One by One. Nicholas Bush
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While Gavin is hooking up with one girl around the corner of our huge L-shaped tent, and then hooking up with another, the rest of us tear up some low-grade weed and pack a small metal pipe that Erik made for us on a lathe machine in his shop class. We pass it around something like seventeen times before anyone starts to feel the effects. The whole thing is so slow that we even pause to call Erik on his cell phone and ask why it’s taking so long to feel anything. He assures us that it’s real weed, but that since it’s our first time it will take a while to feel high, and to just keep smoking it. After about thirty minutes, we all sort of look at one another and smile broadly at the exact same time. Kieran bellows, “This shit is like Viagra!” and we all burst out laughing. What a goofy thing to say.
While we’re smoking, one of the girls comes around the corner of the tent and then climbs onto me, but I’m laughing so hard with Jake and Kieran that nothing sexual happens between her and me. Instead I spend the night laughing and doing ridiculous stuff with the guys, things like tearing the clothes off Kieran, throwing him outside the tent, and then zipping it shut. It’s one of the most fun nights of my life.
By the time we return to school the following week, a rumor has spread that us “bad boys” are severely out of control and have gotten into drugs. After this, everything seems to change overnight. I love the image of myself as a party boy and run with it. It seems, however, to elicit some serious hostility from teachers and girlfriends. Many of them act as if I’ve crossed a line by smoking weed. I don’t agree with this judgment, and something about it gives me a weird, palpable feeling of impending doom, like a storm is rapidly approaching, like I’m in the thick of the calm before it will hit, but this doesn’t affect my behavior. Over the next ten years my instincts now will prove to be correct; this is the time my life starts to spin out of control and then heads straight downward, like a dive-bomb, into the desolate, derelict pits of hell itself.
But right now I don’t know what’s to come. In fact, I’m pretty convinced that any condemnation of drug use is utterly baseless, and that drugs are meant to be enjoyed by the user at his or her discretion. Just say no? Try just say yes. Besides, the DARE officer told us point blank that weed won’t kill you.
So now I’m off and running. Usually when I go out to party, I get a cup for free because I’m with my sister, and I fill it once or maybe twice from the keg to look older. All the girls ask how old I am, and I tell them, “Old enough,” or “Find out.” From there, I usually just try and get laid, you know? I never really get drunk because I’ll have to drive my sister home. But after my experience smoking weed at the farm, something is different. All I really want to do is get high. I don’t care about looking cool or saying the right things to get with girls, like I used to. That takes effort and time and there’s no guarantee that it will go well.
My parents know that I party, and although they’ve always been strict with us, my father encourages it to a degree. I think they like the idea of having a popular kid and are okay with whatever I need to do to make that happen. On a few occasions they ask me what I did last night at “a friend’s house” and I tell them I just made out with some girls. They don’t press for more info. Whenever Allison and I head from one place to another, we’re supposed to call my parents so they know what we’re up to, but she’s not always in the best state to talk to them. Sometimes she even accidentally drunk dials our house. Without them ever implicitly saying it, I just know they know, you know? They do, however, make one thing perfectly clear: if I get a girl pregnant, my life is over, and they mean this in the fullest extent of the word over. In bed I think, I better pull out or start using condoms because my life is on the line. I could die. But while it seems like a good idea, in the moment, my body always prefers to go in a different direction. Something in me puts the threat of death on the back burner in favor of instant physical satisfaction and release. This theme will stick with me into adulthood.
Chapter 2
Living with my family always feels so off, like something is missing. Looking back, I will know it had a lot to do with the fact that I knew my home wasn’t normal. I mean, I was normal, or at least I thought so, but my home wasn’t and I was powerless to change that, which is enough to drive a person crazy. Every home is dysfunctional if you look at it closely enough, but damn, mine was like a movie and I had to play my part to perfection. There wasn’t love so much as manipulation. To suck up and feign affection went beyond what I was willing to express; I would never bow in that way. But as kids, we had to put on a show for our parents that said, “We like you, we’re friends,” while enduring their impossibly high standards of perfection and absorbing the punishments that inevitably came.
To hold onto my sanity and cope with the stress, I adopt several strategies. First and foremost, I make sure to check in with my siblings as often as I can, to connect with them at a heart level; we all yearn for deep personal relationships. I stick close to Allison and especially Austin, who sleeps on my bedroom floor when I’m home. Sometimes we lie awake for hours. I’ll say, “Ask me questions,” and he will.
“Why do some people in my class never talk? They just never say anything all day.”
“They’re just shy, little buddy.”
Aside from them, I have music and video games. I can sit alone and listen to entire Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin albums, or shoot bad guys in the face all day on PlayStation 1 or Nintendo 64. I also teach myself to play my favorite songs on the drums. I played Jay’s kit so often over the summers that his mom eventually just gave it to me. It’s a Yamaha Stage Custom with total beginner cymbals. I practice in the farthest corner of the basement, wearing headphones and listening to the songs I’m learning on CDs turned up to full volume.
At home, I become a moody, tough, and silent type of guy. My shaky relationship with my parents is a ticking time bomb, always on the brink of exploding. Eventually they will find out what I really think of them, one way or the other, and it will have to be by my actions because I sure as shit can’t tell them anything they don’t want to hear.
One day in the early 2000s, I’m going about my business, chatting with friends on AOL’s instant messaging service, AIM, when some mysterious fucker messages me and begins attacking me. He says he knows all about me and tells me his name, but I’ve never heard of him so I message other people, asking around about him. I learn that he is my age, in my grade, and plays football with me, but isn’t on my team. He’s on the losing squad and it’s pretty clear to me that he’s bitter about this and jealous of me. I wonder how it’s possible I’ve never heard of him, until he says he just moved to Green Bay and joined the team late. These aren’t problems, but what is a problem is when he says he hooked up with one of the girls in my grade who I am enthralled with and trying my best to cajole, but to no avail. He even calls her his girlfriend. My blood boils at this, and when I message the girl to ask, she confirms it. She says he just walked up to her and started calling her his girlfriend, and that’s how it all happened. I wonder if he’s dating her just to piss me off. She isn’t even that hot, so why else?
I message the scummy piece of trash that he’s about to meet his maker, and that I persuaded and arranged with this girl a winner take all Wild West duel of a fistfight for her. It turns out that the guy recently moved from Cicero, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, to a house just kitty-corner from my street, next to my suburb’s park, and we arrange to meet there the following day after school. Giovanni Russo and I will fight to the death if necessary, like animals in mating season. That’s my girl, and this is my neighborhood. Or are they now his? No weapons, no other people—just me, him, and our fists will decide.