May 2, 2011

The Day The Sun Died


I drove out to the house off of Van Nuys where Jeremy lived looking for heroin or oxycodone, but sometimes he had nothing and I never knew which way it was going to go. Jeremy always greeted me when he heard me drive up the gravel driveway.
            Instead his brother, Garrett, walked out front say hello, which was odd because Garrett didn’t live nearby or anything. In fact, he lived outside the city in a huge house that he bought from the accident he and Jeremy had been in 10 years ago.  I had spent time there, and couldn’t see why he’d want to hang in this shit-hole, when he could be kicking it in that place of his. He was wearing overalls and a plaid shirt opened underneath with a silver and diamond cross I had seen on Jeremy. Although his boots were alligator, they were covered in dirt from being out with the horse in the back where they had a stable.
            “Hey there, Jeremy’s not home.”
            “Okay, I’ll come back later.”
            “Come inside, you can wait. We’ll have a drink.”
            The lawn was dead and the pit-bull stood guard at the front door like usual. He always eyed me, but Jeremy had him smell my shoes and told him to like me, so I always thought I was safe. Garrett was the handsome one. Not covered in burns over 75 percent of his body like Jeremy. They were twins. The accident had something to do with a meth lab. Garrett got out. Jeremy didn’t. The fact that he lived was amazing to all the doctors.
            Garrett disappeared in the kitchen and left me in the main room with a girl and her daughter. They both looked at me and I smiled at them. The little girl was dancing and she grabbed both my hands and danced me in a circle. There was a little pink ghetto blaster on the floor and the music coming out was like some Disney fairy tale. She wore a bright pink dress and had flowers in her curly blonde hair.
            “My dad’s not coming back today,” she said.
            “Oh, that’s too bad, was he supposed to?” I asked.
            “Yes. He’s always supposed to. He never does it though. I’m used to it.”
            I caught the woman, who I assumed to be her mother, staring at me and gave her a smile. She froze me out and gave me a look like she’d kill me later when no one was watching. Cut up in a garbage bag with all my teeth pulled out. Garrett came out with beers and I stopped dancing with the little girl.
            “Garrett and I are going to have a talk,” I said.
            “You’re pretty,” the little girl said.
            “Thank you. So are you,” I said.
            Garrett led me away from them and out the back door and pulled out a chair covered in dirt and other stuff and told me to sit down. I looked for another option but there wasn’t one. His eyes never left my face the whole time watching me to see if I would care if I sat on dirt and who knows what else.  I sat.
            “The girl in the front had a father, but he’s not coming back,” Garrett said.
            “Why not?”
            “I killed him.”
            I wasn’t sure what to do. I took a drink of my beer and tried to look for an escape route in case things got weird.
            “Aren’t you going to ask me why?”
            “I was taken aback is all.”
            “He molested that little girl in there and when her mother found out, he beat her up.”
            “I’m so sorry.”
            “Don’t be. They’ll be all right now. He was a criminal before they met, she just didn’t know it.”
            “I see.”
            The backyard had two cars covered in blue tarps and a stable for two horses. It was one of the hottest days California had had in a while; the valley was always 10 degrees hotter. I was wearing a dress and it was sticking to me. There were no umbrellas, empty bottles everywhere and ashtrays never emptied.
            “Do you need a hat or something?”
            “That would be great.”
            Garrett disappeared inside the house and came back with two overdone straw hats, the kind you’d wear for gardening. He put one on my head and sat down.
            “You’ll want to know about Jeremy.”
            “Yes. Where is he?”
            “He went to stay in my place. He’s not going to be doing what he’s been doing anymore. He’s getting clean.”
            “Oh.”
            I knew it was a lie the second he said it, though I had no proof. You know how you just can tell. Plus, he was wearing Jeremy’s favorite cross, the one he never took off his neck. I had the number of his mother; I thought maybe I could call her later after I got out of there. I would have to find someone else to get me drugs. That was my next thought.
            “He left something for you, so you wouldn’t be caught out in the cold.”
            I nodded.
            I didn’t know what to say to Garrett because I never liked him. He was handsome true, but whenever I heard the accident story, something always made my stomach sink. Something like, he could have helped his brother. I know it was fire and all, but the way Jeremy told it, from his vantage point he saw his brother look at him and run. Not toward him to help him, but away from him. Jeremy said he thought about it day and night for two years and then asked god to release him from hating Garrett. He was always wondering if Garrett had come to help, if Jeremy would have been saved or if Garrett would have been disfigured the way he was. It hurt me every-time he told the story, which was often because we used drugs together and people like to tell the same story over and over even though we tried not to.
            Jeremy was also the one with the personality. Garrett always got the girls. It sucked to know that that was something we could never do anything about. I had kissed Jeremy once. I remembered it. We were out by the horses. It was my first time doing heroin. He put it in a cigarette and I took a hit. It wasn’t what I expected; it felt like happiness hit the cells of my body. A rush of the all at once feeling of total release. I hadn’t known I had any pain in my body until that moment when it all disappeared. The feeling of it leaving was overwhelming. Try imagining something you’ve always known, that has always been with you, forever and ever, suddenly disappearing. That was what it was like.  There was no choice in it. Jeremy watched and he told me he loved me. Then I threw up on his shoes. I had wanted to love him back. I really had, but I couldn’t and I felt the shame of not loving the thing you are supposed to love.
            Garrett and I made small talk about what I can’t remember. Then he went inside and got the package from Jeremy and handed it over. It struck me how all the time we talk to people we don’t even like, just to get by, always barely making contact with the ones we really are drawn to. I only talked to him to find out about Jeremy. I’m not sure if he could tell or not though.
            “Thanks for coming by,” Garrett said and he walked me back out front where I said goodbye to the little girl and hugged her.
            “Are you going?” she said with a sad voice.
            “I am. So nice to meet you.”
            “I love you,” she said and threw her arms around me again.
            “I love you too,” I said and slid out the door to freedom. I felt sick about that girl, leaving that little shiny thing with two people who were going to harm her in ways I can’t go into. She would be ruined and there was a great sense of loss in the knowing of it.
            I had been staying at my parent’s house in Encino. I had a stash that could get me by and I was sharing with this new kid named Pretzel. Pretzel was a mulatto ex-model who wore this red emo t-shirt for the first few week I knew him. I got so sick of it, finally, I got a shirt out of my father’s closet and made him wear it. He wore it for only an hour and then the emo shirt came back out. At first he was a bore like everyone, but one night he grabbed me hard by both arms and said, “I could kiss you for 24 hours straight.” I thought of him differently after that. Like I could love him or something. As long as he didn’t need to have any sex. I was pretty fucked up that way. My last boyfriend and I tried, but I always just ended up laughing. It felt funny. I went to a shrink and they gave me some bullshit about being molested, only I know I wasn’t.  They were just out of ideas. Plus, aren’t the molested ones sluts? My friend Terri was molested and she was a complete whore. They gave me some pills though and that’s always good.
            Pretzel set up a turntable in the living room and played all kinds of music. I called Terri and a few of my friends from when I lived in Venice and they all came to hang out. Terri had never done heroin and got pretty pissed when she found out that’s why I disappeared.
            “We do everything together,” she said.
            “Sorry,” I said, even though I wasn’t. She did coke and sucked cock long before she ever told me about it. We danced around and drank champagne from my father’s cellar. The party was on and there hadn’t been anything bad that happened to any of us for some time, so the drama level was low. Just pretty sparkly people getting blasted and doing stupid dances. That was it.
Then, one night my doorbell rang and I went to get it and it was Jeremy. He was dirty and skinny and had scratched up and down his arms on the good arm and the burn arm. It was the best thing I had ever seen---Jeremy standing there.
            “He tried to bury me alive,” Jeremy said.
            “Jesus, are you okay?” I said opening the door. At that moment all the beautiful kids I had in my house looked at Jeremy like he was an alien.  I felt bad too, because it was one of those moments when I realized I was ashamed of him. I was ashamed to be ashamed. He wasn’t beautiful, but all of us were. It sickened me to be this way, but it was beyond my control. It washed over me like the feeling of adrenaline or any other kind of feeling that you can name but might not want to in order to hide it from yourself so you can go on living in that manner. Emotionally dead-land, that’s what my friend, Terri called it. Dead-land. I felt nervous as hell, but also real guilty that I hadn’t ever called his mom. I was a bad friend and to be honest it wasn’t on purpose, I forgot.
            I got out a cigarette filled with heroin and gave him a drag, then I put him in the shower, more to get him away from the others than anything else. We were going to turn off all the lights later and he would be safe from their scrutiny with their fucked up plastic noses and perfect faces.  I sat on the toilet while he showered. The bathroom was tiled with glazed Moroccan blue and white tiles and I had t-light candles going all through the house. They flickered off the tiles and made shadows on the walls. I stared at the shadows and marveled at the wonder that so much in life is in the shadows, and only some of us were willing to go into the darkness to find what was missing from the light. That’s the part you don’t read about. Drugs do that. They take you to the other less obvious sections of your psyche and they make you see things you didn’t know existed and never even wanted to know, but then you fell in love with those things too and had a hard time coming back from it. One of my friends always said he liked cocaine psychosis better than the cocaine. Only, I had it once and pulled out all of the hair at the crown of my head and that’s why I’m now a charge of the state. There’s some worse stuff I did to my shoulder, and something I can’t tell you because it’s too scary.
            Jeremy told me the story. Garrett had drugged him and buried him in a shallow grave in the back of his parents’ house. Jeremy woke up and didn’t know where he was, just that dirt was on top of him and he dug and dug for two days to get out. It would have taken him less time, but he was tied up, so there was that.
            “I knew he had done something to you. As soon as I saw the necklace.”
            “He’s mental,” Jeremy said. “I’m going to kill him.”
            I didn’t say anything. He got dressed in some of my father’s clothes and then we went out to the living room and got high. The heroin he had left me was good stuff and it didn’t take a lot to be on your way. We fell asleep on the couch in the center of the room.
            When I woke. It wasn’t morning. Or if it was I couldn’t be sure, not unless I was willing to get up and look. I was on the plush carpet surrounded by bodies sleeping. Other than the people I invited, mostly I didn’t know where they came from; just that they found out my house was open and then appeared. First one. Then two. Boys. Girls and so on. The red couch cast a glow onto the carpet like a halo. Golden light shone from the velvet in a way that defied what one knows of the physical world. It wasn’t a hallucination. I’ll get to that. This was warm. Part of the reason I was on the floor in the first place. The hit of heroin I took was too strong, but that was hours ago. I couldn’t understand why all the lights were off and then the lights themselves, carved glass sconces on the walls, shone tiny rainbows on the wall surrounding them. They made me know once and for all that the smallest things are the things worth remembering. Tiny rainbows.
            Pretzel was still sleeping and I studied his face, totally hoping that if I ever had sex and was able to bring forth a baby, that it could be as beautiful as he was. I was almost positive he was gay too, but that didn’t stop us from pretending to be a couple. I couldn’t have sex and he was gay, so it kind of worked out.
            Terri had gone off with someone, and we didn’t see her again. At some point in the night, something happened to Jeremy. We had to call the paramedics and then everyone scattered to different houses so that we wouldn’t be caught with our pants down. Jeremy had slipped into a coma right there on the floor while we were all out cold too. We hadn’t noticed because we were all pretty fucked up. I imagined his brother at his bedside fakely trying to be nice and it made my skin turn.
            I called Garrett on the phone the next day to tell him where his brother was. He drove into the parking lot and parked his car. He got out and was walking towards the entrance. I came up behind him.
            “Hi Garrett.”
            “Hi Sunshine.”
            I shot him like my dad showed me that day at the gun range, saying, if he comes at you just do it, you won’t have time to think. And he was right, the human head makes a sound he didn’t tell me about, I won’t burden you with that, but believe me, it’s memorable. I got outta there, what else you wanna know?