D. Pierson - The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

There’s more cackling and Jake yells, “Throw me the keys!” There’s the sound of keys. A man’s voice, low. My brother and his friends’ voices, loud and wanting to swing, but nobody has yet. The Man’s voice again. My brother and his friends, lower this time, more conversational, sounding less like they have a couple of golf clubs they’re about to bring down on dude’s head. The sound of a trunk opening. Alan, audible: “Hol-ee shit!” The Man’s voice, my brother’s voice, Jake’s voice, my brother’s voice. My brother and Jake’s voices, closer, like they walked away from everyone else for a war council.

“… their money back,” Jake is saying, “and the money we’d make just selling the shit ourselves! And think of how much we could still keep.”

“How do we know it’s real?” my brother says.

“Alan knows this shit. You’ve seen Alan’s mom. Fucked up. Alan knows pills, dude.”

“How about we just fuck him up and take it?” my brother says.

“Look at this guy,” Jake says. “I think he might be somebody.”

A moment, then the sound of something sliding out of the trunk, the trunk shutting, the man’s voice, the car keys, the car door, the car turning on and driving away.

Alan, again: “Hol-ee shit.”

My brother comes around the side of the dumpster and says, “Change of plans, fag.”

And that is how instead of assaulting this mystery guy and getting him to leave me and my friend alone, my brother and his psycho friends accepted, as payment for not fucking him up, a suitcase full of pharmaceutical tranquilizers, antipsychotics, and painkillers, hundreds of bottles with “Trial” written on the side, from the mystery guy. Who they said was really cool. Who they said didn’t seem fazed by their masks or weapons, and knew just what to offer. Who, they say on the way back to Jake’s house, cracking open bottles of pills, washing them down with whatever half-empty bottles of flat soda are rolling around the floor of the car, they should really invite to their parties because dude clearly has the hook-up. When we pull up to Jake’s house my brother says he’s sorry, but I gotta understand, right? Alan says he already can’t feel his face, so they’re in business, definitely in business.

I have to call Eric and tell him my fuck-up brother fucked up, and though we got a full refund, it’s still the case that neither of us can really go home.

We can’t go to Eric’s house and we can’t go to my house and we don’t really have much in the way of other friends to stay with, at least I don’t. But Eric does: Eric has those kids I saw him with in the pictures he sent me when he was trying to make me furious, Chrstine’s college buddies.

“Those kids in the pictures you sent me,” I say to Eric after we’ve dealt with the fact that my brother disappointed us, which isn’t really a surprise but is still a bummer because we thought we could use the enemy we know against the enemy we don’t, like in volume 3.4 of TimeBlaze where Dr. Praetoreous rallies the Hinterland Scourges to fight the malevolent Zethi Railroad Co. that threatens them both. I don’t say Christine’s friends because Christine’s name is still this big hot word between us.

“Those kids,” it will turn out, are Randy and Christopher and Benjamin and Chelsea 2 and Arthur and Larissa and Punk-as-Fuck Jess.

Eric has Randy’s number.

“Hey. Randy?” Eric says when Randy picks up. “Hello, it’s Eric,” Eric says. “My associate and I are in something of a pickle and I was wondering if you could provide invaluable assistance,” Eric says.

I look at him like, what is wrong with you?

“Really? Outstanding. We’re at the gas station at Ray and Ranch Circle. Yes. We’ll be here,” Eric says. “And we’ll buy you gas. And that won’t even begin to make up the debt.

“Alright, then,” Eric says, and hangs up.

I was looking through the gas-station magazines, but I give it up to glare at Eric.

“How I talk when I’m around them,” he explains.

While we wait for Randy I page through a gaming magazine’s E3 wrap-up and Eric buys Mountain Dew. I look at screenshots from a new World War II first-person shooter and think about me being dumb around everyone and smart around Eric and Eric being smart around me and smarter around Christine and even smarter around Christine’s friends. I expect that when these guys roll up, they will look like college professors, they will flash library cards, they will wear glasses, they may very well not arrive by car at all but instead pull up on a tandem version of one of those old-fashioned big-wheeled bicycles. But when Randy finally does pull up (in a car), Christopher in the passenger seat, they seem dumber than all of us. Randy isn’t wearing a shirt and Christopher isn’t wearing shoes.

“Fellows, this is Darren,” Eric says.

“Hey man,” says Randy.

“Oh, right,” Christopher says.

The “oh, right” seems like recognition, like one night after Eric was a part of their circle everyone was sitting around on the floor at somebody’s place and Christine, from where she lay with her head in Eric’s lap, got around to mentioning me like a crappy town where she met Eric and they escaped from it just in time. I think how good it is that Eric can be around these guys without Christine’s having to be there, because I am not ready to be in a room with both of them and act like everything’s cool.

I don’t know how to think of these kids, and I guess if I could they’d want to kill themselves or change because they’d be labelable.

These kids, I come to find out, love their full names. Christopher. Benjamin. Franklin.

And they talk in this way I can’t pin down, either, that sounds sarcastic but is actually sincere. Unless it is actually sarcastic.

I first notice this right after Randy and Christopher pick us up. We get on the freeway and get off by where the college is, and they take us to lunch at this place Cheba Hut, a weed-themed sandwich place which on the way there Christopher admits is “pretty lame but the sandwiches are really good,” and if he means it the sarcastic way it sounds like he means it then he thinks the weed theme is really good and the sandwiches are pretty lame but it turns out the weed theme is pretty lame and the sandwiches are really, really good. And I start to figure out that as much as it sounds like the things they say are sarcastic because of the simplicity of what they’re saying and their tone of voice, they actually really do unironically think that dancing is fun and local music is a good thing and so is making stuff, just things in general. And I wouldn’t expect college guys who consider themselves intelligent to say so many things that don’t have cynicism attached to them, but the sandwiches are only the first thing they’re right about.

Basically something I think I believed without ever having thought about it is that part of being smart is not being able to start a sentence with a subject and then end that sentence by saying that subject is a good thing and actually mean it.

Eric’s sandwich has sauerkraut which goes with the sort of little-old-man image he seems to have built for himself and he pays for all of our lunches to thank Christopher and Randy for “coming to our aid in such a gallant fashion.” Christopher chuckles when Eric says this, toasting with his Styrofoam cup full of Mister Pibb, and Randy says “You’re the best” while picking lettuce off his toasted sub which on the menu is called The Dank. Eric makes them promise not to tell anyone our whereabouts, and tells them we’ll be “off your hands just as soon as we formulate a plan to spring ourselves from the situation in which we are currently embroiled,” and they do. They probably don’t think we’re in any more serious trouble than maybe having been caught with some of the product that’s depicted in murals all over the walls, spiraling organically out of Bob Marley’s hair, raining down from a UFO, being dreamed about by Hendrix in a thought bubble shaped like a marijuana leaf. Tony DiAvalo should be apprenticing at the feet of whatever burnout da Vinci painted the wall in here.