and then he smokes. “He shouldn’t miss breakfast, it’s bad for you.”  He takes another hit.  “Maybe he left a note.  People usually leave notes when they go places, don’t they?”

            I look at the refrigerator, the door of which is hanging open, and I can see from here that they drank all of my beer last night.  There is a note on the freezer door.

            It’s the back of my electric bill- by the way I haven’t paid it yet- and I can see that it’s four days over-due.  I read the note. 

Afterward, I need a drink.

            “What’s it say?” Tim Tim asks, as I sit down at the other end of the table, literally feeling my brain swelling through my skull.     

“It’s not so much what it says, it’s what it means.”

“Is it bad?” Tim Tim sidles up to me, hovering over my shoulder, his nitrous inhaler dangling from his hand. I look up into his little kid eyes, his eyes look like Bambi’s eyes, or like the eyes of a character from some Japanese animation, big and bright, then I look down at his tank

I ask him, “Do you have any more of that shit left in there?”

Tim Tim smiles.

I need numbing.

3- The Last Night

            The pain came on sudden that first time.  Came on hard.  Long, twisting lines of pain arcing through my skull from back to front, starting at the base of my skull, and tracing over the lumpy ridges of my scalp.  Knives in my eyes.  It hit me so hard, and so sudden, that I was barely able to lean my body over to the bar where I found a stool with my hands, and sat myself down in an effort to not fall off the planet as the pain spun up tight, in my head, and discharged over and over again.

            The juke in the corner was kicking out an old song, something slow and guitar-driven, with the crumpled paper voice of an old man who’d spent too many nights emptying bottles of cheap bourbon down his gullet.

“I got a belly full of you and that Leavenworth stuff,” sang the gravelly voice.  “Now I’m gonna get out, now I’m gonna get tough.”

I ran my fingers through my dry, unwashed and uncombed hair, and I settled in my seat, hunched over, with my head in my hands. I squeezed on my temples in that stereotypical “if you touch right here all the pain will go away spot,” but it did nothing.

            It hurt so much that I was near crying.

            The Gateway, something, a voice, said to me.  Not the voice of the gravel- throated singer yelping from the juke.  No, not him.  This was something different.  This felt…inside.

The Gateway.

            My thoughts began to wander…wander and turn into something else.  Sounds and images, not connected, or at least they didn’t seem to be.  Old movies I’d seen, The African Queen, with Bogart, for one, a poem by William Carlos Williams that I read in High School, political speeches, a lecture, in high school, from a plump, middle aged maid of a health teacher, with bad skin, about the safety and security of abstinence.  It was all happening at once, like a dream.  I had a vision of my mother’s face and my father’s shoulders and the taking of the Americas from the Natives by the white man.

            It asked me, Do you see?

            The clinking and clanking of glasses opened my eyes, and there was Kevin, sitting next to me with a beer and a shot for himself and the same for me.

            “It’s only just past one,” he said, looking more sober, more serious, than I could remember.  “You done already?”

            “What?”

            His voice elevated, and slurred.  He wasn’t as sober as he wanted to seem.  “I asked if you were done.  Are you fucked for the night?”

            “No,” I said, shaking off that pain, that feeling.  That voice.  “I’m just…a headache.  That’s all.”

            I turned around, my back to the bar, and I looked around the place, my eyes…fuzzy.  Pink, tall, with long, well-shaped legs, leaning against a pool table with bills jammed down the front of  her tight, low-cut blouse.  Chalk in her hand, she greased up the tip of the cue, locking eyes with a sleazy-looking guy with a neatly-manicured beard and slicked-back hair. Fifty riding on the game.  She had high balls, and there were a half dozen of them sitting mid-table and against the rails.  A solitary three ball sat, hanging around a corner pocket, aching to be chipped in.  She smiled at the man with the Vitalis hair and the patterned shirt three buttons open to a dog’s hairy chest.

            “I’m so far behind…whatever will I do?”

            She looked over at Kevin, and ran her tongue over smooth, white teeth, and she winked.

            Still smiling, she leaned over the table, as if she’d known her shot for hours, and she calmly pulled the cue back and forth between her nimble fingers.  “Eleven,” she said.  “Corner pocket.”

            With a slow, smooth strike, she sent the cue down the other end of the table, where it struck the eleven and sent it slanting down to the other end of the table, briskly into the pocket.

            Pink swung her hips as she walked past the man, and ran a hand over his exposed chest. She giggled and kissed him on the cheek.  From where I sat, he knew he was done.  She smiled at Kevin, who laughed and sipped his beer.

            A skinny kid, Tim Tim, whose very fake ID said that he was 32 and from Switzerland, was sitting in a corner booth with his back to me opposite a Perry Ellis suit with sterling silver cuff-links and wire-rimmed glasses.  They were laughing and drinking Heineken.

My head was throbbing.

            A pale, skinny chick -probably a hooker- in skin-tight leather pants and a see-through halter was propped-up in front of the Roc-o-La juke box, and feeding singles into the machine, picking songs.  It was something different now, something slow, and catchy, and she started shaking her hips slow and steady, and I felt my cock stirring in my pants, and I remembered that it had been over a month since I’d been laid.

            Maybe  longer.

            I wasn’t looking at Kevin when I heard him say, “Are you listening?”

            “Yes,” I said, taking a sip of beer.  The shot, probably something cheap and hard on the intestines, still sat on the bar next to his, waiting for ceremony, apparently.  He looked like a lawyer, the guy with Tim Tim.  Maybe an investment banker.  “Sure I am.”

          “Look,” he said.  “I’m just saying that whatever I said last night, I don’t want you talking about it to anyone.”  I didn’t know what he was talking about.

            My hands were shaking, and even in cave-like darkness of the  bar, my eyes were killing me from the light.  “Yeah, Kev,” I said.  “Sure thing.”

            Kevin lit a cigarette, and he took a long, deep breath of smoke, and for a moment he became very quiet.  Something old was playing now, something slow, and sad, and kind of bluesy, and Kevin sat with his head in his hands.

            “…an’ Charlie, I think I’m happy…for the first time since my accident…”

            Across the room, I saw Tim Tim, thin and frail, lead the investment banker, who was loosening his tie, into the men’s room, and the room was starting to spin, and Kevin said to me, “The thing you have to know, man…the thing you have to know is that none of this is anything but what it has to be.  You know?”

            Again, in my mind, the flash, the voice, The Gateway.

            “I mean…I mean…everything…you know?  I just…I mean, I didn’t…I didn’t plan it, you know, but it…”

            It’s all connected.

“It fits.  It all fits, and it’s all…I know what I’m doing, okay?”  He drank deep from his cheap domestic, and he said to me, “This fucking city is dying anyhow…you know?”

            I said that I knew, though really only half connected to what Kevin was saying. I squinted and pushed the palm of my hand directly into the center of my forehead. Pressure on pressure.

            My eyes were dry, and they were throbbing.  I’d taken some pills before, whatever Tim Tim had in the medicine cabinet.

            “This fucking city.”

            I’d had too much to drink, and my feet were numb, and my face felt like it was on fire.

            “I think…”

           A deuce of junk, a two dollar shot straight to the blood stream in a stall in the men’s room, cooked in a spoon, and slammed into a freckle.  The feeling…

            “…you need to slow down, Ricky.”

            …the feeling of flight. That rush of escape rifling through my body. Sliding down a silky rainbow made entirely of the best fucked you’d ever been.

            The room was spinning, and I looked at Pink leaning over the table, and I looked at the men’s room door, and the lights were starting to flash, like the close combat of muzzle flares in the dark, off, and on and off, and nobody seemed to notice.

            “Verm tells me you’ve been buying from him,” Kevin told me, as I reeled myself back in, but only in pieces, trying to follow the conversation.

            Pink dropped a combination, sending the 14 and the 10 into opposing corner pockets, and the well-manicured beard was looking at his fifty now instead of her ass, my head was splitting open, and there were blue and white lights everywhere, and my eyes were on fire, and my throat was dry, and I could hear moaning from the men’s room, and Kevin was…laughing.

            He was laughing…and I was falling apart.

2- The Last Day

            The next day, I sat on a concrete stoop on 149^th street in Howard Beach with my hands jammed deep into my pockets against the cold breeze that had settled in the afternoon, reading a book, and watching a tall, thin black kid bouncing a tennis ball in the middle of the street.

            The kid’s name was Jack, or maybe it was Jimmy.  He was young, maybe fourteen.  Hunched down over the sidewalk, he slapped the tennis ball against the ground with one hand…he let it bounce a few times on its own, and then he slapped at it with the other hand.

            He did this over and over.

            It was October, and the trees were starting to turn, where there were trees.  I stood up, and I craned my neck around in every direction, and I worked my shoulder-blades and my back.  It was a residential street, near the Conduit…lots of small apartments in duplex houses and in co-op apartments.  I didn’t live there, not in that neighborhood.  Not for a long time.

            I watched the boy, Jayson- if that was his name- bouncing his ball up the street.  I remembered him for some reason, from when he was a boy.  I remembered that he was soft in the head, and couldn’t learn how to read and that he got made fun of a lot by some of the younger kids that lived near there.  But that boy was only seven.  Even then, he had a large, lilting head…the same one he had now, slack to the left like a Macy’s float with broken cords…a head too big for his narrow body.

            He slapped away at the tennis ball, always let it bounce three times, and it always stayed close by.  His feet moved...quick, agile, and his hands were supernatural.

            I could barely look away.

            There were clouds forming in the sky, and it looked like rain, and it felt close to snow.  A gaunt, pale black woman with skin the color of cigarette ashes and long, stringy hair came to Jayson.  She wore shorts that came all the way up her thighs and a t-shirt that rose up above the caved-in remains of her stomach.  She was trembling all over, and had her arms wrapped around her middle as if she were fending off implosion.  She whispered something in his ear, and the boy laughed.  She looked at me, and her cheeks were sunken, and her jaw was swollen. 

I almost screamed.

            “It’s that African blood,” Vermin said.  “That’s what it is, the fucking jungle, man.”

            Vermin was sitting next to me, and he was one of Getch’s guys.  He was wearing a ratty pink bathrobe.  He wore it everywhere.  Under his robe was a big bulge, the bulge of a stainless steel Ruger, .357.

            Vermin scratched at four days of beard, and pulled his robe tight around a brown sweater with a hole in the chest.  “It’s cold,” he said.  “Too fucking cold.  Already.  I have tropical blood, my man, I’m straight on that.  I’m part African, part Colombian, part mother-fucking Afghanistanian, but I know that my genes, my genetics were not put together with this northern, wind chill shit, you dig?”

            It was cold, but I didn’t notice.  I was looking up past the school, and far off in the sky.  Gray clouds were swallowing up the Earth, beginning with Astoria.

            The girl with the sunken face was whispering to Jayson, and he was holding the tennis ball in his hands. Clutching it close to his body.

            “I think Randy Johnson is too tall to pitch in New York,” Vermin said to me.  “It’s the wind,” he said.  “It’s this cold weather.”  He scratched at the scruff of his beard, and he shifted in his seat, and he sipped from a hip-flask of whiskey.  He pointed at a lamp post across the street, and he said, “See?  See the way the wind is slamming into that thing,” and I didn’t.  “Tall objects, man.  They take the wind like fucking bug zappers take fucking mosquitos.”

            I agreed, even though I wasn’t listening.  My head hurt, and my stomach was turning in knots.  I popped a fistful of aspirin and I reached across for Vermin’s flask, and I chased it all down with Kentucky’s finest, and I looked at the sky, and I said, “Tall objects,” thinking of Kevin and the night before. 

            The light in the window.

“Fucking tall objects.”

A light rain was starting to fall.  The skinny black girl disappeared into an alley, dragging the boy with the limp neck off with her.  Way out past Brooklyn, and past Coney Island, and far past, the sky was tearing itself apart.  I smiled, and I was sure that I could hear music.

Vermin turned over the paperback on my lap, and he spied the title.  “So what the fuck is that about?”

“The end of the world,” I said, laughing.  “The end of the world.”

Co-author of this ongoing project: Dennis O'Brien

Co-author, coffee drinker, lover of THE WHO, and glorious sunbather- DENNIS O'BRIEN.

1- KEVIN

Prologue: Kevin and Laird

      The hulking frame of Kevin’s Chrysler moved slowly down Ocean Avenue, passing Prospect Park.  It was rust brown, with windows that didn’t work, but it had six-hundred dollar rims, and a five-hundred dollar sound system.  They rode in silence, however, past green grass, chain-link fences, and parked cars through falling rain.  It was almost two in the morning, and there was something quiet about the night.  Only the tires with their spinning rims rolling along on wet asphalt, and the rain itself seemed to make any noise at all.  Doors were locked, and windows were shut.  Not so much as a night light seemed to penetrate the cool, wet darkness.  Sitting in the passenger seat, huddled into the corner with his face pressed against the window, the rain was the only thing that Laird could hear.  It had come down hard in the evening, and had left the concrete of the streets and buildings slick and shimmering in the car’s headlights.

Rolling his head from side to side, Laird watched as Brooklyn passed by in a daze of trees, brick, and concrete, bathed in that sickly yellow light.  Watching through the fogged-up window as tiny rivulets of rain that slowly inched their way down the glass, he saw people slumped in the alleys and the ditches, and congregated on stoops.  Their faces, mostly black, Hispanic, or even a kind of ash gray white, turned down their eyes as the car passed, or they met Laird’s gaze with anger and intent.

Laird was on Percocet and Paxil, and he was calm and pliant.  His face pressed up against the glass as the car sped on, the window seemed to make up everything in the world.  But the glass looked eight inches thick, and every light and every shadow looked a thousand miles away.  The eyes and the hunched bodies to which they were attached looked animal.  Hungry, starving.  From where he sat, he saw them gnawing on their own arms and howling like coyotes.

Kevin sat, back stiff behind the wheel, his arms locked-off, tight.  They’d been to a Mets game, but they’d left after the fifth inning, with some Asian kid named Ishii catching a beating to the Pirates of all teams.  For five innings, Laird watched as Pirates players struck the ball into the gaps and into the bleachers, and he ate a hot dog, drank three beers, and washed it down with the Perco, and the Paxil. He might have swallowed his last Secenol, too.

“Turn the radio on,” Laird said, as they passed a woman who sat, legs folded under her, Indian style, sitting in the middle of the sidewalk on Snyder Avenue, with her hands raised up to the heavens, rain coming down and soaking through her clothes.  She wore ratty jeans and a dirty blue sweater, and her face- pale except for the bruises and the swollen purple of a black eye- was turned up to the sky.

“No,” Kevin said, staring straight ahead.

The right windshield wiper was broken, and while the left paced back and forth across the wet windshield, it only swung a quarter of the way, slow and laconic, missing the beat, and then stopping, retreating, and starting over again.  Kevin’s eyes lay wide open, and they looked straight past the lagging wiper and the wet glass, like a trance.  He said, “I don’t want to hear anything.”

He turned the car at a corner with a small Puerto Rican bodega, the kind of place that sells five dollar phone cards and single servings of jerked beef, and followed it up a dark street with old brick buildings and empty cars jamming the parking lanes.  Laird’s eyes met those of an old woman pushing a grocery cart.  She wore an old brown sweater with holes in it, and her face looked brittle and dirty.  She smiled black, moldy teeth as they passed, and Laird shivered.

Kevin pulled the car up to the curb at an empty spot, and he killed the engine.  They sat for a minute in silence as he lit up a cigarette and took three long pulls.  Laird ran rough-skinned hands over his face.  His buzz was fading.  His skin felt dry, and he had three or four days of beard on his face, and he was sure that he looked awful.  He felt awful.  It was just past two in the morning, and considering the time and the neighborhood and Kevin, they were probably here to see one of his sluts.  Maybe one with a friend. 

Maybe if he had a comb and a toothbrush…

With the headlights off, Laird noticed that there were no street lights on this block.  Everything had been turned off.  Colors and people, and objects blended together into a thick, dark paste.  All that he could see, in all that dark, was a few feet in front of him in any direction, through those thick, cloudy panes of glass.  There were no cars.  They had all disappeared.  The only thing in the world that he could really see, looking up, was a single window in a single building, with the light on.

He recognized it, actually.  He’d been there before. 

That was where Pink lived.

The cherry of Kevin’s cigarette glowed orange and red in the nothing, and his mouth was the only thing that seemed to have shape.  “Ricky,” he said, “have you ever gotten to a point where you feel like you’re just running for the sake of running?”

            Laird was thinking about Xanax, and the way it could make his body fall limp.  He would fall asleep and wake up covered in drool and puke.  The way that he felt when he drank Vodka, like his intestines were on fire.  The gram of shitty coke that was in his breast pocket in a small, folded piece of white paper, the thought of which suddenly made him smile.  He definitely wasn’t thinking about Kevin, and he wasn’t listening.

            “…Rick,” Kevin said, but all Laird saw was his lips moving, and all he heard was the tobacco crackling and popping and slowly oxidizing and burning.  Kevin said something, but it was drowned out in the sizzling of tobacco and the pounding of rain.

            “I can’t hear you,” Laird said, thinking about the Secenol.   The night air was cool, but the windows were beginning to fog, and he felt tiny pockets of sweat forming in his shirt.

            “I’m so fucking scared,” Kevin said.  Laird turned the knob on the radio, but he couldn’t get it to work, and the silence was driving him mad, and then Kevin said, very slow, and clear, “I’ve got to make a move, man.”

            Laird’s hand found its way into his pocket, and out came the little make-shift envelope, folded like a Chinese throwing star.  Barely able to see, he fingered a pinky-full of coke, and he bumped it quick, hoping that Kevin didn’t see.  The back of his throat filled up with a taste like aspirin, and his nose began to run, and his heart began to race.

            Kevin said that he had a move he was making, and that he wanted Laird in on it.  A quick strike at some quick cash.

            “That’s…” Laird searched for a word, any word.  He searched for a word, and he bumped another finger tip of the coke, which was making the back of his throat burn and wasn’t very good.  He was sniffling, and he wiped snot away from his nose with his sleeve, and he said, “That’s decent.”

            He felt Kevin’s hand on his shoulder, and Kevin told him that he had a move coming that they were never going to see coming, and Kevin told Laird that he was going to need to meet with Vermin, and that he was going to have to get a message to Getch about a shipment that was coming through, and…

            “Stop for a second,” Laird said, wiping snot and a bit of blood from his nose, “Do you think I should write this down?”

            Kevin was sweating, and his hands were shaking.  The cherry of his cigarette danced around, spilling ash on the imitation leather, and the carpet.

            “The guy’s supposed to meet with me at eight o’clock in the morning, and he and I are supposed to go to meet Getch...”

            Laird’s eyes were so watery that he couldn’t really see, and the air tasted like aspirin and cheap, burning non-leather.  All he could do was stare up at that one window, that one light, and at the silhouette of a woman, which stood there like a frame from some old French film in black and white, and feel sick to his stomach.  He felt like he was folding in half inside, but he kept nodding.

            Laird took a deep breath, and Kevin was crying, and he said, “But I’m not meeting him, this guy.  I’m not meeting him because he’s…”

            Laird bumped another line, and he stopped being able to hear.

            His eyes were out of focus, but Kevin told him that everything is going to be all right, but they had to stick to the story.  You have to stick to the story.  Kevin said that there was a plan, and that Laird had to trust him, and his hands were shaking, and he took a long pause, and he asked, “Are you high?  Are you high right now?”

He screamed “Jesus Christ,” and he shoved, he pushed, and he screamed at Laird, “I need you to fucking listen to me, Richard!”

He screamed, “I need you to understand that I am not going to be there when you show up at Getch’s place tomorrow, and that I’m sorry for what I’ve done, and I’m sorry for what I’m going to do.  I wouldn’t…if I didn’t have to, I…”

            Laird shook his head, and then he nodded.  “I understand.”

He neatly folded the make-shift envelope tightly closed, and stuffed it back into his breast pocket, and he ran his fingers through his sweat-damp hair.  His pulse was racing, and he sniffed hard and swallowed Tylenol-flavored snot, and he told Kevin, “It’s cool.”  He told him, “Everything is…”

            Up in the window, the woman shadow, Pink, the French film, smoked a cigarette, and Laird watched tendrils of smoke, dark against the sick yellow light, rising up into the sky, and she stood, leaning against the window with her head hanging low.  She looked so…beaten, and sad that he had to look away.

            Kevin was crying.

“I’m fucking sorry, and I don’t know what else I’m supposed to say.”  He slumped over the wheel, and he continued to cry.  “I am so fucking sorry.”

How a series of smaller shorter stories became one bigger longer story...an overview.

It's rather simple really...but then again, not so simple. Because as it turns out, most simple things tend to turn out to be pretty complicated...(just like how this intro is going to sound when i read it back to myself)

I'll just say: "We were at a bar."

It's funny because that's such a cliche thing to say- "We were at a bar.", because so many stories, yarns, tomes, even just complete bullshit start with the whole bar scene scenario that it actually seems like the beginning of bad, to mediocre fictitious beginnings- but it's the truth.

My co-author DENNIS O'BRIEN and I were at a bar, both of us just having recently graduated college, and itching to get back in the ROUTINE of writing. We really missed the daily writer's grind. Meaning: that "feeling" you have when you're all set to come to school, everyday, like clockwork, and write. That feeling becomes very comfortable, and believe me, once you're out of the school setting, and no one is breathing down your neck to perform, or hitting the dance-monkey-dance drum on assignments that need to be turned in by deadline- that "feeling, that motivation can wane.

It gets hard to find the sparks you need to ignite to write, especially directly after college (I think we were a year out, each of us when we started this venture) because you're suddenly thrust out into the "real world" and the environment changes so much- that it actually ends up fucking with your creative "Chi" and that routine you're so used to gets shocked directly out of your system.

But we said "fuck shock", we didn't want to just drop off...get lazy, and not continue to be collaborators.

We both had been editors for our college newspaper (Dennis was the Sports Section editor, and I was the Arts and Entertainment Section editor) and we missed that discipline that the college setting affords you, becaue believe me, you can get lethargic without someone telling you to write anything, or being assigned something to write about.

In college, as a the writers we were, we were enclosed in this little comfy nook of a writer's bubble, where there was always material present and really good peer-to-peer contact to ping ideas off to bounce back on you to feed the creative process- and we liked that discipline <-----this was the BIG THING.

So we wanted to stay disciplined.

So, back to the bar...I came in with an idea I had sketched out that I approached Dennis with. Basically, I had an outline. Well, more like a diagram. For people who know me, and who know the way I write, I'm always drawing diagrams and like these little character time lines and event synopses on crappy pieces of paper, napkins, or my personal fave- the back of those shitty place mats you get at restaurant with all the local advertising on them.

I drew up what I wanted the story to be "about" in what could possibly be the shittiest way anyone had ever drawn up an outline for a story. I was using pictures, and characters names, and jotting in themes, and locations all over the place- and to many- that all may have been the most confusing fucking thing ever. But you see, all throughout college Dennis and I had been like kindred writing spirits, so when I started to put the pedal to the metal, and really get my point across, he instantly understood what I was going for. (This I what happens when you work with a good partner.) It's not a forced tango- things just fall into place- and they did. And when they did, Dennis instantly started to add really awesome little bits to the story, too and it grew into something we both knew we could do as a tandem.

But we needed order. So, we agreed on a few things that would have to be set in stone. Because without agreeing on what to set in stone, with two writers working on a piece, with an ensemble of characters,.different motifs, voices, tones, themes, etc etc. things could have gotten really shitty, really quickly.

We set the story up backwards. We knew, already just from that conversation, where it was going to end. I feel like if you don't know your ending, when you're writing a story, it's like getting into a car and hopping on the road without a destination. And I don't like that feeling. I like knowing where I am going to end up, I like knowing where the story and the characters are going to end up as well because there's a guiding sense of control knowing EXACTLY what the ending is going to be and working towards it. So does Dennis. So knowing exactly where we wanted this story to go, from the very first meeting, with my crazy diagrams and character ideas, was a huge plus.

Next, was figuring out, who was going to write whom? And what? And where? and all that stuff...and what perspective this endeavor was going to be written in as a whole. After a few drinks, and some pondering and some more drinks and some pondering, we basically said: "Fuck it" let the perspective of the narrative shift. We just felt it would be more fun, and give the story a very sinewy type feel because we had already agreed that we definitely did not want to write a completely linear narrative- we wanted to play with structure and free form it in a buck the norm post structuralist type of way, without coming off like two assholes who seemed like they did not have a handle on the material itself.

Matching our "voices" as individual authors was another big thing we discussed- because Dennis and I do have stylistic differences. And from that, questions came up like: Did we want to know which one of us wrote which piece of the story? Or, did we want to keep it unknown? Really, that worked itself out a we moved on with it as we both glossed, and polished and added and took away from each installment. The perspectives of the narrative may shift- but the voice is relative through out, and became easier as we got to really know our characters own voices.

Then came the big question: How will you know what to write after I add something or take something away? To keep the answer to that question simple- we played it like it a choose your own adventure novel in some ways (obviously we would correspond with ideas about each story o we each had some clue a to where it was going and contact and communication is paramount) but neither of us wanted to be painted into a corner, and the only real rule we went by, was if someone was going to get killed off, give a brother some head's up, so neither of us would start writing something that did not make sense because a character was DEAD and not in the story anymore. (But even with that, there's ways around it, and if The Bible could bring people back to life, we figured so could we.)

Other than that, we followed a: "You write an installment, I'll write an installment" regiment and we went from there, then we each looked over the work- and kept writing from where the other author left off, like a relay race passing the baton.

The work was all about making the characters pop...seeing where we could take them...seeing what we could put them through...what kind of genre we could bend...what two genres, or even three or four, we could mix together to create a cocktail that would simply be FUN TO READ.

Because when it stops being fun, then I'll/We'll stop doing it- and that goes with, and, to, for anything in BOTH OUR LIVES.

So, we hope we gain some readers as we post- and we hope you all enjoy it.