I’d been at home after doing a few shows around town as April came to a close and May peeked open, right before finals week, mostly bars where my parents knew the owner and in their pinched way, informed me that it would be “most beneficial” if I would find the time. After I played a few songs that confused them, I finally gave in—gave up—and settled into Bob Seger and AC/DC to meet their oldies-but-goodies needs. Nothing like a bar full of overweight, drunk doctors, lawyers and finance people in their 50s looking to rock out. That Nicole Kidman movie with the fake, robot wives could have been set in Sudborough. Bet they didn’t because it was a little too close to the movie script and the producers freaked right the fuck out, running for Logan airport before the Mom-bots got them. God, how I needed a hit of anything to get away from that. So it was even better when a few friends from high school had gathered in my basement after that gig.
After the initial preening that came from being a senior at an Ivy or near-ivy, our chests puffed out like being on the debate team was akin to hunting mammoth with spears, my buddies settled down, brains full of Joe’s internship at Ropes & Grey this summer, my acceptance to Harvard law, and Judy’s Rhodes scholarship. The less-successful among us, instantly castrated into beta males, shifted down a few levels to their baser natures and found that one, small speck of social space where competition didn’t matter: substance.
Well, drugs, actually. Peyote. ’Shrooms. Some pot. Coke galore. A little K2, which I wouldn’t touch. Why use synthetics when the natural stuff was smooth and fun? And a little acid.
Someone even brought a Costco-sized bottle of NyQuil. Ooo, we were slumming.
Bored out of my fucking mind, even on a few hits of acid and a half a bowl, I realized I was bored not because there was nothing to do, and not because there was no one to do (Judy was an unofficial guy, and had banged everyone else, so I was holding out for Except That Guy status, a fact I weirdly prided myself on… but that made me wonder why I was proud of not getting laid). I was bored because my entire life was one big string of boring events chained together to make a necklace of boredom.
A garland of ennui. A rope of grindingly painful nothingness with which to hang myself.
God, even the word “ennui” sounded boring.
I realized I live in a world of full-of-shit people who don’t know they’re full of shit and they just perpetuate the shit by making…more shit. And once I take my final exams in the next two weeks I’ll graduate with my bachelor’s degree, head off to Chicago for three years of masochism re-branded as law school, and the transition to pod person will be complete.
Instead of keeping that cycle going, I’d grabbed this guitar, stripped naked, and eaten the entire bag of mushrooms Joe had stolen from the evidence room when on a tour at a precinct in Boston, part of a criminal law class. A stroke of genius, really – what better way to subvert the dominant paradigm than to shed designer labels, bespoke suits, and get high as a fucking kite to escape it all?
What a rebel.
And now I was wedged on the floor of someone’s shitbox, that someone being a frizzed out, juicy young woman with breasts like a porn star’s, a voice like a redneck combined with Katie Couric, and what the fuck was on my neck?
And why was my dick covered in splinters?
Blink. The glow from a streetlight was shining in the car in that surreal way highways can lend, stripped of buildings and trees and anything resembling civilization or nature, its own little category of space. This woman’s face stared at me from above, expectant, as if she’d just said something to me and needed an answer.
MENSA me said, “Huh?” My hands were a bit numb, but when one brushed against my rock-hard boner, that got my attention. What was I doing on the floor with my ass scratchy and cold, peppered with splinters and my best appendage standing straight up at attention (ten HUT!) pointing at this woman?
She wasn’t just any chick, either. As my eyes came into focus and my feet decided to stop being nineteen yards long and covered in marshmallows, I got a better idea of whose car I was in, and why my ass felt like it was colder than it should be, pressed against the floor. Shit. Was that a hole in the actual bottom of the car?
The light made her hair glow. Glow, I tell you. Or was that the ’shrooms? Not sure. Either way, after I impressed her with my erudite, “Huh?” I followed it up with, “Wanna fuck?”
She grinned. “Well, ain’t you suave? I don’t fuck anything that wears a collar. That really helps to maintain standards ’round here. It’s a shame other folks in my family don’t have the same rule, because Uncle Jack’s permanently disabled from that goat he…” She winced. “Oh, nevermind. You don’t know me well enough to hear that story.”
“I’d like to know you,” I said, the words oozing out like slime. Sexy slime. Like sensual slime designed to cover her and draw her into my world of primordial arousal ooze. The exact idea wasn’t really clear. My hands reached up and unclasped the collar. She was right. I was actually wearing a collar, which I pitched into the field by the side of the road, because if that was an obstacle to getting sex right now, off it went. Ta ta! Buh-bye.
Then I noticed the cotton balls in my mouth, and how her hair was actually – literally – on fire at the edges. With tiny snakes flicking flint to make the fire.
Laughter. “OK, there, Trevor.” She knew my name? “But first, how ’bout we get your ass off the ground. You’re no more than three inches away from road rash.”
I wasn’t imagining it; as she reached out to help me up, my buttock peeled off the floor and I saw it – a rusted-out spot about five inches around. Little grey rocks and tar mocked me.
“You have the strangest accent. Am I in western Mass, in some pocket of the Berkshires where people talk like this?” Or, worse – stuck in Hampshire College at some linguistics experiential conference?
What the fuck? her face said, but her words were a bit more measured. “Trevor, you’re in Ohio right now.”
“Ohio?”
“Right.”
“Corn fields?”
“Yep.”